My best practices for home office - Corona edition

Take some rest

If you follow my blog, you may already know that I work from home since more than 12 years. Except for some business travel, I tend to do the "things" considered work from a dedicated room in my house in Germany. Over the past years, I tried to find the balance between being productive (team, customers, employer, ...), take care of my family, socialize where possible and staying sane and healthy. Here are some of my best practices. They may or may not work for you, but at least give you some inspiration.

Gradual Adjustments: Back to school, epilepsy medication, and DB2

This week school started again for the kids (and parents). It means to adjust to getting up early in the morning (where is the extra hour of sleep?), getting used to new and different schedules, and coping with homework. It is a process that isn't done in the blink of an eye, but which takes time. Most adjustments are "in the system" within a day or two, the rest is a matter of few weeks until everybody is really back in school mode/mood.

As I wrote before, one of my sons has/had epilepsy. Since middle of June we are happy to phase out his medication. Every 4-5 weeks we are reducing the dose of tablets he has to take, so that his body can adjust to the changed "chemical cocktail". After each change it takes a week to get used to it, then the remaining 3-4 weeks to really adapt to the new dose. Getting rid of medication is not an abrupt event, it takes a while.

Guess what DB2' autonomic features, especially the self-tuning memory manager (STMM) are doing? For a change in the workload characteristics STMM tries to adjust the configuration, the amount of available memory for different consumers. First it usually is a bigger adjustment, then it gradually moves to the final state. In a pureScale environment, previously a single member was in charge of choosing the memory configuration if STMM was active. Starting with DB2 10.5, you can specify whether each member is adjusting the memory configuration on its own, or a single member should do it and whether you pick that member or DB2 dynamically picks it.
So is it like "back to school"? I guess not, every family member has to adjust at the same pace and over night...

Epilepsy and computers: Types of Memory

Last months my son and I spent a week in hospital again for a regular post-surgery check up. As you might know from past blog posts, my youngest son had a brain tumor which caused epilepsy. The tumor and some brain tissue including the hippocampus on his right side were removed two years ago. A hippocampus is like the central memory controller in a computer and fortunately we have two of them for redundancy and failover.

When you work with computers, especially database systems like DB2 or Oracle, all day, it is interesting to look deeper into how the human memory works. There is a sensory memory acting like an I/O buffer, the short-term memory (think CPU registers, caches, and main memory), and the long-term memory (disk, tape, etc.). What I learned at the recent hospital visit is about the different types of long-term memory. Typically it is classified as declarative memory and procedural memory. You can think of the declarative memory as your "storage of facts" or the data in a database system. The procedural memory is for processes that can be performed like walking, playing piano, riding a bike, etc. In DB2 you could compare it to the package cache where information about how to execute statements is stored.

Having different types of memory and different ways of how new information is acquired and managed leads to the surprising fact that even though someone might have trouble learning new facts (because a hippocampus is missing), that person could be still excellent in learning and reciting piano pieces.

As written earlier: How does someone cope with memory problems caused by epilepsy? Our son has occupational therapy to develop strategies for more efficient use of his working memory and also to train (build up) his capabilities. The Epilepsy Society has this summary on the memory issue and workarounds that can be used like sticky notes (external memory), task lists, etc.

Photo campaign for epilepsy awareness and tolerance

I just returned from two business trips and looked over the mail (paper-based). Included was one epilepsy-related magazine that we receive since we co-founded a local support group for parents of children with epilepsy. A story in the current edition of that magazine is about a photo campain named DOWNsideUP.

The photographer, Xavier Escalere, lost his then 25 year old girlfriend when she drowned because of an epileptic seizure. He started a campaign for more awareness of epilepsy and to create more tolerance. Many people still need to hide that they have epilepsy.

The photos on DOWNsideUP are shot in many continents/countries and provide surprising perspectives.

Buffer pools, registers, working memory, and epilepsy

What does it mean to a high-powered database server (lots of CPU cores, plenty of memory, fast and big disk system) when the bufferpools are tiny? What happens with a CPU with lots of cache when only few registers can be used? What happens with human brain if the so-called working memory is impacted by epilepsy-related medication or surgery (see my earlier posts related to epilepsy and IT)?

All of the three mentioned systems cannot utilize their full capabilities, throughput is limited because an important component is impacted. But what can be done to improve throughput?

The key is to change the strategy and to deal with the shortcomings. In a database server like DB2 or Oracle it would be to improve selectivity to reduce the data to be processed, to create indexes to avoid access to much data, and to enable data compression so that less data is moved. For software running on a system with too fw registers it would be to change algorithms, so that, e.g., fewer operands are handled.

How does someone cope with memory problems caused by epilepsy? Our son has occupational therapy to develop strategies for more efficient use of his working memory and also to train (build up) his capabilities. The Epilepsy Society has this summary on the memory issue and workarounds that can be used like sticky notes (external memory), task lists, etc.

Hospitals - a place of extremes

A Happy New Year to everyone. The last week of 2011 was like the first week of 2011, I was in the hospital with one of my kids because of an epilepsy-related check-up (all is well). Hospitals are the place to be to experience life at its fullest extent.

It's the place where - for many people - life begins and/or ends. You will receive personalized treatment as long as it fits into the standard procedures (think of "customized" ERP software like SAP...). It is where absolute boredom and highest suspense and action meet. Hospitals are thoroughly organized through all kinds of processes, they are certified for quality, for hygiene, etc., but they can also be the most chaotic place. If you want to meet new kinds of viruses and bacteria, go to a hospital even though they have disinfection and sanitation processes much more than any other place.

