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.
info_outline
Finding a Break
04/15/2021
Finding a Break
Microsoft was one of the companies that dramatically pivoted to remote work. They enhanced their Teams product in a number of ways to help themselves, and their customers collaborate when people are not located in the same physical space. They also started to study the way in which people worked. , and they continue to study how work has changed, even though they are . There is a . Managers think they are thriving, and workers are not. There may be many reasons for this, but I suspect one of these is the privilege of space. Many managers and senior workers likely have bigger residences, and can spread out. They can change their locations and experience a new environment. Since so many of them might get by with less powerful laptops, and often work on a single item at a time, it's easy to move from the kitchen to a dedicated office, to a bedroom, or even out on a deck. Read the rest of
/episode/index/show/voiceofthedba/id/18742373
info_outline
You've Changed. Has Your Employer?
04/08/2021
You've Changed. Has Your Employer?
This past year has been one to remember. It's disrupted lives and changed the world in many ways. Whether you have been cautious or fearless, scared or angry, the pandemic has changed you and the world. There's about life during the pandemic and how life has been turbulent from one point of view. While I related to some of what the author wrote, I didn't relate to a lot of it. I also know I've been lucky, and relatively lightly affected by this pandemic. I've published, and needed, at times, but I've been able to live my life, get outside, still coach youth, still visit some restaurants and take some limited vacations. I've , recording how . I've changed, and I've struggled, but I've also been able to do things and I didn't have the lockdown, and the limited life that some tech pros had, and I certainly didn't have the struggles with security and finances that many less privileged dealt with. Read the rest of
/episode/index/show/voiceofthedba/id/18610559
info_outline
Growing Outside the English World
04/06/2021
Growing Outside the English World
The CEO of our company is English, and he likes to remind me (jokingly) that there was a long time when the sun never set on the English empire. I will jokingly remind him that one country has set foot on the moon. One of the things that has changed me in the last decade is travel. I've been lucky enough to visit many countries around the world for work, and a few more for personal trips. In this time, I've often engaged with local people and tried to experience life a bit from their perspective, rather than be a tourist and just look at a thing or place as an outsider. I've often read a bit or researched an area to learn some history or get some context. Read the rest of
/episode/index/show/voiceofthedba/id/18610364
info_outline
Poor Software Testing
03/23/2021
Poor Software Testing
I am a big advocate of testing your code, including your database code. I like repeatable testing, especially unit testing. I think this has contributed to the increase in quality over the last ten years as more developers have incorporated unit testing into their work. That, along with the increase in standard frameworks, seems to have resulted in less crashes and instability in much of the software I used today.That being said, the client ultimately decides if software works as expected. Certainly there can be logic errors, but there also could be errors in how specifications and requests are interpreted. This is one reason we need humans to do some QA testing and clients to ensure there is some user acceptance review. Read the rest of
/episode/index/show/voiceofthedba/id/18429476
info_outline
Removing SA from Azure SQL Database
03/22/2021
Removing SA from Azure SQL Database
One of is to use Windows authentication. This has been in the docs for years, and I've heard many MS consultants and employees note this. Many customers and clients have tried to use Windows Authentication only, but often in a cross platform environment with Java or Linux clients, one usually has needed SQL authentication with a user and password. Client libraries have been enhanced so this isn't necessary, but still some people prefer SQL authentication, especially with clients outside their organization. It's simple, easy, and developers can make it work in seconds. With Azure SQL Databases, some companies defaulted to a username and password, as their Active Directory (AD) wasn't extended to Azure. That has , and many people are taking advantage of it. In fact, some customers are so integrated, they want to do away with usernames and passwords in Azure. Read the rest of
/episode/index/show/voiceofthedba/id/18429404
info_outline
Working in a Distributed Fashion
03/21/2021
Working in a Distributed Fashion
Recently at the Redgate Summit, Kendra (|) noted that all the developers working for her are doing so in a distributed fashion. She is a product manager at Redgate, and her team uses git to move source code around and share it with different members for the applications they work on. For database work, I often see people using a shared database, which can create issues between developers, though many teams accept this as a part of working on the same project. We often just expect that our code is in the shared database, which means we don't need to actually move it around. Hopefully, we do put it into version control. Read the rest of
/episode/index/show/voiceofthedba/id/18372299
