Voice of the DBA

Tag: misc

  • Technology for Sharing

    Zipcar
    Zipcar has done a great job of using technology to more efficiently manage assets in the real world.

    Computer technology has done an amazing job of making many parts of business more efficient. It has streamlined processes, freed up many people from relatively menial tasks and increased the speed at which we can accomplish many things. This has been both good and bad, as fewer people are needed in many positions because of the capabilities of technology, but this has also freed many more people up to spend more time thinking about more complex problems.

    We have also seen investments in computer technology result in much more efficient operations in many industries. One example is our delivery companies plot our optimum routes for package delivery, saving time and fuel. Another example caught my eye the other day: car sharing for government fleets of vehicles. It’s a concept, using technology from ZipCar, that could potentially save tens of millions of dollars.

    The concept of sharing is nothing new in computing, where our applications have been sharing computer resources for decades. However a number of companies have started to expand that concept to the real world, because of the power of new technologies that allow tracking, management, and administration of physical assets. Quite a few companies have come up with a way to share resources and run a business. This same concept is something that we are doing with virualization, allowing multiple users to share the same hardware as there are significant amounts of time when any particular server is not being used to its potential.

    In the real world, we have to have enough cars to satisfy the peak demand, when the most number of people need a car, which is challenging. My guess is that some people will not be able to get a car when they need it, especially as the software tries to reduce the number of cars to the minimum level it can. We see people doing this with VMs (Virtual Machines) as well, which can lead to worse performance than expected from a particular VM. I think in many cases this is acceptable to companies in order to save money, but there are cases where it isn’t. For those cases, you might be better off with your instance on a physical host rather than a VM.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.

  • The Mechanical Turk

    The original Mechanical Turk
    The original Mechanical Turk

    Today’s editorial was originally published on Apr 17, 2007. It is being re-run as Steve is at SQL Server Connections.

    I stumbled across Amazon’sMechanical Turk while helping search for Jim Gray. As a side note, Jim is still missing and presumed dead after an exhaustive search by the Coast Guard and many of Jim’s friends.

    The Mechanical Turk is based on the mechanical chess playing machine created in the late 1800s. It turned out to be a fake, with a human inside, and that is what Amazon has built. They have a way for you to distribute a workload and let humans work on the problem, or a very small piece of the problem. Similar to a super computer, but this process uses humans for things that artificial intelligence can’t handle.

    The basic idea is you create some task, for example one of the items I looked at was reviewing a list of vendor names associated with a contract for the city of Tulsa. It’s a data task that might not be easy to implement in something like SSIS, but a human can easily complete it. And get paid!

    Maybe not much, in this case $0.02 per item, but it’s a good way to distribute the workload.

    If you can find someone to work on the task. I guess if you wanted to fund a book habit at Amazon, it might be worth taking a few minutes here and there to look through data tasks and earn some money.

    I completed two and earned myself $.07 🙂

  • A Break from Databases

    What do you recommend from Oscar season? I'll say The Descendents

    Last weekend I was all alone Sunday night. Monday was a holiday for me, my wife and kids were out of town, and it was too quiet in the house, so I decided to go see a movie. Safe House was my choice, and it was one I enjoyed during a two hour break from life. I don’t go see too many movies a year, outside of the kid-related ones, but this was fun.

    This Sunday the 84th Annual Academy Awards take place, and while I won’t be watching them, it’s always interesting to me to see which movies and people win awards. A winning actor or actress might entice me to go see a future movie that ordinarily wouldn’t capture my interest. It’s always nice to see talented people working their craft, at least to me.

    We tend to work hard in Information Technology, and it’s nice to get a break. With that in mind, I thought we might take a break this Friday from talking about work, and talk about leisure. The poll this week is:

    Which movies from the 2011/2012 Oscar season would you recommend?

    These don’t have to be movies that are up for awards, just anything released from last February until now. What did you like, or what would you recommend the rest of us avoid? Let us know this Friday which films might provide a nice escape from the pressures and stress of reality.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.

  • Congrats, Yanni

    Sunday was an exciting morning for me and quite a few others in the SQL Server community. My morning was interrupted constantly as I was tied to my Twitter stream, looking for updates like this one:

    One of the updates I caught during my morning

    I had puppy duty, dinner to cook that required a trip to the store and 8 hours of cooking. I had a few chores to handle like horses to feed, and I found myself taking longer to do those things than I should have because I was constantly checking my phone. I wasn’t the only one as I saw 6 or8 other people in the SQL community, all cheering Yanni on. I’m sure there were others outside my twitter feed as well.

    We were all sending tweets that the Runmeter app will read to you over headphones. I’ve used the app and it’s cool when someone sends you a note when you’re running, even if it interrupts the music.

    I probably sent 20-30 tweets to try and help cheer Yanni on during her first marathon. I met Yanni last year, and I’ve been following her journey as she climbed a mountain, ran a half marathon (with other SQL people), and made the decision to run just a marathon, but a marathon and a half in a week. As someone that’s run a marathon, I can appreciate her effort, accomplishment, and I’m impressed.

    I’m also thrilled to be a part of the SQL Server community, which in many ways seems to be a tighter set of groups of people. Groups because we aren’t one big happy family, but we are a series of smaller ones that support each other, cheer each other one, defend each other, and laugh with each other. The biggest reason that I attend events is to meet people and spend time with them.

    Yanni is never without a smile on her face, and I’m sure part of it is the wonderful people who work with SQL Server in their spare time, when they’re not making life a little bit more interesting to each other, 140 characters at a time.

    I congratulate Yanni, and I urge you to do the same, with a comment on her marathon post.

    Update: This is the post race post.