Avsnitt
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It seems that when I travel to offices these days, it's standard for most desk setups to have two monitors. I think all the desks at Redgate have a docking station and two monitors for people to use. They also convert to standing desks, which is handy. I have a standing desk that I use regularly, and it's nice to have that option when I visit an office. At a number of customer sites, I've seen similar setups, sometimes with laptop/monitor lifts instead of desks that rise.
Recently I saw a docking station announced that can support four monitors. I wonder how many of you want, need, or use more than two monitors. While there is often a standard in offices, since many of us work part or full-time at home, perhaps you have a different setup. Maybe you have one or two large monitors instead of 3 or 4 smaller ones. I'd certainly be interested to know if any of you have more than 4 monitors.
Read the rest of Multiple Display Productivity
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I've got a few certifications and quite a few more that have expired or aren't relevant. Does anyone think Windows NT 4.0 or SQL Server 6.5 matter? If you need help in those areas, ask someone else. Unless you have a crazy budget with a willingness to pay a ridiculous hourly rate.
Kamil Nowinski had a recent video discussing why IT certifications are still relevant. He had ten reasons, and if you want to watch the entire show, you'll hear his reasons and some rationale why he thinks they matter. It's a good set of reasons: keeping up with tech, practicing learning, demonstrating a commitment to some technology, finding a community of certified colleagues, and more.
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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One of the things that I've found with cloud computing services is that the people involved with managing these resources sometimes get asked to become financial accountants.
I saw an interesting post from SQL Rod asking about this new task as something all of us might need to consider a part of our job in the modern world. He asks if we are Techouncants or Accountechs? This isn't in the sense of being the Financial DBA trying to manage costs in the cloud, though that is part of his post. It's more about making smart financial decisions. Certainly, as more workloads move to the cloud, and they are for many of us, we likely need to keep an eye on costs, usage, and tuning.
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For most of us working in technology, I think we understand that if something is broken we might need to work. Not that we have to, or we need to, but we might need to. Perhaps you feel differently, or your company approaches on-call in another way. If so, let me know today how you deal with staff being on-call.
In my career, there are jobs with formal on-call, informal on-call, or even no on-call. In the latter situation, there isn't anyone who is prepared to handle issues outside of normal working hours, but that doesn't mean if management calls you can ignore them. It's that the organization didn't expect issues. I worked in a small company (< 50 people), where we primarily had systems for people who worked in the office, and nothing was running at night (outside of backups). Normally no one knew if there was an issue overnight or on weekends, but I did get called by the owner when he went in one weekend and couldn't receive a fax on our computer system. So I guess I was the emergency-on-call person.
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I saw a quote recently that resonated with me. It's not something I've often struggled with, but I have at times. Here's the quote:
"Life rewards action, not intelligence. Many brilliant people talk themselves out of getting started, and being smart doesn't help very much without the courage to act. You can't win if you're not in the game." - @JamesClear
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Last year, I read Surrender, 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 a rich and famous singer. He's had to build more skills around how to communicate with others, convince them to take a course of action, and educate himself about the world. In trying to build these skills, he's founded or worked in organizations around his time with U2.
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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 the rows for managers and directors. No cubes!
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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 with me less because many trips were all work, and I lacked energy from the pace of moving all over the world.
Read the rest of When Are Your Breaks?
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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 code freezes or no-deploy periods that many companies have? How do you implement a code freeze under DevOps?
Read the rest of The Code Freeze
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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 opportunities you might appreciate because you're comfortable. Perhaps you're the frog in water that's being heated so slowly that you don't realize how poor your current situation is for your health.
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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 on, so I did. That day.
Read the rest of Under the Bus
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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.
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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) State of Database Landscape report 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 (Ryan) for a new job, and another, an opportunity (Grant) as the company focus shifted. I assume some of you out there have had similar experiences either moving towards, or away from, SQL Server.
Read the rest of The Journey to Change
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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 Redgate Monitor. 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 decided it could save money by leaving the cloud. I've seen other companies decide they were saving money in the cloud. Many, however, are likely unsure of the total return they get compared to the costs of cloud computing. I have seen some posts (like this one) that try to help you get a handle on your costs, but there is often a lot of complexity in cloud costs when multiple departments have different accounts (AWS) or subscriptions (Azure) with a provider.