Hospitals also have all kinds of technology which helps both efficiency and medical results, but the human is at the core and without highly experienced humans the technology does not help at all. And in terms of data management you will find traditional relational systems, content management, BI systems, image processing, video and sound processing, archiving, and so forth. And a lot of paper, all kinds of paper.

Health care is a very old profession and always at the edge of technology.


With all that in mind I wish you both a very interesting year full of action and a quiet, relaxed year. The right mix will do...

Epilepsy, computer viruses, and personality changes

Did you ever encounter a computer virus on your machine and were thinking that it is no more "your computer"? What I mean is that the PC behaves in different, not known before patterns. It may slow down, react differently during your standard use and may seem weird in its behavior. Your computer encountered "personality changes".

As I wrote a couple of times, my son/the family has been dealing with epilepsy caused by a brain tumor. Fighting the cause for the seizures and damming them is one thing, coping with the changes to that person is another. A big impact on family and social life may have the personality changes caused by epilepsy. When your kid gradually slows down speaking, when he becomes more aggressive over time, when your child over time has more and more trouble remembering things, you know that you will have new challenges added to the core issues, the seizures.

For a computer virus there is usually a cure by cleaning the computer through different ways. For epilepsy damming the seizures through drugs or trying to remove the cause through surgery are first steps. Thereafter, dealing with the personality changes is a long road ahead. In the case of my son, we are hoping for the best. Next on the list will be to break free, not from Oracle :), but from medication...

High availability, epilepsy, functional MRI, and DB2 commands

In the past I had written a couple times about epilepsy and some computer-related aspects. Today, I want to point you to some more interesting aspects of your brain and high availability. As written earlier, one of my sons has epilepsy which was caused by a brain tumor. Last January, my son and I had a very interesting session in the hospital where a functional MRI (fMRI or fMRT) was performed. The reason has to do with the high availability of the brain.

What happens when you use DB2 with HADR or pureScale and one machine fails? If all is configured right and it indeed works, tasks should move over to one of the machines still up. When a child has epilepsy, depending on the type and seriousness, parts of the brain can get damaged. However, the brain is flexible and to some degree self-repairing. As a result, the functional "processors" of the impacted area can move to a different part of the brain. In DB2 you can monitor the HADR environment and query the state of the pureScale cluster: Who is primary, who is in peer state, on which machine are what services active? But how do you find out where in your brain the speech center is located (actually one of many)? The solution that helped in our case was to perform a functional MRI. It showed where important parts were located and whether it was safe later during surgery to operate in those areas where planned.

Conclusions: DB2 is simple to administrate compared to planning brain surgery.

BTW: Many hospitals use DB2 for patient records and much more.

Memory leaks in software and epilepsy

Image via Wikipedia

We all know what impact memory leaks have and how hard - at least sometimes - they are to detect. Often, there are small, but repeating leaks and over time they add up to either resource issues, weird application behavior or crashes.

Epilepsy can be similar. Sometimes, it can be spotted easily, sometimes it is hard to detect. In the case of my son, we didn't notice his condition for some years. There are many causes for epilepsy, e.g., in his case a brain tumor. It was constantly "nagging" the surrounding parts of his brain. Over time it added up and then caused (relatively mild) seizures. Initially they were seldom and infrequent. Every few weeks we spotted some short, but weird or strange acting of our son. When the pediatrician suspected epilepsy the first time and EEGs of different duration were ordered, nothing special was found. That's when a MRI was done and eventually the tumor was detected. Next on the list was a visit to an epilepsy monitoring unit (EMU) with week-long 24x7 EEG, video and audio capture. All the activity was necessary to track down and understand my son's epilepsy.

When you know (or think) that there is a memory leak inside your application, there are different ways to try to find it. These days, there are tools to assist. Sometimes, still the leak cannot be easily found or its impact easily seen - similar to epilepsy and what it is causing.

At IBM we use and recommend IBM Rational Purify to detect memory leaks in software. DB2 offers the db2mtrk tool to show you how memory is used and db2top can also show you such information.

Epilepsy: When computer science and medical science meet

Over the next couple of weeks I plan to write some blog posts dealing with epilepsy. One of my sons - maybe it is fair to say, the entire family - has been fighting epilepsy for some years now. We don't know when his epilepsy really started, it has been at least 2 years with visible impact. We expect that it is gone now because he had surgery about 3 weeks ago to remove a brain tumor which caused his epilepsy.

During our visits to doctors and clinics, by talking with other parents and meeting kids with various forms of epilepsy, and by reading we learned a lot. The more we learned, the clearer it got to me how close both computer science and epilepsy are. In computer science, e.g., for database systems, we care about cluster and high availability technologies. Epilepsy is a neurological disorder that impacts the CPU, the main board, and the I/O system that we humans utilize.

What I find interesting is that about one in every hundred has or had epilepsy and that there are more than 40 different kinds of epilepsy syndromes. Some can be dealt with (controlled) by drugs, some cured by surgery, but for many neither works. We learned that the human brain uses advanced technologies to guarantee high availability and to recover from failures. Often, single point of failure is avoided. For computer issues we call in service and have parts replaced. For us humans, however, we should be grateful when our core system is running "normal" - many don't share this fortune...