Metrics and Measures
Voice of the DBA
Many organizations have been trying to find better ways to build and deploy software for their customers. Whether they deal with the general public or internal customers, we know that delivering software that customers use can be a competitive advantage. That's the goal of DevOps. While most developers and management want to do this, they sometimes forget what the goal is. Instead, they want to continue to work in a similar manner themselves while giving lip service to actual change. They often do this while pushing others to somehow produce more and better software inside the same...
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How Normal Is Your World?
Voice of the DBA
The last three years have felt like a bit of a time warp. I'll run into someone or reach out to a friend, thinking that I haven't talked to them in a year or two. Then I realize that it's been 4 or 5 years because the 2020-2022 time frame felt like a year or less. A long year, but still, less than the three years that passed. Life is mostly back to normal for me, with travel, events, vacations, coaching, work, etc. all similar to the way things were in 2019. At the same time, I've changed and my life has changed. Some of this is aging, some is life moving on, but some is from the pandemic....
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Has Everyone Had a Data Breach?
Voice of the DBA
Almost every time that I attend an event, I'll end up meeting someone that has had security issues at their company. I'm always surprised how many people have had ransomware or other security problem that didn't get well publicized. It's not like everyone has had one, but out of 100 people, it seems there is at least one issue. Many of us work with third-party companies for either products or services. It's become standard to use other firms for specific things your organization needs. However, since that's the practice, many of those firms you partner with have their own partners. After all,...
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Nested Transactions
Voice of the DBA
One of the very common expectations from many SQL developers involves transactions. Many developers (database or application developers) think they can open a transaction, do something, open an inner transaction (nested), and then commit or rollback the inner transaction separate from the outer one. If you've worked with explicit transactions and experimented with this a bit, then you know that this doesn't work. Recently as he had a client think that committing the inner transaction would release locks. It doesn't. Read the rest of
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Stale Data Causes Security Issues
Voice of the DBA
Security has become better and better in many organizations. At the same time, hackers and malicious actors are doing a better and better job of finding new ways to attack systems. Some work to target specific individuals, often because of government or industrial espionage. Most of us aren't likely to deal with those issues, unless we work with (or are) someone that is very important in a particular situation. Instead, many of us deal with wider spread attacks that look to exploit vulnerabilities in technology or humans at scale, hoping to find the weak links. Lots of people I know have dealt...
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Will ChatGPT Write Our Queries?
Voice of the DBA
The short answer is no. The longer answer is it depends, and perhaps to be more complete, ChatGPT likely will help us produce the simple, tedious queries with much less effort. There has been a lot of news about AI and ChatGPT and how well it performs for a computer. That last phrase is important because while it's impressive, I don't know that any of us would consider ChatGPT to be in our list of the . The tool isn't that impressive compared to most people, especially our friends. Read the rest of
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The Top 5 Technologists
Voice of the DBA
There's a common party question about which ? Often this is amended to include living or dead people, and it's often interesting to hear people tell you who they'd invite and why. Since most of the people reading this work in technology in some way, I was wondering who you would invite to a party that's related to technology. Living or dead, however tangential, is there a list you can come up with? Read the rest of
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The Danger of Sharing Data
Voice of the DBA
In the past, many businesses hired employees whose role was deciding which prices to charge for their goods or services. At one point, organizations largely set prices based on their costs, though over time they tend to look at their competitors and set similar prices. If, however, management from multiple companies went into a room and determined prices, this would be price-fixing. is illegal. In many countries, we would not allow different companies to work together in a way that might reduce competition or take advantage of consumers. However, that might be a struggle in the future as we...
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Building Recommended Software Practices
Voice of the DBA
Many of us work inside an organization that has a process for building and deploying software. We may find our org doing this well, or we may feel our process is poor with lots of room for improvement. A lot of the discussion around how to be better at building software in the last ten years has been around the philosophy of DevOps. This concept doesn't really prescribe how to build software, but give you goals to aim for. That means you still need to take the ideas of flow, feedback, and learning and decide how you implement them with your staff. What practices do you follow to ensure you can...
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The Cost of the Cloud
Voice of the DBA
Basecamp (formerly 37 Signals) is . One of the founders gives some reasons, and he had on what they've spent in the cloud the last few years. Over USD$3mm on various services, though their costs in search seem very high. I don't, and haven't, run as busy a business as they do, so I don't know if they've truly done a good job architecting things and setting up services. They say they have, though I'd expect everyone to say and think that. However, I'll assume they are correct and they can't optimize things any more than they are currently. Their decision makes some sense, and I agree with it....
info_outlineWe collect a lot of data in our databases. Not as much in bytes as a lot of the video/audio/TikTok/Instagram sites, but still enough that many of us are constantly adding storage to our systems. All this data is not only a challenge to manage, but it also means that we are regularly dealing with query tuning issues. Better code, indexes, and more become regular challenges with large volumes of data.
I am a big fan of trying to reduce the data you manage where possible. Archive, delete, remove older data, do something. This not only makes your systems easier to manage and improves performance, but it reduces your risk. Any PII data you have that might store is an ongoing risk in the event of a data breach. I don't pretend this is easy to do in any way, but it's a good idea.
Read the rest of The Challenge of Deleting Data