Voice of the DBA Steve Jones

Several years ago, I heard about a new product coming in Azure that would provide an IaaS (infrastructure as a service) VM to run SQL Server, with Microsoft managing most of the admin tasks for the instance, like patching and backups. That didn't seem like a big load to me, and I wondered if anyone would actually pay for this product. After all, don't most companies find managing patches and backups?
That product became Azure SQL Managed Instance, and I've been surprised at the adoption. Quite a few clients have adopted this as a way to lift and shift (mostly) to the cloud in an easy fashion without the restrictions of Azure SQL Database. This looks like a "normal" on-premises SQL Server, and there are both high-performance (Business Critical tier) and average-performance (General Purpose tier) versions of the product that let you choose what level of price/performance you need to achieve.
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Most of the people I know who speak at a SQL Saturday or user group aren't paid for their efforts. At many of the community events, the speakers are volunteering their time. Many are also paying for their own way to those events not located in their area. A few, such as me, might get a company to cover their travel expenses, but often this doesn't include time. If I attend a SQL Saturday, I still have a bunch of work on M-F that needs to be done. No comp time for these events. That being said, I'm happy to donate some time and money to community events.
Some speakers build and teach full-day sessions, usually called pre-conference sessions, for which they are paid. There can be competition at large events like the PASS Data Community Summit and SQL Bits to get a session since the payment can be rewarding. I've seen some speakers make USD$1k or so, which can cover travel expenses, and others make over USD$10k, which is a nice payday.
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This article has a concept I've never heard about: invisible downtime. This is the idea that there are problems in your application that the customer sees. Your servers are running, but the application doesn't work correctly or is pausing with a delay that impacts customers. From an IT perspective, the SLA is being met and there aren't any problems. From a customer viewpoint, they're ready to start looking at a competitor's offering.
Lots of developers and operations people know there are issues in our systems. We know networks go down or connectivity to some service is delayed. We also know the database gets slow, or at least, slower than we'd like. We know there are poor-performing code and under-sized hardware, running with storage that doesn't produce as many IOPs as our workload demands. We would also like time to fix these issues, but often we aren't given any resources.
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Kubernetes is cool, and I think it's really useful in helping us scale and manage multiple systems easily in a fault-tolerant way. Actually, I don't think Kubernetes per se is important itself; more it seems that the idea of some orchestration engine to manage containers and systems is what really matters. As a side note, there are other orchestrators such as Mesos, OpenShift, and Nomad.
However, do we need to know Kubernetes to use it for databases? This is a data platform newsletter, and most of us work with databases in some way. I do see more databases moving to the cloud, and a few moving to containers. I was thinking about this when I saw a Simple Talk article on Kubernetes for Complete Beginners. It's a basic article that looks at what the platform consists of, how it works, and how to set up a mini Kubernetes platform on your system. It's well written and interesting, but ...
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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.
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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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