The Human Factor

A week ago I was in Pasadena attending the SCaLE 20x conference, a gathering of many different open-source communities discussing the technologies and platforms that draw them together. I was fortunate enough to hear some excellent presentations on PostgreSQL and give two talks as well. After the first round of talks on Friday morning a friend walked over and asked if I had heard about the bank Silicon Valley Bank failure yet. "Yes," I replied, "I have a lot of friends in the open-source community that I'm sure will be impacted. The next few days will certainly be difficult to watch as I think of what's ahead for them."

Then on Tuesday, just a few days later, OpenAI announced ChatGPT-4, a significantly updated multimodal system with increased AI capabilities. At many levels it is impressive to see what can be done with these new capabilities. For instance, I enjoyed seeing Marco Russo from SQLBI.com have a bit of a sparing match with the new model trying write DAX code.

Just days apart, these two events will have far-reaching effects on many aspects of the technology communities we are a part of.

You know the saying, "life comes at you fast!"

Don't worry. This isn't an editorial about bank collapses or how AI is going to take over our jobs and the world. (Whew!)

Instead, I was struck by a mostly overlooked similarity in each story. Both headlines, the SVB collapse and ChatGPT-4, can't be separated from the importance of human experience. Neither of them can be separated from real people, with an understanding of real systems, using real data. Likewise, the experience that we each bring to the table helps us understand if a course correction is needed in a specific situation, or if the information we're receiving is missing a critical piece. When we take it one step further and begin to use that experience to teach others how do to the same thing, the overall system improves and our community gets stronger.

As a data professional involved in a few different technical communities, that encourages me tremendously.

I see so many examples of folks giving generously of their time and experience to help others learn and grow, both in-person and online. The conferences I've had an opportunity to attend so far this year have been life giving, well run, and well attended. I'm excited to see how things continue to evolve for the remainder of 2023.

What about you?

• If you're physically able, have you started to get involved with a user group or conference again?
• Have you offered to share what you've learned in the last few months with others at work?
• Have you considered recording a video demonstrating that new trick you've learned and sharing it with the world?
• Have you considered contributing a blog post to either T-SQL Tuesday or PGSQL Phriday sometime this year?

We may not be able to solve all of the world's problems or stop banks from collapsing, but working together and sharing our experience with others can help improve the human side of the equation, which in turn increases the likelihood of building successful, sustainable systems we enjoy.

Let's get at it, together!

Ryan Booz

Join the debate, and respond to the editorial on the forums

Redgate works alongside thousands of organizations around the world, helping them to assess, identify, and improve their Database DevOps processes. We’ve found that many people believe they’re practicing DevOps but when they dig deeper, realize they’re missing key processes that can offer huge improvements, and deliver value quicker to the wider business.

Monitoring large server estates with a mix of database platforms can be a daunting task. This articles highlights why a database monitoring tool is a necessity and not a luxury.

Static data is often required for the basic functioning of a database and any dependent applications. Therefore, it's vital that we can track this static data to understand how, when, and why it changed, and that we include any static data changes in our database deployments. Flyway Enterprise will now do both tasks automatically.

A couple of days ago, I was thinking about what you needed to know to use ChatGPT (or Bing/Sydney, or any similar service). It’s easy to ask it questions,...

Eitan Blumin gives everything a name: This article was published by Aaron Bertrand a few years ago, talking about system-named constraints in SQL Server. The…Continue readingThe Importance of Naming...

When In-Memory OLTP came out, I worked with it briefly, and I remember coming away thinking, “Who in their right mind would actually use this?” I was so horrified...

Learn about the similarities and differences between Snowflake temporary tables and transient tables versus SQL temporary tables.

In this post we are going to see how to work with Excel files in Spark. We will be using the spark-excel package created by Crealytics. […]

Joji Varghese gives us a hand: In an Azure Kubernetes (AKS) cluster, Pods can access physical storage resources such as disks or volumes using Persistent…Continue readingTips for AKS Storage...

The conversation around Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not a new subject to the database space, but the recent rise in machine learning tools like ChatGPT have sparked increased focus on new ways to simplify existing DBA challenges. Join Redgate’s own DevOps Advocate, Steve Jones, along with webinar guests Kellyn Pot’Vin-Gorman (Principal Cloud Solution Architect, Microsoft) and Brian Randell (Product Marketing Director, Github) to discuss how AI could help manage complex database ecosystems.

Nearly 10 years ago I wrote a blog post about havi...

How I think about safety at the events has changed dramatically over the past 10 years. When I was young and unmarried, I didn’t think about it at all....

EightKB is a wonderfully ran conference by my friends Mark Wilkinson (T | B), Anthony Nocentino (T | B), Andrew Pruski (T | B), and The post Call to Action... The...

Clients look to us to help them make their charts and graphs look better. That's what most folks think "data visualization" means in our world today. Though that is...

In this series of blog posts, we speak with database professionals from Financial Services organizations around the world to better understand how DevOps is shaping the sector. On the...

Hiram Fleitas rebuilds the QA environment: Click through for notes on the process.

Many .NET developers prefer to work with Visual Studio and automatically create and update the database from their C# code (known as the “code first” approach). On the other...

In order to focus on their primary task of developing databases, the development team need to automate as many as possible of the routine tasks that are essential for...

