Voice of the DBA

Tag: software development

  • DBAs Need to Learn to Develop

    My first exposure to computers was as a child, learning to program in BASIC, Assembler, and Pascal. From there I moved into other areas, such as networking and system administration. I learned about a variety of technologies before focusing on databases, but I found that my knowledge from other areas of computing helped me be a more successful DBA at quite a few jobs.

    Last year we put on a number of SQL in the City Seminars where Grant Fritchey and I talked about development practices. We give a variety of advice and practices that you can use, but one of the best things that we say in our half day event comes from Grant. He says that DBAs need to “Follow the local development paradigm as much as possible.”

    I completely agree with this. I think that many of the practices of building software, as flawed as they might be, are good ideas that many developers use on a regular basis. They know how to work in a flexible manner, tracking their code and keeping it under control, and fixing problems in a rapid manner. As immature as the software development process can be, there are things that we, as DBAs, can learn.

    As SQL Server continues to grow as a platform, there are more and more enhancements, many of which involve programmatic capabilities expanding. I highly recommend that DBAs think about learning more about programming, and specifically a .NET language, if you’ve never used one. If you have, consider brushing up those skills.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

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  • Checking Up on Developers

    This editorial was originally published on May 8, 2009. It is being re-run as Steve is on vacation.

    The other day I was reading Brad McGeHee’s post on duplicate indexes, and it struck a chord with me. That same issue is one I’ve seen many times with in house applications. Developers don’t understand indexing, they create one clustered index (CI) as the PK, and then they create the same index as a nonclustered (NCI) one. Either they don’t realize that the PK is an index, or they are ignorant of the differences between a CI and an NCI.

    What’s worse is that I see it in third party applications as well. If you’re selling a product, I think you ought to know how to tune it for a database. If you don’t, I’d like to see some recourse for clients. Maybe some common settlement in a lawsuit. A few of those and I bet you’d have more DBAs hired by software firms.

    Or a little more training for developers.

    For this Friday’s poll, I wanted to pick on developers a little. I like developers, I appreciate the work they do creating some great applications I use, but I also think they make some silly database mistakes. So this week:

    What are common mistakes developers make in SQL Server?

    Indexing is one area, but what other things do you see a lot from developers? I’m thinking a good list of mistakes here might be a nice checklist to go over with developers as they complete an application. It could be in code reviews, QA, pre-purchase requirements, RFPs, any number of places.

    I’ll add one more indexing issue that I’ve seen often in third party applications. Too often I’ve seen developers create a separate index on every single field in a table. For all tables! I realize that indexes improve query performance, but it does create an issue with inserts/updates, and space. Space isn’t an issue as much as it was in the past, but as data sizes get larger, I would not be surprised to see this becoming a problem in some applications. More indexes also impact backup time and size.

    Give us a response this Friday of the common mistakes that you see developers making, and that you wish they’d learn to avoid.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

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  • It Starts with Version Control

    As a software developer, I learned about the value of version control over time. My first forays into development were as a child, where I made a single backup of my code on a separate floppy disk in the event I had an issue. This was my one-man-wolf-pack version control system, and it served me well, although it wasn’t efficient. In a few of my early development positions, we zipped up all our code each night to a separate folder, giving us the pentagram-version-control system. This worked as long as we didn’t need to go back over a week, but it still wasn’t very efficient. I think that because we worked on fairly small projects and could hold most of the code in our minds, we muddled through issues.

    Later I was introduced to a real version control system (VCS), Visual SourceSafe. Some of you cringe, but that system worked well. We could see the differences in code, and over time I learned to cut loose with my development, just trying new things, knowing that I could easily revert code backwards without much effort. Since then I’ve worked a bit with Subversion and Git, both of which seem to be very capable, mature systems. I still plan on getting some work done with Mercurial and TFS at some point, just to compare the features and functions.

    I started source controlling my databases after reading an article by Bill Wunder. This was over a decade ago, and it seemed to make sense to me. All of the things I had learned about VCS worked with databases as well, and I learned that having a database under VCS provided me with some stability in development, including the ability to roll back to previous versions of code when we found bugs. Trust me, checking out a previous version of a stored procedure is much, much less stressful than restoring an old backup just to look at stored procedure code.

    These days I see more and more people putting their databases under version control, which is comforting. It makes me think that we, as data professionals, are maturing in our industry. However there are still lots of people out there that don’t use a VCS for their database (DDL) code. Some don’t even use a VCS for their application code.

    There’s no excuse these days. Subversion and Git are free and open source. Download them, spend a few days, and get control of your code. All of the ways in which you can improve the efficiency and quality of your software start with more knowledge, and a bit of version control on which to apply your craft.

    Steve Jones

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  • Runtime Code

    I was talking with someone recently who was building a dynamic process that generated its own code at runtime to process ETL files based on a set of rules. It was an impressive system, and reminded me of how BIML can dynamically produce code and build packages.

    However then I started to wonder. If you produce code at runtime that then runs, how well is that code tested? I suspect most people would test the code generation process. Is this producing the code I expect, but how many would then write additional tests for the generated code as it executes? I suppose people might also just test the generated code, but if that’s the case, are they really testing the generation process extensively?

    I’m not sure there’s an easy answer, and not sure if there’s actually a strong testing framework that exists to help here. As BIML becomes more popular and even ETL frameworks are used more and more in our software processes, I hope that we develop new testing methods to better ensure we are building quality code. I know some SSIS test frameworks exist, and there has been some writing on the topic, but I wonder how many SSIS developers bother to perform anything more than cursory tests? My suspicion is very, very few.

    Ultimately I think we as an industry need to learn to build better software by improving our techniques, samples, skills, and testing.

    Steve Jones

    Video and Audio versions

    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 at www.everydayjones.com.

    Follow Steve Jones on Twitter to find links and database related items and announcements.
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