September 25, 2019 at 3:22 pm
Maybe you should finish building the bridge instead of burning it. Not sure if your Report Person is part of IT or the Business. I would have to assume from your attitude, the Business.
Spending a month cleaning up a half baked ETL process and queries, only to have uncovered someone making extensive use of those tables, then “too bad”?
Perfect time to finish what you started, and work with the business. If they fix all their reports, do you see that as something that shows your value in providing solutions for them? Or drive them further into having their own ‘experts’ provide their reporting needs?
By spending a month on this already, it would appear someone recognizes value in what was being done. And keep in mind that value to the business drives the IT budget. I might venture that whoever let you spend a month “fixing” would welcome the chance to show the business the value in the follow up. A data mart (or start of a data warehouse) - 253 reports provide a lot of requirements for measures and dimensions - might be easily justified.
You might want to give a bit more thought to the big picture.
September 25, 2019 at 4:04 pm
Maybe you should finish building the bridge instead of burning it. Not sure if your Report Person is part of IT or the Business. I would have to assume from your attitude, the Business.
Spending a month cleaning up a half baked ETL process and queries, only to have uncovered someone making extensive use of those tables, then “too bad”?
Perfect time to finish what you started, and work with the business. If they fix all their reports, do you see that as something that shows your value in providing solutions for them? Or drive them further into having their own ‘experts’ provide their reporting needs?
By spending a month on this already, it would appear someone recognizes value in what was being done. And keep in mind that value to the business drives the IT budget. I might venture that whoever let you spend a month “fixing” would welcome the chance to show the business the value in the follow up. A data mart (or start of a data warehouse) - 253 reports provide a lot of requirements for measures and dimensions - might be easily justified.
You might want to give a bit more thought to the big picture.
I think you may be over reacting here. I'm pretty sure that the snappy 'go fix it' response would have been for the benefit of us here, and not how the conversation actually played out.
If you haven't even tried to resolve your issue, please don't expect the hard-working volunteers here to waste their time providing links to answers which you could easily have found yourself.
September 25, 2019 at 4:47 pm
Maybe you should finish building the bridge instead of burning it. Not sure if your Report Person is part of IT or the Business. I would have to assume from your attitude, the Business.
Spending a month cleaning up a half baked ETL process and queries, only to have uncovered someone making extensive use of those tables, then “too bad”?
Perfect time to finish what you started, and work with the business. If they fix all their reports, do you see that as something that shows your value in providing solutions for them? Or drive them further into having their own ‘experts’ provide their reporting needs?
By spending a month on this already, it would appear someone recognizes value in what was being done. And keep in mind that value to the business drives the IT budget. I might venture that whoever let you spend a month “fixing” would welcome the chance to show the business the value in the follow up. A data mart (or start of a data warehouse) - 253 reports provide a lot of requirements for measures and dimensions - might be easily justified.
You might want to give a bit more thought to the big picture.
Hmmm. A lot of assumptions here?
This database/process was originally planned to be a data warehouse. The unfortunate thing was that the person who was leading this charge did not have the technical skills to do this work, and the development group already had other plans in place for reporting. This warehouse morphed into the set of flattened data tables that it is now.
The changes I made were basically a stop-gap to keep it alive. The sources of the data changed from on-prem to Azure and another one of the source OLTP databases is being eliminated. During this process, I uncovered a significant amount of things that were simply not correct. Half of this work was so that we can better understand what their needs are.
The future plans for this are PowerBI for the reports and dashboards, and an Azure data lake as the source. All of the reports are being built in PowerBI and run against this system.
Working with the group that is consuming this data (it's a statistical analysis group, certainly not technical) and the developers who are working on creating the future state of reporting, we have a well thought out and well designed plan for how it needs to be architected.
The small picture was painted by the folks who are creating the Power BI reports and dashboards. Myself, as well as others, have tried to point them in the right direction regarding scalability and best practices. We provide them monthly feedback on a formal basis, as well as almost daily interaction on all of the things they work on. This is the group that had to change 1500(!) SSRS reports 2 years ago when we changed our logo because they embedded the company logo directly into the reports. We had previously set up source control, Visual Studio projects, etc. for all of the SSRS reports as well as provide them with classes on best practices for SSRS. They still choose to use Report Builder, store the .rdl files on their local hard drives, hard-code values into queries, and so forth.
Because of the work I have done in relation to the future of reporting and BI, I received an individual award at the company's annual meeting. That goes with the award the GROUP won last year at the same meeting. Oh yeah, I also got a nice check to go along with that.
