If you could go back in time and meet yourself on Day One of your IT career, what advice would you give?

What a great question.  I’ve previously blogged about What I Would Tell my 16 Year-old Self .  All good stuff there.  Especially about the hot rollers.

But what would I say to Karen Lopez, brand new Senior Systems Analyst (yes, that was my first job title)?  There a bunch of small stuff that really turns out to be big stuff later:

• Skip the Full Day Voice Mail Training.  Sure, it was mandatory, but the guys only had to do a half-day version of it.  Insist you don’t know need a full day.  Set the direction for how the team sees your role on the project from the start.
• Don’t let that clerk at the Passport Office talk you into bad data quality: alphabetizing your names on your passport.  That one decision is going to impact you more than you can ever imagine.  But you will get some great data quality presentation material out of it.
• Respect your boss, but don’t let him manage your career.  My first boss started on the same day I did.  He wasn’t a twenty-something, though.  He had retired from the US Army the day before and had come to work for the defense consulting company I worked at.  To manage projects for the US Army.  Funny how that works.  He brought with him his military bearing…and his need to be in command of everything, even the technical design of the application we were building.  Even though he was an accountant and had no technical experience or training. 

  He and I didn’t really look at life the same way, but he was my boss.  I let him manage my professional development plan, my training, my assignments much more than I should have.  He wasn’t a good fan of female engineers, either.  So our non-technical tester was the guy who did all the demos and presentations, even though he really could answer any of the technical questions he received.

  Karen, that boss should not have been able to set your path, only guide it.

• Don’t try to explain everything that caused a bug or a mistake in a deliverable.  Just fix it and fix the problem that led to it.  Nobody really cares why it happened unless the think you are going to do it again.  Fix it, learn from it, move on.   Don’t make your mistakes stand out more than anyone else does.  Be honest, but don’t broadcast them.
• Never accept the first offer.  I can’t tell you, Karen, how many times you are in a negotiation and don’t even realize it.  The earlier you realize this, the better off you will be.  Think your boss is doing you a big favor by sending you on a local one day course?  Sure, she is.  But she’s sending Chad on a full week of bootcamp training because he asked for that instead.  Think you are fortunate because you are getting a 5% raise? You are, but Chad got 10% because he negotiated it.
• You will make great friends at work.  But they are your colleagues first.   Save the details of your life for friends outside work.
• No one cares what shoes you are wearing…as long as you can keep up the sprint with everyone else.  Wearing impractical shoes is going to slow you down. That’s literal and figurative advice.  See, double the value.

I think First Day of Work Karen did okay over the years. She got to work at all three branches of the US government during her first job.  She played volleyball on the Mall.  And she learned a lot about voice mail, a bleeding edge technology then.  But there were more important things to learn along the way.

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At Enterprise Data World last week I had a chance to defend my crown at the Lightning Talk sessions.  Lightning Talks are 5 minute presentations, usually done to highlight one point or to motivate people to go do something.

Most of my lightning talks, though, are rants on some thing.  Think a 5-minute long roast.  This year, I picked on Big Data and NoSQL names and terms.  While it appears that one person didn’t fully grasp the "roast" part of this rant, I think I did okay. At least most of the laughter wasn’t at me, but with me.

Mark Burnelli, Senior New Editor at SearchDataManagment.techtarget.com wrote an article about my rant:

The humorous verbal shellacking of big data — which generated plenty of audience laughs — came at the hands of Karen Lopez, a senior project manager and principal consultant with InfoAdvisors Inc. Lopez is also proprietor of the popular Datachick Twitter feed and often uses that outlet to post admittedly snarky comments about the world of information management.

Datachick gives ‘big data’ a verbal beat down at Enterprise Data World

I did start my presentation by saying:

By the way, every single one of these rants is totally unfair, cherry picked and irreverent.  I know. It’s shocking.

I will be blogging the entire rant over on Dataversity.net and will post here when it goes live.

I should also mention, to those of you snickering, that I am currently drafting a similar rant for the RDBMS technology/naming/terminology set.  It will also be full of snark.  Shocking, I know.

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This year the event will be held in Atlanta, so at least we’ll be warmer than some years, right?  I remember a particularly freezing March in Boston.  I don’t want to repeat that, ever.

By the way, there is still time to register and I believe there is still a $100 discount available.  If you can’t find that, contact me and I’ll see what I can do for you <grin>.

My Events

This is a busy year for me at EDW.

Kick-off Panel: I’ll be part of the "Welcome Panel" moderated by Tony Shaw of Dataversity.  Jaime Fitzgerald, Peter Aiken, Sue Gueuns and I will be talking about our tips for getting the most out of the event, including our recommendations for the sessions we most want to attend.

http://edw2012.dataversity.net/sessionPop.cfm?confid=65&proposalid=4803

Size Doesn’t Matter: I’ll be defending my Talk Champion crown sweatshirt at this year’s Lightning Talks.  All other speakers, be warned.  I talk FAST.  I’m also known for going for the cheap jokes that get votes.

http://edw2012.dataversity.net/sessionPop.cfm?confid=65&proposalid=4813

ER/Studio Special Interest Group: I’ll be leading a user-to-user discussion of Embarcadero and their database and data modeling tools. We will have Embarcadero reps there to contribute, but this is still a user group meeting.  You don’t have to be a current customer to attend.

By the way, there are also SIGs for CA ERwin Data Modeler and Sybase PowerDesigner going on at other times. 

http://edw2012.dataversity.net/sessionPop.cfm?confid=65&proposalid=4505

Finding Myself: A Case Study on Your Data Model, My Data and Me:  This is my regular session at the event, where I take a snarky look at how your systems mess with my data…and how I pay the price for that messiness.  I hope you’ll join me for this irreverent look at cost, benefit and risk choices that "they" make when "they" manage our data. 

http://edw2012.dataversity.net/sessionPop.cfm?confid=65&proposalid=4496

Data Modeling Power Panel – Contemporary Issues in Modeling:  I’ll be participating in Alec Sharp‘s panel along with Michael Blaha and David Hay on forward-looking topics in data modeling and management.  My topic will focus on NoSQL, especially extensions to relational DBMSs.

John Zachman

This year marks the 30th year since John Zachman shared his Zachman Framework with the world. There will be a special event on Wednesday evening to recognize his contributions to enterprise architecture over the last three decades. 

Social

Of course in addition to all the great sessions, there will be social events and time for catching up on what other data professionals have been up to since I saw them last year in Chicago.

For those of you who can’t make it, a bunch of us will be tweeting using the hashtag #EDW12.  You can follow along on Twitter, even if you aren’t signed up for it, by going to http://search.twitter.com and searching for "EDW12"

I hope to see you and get a chance to chat with you at this year’s EDW.  That’s why I go…the sessions are great, but the chance to share ideas, tips, tricks and data stories is what keeps me coming back.

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Pipeline im Bau (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Thinking about it, this could also be titled “There’s No I in Team” or “Communication is Key”.

