Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • #sqlhelp

    I know that Twitter is really representative of only a fraction of the people in the world, and arguably it’s not even a good representation of any group because it’s a self-selective group that chooses to share thoughts, ideas, news, etc. with the world. However I do enjoy the medium, and find myself learning about the world, thinking about opinions, and once in awhile, getting help.

    There is a hashtag on Twitter called #sqlhelp. It’s an amazing tool that I’d highly encourage all of you to consider when you want a quick answer to a problem. Hashtags are a way of denoting tweets about a common subject, though there is no official set of hashtags. You can make one up yourself and see if it catches on.

    #sqlhelp certainly did, and I find it useful for many short, quick questions. While I was writing this piece, I saw questions come up on licensing, Oracle->SQL Server conversions, security in a database, and how to read an execution plan. I also saw some noise, with requests for consultants to teach, product advertisements, and a webinar notice. I’m slightly worried that noise level might overwhelm this channel, but if you’re on twitter, you should try using it for your next problem.

    As with any answer you get from the Internet, you should test things yourself and decide how trustworthy the source is. You might get an answer from Brent Ozar or Paul Randal, but you might get some new DBA on his first day of work. Also be aware that 140 characters can severely limit the questions you can ask. If it’s complex, I’d suggest you try the SQLServerCentral forums instead.

    Whether you like Twitter (and #sqlhelp) or not, I do believe that this is a great example of how our community does a great job of helping each other out. We teach, learn, support, and inspire each other, arguably more than any other industry or technological group I know of. It’s a joy to be a part of the community, and I’d encourage you to join us on Twitter, forums, or local events.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

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

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

  • Developers, developers, developers

    StackOverflow ran a survey for their members in 2013 and released some results recently. The results are on their blog, along with some observations about the data. While most of this audience aren’t in the development space, some may be, and the impacts of the results could certainly affect our careers.
    Most developers and applications aren’t getting much accomplished without data, and whether they use SQL Server, another RDBMS, a NoSQL platform, or a dumb data store, chances are we can help them. Chances are also that if they make a poor decision, we’ll be dealing with the mess in some way.
    The observations note that mobile is still growing, and I believe that. I still think the mobile market will dwarf the PC explosion we’ve seen the last 20 years, and that means we should be preparing and understanding how to deal with data from mobile devices, think about scaling to meet lots of small, quick calls for data from a device.
    I also like the fact that more people are working remotely. If they let developers work remotely, that’s a good step towards DBAs becoming remote as well. As someone that has worked from home for over a decade, I appreciate the challenges, but I still can’t help but thing my productivity is much higher than it ever was in an office.
    It’s also nice that the second most popular language (in use) is SQL. Not necessarily T-SQL, as I’m sure various other platforms are developed on, but it does show that SQL is very important, even to developers. Perhaps the next time a developer is struggling with SQL, you can refer them to this survey and then see if you can help them improve their query skills.
    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.4MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Mevio . feed

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

  • Powershell in a Month – Day 19 – I/O

    This is part of my Powershell Challenge, to learn more about PowerShell (PoSh) using the Learn Windows Powershell 3 in a Month of Lunches book by Don Jones.

    Not the I/O that we think of in T-SQL, but more the I/O that’s a part of many programming languages. This reminds me a bit of C, with the explanation of how the powershell environment interacts with the user. It’ s not standard in and out, but it’s close.

    This chapter also feels like it was written by a different author than some of the previous chapters. The chapter goes into some of the ways in which output commands interact with the shell, and how some do not. For example, the difference between Write-Host and Write-Output. The chapter uses diagrams of the pipeline to explain this. I was surprised that these diagrams weren’t used earlier in the discussion of the pipeline and how objects and data can flow through the pipeline. That’s a big omission from my point of view. I have a good idea of what a pipeline is, but the diagrams would have made it easier for many other people to understand what a pipeline is.

    In any case, this chapter mostly deals with the relationship between the input and output and the PoSh process. There are mentions of the separation and how other editors might deal with the input and output differently, but not good examples. In some ways, I found this chapter a bit lacking. In a few sections, it seems that the prose is devoted to more about what not to do than what to do and how to build I/O interaction with the user.

    The lab wasn’t great and overall, I didn’t like this chapter very much. Felt a little confusing about how I use this information.

     

     

  • Powershell in a Month Day 18–Variables

    This is part of my Powershell Challenge, to learn more about PowerShell (PoSh) using the Learn Windows Powershell 3 in a Month of Lunches book by Don Jones.

    I’m slightly behind here after holidays and some travel. Apparently my pop-up reminder for my own studies bears about as much value as quite a few other reminders that appear from people at work.

    I’ve had to deal with variables in any number of languages in my career: BASIC, Pascal, C, C++, Java, C#, VB6, VB.NET, Foxpro, T-SQL, and a few more. I thought this chapter would be simple and it certainly started out that way, but I learned a few things and was pleasantly surprised.

    NOTE: The editor here is substituting left and right quotes, and left and right double quotes as part of formal writing. In executing this code, the normal straight quote and double quotes are needed in PoSh.

    The chapter starts out with the simple stuff, assigning values to variables. Unlike most languages,we don’t need to declare variables. You need one, just use it.

    $domain = ‘SSCLab’

    I’ve done this quite a bit in some of the practice for this series, but also in setting up my virtual lab. However I wasn’t sure why single and double quotes matter. If you’re not sure, this this:

    $computer = ‘Tiny’

    $Phrase = ‘Computer: $computer’

    $phrase

    and then this

    $computer = ‘Tiny’

    $Phrase = “Computer: $computer”

    $phrase

    You’ll see a difference. The first produces

    Computer: $computer

    The second actually does substitution and produces

    Computer: Tiny

    That means that you really need to pay attention to which set of quotes you are using in code. That’s an area I need to be careful. I also learned about the backtick as an escape character, but that’s an easy one as it’s similar in lots of languages to escape things out for newline and other special characters.

    What’s interesting about PoSh variables, and probably one of the more powerful things, is that the variables can contain objects. That’s big. It’s like being able to overload classes into variables easily and quickly. I’m sure the exercises just scratch the surface, but it’s cool.

    The lab was easy, just getting a job running and putting results in a variable. A combination of a few of the last few chapters.