info_outline
Tool Limits
03/18/2021
Tool Limits
In many jobs, there are a variety of tools that people use on a regular basis. Chefs buy knives, mechanics buy tools, doctors buy stethoscopes, etc. While many of us in technology don't always have to buy tools, some of us certainly do. When there is value and it makes sense, many of us have purchased IDEs or add-ins or a utility that makes our work easier. Our tools are different than physical ones. We need a place to install them, but we often have employer-owned workstations, which complicates matters with licensing and rights to install. Bringing tools with you, or taking them with you, is often a strange situation, especially as our tools often need "privileges" to connect to other systems, which may be a problem for many employers. Read the rest of
/episode/index/show/voiceofthedba/id/18372227
info_outline
My Time is Valuable
03/18/2021
My Time is Valuable
In most of my jobs, I've been given tasks to accomplish, often without a lot of my own input. Someone triages work, or develops a project plan and then assigns me things to do. Often these are fairly narrow pieces of work, but with some latitude on how I might actually complete the task. Over the years, I've been asked to do things that weren't a part of my job. At one small company, I spent an afternoon making Ethernet patch cables because we needed them, I knew how, and my boss said it was a good break for the two of us. At another job, I was asked to help go through the separation process when employees left, zipping up files, archiving mailboxes, etc. Read the rest of
/episode/index/show/voiceofthedba/id/18372164
info_outline
Nothing on My Laptop
03/14/2021
Nothing on My Laptop
I heard this quote at the : "If I drop my laptop in water, I can get everything back." The context of the quote is that all your work, your IP, your code, etc. is saved in some common or duplicate location. Everything essentially has a backup. I learned the lesson early in my career that keeping one copy around of things was bad. On an old Apple II, I formatted the wrong disk numerous times, necessitating me recreating homework multiple times on a very tight schedule. Over the years, I often made sure I had some backup service, but things really changed for me about ten years ago. Read the rest of
/episode/index/show/voiceofthedba/id/18290873
info_outline
Imposter or Student
03/12/2021
Imposter or Student
If you're moving forward in your career, you're a bit of an imposter. Actually, according to David Perell, . Many of the very successful people in technology built things that they knew nothing about. They learned technology, business, sales, and more on their way to success. I posted a note about the video above, and someone suggested that we are students instead. The negative connotation of an , someone that deliberately fakes their knowledge is something that bothers many. I get that, and I do understand the desire to disclose what you know and what you don't. Read the rest of
/episode/index/show/voiceofthedba/id/18290813
info_outline
Disclosing the How
03/08/2021
Disclosing the How
Many of us have written a computer program of some sort. Maybe just a script to complete a task, maybe complex software the clients interact with. For all of us, I would guess that we've been asked to do something, or we've asked ourselves to build a program, and we use that request as a specification for our code. When we do this, how many of us get this right the first time? I'm sure some do, and the simpler or narrower the task, the more likely we get it right. However, we also sometimes make mistakes and realize that our specification wasn't correct or that we interpreted the specification incorrectly. Even when I write code for myself, sometimes I realize I haven't described when I need clearly enough, even in my own head. Read the rest of
/episode/index/show/voiceofthedba/id/18117056
info_outline
Using Dynamic SQL
03/02/2021
Using Dynamic SQL
There are many ways that you can structure your T-SQL code to solve complex problems. Throughout my career, I've learned different ways, and also some patterns to avoid. However, those change over time. For example, there was a time when heavily loading tempdb caused issues in the v6 era. As a result, I tried to avoid using them. These days, I'd consider them a good option to think about. One of the techniques that I see people trying often is Dynamic SQL. This is where you don't write the code directly, but you write code that will put together a string of code to execute, and then you call this with EXECUTE() or some other mechanism to get your results. Read the rest of
/episode/index/show/voiceofthedba/id/18112478
info_outline
Viva
03/01/2021
Viva
I want holographic screens and meetings. Heck, I'd like Teams/Slack/Zoom/etc. to recognize multiple screens and let me separate out different cameras to different screens. I'd like to be able to see more than a tiny thumbnail of a presenter, or of other people that are in a meeting. That might be one of the things I miss most when I'm in these virtual meetings. I can often barely see others. is a new platform for remote work and collaboration. I'm not completely sure what it is, though there is . It's not an app, but appears to be some way to connect various information in an organization into Teams. It's like an intranet from the 90s, but designed to help someone navigate their organization and work environment. Read the rest of
/episode/index/show/voiceofthedba/id/18085178
info_outline
What's a lot of money?
02/26/2021
What's a lot of money?
