Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

  • Daily Coping 1 Apr 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 choose to smile today at something you encounter.

    I tend to smile (and wave) at people. And horses. I’ll wave to the horses, which my wife thinks is silly.

    I smile at things I see, though, and often it’s something a kid does. Kids are amazing humans, and they view the world in fascinating ways.

    For me, I was smiling recently at SQL Bits, where I saw people hugging and shaking hands. It’s something I’ve missed at events, the closeness of friends. Most people asked others if it was OK, and for the most part it was.

  • The Summit is Back in Person

    Registration for the Data Community Summit opens today! You can sign up and come to Seattle in November with all the other data platform pros that you’ve missed seeing the last two years.

    The event will be hybrid, but I’m going in person. I’ve missed seeing many of you, and I am looking forward to the chance to wave, shake hands, hug, and interact over coffee and cocktails in person. I’ve gone to a few conferences this year and have a few more scheduled. Each one of them is a little more normal, which I hope is a trend that continues.

    If you aren’t comfortable coming in person, there is a still a hybrid option, with recordings of sessions for no-demand sessions available early. This will help with speaker Q&As, but there will also be a lot of sessions taking place live, with the ability to watch and ask questions, almost as if you were there. SQL Bits did a great job with hybrid, and I expect the Summit to be even better.

    Breakfast is Back

    Breakfast is back this year, which means you can wander into the convention center early, meet with friends, and make new contacts.

    One of the things I’ve enjoyed is wandering around the hall and looking for friends to chat with. Or stopping at a table and introducing myself. Or just picking a spot and seeing who might come up. With a few meals a day, this is a great chance to expand your network and learn just how diverse our community can be.

    Register Early

    As with many events, prices rise over time. Now is the time when you can convince the boss to pay the least by registering now. The discount today is enough to cover quite a bit of the travel expenses, and every bit can help. You have until May 25 to get this opening pricing.

    This is THE event for data professionals, especially those working with SQL Server, the Microsoft Data Platform, or using AWS. There are many blogs and posts across the years about the value, excitement, and knowledge gained at the event. Show a few to your boss and get registered today.

    Seattle is a wonderful city, and there is a lot to do. If you want to combine a fun vacation with the trip, I’ve had some good times there with my kids before and after the event. If you’ve never spent a couple days there, this might be the time to think about it.

    This is the homecoming for the data platform community and I hope that I see some of you there. If you see me, please stop my and say hi.

  • Daily Coping 31 Mar 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 appreciate your hands and all the things they enable you to do.

    My hands are critical. I learned to appreciate them quite a bit recently while trying to present at SQL Bits. I had injured my wrist and was wearing a brace to limit activity. When I went on stage and tried to use a mouse, I struggled because of the brace. I realized just how impactful an injury to my hands can be.

    I use my hands to type for work, play guitar, coach kids, cook, and more. When I’ve been injured, I find my life impacted substantially.

    I am grateful that my hands work well and have served me well across many years.

  • Passed a CosmosDB Exam

    I took the beta exam for Cosmos DB a few months back. I did this as part of the MVP program, as they were asking people to evaluate the exam and give feedback. I’ve lightly used Cosmos DB, but I also thought I might get some practice with the platform and taking an MS test, which I haven’t done in years.

    I passed!

    I got a note today that the results for DP-420 were in. This is the Designing and Implementing Cloud-Native Applications Using Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB exam, which is way out of my area.

    To be fair, I didn’t want to just take this blind, so I spent about a week and a half studying regularly each day, going through the learning path and understanding the different aspects of CosmosDB. It was interesting and confusing, but I acquired a decent understanding of what the platform is and can do.

    What I didn’t know were some specifics like how many RU/s might be available for a particularly sized contained. I did, however, learn about the different types of containers, accounts, hierarchies of things, etc.

    Feedback

    I like the beta exams because you get more than the 5 minutes or so to give feedback, and can do so for many questions. While I think the exams do test some knowledge in most cases, I also think that they can mislead people at times. I also think that some questions are really fact memorization.

    For example, if you asked me what is max size of a serverless container, that seems like a reasonable thing to know. If you’re planning an install, you should know that serverless limits things.

    However, this is a memorization fact. It’s a documentation thing you can look up in seconds, and by the way, you should. That number could change any day as Cosmos DB evolves.

    There were 2-3 questions like that on my exam and I gave that feedback. I don’t have a better question, but knowing that a container is 10GB or 50GB seems like a poor test of knowledge.

    There were a few issues I had with wording, but overall the questions weren’t bad, IMHO. They were hard. Unlike many of the other SQL exams, I found most of these to be hard and was unsure of if I really knew the answer.