Voice of the DBA
A series of episodes that look at databases and the world from a data professional's viewpoint. Written and recorded by Steve Jones, editor of SQLServerCentral and The Voice of the DBA.
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The Useful Cloud Tags
06/30/2022
The Useful Cloud Tags
One of the things I've seen in working with cloud based resources is that you get a lot of them in your account quickly. A database might end up with a server, an IP address, a network, security groups, and more. A few clicks of the mouse in the Azure Portal can create a new Resource Group that doesn't just have the one thing you need, but 3, 4, or more other items. In addition to the quantity, there are also the problems of namespaces in cloud resources. Some of the items you provision are publicly named in a domain, such as database.windows.net. In these cases, the resources need to be unique among all cloud customers. Just like domain names, this means that you might have collisions with your favorite name. While I might like jones.com, there are a few other people that would likewise prefer this. The rest of us might have to choose jones2.com, , or some other variation. In large organizations, you might end up with for an Azure SQL Database. Read the rest of
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Returning to an Employer
06/28/2022
Returning to an Employer
I've had a number of jobs in my career. In many instances, I left on good terms, and I'd go back to the organization if there was a job that suited me. I'd like to think that many of these organizations would rehire me if I applied, as I did good work and had success. I've always been pleased when someone is disappointed at my resignation. Intel had a large layoff in 2015/2016 where over 13,000 employees were dismissed. The CEO at the time implemented a no re-hire policy, meaning those who were laid off, or I'm guessing those that quit during that time, were not eligible for employment in the future. Read the rest of
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Accounting for Typos
06/26/2022
Accounting for Typos
When I watched Star Trek as a kid, I was amazed by the technology. Talking to the computer, the touch screens, the handheld communicators. We have most of those devices now, without the space travel. Hopefully that will start to change with all the efforts being made by various organizations. One of the things that always bothered me was the chance for mistakes. A mis-spoken (or mis-heard) command to a computer that didn't verify things as a human might. The chance to hit the wrong part of the screen as the starship moved. It seemed as though soft buttons would have allowed more mistakes than hard ones. Certainly humans make mistakes with physical switches, but I think I make more mistakes trying to hit a part of the screen in my Tesla than using one of the (few) buttons or wheels to change something. Interestingly enough, my 23 year old decided on a slightly older car because it had more physical buttons and fewer soft ones. Read the rest of
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Long Term Storage
06/23/2022
Long Term Storage
Data storage has always been a concern for data professionals. Early on in my career, we dealt with large ESDI, IDE, and SCSI drives, all of which would fail unexpectedly in servers. Sometimes after a few years, sometimes after a few weeks. We learned to use RAID and tape backups to ensure that our data was recoverable. In many places tape was the long term storage medium used. These days, I know many people have moved to secondary disk storage of some sort, often rotating data across a few disk types that give you recovery for days, weeks, or longer. I don't know how long term storage work in Azure or AWS, but I assume some sort of combination of technologies are in use. I also know I don't trust them completely to be readily available and recoverable after a few years. Read the rest of
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Onboarding Remote Employees
06/21/2022
Onboarding Remote Employees
I guess that I was a remote employee that needed to onboard at a new company at one point. When Redgate Software bought SQL Server Central, I lived in Colorado and the company was (mostly) in Cambridge, UK. However, I was hired mostly to continue the same work I did at SQL Server Central, so I didn't really on board with the company. I signed a contract, and set up payroll paperwork, and that was it. I used my same workstation and laptop, albeit with a new account, password, and VPN, but almost everything was the same for me. Over the last two years, we've hired many people at Redgate, with most of them being brought onboard remotely. Plenty of them have never seen any of our offices, and quite a few didn't meet any other employee in person for months. from people we've hired in the last year about the remote onboarding process. Read the rest of
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Better Communication of Information
06/19/2022
Better Communication of Information
Many of us work with data in some way that helps a customer better understand data, use it to make a decision, or support a some conclusion. The way we present data (or help others present data) can impact how well a consumer understands the information represented by the data. There are people whose job it is to design visualizations and ensure the final product communicates well, but often I find a developer or DBA is the person that gets asked for help. What do we recommend when looking at a set of data and deciding how to format it? A few posts I saw recently help with decisions () or basic knowledge (. I've seen that help me understand the impact of my decisions and how to better design my informative reports for more people. In fact, I hope more people produce content on how and why they have built reports. It's helpful for many of us that would like to do a better job. Read the rest of
