Voice of the DBA

Tag: software development

  • Great Companies – Spotify

    I don’t know anyone at Spotify, nor have I worked there. However when I see descriptions and explanations like this one of how they organize and build their culture, it makes me think they’re doing it right.

    Autonomy is important, and it helps motivate people. I need to do more writing here, but for now, check out this video. About 13 minutes long, but interesting.

  • Is Unit Testing Important?

    This editorial was originally published on Nov 10, 2009. It is being re-run as Steve is on vacation.

    I saw a question on the SQLServerCentral ASK site the other day asking about unit testing for T-SQL stored procedures. There weren’t many responses, but they were interesting to me.

    I wondered how many people bothered to test their stored procedures as a unit. It seems that the idea of test driven development, or even of comprehensive testing of SQL code isn’t very mature. If a query runs and appears to return the data we want, do we bother to test for edge or unusual data conditions?

    Or do we even know how to write those kinds of tests?

    Testing your code as it’s being written is a well known way to reduce your technical debt and ensure better code when it’s released. It’s also a way to lower the cost of maintaining your software over its lifetime. However it slows down development as well.

    That’ s not why most people don’t test their code well. The big reason is that it’s B-O-R-I-N-G.

    But does it matter? Is there really an issue? After all most T-SQL queries are built to scale. If the data is correctly assembled into sets with a small set of data, it will work correctly on large sets of data. Maybe not efficiently, but it tends to work. So is unit testing of T-SQL code important?

    My guess is that it is not all that important. At least not as important as performance tuning. If you have extra time to spend on a query, I think most DBAs would prefer to spend it on making the SQL more efficient, not more tested.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    Everyday Jones

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  • The Worst Code

    This piece was written awhile ago by Jeff Atwood, but I saw a mention about it recently. It’s about software developers hating software. It’s a fun piece, and written a bit tongue-in-cheek, though with a lot of truth in there. Certainly lots of the “bundled software” that come with gadgets is unnecessary and poorly tested. That’s sad, as there is the chance to add value to products if the software is well written, and perhaps, open sourced.

    However the thing that caught my eye was the ending. Mr. Atwood says that if a developer in an interview doesn’t say the worst code they’ve seen lately is their own, then they may not be a competent developer. I hope that part is also a joke, and I suspect it is. Though I also think that it’s a healthy attitude for people to see room for improvement in most of their endeavors.

    No matter what type of task you are performing, and certainly programming is an area many of us focus, complacency is a poor way to approach your work. We know we won’t be perfect, we know we’ll make mistakes, we know there’s room for improvement, and we know we NEED TO GET THE PROJECT DONE. The balance we strike in moving forward should be accomplishing tasks, learning what we did right and wrong, doing more of the former (and less of the latter) in the future, all while taking pride in the work we do well.

    Certainly some people are obsessive and perfectionists. There’s probably another few choice words some of you have for those individuals, but most of us need to balance our desire to build something amazing, with the necessity of completing work. We also need those little wins that come from having our work solve problems, even if we’d build software better the next time. The important thing is that you try to do better the next time.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.7MB) 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.