It’s that time again! This month, Todd Kleinhans (b/t) asks us how we use databases in our day to day life, i.e. personal use or “outside of our work / day-job”. Actually, the question is kinda vague — because if you think about it, we all use TONS of databases in our daily lives. Your phone’s contact list, your calendar, online shopping, banking.. the list goes on. As I’ve said before, Data is everything.
But what I think he meant, and the way most of the community has interpreted it, is “How do you manage/administrate/build/work-with/develop databases in your day-to-day life outside of work?”. So we’ll go with that.
Now this may out me as “not a real DBA” or some such nonsense, but honestly.. I don’t spend much of my time creating silly playground databases. Not that anybody else’s are ‘silly’ — just look at some of the fantastic posts for this month! Such neat ideas brought to life.
Special shout-out to Kenneth Fisher, who, if you look closely at his screenshot (and it’s not even related to this post), committed the abhorrent sin of creating a database name of pure emojis — FOR SHAME sir! But also you’re awesome. ❤
Me, I’m more of a quick-n-dirty spreadsheet guy. If I need, say, an inventory of my computer parts & gadgets so I know what I can & can’t repair, what materials I have to work with as I tinker, etc.. well, I create a Google Sheet. And it serves my needs well enough. (Spoiler alert: yes, you can view that one; I shared it. But it’s fairly outdated since I moved in March and haven’t had time to re-do inventory since.. last autumn.)
But for blogging in the tech field, you gotta get your hands dirty. So when I dived down the rabbit-hole of the Nested Set Model, of course I created a sample database to write & test the code against. And there have been some additional bits & pieces for blog demos and GitHub samples.
Most of the time, I’m creating databases / entities on SQL 2016 Developer Edition. Of course by now, that’s 2 major versions ‘behind’, but since I don’t run Linux personally (yet?), and I’m not a conference speaker (yet??), I don’t feel a burning need to upgrade. It’s FAR superior to Express Edition, though, so please for the love of all that is holy, if you find yourself using Express for personal/playground use, save yourself the headache and go grab Developer.
Containers/Docker? Meh. If you want to start playing with those, definitely look at 2017 or higher. It sounds appealing in theory — “just spin it up when you need it, spin it down when you don’t!” — and I’m sure that’s great if you’re starved for resources on whatever laptop you’re working with, but if you’ve done your due diligence and set your local SQL instance to appropriate resource limitations (hello, ‘max server memory’ and file-growths!), I’ve found that its impact is quite tolerable.
But come now. Surely this isn’t just a “shameless self-promotion” post or a grumpy-old-DBA “get off my lawn” post. Right?? Right!
To you folks out there creating your own nifty little databases for personal projects, learning/development, or even hopes & dreams of building a killer app on top of it one day — you’re amazing! Keep doing what you do, and write about it, because I love reading about it. Heck, go try to create the same model in PostgreSQL or MariaDB and see how it goes. We could all use a little cross-stack exposure once in a while.
That’s all I have for this month; short & sweet. I need to finalize plans for virtualizing our main SQL instances (which is really just a migration off bare-metal & onto VMs) within the coming weeks. Yes, we’re that far behind the curve. Now get off my lawn!
=P
nate_the_dba 
😀 I’ll have you know that’s a great demonstration database. Most of the users and objects are themed and use emojis in their name. Have you figured out the name of that particular database? If it helps one of the users is Dorothy🌩.
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Lions & tigers & bears, oh my! =)
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