Remembering Phil Factor
Voice of the DBA
One of the most prolific and popular authors at Simple Talk has been . He wrote many pieces on all aspects of database work and has probably written than anyone else. He has entertained, informed, and inspired many database professionals in his many years as an author. Phil, aka Andrew, passed away recently. This was a shock to many of us and a sad day. Tony Davis introduced me to Phil, whom I always thought of as Andrew, many years ago when I first traveled to Redgate. Tony published and has many more fond memories of Andrew. If you ever get the chance to meet Tony, ask him for a few. Read...
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Pushing the Limits of AGs
Voice of the DBA
Many of you reading this likely have an Availability Group (AG) set up on at least one database in your organization. Maybe not most, but many of you as this has proven to be a technology that many people like for HA/DR, upgrades, and probably other uses. As the technology has evolved from it's SQL Server 2012 debut, it has improved in many ways. This might be one of the few features that has received regular attention from the developers in Redmond across multiple versions. That's not to imply this is a foolproof or bug-free feature. Numerous people have had issues with the various types of...
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AI Steals Joy
Voice of the DBA
Take a moment and think about how much work you do each day. If you write code, how much time do you actually spend writing code around meetings, admin work, and other tasks. If you manage systems and develop scripts, how often do you get to work on a script, change it, upgrade it, or add a new feature? I bet it's a minority of time for most of you. Studies show that many developers spend only an hour or two writing code each day. I would guess it's lower for sysadmins or DBAs who incorporate coding into their jobs. Now think about how much you enjoy each thing you do. I assume meetings aren't...
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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...
info_outlineThe short answer is of course, most of us can learn and improve our skills to become better developers, engineers, DBAs, etc. While we might not be able to become the 10x engineer that many aspire to be, we can certainly become a better employee inside of an organization.
There's a piece on becoming a more effective engineer, which is actually titled know how your org works. It a piece from an engineer that started with a tweet: The text was:You can either complain and pontificate on Twitter on how the tech industry *should* ideally work, or you can learn how your org *really* works and what’s rewarded, and optimize for that. Or quit and find another job. This might sound cynical - but it’s what it is.
That sounds a little harsh, but the reality of how your org works or is structured or interacts is a reality. We all have hindsight to look back and wish someone (including us) had written code better. We might be sure if we could change one thing, or add/remove someone else, or make some other change, then things would be better. We might feel that there is a simple solution. Those things might be true, but they aren't the reality of the situation.
Read the rest of Can You Become a More Productive Engineer?