Voice of the DBA

Tag: T-SQL Tuesday

  • T-SQL Tuesday #132 Pandemic Coping

    tsqltuesdayThis year, 2020, has been crazy. What started as a normal year for me, including a sabbatical, turned into a crazy, shutdown, lockdown, stuck at home pandemic around the world.

    My world changed a lot, as I cancelled a trip at the beginning of March, and all subsequent ones. Coaching volleyball stopped, and most events were cancelled, big changes for me.

    At the same time, my daughter came home from college and spent the rest of the semester with us and my oldest switched from teaching in person to being at home and finding a place he could virtually teach.

    This month, Taiob Ali asks us how we are dealing with these changes.

    Coping

    At first, I was coping fine with things fine. I live on a large ranch, my wife works from home, and I’ve been doing so for nearly 20 years. I have an office and am used to working here regularly. We are healthy and financially secure, and mostly it was a pain dealing with the changes in the world.

    As part of the Redgate Community Circleww, we started to think about how to help others, and came up with different ideas. One of mine was to publish some coping tips. At first, I was trying to help others, but over time, I found these to be invaluable to me.

    I get these from Action for Happiness for the most part, though I add some myself. I work through these in my life, often a few days in advance, and then write about them. I was thinking to stop these after June, but many people responded they liked them, and I’ve continued ever since then, which seems like a long time.

    I’ve also found these help me. During August, I struggled with the length of the changes, and the fact that looking forward another 6 months, I couldn’t see an end to the pandemic. The weight of the length of this weighs on me.

    Physical Health

    I’m in my 50s and exercise regularly, usually doing yoga or going to the gym 20+ days a month. My diet is OK, probably better than average America, but not great. Still, while my routine was interrupted in March, with less stuff than I’d like:

    2020-11-09 13_34_53-MapMyRun

    I got better in April and was in a good routine through June.

    2020-11-09 13_35_13-MapMyRun

    Mostly life was good until the end of October.

    I had a trip planned to visit family, but cancelled. My wife got sick, then I did, then my daughter. A week later one of my sons got sick. We had been diagnosed with COVID, and it was both scary and hard. The symptoms weren’t that bad, but all of my energy was sapped. I spent most of two weeks in bed or with very light chores around the house.

    2020-11-09 13_37_35-MapMyRun

    Since then, I feel better, but there are still some gaps in my health. I have no worry of dying, but I am worried about long term physical ability.

    Wear a mask, try not to get it, and if you don’t believe in masks or the disease, you’re a moron. Don’t leave me a comment on what you believe as a non-epidemiologist or non medical professional. Pardon my language, but fuck off.

    Mental Health

    I’ve struggled. Despite working at home for a couple decades, I’m used to changing my environment, going to see others, traveling, and more. Seeing my children depressed from school changes, not seeing the kids I coach, not getting to the gym, not going to restaurants and movies, it got to me.

    The longing for a change of environment, and not seeing the same four walls of my office weigh on me. The struggles I see on the news, especially from so many people losing jobs, businesses, and more are hard. I have a lot of empathy and realize I am incredibly blessed.

    I’ve made an effort to chat with others. To reach out at times, and ask for support from my wife and a few close friends.

    My mental health as suffered, even as I try to cope. I continue to work on this regularly, talking more, and trying to find the good things in my life as much as I can.

    Professional Growth

    I had hoped to do more learning, expecting that this pandemic would be less than six months. On one hand, I greatly underestimated the struggles of being at home all the time. On the other, I got some things done.

    I’ve had different goals this year, and I have spent some time learning more about Power BI, DAX, and visualization. I’ve read more business/non-fiction books this year than in the past. I’m making progress on goals. Not as much as I’d like, but some.

  • T-SQL Tuesday #131–An Analogy

    tsqltuesdayThis month the T-SQL Tuesday invitation is from Rob Volk, the last of the crew that I pushed to host last year at a SQL Saturday. I managed to get four people to agree to host, and all did so. Rob is the fourth this year, and I’m grateful for him and the others for doing this.

    In any case, this month’s invitation asks us to explain what we do. The title is data analogies, which makes sense as most of us participating work with data and so we likely all get asked what we do and we talk about databases. I’ve often said I worked with computers, then I work with databases if someone asks more. Few people want more depth.

    However, while I do work with data, that’s not really the main part of my job. It’s more an adjunct responsibility that I enjoy.