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My Incredible Journey With Your Help
06/16/2022
My Incredible Journey With Your Help
At Techorama, I saw a keynote from Derek Martin of Microsoft. The talk was called , and it's worth seeing if you can find it live or recorded. David talks about his growth in life from a young man to a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, husband, and father of six or seven. All the while dealing with a mental illness and learning to ask for help and to manage his busy life. It's a great talk, though one I only lightly relate to. My life has been mostly easy and wonderful. Not always, but mostly. My problems are often minor ones. As I write this, I had surgery this morning to repair a painful ankle I've been dealing with for a few years. Things went smoothly and I expect rehab to be the same. Read the rest of
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Becoming a Better DBA
06/14/2022
Becoming a Better DBA
One of the things that I try to advocate for is that more of you actively manage your careers and find ways to improve your skills. I want you to be more impressive and find an amazing job for you. Not my job, because I have the best job in the world, but I hope you find a job that you love as much as I love mine. It does take effort, work, and focus. It's something else to manage in life. I certainly don't want you to only care about work. After all, we work to live, not live to work. Read the rest of
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Are Cubes Dead?
06/05/2022
Are Cubes Dead?
I was talking with a friend recently about technology. This individual is a person focused on business intelligence, originally a developer, but now an architect and consultant. They have a fair number of clients and have worked with them to build solutions to assist in analysis and decision-making for all sorts of organizations. This person has primarily worked in the Microsoft stack but has embraced NoSQL, Hadoop, and other technologies. In many ways they view the world as I do, using what works well for a particular situation without prejudice. They want to be effective, using whatever technology may be best in the current situation. In their career, this person has extensive SQL Server Analysis Services experience and has built many cubes over the years that clients access with any number of front-end tools. I would guess that cube design and construction have made this person a lot of money over the years. Read the rest of
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The General Database Platform
05/17/2022
The General Database Platform
It's been a decade-plus of the Not-Only-SQL (NoSQL) movement where a large variety of specialized database platforms have been developed and sold. It seems that there are so many different platforms for data stores that you can find one for whatever specialized type of data you are working with. However, is that what people are doing to store data in their applications? I saw this piece on , postulating that a lot of the NoSQL database platforms have added additional capabilities that make them less specialized and more generalized. I've seen some of this, just as many relational platforms have added features that compete with one of the NoSQL classes of databases. The NoSQL datastores might be adding SQL-like features because some of these platforms are too specialized, and the vendors have decided they need to cover a slightly wider set of use cases. Read the rest of
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The Future of Certifications
05/12/2022
The Future of Certifications
Hacker News is a forum for experienced developers. While I think plenty of beginners lurk there, the discussions seem to be dominated by those who have worked in the technology or software industries for years. I saw an interesting article that noted and backed up the claim with some search results that show few results for various terms. I think that many experienced people working in technology are wary of certifications. With a little practical experience, one quickly realizes how little certifications actually do to prove you know how to work with a platform, or with code. Most companies that hire someone with a certification will need to allocate some time to training them how to work on their systems. To be fair, this is the case with a college degree as well. Read the rest of
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Crazy Interview Questions
05/08/2022
Crazy Interview Questions
Redgate had a discussion recently among our developers about our interview process and questions. There has been a standard question asking candidates about 2D arrays, but as one developer pointed out, we don't use these in our code base. So, why do we ask candidates about this topic? The developers came up with a different question, actually a series of questions that ask about a class and then how to test parts of this class. We mostly work in C# in a DevOps culture, so this seemed like a good idea. They proposed a scenario with a few questions and then asked current developers to solve the questions and give feedback on the language, structure, and difficulty of the problem. Read the rest of