The other day I was talking to a someone about the amount of money their business spent on a particular transaction. This person thought the amount was high, but I didn't. We had an interesting discussion from there. Today, I'm curious what you think is a lot of money that your organization might have spent on some transaction. A piece of hardware, some software, maybe even another company. Are there times you've felt they overpaid for some item that you wouldn't have bought? Read the rest of
/episode/index/show/voiceofthedba/id/18085025
info_outline
UX Matters
02/25/2021
UX Matters
When I was early in my career, VB v4 was popular, and easy. So many basic apps were built by not only software developers, but people in other departments with an interest in programming. Through VB v6, I found so many apps being built, often with complex and un-intuitive interfaces. I was reminded of these apps when I saw Apparently an employee was supposed to send interest payments of US$7.8mm to creditors, however, the employee paid $500mm to Revlon, the entire amount of the loan. A mistake, and one for which Citibank is likely liable. Read the rest of
/episode/index/show/voiceofthedba/id/18084965
info_outline
Shared Security
02/23/2021
Shared Security
When I worked in a large Operations team, we had various passwords for some systems that we stored in a password vault. This was on a network share that only the administrators had access to read. We used this for keeping a number of passwords for various services and systems that required sysadmins to access. However, we tried not to use shared accounts whenever possible. We wanted to ensure an audit trail, for both compliance and understanding of what happened in our environments. All sysadmins had two accounts, which allowed them to access most services. We only had a user/password stored for certain systems that needed some sort of separate account, and we did change those passwords regularly. Read the rest of
/episode/index/show/voiceofthedba/id/17988386
info_outline
Being Professional
02/22/2021
Being Professional
I often write about data professionals, meaning those people who work with data and are paid to do so. Certainly some of you might be amateurs, doing data work as a hobby, but most of the people that visit SQLServerCentral work with data as a part of their career. The second part of that title is the "professional" part. What does it mean to be a professional? I saw recently that caught my eye. He talks about treating others as you'd like to be treated, which is a good place to start for most of us. Read the rest of
/episode/index/show/voiceofthedba/id/17988284
info_outline
Coding Tips
02/19/2021
Coding Tips
I really like Visual Studio Code. The more I use it, the more I get comfortable in it, and the more I appreciate the design and flow of using the editor. I didn't feel that way early on, preferring the comfort of Visual Studio, but now I most often use VS Code. The other day I saw an article from one of the PMs for the product, with . I like some of these, and have already found a few to be handy in my work. I've even started to search out a few more of these, and found . Read the rest of
/episode/index/show/voiceofthedba/id/17988185
info_outline
The Growth of Terabytes
02/17/2021
The Growth of Terabytes
Years ago, fresh out of university, I joined the . As one of the benefits, I got their magazine, with various articles that might expand my knowledge. In one issue, I remember reading about the challenges of video on demand. At the time, calculating what it would take to store digital movies and broadcast them to each TV seemed like an impossible task. This was in the days if hardwired 10Mbps Ethernet and dial-up Internet. Not too long ago I had some Internet bandwidth issues, and got some stuttering during video meetings. I run as a skin on my PC, and once I got things working, I was curious what sort of bandwidth I was using. These days, if I'm not doing any streaming of audio/video, my PC seems to need about 1-3kbps to keep Tweetdeck, Outlook, Slack, etc. going. Youtube seems to get bursts to 1.5Mbps every few seconds, but plenty of low < 100kbps times in between. Netflix seems to be a steady 2Mbps to get video. Read the rest of
/episode/index/show/voiceofthedba/id/17988119
info_outline
Column vs Row
02/11/2021
Column vs Row
I've been working with databases for a long time. They've always been relational databases to me, unless they were a key-value, document, or NoSQL class of store. A few years ago at the Pass Summit, David Dewitt gave a keynote on changes to storage that Microsoft was implementing, talking about . At first the structure felt confusing, but as he proceeded, it started to make sense. We don't like SELECT * for many reasons, but one is that lots of unnecessary data gets moved off disk, into memory, and across a network. This is the nature of a row based store, which is what we usually have in relational databases. Read the rest of
/episode/index/show/voiceofthedba/id/17840240
info_outline
Anyone Can Click Through Once
02/10/2021
Anyone Can Click Through Once
I was watching some of the Virtual Summit conference content () trying to catch up on a few sessions that I missed during the event. One of the sessions I watched was a PowerShell panel. In the panel, Ben Miller ( | | ) said that "anyone can click their way through something once." I agree with that. It's really easy to run through something once, even a long wizard or install process. Most of us find it easier to just get something done than work on a script to complete it. Often, I find myself doing this for tasks that I tackle rarely, like installing SQL Server. With the growth of containers, I rarely install SQL Server anymore, but the few times I might want a VM outside of a cloud system, I find it easier to just run the install than find a script and alter the settings. Read the rest of
/episode/index/show/voiceofthedba/id/17840249
info_outline
A Bug or a Vandalism Opportunity
02/09/2021
A Bug or a Vandalism Opportunity
