Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

  • Register as a Pre-Con Speaker

    I’ve been debating how we better organize speaker resources and one of the things I proposed was a pre-con registry of speakers. I did so at the sqlsaturday blog.

    There was a little debate, but then lo and behold, Rob and Daniel built this at callfordataspeakers.com. There is a precon page now at: https://callfordataspeakers.com/precon

    Rob wrote this up, but you can register yourself, and I’d encourage precon speakers do to so. You can find instructions in this repo.

    I’d also encourage anyone that knows of precon speakers to send them a note to register themselves for organizers who might need to find a precon speaker.

  • Daily Coping 13 Jul 2022

    I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral 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.

    Today’s tip is to get the basics right, eat well, exercise, go to bed on time.

    I got out of my routine with a lot of travel. Then with getting ready for volleyball tryouts and catching up on ranch maintenance. I sometimes forgot to follow a good routine.

    This is my second week at home and I’m getting better here. I am trying to get to bed around 1030, up at 7, get a small breakfast and coffee and get to work. I’m having my protein smoothie snacks, eating a reasonable lunch and dinner and finding time to get to the gym or go for a walk.

    Tackling the basics while I can.

  • T-SQL Tuesday #152–It Depends

    tsqltuesdayA great invitation this month from Deborah Melkin. I thought this was very apt, as I use this phrase often. Many of us do.

    This was a tougher post to write because, well, too many choices. However, I sat down to try and give an example of where this comes into play for me.

    Everyone should write a post, or a few posts, on this topic. Your decision making and reasoning are important things to share with others.

    The Devil is in the Details

    I deal with quite a few proof of concepts and questions about altering database development practices. One of the questions I’m often asked is how does a particular group get started with automating their database deployments.

    It depends.

    That’s really the answer, and I have to start to ask them questions about their pains. What is the driver for change? What things don’t work well right now? The answers to what doesn’t work well will drive how we move forward.

    Is it failed deployments? If so, then is this bad code? Let’s test more. If it’s people not always running all the scripts, or the right scripts, then we need a test environment where we actually run scripts to see if they work.

    Do you lose track of what changes developers have made? Let’s make sure we have version control as a funnel to capture all changes, and from there we can look at manual or automated deployments of what’s changed.

    Are you struggling to get code that meets the requirements? Again, testing can help, but maybe you need to structure better communications between developers and business customers, and make small changes that your customers can actually see and test.

    If you can’t keep up with requests from developers, then maybe this isn’t about database development and this is more of a staffing issue.

    The devil is in the details, and to make a successful leap to a smooth DevOps process for database development, we want to adapt to your environment. Let’s address the pain, and minimize the changes we need to make.

    There isn’t a once size fits all. This is a set of tools and principles we want to use, but in a way that works best for your situation.

  • Daily Coping 12 Jul 2022

    I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral 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.

    Today’s tip is to find something to look forward to today.

    It’s Tuesday, which isn’t that different from any other day of the week for me now. The winter is different as I’ll be coaching Tuesday nights, but for now, this is just a day.

    However, I like to go to yoga Tuesday mornings, and go through a class with an instructor that I enjoy. Waking up this morning, that’s what I am looking forward to doing after a little email and before a busy work day.