How Do You Act When You Need to Learn New Technology?

  • David.Poole (11/8/2016)


    Rod at work (11/8/2016)


    This is a bit of a tangent, but I had to respond to the mention of Gartner. Before I came to my current job all I knew about Gartner is that Gartner would appear in the by-line of some articles I'd read online at websites, blogs, etc. that I frequent for tech news. But boy, where I work now Gartner just about speaks the words of God. I've learned whole new terms like Gartner's "Magic Quadrant". WOW, does that have a powerful effect! Gartner's Magic Quadrant to upper level managers is like catnip to cats. But I see it both ways, too. I believe companies eagerly desire to be in that Magic Quadrant. I don't know what to think, sometimes. I suppose this "Magic Quadrant" stuff has its place, but I tend to think its taken more seriously than it should be.

    In general Gartner represents a reasonable direction of travel but like the proverbial lamp post it should be used for illumination rather than support.

    There are one or two Gartner..ish information companies around and one vendor I spoke to joked about making sure he took the company rep to the correct restaurant to ensure they got a positive write up. Cynical but with a grain of truth.

    If I want to buy a car the chances are I know someone who has the one I'm interested in and there are certainly trade and consumer publications that will tell me all sorts of things about that car.

    If I am a CTO in the market for new technology solution 'x' who have I got that I can ask? It tends to be my competitors who aren't going to reveal much or marketecture presentations. Hence the Gartner/Neilson or whatever comfort blanket

    +1000

    I see Gartner being misused in the same way as "best practice" documents. In some orgs both have been used to shut down discussion or analysis, rather than encourage it. The guidance provided by both can be useful if and only if you actually can prove that a. it solves your problem and b. it does so in a way that won't tear everything around it apart.

    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?

  • With all external sources of information you have to treat them with some scepticism.

    The phrase "completeness of vision" can mean many things. It might mean "we have a mature, well integrated product line" or it might mean "We have a product for everything but none of it integrates particularly well".

    IBM claim to be the largest cloud provider. According to their definition they are telling the truth. According to other definitions AWS is bigger than the next 8 put together!

    Frankly I would regard being fobbed off with "it's top right of a magic quadrant" as being a sign of lazy architecture. I'm more interested in a list of problems we need to solve and a reasonable stab at a matrix describing how the candidate technologies address those problems and at what cost.

    I'd also like to see thought processes following the line that "We are taking a punt, it may not work out. Product X does everything we foresee doing in the next 2 years. We'll adopt product X until the need for the Rolls Royce solution materialises.

    If you go with an expensive solution from day one you can't afford to fail, will be highly visible and be strangled by risk aversion. If you go with a low cost experimentation model then you can be far braver in what you try. You'll learn as much from failure as success. It's a complete change of mindset

  • Gary Varga (11/7/2016)


    ...or they could just continually lose staff with all their knowledge of both the business and it's workings then hire someone with none of that but the one skill they weren't prepared to train existing staff on with the increase in salary for the new person being more that the difference in the cost of the training.

    (This from a freelancer!!!)

    I agree. Losing staff loses a lot of history that is often overlooked until they are gone, when it's too late.

  • Iwas Bornready (11/14/2016)


    Gary Varga (11/7/2016)


    ...or they could just continually lose staff with all their knowledge of both the business and it's workings then hire someone with none of that but the one skill they weren't prepared to train existing staff on with the increase in salary for the new person being more that the difference in the cost of the training.

    (This from a freelancer!!!)

    I agree. Losing staff loses a lot of history that is often overlooked until they are gone, when it's too late.

    Elevator conversation:

    Joe: Hi, I'm Joe from XYZ Corp. You here for the SQL Saturday?

    Me: Yep. Giving a presentation.

    Joe: What do you do in "real life"?

    Me: I'm a hybrid DBA. I do both Systems and Application DBA work.

    Joe: What kind of work do they do?

    Me: All the stuff no one knows about until they stop doing it. 🙂

    --Jeff Moden


    RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
    First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
    ________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.

    Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.


    Helpful Links:
    How to post code problems
    How to Post Performance Problems
    Create a Tally Function (fnTally)

  • Jeff Moden (11/14/2016)


    Iwas Bornready (11/14/2016)


    Gary Varga (11/7/2016)


    ...or they could just continually lose staff with all their knowledge of both the business and it's workings then hire someone with none of that but the one skill they weren't prepared to train existing staff on with the increase in salary for the new person being more that the difference in the cost of the training.

    (This from a freelancer!!!)

    I agree. Losing staff loses a lot of history that is often overlooked until they are gone, when it's too late.

    Elevator conversation:

    Joe: Hi, I'm Joe from XYZ Corp. You here for the SQL Saturday?

