Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • The Financial DBA

    I’ve got an Azure subscription. At least, I think I have just one. I know I have a few Microsoft accounts, across 4 (or more) different email addresses, that I use for various VSTS development purposes, but only one should have any Azure resources. When  I check each of them, I find that I do only have resources (and charges) for one. However, I also found a strange charge on my credit card statement from Microsoft Azure. It was just a couple dollars, but as I started digging through the various statements, I couldn’t determine where the charge was from, or what it was for. As of now, I’ve opened a support case with Microsoft to track down my usage.

    This has me thinking of the future of many data professionals, some of whom will certainly have a few assets in a cloud based environment. I have a small subscription, but plenty of resources, and keeping track of which items belong to which resources and what I need isn’t always easy. It’s quite the challenge, especially when billing and finance aren’t my job. In an organization like Redgate, I’d guess we have lots resources, some of which developer provision, need, and then might forget about. Who reconciles this and ensures the assets we have are those we need?

    As we move to a world where services are used as often as assets, perhaps interchangeably, I expect that many of us will need to be accountable for not only the usage, but tracking why we’ve engaged that service. Over time, we need to retire and get rid of assets, but ensuring we remember exactly what we’re using and why can be hard over time. With a little employee movement, many of us might find ourselves in charge of services that we don’t understand, and might not be sure are necessary. We also might not be sure these services can just be discarded. The last thing we want is some uptime disruption because we terminated some service contract.

    A whole new dimension to our job is likely coming, and for many of us, this will test our documentation and organizational skills. I wouldn’t be surprised to find many DBAs or lead developers having a standing monthly meeting with someone in finance to be sure we aren’t wasting money.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.3MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • Cool Projects

    This editorial was originally published on Aug 23, 2013. It is being re-published as Steve is on vacation.

    I had a conversation recently with a developer that was working on a rather neat problem. This had to do with a financial system and it involved some complex calculations and real time interactions with a variety of systems. It was important for their company, and a lot of pressure was on this developer to not only deliver this software quickly, but also to have it perform at a very high level. This particular person was using Red Gate’s ANTS Performance Profiler to dig into their code, feeling pressure to make it as efficient as possible.

    However this developer was also enjoying the work. It was a challenge, and it was a cool project.

    I know this community is made up of people working in all sorts of industries, in a variety of roles. We develop many different kinds of software. Some may be for employers, some may be for ourselves, some may be for a side business, but  across that spectrum of work, there are some interesting applications.

    What cool things are you working on?

    It might not be software. Perhaps you’re working on an interesting data application, like a super collider. Maybe you work on some gaming software or a large hardware system. Perhaps you deal with a system that makes people’s lives better, easier, or even possible. I’m sure more than a few of you work on some real time systems, which have all kinds of data challenges.

    Let us know this week what type of interesting work you’re doing.

    Steve Jones

     

  • The March of AI

    Machine learning and AI systems are becoming more and more popular all the time. The constant onslaught of media articles and hype is pressuring more and more companies to experiment with AI systems. Whether these techniques work or not, no manager wants to be the one that has ignored the trend. A failed machine learning venture might be preferable to the lack of any project in the eyes of many in upper management.

    Our vendors press as well, after all, sales are on the line. I wasn’t sure how useful the R language would be inside SQL Server, but I am amazed at the effort and popularity of R among SQL Server professionals. R, and possibly Python soon, are becoming integrated into every product and tool from Microsoft, as well as other vendors. Every month I see more and more people experimenting and learning how to use R for a wider variety of tasks, from analyzing disk space and database performance to extrapolating business measures.

    Most of us aren’t skilled enough in math and statistics to really develop and build intelligent systems. We don’t have the background, or we haven’t worked in those areas for a long time. However, many of us can learn to work with ML and AI systems, managing the models, integrating the code others write into our applications. I do think there is value in learning a bit about these technologies, though I don’t think you need to become an expert. Some of you might want to be experts, and I wish you the best of luck on your journey.

    I do believe that AI will change the world. It’s going to become a larger and larger part of many systems and processes throughout the world. These intelligent systems will press and push humans in ways that we don’t expect and that we might not like. For us data professionals, we will be at the heart of many of these changes, with opportunities to grow our careers we might never had considered.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.0MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • A Database Design Test

    I was watching a presentation recently on database design and the speaker talked about how he hires developers. These are full stack developers, for whom the database is a portion of their responsibility. One of the tasks he gives them is a short database design test, designed to get a rough idea of their knowledge of databases.

    The test is a short story, with a classroom/course/scheduling scenario. There are descriptions in some business terms, and the instructions ask the reader to to decide how to put entities together and link them. There is a sample unlabeled diagram with only a couple boxes. The diagram is meant to clue them in to the way to indicate relationships, and there are names of different structures in the test in bold. For someone experienced in databases, this would seem trivial as the entities are listed in bold, and the test is designed to be completed in 5 minutes. Extra points for not crossing any relationship lines.

    I found this to be a nice, short test to gauge a developer’s knowledge. The speaker noted that they didn’t worry too much about time taken, or the exact notation used in the digram. This is mostly a way to measure if an individual thinks in terms of entities and connections. This is part of a few tests used for a basic evaluation of how a developer solves practical problems, and avoids the trivia based examination used by many interviewers.

    I was intrigued since I’ve never been really asked to design anything and I’ve had quite a few jobs where that would be a portion of my job duties. No one has given me a scenario and asked me to produce an ER diagram. The most I’ve gotten is some theoretical questions on normalization, or what keys are. I wonder if I’m alone. For those of you reading this, have you ever had a design test of any kind in an interview? Can you disclose the types of questions or scenarios? When were you tested? It would be interesting to see if this is used by much of anyone.

    There seem to be so few ER diagrams in the real world, especially from vendors, who should always produce one for clients. I suspect that few people understand them, or even write them, even though they can be invaluable when trying to write reports and understand the relationships between different entities. Many ask, but could those people produce one? Or read it beyond realizing which field in table a connects to which field in table b? Let me know this week if you’ve been tested on your database design skills.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 4.1MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.