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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Building Bonds with Entertainment
10/03/2023
Building Bonds with Entertainment
Over the years I've had the chance to work in a lot of companies, and I've seen a lot of different team-building attempts take place. In restaurants, these were often nights out with too many adult beverages. At a power station, we had some large outdoor BBQs, where again, sometimes there were too many adult drinks consumed. When I came to Denver, I worked in a company that had a small fund they used for team outings once a quarter. A movie, bowling, maybe a meal, usually during an extended lunch hour or an early end to the day. At Redgate, we have a Feel-Good-Fund in each office and teams can make use of this for an activity periodically where they engage in something together. I rarely get to participate because I'm so remote and it makes me a little sad, since I see pictures on Slack of escape rooms, punting (boating), visiting museums, archery competitions, and more. However, we have taken the time to do a few things when Grant, Ryan, and I get together. Most recently, we went to a science museum in Cambridge one afternoon. Read the rest of
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The Need for DevSecOps
10/01/2023
The Need for DevSecOps
One of the things that happens with many companies that start adopting DevOps is that they release new features constantly. They publish their lists of changes, and they try to attract customers and grow their businesses. They may make some mistakes, but they fix those quickly and keep pushing forward. That's the idea, and it works well. However, many of the developers (and most managers), don't think about the security side of their changes. looks at the way hackers and criminals view DevOps, often using release notes and feature changes as a target to focus their efforts. In this way, they exploit holes and vulnerabilities in software to attack data storage. The examples include S3 buckets of storage and Elasticsearch, which is notoriously poorly secured by many people. Read the rest of
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A Staffing Disaster
09/28/2023
A Staffing Disaster
There was a failure recently at an Azure data center in Australia when a utility power sag caused equipment to trip offline at one of the Azure data centers in Australia. You can read about it , but essentially the headline is that there were only three people on site when the incident occurred, and that caused them to be unable to restart the equipment in time. In a little more detail, there weren't enough people to quickly restart the equipment chillers after the incident. The staff had to access the equipment on a roof when 13 of the units didn't restart. They were able to get to 8, but when they got to the last 5, the temperature of the water had risen to a level that wouldn't allow a restart. So they had to power down some computer equipment and go through a more lengthy process to get everything running. Read the rest of
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Running a Service
09/26/2023
Running a Service
Many of us work for some organization and we're responsible for managing a database or coding some application or some other data related position. Perhaps we ensure reports work for our users or move data around. In many cases, we have customers, whether they are internal to our organization or perhaps external from another business or even the wider public. However, many of us see our jobs as a part of the org/business and not that we are actually providing some service to others that we are responsible for. While I've certainly felt that way, I learned at some point that if I were an app dev, I ought to treat people using my app as customers, even though they don't pay me in currency. They often pay me in praise, or better yet, with praise to my boss. As a DBA, I treated both app devs and users as customers. That helped me take pride in my work and learn to view my position from other points of view. Read the rest of
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Are You Worried About AI?
09/24/2023
Are You Worried About AI?
The AI revolution is happening. I don't know how successful it will be, but regardless, people are trying to get AI into everything. That might be good or bad in various situations, but it has people worried about AI. looks at a survey from the American Staffing Association that says 47% of people somewhat or strongly agree that their job is replaceable by automation with an AI. There is more data to dig into, but that's a lot of people who worry about their jobs. Most people do think that tech is generally a good thing. I do find that many of us in tech, and some other industries, are buried in work. There's never a shortage and we could easily work 60, 70, or more hours a week and not complete everything. The flip side of that is a lot of work doesn't necessarily need to be done now and could be delayed, so I think it's hard to decide whether we need more help or more patience. Read the rest of
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If You Build It, Will They Use Linux?
09/21/2023
If You Build It, Will They Use Linux?
