I Don't Want To Do XX
Voice of the DBA
Every job is a job on some days. I've said this to my kids and others I've mentored over the years. I've probably written that here, and I truly believe it. When you work at a job, some days are bad days. There are always days you don't want to do the work. There are also likely some days that you dread starting. Whether you work for someone else or run your own business, there will be times you aren't completely in control of the work and wonder how you ended up in this situation. Even if you're self-employed, you have clients that sometimes dictate your day. Read the rest of
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The Cost of Multiple Platforms
Voice of the DBA
I ran into an interesting post that noted . The example might be that your "software" could use PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, Clickhouse, and something NewSQL (Spanner, CockroachDB, etc,). Some of you might think that's not reality, but keep in mind that for a lot of your organizations, the "software" is what the customer uses. I'm sure my bank has multiple systems behind the mobile app I use to pay for things, move money, check balances, etc. I would guess there is some DB/2, SQL Server, and some analytics or No/NewSQL stuff in there. Hidden as different applications that make up the "app",...
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The End of Summer
Voice of the DBA
Growing up, this was the last week of summer for me every year. When I was a child in Virginia Beach, school started the day after Labor Day every year, which is next Monday in the US. This was our last chance to sleep in, enjoy the ocean, and stay out late without commitments. Starting next week we'd be back in school, up early, with homework to do every night. As an adult, the end of summer doesn't really stand out anymore. Corporate changes are usually at the beginning of the year or in July, so it's the end of June or December that are slower times. September is often the beginning of...
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Measuring Productivity
Voice of the DBA
I've dealt with a lot of customers with who lately are concerned with the ROI of their teams. Certainly they want a good ROI if they purchase as do we. Our goal has been to be partners with customers and continue to add value to the products they've purchased on a regular basis. We release every week or two, and our and updates reflect this. New functionality, fixes, and previews. I'm proud of the constant updates we deliver, and I know customers get increased value throughout our partnership. Does our software provide a good ROI? I get asked this question by execs regularly, and I often...
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Preserving Data
Voice of the DBA
Most data professionals I know go out of their way to take care of the data entrusted to them. Most people ensure backups are running, lots (hopefully most) test their restores. A few will ensure a good rotation their data offsite. Some of you might have formal rotation schemes, and some might just keep a rolling list of xx backups available. Likely a few of you don't worry about anything other than the last full backup, which is a risker approach than I'd take. Read the rest of
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Collecting Data is Hard
Voice of the DBA
Data is the lifeblood of much of the world today. Not necessarily big data, and certainly not perfect data, but organizations, individuals, governments, really everyone is making decisions based on data. You might think it's going to rain, so you cut the grass today, or maybe defer adding fertilizer. Your organization sees demand for a product, so it orders more and produces more. Government is always using data to make decisions. We might not think they make great decisions, but data matters. Recently I was reading a science fiction book () about the future, where a person's brain (Henry)...
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Admin Rights for Everyone
Voice of the DBA
I was chatting with someone that works at a smaller organization Still a few hundred employees, but the technical teams (dev and ops) were less than 20 in total. They mentioned that everyone had admin rights to the systems as they worked as a team and sometimes developers provided production support. I haven't encountered that in quite some time. Is it still a thing to give a lot of people administrator writes across many systems? I know for many organizations there is concern about developers being able to change things in production, but if you aren't a public company or a regulated one,...
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A Challenge of Our Knowledge
Voice of the DBA
AI is here to stay. It will evolve, it will get better at some things, and we might decide that it's not good for certain tasks. It's a weird, new, different technology that somehow seems magic, extremely intelligent, and at times as dumb as a box of rocks. It can do things that I could never do, or would never do, for myself. Heck, I'm not sure I could or would pay someone to do . Yet this was less than a minute for a computer system to take and transform it into something fun. Christian Buckley wrote an , which sums up nicely one of the struggles many of us have with AI. Many of us identify...
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An Eventual Consistency Scam
Voice of the DBA
Recently I sold a car. It was an interesting process as I hadn't sold a car to someone I didn't know in a long time. I listed the car in a few places and was surprised by the interest. It was an EV (I guess it still is), and with the rising price of fuel in the US, maybe I shouldn't have been surprised. I arranged a couple of showings, but I had quite a few people offer to buy the car after only seeing a few pictures, asking if I'd take a check. Some of you might be wary at this point, and I was. However, my wife had gotten similar offers from a few people when she was selling a horse. She...
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Never is Not the Policy
Voice of the DBA
Years ago I worked with a few developers and DBAs that were temp-table happy. As in they defaulted to using temp tables everywhere. This was in SQL Server 6.5, and tempdb was an issue with contention, sizing, and performance. I rewrote so many queries to remove temp tables for our clients that I banned them. I told other developers they could never use temp tables in their SQL code. They, of course, would try to submit code with temp tables in our VCS (Visual SourceSafe at the time), but an early, pre-automated CI/CD would notify me and I'd have the developer rewrite their code. There were...
info_outlineFor a while, I kept seeing that the cost of writing code was approaching zero. So many people felt that with an AI LLM, the costs would go way down to produce software. I'm not sure that's true. In fact, some companies are finding they spend more on AI tokens than salaries.
However, the ability to produce more code, experiment with ideas, or generate proof of concepts has gone up. Whether it's worth the cost or not depends on the engineer, but some organizations are finding that they can try more things than they would ever had time to try in the past. The time of engineers was the constraint, and if you can afford the cost, AI LLMs can relieve that time pressure.
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