Voice of the DBA

Tag: Friday Poll

  • How many environments?

    One of the things I’ve learned over time is that in order to develop software, you need multiple environments. I think that outside of school projects, I’ve always used at least two environments: development and production. At school there were times I worked on software that I also used, and would make changes on my live (and only) system. I had no shortage of regrets, and whenever I question using a Version Control System (VCS) or separate environments, I think back to those days.

    People I meet these days that develop software almost always have more than one environment, and most have at least 3. The most common model might be development, test, and production, but plenty of people work with even more. Maybe not as many as the seven Grant once had to deal with, but I have worked in environments where we had six database environments for one of our software pipelines.

    How many different environments do you work with?

    The poll this week asks for the count in your organization. I realize that you probably have multiple applications and test environments, but choose one or more and give us some answers.

    The most I’ve worked with was in a financial services company. We had a development database and a separate QA system for testing. There was a staging system to mimic production, a Beta database for users to actually test against and production. That worked well, and we were able to easily refresh environments as needed without impacting our development efforts. Mostly because we have a strong DevOps type process.

    Let us know this week how you’ve got your systems set up and what each one is used for in your software pipeline.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.8MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

  • Is Skynet Coming?

    That’s the question this week: Is Skynet coming?

    I read a piece recently that noted Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates have warned us about artificial intelligence. They have been quoted as this is potentially something that the human race needs to be cognizant of. However, I wonder.

    I know what IBM’s Watson does is amazing, but is it intelligence? Is it anywhere close to sentience? Or is it really just pattern recognition and matching with facts? I think more of the latter, and I’m not sure we’re moving closer to a computer intelligence.

    I guess there are narrowly defined domains where computers seem to be improving their capabilities, but it seems to me that these areas are defined by the programmers and the systems are tailored to a specific ability.

    I do agree with the article that combinations of massive computing power and humans will make fundamental changes in the world. I think many, many jobs are potentially going to be lost and workers dislocated because of the ability of computers to do many jobs that humans perform today. I don’t have any solutions here, but I am glad I work in technology.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 1.6MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. feed

  • Does It Count?

    This editorial was originally published on Jan 28, 2011. It is being re-run as Steve is out of town.

    I wrote a blog recently about downtime and SLAs, and the need to have not only downtime SLAs, but also a data loss SLA. Thanks to Paul Randal (blog | @PaulRandal) for clueing me in to the need for having both. In the comments someone mentioned that scheduled downtime ought not be counted against your uptime measurements. That’s a debate I’ve had in the past with employers, and I thought it would be a good Friday poll:

    Should scheduled maintenance be counted against your downtime SLA?

    There’s an argument that says since the outage is scheduled, and people are informed, that this shouldn’t really count against your work in keeping servers running. The flip side is that when the database instance is down, it’s not useable, and of limited use to the business.

    I know that companies that calculate the usage of their vehicles, and maintenance counts against usage time. While it’s necessary, the idea is that mechanics should be looking to minimize it, and perhaps ensure that extra checks are done when the vehicle is being worked on to help prevent future issues. A similar argument could be made for database servers.

    Do you feel that scheduled maintenance is downtime? Is it calculated that way at your employer? Let us know this Friday.

    Steve Jones

  • Statistical Analysis

    I ran across a book recently that is written to address some of the statistical issues the author has found in many scientific papers. It’s been released online for free, but if you like it and would like a more portable format, you can buy it for a reasonable price.

    I haven’t dug into the book much, and I certainly don’t consider myself to be a statistician. That wasn’t one of my stronger subjects in school, and it’s a weakness I’d like to correct at some point. However I have had to use some of the statistical functions in past applications, and I wonder if I was using them wrong.

    This week I decided to see how many of you are using more complex math in your systems. I’m hoping you understand how the functions work, but I wanted to ask what you’re using:

    What statistical functions have you implemented in a production system?

    I am thinking of functions beyond basic aggregates like SUM and AVG. Are you using standard deviations, linear regressions or some other complex functions? Have you made use of built-in functions in T-SQL, R, or some other language? Are you implementing custom functions in code or CLR Aggregates?

    I think this is one of the areas where our profession will grow more and more across the next decade. As we deal with lots of data of varying types, and our organizations look to gain some strategic advantage through deeper insight into their information, we will have lots of chances to experiment and learn more about complex data analysis.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.1MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. feed