About 20 years ago I was a young(er) Engineer working away at a company learning all about how things worked.  I was given the task to look after and inspect a pipeline project that was about 20 kilometers long.  One of the tasks at the end of the project is to test the pipeline before it is put into service.  The tests are done with water and the pipeline is pressurized almost to its full theoretical yield strength.

In the days leading up to the tests there wasn’t much for the inspector (me) to do so I helped out the contractor doing some menial tasks on the site.  One of them was filling this long pipeline with water.  We used a small water pump that pumped at a maximum of about 200 psig.  Not much compared to the full yield pressure we were going to test at.  As you can imagine when you are testing a pipeline at over 1,000 psig you have to use some pretty heavy duty fittings so we could pretty much do whatever we wanted with that little pump…including closing the valves with the pump running.  Remember this as you read on…

The day of the test everyone got there, we set up the test assembly, the dead weights to measure the pressure and a high pressure piston pump.  This piston pump can pump in excess of 3,000 psi, but it pumps relatively slowly compared to the pumps we used to fill the pipeline.  But think about it, water is incompressible so if the pipe is already full of water it doesn’t take a lot more to get it to the test pressure.  I forget the exact values, but it was probably about 400 to 500 gallons of water that we needed to pump in.

So we started pumping water and found it was taking extra time to get the pressure to rise the way it should.  Sometimes you see this if there’s a bit of air in the line, but in this case the pump just seemed extra slow.  I had been on tests before (and had them go wrong before) and I knew (or thought I did) what was happening.  We stood at the top of the excavation looking down at the test head and wondered what was wrong.  Without saying anything to anyone, I jumped in the excavation and put my ear next to the valve.  It didn’t sound right to me.  So guess what I did….I closed the valve.  In my mind I thought there might be something in the valve and if I closed it and opened it again right away maybe it would help.  It was a sound theory, right?  Wrong.

Remember what I said about using heavy duty fittings?  The valves were 2” ball valves rated at 3000 WOG or 3,000 psig.  Remember what I said about the piston pump being able to pump in excess of 3,000 psig?  Guess what happened when I closed that valve WITH THE PUMP RUNNING?  Let’s just say I never got the valve open again.  I took the top of the valve, the handle and the stem in the chest.  Lucky for me I was bent over the valve far enough and it was late fall I was wearing enough winter gear it wasn’t too bad.  I got a face full of water right away so I didn’t even realize I got hit by anything else.  It wasn’t until later that I started feeling a dull ache that let me know.

I was working with a team.  Had we actually talked about the issues and what we should be doing I never would have dead headed such a strong pump against a closed valve.  We may have closed the valve and reopened it based on my theory, but we would have shut the pump off first.

Sometimes you just shouldn’t jump in feet first.

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As I called for last week, this is my #failfriday blog post.  I’ve made so many mistakes, it was difficult to pick one.  There was the time I did a quick spellcheck of a letter to a key client and managed to change his name to Murderer, as in Dear Murderer.  Those were good times.  Then there was the time I generated and printed about 1000 graphs for evidence in a court case and managed to screw up the last data point on every single one of them.  This was an instance of an off-by-one error.  So they all had to be redone on a pen plotter.  That takes days….and lots of pens.

Of course, I’ve had many of the #fails that most people shared on Twitter: Running a script or command in the wrong location, usually the wrong server or directory, and wiping out data that had not been backed up.  I have a feeling this is a requirement to become a professional: this fail changes you for the rest of your career.

I decided to pick a trivial fail, but one that showed the dangers of being a data architect.

Strawberry Fields Forever

In Ottawa I lived near a strawberry farm.  How wonderful it was to have fresh strawberries, picked minutes before, for several weeks.  One night I was driving back from the city and stopped by the farm to see if they had any for sale.  I remember I was wearing a suit, heels, the whole business chick outfit. Not really strawberry picking attire.  So I was on a mission to get berries that had been picked by other people.  You could buy strawberries two different ways:

• Pick Your Own:  Basically the farm gave you trays and you picked your own and paid the cheapest rate.  Because carrying trays was hard work, people would fill the trays, then bring them to sales hut to hold them.  Then the pickers paid for all of  them at once.
• Already Picked: Local kids would pick the berries and bring them to the sales hut and get paid for picking them.  Buyers like me paid a premium for having the hard part done for us already.  However, if you got there late in the day, like I did, the chance of finding these was rare.

So this was my plan: buy a flat of “already picked” berries.  That was my category, remember.  Not “Pick Your Own” but “Already Picked”.  See, I was thinking like a data architect.  Those were 2 subtypes of STRAWBERRY: ALREADY PICKED STRAWBERRY and PICK YOUR OWN STRAWBERRY.

So I waltzed up in my blue power suit, looked at the shelves in the sales hut and saw many flats of berries and asked the bored teenage sales girl “Are those strawberries already picked?”

Are those strawberries already picked?

….I’ll let you guess what happened next.  If you picked “laughter, eye rolling and general snickering”, you’d be spot on.  See, it turns out that the sales girl didn’t live in a land of data architecture, where everything is categorized, sorted and taxonomized to the 9th degree.  She lived in the real world, that place where strawberries are either still on a plant or not. 

I  learned my lesson that day.  Data architects sound funny outside their normal habitat, those whiteboard-shrouded conference rooms where data is managed.  And sometimes we sound really silly in the real world.  We need to remember that.

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A former contractor’s personal laptop containing patient information was stolen, according to a statement from Larry Warren, CEO of the hospital. “This information was downloaded in violation of Howard University Hospital policy,” he wrote.

I’ll give you 30 seconds to spot 3 problems with the situation.  Tick, Tock.

I can see three especially worrisome problems:

• Information was downloaded in violation:  I’m guessing that there was no monitoring of downloads of sensitive data at this medical institution.  This sort of monitoring may have prevented this data from leaving the building.
• Former contractor:  So a person who had access to this sensitive data was allowed to leave the organization with it. I personally refuse to put data such as this on my own devices, mainly because I do not want the liability of having to protect it or report it if something were go wrong.  I am usually the only person on the project who refuses.  However, I have never even been asked or reminded about removing any company data from any of my storage devices when I go on to other projects.
• Personal Laptop:  I sometimes use my own equipment when working at a client and that is normally due to the fact that client systems are often less powerful than my own and they don’t have licenses for tools that I need to do my job..  But I’d rather use systems that have enterprise-class security, encryption and monitoring.  I wish more corporate systems supports such practices.

Since the article did not mention that the data was encrypted, I’m guessing it wasn’t.  I’m also wondering why this ever got reported…most former consultants would not do so, I’m guessing, if they had the data in violation.  Perhaps the laptop was recovered and the breach was reported that way.

I’ve previously blogged about how poorly medical data is protected.

This sort of data breach makes me mad. It’s nice that the hospital says that they are now “implementing enhanced security measures”, but why didn’t they do that before? Did their compliance officer recommend it but management said “no, too expensive”?  Did their DBA say “the database is encrypted, so we are covered”?  Did the former contractor take the data maliciously? Did he have to put it on his personal laptop? Why do we continue to treat data as if it is someone else’s problem to manage?  Do we not understand that we have a professional obligation to protect patient data?  Even with legislation it seems the message still isn’t making it through to everyone.