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Traveling Observations
05/05/2022
Traveling Observations
I fly regularly. While I only had one trip during 2020 in the most dangerous time of the COVID pandemic, I flew a record number of miles in 2019 and had 10 trips in 2021. As 2022 progresses, I find myself back in the air and on the road, visiting new and familiar places for work and pleasure. I both enjoy the familiarity of known adventures and the excitement of new places. Already this year I have trips in place to three new places I've never visited and I'm hoping to plan more. I usually fly to LAX a couple of times a year. I visit Redgate employees in the area or travel to some event. Occasionally it's a waypoint on a journey to some other city. As a result, I've gotten to know the scenery on the way, and the view is one I never get tired of. Read the rest of
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Project Zero for Better Security
05/04/2022
Project Zero for Better Security
Google started to study zero-day vulnerabilities in systems. They want to improve security and safety, at least from a software and hardware standpoint. Its mission is to make it more difficult to find and exploit issues in software. They published an update recently that showed , at least according to data from the last few years. The metrics show a change in patching from an average of 80 days a few years ago to 52 days in 2021. There were also patches that missed the 90-day deadline, though only one missed the 90-day time and also a 14-day grace period. They are also trying to help with the understanding of how well vendors are adapting to new challenges. I hope this pressures and inspires smaller vendors and even individual organizations to take security more seriously. Read the rest of
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Testing or Learning
05/01/2022
Testing or Learning
All of us get into challenging situations. This might be a coding problem that we struggle to solve. It might be an argument with a co-worker. It could be feedback from a customer on how we dealt with them or maybe just how our app works. Our responses to a challenge might determine how we view the situation, our future actions, or even just how we react to life in the next few hours. When someone struggles or feels as though they have failed in a situation, they tend to react in one of two ways. They can view the experience as though it were a test and they didn't pass. This is quite common among many people, who might become sad, angry, or defensive. They might defend their approach or look for an excuse. They might seek to put the whole situation behind them and move on. This is a common reaction and one I've had often. Read the rest of
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Gathering Data Through Life
04/28/2022
Gathering Data Through Life
Every once in a while, I find a list of places posted on the Internet with a "how many have you visited?" question attached. This might be US states, countries, cities, or even attractions. I love traveling with my wife and having new experiences, and as we've gotten older, we value the experiences more than any physical things. It's something that I hope we've passed on to our children as well. My wife and I have been very blessed and have been able to travel a bit in life, though not as much as we would have liked with three children and a ranch of horses. We made it a goal about 6 years ago to try and visit a new country every year and experience life in another culture. The pandemic limited our travel for a few years, but we are starting to make plans to travel a bit more and gather some data for our minds. Read the rest of
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Migrating a Large Database
04/26/2022
Migrating a Large Database
I have upgraded lots of SQL Servers from one version to the next, and for the most part, the process has been smooth. That's not always the case, and there have been some long nights where the Operations staff had to scramble to fix things, script out old logins, call Microsoft support, and perform various data exports and imports to get a new instance running. I've been a part of quite a few of those teams. Most of my upgrades were with relatively small databases, at least small for that time period. However, I have upgraded a few "large" databases in the past. We had a 400GB database on SQL Server 6.5 in 1999 that was a challenge to move to SQL Server 7. I also upgraded an 800GB database in 2001 from 6.5 to 2000 for our Financial team, which involved a lot of stress. Read the rest of
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The Craziness of Code
04/24/2022
The Craziness of Code
Every once in a while I find a fun post that makes fun of programming. I think because the author is struggling with some piece of code, they write about the craziness of software development, often with an analogy that compares building something in the real world to how software programs get written. , with a bridge construction analogy, that degenerates into a rant on the disparate ways in which different programmers work together and how the entire world of the Internet is held together in a constant patch-fix loop. I do think that most large software applications have a decent amount of inconsistency. I'd suspect most large databases (in terms of object count), also have a variety of techniques, tools, and standards in use. That's because the tooling that we use to build things change. We don't have the constraints of the real world, which is why we could have a stored procedure using and another one . Read the rest of