Read the rest of The Cloud Database Cost Analysis
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Chocolatey Solutions Engineer Stephen Valdinger 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 Amazon, Spotify, or others. Often quite a bit of time and effort is spent changing the way your development team works, and often without a lot of success.
Read the rest of Another View of DevOps
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I wrote a post about Git recently since I've found far too many people who didn't know Git well (or at all) and they seemed hesitant to experiment and learn.
Is this because of being too busy? Do we have so many people who are working in tech where "it's just a job" and not because they enjoy technology? Or has management in too many places beaten people down to the point they don't want to try things? Perhaps your coworkers are resistant to change (or lazy) and you don't want to discuss new ideas with them.
Read the rest of An Experimental Mindset
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Re-platforming is the process of moving a system to a new platform. Imagine taking an ASP.NET/SQL Server website and moving to Azure Functions on Azure SQL Database. Or maybe taking a Java client/server app with Oracle and moving it to a series of microservices against MongoDB. Those changes could be a net benefit to your organization in the end, but they aren't quick or easy. They're often fraught with various challenges that can cause a lot of stress while creeping over budget.
There's a post that talks about some of the things you might think about if you embark upon a re-platform. Often this takes place when an organization is looking to modernize their tech stack. Quite a few of the technology DevOps success stories take place when the older structures are not maintainable, but also not able to handle increased workloads or performance requirements.
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Legislation was introduced in Australia to allow employees to protect themselves from unreasonable calls and emails from work during off-hours. You can read more about it, but a bill was passed to allow employees to ignore calls and messages without repercussion It is expected to pass, though I don't expect this to do a lot for bad bosses. They'll find ways to hint or imply that you need to respond, and might even remove your chances of advancement/promotion/raises. While you can sue, that rarely works out well for anyone.
From the various reports I've seen, I'm not sure if this includes salaried workers or just hourly workers. I certainly think hourly workers ought to be paid if they're called after hours. I've even been paid as a salaried worker if the calls outside of core hours exceeded a certain amount per week. That seemed fair to me, and in our team, there was always someone willing to work more for extra money, so I could trade on-call work if I didn't want to do it.
Read the rest of Protecting Off Hours
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Redgate released the results of their State of Database Landscape recently, and I was part of a webinar where Beca Parker, Ryan Booz, and I discussed the results. As we were talking, one of the things that struck me was the high number of people who had picked skills as being a challenge for their organization. In a single environment, skillset requirements and training were the number one challenge, and it was listed as the number one obstacle to implementing a DevOps approach.
While this industry is full of self-taught individuals who have spent time learning new technologies and tools, it's somewhat amazing that training continues to be an issue. Many organizations limit their training budgets and time allocated to employees while continuing to expand the number of technologies and platforms they use. This is one reason why I think changing database platforms to avoid licensing costs is unlikely to save you money anytime soon. Retraining staff and developing competence takes time. Perhaps this is also one reason why many companies look to the cloud, thinking that they can reduce the amount of upskilling needed by their staff if the cloud vendor manages the systems.
Read the rest of Growing Skills at Work
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The title of our keynote session at the Redgate Summit in Atlanta is Navigating the Database Landscape, and I'll be delivering part of the talk, along with Grant Fritchey and Kathi Kellenberger today, Mar 13. This is based on the State of Database Landscape Survey results, as well as our experience working with customers and implementing DevOps solutions over the last decade. The talk was mostly written by others, but as I rehearsed the session, I found myself wondering about how I'd approach my job if we returned to being a DBA or developer.
When working in technology today, there are many challenges outside of actually learning about any of the particular products, languages, platforms, etc. We have the politics of working with others, ongoing work, emergency requests outside of channels, random questions asked by others, code reviews, and probably a few other things I'm forgetting, all outside of learning any new skills. While I consider myself a lifelong learner, I know that finding time (and energy) to acquire the basics of any new technology is challenging.
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