So, the answer is that we have looked at the big picture, it's ready to be painted, and the canvas is sitting on an easel. We will not start painting until early 2020.
Sorry that I was venting about the short-sightedness of others.
Michael L John
If you assassinate a DBA, would you pull a trigger?
To properly post on a forum:
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/61537/
September 25, 2019 at 5:39 pm
If someone spends over a month of time fixing a half baked ETL process to provide a reporting environment, created by a co-worker, what is your take of the situation? Especially if the snappy response ends up being what did transpire?
Sorry if I read too much into things, but likely at least part of my over reaction may be something to consider. I actually got my start in IT by having been the go to person for Operations for reporting, then being moved into IT. So I might have a different spin on things having been on both sides of this situation several times over the years,.
Just the fact that someone fixing things - not just speed up the process, but errors in the data or logic, is a bit troubling. They may be doing the right things, but when the 253 reports are fixed and running again, I would expect questions. Some numbers likely will have changed.
The poster can blow at the smoke I created, and let me know if there was any fire to be found. Or I have everything totally wrong, and my response was a waste of time.
September 25, 2019 at 5:55 pm
So in the end, my response to your original post were things that were addressed. Apologies are in order for my over reacting, although your original post and reply leads me to think I was set up.
September 25, 2019 at 6:17 pm
Yes, you did read a lot into it.
Michael L John
If you assassinate a DBA, would you pull a trigger?
To properly post on a forum:
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/61537/
September 25, 2019 at 9:06 pm
And it appears seeing just the top of the ice berg, exposed much of my over reaction was taken care of in a big picture set of projects over the course of years.
Glad that you saw much of what I did and it was recognized. Much too often these days people only address the small picture, which is what eventually led to this chain of events. It was an ‘experiment’ that lacked vision and requirements. Yet became mission critical.
Some of what is lost in editing are great teaching lessons. Yes, I did read a lot into something. But how much different would things appear if instead of ‘you’re over reacting’ and a response outlining a multi year project that your original post was part of (apparently big picture was a trigger), maybe we should step back a bit. At the core was a still born data warehouse. What happened was a series of projects to formalize and give a supportable path going forward. What is important is being able to recognize when you run into this, and suggest a path for the future. For me, ETL and reporting said enough.
September 26, 2019 at 1:45 am
Ever have a day go from "seems to be going good" to "seems to be getting better" to "um, I think I screwed up bad" to "kicking the side of your house mad because of everything?"
Yeah, my day. We're part of / assisting in a, let's call it a combination process, procedural, and security (physical and IT) audit. My part was going well, no big surprises with my servers, but, I screwed up. One of the big no-nos? Walking away from your computer without locking it. What did I do? Walked away after trusting the auditor reviewing the SQL saying they weren't part of the "physical security" audit. So, might've screwed the pooch there (maybe not enough to fail the audit, but it won't help.) Then, the day gets worse. I get home and stop to get the mail. Now, some background, our mailboxes are the "cluster" style where the mail person stops in one place to load the mailboxes.
And, right below the mailbox cluster, there is a storm drain...
And I carry all my keys (house, mailbox, both cars, etc) on a carabiner clip. Which I usually, after opening the mailbox and pulling out the mail and locking it back up, loop over my finger.
Which this time, it decided not to stay on. And of course, it found its way into the drain. Tried spotting them down the drain, took the car home (push button start and I tend to leave it running when I get the mail,) but I couldn't get in the house. Went back later to try to fish out the keys with some help from my Dad and nephew, to no avail. Tried a magnet extension pole when the wife got home (had her stop and buy one,) with no luck Went back after dark with flashlights and couldn't even see the keys in the water in the drain. Hoping the water department calls the wife back tomorrow and come and see if they can find them...
So yeah, fun day...
September 26, 2019 at 7:05 pm
I'm sure that someone else will understand what is being requested here, but it's beyond me.
If you haven't even tried to resolve your issue, please don't expect the hard-working volunteers here to waste their time providing links to answers which you could easily have found yourself.
September 26, 2019 at 7:21 pm
Ever have a day go from "seems to be going good" to "seems to be getting better" to "um, I think I screwed up bad" to "kicking the side of your house mad because of everything?"
Yeah, my day. We're part of / assisting in a, let's call it a combination process, procedural, and security (physical and IT) audit. My part was going well, no big surprises with my servers, but, I screwed up. One of the big no-nos? Walking away from your computer without locking it. What did I do? Walked away after trusting the auditor reviewing the SQL saying they weren't part of the "physical security" audit. So, might've screwed the pooch there (maybe not enough to fail the audit, but it won't help.) Then, the day gets worse. I get home and stop to get the mail. Now, some background, our mailboxes are the "cluster" style where the mail person stops in one place to load the mailboxes.
