I hate to admit it, but I’m a hoarder.  Yes, like those insane people on the A&E TV show.  Only my hoarding is all virtual.  For example, take the image above.  That’s just a tiny part of my Google Reader home page.  That’s a tiny part of my Google Reader home page AFTER reading most of the day on a recent Sunday. I still had thousands of entries to go after hours of reading.  On top of that, I subscribe to some technical e-newsletters.  I’m a member of quite a few LinkedIn discussion groups, each of which produce daily and weekly newsletters. (I only subscribe to the weekly versions).  Then there’s Twitter too.  In all, there are THOUSANDS of interesting floating through the ether which I’d been trying to collect and, occassionally, read. Bah humbug!

The Downside of an Information Hoard

You might think that, as an IT professional, hoarding information is good for you.  After all, the more you know, the more effective you are at your job, right?  Uh – no.  I’ve discovered a few downsides to keeping all of this information around.  First, I lose time on administrivia, uh, I mean administration.  I can’t think of a time when a search on Google has not produced the information that I’m interested in.  So by spending time keeping up with my blog feeds, adding new blog feeds, deleting old ones, and so on, I lose time administrating something that really doesn’t need to be administrated.

Second, there’s the time it takes to read all of these entries – many long hours to read thousands of entries per month. I’ve actually figured out a little trick to make this go a lot faster. What’s that trick? Well, previously, I used to start reading my entries and then clicking “Next Entry” each time. Even when I skipped a lot of entries, just slogging through them all was a big time drain.  Now, I simply select large swathes of entries that I’m not interested in and click “Mark as Read” without ever opening them. Works great!  I’ve also gotten a lot more aggressive about dropping bloggers and RSS feeds that offer low value.  A lot of bloggers have popped up who only recount things which are available in Books On-Line.  Why spend any time on that at all?  I’m looking for strong insight, experiences, and analysis – not simple technology facts.  (A follow on thought to this tip is that “Bloggers Should Write Meaningful Article Titles!”)

Third, and more importantly, information hoarding takes a big emotional toll on me.  Maybe it’s a factor of just how my brain works and is completely inapplicable to you.  But in my case, I always carry a subtle nagging feeling when I have unread entries in my various accounts.  Even when I know that these entries are optional and that it’s not necessary for me to read any of these things, I still feel like I should read them. Basically, it makes me feel like I should be working all the dang time and that makes me feel anxious.  Anxiety makes me less productive and more prone to burn-out.  And anxiety bleeds through my work hours into my home life.  It makes it hard to enjoy a movie with the kids or some gardening in the yard.  All because there’s that feeling that I haven’t gotten the hoard processed yet.

The Solution to the Information Hoard

I mentioned a couple specific techniques for thinning out the hoard in paragraph two.  To summarize, first, subscribe to only those bloggers, feeds, and newsletters which add actual understanding to your life.  Second, open and read only those entries that matter and skip the rest. Those are techniques for dealing with lots of entries to read.  But my last problem, the anxiety issue, was a little bit harder to solve.

Like a lot of internal ways of handling life’s problem, the answer is simple but not easy.  Similar life problems with simple but difficult solutions might include feelings of guilt (the solution is confession) or anger (the solution is forgiveness, either of yourself or for the other party).  So what’s the solution to anxiety? Here’s my thought process – the answer to my information hoard is about values.  What do I mean?   I value these various things because they make me better at my job.  Losing things of value causes me some anxiety.  My anxiety has its roots in the feeling that I’m letting things of values (these various blog entries) slip through my hands.  Why would you ignore things of value, or even worse, get rid of them?!?  On the other hand, if you asked me what I really and truly valued most in this world, I’d answer with “my family and loved ones”.  But again, do I actually demonstrate this priority with my time? Not nearly enough. Therefore, the answer is to properly appraise the value of my time.  When I think about it rationally, I think that this sort of reading is worth about 30 minutes per day, maybe a full 60 minutes when there’s something really important to learn or someone really significant to listen to.