Does your organization have security monitoring in place to protect patient or customer data?  If it doesn’t, have you recommended that it do so?  Go do it, now.

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So I’m inviting everyone, including my panelists, to share a mistake they made, how they recovered from it, and the tips they want to share on making things right after making a mistake.

While this is a #FailFriday meme, you can take your time to put your post together – post it anytime in the next week.  I will summarize all the posts here.

For this week, you should write about mistakes you made because you were inexperienced.  We’ll have a new #FailFriday about other type of fails next month.

No need to do anything special for linking.  If you want to appear in the summary, use the hashtag #FAILFriday or leave your link in the comments.  My post coming up when I get to the next airport.

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I’m moderating a panel for 24 Hours of PASS on the topic of making mistakes…and how to recover from them.  

Our session is at 2 PM EDT, 21 March.

I Was Young and Didn’t Know Any Better

I have an all-star panel:

Grant Fritchey ( blog | @gfritchey )

Tim Ford ( blog | @sqlagentman )

Stacia Misner ( blog | @staciamisner )

Tracy McKibben ( blog | @realsqlguy )

Mike Walsh ( blog | @mike_walsh )

Each of us will be telling about times we messed things up, then how we recovered from those mistakes.  We’ll also be taking questions

It’s free to register for the panel and all the other 24HOP events.  

We’ve all been there: Something went wrong and mistakes were made. We identified the problem, corrected it, and took steps to ensure that the same type of mistake wouldn’t happen again. But what about the times when we took actions that we knew at the time we were going to regret? Did we really make failure a greater option on our project?

This group of SQL Server professionals will talk about times they messed up—even when they should have known better—and how they have changed their approaches to getting stuff done with fewer mistakes. We will also cover 5 tips on dealing with the organizational politics of making mistakes.

Session takeaways:

• Get lessons learned about how to respond to mistakes and errors made while working with databases and data
• Learn tips and techniques for ensuring fewer mistakes
• Identify 5 [too many to count] tips for dealing with the politics of mistakes

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Ross Mistry (site | @RossMistry) and Stacia Misner (blog |@StaciaMisner) have written Introducing SQL Server 2012, a 288 page eBook and it’s free for download.  It’s currently available only as a PDF, but according to the publisher, .mobi and EPUB version will be available by 23 March. 

Ross covers the newest features and enhancements on the database administration side while Stacia describes what’s new with business intelligence, data quality, master data, analysis services, integration services and reporting services.

Once you get the book, you’re going to want to get your hands on the pre-release (RTM) version of SQL Server 2012.

So head over to http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/default.aspx , download the RTM of SQL Server 2012  and get started.  You should also check out the demos from the SQL Server 2012 Virtual Launch site for overviews of some of the newest features. 

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This website brings together key open data sets such as White House visitors,lobbying, campaign donations, etc. As the URL shows, it’s a sub site of the over all US open data project, http://data.gov.  You can see in the image below the datasets that comprise the Ethics data site:

The data is available for download and the website offers some nifty ways of working with, visualizing, and embedding the data. For instance, I’ve embedded the White House Visitor data right here. Go ahead, do some searching or filtering, right here.

You can change the column order by using the Manage button:

You can set up some fairly decent filters (is, contains, etc.) on the columns, too.  Here are the visitors named Karen Lopez:

That’s not me.  (I seem to recall that I am mayor of the Lincoln Bedroom on Foursquare, though.) This is the problem with trying to use something like First Name and Last Name as a primary key.  My data does show up in the Federal Campaign donations list, though.  Only one donation…my other donation was returned to me because "Canadians can’t donate to US campaigns".  Unfortunately for that candidate, they assumed that I was Canadian based on my residency, not my citizenship.  They lost the money, but the other campaign got to keep my money.  The entire world is one big data modeling problem, I tell ya.  Get your semantics and your syntax right and you can take over the world.  Or at least the US.

The real power in open data is being able to find correlations.  As Deputy CTO Vein mentions, one could match up the data from the White House visitors, lobbyists and campaign donations to see if you find any matches.  That’s not bad, it’s just more information.  This is tough to pull off with any certainty, though, due to that dang primary key issue I mentioned above.  What might help this? URIs.  Or some other way of uniquely identifying people and organizations.

To cross match data, you’ll need to use one of the Export methods of using the API (Socrata ) or download the data to your own tools.

Data is available for download in these formats:

You can also discuss the datasets right on the site (registration required).  There are only 7 datasets that are part of this ethics website, but the data stewards are eager to find out what datasets you’d like to see added.  I’d also like to hear what data you think should be part of an ethics website focused on data. I’m thinking:

• Expenditures that required extra approval/oversight
• Travel data (who went where an why)

Some of the criticism that I’ve heard about data.gov is that there are too few datasets or that so much more could be provided.  I’ve even heard complaints about money being spent on this service.  As Tony Clement, Canadian MP and President of the Treasury Board (site | @tonyclementCPC ) said recently about the Canadian open data initiatives: open data is about transparency.  We can’t wait until we have all the data, in a perfect format, to share it.  He also mentioned that open data is saving the Canadian Government in significantly reduced costs for Freedom of Information Access requests.  Think about it.  What open data will become is self-serve FOIA.  No waiting around for someone to spend weeks or months to find some data, then thousands of dollars to prepare and provide it.

I’m also hoping that the move to open data will allow government data architects to influence good data management practices.  Exposing the data to sunshine is going to allow us, the people who fund the data collection and processing, to point out where the data is poor quality.  The usability and ability to integrate data sets is going to be key in making it useful.

I’m thinking that I’d like to use some of these sets and others from data.gov for some upcoming demos.

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I know I work in a man’s world.  Women make up a small percentage of technology professionals, but I’d like to see that changed.   Rob recently came across this report from the Ontario Labour Relations Board about a dismissed elevator company worker who had appealed his case to the board.  One of his defenses was that his behaviour was acceptable because there were no women working on the job site and therefore his behaviour should have been okay. In other words: it was a man’s world.

Wait until you read about the behaviour…Okay I should tell you to swallow that swig of coffee and put your mug down, first.

The responding party dismissed the grievor from employment when a video posted on the internet showing the grievor with his genitals exposed and his scrotum being stapled to a 4 x 4 wooden plank came to its attention.

 

Did that get your attention?  It did mine. I’d like to hope that it wouldn’t have been just females who thought that this act was inappropriate for the workplace.  In fact, the outcome of the hearing reaffirmed the dismissal and the behaviour was deemed to violate the company’s workplace harassment policy.  Think about that.  A guy who was stapling himself was harassing others.

Boys Will Be Boys?

Part of the former-employee’s defense was that the lunchroom where this happened was an "all male environment" and that this sort of thing happened on the show Jackass…basically that boys will boys.  This reminded me of a recent article from Business Week about the new trend for companies to recruit and hire Brogrammers.  These are anti-geek, all-male teams of programmers who like to "bro down and crush code".  I guess because that is "better" than being a geek.  I left a comment on that article in case you are interested in reading my opinion about companies who want to recruit only brogrammers.