And, right below the mailbox cluster, there is a storm drain...
And I carry all my keys (house, mailbox, both cars, etc) on a carabiner clip. Which I usually, after opening the mailbox and pulling out the mail and locking it back up, loop over my finger.
Which this time, it decided not to stay on. And of course, it found its way into the drain. Tried spotting them down the drain, took the car home (push button start and I tend to leave it running when I get the mail,) but I couldn't get in the house. Went back later to try to fish out the keys with some help from my Dad and nephew, to no avail. Tried a magnet extension pole when the wife got home (had her stop and buy one,) with no luck Went back after dark with flashlights and couldn't even see the keys in the water in the drain. Hoping the water department calls the wife back tomorrow and come and see if they can find them...
So yeah, fun day...
Hopefully today was better. That last one is one of my big fears, loosing my keys, along with loosing phone or wallet. Had something similar happen to a friend back in the early 80's, luckily we were able to lift off the storm drain grate ourselves and jump down to get his keys.
-------------------------------------------------------------
we travel not to escape life but for life not to escape us
Don't fear failure, fear regret.
September 26, 2019 at 7:25 pm
Yeah, couple hours ago a guy from the water dept called to check which of the two mailbox clusters it was, because there's two on the same street, both with drains right by them...
Working from home today, so I told him which and threw my shoes on and hoofed it down to meet him. By the time I got there, he had the grate off and was fishing with a magnet on a string, right after I told him I was glad to see him, he's pulling my keys up!
As for pulling the grate myself and jumping down, the drain itself is only a bit wider inside than my shoulders, and I didn't know this initially, goes a LOT deeper than it looks! Very good chance if I'd gone down there, I'd be getting pulled out by the fire dept (then maybe charged with something like trespass or the like...)
September 26, 2019 at 8:02 pm
Yeah, couple hours ago a guy from the water dept called to check which of the two mailbox clusters it was, because there's two on the same street, both with drains right by them...
Working from home today, so I told him which and threw my shoes on and hoofed it down to meet him. By the time I got there, he had the grate off and was fishing with a magnet on a string, right after I told him I was glad to see him, he's pulling my keys up!
As for pulling the grate myself and jumping down, the drain itself is only a bit wider inside than my shoulders, and I didn't know this initially, goes a LOT deeper than it looks! Very good chance if I'd gone down there, I'd be getting pulled out by the fire dept (then maybe charged with something like trespass or the like...)
Yeah, I wouldn't be doing it now, that's back when we were teenagers and had no fear.
-------------------------------------------------------------
we travel not to escape life but for life not to escape us
Don't fear failure, fear regret.
September 26, 2019 at 8:17 pm
Hopefully today was better. That last one is one of my big fears, loosing my keys, along with loosing phone or wallet. Had something similar happen to a friend back in the early 80's, luckily we were able to lift off the storm drain grate ourselves and jump down to get his keys.
My lost keys story (actually have a couple, but this is the good one).
My wife & saved for several years so that we could go to Europe for the 200th anniversary of Waterloo. We weren't there the day of, but we made the following week. Close enough for me. Anyhow, we have the kids with us and it's our first full day in Belgium at a hotel in Brussels. The plan is, I go to the airport, get the rental car, come back, pick up the family and our first stop of the first day of the holiday is to make my daughter happy (the rest of the trip was all battlefields) and go to the Herge museum. I get back with the car, but there's a mix up on stuff, so I need to run back to the hotel room. We're standing in an elevator. I pass the car keys to my son, but we fumbled somehow. The keys drop, then practically slither and crawl their way into the gap on the elevator as we watch them plunge out of sight.
My son and I look at each other and burst out laughing. My daughter bursts into tears. My wife starts screaming. My son and I are can barely stand we're laughing so hard. Michele, Mrs. Scary, is pissed. My daughter is having a melt-down. I finally stop laughing and calm everyone down and chase them back to the hotel. Then I track down the number and get someone to come out and go down the elevator shaft. Cost us 50 euro. Worth every penny.
Oh, and for the rest of the trip my son and I took pictures of us holding the keys over holes and stuff. Best one is dangling the keys over the well in Hugomount. Made my wife & daughter freak, every single time. I'm probably going to hell. I'll still be laughing.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt
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