Seagull Management
Voice of the DBA
Last year, I read , a book by U2 lead singer, Bono. Bill Gates listed this as one of the top books to read at one point, so I picked it up and dove in. I have enjoyed U2s music since I was in high school, and was interested to hear what made Bill Gates recommend his book. The book is partially a journey of U2, but mostly a look at how Bono's view of the world and life has changed over time. Bono grew beyond music in his life to become an activist and try to shape the world into a better place. Whether you agree with his efforts or focus or not, it's admirable that he has tried to be more than...
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Missing the Office
Voice of the DBA
Recently I traveled to visit a customer who has an in-the-office culture. They have multiple large buildings outside a major US city and almost all their employees (7000+) live nearby and are expected to be in the office the whole week. More senior people can opt for 4 10-hour shifts rather than 5 8-hour shifts, but with few exceptions, they have people in the office. I hadn't seen that in a long time. Almost every customer is mostly remote or some level of hybrid (usually 2-3 days a week in the office). What's more, they have an open culture, with rows of desks for teams and spaces between...
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When Are Your Breaks?
Voice of the DBA
As I work through 2024, I found myself doing a little more vacation planning this year than in previous ones. In 2022 I traveled quite a bit, but my wife went with me often. We went to Europe 5 times that year and added quite a few vacation days around my work trips. My wife thought that was a great year. Last year, 2023, was different. I traveled more (36 trips), with most of them being short. When I traveled that much, I wanted to end trips quickly and get back home. I learned that was too many, and also too disruptive for life. I got behind on things I needed to do at home, my wife went...
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The Code Freeze
Voice of the DBA
One of the ideas behind DevOps is that we minimize the time between code commit and deployment to production. We want to avoid work-in-progress and bottlenecks to getting our software into the hands of customers. This has led a lot of companies to release more often, albeit with smaller sets of features. The total number of things delivered under DevOps might not be greater, but it often is more targeted to those things our customers want/need/use. However, the idea of releasing often means that we try not to stack up too much work before deploying it. What does that mean for holidays and the...
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When is it time for a new job?
Voice of the DBA
I subscribe to quite a few newsletters, and one of them is for job hunters. I have a great job, maybe the best job for me, but I like to keep in touch with what's going on because I, well, I have job insecurity and worry about being without a job. I think this is leftover from childhood. I also want to know how to help others in finding their dream job. Recently there was a question asking when it was time for a new job How can you tell (for yourself) when you should be seeking new opportunities? It might not be easy to recognize for many of you. Perhaps you don't realize there are other...
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Under the Bus
Voice of the DBA
I've had a good career in database work. I've had success, and I've had some failures, fortunately the former far outpacing the latter. In my career across many companies, the code I've written has tended to work well, or at least well enough. I've managed systems and ensured a high uptime, and solved issues quickly. I have left quite a few jobs in technology, some because I was unhappy, some for better opportunities. I was asked to leave one job. I disagreed with my boss, thought he was a jerk, and our CTO told me this person was more valuable than I was at that time. The CTO suggested I move...
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CosmosDB APIs Inside SQL Server 2024
Voice of the DBA
CosmosDB has been a great data platform in the Azure cloud that helps companies deal with disparate types of data. The CosmosDB APIs include those for MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, and Gremlin. These wire-level protocols let you work in a way that is compatible with those systems for storing data. That's coming to SQL Server. Read the rest of
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The Journey to Change
Voice of the DBA
I assume most of you reading this work with SQL Server, at least for some of your workday. I know there are plenty of you who also support Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, or some other database platform. The results in our (Redgate's) showed that many organizations, indeed most, have more than one database platform in production. This was also a theme in our Data Community Summit and Redgate Summit keynotes, where Ryan and Grant discussed their journey to learn a new platform (PostgreSQL). One, a requirement () for a new job, and another, an opportunity () as the company focus shifted. I assume...
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The Cloud Database Cost Analysis
Voice of the DBA
There is a skill that I think DBAs and sysadmins will need to develop: cloud cost analysis. I've thought this was important for quite a few years, and I've been (unsuccessfully) lobbying for cost information to be gathered and analyzed in . Hopefully, this work will get done soon, as I see more companies asking their technical people to provide analysis and justification of the resources being billed for in the cloud. Basecamp analyzed its costs in 2023 and . I've seen other companies decide they were saving money in the cloud. Many, however, are likely unsure of the total return they get...
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Another View of DevOps
Voice of the DBA
Chocolatey Solutions Engineer said, "DevOps isn’t something you do, but rather, it’s a way of doing things. What works for us here, may not work for you there, so you adjust." He then went on to say that DevOps is a way of working that reduces time to introduce changes, while at the same time making changes traceable, accountable, and revertable. I've seen many companies try to copy what another company has done, especially with regards to DevOps and software development. I see companies copy the organization of teams from , , or others. Often quite a bit of time and effort is spent...
info_outlineI was reading a short piece from Mike Fal recently and it struck a chord with me. I started working with computers as a developer, really a hack programmer as a kid. Friends and I would build small games or hack existing ones to change things. Eventually I was paid to write code, and moved into data work because the pay was better. That was 25 years ago, and I haven't regretted the change since. In fact, I've enjoyed working with data.
Even as I managed data, I always ended up writing some code. Not code, code, like an application that others could use to accomplish a task (though I have often done a touch of that), but rather code to help me as a DBA. I had code to check servers and record values. I had code to move backup files around and generate restore scripts. I had code that would build reports for other DBAs. Some of this code are queries, some are more complex scripts in PoSH (or older VBScript), some could be C# or some other language, but it's all code. Fundamentally, the code isn't much different from the code that application developers write and deploy to clients, web servers, or mobile devices.
Read the rest of "The New DBA is a Developer"