The Recording
The Panelists
- Kevin Feasel
- Mala Mahadevan
- Tom Norman
Notes: Questions and Topics
Tips for Working from Home
I started us off with a topic of discussion: working from home. Mala and Tom both have significant experience with the topic and they share their thoughts. Stick around for a bit of ranting about Microsoft Teams. @thedukeny points out this highly-upvoted item to allow for multiple Teams accounts at the same time. Slack does it right, and teams is painful.
Tom brought up desk-sharing, which I absolutely hate. On the plus side, it did remind me of a Dilbert strip from 25 years ago.
Containers
Chris Voss asked a question a while back and I finally got a chance to answer: Our team is starting the use of containers for local environments to test our database development, before deploying to the shared dev environment.Can anyone share their container strategies, and what are space considerations for local sandboxes? Would it make sense to put an entire application code base in the same container?
Answer: There are a few questions in here, so let’s take them in turn.
As far as space goes, Tom Norman pointed out that containers won’t save you space across machines: if you have a 500GB database you need on every developer’s laptop, even if that database is in a container, it’ll cost you 500GB of disk space per laptop. Kevin pointed out that the container savings is when you can layer your containers: if you have a bunch of applications using .NET Core, for example, you can reuse container layers so that you might have a couple dozen .NET Core apps which all use the same base layer, so that layer gets stored on disk once.
Does it make sense to put application code in the same container as database code? No, for the same reason that you wouldn’t put app code on the same server as your database. Keeping components isolated reduces system complexity and makes it easier to upgrade or swap out parts.
The Telemetry Service
Mark Gordon raised a question about the telemetry service which derived from a weird account setup. Mark’s research led him to read up a bit on the telemetry service. We then had a bit of discussion about the telemetry service itself and I referenced a Brent Ozar post on the topic.
My personal opinion is that I’m fine with a telemetry service. I build telemetry in my applications and would expect the same from products like SQL Server. There are differing opinions on the topic, though.
Events of Note
We wrapped up with a few events of note:
- Data Architecture Day is Saturday, May 16th. The call for speakers is open through April 29th and we are looking for data architecture sessions.
- SQL Saturday Richmond is the first-ever virtual SQL Saturday and will take place on April 25th.
- PASS Summit’s call for speakers closes April 23rd.