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Scripting Makes Mistakes Easier Than Ever
04/21/2022
Scripting Makes Mistakes Easier Than Ever
A number of you likely use Atlassian products like Jira, Confluence, Opsgenie, or something else. You might have been affected by a large outage they had (, , ) recently which lasted at least 9 days. I don't know if all customers have their data back and are working, but this was a surprisingly poorly handled incident according to a number of reports from customers. There's a that you might want to read. The bottom line in this issue is that Atlassian looked to deactivate a legacy product with a script, but they apparently didn't communicate well among their teams. The script ended up using the wrong customer IDs and also marked the sites for permanent removal, not temporary removal (soft delete). While they supposedly test their restore capabilities, they weren't prepared for partial restores of subsites. I'm guessing this is likely a partial database restore, which many of us know is way more complex than a full database restore. Read the rest of
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Using T-SQL over PoSh
04/19/2022
Using T-SQL over PoSh
Why would you use SSMS/T-SQL over PowerShell (PoSh)? When is T-SQL directly a better option than PoSh? That's a question I ask myself regularly as I see articles and blogs that discuss how to accomplish a particular task using one tool or the other. There is plenty of overlap in the capabilities for each language when it comes to working with SQL Server, so this is a decision I think about regularly. This is especially true if you use dbatools. There also appears to be a bias towards one tool or the other for each individual. Many people traditionally have used T-SQL to accomplish most database tasks, and they tend to always look for a solution with a script in SSMS. Others are excited by PoSh and I have seen plenty of questions on the SQL Server Central forums asking how to structure their code in that language. In both cases, there is no shortage of people that argue that you should use T-SQL instead of PoSh or vice versa. Read the rest of
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A Third Space
04/17/2022
A Third Space
It's 2022, two years into a pandemic, and it finally seems that many things are returning to the way they were in 2019. Life outside of work is fairly normal for me, and I have a number of trips. Work is starting to pick up and we've seen a few conferences and pop up on the schedule. Work is still mostly remote for many technology workers. Not all, and some companies are , part or full time. My son got a job as a software engineer and he has to go to the office every day for six months. After that, if he proves himself reliable, he can work at home 2-3 days a week. Read the rest of
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Your User Manual
04/14/2022
Your User Manual
Many of us have spent time looking through manuals or the documentation for some software or product. I know I'm on the regularly for work, and there is no shortage of times I've used various manuals to help me fix something around the house. We usually use a manual when we want to learn how something is supposed to work, or how to get it to do what we want. I saw that I thought was a good idea for some people, maybe many people. This isn't a manual for how you should live your life or work, but rather, how others might interact with you. This manual describes how you work, what motivates you, stimulates you, what pleases you, and even the environment in which are most productive. Read the rest of
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When to Use Zero
04/12/2022
When to Use Zero
I'm not great at building charts and graphs. I can build a basic chart, but I often depend on the tooling I use to size, scale, etc. appropriately for whatever I'm graphing. That, or I just use a basic graph that starts from zero and has some sort of linear scale. Or I just present a table of numbers. There are plenty of misleading charts, especially used by the media that want to show some particular aspect of data that suits the story they are reporting. Many of these misleading charts often don't start at zero, and they end up scaling in a way that can confuse people. Read the rest of
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Moving Away from MySQL
04/11/2022
Moving Away from MySQL
I like SQL Server as a database. I think it's very complete, solves most of my problems, and is easy to use in work. It costs money, but less than some others. It's also more complete to me than some of the open source databases out there. That being said, I think most of the top five or six relational platforms would work for me and I wouldn't hesitate to use them. I ran across , who worked at Oracle on the MySQL team. It's on his last day there, and it's a bit of a why did he leave. I like that he notes he found a better opportunity, but he digs in deeper. Why did he look for a new opportunity? Read the rest of
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The Backlog
04/07/2022
The Backlog