But back to our elevator guy…

Some of the other wonderful things that took place in this broworker environment:

One individual (not the grievor) was offered $60 gathered from the people in the room if he ate the spoiled food.  He did and received the $60.  The grievor explained that someone watching what had taken place said after the money was paid, “what are you going to do to top that next week?”

The following week, the grievor suggested to the individual who had eaten the spoiled food that he would collect money from the group if that individual chewed off the grievor’s rotten toenail.  Some $75 was collected from about the same number of people.  When that individual chewed off the grievor’s rotten toenail, the $75 was paid to him.

Again, you’d think that gender had nothing to do with whether or not this behaviour was acceptable, but it was a part of the defense to state that this sort of thing happens when guys get together.  In fact, it turns out this might not have been issue until someone posted a recording of the stapling to the Internet.

There was no evidence that any one who witnessed the incident first hand was offended by the grievor’s conduct, the applicant pointed out.  To the contrary, both the grievor and others were cheering.  It was only after the video was posted on the internet that the grievor’s conduct became an issue and the grievor was not only not responsible for circulating the video so widely, he had sought to have it removed.

One of my favourite findings:

I agree with the grievor; exposing his genitals and permitting his scrotum to be stapled to a wooden board was not only inappropriate behaviour, it demonstrated a great deal of stupidity.

And in case you are worried about whether or not you need to update your organization’s workplace policies:

In my view, any reasonable employee would recognize that exposing one’s genitals and having one’s scrotum stapled to a 4×4 wooden board on the employer’s premises and permitting that conduct to be recorded on a video is patently unacceptable in almost any workplace particularly when the employer of the employees involved can be easily identified.  An employer, in my view, need not establish and promulgate a policy prohibiting that kind of behaviour.

I’ve also been in workplaces where there is a lot of harassment going on.  It’s always a tough decision as to whether I should just say "boys will be boys", to ask people to stop, to leave the room, or to escalate the issue.  I think I’ve only ever once escalated an issue and it just about killed me to do so.  But someone else was being bullied and she nor I could get the bullies to stop.  In the end, she had to leave and find a job elsewhere.  It’s tough to be the person who feels a workplace has become hostile. 

Lessons Learned

What I learned from this case:

• Your team members will have a huge range of opinions about what they think is acceptable behaviour and what isn’t.
• You are bound to cross that line or witness that line being crossed at some point in your career…or even many times.
• Sometimes speaking up isn’t about complaining…it’s about stopping something stupid from hurting everyone.
• Just because no one has reported you now, doesn’t mean someone isn’t going to report you in the future.
• Your activities in The Office matter because they reflect on the reputation of the company.
• If there’s a camera around, the pictures and the video will end up on the internet.  Act accordingly.
• I’m going to bring my own stapler to work from now on.

I’m wondering, though, where the team crossed the line, in your opinion.  Was it at the eating of rotten food?  The toenail thing? And was the behaviour more acceptable because there were no women in the room?  I really want to know what you think.

I’m glad the Board felt is behaviour was unacceptable even though there were no women around. It’s difficult find the balance between "it’s all fun and games here" and "until someone gets hurt".  But I think I’m really clear on this point: staplers are for paper only.

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My friend Argenis Fernandez (blog | @DBArgenis) is the host of this TSQL Tuesday and he’s chosen the topic of Jack of All Trades, Master of None.  This is one of my favourite discussions about the IT industry.  My interest stems from the Agile Manifesto that says:

 

The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

 

This one statement, which sounds wonderful to me, is often interpreted to mean:

 

Agile teams must be made up of generalists: no specialists allowed.

 

Another interpretation is that anyone on the team must be able to do any job on the project. Most rational agile teams don’t take that extreme interpretation.  Or at least they never repeat that mistake more than a couple of times.  They learn that having people who understand things at more than a surface level will make work go faster and with less rework. 

Specialists vs. Generalists…or is is Specialists vs. Speed?

This is a very strong belief of one prominent Agilisto who is extremely vocal about this principle.   His articles and post are full scathing attacks on people who specialize.  Sure, he allows people to have a couple of specializations just for fun, but he’s clear that specialists impede the speed of a project, hold back production and generally lead to diva princesses, his name for me when I appear in debates with him.  There’s also a prominent consultancy that tells clients that no one with the words "analyst, audit, architect, administrator" will be allowed to speak to anyone on the project –teams must be just business users and team members (developers).  This consultancy is also adamant that only a developer and a clerk be able to decide on requirements and implementation issues. 

I’ve been on those projects.  We ended up with the clerk and the generalist designing and implementing a brand new way of doing accounting, with a brand new chart of accounts.  Just for one project.  They couldn’t get into QA testing because their solution was not going to pass audit, integration, security or generally accepted accounting practices reviews.  But dang, they sure did it fast.  And their new way of doing accounting led to inaccurate accounts, but that didn’t matter.  They were fast. However, they were sent back to do it all over again.  It was painful for everyone.

These are the types of things an architect, auditor, administrator and analyst would have slowed them down with by pointing out gaps in their solution.  But dang, they sure did it fast.

Over Specialization and Over Generalization

I do recognize that people can be over-specialized. You see those people all over…if you ask a question, their answer always involves the same solution or tool.  They can’t see any other way of doing something than what they know. I also know people who are fabulous at many, many things on my projects. But in my opinion, the all generalist meme really translates to:

 

Our team needs to be staffed with people who are specialists in everything.

 

Think about that for a few seconds.  What would that mean, just on your current project? Someone who knows these topics at a professional level: database, network, security, design, data, storage, development, coding, planning, estimation, capacity planning, estimation, UX, reporting, analytics, scalability, reliability, availability, quality, testing, compliance, legislation, localization, globalization, privacy, accessibility for people with disabilities, reporting, methodology, development environments.

Now insert the words for all the technologies used on an enterprise system.  All of them.  We need professional level people to work with all of them.  Note that professional doesn’t mean expert; it means someone who can get something done with minimal supervision. 

Then insert all the words for all the activities your entire enterprise does.  Do you have a few hundred words? A few thousand? Imagine trying to hire someone who meets all those criteria at the professional level?  Even if you could find that person, which I don’t believe you can, how much are you going to have to pay her?  Does your company have enough spare zeros hanging around to do that?  [tweet quote] What are they going to do when they need 100 more people, just like that?

Why I Hire Specialists who Make Great Generalists

So what does this mean?  I want to hire people who have a broad understanding of IT development. I want them to have a good literacy-level understand of most the things we do and use.  If they don’t have that knowledge, then they need to be able to pick it up as we go.  But I need specialists.  I don’t have time on my projects to train and mentor someone one who is going to build the database on the difference between foreign keys, alternate keys, surrogate keys, primary keys and Florida Keys.  Now if someone else on the team wants to know that, I’m happy to point to resources where they can find that out. However, my database designer needs to be able to work under minimal supervision to be able to do that.  In fact, I’d prefer that they know how implement in it in our specific technology.   They should be able to rely on external resources, but they shouldn’t have to sit at their desks with a (virtual) book open before them showing them how to do every step.  That’s a recipe for disaster. It will take longer and be more error prone.

