11/17/2023
by Marlon Ribunal
Comments Off on Building Upon Your Productivity Momentum: Staying Productive For Life

Building Upon Your Productivity Momentum: Staying Productive For Life

Note: I found this sitting in my Medium draft. This was a cross-post from my old productivity blog that got lost in oblivion.

Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort.

Paul J. Meyer

The state of being productive doesn’t just happen overnight. It is brought about by full dedication and constant diligence. It is not a quality or quantity subject to measurement or metrics on a dashboard or performance sheet.

Productivity is an attitude toward work — a way of life. It is by itself a state of being. It is not a condition of having done something but of doing.

Productivity is an attitude toward work — a way of life.

Once you are already in the state of being productive, you have to grasp that moment with both of your hands because it is easy to let it loose; and getting yourself out of the productivity pit — the unproductive state — can be a daunting task.

There are pitfalls out there that you can easily fall into when complacency overtakes your momentum. Drawbacks can get in your way and swallow you up into the abyss.

Here are some of the things that you can do to successfully maintain your state of being productive:

Reinforce What’s Working

If you think you already have the perfect formula for productivity, there is no reason to reinvent the whole thing. You may try variations of the formula but it is not a good idea to dismantle its core and rebuild one after another.

Although you must also assert some flexibility into the system, this does not mean you have to abandon its constant reinforcement. Find your winning formula and stick to it.

Eliminate The Non-Essential

Any productivity system, no matter how effective it is, needs some pruning. As your way of working evolves, you will find things that might have become superfluous as you make your adjustments or adaptation.

Your work might remain constant but the ways of doing it will not. We always find new ways of doing things so it is important to make room for changes by discarding the things that no longer fit in our system.

Separate Concerns

New responsibilities and the daily load of work can overwhelm us if we are not ready to tackle them. If you’ve been reading the GTD book by David Allen, you are probably convinced now that a stress-free productivity is not a matter of managing your time. It’s about getting your stuff out of your head.

If you think you are swamped by responsibilities and you feel like you’re in trouble, think about what Henry Ford might have to say, “There are no big problems; there are just a lot of little problems.” And, I am sure you will agree if I say that little problems are easier to deal with than the big ones.

Set New Goals

The end itself is a new beginning. Once you reached your goals, you have to set new and better ones. 

Your system becomes rigid, and thereby your job suffers boredom, if you let mediocrity thrives in your system. Set higher and better goals to achieve.

Improve Your System

There is always room for improvement. Continuous improvement on the way you do your job can reap more productivity and great successes. Your system becomes more and more efficient if you are committed to its improvement.

Set your eyes on innovation. As you do this, don’t forget Steve Job’s piece of advice, “Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.” And you can apply that advice to how you handle your daily work.

Learn To Automate

In order for you to guarantee efficiency and productivity, you have to go for automation. Don’t waste your time and effort on things that you can automate. Automation is your ally. Look for technologies that can truly help you get things done.

But remember that on top of any automation or technology must be your proven and solid system. To quote Bill Gates, “The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”

Be A Student

Never stop learning. Pursuit of knowledge and innovation is the strong key to ultimate productivity and efficiency. Learn new technologies and never stop looking for systems that you can adapt to your own.

Efficiency and Productivity demand incessant learning.

Be A Mentor

Bring out the best in others and they will happily return the favor. Helping other people reach their goals should be part of your goals. You need other people. You don’t need to monopolize all the good stuff. Share your knowledge to others and you will never run out of great resources when you most need them.

Celebrate The Milestones

There must be a reason to all your efforts. Celebrate every success that you achieve. Celebrate to remind yourself that much has been done to bring all your tasks or projects into accomplishment.

Take also this moment to look forward to your next projects and remember those marks that brought you successes.

Learn From Mistakes

W. Clement Stone has a great outlook on learning from our own mistakes. He said, “Like success, failure is many things to many people. With Positive Mental Attitude, failure is a learning experience, a rung on the ladder, a plateau at which to get your thoughts in order and prepare to try again.”

Mistakes are not failure; they only mean we did not succeed the first time we try.

Continue On Building Plans

Jim Rohn reminds us to not stop looking forward and never to stop building our goals and plans: “If you go to work on your goals, your goals will go to work on you. If you go to work on your plan, your plan will go to work on you. Whatever good things we build end up building us.” Continue to look forward to the next day.

Productivity and efficiency may be hard to achieve if you are building them from the ground up. But as you start picking up the pace, you find that they become easier to attain. They become part of your life. They become you.

10/10/2023
by Marlon Ribunal
Comments Off on The Evolution of Database Administration: From Administration to Database Reliability Engineering

The Evolution of Database Administration: From Administration to Database Reliability Engineering

In the fast-paced world of IT, where trends like DevOps and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) dominate the landscape, the concepts of Reliability and Observability have seamlessly woven themselves into the fabric of IT operations. For those of us in the field of Database Administration, this evolving philosophy has brought about a transformation in the way we work.

Gone are the days when database administration was primarily about handling administrative tasks and ensuring Service Level Agreements (SLAs) were met. It has now transcended these traditional boundaries, taking on a more holistic and strategic role within the IT ecosystem.

