Container Development Work
Voice of the DBA
On my new laptop, I only use containers as database servers. I made the decision not to install SQL Server or PostgreSQL and instead work on containers only. I've written lightly about this, but I set up docker-compose files to load different instances of SQL Server and PostgreSQL (and others) and batch files to start and stop them. I've also set dedicated places on my disk where I can drop backup files and access them from the host. It's 2024. I moved to containers on my laptop exclusively for databases for the first time this year. This is despite the fact that I like containers, am...
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Fifty Percent
Voice of the DBA
Most of us will have more than one job in our career. In fact many of us will likely find a new job in the next five years. I hope I'm not in that group, but I recognize that it's a possibility. We never know when our situation will change, or our employer's situation will change. That is one reason I recommend you keep your resume up to date and continue to work on improving your skills. I saw recently from Brent Ozar, in which someone had asked him if they should apply for a job even though they didn't meet all of the requirements or know all of the desired technologies. Brent recommended...
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Trying New Technology
Voice of the DBA
I had someone ask me about recently. Would I think that's a good choice for a database. I don't really know. From their blog and some online research, maybe, but it's also a minority player in a niche space. I had a chat recently with someone that had implemented , a graph database. Why that and not Neo4J I asked them? Someone at the company had tried it and recommended it. Not a bad reason, as I think experience with tech is important, but it's not the only thing. Read the rest of
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A Kafka Introduction
Voice of the DBA
I've heard of Kafka before. I know it's an Apache project and you can download or read more at . I knew it was a way of moving data around, some sort of ETL tool useful for moving things around. More like a message and queueing system, which is a tool that seems like a great idea, but one that everyone struggles to work with. And one that seemed complex. The overview is that Kafka is "a distributed system consisting of servers and clients that communicate via a high-performance . It can be deployed on bare-metal hardware, virtual machines, and containers in on-premise as well as cloud...
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Your Computer Science Education
Voice of the DBA
I know a lot of people in this business do not have computer science degrees. While some do, I suspect it's a minority. I'm certainly curious, so if you want to share your education experience in a comment, tell me if you have a degree and what the focus was, as well as answer a few other questions. At recently, professors and from talked about their computer science curriculum for growing the next generation of professionals. Along the way, they also asked the audience these questions: Read the rest of
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A Lack of Architecture and Planning
Voice of the DBA
A few weeks ago, I was sitting in the audience, waiting for my turn to speak at Just before me, Xe Iaso delivered a funny and thought-provoking talk on . It was very well done and had me feeling nervous about following that session. The talk is a bit of a satirical look at an interview Xe had for a company that tried to get them to derive an architecture for a large distributed system. It was interesting to hear Xe note that often we have architecture diagrams of what we'd like to have, but never an explanation of how we implement a large system, especially one that has to grow as our...
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What Do You Drop?
Voice of the DBA
Many years ago I was training for a triathlon. I had competed in the the previous year in Virginia Beach and wanted to do it again. I had a young child, work was busy, and I was struggling to find time to swim, bike, and run every week. One night, I was at a work event with a customer who was also a triathlete. He was much more competitive and successful than I was at competing in triathlons, and he told me I should just get up earlier and find time to train or ensure I spent time after work on training before I went home to ensure I was meeting my goals. That sounded fine. Want to be better...
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Prevent Complete SQL Injection
Voice of the DBA
I would hope most of you reading this know what SQL Injection (SQi) is and how you can prevent it. Or at least what patterns cause problems. If not, here's that is worth reading. If you have more questions, . SQL Injection has been, and continues to be, a problem in many systems. In fact, I chatted with Mike Walsh recently after he'd published on an attack for one of his clients. He has some notes that explain how your database server might be vulnerable, as well as a description of a recent attack example. He also notes that many of you are responsible for protecting data, which is separate...
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A Checklist for Learning
Voice of the DBA
One of the challenges many people have is focusing their learning efforts along some path. The best way to move forward is with steady effort that guides you through steps to build knowledge or skill. However, with so much information out there on the Internet, how do you decide where you focus your efforts? Lots of people choose a random method, but the world is full of those people, many of whom never develop strong skills. That might be fine if you are an hobby guitarist or piano player, but it's not the best way to approach your career. Read the rest of
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Send Metrics Not Logs
Voice of the DBA
This is part of a series on observability, a concept taking hold in modern software engineering. One of the interesting things I saw in was that they are sometimes bandwidth-constrained at remote sites. In an early version of their platform, they sent logs back to HQ, and their logs used all the available bandwidth, so they were unable to process credit card transactions. While most of us don't deal with lots of remote offices sending data back to a central data warehouse, we do often work in distributed environments, and we may send data to/from a cloud or even employees' remote offices. Or...
info_outlineI assume that most of you know about the principle of least privilege. If not, please read this short blog from Brian Kelley and make sure you understand how you should approach security. In the modern world, we also ought to adapt our systems for the zero trust model, which includes the least privilege principle.
However, I wonder how many of your organizations really follow these security guidelines internally. Are you strict about adding limited access and removing it when people change jobs/roles? If you use Windows Auth (or Entra), are your admins doing that or just adding in new roles? Do you scope down database access roles in granular ways or just stick with 1-2 roles for the most common things people do?
Read the rest of Least Privilege