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Casino Night is Back

Voice of the DBA

Release Date: 09/10/2024

The Load of Real Time Data Warehouses show art The Load of Real Time Data Warehouses

Voice of the DBA

If you have a data warehouse, what do you think your ratio of reads to writes is on any given day? Do you think 1:1, as in one read for each write? Is it 10:1, with 10 reads for each write? 100:1? Do you track this in any way? One would think that most of the databases we work on in the transactional world have many more reads than writes. I'd have assumed the ratios might be higher for data warehouses, where we load data that is queried (read) as the primary use case. After all, I expect that there are lots of people querying data that is loaded into this warehouse, with relatively few...

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Where's the Printer Friendly Option? show art Where's the Printer Friendly Option?

Voice of the DBA

When is the last time you read an article/blog/etc. on the Internet and saw a button for a print friendly version? That used to be something on every page, and one people often shared on social media (or email) because it didn't have all the advertisements in it. I remember having to help code this feature on SQL Server Central when we started as plenty of people wanted to print articles out and read them later. That desire led to Andy brainstorming that we should release The each year. I was reading about how the Internet has changed many things in our lives and I thought about these links....

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Cleaning Up Your Database show art Cleaning Up Your Database

Voice of the DBA

How many of you have objects in your database that aren't being used? What about something in a schema with a _old in the name? Or _2 or _3 or _delete? There is a lot of old, deprecated stuff I see in production databases. In fact, I've been somewhat amazed as I work with clients that many of the scripts we can build from a database with SQL Compare won't actually execute on an empty database because the script is full of broken code. I also find plenty of DBAs that want to clean things up, but they don't. Sometimes they're afraid they'll break something, which is certainly possible. Sometimes...

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Effective Engineering show art Effective Engineering

Voice of the DBA

I'm not the smartest developer or DBA. I find myself mystified at times by and I'm amazed at times by the complex systems that I see the put together. I can usually figure things out (sometimes by asking the authors a question), but it's not always easy to do. We have some truly gifted, incredibly intelligent people in this business. I am, however, effective. I have been very successful in my career at getting things done well enough, things that work well, meet the needs of my client/employer, and meeting deadlines. I don't just slap things together, but think about them, build them, test...

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Dead To Me show art Dead To Me

Voice of the DBA

I saw a note from someone recently that reminded me of . This was (is?) a technology in SQL Server that I thought might have great potential. I even had a few presentations on the subject, but sadly I've rarely seen anyone implement it. I'm sure some do, but I think for me, this is dead technology. There have been other tech items from which I've been turned off or abandoned over the years. It seems in SQL Server, we have some tech that even Microsoft has abandoned and doesn't put any development resources into improving. Read the rest of

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AI Is Great and Tech is Failing show art AI Is Great and Tech is Failing

Voice of the DBA

On a recent weekend, I got a text from my bank that they had declined a charge to one of my business accounts. I called them back and they let me know there had been a couple of weird charges on the account that their AI system detected. This seems to happen every year or two so I wasn't overly worried. I cancelled the card and ordered a new one. A day later, my wife got a call about our credit card with the same issue. She cancelled the card and got new ones ordered. However, I use that card to travel and I had a trip booked. Suddenly I was without a credit. Luckily, we have another card for...

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No Backdoors show art No Backdoors

Voice of the DBA

Every once in awhile I hear about someone in law enforcement sure that tech people can build in a safe, secure way for data to be unencrypted by the company or vendor. The latest appears to be from Australia, where the . Backdoors never work. Anytime an encryption key is stored, it could be stolen. We see this all the time. Keys are just data, and all the time. . . One of the reasons that Azure allows a BYOK (bring your own key) for encryption mechanisms is that many organizations don't want to trust Microsoft to store their keys. I'm guessing Microsoft doesn't want the liability, either....

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Bad Stored Procedures show art Bad Stored Procedures

Voice of the DBA

I don't see a lot of SQL at The Daily WTF, but was great. It's a stored procedure that was likely just converted from embedded code, as noted by the poster. It's a strange set of code, that doesn't quite make sense to me, and I can't imagine why someone wrote it. Arguably, this is no better than having this code in a C# or ASP.NET application. Or is it? Read the rest of

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When Do We Worry About Scalability? show art When Do We Worry About Scalability?

Voice of the DBA

"We need to get the code written for feature X. Can you finish this query today?" We've all heard some variation of that request. We have a request or demand, and we need to get it done. We need to get code out so our business can advance, sell more things, get more customers, etc. There's always some reason to get new code pushed to production quickly. Read the rest of When Do We Worry About Scalability?

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Technology and Privacy show art Technology and Privacy

Voice of the DBA

There can be a big divide among tech professionals on how they view data privacy. Some don't worry too much, and some are very upset about the lack of data privacy and poor data handling practices from many organizations. Most people are probably in the middLe. I do know that every time I post about a Tesla, there are many people who mention the incredible amount of data Tesla collects, and how that makes them nervous. Tesla discloses that they collect, and I get copies of my data with my own logger. I find the data interesting and I glance at it over time to look for trends. I'm still happy...

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We are bringing back the SQL Server Central Opening Night party at the PASS Data Community Summit this year. This was one of the most fun things I've been a part of at the Summit for many years and I'm looking forward to the conference even more.

The party will take place Tuesday night, after the Welcome reception. from 8pm-10pm, once again catered as a casino themed party. I'm using the same company we've used in the past, and we'll have a cash bar and lots of prizes. I've already started to make a shopping list of fun things to give out as random prizes as you enjoy the games. In the spirit of competition, we will save a prize or two for the top chip winners.

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