Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

  • Adding the Social Headline Topic

    The world is changing, and the activism is infectious. I’ve tried to be fairly apolitical and unoffensive for most of my career. I definitely have not always succeeded, but in general rules, I’ve avoided most controversial topics, tried to avoid profanity, and been polite in disagreement.

    I think those are good general rules, but I don’t think I can be silent about some of the difficult topics impacting the world today around #BlackLivesMatter, LGBTQ issues, treatment of women, and more. These are not political topics, in most cases, but just basic humanitarian issues.

    I’ve added the tag, social, and will prefix posts with “Social:” as I discuss and debate these items in my mind.

    If you are not interested, please ignore these posts.

    If you wish to comment, I will respond to serious questions, but will ignore and disengage from trolling.

    If you wish to make a joke  or use irony, sarcasm, or any other technique, please refrain. I see enough of this on Twitter, and honestly, most of you suck at it. You’re not funny, and it comes off poorly. I try to be careful here myself, because I’m not funny either. I might be able to make a joke, but as a public speaker for over a decade, I know it’s a rare occurrence.

    I am also looking to drop posts of this nature on Friday, trying to give them time to grow and mature in my mind.

  • Daily Coping 9 June 2020

    I’ve 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.

    Today’s tip is to think of 3 things you’re grateful for and write them down.

    This is similar to a previous tip, but this is a good exercise. As we often say in yoga, learn to practice gratitude.

    Thing 1

    I am grateful for my health. Despite a body that feels like it’s deteriorating as I get older, I am in good health.  I rarely need to go to the doctor, and I haven’t caught COVID. I can still snowboard, and while it feels really slow, I can still pull on the rowing machine at a decent rate. At 50+, I made it through a 5k row at a 2:05 pace. In college, I was doing about 1:56. Not bad.

    Thing 2

    I am grateful for Simon Galbraith, CEO of Redgate. For giving me this amazing job, for leading Redgate during times of struggle and success, for the culture and respect which he has implemented in our organization. He leads, and does so in ways that make me think, inspire me, and challenge me.

    I’ve said it many times, that the highest praise I have for him is that he has built the kind of company that I would want to build if I tried to start one.

    Thing 3

    I am grateful for the way my children drive the world forward. All different, all living life in different ways, with different thoughts and different actions. I am proud of them, and while I don’t always agree with their choices, I am grateful that they have chosen to be themselves, live their lives, and give me hope for the future of my community and this world.

  • T-SQL Tuesday #127–Non SQL Tricks

    tsqltuesdayToday is T-SQL Tuesday, with this month being hosted by Ken Fisher. This is an interesting topic, looking at tips, but ones outside of SQL Server. Since many of us are data professionals, I think this is a place where I might learn a few things from others. Looking forward to the recap.

    I spent a number of years working in network administration and desktop work, as well as some software development teams, so I have to think about what I think makes a good tip.

    A Quick Fix with Contig

    One of the problems with a machine that runs out of memory or disk space is that it will act slow and suspicious. It often isn’t obvious that you’ve run out of resources, since we often don’t think about a slow degradation for RAM or disk space. Usually we’re looking for a runaway process, a virus, or something else. I’ve been surprised sometimes that I spent an hour, or watched someone else do this, before checking disk space.

    These days Windows is better about warning us when space is low, but it can be easy to ignore this or defer action until a later time when you’re busy. This tip won’t help you with RAM, but it can help with storage, which often affects things like pagefiles.

    Contig.exe is a utility from the Sysinternals utilities. It is designed to defragment files, but it can be used to create new files. Of whatever size you want. I’ve written about this before, and I use this on my machines. Whenever I get a new drive, I usually make 10 new files, each 1GB in size and keep them around. This post reminded me to do this on a new drive.

    2020-06-02 21_03_35-SanDisk1MB (E_)

    If I run low on space, I can get 10GB back quickly, without searching my filesystem for something to delete.

    You could do the same thing with a large ISO if you want, but keeping a file ready to delete can be handy. It always seems I run out of space when I’m in a hurry to get something else done.

  • Social: A Small Step to Address Poor Past Behavior

    Tl;Dr – This is about changing your main branch in git to main. However, please read and think about what I am saying here.

    When I started working with Version Control, the main branch was named trunk. I worked with code and we always branched away from trunk, which was our source of truth. I have no idea of the origin, though people seem to think this relates to trees. That makes sense.

    Then why master? No idea. The inventor of Git is Linus Torvalds. He’s been accused of poor behavior, though I don’t know I think he is racist. Git was supposedly chosen as it’s an unpleasant person in British slang. That makes sense.

    I followed him early on, and remember trying to get Linux 0.6 working on hardware. I was fascinated with his work, and I hope he chose “master” as the moniker for the main branch because of the verb definition rather than the noun. Who knows?

    In any case, technology is littered with the use of “master” in our terminology. Replication, especially, but HA tech and in many places where we distribute something from one machine to another. I would like to think this is idea of one with more/better knowledge (the master, in the Kung Fu sense), distributing that to others.

    However, there is the connotation of control.

    The IETF agrees and has draft terminology change recommendations. In line with that, I saw a note from Scott Hanselman on changing your git default branch, this after I saw a few people this weekend noting they were submitting PRs to make the change.

    I decided to do the same. I don’t know how to do this on GitHub without a local repo, so I’m following Scott’s process.

    git branch –m master main
    
git push –u origin main

    This moves all the code (all commits and history) to a branch called main. Then pushes this up and tracks it.

    Once it’s there, I need to go to the repo settings and change the default branch to main and delete master. This will cause some issues on laptops, but those are up to date, or they have minor unpushed demo changes that I can abandon. I’ll then pull down the new structure of the repo.

    Don’t do this haphazardly. Communicate with your team and ensure everyone is aware of the change. Then slowly work your way through the repos. It’s a chore but a small one. One I’ll be working my way through until I’m done.