Be Both a Specialist and a Generalist

How can you do that? By ensuring that your professional development plan (you have one, don’t you?) includes activities that strengthen both your specializations and your overall technical and non-technical skills.  That means you read about things outside your specialization.  You actually sit through a DAMA meeting or a SQLSaturday session that isn’t part of your "today job".  You expand the depth and breadth of your knowledge.  Heck you even attend a session on professional development.  Then you make sure you plan gets executed, even if it means paying for your own training or getting up early on a Saturday to attend free training at a SQLSaturday.  Maybe it means starting up a series of brown bag lunches at your company, where every group takes turn presenting 20 minutes on their favourite topic for other groups.

If you are a data architect, it means learning more about process modeling, database implementations and development tools in your shop.  If you are a DBA, it means learning more about data modeling and data compliance.  If you are a developer, it means you learn more about all of the above.  It’s up to you.  You need to take care of both your inner generalist and inner specialists.

Generalists are great…in general.  You can’t master everything, no matter what people tell you.  But your specialization won’t be much value if you can’t apply that knowledge within the context of the overall project.  You need to be both.

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1. What If Its A ‘Wicked Problem’?

Karen SQLPASS WIT Panel 2011 (Photo credit: John Robel)

It’s International Women’s Day.  Yes, we get one day a year to celebrate our ladyhood.  Or something like that.

I used to snicker at meetings, classes and events focused on Women in Technology (WIT).  The thought of sitting around in a room full of women complaining about how hard it is to work in a man’s world did not appeal to me.  To think of rallying around a cause for pay equity drove me crazy because I had never met a woman who had ever asked for a raise.  I still have met only 2 who have told me they have done this.  I thought that WIT issues were only about man-hating and failing to ask for what we deserved.  Then an amazing thing happened.  I was asked to serve as a national spokesperson for the CIPS Women in Technology program.  I really didn’t want to do it, but agreed because I wanted to help.

Why was it amazing? Because I found out that most WIT initiatives aren’t about male-bashing and waiting for someone to make our lives better.  One specific cause that made me "get it" was the fact that girls who are interested in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) don’t pursue studies in these areas because we, society, are constantly throwing obstacles in front of them.  That got me going.  I had experienced the same things:

• A high school guidance counsellor who told me that I did not want to pursue a career in a man’s field.  That I would be lonely amongst all those guys and never feel at home.  Wow.  Was she wrong.
• A series of really terrible math teachers.  And by terrible, I mean a couple who were very vocal about a female’s inability to succeed at math…high school math.   Teachers who were also coaches who really didn’t want girls in their classes.
• Family members who didn’t really want me to study science.  My grandmother told me it would be better to marry an engineer than to be one.  So I did both.
• Messages from all around me that pretty was better than smart.  That pink is the only colour for girls.  That boys do fun things and girls take care of them.

So in my time as WIT spokesperson, I was able to see that we have a huge problem in society that the majority of the population is being discouraged from studying STEM and pursuing STEM-related careers.  Sure, no one should be forced into these careers, but it makes me mad to see smart, highly-capable girls being steered away from professionally and financially rewarding jobs.

Research

Recently the Girl Scout Research Institute released a report, Generation STEM: What Girls Say about Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.  In the executive summary, they outline their findings:

 

These findings, we believe, will lead to more comprehensive solutions to the underrepresentation of women in the STEM
workforce. We found that:

• Seventy-four percent of high school girls across the country are interested in the fields and subjects of STEM.
• Girls are interested in the process of learning, asking questions, and problem solving.
• Girls want to help people and make a difference in the world.
• Girls who are interested in STEM are high achievers who have supportive adult networks and are exposed to STEM fields.
• Girls who are interested in STEM fields are actually interested in many subjects and career opportunities—STEM is just one area of interest among many.
• Perceived gender barriers are still high for girls and may help explain why STEM fields aren’t their top career choices.
• African American and Hispanic girls have high interest in STEM, high confidence, and a strong work ethic, but have fewer supports, less exposure, and lower academic achievement than Caucasian girls.

This research can help to change the discussion on girls and STEM by offering a much needed
strength-based perspective focusing on what contexts are most supportive for girls. We hope
this research helps to take the conversation to the next level by focusing on how to use girls’
interests to cultivate career plans for them in STEM fields.

So girls do have an interest in the subject, they do want to work in these fields, but something stops them.  That’s what I talk about on WIT panels.  The number one question I get from people opposed to WIT programs is "why should we force girls into something they aren’t interested in"  The answer: we shouldn’t.  But research like the GSRI report shows that many girls who say they aren’t interested don’t have a clear image of what our careers are like.  Others have an interest, but don’t believe they can or don’t believe they should. This is a huge problem for the IT industry and for the economy.  More than half of our workforce is female, but things are getting in the way of them preparing for, entering and staying in the IT field.  I want to motivate those of us in the IT profession to actively do something to remove these obstacles, one misconception at a time.

You Can Help

You have the power to do that.  Talk to the young women in your family.  Tell them how great it is that you still have a job and your company is still trying to fill open positions.  Tell them about work you do that is making a difference in other people’s lives.  Talk to their parents about how important it is that they ensure their girls have a great math teacher or tutor.  Ask your local user group, DAMA Chapter or SQLSaturday why they didn’t have a WIT panel.  Volunteer to be on a WIT panel — yes, even you men. If your local user group doesn’t allow men on the WIT panels or events, ask them why they think this is only a female issue.  Start people talking about why they think WIT is an issue or not. Then share the facts with them.  Volunteer to speak at your schools.  Take a girl to a museum.  Let your daughter shop in the "boys" toy aisle, too.  Speak out when someone says that giving girls career options is forcing them to be less female.  Talk to people about this post.  Leave a comment.  Share it.  Get people thinking about the WIT issue as a problem for all of us.

You can make a difference.  One person at a time.  Do it.

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2. Are You Sitting at the Table: Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders

On Wednesday, 7 March Microsoft is holding a virtual launch event for the newest version of Microsoft SQL Server to be released on 1 April.  You want to be there.  Yes, even you data architects, business analysts, project managers, enterprise architects and other IT professionals working in the upper rows of the Zachman Framework.  Why?  Because there are many new features in SQL Server 2012 made just for you:

• Master Data Services
• Data Quality Services
• BI Semantics
• Self Serve BI
• Hadoop integration
• New Data Tools
• New datatypes, database objects and other design features like ColumnStore Indexes.

MVP Lovin’

You’ll have access to SQL Server MVPs who will be standing by to take your questions and chat about the new features we are most excited about. I’ll be working at these Topic Pods:

• Application Development, Beyond Relational, Connectivity at 6 PM ET / 3 PM PT
• Business Intelligence & Enterprise Information Management at 9 PM ET / 6 PM PT

If you register for the event, you can stop by and chat with some awesome SQL Server MVPs and me about some of the newest features of SQL Server. 

Prize Love

Unlike that other launch that is happening tomorrow, at the SQL Server Launch you can earn some really great prizes: cash gift cards, SQL Server Gear, and Xboxes.  So the more you watch, the more you engage, the more you can win.  Cash, Swag and Gaming.  What more could you want?