That’s it.  After 30 minutes, I can walk away from any sort of reading guilt-free.  So what’s my new solution to the information hoard and the anxieties that it’s been producing?  A quick check on the writers and topics I care about the most and then “MARK ALL AS READ”.  Yes, there will be more to read tomorrow.  But now I no longer carry an ever increasing load saying to myself “Someday I’ll get to that”.  I feel better already.

Feedback Requested

What’s your strategy to dealing with your information hoard?  Are you still keeping everything you ever produced or read digitally?  Does my approach sound reasonable and workable to you?  Or am I off base?

Thanks!

-Kev

-Follow me on Twitter

A while back at a SQL Saturday in Indianapolis, I was enjoying the WIT panel discussion listening to the panelists discuss their  upbringing and how they became a success in the field of technology.  Their stories were, in some ways, similar.  They were smart.  They weren’t scared of math.  They had an important mentor who supported them and encouraged them that they could accomplish any goal.  They endured struggles such as financial hardship that, while difficult to overcome, also refined their desire to become successful in their careers.  Some of the women who had to deal with men of the previous generation even had to overcome blatant chauvinism.

But then another similarity among the panelists, just a hunch really, struck me.  I had to ask, to confirm my idea. “How many of you were a bit of loner or at least weren’t heavily influenced by your friends’ opinions before your professional career?  Because with my own daughters, it’s their friends who they want to please.  And they’d punt right away if their friends teased them about being good at math, or choosing a technical career, or anything else I can think of for that matter.”

It was pretty much unanimous.  All of the panelists were loners or had a very small social circle during their formative years.  Now perhaps I’m speaking from an inaccurate assumption, but most of my daughters are tight with their friends.  And friends mean a lot to them, perhaps more than any other aspect of their social lives (like their family).  So if their friends tell them that being interested in technology will “geekify” them, then they’d drop it like a hot potato.

So I wanted to put this question out to my female friends in the IT world.  Were you in a big circle of friends during your developing years?  What importance did you place on their opinions?  Did they give you any flack for going in to IT or doing well in technology related classes?

It seems like the days of overt chauvinism are behind us here in the US.  But I wonder if we need to start earlier with our daughters among their own peer groups to support them for a future in technology.

Thoughts?

Thanks,

-Kev

-Follow me on Twitter

[READ MORE ON DATABASE TRENDS & APPLICATIONS ]

In this podcast on the uber-popular podcast “RunAs Radio”, host Richard Campbell asks me about what topics are of particular interest at Tech-Ed 2011, focusing the discussion on cloud and SQL Server “Denali”

You can download the MP3 version of the podcast or the transcript here.

I had a very interesting conversation recently with a good friend of mine.  She’s at the top of her game as a first class enterprise DBA in a major medical institution.  She was interested in my career advice because she’d recently received an unsolicited invitation for a higher paying job in the business intelligence (BI) field.  While I won’t talk much more about the specifics of that conversation, it’s not a unique conversation.  In fact, I gave an interview to SearchSQLServer.com a while back about how DBA career paths are more and more leading into an even better paying career in business intelligence.  Check out the interview HERE.

I’d like your opinion here.

Follow my logic here for a moment as I walk through a couple rhetorical questions.  Have you ever had a friend developed an application entirely on SQL Server Developer Edition?  (Not that YOU would ever do such a thing, but maybe you know someone who has. Right?) And has your friend’s IT department actually deployed said application only to discover that they’re only licensed for Standard Edition in their production environment?  And then was your friend’s IT management team is horrified to learn that they’ve either got to go through the very expensive process of extracting all of the Enterprise and/or Datacenter Edition features for the production application in order to remain in compliance, upgrade to the more expensive SKU licenses, or risk a potential future audit?

I’m not saying that this has happened to any of us.  We’re too smart for that, after all.  But have you ever known anyone who’s had this experience?