There's in Field of Dreams where James Earl Jones says that people will come. It's in response to the early in the movie. This is the climax of the movie, where Costner makes a financial decision to trust his instincts and hope his farm will be saved. In many cases, organizations do just this. They build something, assuming people will come. They may have some data, research, or other reasoning as to why why people will use what they build. However, that's not always the case. Sometimes they build something and hope people will come, much like . Read the rest of
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Flexing for the Cloud
09/19/2023
Flexing for the Cloud
Many of us in technology regularly experiment with new tools and technology. We often do this to adopt new skills when we need to solve a problem or we have inherited some code that needs enhancement. The cloud is in many ways no different than things we've done before, but the way we do them, or maybe the way the cloud handles some things, means that we need to change how we view a task or perform our jobs. Migrating to the cloud is something that many of us have had to tackle at some point. I've seen a good amount of lift-and-shift, including many companies who just mandated moves to the cloud without much planning. As mentioned in , that was cloud migration 1.0. Really, I think this was something that's been going on for years, and continues to occur today. Lots of management are seduced by the promises of the cloud to make their organization's IT systems better, so they move everything without thinking. Read the rest of
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The Importance of Thick Clients
09/17/2023
The Importance of Thick Clients
I've used a number of clients with SQL Server across the last 30 years. I worked early on with the command line and (now and soon ). That was handy with DOS and Windows 3.1. However, I soon moved to GUI tools and spent years in , which was how I ran Query Analyzer. was the next evolution, though I used for awhile to get offline query work while on a plane. This was handy for me in documenting and commenting code without a server. Amazing to think I used to work without a SQL instance on my laptop. (Management Studio) has become the de facto way I've written queries for over a decade. Microsoft has tried to push people to (ADS), but I don't see a lot of people moving to it. It's fast, but also, not attractive, at least not to me. Read the rest of
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Advice To Be a Better Person
09/14/2023
Advice To Be a Better Person
As a hobby, I coach volleyball for kids. Each year I meet new kids and parents and talk about my philosophy. Part of that is that I teach skills, athletics, how to compete, and more. However, I do emphasize as well that I'm trying to build better people, not just athletes. I want these kids to be better prepared for life, for job interviews, for future teachers and coaches, and for better relationships. While I'm not perfect, or maybe not even a great person, I do try to improve myself on a regular basis. Or at least learn to be a better person to others. This isn't because of any ideal or goal, but because life is more fun when I have more skills. Whether that's working with objects or interacting with people. The smoother things go, the more I enjoy the world. Read the rest of
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The Team You Want
09/07/2023
The Team You Want
Brent wrote about and challenged people to write a testimonial for them. There are some great comments on the post, and some funny ones. It's worth a read when you need a break from other work. I especially chuckled at the Brent used. I think . That got me thinking: what do I want in a team? Or maybe, who do I want in a team? Read the rest of
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Rogue Colleagues
09/05/2023
Rogue Colleagues
The economy might be good or bad for you right now. Some of that depends on where you live, what your employment situation is like, what your habits dictate about how you live life, and more. No matter what your situation, likely there are people around you that complain about the world and others who think things are fine. There are likely more of the former than the latter, but that's because humans tend to complain out loud more than they praise. When people think there is an economic downtown for themselves, they may be more likely to engage in malicious activities. While I don't think most data professionals will start to hack other systems, or even their own employer's systems, there is evidence to support the idea that some might be susceptible to recruitment by bad actors. references some research and warns security groups to be wary. Read the rest of
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Looking Forward to the PASS Data Community Summit 2023
08/31/2023
Looking Forward to the PASS Data Community Summit 2023
I was lucky enough to attend the very in 1999. It was a brand new event, and while not overly large, it was busy and crowded in the basement of a Chicago Loop hotel. I had the chance to meet there and ask her a question. That was the highlight of the trip, but I also learned a lot about SQL Server 6.5 and 7 there, spending all the time I could in sessions and hanging out after each one listening to the questions others asked the speakers. Since then, I have been lucky enough to go to most of the . The event has changed a bit, and I look forward to going to see friends each year and re-connect with them. I've also loved meeting new people, often those I've corresponded with online. Each event has been memorable and exhausting at the same time. It's a busy week, and I can sometimes feel overwhelmed. However, it's always felt like it was worth the trip. Read the rest of
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Power BI and Git
08/27/2023
Power BI and Git
When Power BI was released, I was working with customers to try and adopt DevOps for their database code. At that time, I thought the Microsoft developers had made an extremely poor decision with the PBIX format in that it wasn't well suited for version control. In 2011, when it was first released, we not only had decades of knowledge about version control and the power of DevOps, but we'd also been living with the extremely poor format of code in Integration Services packages (among other data tools), that were poorly suited for understanding in version control systems. Power BI has grown, and with the Fabric announcements, there are . There is also a that saves your project in a folder structure rather than one file, which is better. I'm not sure it's great, especially if it doesn't enforce text in a way that ensures a developer can easily see changes between settings and understand them. I can certainly diff the XML in two SSIS packages, but that doesn't mean that it's easy to understand what has changed. Read the rest of
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Removing Weak Security from SQL Server
08/24/2023
Removing Weak Security from SQL Server