Lovin’ Just for You

While I think non-DBA types can get a lot out of the overviews of all the new features, I think developer and  data professionals will find these agenda items the most applicable:

Blazing-Fast Performance: A Technical Best Practices Tour with ColumnStore Index
Go behind the scenes with SQL Server engineers for a quick technical tour of the ColumnStore Index feature and an introduction to best practices for achieving astonishing performance with your ColumnStore Indexes.

Blazing-Fast Performance: Explore FileTables, Full-Text Search and Semantic Search for Faster, More Meaningful Results Across Unstructured Data
80% or more of the data produced and stored are so called unstructured documents and are often not stored in the database, but often need to be managed in conjunction with relational data. In order to facilitate the storage and management of unstructured data, SQL Server has evolved from storing blobs to providing a sophisticated integration with the Windows Filesystem and provides rich services over such data to provide an interesting and compelling application development experience. This presentation introduces the new unstructured data processing capabilities of SQL Server 2012 that provide full Windows application-compatible file management over files stored in SQL Server as well as the services to unlock the information in such data such as the extensions and improvements to Full-Text Search and the introduction of semantic similarity search.

Organizational Compliance: Using the New Security Features and Audit Enhancements to Increase Compliance Policies
Introduction to new security features in SQL Server 2012 such as User-Defined Server Roles and enhanced Auditing to increase organization compliance.

Peace of Mind: Quick Tour Through the New SQL Server Migration Assistant
In this session we will review SSMA modules that automate assessment, schema conversion, data migration and testing of Oracle and Sybase migrations to SQL Server 2012.

Unlocking the Value of Big Data with Microsoft Business Intelligence
Klout is a ground-breaking company that extracts signals from social networks to determine which people are most influential. Hadoop is a core part of how Klout captures and processes over 3 billion signals daily, however translating and analyzing these signals into meaningful information requires a scalable and cost effective business intelligence solution. That’s where Microsoft SQL Server 2012 comes in, delivering “speed of thought” ad hoc queries, with response times of under 10 seconds on 35 billion rows of data. Learn more about Big Data and BI best practices in this session.

Rapid Data Exploration: Empowering End User Insight Through Rapid Data Exploration and Visualization with Power View
Introduction to Power View, the new thin, self-service ad hoc reporting tool. In this session we will highlight its main features, scenarios, show a demo, and discuss its relationship to other products in the BI stack (SharePoint, Excel).

Rapid Data Exploration: Powerful Self-Service Analysis with PowerPivot
Get a taste of what’s new in PowerPivot, the self-service BI experience that enables information workers to build their personal and team BI applications within the familiar environment of Excel: This session will provide a quick introduction to PowerPivot, followed by demos highlighting the top 5 new modeling features delivered with the release of SQL Server 2012.

Managed Self-Service BI: End User Created, IT Managed
Introduction to the BI continuum – IWs using the familiar tools like Excel, IT retaining control and governance of the workbooks. We will show how IT can manage the system in SharePoint, and how self-service BI solutions transition to managed corporate BI solutions.

Credible, Consistent Data: Going Under the Hood with the New BI Semantic Model
Introduction to the BISM, position tabular and multidimensional types of models. We will show how easy it is to create a model in PowerPivot, show how Power View is leveraging it, and highlight how easy is it to go from an individual workbook to the enterprise IT governed BI solution.

Credible, Consistent Data: Improving Data Quality with the New Data Quality Services
No matter how brilliant your BI tools are, it’s garbage-in-garbage-out. This session will give an overview on the new Data Quality Services product in SQL Server 2012. Come watch this important scenario to learn how to position, sell, and demo the new DQS product.

Credible, Consistent Data: Empowering IW / Data Experts to Efficiently Manage Important Data with the New Master Data Services Add-In for Excel
Introduction to the improvements and new functionality in the SQL Server 2012 release, empowering IW to curate the organization’s important data, maintaining it accurate and relevant through its lifecycle, via easy model creation and validation.

Credible, Consistent Data: Introducing New Team-based Data Integration with Integration Services
There are plenty of new features for SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) in SQL Server 2012 that make it a very compelling release for your customers. This session will cover some of the highlights of the release, including the new Change Data Capture functionality. We will demonstrate how to bring together key components needed to build an effective ETL framework using SSIS. This reusable framework will show off the new functionality and productivity enhancements for existing users, and present a compelling story for customers who have never seen or used SSIS before. We will cover the end-to-end lifecycle of an SSIS solution, including how to maintain and manage the framework once it has been deployed into production.

Scalable Analytics & Data Warehousing: Fast Track for SQL Server 2012
Fast Track for SQL Server 2012 has significant improvements, leveraging exciting new enhancements in SQL Server 2012 like the new ColumnStore Index feature. You will also see how Fast Track partners are working with the SQL Server team to transform the latest enhancements in server and storage technology into highly optimized data warehouse Reference Architectures.

Big Data Analytics with Apache Hadoop and SQL Server 2012
In this session we will explore Apache Hadoop on Windows Server and Azure and powerful insights we can generate integrating with SQL Server.

There are more sessions, so be sure to check them all out.  I hope you register and learn how you can Love Your Data with SQL Server 2012.  See you there.

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It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Experts often possess more data than judgment.
-Colin Powell

Sir Doyle and General Powell seem to have conflicting points of view about data, but I’m not sure they do. I love my data and yet data alone won’t solve many problems.  I have to figure out which data to use, how current the data needs to be, and how to use that data with other data and my own experiences and biases to get to a decision that’s right for right now.  

We in the data profession pretty much spend our days trying to get quality data to the right people as quickly as we can. We provide analytic services in hopes that management can turn that data into good decisions. We add biases, we filter out biases, we support a lot of guessing.  None that makes Sir Doyle or Gen. Powell wrong.

What if we provide data and analytics to organizations, but mostly management just makes guesses? I recently sat in a meeting where we were asked to keep adjusting the data rules until the analytics would show exactly what values the end users wanted to see.  Of course this is a fine balance: end users need to set the requirements around how data should be processed to produce the analytical solutions, but at some point we data pros can’t get sucked into using decision systems to justify bad decisions.

I’ll leave you with a quote from Mr. Heinlein:

To get anywhere, or even live a long time, a man has to guess, and guess right, over and over again, without enough data for a logical answer.
-Robert A. Heinlein

That might be how a man should live, but organizations need to ensure they are working with good data and great analytics.  At some point your competitors will stop flying by the seat of their pants via SWAGs.  And they will most likely be making better decisions than your organization.  If your analytics are there only to make end users feel better about their guesses, you’re doing it wrong.

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I was invited to attend a NASA Budget Briefing as part of a recent NASATweetup held at NASA Headquarters on 13 February 2012.  I’ve been to other NASA Tweetups, but this was a new type of event for both attendees and NASA.  First, the topic was more administrative than any others.  No fire or sound waves. No Florida hair.  Heck, one of the people I hadn’t seen for a while said "You look different".  My response: "You’ve never seen me in work clothes". 

