Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

  • Daily Coping 16 Sep 2022

    Today’s coping tip is to make time to aim to be good enough, rather than perfect.

    I find that many of us that work in technology want a solution to be great. Often perfect. Computers are so good at following instructions that we expect them to work as we intend all the time. We aim for this perfect in our code and we find “good enough” to be a low bar.

    However, good enough means to me that it is good enough for most situations. It’s not leaving something unfinished or undone, but finishing something that works well. I often tackle chores in this manner, usually because of time crunches.

    Recently I was traveling a bit. I was gone from home for 15 days in August, and during those stretches, it rained quite a bit. The grass grew near the house, and I came home from a trip with a few commitments and kept delaying cutting it, thinking it would just take a few minutes and I’d get to it. With another 8 day vacation, I ran out of time and left town.

    I came home to grass that was really high, but I had other priorities. I needed to fix our gate, as my wife is using the front pasture and we need to keep horses in. Another busy weekend, and I got to the grass Sunday afternoon. I cut it and then needed to rake up the excessive clippings. As I did, I realized that there were a few stretches that had gotten weighed down and as I rake them, they stood up a bit. Not a clean lawn.

    However, it was good enough for the weekend. I still needed to edge with the weed trimmer, so I left them, finished edging and walked away. I can go back later this week and recut the lawn, even though most won’t need it.

    Good enough for today.

    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 15 Sep 2022

    Today’s coping tip is to make time to do something you really enjoy.

    I do enjoy life, and I’m lucky that I have the chance to do a lot of things that I enjoy. One of those is watching and coaching volleyball. Technology helps here in a few ways, which lets me cope with a busy life.

    These were on two days, but both were enjoyable times for me. First, thanks to cheap bandwidth and streaming technology, I was able to watch my daughter play volleyball in New York. My wife and I got up early and spent an hour watching her play last Saturday before we got on with our day.

    Second, I left work a touch early to go watch high school volleyball, seeing a kid that I will coach this coming season play for her school. It’s a fun, enjoyable time, and one of the few times I can cheer for this kid without looking for ways to improve.

    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 14 Sep 2022

    Today’s coping tip is to give yourself permission to say ‘no’.

    This is my default, and it was something I consciously made a decision to do over a decade ago. In general, my instinct is to say no to new requests from others. Then if I have time, I can always change my mind if it’s important or I can fit it into my schedule.

    I’m not so good at this in my personal life. My wife asks me, or I want to do something, I tend to say “yes” to myself. Especially if it’s a physical project that I can (or have) handle.

    However, I do get myself overloaded at the ranch. I’ve started to try and remind myself to say “no” to some projects. Either they get delayed or we pay someone else to do them. I had some lawn work to do recently and I told myself “No” and asked a kid to tackle it.

    Both a chance for me to say no and ask for help.

    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.

  • T-SQL Tuesday #154–Thinking about SQL Server 2022

    This month is an interesting T-SQL Tuesday party, as Glenn Berry hosts and asks us to think about the upcoming new release of SQL Server. Sometime later this year, I expect SQL Server 2022 to be released and Glenn is asking us to talk about our experiences.

    If you haven’t looked at this new version, which is in RC0, you might take a few minutes to play with it and see if the language (or other) changes might be useful in your organization.

    If you want to host a T-SQL Tuesday yourself, ping me on Twitter.

    My Work with SQL Server 2022

    I first saw some demos of SQL Server 2022 in 2021, at various conferences. Microsoft showed off some new capabilities, some of which were very interesting. I was lucky as an MVP to get some access to private, pre-CTP builds and experiment a bit with new features.

    This spring Microsoft publicly released CTP 2.0, then 2.1, and now RC0. I’ve upgraded to 2.1 on my desktop, and was waiting the docker container to update before moving to RC0. just after Glenn’s invitation, I saw the container was up to date, so I pulled a new one.

    I’ve run some of my old demos on the platform, just to check that they work. That’s really work to see if there are any regression bugs. I have rarely found this to be the case, but it has been interesting to do this with 2017, with the linux version, and more. I’ve only been lightly interested in this release, as a few of the changes aren’t applicable for the work I do with Redgate. Others might be interesting to the community, and I need to spend more time on them.

    Really, I got mostly interested in the T-SQL language changes. I had been using Window functions and the OVER() clause quite a bit and find writing them cumbersome, but I was excited to see the SELECT..WINDOW clause. I’d also liked the STRING_SPLIT enhancements with an ordinal.

    There was an article sent to SQL Server Central that got me to look at more of the features, and I think that while most of these aren’t changes I’ve been needing, they do improve and round out the language. I look forward to experimenting with them a bit.

    I’ve reproduced a few performance demos, looking at the query optimization features, and those seem good, but for me and many other developers, these will just be things that should work. Not something to get too excited about. Unless you’re on call, then you might really want to upgrade and hope these fix some of your problems without creating other ones. Maybe the thing I’m most excited about is the granular UNMASK permission, which has been overdue for a couple of versions.

    I don’t quite know what to think of this new version. While there are more changes than I expected, it feels like a lot of small changes and not much of a fundamental shift in the product. I suppose it’s a major release, but kind of like SQL Server 2014, this feels more evolutionary than revolutionary.