I was checking some arguments in the for SQL Server and saw that the MEDIAPASSWORD option was deprecated and marked as being removed at some point. That made sense, and I assumed that PASSWORD was the option to be used moving forward. However, that option is also marked as deprecated. What should we do? Read the rest of
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Shift Right
08/22/2023
Shift Right
Earlier this year I was watching someone present on DevOps and IaaC (Infrastructure as Code). The speaker was showing how they had worked with clients to implement tests and checks that evaluated whether their systems were deployed and the code was working as expected. They did this as the CI/QA environments weren't maintained, but rather spun up as needed when code was committed or tested. What I found fascinating was the part in the talk where the speaker said they were "shifting right." Read the rest of
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A Real World Clash with AIs
08/20/2023
A Real World Clash with AIs
A group of people are protesting more cars in San Francisco by . It is likely that the cone disables some sensors and won't let the cars move. For truly autonomous cars, this could be an issue if people could prevent them from working with small hacks. I could imagine a strip of duct tape or some other smaller obstacle that might also work and be less noticeable to anyone looking at the vehicle. Ignoring the humor here, or the more-cars-in-cities debate, this is an interesting place where computing systems can fall down. People do find ways to hack sensors or other ways in which our software gets data from the real world, which can force behaviors we didn't expect. We might allow for these, or we might not. In this case, I don't know that the developers could do anything different, other than perhaps detect and alert the owners that the vehicle can't move until someone clears the obstacle. They could add more sensors, but I suspect hackers would just block those. Read the rest of
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Taking Advantage of Conferences
08/17/2023
Taking Advantage of Conferences
I've been very lucky in life to go to many conferences throughout my career. I've gone as both an attendee and a speaker, and I have found them to be valuable in helping me continue to grow and thrive in my career. This is across many employers, some of which I don't think had particularly great benefits. Plenty of people I worked with did not get to attend any conferences, and some of them felt resentful. I understand that, but I think that many employers are willing to invest in training and conferences when there is a return for them. I started going to in DC, as a young professional wanting to learn. It was close enough to drive up and go for the free day and then return home. A few colleagues and I would make the trip once a year and talk with vendors, chat with attendees, and learn more about computer networking. Across a couple of years, we had moved from and to ethernet and IPX to IP, and this was a place where those technologies, and many more, were being discussed. Read the rest of
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Using Clear Language to Avoid Confusion
08/13/2023
Using Clear Language to Avoid Confusion
A long time ago a software engineer advised me to try and ensure that I made my interfaces clear to users, especially those that are busy focusing on some other task the software enables. The phrase he used was to make a "Fisher-Price" interface, referring to the toy company that makes for their toys. The idea being that we didn't want to cram too many things on the screen or possibly confuse a user. As a kid, I watched on television and enjoyed the show. Lots of kids had a similar view, but they might not have known that the main actor took care in choosing his words to convey concepts and ideas to children. In fact, the former producer said that the writers joked that his manner of speaking was its own language, called "Freddish." Read the rest of
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What Have You Done Lately Outside of Work?
08/10/2023
What Have You Done Lately Outside of Work?
I was chatting with someone recently that's younger than me. They've got a good job and had some success learning, but they felt like their career wasn't progressing fast enough. This person still wanted to grow their career and their income. That's the place many people find themselves. This individual was asking my advice since they thought I'd had some success and were looking for me to share some of the things that worked for me. I asked them this question: What have you done lately outside of work for your career? Read the rest of
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How Wrong is Stack Overflow?
08/08/2023
How Wrong is Stack Overflow?
I chose the title slightly to poke at Stack Overflow (SO), but the same take expressed in could be said about SQL Server Central. It's not quite the same as anyone can answer questions on SQL Server Central. The tweet is a (long) hot take from , a C# developer and MS evangelist in Denver. Essentially he says that a lot of the SO answers are wrong, especially as the software and languages change. Old answers are upvoted, and remain at the top of the list, even as newer answers might be better. People don't like the behavior on SO of moderators and people who post, which is something we've tried to avoid or limit here at SQL Server Central. We want there to be professional discussions. SO also doesn't allow much discussion or nuance in the questions or answers. Read the rest of
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Archive to the Lake
08/06/2023
Archive to the Lake
was announced at . This is the next evolution of data warehousing from Microsoft, folding in Synapse and a number of other technologies to create a simpler location for storing and analyzing data. We've published some articles on the platform and there's from on Linked In. It's worth listening to, even in the background. Paul has a nice style and a great voice. Part of this platform is . This is a data lake for your org, just one of them, and while it's able to store data in many formats, it's mainly optimized to read tabular data in the . This is essentially a compressed text file that allows for some transactional changes to the original data in parquet format. Read the rest of
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Flexible Work Policies are Preferred
08/03/2023
Flexible Work Policies are Preferred
The great post-pandemic, post-Great-Resignation, hybrid/remote/in-the-office work debate continues. It seems almost every week I see more stories that report on, hype, attempt to prove, or otherwise stoke emotions about whether the future of work for many people is more likely in any of these three situations. One company mandates everyone back in the office, another goes completely remote, and it seems many can't decide and have some sort of hybrid approach. Your boss might have strong opinions on one of these situations, which may or may not align with your organization. I see CEOs wanting one thing and individual managers sometimes wanting another. As much as I like remote working, and I've been based out of my home for over two decades, I also like seeing people and I am regularly traveling to the various Redgate offices (along with ). Read the rest of