The first two NASATweetups I attended were launches (STS-134 and Juno).  Both of these had 150 attendees with a two-day program of speakers and presentations, then a launch.  This meeting was part of an existing event, a media briefing about the 2013 Fiscal Year Budget.  Yes, this was PowerPoint and spreadsheets, for the most part.  However, the content of those presentation materials was going to show us which programs were moving forward and which ones were going to have to change or be dropped completely.  Being a data professional, this was my type of event.  I wanted the data and the budget wasn’t going to be released until one hour before the event.  That’s a fast read of a set of slides and some large documents.  I went for the slides.

The second thing that was different: this tweetup was much smaller. The original registration limited attendees to 20 and I think we had just under that.  The most important difference was that we were going to be part of the media, able to ask questions along with the traditional media.  This is a first for NASATweetups and I’m not sure how many other US Federal media briefings have involved a mix of traditional and social media. I was excited that I could be part of this new approach to media, especially because it brought together two of my passions: space and social media. More on that mixing later.

The NASATweetup

The first thing that was different from other NASATweeups: We received no badges or swag bags…because traditional media don’t get those, either.  If I do one of these again, I’ll bring my own badge or credentials.

In the opening statements, Bob Jacobs announced this new era and took our photo, which was posted to Twitter.

You can see him pause to take the photo in the video below.   I think that was our second sign that this press briefing was going to be different. 

This year, we are trying something a little different. As well as traditional media representatives, for the first time we have invited members of the social media community to be a part of today’s presentation, and we will be taking questions via Twitter using the #AskNASA. So we thank everyone for joining us for today’s presentation.

We will go over some of the ground rules first, but well, wait a second. I want to make sure I capture this. If we are going to be social media, I need to do it from here too.

[Laughter.]

MR. JACOBS: Okay. Got a Photo.

The briefing was done by Major General Charles Bolden, NASA Chief Administrator and Chief Financial Officer Elizabeth Robinson.  It started with a video about NASA’s plans.

I’ve listed some links in the related section below of the analyses of the impact of the new budget, but the ones that were of note to me:

• STEM education and outreach was cut from $138 million dollars in 2012 to $100 million.  That’s a significant cutback to this program, but only a tiny portion of a tiny portion of the overall US Federal budget.  This is going to make it more difficult to find and retain qualified people in the future.  I’m also guessing that other organizations are having their STEM budgets cut as well.
• ExoMars program will need to be re-programmed, meaning that we will not be collaborating with the European agencies for these Mars exploration programs . This has left ESA scrambling to find other countries to help with these programs, most likely Roscosmos.

DataChick’s Question on Open Government and Open Data

I was fortunate to be called upon to ask a question:

Let’s take one more question over here, and then we will take a couple from Twitter, and then we will go to the field centers.

QUESTIONER (Karen Lopez): Hi. I am Karen Lopez. I am Datachick on Twitter.

One of the ways that the public, the rest of us, can benefit from all these NASA missions is via access to open government transparency and open data initiatives, like at data.NASA.gov. Have budget pressures made any changes to those programs? Will they continue to expand?

ADMINISTRATOR BOLDEN: Do you want to take that?

DR. ROBINSON: Okay. So NASA couple things. One is you know the administration has a very vigorous Open Government Initiative, and NASA is a participant in that. And it recently went international, and we have an international event coming up in April April, thank you April, where we will be gathering together folks from around the world, virtually, of course, to work on things. So we have very vigorous programs.

And a large part of what we do in Open Government is, as you said, we leverage off of things that the programs do already, make their data available, make it accessible, Open Government a little bit more just to point them in the right direction. So it’s really Open Government is really a philosophy at NASA that we try to put as much as we can out into the public in the most understandable way possible, and so we are doing that.

The Open Government Initiative has taken us in a few different directions, and we will continue that. We plan to keep going forward, but it is always when you talk about Open Government, it is really it is hard to predict, because we are going to do so much, right? We are going to have so much data coming in and all of that. NASA is a very exciting place to work, because now we have apps on our iPhones from NASA and a whole bunch of things, so we are already out there in terms of Open Government

QUESTIONER (Karen Lopez): [Speaking off mic.]

[Here I followed up with "So no immediate changes?" ]

DR. ROBINSON: Well, not in the near future. We’re going to assess I am looking at my partner here. I am the senior accountable official for Open Government, and then our CIO over there

ADMINISTRATOR BOLDEN: We are both looking at the CIO.

DR. ROBINSON: Yeah, we are both looking at the CIO, and it is her folks mainly who do it. And so I think we are really going to assess up to this international event, how to keep those kind of things going or not.

And with that question I was able to add my third passion: Data.  As in, Love Your Data.  The terms data or information was mentioned 21 times during the briefing, twice in NASA Administrator Charles Bolden’s opening remarks.

This budget supports more than 80 science missions, 56 currently in operation and 28 now under development, that cover the vital data we need to understand our own planet, diverse missions reaching farther into our solar system, and the next generation of observatories peering beyond the reaches of our neighborhood to other galaxies and their solar systems and undiscovered phenomena

The missions currently at Mars the Mars Science Laboratory, on its way, and MAVEN, well into development will provide many years of data to help us understand the Red Planet and our needs in future years to meet the President’s challenge to send humans to Mars in the mid 2030s.

Citizen Journalists?

No, we weren’t. In some of the descriptions of the event, including the announcement of the Tweetup, we were described as "Twitter Fans" of NASA.  One of the issues I can see with trying to mix fans and journalism is that…they shouldn’t mix.  Sure, it’s not unheard of for a journalist to be excited about interviewing someone, but in theory they aren’t supposed to be fans.  I don’t think my role there was as a citizen journalist.  However, I think we Tweetup attendees did a good job not gushing all over Bolden and Robinson in our questions.  In fact, I was impressed by the lack of fanboi attitude in any of our questions.

You can really tell the difference when you see this still taken from This Week at NASA coverage:

Three laptops, all running Tweetdeck in that photo.  That’s me tweeting in the upper center of the frame. Most of the traditional media attendees brought digital recorders and paper.  So while they were taking notes, we were sharing live.  That’s not necessarily better.  It’s different.  Mixing social media and traditional media can work.  They don’t have to compete.

Some of the traditional media people from major media organizations even retweeted my question and told me afterwards that our questions were good.  I think that means the new era of mixing traditional and social media may continue.  I look forward to future NASATweetups for these types of events.

Overall….

In talking to people after the event I think this experiment was a success.  The Tweetup crowd came up with some great questions, as did the Twitterverse via the #AskNASA hashtag.  I am happy that I was selected to be part of this new era of social media, NASA…and Data.

NASATweetup Video from C-SPAN

The entire event was just over an hour.  You can watch the whole thing via this C-SPAN feed.

Or if you prefer the shorter briefing of the briefing, you can watch the one minute version on TW@N at the very beginning of this video.

