Month: January 2022

T-SQL Tuesday #146 Round-up! Upending Preconceived Notions

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Hello everyone!

First of all, I want to thank everyone who took some time to participate in this month’s T-SQL Tuesday: Upending Preconceived Notions. There’s a fantastic line-up of contributions! I was tickled that many of the topics chosen were things I once held one viewpoint on, later learned more, and evolved that viewpoint.

That was a lot of fun. And I’m happy to say that I learned some stuff.

Thank you again to everyone who took some time to contribute a blog post!

Dear readers, I hope you take the time to read each and every contribution, and come away learning something new too!

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T-SQL Tuesday #146: Disk Storage – More Than Meets The Eye

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Welcome to another edition of T-SQL Tuesday. This month, I’m the host and I’ve asked participants to blog about “Upending Preconceived Notions.”

What’s Your Preconceived Notion Andy?

Just over 3 months ago, I joined Pure Storage, which is fundamentally a storage infrastructure company. Confession: I’ve never been an infrastructure OR storage guru. I’ve spent the vast majority of my career focused on slinging code, and not the underlying hardware. But like many things in life, these things can be taught and I’ve been learning a LOT these past few months!

What I Used To Think About Disk Storage

For the vast majority of my career, I just thought of storage as a place to read and write your data from. Storage was merely a receptacle… a place for your data to live. Of course, as data professionals, we want to move tons of data quickly, so things like latency, throughput, and capacity still mattered to me. But beyond that, disk was disk.

So What Changed?

Frankly, I learned about how Pure Storage’s FlashArray worked underneath the covers. (DISCLAIMER: I may slightly butcher what I explain next, as I’m still getting to the point of being able to eloquently articulate the stuff I’ve been learning.) When writing data blocks, FlashArray essentially maintains “metadata” about what data tidbits live where in the storage array. I’m going to over-simplify and say let’s just think of this metadata as a glorified index or table of contents, okay?

So why is that special? FlashArray uses this metadata not only to find where your data lives but to MANAGE it as well. We do things like make copies of our data and I know we can ALL relate to staring at progress meters moving at a glacier’s pace. Well what if all we had to do is make an adjustment to the metadata instead? I’d rather just copy a small little “table of contents” instead of an entire book of information, and it’s a heck of a lot FASTER!

If you’re curious to learn more about this, here’s a cool blog about ODX and FlashArray. https://blog.purestorage.com/purely-technical/odx-flasharray-engineers-perspective/

Why does all of this matter?

As data professionals, we have to move data around a lot. And it is often a hassle. Refresh dev/QA/staging with a copy of Prod. Reseed an Availability Group. What has blown my mind is that because of clever decisions that Pure has made, regarding how data is stored in FlashArray, now enables data professionals to attack those copy/data movement headaches in ways they could not before! I’m amazed at some of the things that can be done almost instaneously, that would take hours in another vendor’s storage array. And that is extremely exciting to me!

Revelations

As I’m writing this very blog post, I just had a personal revelation.

Years ago, I attended SQLskills’ IE1 class. One of the first topics was SQL Server storage engine internals and it was another one of those eye opening moments in my career journey. And I just realized that my new understanding of FlashArray and how it works underneath the covers, has really opened by eyes and changed how I view storage SOLUTIONS! This bit is totally just a personal notation, but I figured I’d write and share it here anyway!

Think Back

Anyway, I hope you all enjoyed this story. Sorry if it came across as a Pure Storage commercial – it wasn’t meant to be, but damn, they’re doing some really wicked awesome stuff underneath the covers!

Regardless, if you’re reading now, think back over the course of your career and ask yourself if there’s ever been a time when you’ve learned something that’s totally changed your outlook or view on something bigger.

Thanks for reading!

T-SQL Tuesday #146: Upending Preconceived Notions

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Welcome back to another edition of T-SQL Tuesday! I’m honored to be your host once again!

Theme to Kick off 2022

This month, I’d like to ask everyone to think about something you’ve learned, that subsequently changed your opinion/viewpoint/etc. on something. Maybe you’ve had a certain opinion, belief, or bias? Perhaps you’ve always thought something worked a certain way? Or you’ve always thought that a certain something (called “X”) was only good for “A”, only to later learn that it can help with “B”, and “C” as well. Regardless, you learned something and it totally upended and changed that preconceived notion you held previously.

When has this happened to you Andy?

Let me share an example. In my past as a T-SQL developer, I remember when I first learned about CTEs. I thought the world of them and started using them everywhere! However, there was one slight problem. I was under the mistaken impression that they pre-materialize each sub-query. And they do… in OTHER RDBMS’s. Whoops! After a few years, I learned that they don’t behave that way in SQL Server. Instead the query optimizer inlines the query in the CTE, making them functionally no different that a subquery. And well, let’s just say that that made me regret some of the coding decisions I’d made during my “CTEs-are-awesome” phase.

Rule Refresher

To remind you of the rules, please write a blog post corresponding to this month’s theme, include the T-SQL Tuesday logo, link back to this announcement post for the trackback, and leave a comment here with a link back to your contribution. Deadline is end of day Jan 11, 2022 (don’t worry about time zones, I’m not picky about late entries).

The other thing to remember is, your blog is your blog. If you want to gently twist the theme, to write a blog that better suits you, by all means do so! Just want to encourage you all to participate!

Go Forth and Blog!

So take some time to think about something you’ve learned that subsequently upended a preconceived notion you held before! I look forward to reading your contributions.

Happy Blogging!