Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

  • Daily Coping 27 Feb 2023

    Today’s coping tip is to tell a loved one about the strengths you see in them.

    For one of my kids, I’m letting them know that I see:

    • responsibility for meeting their commitments
    • independence in making their own decisions
    • accountability for their decisions
    • strong willed to drive themselves to accomplish more than they have to
    • compassion for others

    I’m proud of all my kids, and I took time to let one of them know.

    I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQL Server Central newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.

  • Daily Coping 24 Feb 2023

    Today’s coping tip is to be gentle with someone you feel inclined to criticize.

    It’s very easy, and maybe very human, to start to criticize others for doing something we wouldn’t do, or at least, something we don’t think we’d do. I sometimes wonder if we are much more likely to do this with people close to us than those we know less well.

    My kids are adults now, and they are in charge of their own lives. They make mistakes, as I do, and there are times that I want to point out they could do better, or take other advice, or something else.

    I am learning not to do that. One of my kids did something that cost them more money than they expected. They were upset, and it would have been easy for me to criticize the action. Instead, I have been working on being sympathetic, listening, and asking what they think or what they do. Let them work through it without me trying to solve the problem, take responsibility, or criticize.

    I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQL Server Central newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.

  • Daily Coping 23 Feb 2023

    Today’s coping tip is to give sincere compliments today to people.

    A tough day recently coaching, but I kept this in mind. Complementing parents, competitors and fellow coaches, and even my kids. All while not having things go our way.

    It was tough, but I was working to find something good to say about a variety of people.

    I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQL Server Central newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.

  • A Test Client for Zero Downtime Deployments

    I’ll be at VS Live in Las Vegas this March to discuss zero downtime deployments. If you want to come and join me for this session, or any of the other great ones, register today and save $500 with the promo code “Jones”. You can use this link to register.

    To simulate the effects of deployments on a workload, I built a small client. It’s nothing great, and likely some of you will laugh at my C# skills, but it works well enough. It’s a simple Windows form application that writes to a text box. However, it’s valuable to determine if there are any issues when you’ve made a deployment.

    This post looks at the rough design of the client. Code is available in this repo: https://github.com/way0utwest/ZeroDowntime

    Using WPF

    I wrote a small app a few years ago to test and present on Always Encrypted. This was a basic WPF app that added the proper values to the connection string for Always Encrypted and let you query encrypted data (or not).

    Like all mediocre developers, I copied and pasted that project into a new folder and set about modifying it. In this case, I set up a loop that continues to run and execute some database code, essentially using this loop:

    while (iRunQuery > 0)
    
{

    I set this value to 0 initially, and when a button is clicked, it’s 1. This then runs a bunch of lines to decide which DB code to run. I’ve mostly made this stored procedures to make it easier to adjust demos without touching C# code.

    It’s not pretty.

    At the bottom, I have this (outside the loop)

    Application.DoEvents();
    
System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(100);

    This is designed to catch me clicking a “stop” button that will set the variable back to 0. I added the delay because otherwise this runs a bit fast.

    I have a few option buttons that adjust what code I’m calling, so I can simulate toggling feature flags on and off. I also log results to a window so you can see them, and I catch errors and log those. Errors are also counted, so we can see the impact of “non zero-downtime” changes.

    It’s not a great example of software, but it does work.