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According to a study by Ponemon Institute sponsored by MegaPath:

• 91% of small healthcare organizations (think your local doctor, dentist, optometrist or clinic) had experienced a breach of protected health information (PHI) in the previous 12 months; of those, 29% resulted in medical identity theft
• 52% of small healthcare providers rated their security technology plans as ineffective
• 43% had experienced medical identity theft in their organizations
• 55% of respondents had to notify patients of a data breach in the previous 12 months
• On average, less than 10% of the respondents’ IT budgets are spent on security

You can register and download the entire paper at http://www.megapath.com/solutions/industry/healthcare/study/

I found this table the most interesting discouraging:

From a data governance and data protection point of view, I’d really expect to see ALL of those be 100%.   My doctor recently moved to mostly electronic health records (as have most in my province), but I’m wondering what his answers to all of these questions would be.  When I think about the 91% data breach numbers, I see this table as one of the key reasons that number is so high.

Even if you aren’t in a health-related organization, I’d expect your numbers to be higher.  63% backup and disaster recovery plans? How can we call ourselves professionals when this is life-critical information?  Ultimately it is organization leadership who are responsible for protecting data.  But I’ve always been concerned about how far we data professionals should go in ensuring that the public is protected from harm when data polices and practices are not sufficient.  Should we not move to other projects? Report bad practices?  To whom?

This is a US-based study and I’m curious about similar numbers in other countries with and without health data privacy legislation.  If you have links to other sources, please provide them in the comments.

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To create a column with the IDENTITY property in SQL Server 2012:

CREATE TABLE 

    [ database_name . [ schema_name ] . | schema_name . ] table_name 

    [ AS FileTable ]

    ( { <column_definition> | <computed_column_definition> 

        | <column_set_definition> | [ <table_constraint> ] [ ,...n ] } )

    [ ON { partition_scheme_name ( partition_column_name ) | filegroup 

        | "default" } ] 

    [ { TEXTIMAGE_ON { filegroup | "default" } ] 

    [ FILESTREAM_ON { partition_scheme_name | filegroup 

        | "default" } ]

    [ WITH ( <table_option> [ ,...n ] ) ]

[ ; ]

<column_definition> ::=

column_name <data_type>

    [ FILESTREAM ]

    [ COLLATE collation_name ] 

    [ NULL | NOT NULL ]

    [ 

        [ CONSTRAINT constraint_name ] DEFAULT constant_expression ] 

      | [ IDENTITY [ ( seed ,increment ) ] [ NOT FOR REPLICATION ] 

    ]

    [ ROWGUIDCOL ] [ <column_constraint> [ ...n ] ] 

    [ SPARSE ] 

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms174979(v=sql.110).aspx

I’ve highlighted the syntax that applies the IDENTITY to a column.  SQL Server will know which column has the identity property (and you can only have one of these columns in the same table).  Notice that there are only three options for an IDENTITY.

To create a SQUENCE in SQL Server 2012:

CREATE SEQUENCE [schema_name . ] sequence_name

    [ AS [ built_in_integer_type | user-defined_integer_type ] ]

    [ START WITH <constant> ]

    [ INCREMENT BY <constant> ]

    [ { MINVALUE [ <constant> ] } | { NO MINVALUE } ]

    [ { MAXVALUE [ <constant> ] } | { NO MAXVALUE } ]

    [ CYCLE | { NO CYCLE } ]

    [ { CACHE [ <constant> ] } | { NO CACHE } ]

    [ ; ]

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff878091(v=sql.110).aspx

Notice that there is no TABLE or COLUMN referenced in that TSQL.  You are just creating a SEQUENCE.  SQL Server will have no idea what you are going to use it for or where it will be used.  In fact, you could create a SEQUENCE and never use it. Notice there are several more options for a SEQUENCE.

SEQUENCEs are separate objects in a database and can be used to populate more than one column even across several tables.  Because they aren’t bound to a table in any way, they can be used in ways that IDENTITY columns can’t be used.  For  instance:

• One SEQUENCE can be used across more than one table. For instance, a Control Number or Document Number on several tables.  I’ve seen this used in other DBMSs to generate document numbers across subtypes, say Purchase Orders, Shipping Notices, Return to Vendor Numbers, etc.  There’s a requirement that they be unique across all types of documents.  This could not be done with IDENTITY.
• Using a SEQUENCE allows tables to have more than one auto-generated number in multiple columns. Think of Order Number and Cancellation Number, both on the Order table. You can’t do that with IDENTITY.
• Since sequences are generated completely outside a table, you can chose to store the resulting value in a different format, say VARCHAR or CHAR. Or, heaven forbid, you might want to append data to it or do other kinds of evil to it before storing it.
• Since sequences are generated completely outside a table, you can store the results in a NULLable column.

I think the confusion sets in because we tend to think of auto-generated number as useful only as surrogate keys. But we have real data needs for generating numbers other than just row identifiers, even if that’s the primary use for this. In fact, one could have a table with a PK that uses IDENTITY and an unlimited number of columns that use a SEQUENCE to set their values.  Of course, SEQUENCEs can be used for surrogate primary keys, too.  The existence of SEQUENCEs gives us another option over IDENTITY.

So SEQUENCE is a feature that just generates numbers based on some characteristics. A designer has many ways to use the number once it is generated and tables are not dependent on that method to get that number, nor do they even “know” about how that value was provided.

This separation of the COLUMN from how the data is populated is a feature of using SEQUENCEs. How one uses this separation depends on the technical and business requirements for the data.

Related Posts

1. Identity Column Issues and Trade-offs
2. Get Hands On with SQL Server 2012 – Virtual Labs
3. 12 Days Of SQL – What is your Over / Under?

Image via Wikipedia

The American experience stirred mankind from discovery to exploration. From the cautious quest for what they knew (or thought they knew) was out there, into an enthusiastic reaching to the unknown. These are two substantially different kinds of human enterprise.
-Daniel J. Boorstin

Which kind should we be?

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On Monday, 13 February I’ll be part of another NASATweetup, this one at NASA Headquarters.  Administrator Charlie Bolden will hold a briefing on the 2013 NASA Budget.  There have been many reports that the 2013 budget will remain about the same as it was in prior budgets.  However, this means that NASA will most likely have to pull out of agreements with other space agencies such as the European Space Agency (ESA) on collaborative efforts for future MARS missions.   

I believe this is the first time that NASATweetup attendees will be attending a formal briefing and the first time we will be able to ask questions.  In addition, NASA will be taking questions via Twitter from tweets using the #askNASA hashtag.   My interest will most likely focus on the impact on NASA’s successful open government (http://open.nasa.gov ) and open data ( http://data.nasa.gov ) programs.  I’ll also be interested in hearing what these budget restrictions mean to ongoing collaboration with other space agencies such as the Canadian Space Agency, Roscosmos, JAXA and ESA.

You can watch the budget briefing live at NASA TV on Monday, 13 February at 2 PM EST.  This is available in many formats; make sure you take advantage of the formats offered for your device. 

NASA prepared a video last year about their quest to win the future.  It looks like NASA will be scaling back on those plans for 2013.  

Briefing photo by Bob Jacobs

Resources:

• http://www.nasa.gov/news/budget/index.html NASA Budget Page
• http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/516674main_NASAFY12_Budget_Estimates-Overview-508.pdf The FY 2012 Budget Estimate

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