Category: Learning

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic explains how to get feedback:

We recently kicked off a new 10-week course, which has been really fun to develop, because it’s both longer than our typical workshops and spread out over a greater amount time. Combining these aspects means that we get to cover more topics related to data storytelling and go into greater depth on each. We kicked things off with a focus on feedback, due to the important role this will play throughout the course, and the critical role it plays in our skill development and efforts to communicate effectively with data in general.

There’s some good advice in here.

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Taiob Ali shares some commonly mistaken terms:

A list of items that people often get wrong. If you have a suggestion, let me know, and I will add them to this page.

On-premises and braces are the two I hear people get wrong the most. I had been afraid that the recognition of “braces” as the proper term had been so lost that I was like a monk in 9th century Ireland transcribing illuminations of worn tomes here.

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Joe Celko offers up some thoughts on interpolation:

Interpolation is a mathematical technique which was popular before we had a lot of cheap computing power. The basic idea is that if you’re given a set of data and looking for a value in the same range, you can interpolate it to get a reasonable estimation for the value that is not actually in the set.

If you can find an old calculus, finance, statistics or algebra book, they had lookup tables in the back. Remember that the only computational tools students had back then were pencil and paper or a slide ruler. If you wanted to use a pencil and paper, you had to know what formula to use. If you use the slide ruler, you can only have three decimal places in your answer (yes, there were a couple of over-sized specialized slide rulers which could go as high as four or five decimal places. They were very expensive). But if your slide ruler didn’t have a particular function you were trying to compute, it was hard to get even the three decimal places.

When you try to approximate a value outside the range of your set, that’s called extrapolation. It’s a different topic and requires a slight leap of faith.

Interpolation is a key part of regression techniques. Read the whole thing.

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Kevin Sookocheff dives into things people tend to forget when building distributed computing solutions:

If we continue to develop microservices using the same set of assumptions we used for a monolith, we are operating with a now false set of assumptions that can prevent us from being successful. Even in a small distributed system with just two microservices we need to deal with networked communication that can turn our usual mental model of application development on its head. A common set of rules that can help us update our mental model to be more accurate in a distributed environment is the Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing commonly attributed to Peter Deutsch, an engineer at Sun microsystems who worked on early versions of Ghostscript, as well as interpreters for Smalltalk and Lisp.

Click through for more information on each of the eight fallacies and what you can do to avoid their resulting pitfalls.

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Steve Jones announces that Redgate is the captain now:

Redgate Software confirmed today that it has acquired the assets of the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS), which ended operations on January 15, and will revive the Summit, continue SQLSaturdays, and make available the library of content and training sessions.

Note that this will be different from PASS as it existed, so membership in the old association doesn’t carry over to the new. If you’re interested in keeping up to date on this, check out https://www.red-gate.com/PASS.

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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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Brent Ozar has another year of salary data:

We asked what you make, and 1,747 of you in 69 countries answered. Altogether, you made $171,879,034 this year. Hubba hubba, there’s some earning power in this audience.

Download the Data Professional Salary Survey results (XLSX).

Click through for more details on the process.

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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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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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