Having worked with a lot of customers another commercial RDBMS platforms (which I’ll euphemistically call “SEER” from Redforest City and “IB4” from Upstate City), I can tell you that auditing is a fun and exciting way for those platform vendors to make a LOT of money.  This is especially true because a production application, once successfully deployed, tends to be too valuable to disable or otherwise compromise because high-end features slipped in to the development cycle even though the production environment only a “standard edition” SKU in place.  Ouch! Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place.  Now, keep in mind that this is a strategy used by SEER and not by Microsoft.  But Microsoft could implement the same sort of licensing audits if they wanted to.  (Please leave a comment here if you have ever been audited.  I’d love to hear your experiences, at least as much as NDA’s allow).

So if you use SQL Server Developer Edition (DE), of any version, would you like to see a feature that enables you to run DE not in its default “full featured mode” but at another SKU level, such as good ol’ Standard Edition?  I know I would.

If you’re on the same page as I am, there are a number of suggestions logged on Connect about this very feature!  Make your voice heard!  Check out:

https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/496380/enable-sql-developer-edition-to-target-specific-sql-version

Of course, the more skeptical reader might say “Hey, that’s their tough luck. Developers should know the difference in the SKU licensing options and feature sets of whatever SKU they’re developing on compared to what they’ll deploy on.”  And I wouldn’t fault you for saying so.

But I would go on to point out that much of Microsoft’s success in enterprise IT settings can be traced back to their very strong relationship with developers.  And anything that Microsoft can do to empower developers to save time, money, and resources during the development phase of an IT project in turn energizes that relationship between developer and Microsoft.

It also makes the life of the DBA that much easier, because they don’t need to imply that those cowboys on the development team went off half-cocked again.  So what’s your opinion?  Should SQL Server Developer Edition include a feature that sets the SKU-level of the database engine?

It’s always interesting to see the guestimations of the big brains about figures and facts that are hard to verify.  Here’s an example – how much data is computerized today?  I’m not talking about ancient stuff, like the Codex Synaticus (which, incidentally IS on-line at www.codexsinaiticus.org).  I’m talking about the new and really important stuff, like the fourteen pictures that my step-daughter posted on her FaceBook account from our recent trip to Rock City.
Well, IDC figured that overall digital data was up to 1.2Zb (Zetabytes!)  at the end of 2010.  My mind is boggling.  Ok, so that’s only 1.2 trillion gigabytes!  Doctor Evil, please put your pinky to your mouth and say this huge number . . .

1,319,413,953,436 Gb

Another way to say it is that it’s about 1,228 Exabytes.

You can get other numbers by extrapolating from storage purchases from the major storage vendors.  Of course, not all of their storage sold is actually filled up right away.  But it’s still an interesting number to hear.  So just on scuttlebutt from a friend of a friend of a friend I heard numbers like this:

Online data back in 2002? around 5 Exabytes
Online data expected in 2011: around 700 Exabytes

And, again we’re surmising these values based on published storage sales from various vendors, this data growth is hurtling along at ridiculous speed, with data doubling every fifteen months or so.    Who knows where this will take us, but if we assume a constant rate of data growth (which is a bad bet, IMO), we’ll have 996,000 Exabytes of data online by 2020.  Hey, but that’s 8 years after the Mayan calendar, and the world along with it, is supposed to end, right?

Another tool I really like is PowerWF.  PowerWF is a really cool visual workflow builder that creates PowerShell scripts for you.  Turns out that it integrates with PowerGUI!

This video shows 2 different ways that PowerWF Workflows can be run from within Quest Software’s PowerGUI tool.

Watch the Video - Download PowerWF

Enjoy!

-Kev

White Paper: Integrating Workload Replays into Database Change Management

I encourage you to read the paper and make workload replay a part of your database change management practices.  As I’ve been saying for years, if you don’t have quantitative evidence of what normal is for your database, how can you know what is abnormal?

Enjoy!

-Kev