Voice of the DBA

Tag: software development

Running a Service

Many of us work for some organization and we’re responsible for managing a database or coding some application or some other data related position. Perhaps we ensure reports work for our users or move data around. In many cases, we have customers, whether they are internal to our organization or perhaps external from another business or even the wider public.

However, many of us see our jobs as a part of the org/business and not that we are actually providing some service to others that we are responsible for. While I’ve certainly felt that way, I learned at some point that if I were an app dev, I ought to treat people using my app as customers, even though they don’t pay me in currency. They often pay me in praise, or better yet, with praise to my boss. As a DBA, I treated both app devs and users as customers. That helped me take pride in my work and learn to view my position from other points of view.

There was a post on learnings from running a SaaS service for a year. While few of us maintain a SaaS service, we could think of the app we build as Software-as-a-service, albeit without any revenue. We could see databases we manage as DBaaS (databases as a service) or PaaS (platform as a service) items.

I think that the way we view the world, or view our situations, can be helpful to us in managing our workloads. We can better triage what is critical, what’s important, and what’s nice to have. We can decide when an issue deserves some to cause some stress and we might give an extra effort, and when something can wait until tomorrow. We can decide when we push back on demands and when we accommodate them.

This approach has also helped me to think about ways to improve the service/software/platform I provide to others in ways that helps my customers, or makes my job easier. This way of thinking leads me to make the situation better when I can. It also helps me to discuss the decisions with others, especially management, in terms that can matter to them. Are we finding ways to improve the overall system?

It doesn’t always work, but it often has for me.

And if you’re interested in your own side project, the journey continues in part two. Perhaps you can spend an hour or two a day and build something that becomes your own business. That’s what happened to me with SQL Server Central.

Steve Jones

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

September 27, 2023
Setting up a Local http Server with Node

Setting up a local web server was something that I haven’t done in a long time and this was really easy. This post shows how to do this with a command line node web server.

A Need

Most software that needs a web server sets one up for you. This is pretty easy, and if I have a web app in Visual Studio, it will start up its own server when you run the app. If you had to set your own up, IIS was in many versions of Windows, but it wasn’t a simple thing to configure and manage.

I like simple.

I needed to just serve a file over http to test something. I could have done this by uploading a file to this blog or somewhere else, but I was hoping to keep this small and portable.

Looking Around

As always, I started with Google. I found a bunch of articles on Apache, python (should have tried this) and others. Then I saw this short article on a test web server on Windows. I looked, and this seemed to be something simple. I had node installed, so really I ran this:

npm install -g http-server

This installed somewhere. I had created a new folder in d:\http, but the web server was installed elsewhere. When I typed “http-server” in the command line, it seemed to be running. I saw this:

I created a quick html file, index.html, with this content:

and voila, I had a web server.

It’s basic, but any file I drop into d:\http can be served over http by entering the file name in the path. You can see in the image above, I was testing moving SQL Server backups. That URL actually downloaded that file from my browser.

Summary

This showed how you can set up a server with node. It’s quick and easy, and flexible. I can set this up as needed for tests without any big config. If you need this, here’s one way to test your own web stuff.

May 24, 2023
Experiments with GitHub CoPilot

There has been a lot of attention given to ChatGPT and AI over the last month or two. I’ve tried a few things with the public interface at Open.ai. Some worked well, like this one:

Others not so well:

This post looks at a few things I tried with VS Code and GitHub Copilot.

Getting Access

I saw a note in our internal Redgate Slack that all developers were given access to Github Copilot. This is something you can subscribe to for about US$10/month, or if you are a student, you can get it for free. In my case, I filed a ticket:

It took a week or so as someone was out on holiday and this was a low priority ticket. In any case, I got a note from our ticket system, as well as GitHub, that I had access:

So I added the extension to VSCode.

Once installed, I got a note to sign in to GitHub, and when I had completed that, I saw the Copilot icon in the lower right corner of my IDE.

Getting Started

My first experiment was to open my ZeroDowntime client code and see what happened. This is a VS 2019 project, but I opened it in VSCode, specifically the form1.cs code. I highlighted some code and …

Nothing.

