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Category: Learning

That the Division of Labor is Limited by the Extent of the Market

Eitan Blumin lets me quote one of my favorite chapter headings from Adam Smith:

You see, in this past decade or so, we’ve all noticed a trend where more and more businesses are looking for DBAs who know a bit about everything: RDBMS, NoSQL, Key-Value databases, Cache Databases, Full-Text Search Databases, Vector Databases, and more. In response, more and more data professionals prefer to become multi-disciplinary, doing a bit of everything… Even if it means becoming a part-time Data Engineer / Data Analyst / Data Scientist / DevOps / whatever. Otherwise, they fear that they won’t be able to find enough job opportunities.

But, there’s a cost to that approach. Sometimes a very high cost.

Eitan argues in favor of an approach with part-time experts and full-time jacks-of-many-trades. For smaller companies, I completely agree: a software development company with 5 total employees usually can’t afford a full-time DBA or networking specialist or virtualization specialist, but they can still run into problems that an expert would easily be able to solve. But I think once you get past a couple dozen IT people at a company, there’s enough scope for some critical specialization. In other words, the market within a company grows (hush, people who are going to throw Ronald Coase at me for that statement—it’s metaphorical!) and allows for additional division of labor and specialization.

Anyhow, Eitan has some tips around determining whether you’d rather be a jack-of-all-trades or a master of something.

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New Power BI Course

Eugene Meidinger has gone indie:

The goal of this course is to orient you to the various pieces of Power BI, identify the source of problem, and give some general tips for solving them. If you are stuck and need help now, this should help.

Note! This is an early launch. Modules 1 and 2 are available now, and the remaining ones will be coming out weekly.

You can see the first module of Eugene’s course on YouTube and throw money at him to get the rest as he rolls it out. And if you do decide to throw money at him, load a bunch of pennies into a cannon and blast them at him, then tell him I sent you.

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The Art of the Code Review

Phil Booth shares some recommendations:

First, let’s establish what the point of code review is and also what it isn’t.

The number one, most important reason to review code is shared ownership. “Ownership” can be tricky to define in code terms, but mostly it’s a feeling. It means you understand the code, that you feel empowered to change it and the responsibility to maintain it.

Click through for Phil’s thoughts on what makes for a good code review. I’ve found that the over-the-shoulder code review isn’t nearly as effective as you’d hope, and a proper code review can take a considerable amount of time, up to hours or days for a large change.

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A Review of Data Platform Trends

Brendan Tierney checks the lists:

Each January I take a little time to look back on the Database market over the previous calendar year. This year I’ll have a look at 2023 (obviously!) and how things have changed and evolved.

In my post from last year (click here) I mentioned the behaviour of some vendors and how they like to be-little other vendors. That kind of behaviour is not really acceptable, but they kept on doing it during 2023 up to a point. That point occurred during the Autumn of 2023. It was during this period there was some degree of consolidation in the IT industry with staff reductions through redundancies, contracts not being renewed, and so on. These changes seemed to have an impact on the messages these companies were putting out and everything seemed to calm down. These staff reductions have continued into 2024.

Click through for Brendan’s thoughts on the new SQL:2023 standard and common estimations of data platform product utilization. I’ve historically focused on DB-Engines rather than TOPDB, but they’re both pointing in similar directions at the top.

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T-SQL Tuesday 170 Roundup

Reitse Eskens writes up a roundup about abandoned projects:

When I thought of this subject last year, I was really on the fence if it would work or not. Part of me was convinced it would elicit some response from the community, part of me was convinced people would be looking for a ‘happy’ start of the year and might not want to think or write about past learnings.

Part of me was right, but I never expected SO MANY of you to jump in and write so many wonderful blogs. It feels a bit unfair to summarise all your hard hard work, so please click the links to read the full stories. Well worth your time!

Click through for plenty of stories on the topic of lessons learned from abandoned projects.

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Thoughts on Clean Code

Chad Callihan resolves to write better code:

I’ve been involved with more official development work on top of database responsibilities in the last few months, which led to the recommendation to read Clean Code by Robert C. Martin. It’s an older book published in 2011, but plenty of rules and guidelines still apply. Along with the more technical details, one area jumped out at me in Chapter 12 that can apply to anyone writing code, queries, or scripts:

Click through for a pair of salient quotations and some more thoughts from Chad.

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Goodbye, Ask SQLServerCentral

Thomas Rushton gives Ask SQLServerCentral a Viking funeral:

When I started out as a full-time DBA back in 2010, it was the first Q&A site I found that was active, friendly, and easy to use.

It differs from the main SQLServerCentral Q&A boards by not being broken down into questions relating to a particular version of SQL Server, and a particular aspect of that version. This makes it easier for someone to just ask a question without worrying about if their question is going to the right place. A great benefit to those new to the scene.

Right around the time Thomas started, I was also getting into it and was active for a couple of years until a job change made it tougher for me to dedicate the time. I appreciate everything the crew did for so long, especially because it was a really good alternative to a dedicated Stack Exchange site for databases (which I think had officially started after Ask SQLServerCentral).

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Exploring a Dataset for Microsoft Fabric Suitability

Eugene Meidinger continues a series on learning Microsoft Fabric:

This is week 1 where I try to take Magic the Gathering draft data to learn Microsoft Fabric. Check out week 0 for some reasoning why.

So, before I do anything else, I want to get a sense of the data I’m looking at to see if it’s suitable for this project. I download the data, and because it’s gzipped, I use 7-zip to open it up on windows 10, or Windows explorer on Windows 11. In either case, the first thing I notice is the huge size disparity. When compressed, it is a quarter of a gigabyte. Uncompressed, it’s about 10 GB. This tells us something.

Read on to learn more about the dataset and how Eugene tackled some of the exploratory data analysis.

I also agree completely with Eugene’s point about serendipity. Keeping your metaphorical eyes open will increase the likelihood that you’ll just happen upon something that can help you later, or something that serves a need you didn’t know you had. I used to wander around the library back in my university days because I didn’t know what I didn’t know about topics (that is, the “unknown unknown” quadrant), so I’d just pick up some books that caught my eye. Not all of them are hits, though enough were to make the strategy worthwhile.

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The Importance of Asking the Right Question

Brian Kelley offers some advice:

This is not a “clickbait” title, but an important consideration when it comes to developing technical solutions. Let me give you an example between two questions for SQL Server on-premises running on Windows.

Question 1: Does SQL Server allow you to set things like password complexity, password length, and the number of failed login attempts before the account is locked?

Question 2: Does SQL Server support things like password complexity, password length, and locking the account after a number of failed login attempts?

Betteridge’s Law of Headlines also applies to Brian’s post.

It’s so easy to get locked into answering the question without that additional context, and it’s also hard to tell if a person is asking question 1 because they don’t know the answer in general, or if they’re asking because they know you can do it in Windows but aren’t sure if there is a separate mechanism for SQL Server.

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