Today, the combination of Database Administration with the principles of DevOps, Automation, Infrastructure as Code, Engineering, Architecture, and Reliability Engineering has given rise to an all-encompassing discipline known as Database Reliability Engineering (DBRE). This discipline represents the path forward for individuals seeking to elevate their database management skills and adapt to the changing landscape of IT.

So, what exactly does this evolution mean for database professionals? Let’s break it down:

  1. DevOps Integration: DBRE seamlessly integrates with DevOps practices, fostering collaboration between database administrators and developers. This results in a more efficient and agile development cycle, where database changes are no longer bottlenecks but integral parts of the deployment pipeline.
  2. Automation: Automation has become a cornerstone of DBRE. Tasks that were once manual and time-consuming can now be automated, reducing human error and freeing up DBAs to focus on more critical aspects of database management.
  3. Infrastructure as Code: With IaC, database infrastructure is defined and managed through code. This not only ensures consistency and reproducibility but also makes it easier to scale and adapt to changing requirements.
  4. Engineering and Architecture: DBRE professionals are expected to have a deep understanding of database systems’ inner workings and architecture. They design databases for performance, scalability, and reliability, rather than simply administering them.
  5. Reliability Engineering: Ensuring high availability, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery are central to DBRE. Database systems must be resilient, and DBREs play a crucial role in achieving this.
  6. Operations: DBRE encompasses the day-to-day operational aspects of database management, but it goes beyond mere maintenance. It involves proactive monitoring, capacity planning, and continuous optimization to meet evolving business needs.

As the IT landscape continues to shift towards cloud-based solutions, the environment for Database Reliability Engineering becomes even more promising. Cloud platforms provide the flexibility, scalability, and advanced tooling needed to implement DBRE practices effectively.

In conclusion, the role of a Database Administrator is no longer confined to routine administrative tasks. Instead, it has evolved into Database Reliability Engineering, a multidisciplinary approach that embraces modern IT practices to ensure databases are not just reliable but also responsive to the dynamic needs of the business. For those looking to future-proof their careers in the world of IT, embracing DBRE is the path forward, and the cloud provides the ideal environment for its growth and implementation.

Nota Bene: A good resource book about the philosophy and practice of DBRE is “Database Reliability Engineering: Designing and Operating Resilient Database Systems“. Here is the amazon link.

SQL Query Design Patterns and Best Practices: A practical guide to writing readable and maintainable SQL queries using its design patterns

05/20/2023
by Marlon Ribunal
1 Comment

Book Review: SQL Query Design Patterns and Best Practices

Over the years I have been to different organizations that have their own conventions in their business practices. Codes are written and maintained in certain ways that are compatible with how they operate. These organizations would have written conventions for specific business functions while others maintain theirs through unwritten rule-of-thumbs, and some are even left to their own devices to come up with their own rules. The latter oftentimes lead to technical debt, but that’s another topic for another day. Whether documented in official artifacts or kept by oral traditions and heuristics, design patterns and best practices are ingrained in all the teams’ customs and practices.

SQL Query Design Patterns and Best Practices: A practical guide to writing readable and maintainable SQL queries using its design patterns (yes, that’s the complete title of the book) will provide you with a good foundation upon which a consistent convention for practicing your day-to-day operations can have a solid footing in your database discipline, with few exceptions. Read on.

This book is not perfect to say the least. Some glaring inconsistencies in the way the codes were written have already been talked about in Koen Verbeeck’s review of the same book (review here). I am not going to rehash those here. Let me say, though, that those points raised by Koen are all valid and should be corrected in future edition of the book.

That said, let’s take a peek at what this book has to offer.

The book is divided into 4 parts:

  • Part 1 – Refining Your Queries to Get the Results You Need
  • Part 2 – Solving Complex Business and Data Problems in Your Queries
  • Part 3 – Optimizing Your Queries to Improve Performance
  • Part 4 – Working with Your Data on the Modern Data Platform

As you can see in the list above, this book pretty much covers a wide range of topics that include data retrieval, troubleshooting, query performance, and data platform. That’s a fair coverage if you want to talk about design patterns and best practices in general; but it will take a great deal of effort to jam-pack all these great topics into a 270-page volume. The content covers the topics it presented quite fairly if you don’t set your expectations too high. It is just not possible to cover all these topics in depth within that limited amount of pages.

If you’re new to the industry, this is a good book to have in your arsenal. I would pick this as a reference if I were establishing conventions from scratch.

I love the fact that the very first chapter talks about Reducing Rows and Columns in Your Result Sets. Sometimes even the best codes can perform poorly if the volume of the data being processed is more than what the system resources can handle within a reasonable amount of time. Trust me, you don’t need a billion-row dataset in your presentation layer.

For some this book will seem like it’s a primer on TSQL. For the most part, it really looks like a primer rather than an operative manual that the title presupposes; and there are better primer materials out there for such purposes.

This, then, begs the question: who is this book for? If you are just starting out in the database industry and SQL Server is your primary tool of the trade, this is a good book for refreshing your TSQL skills. If you are a well-established data professional who already built your company’s database conventions from the ground up, you can skip this book.

Don’t get me wrong. I’d recommend this book if you need a starter in TSQL. This is a good companion to our well-beloved volumes such as Itzik Ben-Gan’s T-SQL Fundamentals (Developer Reference) or Pedro Lopes and Pam Lahoud’s Learn T-SQL Querying: A guide to developing efficient and elegant T-SQL code (these two books should already be in your tech library).