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Category: Learning

Rule 42 Software

John Mount describes a software development anti-pattern:

As software changes, it often accretes feature and drifts away from its design, if it even started with one, and many defaults and settings become undesirable. New users are blamed for not moving parameter settings away from the defaults to the “obvious” acceptable values.

Click through for the origin of the name and more info on how to avoid it.

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PASS: the End of an Era

Mala Mahadevan reflects on 22 years of association with PASS:

I finally decided I would write about the lessons I’ve learned in my 22 year association with them. This is necessary for me to move on and may be worth reading for those who think similar.
There is the common line that PASS is not the #sqlfamily, and that line is currently true. But back in those days, it was. Atleast it was our introduction to the community commonly known as #sqlfamily. So many lessons here are in fact lessons in dealing with and living with community issues.

Read on to learn from Mala.

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PASS Dissolving

From the PASS board:

We are saddened to tell you that, due to the impact of COVID-19, PASS is ceasing all regular operations, effective January 15, 2021. 

Also check out their final meeting minutes (PDF):

Tim presented a recap of the non-reconciled PASS Virtual 2020 Summit numbers, showing that only $1,973,031 was brought in falling short by $1,642,39 of the budgeted Summit revenue of $3,615,427. He went on to show that with the Summit shortfall and no prospect of funding support from Microsoft, that even if all other revenue was achieved, it puts PASS is a deficit of potentially $3.22M. the non reconciled breakdown of registration and sales and the potential deficit of $3.22M if the remaining budgeted revenue is met.

H/T Brent Ozar for the minutes.

I’m sure I’ll have more to say in other venues, but my brief thoughts are as follows:

  • PASS was an excellent institution, nearly unique among its kind by being community-driven rather than a community effort owned by a parent company.
  • Another example of such an institution that I’m familiar with was INETA. Emphasis on “was” there.
  • I appreciate everything that PASS has done. I think that they certainly fulfilled their mission and although I hate to see them go, I am grateful that they were there.
  • .NET user groups certainly didn’t die with the passing of INETA, and SQL Server user groups won’t either. At the user group level, my expectation is that it’ll be status quo. This is an advantage of the decentralized user group model.
  • I hope that the SQL Saturday property will be spun off and saved. Yes, the community could make a new SQL Saturday, but my biggest concern is getting the sponsors sorted out. I think there’s some time to do this, as virtual events are quite inexpensive, so only a limited sponsor base is required. It’s the in-person events which have biggest monetary outlays.

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Measure Your DBA Skills

Lee Markum has just wrapped up an interesting series:

Over the last 9 weeks I took you on a journey of skills and career topics related to being a SQL Server DBA. We looked at the Production DBA. We saw skills and career topics from the beginning to mid-career to Senior DBA. Then we looked at the Development DBA and their skills and career development needs. Finally there was a wrap up post.

To make it easier for everyone to get to these posts, I decided to bring them all together on a single page.

Click through to get a feeling for where you’re at on the DBA and database developer sides of the house.

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Data Professional Salary Survey

Brent Ozar has another year of the Data Professional Salary Survey:

Take the Data Professional Salary Survey now.

The anonymous survey closes Friday, Jan 1, 2021. The results are completely open source, and shared with the community for your analysis. (You can analyze ’em now mid-flight, but I’d wait until the final results come in. I’ll combine them into a single spreadsheet with the past results.)

I’ve had fun analyzing it over the years. If you wouldn’t mind, please fill it out and add some more data points.

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The DevOps Learning Curve

Grant Fritchey gives us the low-down on learning about DevOps:

If you’re attempting to implement automation in and around your deployments, you’re going to find there is quite a steep learning curve for DevOps and DevOps-style implementations. Since adopting a DevOps-style release cycle does, at least in theory, speed your ability to deliver better code safely, why would it be hard?

Click through for an idea, including tools to use and some first steps.

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The Spark Starter Guide

Landon Robinson has some good news for us:

If you visit hadoopsters.com/spark or thesparkguide.com, you’ll see something new and exciting from us. It’s official: we’ve written and are publishing a comprehensive guide to Apache Spark.

This guide will be completely online and completely free. A book’s worth of content, containing exercises in Python and Scala to teach you Spark, at your fingertips. Again, free.

Landon has posted chapter 1, section 1 already:

This section introduces the concept of data pipelines – how data is processed from one form into another. It’s also the generic term used to describe how data moves from one location or form, and is consumed, altered, transformed, and delivered to another location or form.

You’ll be introduced to Spark functions like joinfilter, and aggregate to process data in a variety of forms. You’ll learn it all through interactive Spark exercises in Scala and Python.

This is very early in the process but I’m excited.

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