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Constitutional AI
08/01/2023
Constitutional AI
I will admit that I don't know a lot about AI (Artificial Intelligence) systems and how they are built. I've been and haven't been overly impressed with the results. I think some of this is that the my work is creative and I'm both used to being creative and I find the AIs less creative. And less accurate. And require a lot of editing. I don't mind editing, but not if it takes longer than just writing things myself. From my understanding, a lot of the models behind AI systems (chatbots, recommenders, etc.) are built with humans giving them feedback on their responses in what's known as RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback). Essentially paid (often low paid) people that help to "guide" the AI into responses that are useful. Read the rest of
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We're Not Faster with AI
07/30/2023
We're Not Faster with AI
At Redgate Software, we've been trialing Copilot from GitHub with our developers. I managed to get access for this experiment and have tried a few things, though I'm not sure I've found it very useful. I'll continue to work with Copilot, but for now, I just don't find Copilot AI helping me with the types of tasks I do. However, our chief of technology, Jeff Foster, was . It's a good read, and I found a few fascinating things in the piece. First, I was worried about this a bit, as we have explicit guidelines in developers that say we can't take the output from an AI and put it in our codebase. We worry about legalities since we sell software. How does that work with Copilot? Read the rest of
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Large PRs are Bad
07/27/2023
Large PRs are Bad
I heard a joke years ago that went something like this. When a developer gets a pull request for code review that's 100 lines long, they will open the file(s), look at the code, and ensure standards are being followed. They might run some code, they'd walk through the algorithm in their mind, and spend 10, 20, or more minutes examining how the change is built. If you give them a code review of 1000 lines, they'll just assume it's great and approve it in seconds. I know that many developers don't find that funny. Often I meet people that think they're professional and they spend the time needed to examine the changes and ensure they work. I'm sure that many people do this often, and some people are very meticulous about their evaluation of the change. However, everyone gets busy and I know that often depending on who submitted the PR and how busy the reviewers are, the joke does reflect reality. The longer the PR, the less likely someone will either a) spend the time to carefully review it, or b) catch small mistakes. Read the rest of
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Creative Development
07/20/2023
Creative Development
I was working with a customer recently that has a development process that both made me cringe and struck me as very creative. In this case, the customer has software they have written when spawning a few databases for each new project that is created. There are three types of databases created for each project, with unique names for the project. The DDL and DML to create these initial databases are stored in a central database as a set of rows in a table. To make changes to their software, developers create a project (with new databases) and then alter the application and the database to meet the requirements. These changes then need to be captured and applied to a development template database. There is a template for each of the three different databases created for projects. Changes made to these are processed and then added to the central database for new projects, and to upgrade existing ones. Read the rest of
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A Paste Policy
07/18/2023
A Paste Policy
Most of the code I've written for various employers was something that lived inside the organization. This was for internal use and no one outside of the organization ever used it. It was almost always code I'd written, so I wasn't ever worried about the provenance of the code (where it came from). However, I'm sure I've copied code from somewhere online and used that in some way. I might have taken and dropped it on a production server where it was used to process a string. I'm sure I've taken code from various places and used it in administrative functions, like to manage a log file. Read the rest of
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HIPPO vs. Data
07/13/2023
HIPPO vs. Data
One trend for many organizations is to be data-driven. This means using data to make decisions at all levels, or at least support those decisions. This was popularized by many companies, and to back up the claims that those organizations who do this have more success, more revenue, more profitability, etc. Much like DevOps, however, it seems many organizations don't want to actually invest in making data-driven decisions. Instead, many opt to make decisions by . If you've never seen this acronym, it stands for highest paid person's opinion. Many managers will defer to whoever is above them in the org chart, often someone that is paid more money than them. Even when there is data to make a different decision, the HIPPO is still used. Read the rest of
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The Value of Doing Something
07/12/2023
The Value of Doing Something
I live on a working horse ranch. My wife boards, trains, and trims horses and has employees. Occasionally I have to help out with chores, or more often, fixing things. I was talking with a coworker recently and showing some pictures. He was asking why I do things like instead of hiring someone to do it. I caught , which got me thinking. I don't love the flow here, as it wanders between cooking, economics, politics, social justice, and more. However, the core ideas of specialization and taking on a task was what I got out of the piece. Read the rest of
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Better Communication Through Less Messaging
06/01/2023
Better Communication Through Less Messaging
I have learned to really appreciate and enjoy Slack as a messaging tool. It's something I use daily, and a place where many inside my company communicate about all sorts of issues. There certainly can be an overload of channels, but for me, I add and prune channels regularly and it's a good way to segregate conversations. I didn't feel that way when I started. At first, I resisted using it. Now I couldn't imagine not having it, but not everyone feels the same way. There's an article about a SaaS provider and instead using the Basecamp project management platform and keeping communications inside there. Read the rest of
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