    Me: Yep. Giving a presentation.

    Joe: What do you do in "real life"?

    Me: I'm a hybrid DBA. I do both Systems and Application DBA work.

    Joe: What kind of work do they do?

    Me: All the stuff no one knows about until they stop doing it. 🙂

    +10^10

    😎

  • Blimey Jeff, you seem quite agitated on this one 🙂 good to see some passion

    At my company we have a monthly team meeting (about 30 of us) where we do a show and tell by one person on something new. we pick a subject that we know nothing about and go and research it.

    everybody learns and the speaker becomes a recognised expert in that area, we've found that a lot of people take an interest in the new "toys"

    the thing is, we all know lots of new things , but we are mired in our legacy systems and nothing new gets implemented

    I've tried getting service broker, hierarchyid, graph and many other things... nobody wants to step out of their comfort zones.

    I have gotten them used to Stretch (because they don't have to code)

    MVDBA

  • Eirikur Eiriksson wrote:

    Me: All the stuff no one knows about until they stop doing it. 🙂

    I took a week off - everything broke, they didn't know I was cleaning up "developer poo" all day long

    MVDBA

  • MVDBA (Mike Vessey) wrote:

    I've tried getting service broker, hierarchyid, graph and many other things... nobody wants to step out of their comfort zones.

    What did you want folks to use HierarchyID and Graph databases for?  What was the proposed advantage?

     

    --Jeff Moden


    RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
    First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
    ________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.

    Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.


    Helpful Links:
    How to post code problems
    How to Post Performance Problems
    Create a Tally Function (fnTally)

  • Jeff Moden wrote:

    MVDBA (Mike Vessey) wrote:

    I've tried getting service broker, hierarchyid, graph and many other things... nobody wants to step out of their comfort zones.

    What did you want folks to use HierarchyID and Graph databases for?  What was the proposed advantage?

    hierarchyid was for a tree structure of assets in a cinema ( a cinema has a car park, the car park has signs) etc - nice and easy to get all child objects of a node without using a recursive CTE

    Service Broker was just to stick stuff in a queue and get a response when it was done - make the processes pseudo-asynchronous.

    Graph - we haven't figured it out yet but we like the concept of multiple parents to an object

    MVDBA

  • This was removed by the editor as SPAM

  • sorry - I clicked on the wrong button and reported the last entry - completely my bad. - I wanted to "quote"

    I'd love to hear how you use graph for marketing. i work for a marketing company (most of my time is spend in supply chain, but i have to train the guys that use R in SSIS and try and find ways of innovating)

    again - sorry for marking your post as spam - i don't know how to undo it)

     

    MVDBA

  • MVDBA (Mike Vessey) wrote:

    sorry - I clicked on the wrong button and reported the last entry - completely my bad. - I wanted to "quote"

    I'd love to hear how you use graph for marketing. i work for a marketing company (most of my time is spend in supply chain, but i have to train the guys that use R in SSIS and try and find ways of innovating)

    again - sorry for marking your post as spam - i don't know how to undo it)

    No worries.

    It's about following consumers. Like supply chain may do, creating a flow of material going from start to finish. Each step is a data point that can be stored in these types of databases. Then visually displayed showing said flow from start to finish. Marketing, this may be a customer in a retail store such as tracking their footsteps to tracking consumers across marketing channels.

     

  • xsevensinzx wrote:

    MVDBA (Mike Vessey) wrote:

    sorry - I clicked on the wrong button and reported the last entry - completely my bad. - I wanted to "quote"

    I'd love to hear how you use graph for marketing. i work for a marketing company (most of my time is spend in supply chain, but i have to train the guys that use R in SSIS and try and find ways of innovating)

    again - sorry for marking your post as spam - i don't know how to undo it)

    No worries.

    It's about following consumers. Like supply chain may do, creating a flow of material going from start to finish. Each step is a data point that can be stored in these types of databases. Then visually displayed showing said flow from start to finish. Marketing, this may be a customer in a retail store such as tracking their footsteps to tracking consumers across marketing channels.

    we do similar things, mainly eye tracking, for when we move an advert and see the flow of eye movement when a server moves to get their coffee or burger.

    I get a lot of data - thankfully i don't have to understand it. that's not my job. I just have to manage the process and give it to the guys who know R

     

    MVDBA

  • Sure, for us its mostly ads. So, tracking movement across ads and channels and devices is where a lot of this comes into play.

  • xsevensinzx wrote:

    Sure, for us its mostly ads. So, tracking movement across ads and channels and devices is where a lot of this comes into play.

    are you sure we don't work at the same company? 🙂

    MVDBA

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