I hope everyone has a great week this week. I’m off, trying to recharge and refresh after a rough speaking schedule this fall.
My family has a tradition of spending Thanksgiving up in the mountains skiing. There isn’t a lot of snow, but I look forward to skiing, dominos, ping pong, and more with my wife and kids.
You should be sure that you take a break periodically from work and make sure you refresh and recharge. All too often I see people skipping vacation, which isn’t good your mental health.
At SQL Saturday #169 in Denver I sat in on a panel that talked about cloud computing. There was a consultant, a customer, and a Microsoft representative that give different perspectives on what their experiences were with Windows Azure. It was an interesting talk and the more I learn about the cloud, the more potential situations where I think it applies. It’s not for everyone, but there are a lot of places where it can work, and I would encourage you to learn more about cloud services and cloud computing.
One really interesting question was asked. Do you know the skills needed for modern Microsoft data centers? Truck driver. A truck driver can drop off a shipping container with servers pre-configured inside and just plug it in to power and network, often with no cooling needed. A fenced in parking lot, open to the atmosphere, makes a nice, inexpensive, low maintenance data center.
That’s simplified, but it has interesting implications for networking, hardware, and system administrators, but what does that mean for DBAs? How will our jobs change if these shipping containers run SQL Server services on Azure or AWS? It’s a good question, and one that I know worries many people that manage SQL Servers.
On one hand our jobs don’t change. We still need to manage the data, enforce quality, design tables and manage indexes. We must ensure the data is available, intact, accessible by clients. We import, export, and even recover it at times. These are all the core skills of a DBA. On the other hand, we have new challenges to manage. Our recovery process will change. We will need to learn how to scale out our data and applications. We will need to better set expectations for performance, and perhaps more closely expand and contract the resources we use to match the demand we receive. In order to do that, we’ll also have to better understand the financial costing models that vendors provide, along with gathering more knowledge on the actual value our organization receives from more, or fewer, resources.
The idea of remote computing, whether as hosted VMs or a platform that provides database services, is going to be a part of many of our careers. We might as well embrace it, understand it, and find a way to fit in.
Steve Jones
The Voice of the DBA Podcasts
We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.
A good manager knows a bit about what you do, but not necessarily the details.
Today’s editorial was originally released on Nov 27, 2007. It is being re-run as Steve is at the PASS Summit.
My guess is that most of you out there wouldn’t necessarily classify your managers as “savvy”, especially as it relates to data. I know that when I hear managers talking about “data quality”, “data integrity”, “ETL”, or any other acronyms, I tend to cringe, expecting more work, with poor requirements, and likely unreasonable estimates.
But not all managers are that bad and when I attended the Micosoft BI Conference earlier this year, I was surprised to see so many business people, especially managers, there and talking about how much value they got from BI because it gave then more insights into their data.
And they almost universally talked about how important a strong data warehouse with high data quality is to the success of a project.
Data quality is important, but it takes an effort to ensure that you can achieve a high level of quality in your data, meaning that the data is accurate and represents what you think it represents. I caught this interesting article about 10 data quality habits for successful managers. It probably should be for successful organizations and not just managers, but it’s a good guide for managers to be aware of. Without reading the article, I’d bet you could guess at what some of the items should be. They’re mainly common sense, but they bear repeating and it’s good to see them listed in together in a short article.
Data quality takes effort and just like programming, the earlier you can introduce checks and catch errors, the less expensive it is to maintain. However that doesn’t necessarily mean that you should go all the way to the source. Putting in a huge amount of checks and filters in the input client might not be in your best interest.
Consider a salesman, trying to make a sale, entering data and constantly getting pop-ups and errors that force data entry to be exact. Can you imagine how frustrating this would be? And possibly how this might impact data quality? Can you guess at what percentage of people might get names entered as initials instead of misspelled names? Does someone need to be slowed down because they typed “Bbo?”
Enforcing data quality at the source might be better served with suggestions or filters that try to fix common mistakes or even batch up confirmations of suspected errors for someone to examine later. There are any number of ways to make this an easier process and still ensure data quality.
My advice is that you should tackle data quality as an ongoing part of your job. Make constant, continuous, and small improvements, build in checks and balances, and be sure you work with other groups and users to ensure the load is shared, and more importantly, easily integrated into the way they already do business.
And maybe I’ll see you featured at one of the next BI events as a SQL Server success!
Steve Jones
The Voice of the DBA Podcasts
The podcast feeds are now available atsqlservercentral.podshow.com to get better bandwidth and maybe a little more exposure :). Comments are definitely appreciated and wanted, and you can get feeds from there.
Today’s podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo atwww.everydayjones.com.
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I hope everyone has a great week this week. I’m off, trying to recharge and refresh after a rough speaking schedule this fall.
Voice of the DBA 