Then I tried something I’d seen. I added a comment above some code. Still nothing, but when I opened the Github Copilot completions panel, I saw this:

Not helpful, nor what I asked for. Both solutions were similar.

Starting from Scratch

I decided to then start from scratch. I created a new file, set this to C# and wrote this:

Initially I got nothing, but when I opened the Copilot panel I saw this:

That is more interesting. Clearly poor specifications on my part.

Let’s try something else. I added more detail, and as I did, Copilot even added a few things after to help me specify what I needed.

I finished these lines and hit enter and I got something, though not what I wanted.

Let’s try something else:

That’s better. Not great, but better. This doesn’t quite match what I asked for. I copied this to a template project and then added another comment. I want to check for the existence of the parameter, and I got this code, which is better than something I’d write.

Not quite right, and I have some lines to delete, but this gives me something, and as a middling C# dev, this is helpful. Once cleaned, I compiled and ran the code, and it seemed to work, at least for a very basic console app.

Let’s try SQL

I opened a new file, set the type to SQL and wrote a comment, using the appropriate comment style.

I guess that’s OK. Not great, but I didn’t provide much detail. Interesting that it chose to use a created_at column with a timestamp. I never use timestamp, which is deprecated. Not sure how the AI learned about this type, perhaps because of a large corpus of training data using old code with this? Who knows.

Let’s try something else. I’ll ask for a query using a known schema.

A start, but not quite right. I do have to keep hitting enter to get the query written. A couple more Enters and Tabs to accept code get me this:

If I keep going, I get a long query, but it doens’t work. At least not on my version of AdventureWorks.

Not great.

What if I add a comment? I’ll ask for window functions.

I get something else, but again, the final query doesn’t work. This time there are less errors, but the join listed seems to think the Customer table has a first name and last name, which it doesn’t.

Initial Thoughts

I’m not sure how useful this is. I think this is going to be one of those tools that I’ll have to practice with and understand how it works. My basic tests are mostly because I’m not sure what to do with it, or how it can be helpful.

I have lightly seen some demos, but I realize that I need to watch a few more and also experiment with the features. I was hoping it would clean up some of my C# code, which is fairly basic, but it didn’t, at least not with my prompts.

We’ll see how this goes, and I’ll see if I can use it in ADS and if it can actually recognize and use my database schemas to write queries or tests.

May 3, 2023
Creating Documentation

Who should create documentation for software? In many companies, it’s the developers. In fact, in Redgate, often our developers are tasked with updating articles for products on our documentation site. We do have a streamlined process that has developers can submitting changes in some format (markdown? ) and an automation process that automatically updates the site as part of a release.

However, we also have marketing people who are in charge of external articles and communications. They ensure that our product learning and university content is updated. They work with technical people to produce, edit, and publish content. These could be developers, advocates such as Grant or Ryan, or even partners. Our Friends of Redgate also help with content.

Who should write and update documentation? Developers might best know how software changes, especially for new features. I know that developers also hate this chore, and I think they often don’t have the best perspective because the documentation should explain how I use things, not how I built them or just how I expect them to work. Developers sometimes just want to document how they expect the software to work.

At the same time, marketing or some other area might not be aware of changes, necessitating more handoffs from the development teams. That can be a bottleneck in a DevOps flow. Of course, some of this process could be automated, like sending release notes to marketing. However, there is also the need for someone technical to review changes, which can require more resources. It could also mean marketing people ask developers to review changes, taking up their time anyway. If developers are like me, then they might just want to handle it themselves than communicate changes and still have to review someone else’s writeup.

There probably isn’t a hard and fast rule. Not everyone communicate the same, or even that well. Writing is a skill, and while I might ensure all developers work on this skill, I might also try to lean more on those people that communicate well to ensure docs are updated for our clients.

If you are building internal software, perhaps you forgo documentation entirely. I could see developers having a meeting with either QA staff or perhaps a business person to teach them what is changing. Then this person gets tasked with training others on the software rather than ensuring any formal documentation exists. Tribal knowledge might be the best solution here.

If you’re a developer, would you want to control documentation or avoid it like the plague? Let me know today in the comments.

Steve Jones

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

April 26, 2023