    A Newspaper

    When I started SQLServerCentral with my partners and worked for myself, I had no shortage of people asking me what I did. At Boy Scouts, Volleyball practices, scholarship committees, and more, I was regularly asked what I did for a living. I tried a number of ways to explain the site, but eventually settled on this.

    “I run a newspaper.”

    I really do. I have a daily publishing newsletter that contains information for subscribers. Ads, sometimes funnies or puzzles, and articles they want to read. I have a daily deadline of getting things ready, but fortunately, I don’t have a lot that is time sensitive. It’s hard enough to keep up with a schedule without worrying about article A publishing tomorrow and article B needing to go out the next day.

  • Automation Ideas for T-SQL Tuesday #130

    tsqltuesdayThis month we have another great T-SQL Tuesday topic, and again, a host that I pressured into writing the invitation. Elizabeth Noble (@SQLZelda) and I were talking DevOps last year at a SQL Saturday, just as she was effecting some change at her employer. At an event later in the year, I challenged her to host, and here we are, with a great topic, Automation.

    That’s this month’s invitation. Elizabeth describes the process of using automation to smooth out their deployments to SQL Servers. They slowly built a CICD pipeline and migrated projects over and over to save her time.

    This month, what have we done to automate things? I have a few stories.

    Automating Data Collection

    One of the things that I am passionate about is the SQL Saturday events. I loved that PASS maintained a site, and made a feed of event data available, but over time, we’ve lost some data and I don’t think there is much impetus to maintain this over time.

    As a result, I build an automated process to grab data from the feeds and save it as an XML file on my local machine. I have the basic code up at GitHub, though I need to improve and refactor it a bit. These files change as the organizers update them, so I need a good merge process. Right now I tend to delete all 1-2KB files periodically, as the file is built once the event is approved. However, until all the speakers and sponsors are scheduled the file size is just a few KB. Most events are > 100KB once they are set.

    This is a basic way of grabbing some data, and I’m looking to build a few more data collection processes to grab data in my life and keep it around, just in case some service I use goes kaput.

    Automatic Databases

    I work at Redgate, and one of the things I’ve been spending more time doing is the automation of databases for development with the latest code and test data. This is a challenge, but a few of the things that I’ve done with Redgate that help are as follows:

    1. Use Powershell to automate the creation of SQL Clone images.
    2. Use PowerShell to update SQL Monitor alert values and add instances
    3. Use Flyway in a container to deploy changes
    4. Use our SQL Change Automation cmdlets to deploy changes to databases

    All of these items can be automated so that a user just needs to run a script, or sometimes just click a button.

    I’m slowly getting the PoSh code up on GitHub as I build demos and help customers get things done. Right now, getting organized is the biggest part of my job, because I find these questions coming over and over.

    I’m a bit proponent of DevOps and automation. Use tools and computers to do the tedious, repetitive work. Keep your day focused on solving problems and building/improving scripts.

  • My T-SQL Tuesday #129 Time Capsule

    This month the T-SQL Tuesday invitation comes from tsqltuesdayTamara Clark. I strong-armed Tamara last fall, along with her husband, into hosting this year. She came through, with a great topic given the state of the world.

    She asks us to write about what we’d put in time capsule, the items or information that goes into a #sqlcommunity bucket. In some sense, this invitation reminds me of Brent’s reminder post to himself.

    Memories of 2020

    What do I remember about this year? First, a lot of vacation for me. My employer, Redgate Software, gives a sabbatical every five years. It’s a great perk for employees that stick around, and it has helped me recharge and refresh. I think I was the last one to get a sabbatical this year while the offices were open, however, there are other companies that take care of employees, and my first memory is a reminder of this. Maybe some future person opening this capsule will think about asking their organization for this.

    The second thing is that I won’t go into an office this entire year. I didn’t get any visits before lockdown, and we’ve closed our offices for the year. That’s a first for me in over a decade. However, the next thing I want to remember from this year is that so many companies are realizing that work from home (WFH) not only works, but lots of people are very productive. We can rethink our costs in buildings, commutes, living locations, and more. Redgate has traditionally not allowed anyone to avoid the office. There are a few of us that have been exceptions over the years, but 90% of our employees have been expected to show up at the office every week.

    That’s changed, and it will change our culture and organization in the future.

    The last thing to put in this time capsule is the importance of social contact and togetherness. I’ve missed a lot of this across the five months, to the point I work to see some people locally every couple weeks. I love my family, but I miss the social contact I used to get regularly, whether traveling to a SQL Saturday, visiting an office, maybe working in a library or Starbucks for a few hours, or just at a movie theater.

    We need more social contact, or at least, I do.