Software development is complex these days. Maybe it's always been complex, but the shorter timelines and greater vision of what is currently happening in development teams mean that we can see a lot is going on at any particular time. Really, once you get beyond a handful of developers, the coding changes look like a chaotic ballet that may (or may not) be in sync across developers. Modern work tracking tools make this easier, and for any particular developer, it isn't too hard to look at a Kanban board linked to a git repository and track the changes that have taken place. There is always more work to tackle than can be done at the current moment, so it is important to add new tasks to a backlog. Building those, and tracking what is needed, is a bit of an art. What do you write down, how much detail, and what level of effort is needed. Paul Andrew wrote a good post on , using an example from his work. He looks at the need for infrastructure in this case, but that would be a common request these days when DevOps and the cloud require some blurring of the line between code and the resources it runs on. Read the rest of
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Advanced Incident Response
04/06/2022
Advanced Incident Response
Early in my career, I worked at a few smaller companies where a problem with the computer systems meant I went into the office and stayed until things were working. As I went to a few larger companies, I wasn't alone when a system went down, but the process was mostly the same. We figured out what was wrong and found a way to fix or replace things, occasionally with help from a vendor. Those were the (not necessarily) good days before our internal networks were connected to a public Internet. Companies developed formal incident response plans to deal with various issues, whether these were problems we caused ourselves or failures of an application. I had the fortune, or misfortune, to be involved in more than a few issues and learned a great deal in how to solve problems as well as how to manage the impact to a large number of employees. Read the rest of
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Teams Security Issues
01/14/2022
Teams Security Issues
At some point during my career sharing files and links in email became a security concern. There were all sorts of malware problems and issues that spread throughout organizations because someone unknowingly clicked on or forwarded a malicious item. At a couple of large organizations, we had to turn off email for days while we cleaned out systems. Fortunately, antivirus and other types of scanning software improved to prevent most of these problems. It seems that not all developers learned the lessons of the past. inside it based on link sharing in the chats. One of the issues is that the preview features aren't well implemented, though Microsoft security doesn't think this is a problem as a user would notice the link would be incorrect. I think that's a huge leap and not a very safe one to make. Read the rest of
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Acknowledging Success
12/13/2021
Acknowledging Success
Today is the Redgate annual award event, and I'm honored to be hosting again. I've been asked a few times, and I used to look forward to the gathering in Cambridge followed by our annual Christmas party. Last year this was virtual, as it is this year, so I'm hosting again from my home office. Not what I had hoped would happen, but I'll have some fun. Last year I had a number of shirt changes between my parts, and I may do that again. I know there are often annual sales awards in many companies, usually with some vacation or prize being given out, but not a lot outside of the sales department. In most of my jobs, we've usually had some sort of holiday party, but nothing else for most employees. Read the rest of
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Pulling Together
10/07/2020
Pulling Together
When the COVID-19 Pandemic grew rapidly in early 2020, medical supplies were in short supply. Different areas and organizations struggled with different types of issues, and one of the higher profile issues was with ventilators. In March, the projections were dire and quite a few hospitals were worried about the supplies of these devices. This was especially disconcerting given how many people were being placed on them and how long it takes to produce them. I met someone at that time that said getting a car company to produce these wasn't possible. The factories were specialized and converting machinery and people wasn't something that could be done in months. This was someone that claimed to have over 30 years of manufacturing experience. Read the rest of
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Build the VCS Habit
03/16/2020
Build the VCS Habit
I've preached the value of Version Control Systems (VCS) for many years now. In , in the on development, CI, DevOps, and more, I always talk about the value of a VCS. One thing I often say is that if someone won't use version control, they aren't a professional. I don't say professional developer, professional DBA, or anything else. You're not a technology professional without knowing how to use a VCS in 2020. You certainly can't work for me if you won't use one. I saw a on the ways in which a SQL Server professional can benefit from a VCS. Many of us working with SQL Server aren't developers, we may not be some DevOps engineer. We might be someone that manages systems or handles backups. We might be someone that deals with complex HA, DR, or replication processes. We may be report writers or ETL developers. Read the rest of
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