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The Cult of Automation

Last week, while perusing through the usual interesting links from Twitter, I came across an article from Kendra Little (@Kendra_Little) titled “Not Everything Should be Automated”. It’s brief post where Kendra talks about why she has stopped automating some of her tasks. The title is attention grabbing (well, it grabbed MY attention), but there’s a core debate hidden in here that I want to take sides on.

If You Liked It, You Should Have Wrote a Script For Itbrodoyouevenscript

I often hear “you can’t automate everything”. As a card carrying member of the Cult of Automation (caps mine), I usually respond with “why not?” Many of my daily tasks can and should be automated. When doing these tasks manually, I am exposing the work to risk from skipping something, flubbing a syntax, or some other human error. The cost of these errors is compounded by the fact that it often takes a person longer to execute a process manually then if it were automated. This all adds up and can heavily impact your the value you bring to your employer.

This is, after all, why GUIs were created. By providing that interface, we aid users with a method to execute tasks that can have mistake protection built in as well as providing a speedy way to complete the work. This is the conversation I end up having with folks who want to use the SQL Server Management Studio GUI to create databases, that they can do it faster than having to type out that tedious CREATE DATABASE statement. The benefits are less errors and faster time to completion.

Automating a process isn’t really that different, because you’re wrapping up an action in a script so it executes the same way every time. The goals are the same: reduce errors and increase speed. It’s just now, instead of providing a GUI for interaction, we’re scripting out all the actions and getting the heck out of the way. The result is repeatable, consistent action.

Why wouldn’t you automate then? To me, it seems a no brainer to script something out if you do it more than once. When you do that, you reduce your errors while increasing the speed of execution. This is the message of my Cult and one I would hope more people subscribe to.

How do you get to Senior DBA? Practice, Practice, Practice

Let’s go back to Kendra’s post, though. Her message is that she forces herself to type out commands instead of scripting or snippeting them because she wants to make sure she knows and understands those commands. It’s a matter of mastering the syntax. If you automate a task or put it behind some sort of interface, you can quickly lose touch on how to write it. You might forget the options or the exact syntax, which means your skills can get rusty.

As a musician, I know and understand the value of practice. When preparing for a concert, I often rehearse a section of music dozens of times in order to commit it to muscle memory. This means when it’s time to perform, my brain doesn’t get crossed up trying to remember what the notes were and I can focus on making music. Code practice is no different, because when it gets to crunch time, you shouldn’t be flailing with how to do a point in time restore because you can’t remember how a command is written.

This all sounds fine in theory, but let’s talk use case. Restore testing is a perfect example, because it’s something that will commonly be automated. I’ve written my own scripts to aid this and will often set up a regular job to select a database, restore it to a target server, run a DBCC check, and catalog a report of the process for later review. To manually test all my databases is way too long and if I were doing that, I couldn’t work on any of the cool projects. This makes automation a perfect and necessary solution.

However, I still do regular manual point in time restores. This is because I need the practice. I won’t do all my databases and I won’t do it every day (usually once a month), but I still do it. It keeps my skills fresh. It applies for other tasks as well. I have many automated processes, but I will occasionally bypass the automation so I can get my reps.

This takes us back to the GUI discussion. Many of the tasks in SQL Server we could do graphically through SSMS, but more experienced DBAs eschew that to typing the script. We’ve all used the learning tool of scripting out an SSMS action. To script is to understand, at the core, what is happening in SQL Server and gives us better knowledge of how to manage it. I remind many DBAs I’ve talked to that pretty much everything in SQL Server is a T-SQL command of some sort, so it behooves you to understand the relationship between the action and the syntax.

The Bone of Contention

Now we get to my issue with Kendra’s post. I don’t disagree with any of her statements, but I disagree with the tone of the post as set by the title. We’re not arguing against automation here, but instead championing practice. You still should try and automate as many tasks as possible. Just don’t lose sight of the skills you need to build that automation. It’s very difficult to write a script if you don’t know and understand the actions you need to script. Worse yet, if someone hands you a script and you run it without understanding how it works, you could be doing lasting damage to your environment.

Practice makes perfect, and perfect makes automation. You should build and practice your skills, understanding what makes the platform tick. Once you do that, you can script it. Once you script it, you can start practicing your next automation trick. Just don’t lose sight of the skills that got you this far.

6 Comments

  1. […] The Cult of Automation – Mike Fal (Blog|Twitter) […]

  2. Pete Cousins says:

    I absolutely agree.
    We use JAMS Enterprise Scheduler to automate as much as possible – light years ahead of Windows Task Scheduler or SQL Agent.

  3. Sean Redmond says:

    Hi Brent,

    Automation removes *manual* execution. It still needs to be checked that it ran. It needs to be checked regularly that it is doing what it is supposed to be doing.
    There is a great temptation in ‘set and forget’ to automate a script and assume that it needs no maintenance.

    Then there is the argument of resource usage: is it worth automating something when the time spent writing and testing the job is greater than the time that would be saved by the automation. The product managers who assign us DBAs tasks are often of the opinion that we can deliver a monthly report as a CSV faster that it takes to set up the job, test it and maintain it. The jobs need to be documented. Fellow DBAs need to be informed of the new job, lest it fails when I am absent.

    However, whenever someone mentions the word ‘regularly’ or ‘every’, I immediately think about setting up a job. My second task every morning (after checking backups) is to check the folder in Outlook where the notifications are sent and check the Job History in SQL Server Agent.

    All the best,
    Sean.

  4. Sean Redmond says:

    My apologies, Mike!
    You’re not Brent.
    Sorry about that,
    Sean.

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  6. Roland says:

    I like your point of view on automation.
    I love that reading this post led me to your restore script.

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