Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • Goal Progress for Jan 2022

    I set goals at the beginning of the year, and I’m tracking my progress in these updates during 2022.

    My first update. I spent most of January unwinding slightly and studying. So far, I think I’m doing OK.

    Here are the goals:

    Work

    • DP-900 – Passed
    • DP-300
    • Demo with SQL Server – 5%
    • Demo with PostgreSQL – 0%
    • Demo with MySQL – 0%
    • Feedback book – 68%
    • Good Strategy/Bad Strategy – 0%

    Personal

    • Link Google Sheets to Power BI – 0%
    • Create Report – 0%
    • Create Dashboard – 0%
    • Get people using it – 0%

    Community

      • Support the Colorado groups by speaking twice and helping get one event set up
        – 33%
        • CO Springs event set up
      • Speak at 3 other user groups outside of Colorado – 33%
        • Spoke at DBA Fundamentals group
      • Support SQL Saturdays – Help get 10 events run in 2022
        • two scheduled, 2 more close
      • Volunteer 4 days with Habitat – 0 days

    Grade: B

    A good first month, but I need to keep moving forward in February.

  • The Great Developer Resignation

    In 2021, many companies had employees leave positions. The number of people resigning from their jobs was so high that the term “The Great Resignation” began appearing in many publications. A number of industries were affected, and there are no shortage of pundits and experts analyzing why. This happened primarily in the US, but the UK is concerned. This doesn’t appear to be happening in Europe, but there are concerns in Asia and Australia as well.

    The term feels misleading to me, as workers aren’t forgoing work. Rather, they’re changing jobs and looking for new positions, either at a better position in their field or leaving the field altogether. This is disruptive for firms, and costly, as finding new employees can be challenging and time-consuming. We also see a great loss to teams as the more talented employees find it easier to leave and replacing those people with less-skilled workers impacts their productivity.

    I ran across a couple of articles (US, UK) that talk specifically about the challenges when software developers leave. Many companies have realized the value that software brings to their business and feel the impact of the losses that come when they don’t (or can’t) execute on new application projects. The rush to DevOps is driven because better software and a smoother lifecycle improve the bottom line. Unfortunately, just as many companies don’t want to actually change and adopt better development practices, they often don’t want to change their culture, which impacts their ability to retain a talented workforce.

    It’s Friday, and you might spend a little time reading the articles and thinking about your position. If you feel you are good at your job and don’t necessarily enjoy the environment, workload, or compensation, should you think about leaving? Is now the time to ask for a better work environment? Should you look at companies that will give you remote work?

    The main question this week, which I know is hard to disclose publicly, is are you thinking about changing jobs? I expect few people to leave comments, but I’d ask you to think about your situation.

    We know that compensation matters, and many people find they can make a great living working with technology. However, there are other things that are important as well. Having a purpose that allows you to succeed at solving problems you enjoy, a culture that invigorates and stimulates you, autonomy to work on the things that your employer finds important, but in a way that suits you and your team. These are all items that attract talent. The reverse is also true, when you have a micro-managing, blameful culture where lots of uninteresting work is mandated. Those situations repel workers.

    As we come out of the pandemic, and organizations struggle to decide how to handle the future of offices and workplaces, there is a lot of power in workers’ hands. The last two years have shown that most of us can work remotely and get things done. We have the supply of skills that can’t meet the growing demand, and this is a good time to think about finding your dream job. If not the dream, then one that might be better than your current one.

    I have an amazing job at an amazing company, but not everyone does. If you enjoy your position, then good for you. You likely have more security now than ever. I know if I were still working for a few of my former employers, I’d certainly be setting myself up to find something as wonderful as I have now.

    Steve Jones

     

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.

  • Batch, Streaming, and Relational Data

    This is part of a series on my preparation for the DP-900 exam. This is the Microsoft Azure Data Fundamentals, part of a number of certification paths. You can read various posts I’ve created as part of this learning experience.

    The first part of the DP-900 skills document has these items:

    • describe batch data
    • describe streaming data
    • describe the difference between batch and streaming data
    • describe the characteristics of relational data

    These are concepts that are important to this exam. I lightly blew these off when I started studying, but every other person with guides and the practices tests has lots of focus here. I’m glad I spent time here.

    This post covers these concepts a bit. Note, these are more ETL/analytic concepts, not really

    Batch Data

    Most of my career deals with batch data, meaning a bunch of data that arrives at once and is imported into a system. This is different than a connection and query submitted to an OLTP system. The general idea is:

    • Lots of data
    • Processed periodically
    • Latency doesn’t matter.

    Think these key words:

    • Not real-time
    • periodic
    • large/big/lots

    There is an MS Docs article on this. The general idea is that you want to think about a scheduled (or some periodic) processing of lots of data for a purpose.

    Examples of where batch is used.

    • Total up all hours worked last week for employees
    • Load and transform log files from all web servers each day
    • Import files from regional offices into a main database server

    In the analytics space, you’d be using Azure Data Factory (ADF), HD Insight (U-SQL, Hiuve, Pig, Spark), Azure Data Lake (ADLS).

    Streaming Data

    There is a course on this topic. When you think of streaming, think of these key words:

    • real-time
    • stream
    • data processed as soon as created
    • IoT
    • few transactions
    • monitoring or instant decision making

    Streaming is really about time series, about tumbling windows, about data like a stock ticker that you need to constantly and/or quickly process.

    Differences

    These items helped me:

    • Lots of data – Batch
    • Low latency – Stream
    • Long latency, latency doesn’t matter, periodic work – Batch
    • Small, constant sets of data – Stream

    Relational Data

    The workload here is that you are handling regular changes to data, lots of insert/update/deletes, for a business process. Really this means you are thinking some sort of CRUD application the gets and sends data to users in real time, but not with low latency issues. We are thinking a web server, a data entry business app, something that operates on time scales for humans, seconds. Not real time, IoT millisecond work.

  • Making Video Chat Better

    I ran across an article on Zoom fatigue and new tech that was written in July 2020. That month seems like ages ago, and at the same time, not too long ago as the world seems to have still been in some sort of suspended animation for much of 2020 and 2021. However, one thing that has remained since that time is a regular stream of Zoom and Teams meetings that I attend.

    I’ve been dealing with video meetings for over a decade. For most of the time I’ve worked for Redgate, I’ve had regular meetings every week with various people that are in Cambridge, UK. I’m in Denver,  US, and while I enjoy going to England and visiting the office, that’s a few times a year. Across the years, we’ve tried a number of platforms, and various different configurations, including a dedicated conference room with extra mics and sound-absorbing padding on the walls. None of this made for a great experience, though I have to say our adoption of Zoom across the last 2-3 years has been the best experience overall.

    Still, when I have multiple meetings in a day, I feel fatigued. Many people feel similarly, and that has not gone unnoticed. While we do try to cut down on some of the meetings as a company, they aren’t going away entirely for us, or likely, for your company. Some companies are going back to the office, at least part-time, but many employees are resisting, which means we need better tech. Something I hope is coming.

    The article I linked above talks about some of the changes taking place, with some newer tech being tried. I don’t know I’ll ever like video chat without some sort of VR-style view of a room or holograms, but perhaps something will come along that makes these meetings better. I’ve certainly found that having larger views of speakers is good, but when they rapidly switch from one person to another it feels like a 5-year old directing a live TV show. I want to turn off my video and just listen. Or end the call.

    One thing that I’ve found helps is I try hard to get more done through Slack and email, avoiding meetings that aren’t needed. The best way to combat something that doesn’t work well for me is to do less of it, so I work to minimize video, type more, and hope for more live face-to-face meetings a few times a year.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.