The Security of Old Tech
Voice of the DBA
There has been a lot of news about . I haven't had any delays due to this, though I've gotten a few messages in my travels that I might want to reschedule. There was an article that . Old as in Windows 95 and floppy disks. That's old, but obviously it still works. Even with the various accounts of problems, almost every day thousands of flights are managed successfully by the people who run these systems. They're not alone, as the article also points out that some other transit systems make do with technology that most of us would never think of using for any system. Read the rest of
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Password Guidance
Voice of the DBA
I remember working at a large organization with a team of other IT Operations staffers. We rotated this one job every month amongst a few people, each taking turns, where we'd lose a day to update all the privileged passwords for our servers. This was before Managed Service Accounts and the cloud, when we were required to change these every 30 days and then store the new ones in an encrypted store. What struck me when I got stuck with this wasn't the requirement to change every 30 days; that seemed normal. The thing that bothered me was how manual this was. As a former developer, I wrote some...
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Requiring Technical Debt Payments
Voice of the DBA
I was working with a customer recently that is trying to improve their processes. This was a large company, over 100,000 employees, though most of them aren't in the technology area. However, across many divisions and groups, there are a lot of developers and operations personnel who have tended to work in silos, managing their own applications and systems in disparate ways. In other words, doing software development the way most companies do it. Read the rest of
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Guidelines and Requirements
Voice of the DBA
I saw . At first glance I read this as they'd changed the default values, which would be interesting. However, this is a guideline, set to 75%. I also saw a few thoughts from , and quite a few comments. The comments were interesting in a few ways. It is easy to look at 75% and say that won't work for this server that's on my mind right now because I keep getting woken up. That might be true. However, the 75% number isn't a hard requirement. It's a guideline, a recommendation to ensure you have enough memory for the OS, but you're trying to use most for SQL Server. Feel free to adjust it...
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Concerns over AI Chat Privacy
Voice of the DBA
One of the major concerns for using GenAI tools is who is reading the data you submit as a prompt, and will this data be used in future training of the model? In other words, could someone using a future model access the data I put in a GenAI chat? It's a valid concern, and not just because of the vendors. There is a lawsuit over the use of data by OpenAI, and . Since this is a lawsuit, there is always a chance that some of the data retained gets entered into a court document or even that it might be read aloud in court and captured in a transcript. Read the rest of
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Data Sovereignty in the Cloud
Voice of the DBA
I remember when the US government wanted to access data in Azure that was physically stored in Ireland. I and linked to the article back in 2020. This has typically been more of a concern for the EU (and other countries) than the US, but I'm sure there are organizations in the US that use the cloud and don't want their data accessed by other countries' governments. Recently, . The Microsoft response was that they (Microsoft) cannot guarantee data sovereignty for French customers. If the US government served a warrant under the Cloud Act, a US corporation would have to turn over the...
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Ghostworkers
Voice of the DBA
Ghostworking is pretending to be busy at work. According to , it's on the rise with a number of people looking for other remote opportunities at other organizations. Some employees might be just wasting time at the office, though I suspect there is a minority that are actually working at another (second) job. Maybe they are growing a side hustle or maybe they've even accepted another job, and they're spending part of there day on those tasks. This might be part of the reason that many managers want to get people back into the office. I think that's flawed as a) most managers aren't great...
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Your Favorite Improvement
Voice of the DBA
SQL Server 2025 is out in preview form. CTP 2.0 is available for you to test, and that have been added to the platform. Some of these are already in the cloud, but this is your chance to test them in your environment. This is version 17.x, though I don't know we've really had 17 versions to work with. In any case, there have been a lot of versions in my career. I've connected to and worked on all of these: 4.2, 6.0, 6.5, 7.0, 2000, 2005, 2008, 2008R2, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2019, 2022. No 2025 yet (other than install and a few basic queries), but that's coming. Read the rest of
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Can You Ask for a Raise?
Voice of the DBA
I mean, you can ask for a raise. It's always an option, but is now the time to ask for a raise in this economic climate, where businesses can be unsettled and there are a lot of tech workers looking for jobs. I even saw a piece that noted . While that's not where most people work, it seems that often other CIOs/CTOs look to the big tech firms for guidance, and they may choose to hire fewer new staffers as well. This is on my mind at work after reading that I added to the newsletter. It's a response in the advice column where a reader asks how to go about asking for a raise when they think...
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The Next Great Thing
Voice of the DBA
At , I was chatting with Brent about a few things, including AI, which we think is changing the world. I've got my set of AI experiments going, and I do believe we will fundamentally alter work and how we use computers in the future. Not sure if it's for the better or worse, but things are changing and will change more. Read the rest of
info_outlineThis year the SQL Server and Data Platform community is getting together for the annual Summit virtually. You can still register and attend today through Friday for free. The content is also being recorded, and if you register, you can watch it later, or re-watch it, at your convenience. It's free training for your career across a wide variety of topics, so take a moment and fill out the form.
There's another good reason to register now. Next year's Summit will be hybrid, with the in-person portion happening back in Seattle next fall. However, there will be a limited number of tickets available for those that want to travel to the event and be in the same room as other professionals. Tickets for the live portion are only going to be available to people registered for this year's event, so make sure you head over to the site and register today. You can also read about the announcement on the Redgate blog.
Read the rest of A Summit Rebirth in 2022