FigPi runs on an RP2040 chip and has multiple Stem...

Applications of all types commonly access MySQL to retrieve, add, update, or delete data. The applications might be written in Python, Java, C#, or another programming language. The approach you take when accessing MySQL will depend on the programming language you’re using and the connector you choose for interfacing with the database. Whatever approach you take, the same basic principles generally apply to each environment. You must establish a connection to the database and then issue the commands necessary to retrieve or modify the data.

Configuration parameters are the most mythical creatures in the world of PostgreSQL. Ordinary PostgreSQL users often do not know that PostgreSQL configuration parameters exist, let alone what they are...

Tuning SQL Server Queries With Indexed Views Lecture Going Further If this is the kind of SQL Server stuff you love learning about, you’ll love my training. I’m offering...

Tuning SQL Server Queries With Computed Columns Demo Going Further If this is the kind of SQL Server stuff you love learning about, you’ll love my training. I’m offering...

Tuning SQL Server Queries With Computed Columns: Gotchas With Scalar UDFS Going Further If this is the kind of SQL Server stuff you love learning about, you’ll love my...

Tuning SQL Server Queries With Filtered Indexes: Some Gotchas With Parameters And Variables Going Further If this is the kind of SQL Server stuff you love learning about, you’ll...

Tuning SQL Server Queries With Computed Columns Lecture Going Further If this is the kind of SQL Server stuff you love learning about, you’ll love my training. I’m offering...

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari bundle things together: In Power BI you can specify the unique identifier of a column value by using another column…Continue readingPower BI Group By...

A special unplugged video where we write DAX measures with ChatGPT-4! Read more about the “unplugged” format: https://www.sqlbi.com/blog/marco/2021/01/09/the-unplugged-video-series-on-sqlbi-youtube-channel/ #unplugged #chatgpt #gpt4 #dax

I often hear the star schema is the best way to structure data for a Power BI model, I'm not familiar with this concept, what does this mean?

What happens when you combine Power BI, Power Apps and Azure Synapse Analytics? MAGIC! Join Gaston Cruz as he shows a way to bring the Power Platform together with...

Matthew Roche has an update for us: Power BI includes capabilities to enable users to understand the content they own, and how different items relate…Continue readingPower BI Scanner API...

Olivier Van Steenlandt does some documentation: In this blog post, I will guide you through all the required steps to get a Data Model Relationship…Continue readingBuilding a Dimension and...

ApproximateDistinctCount now works for BigQuery, Databricks and Snowflake sources in Power BI

  Most PowerBi reports will use slicers to allow the user to filter and interact with the visuals they have. But in practice, users may forget what slicers have...

When trying to get your DAX measures to work correctly, there are a number of tools you can use to debug, which I will briefly mention, but not go...

I do a lot of Power BI model and report development; maybe you do too. There’s nothing worse than spending an hour or so developing your model only to...

How Power BI uses the Group By Columns attribute of a column and how you can leverage it in specific scenarios.

This book aims to explain the new features in SQL Server 2022, how does it fare?

Microsoft is getting ready to launch its Microsoft...

We all need guidance as we make our way through our careers and our lives. Some people are blessed with the right folks who can offer that by way...

Steve Hughes reaches across the internet: When working with Azure Data Studio and its support of Jupyter books, you will find there is an option…Continue readingWorking with Remote Jupyter...

Mandy Norrbo isn’t satisfied with the defaults: Using {shinydashboard} is great for creating dashboard prototypes with a header-sidebar-body layout. You can quickly mock up a…Continue readingCustomizing Shiny Apps with...

When working with Azure Data Studio and its support of Jupyter books, you will find there is an option for remote Jupyter books. As shown in the image below,... The...

In this blog post, I will be showing how to add text to an image in Python. I used this code to generate hundreds of images with different text...

Steven Sanderson operates over a list of operators over lists: In this post I will talk about the use of the R functions apply(), lapply(), sapply(), tapply(), and vapply() with examples.…Continue readingThe apply() Family in...

In this article, we look at how to use IS NOT NULL for a WHERE clause in SQL along with examples of how this can be used for SELECT,...

Learn about the new functions BIT_COUNT, GET_BIT, AND SET_BIT in SQL Server 2022 and how these functions could be used.

Kevin Wilkie is ready for that end-of-month paycheck: When you work with data, you’ll probably need to work with dates at least once a month.…Continue readingEnd of Month in...

When you work with data, you’ll probably need to work with dates at least once a month. That is the nature of the beast. Today, let’s compare working with...

YouTube channel MayLabs used a Raspberry Pi 4B to ...

Pioneer's BDR-WX01DM optical disc drive and IPS-BD...

Microsoft’s owned GitHub has recently announced that it will soon...

In this article, Joe Celko gives us a history of the different character sets that are used in computing and how that can pertain to your usage in relational databases. Some of these you may have never heard of!

Mercy Bassey locks down some containers: Have you been searching for a way to manage your resources effectively in Kubernetes? Why not consider Kubernetes Role-Based…Continue readingRBAC with Kubernetes

Andy Leonard isn’t XML’s biggest fan: If you are sending me (or some other hapless victim data engineer) lots of data that resides in a stable schema…Continue readingA Critique of XML