I hadn't heard about this problem at all until I saw . Apparently a one line command can be hidden inside a Windows shortcut file, a ZIP archive, batch files, or various other vectors. This command can trigger hard drive errors that corrupt the device. Yikes. A researcher apparently has been trying to draw attention to this since August, but it has not been fixed. What is scary is that this issues can be exploited by tricking standard accounts in Windows, not just privileged ones. Read the rest of
/episode/index/show/voiceofthedba/id/17840096
info_outline
AI Can Improve Healthcare
02/08/2021
AI Can Improve Healthcare
It's early days, but I found to be very interesting. In this case, an AI model was trained to use some patient feedback on knee pain, as opposed to a previous methodology. The old methodology did work, but it had some problems with some populations. I haven't thought that much of our ML/AI (machine learning/artificial intelligence) work is particularly smart. The algorithms learn well and they can match or out-perform humans, but these systems are really mimicking what humans do. They can be more reliably and definitely more scalable, but it's doing what we humans do, not often leaping ahead. Read the rest of
/episode/index/show/voiceofthedba/id/17840045
info_outline
Tough Interview Questions
02/05/2021
Tough Interview Questions
Many of us know that interviewing someone and evaluating their skills is a tough job. There have been all sorts of techniques tried by various companies, some of which , but many are and practical skills. All in all, I'm not sure any of these really predict if someone will be a valuable employee. I've seen a lot of senior technology people lament the quality of the candidates they interview. I suspect some of this is that most of the really talented people aren't out there interviewing regularly. Instead, there are many people applying for jobs, some with narrow sets of experience that might not match what you are looking for. Some may be applying for jobs that are beyond their skills, hoping to get through an interview and get an offer. Maybe others rub the interviewer the wrong way, and create a negative impression that doesn't represent how the person might work with others. Read the rest of
/episode/index/show/voiceofthedba/id/17761943
info_outline
Do it. Try it. Fix it.
02/04/2021
Do it. Try it. Fix it.
"Do it. Try it. Fix it." - Sam Walton That quote is interesting, and while I don't think Sam Walton was thinking about software, this is the loop that I, and many others, follow. We see a problem, and we try some things. If they work, we move on, if not, we fix things. At least, that's the approach most of us would like to take when we see an issue. Sometimes management gets in the way of us following a simple process. Read the rest of
/episode/index/show/voiceofthedba/id/17761970
info_outline
The Database Server Upgrade for Let's Encrypt
01/31/2021
The Database Server Upgrade for Let's Encrypt
is a service the provides free SSL certificates for web servers. They have grown from a small project to a critical service on the web that serves over 235mm clients each year, and often issues over 1.5mm certificates each day. They depend on a MariaDB database to support this, and recently, they made. They run physical hardware on a managed services provider (), rather than using a cloud platform service, which is fine. While cloud services are great, they aren't always the best choice. I'd like to see them talk about any evaluation as to what Datto is better than, say, AWS. In any case, I like seeing how people upgrade hardware, as well as the impact of changes. I haven't always done this when I've upgraded my home systems, though I do notice the new one always runs faster. Good for me, but for production systems, we should have better metrics, if for no other reason than to better learn how to size the next upgrade. Read the rest of
/episode/index/show/voiceofthedba/id/17762120
info_outline
Live versus Stored Data
01/26/2021
Live versus Stored Data
I've been working with various technologies as experiments over the last few years. I'm curious how useful I find them, as well as how they might help the clients and customers I run into at Redgate Software. I think are a technology that has a lot of promise, and their use is growing in many organizations. One of the interesting things with notebooks is they can store results inside them, which allows a transfer of information in an interesting fashion. If I re-run a cell, the results can change, which is a separate issue, but at least I can capture the results. Read the rest of
/episode/index/show/voiceofthedba/id/17640674
info_outline
Are You Empowered?
01/25/2021
Are You Empowered?
Today, even the most clockwork of tasks, like factory floor labor, can benefit from some degree of innovation and creative thinking. There are even some companies that are and improving the way things work. This can work well with jobs that are repetitive and subject to automation efforts. The less people’s jobs can be automated, however, the more you need them to take initiative. When someone's job isn't easily automated, there is a need for innovation and creative thought. Despite the evidence of all these studies, few managers are willing to take this leap. Today, only and act resourcefully; most feel disenfranchised or locked down. Read the rest of
/episode/index/show/voiceofthedba/id/17640617
info_outline
A Beginning Project
01/22/2021
A Beginning Project
One of the ways in which developers become better at their craft is by building software. They tackle a personal project or maybe modify someone else's code. They may work through exercises, solving problems like the . As with many tasks, practice makes perfect. Database developers need to do the same thing. To grow their skills, they certainly need to find ways to improve their skills. That means tackling some sort of database project, which is often inherently more complex than a software project. Beginning code projects might ask you to reverse a string. Certainly a T-SQL project might do that, but what about storing a set of data for strings? What about setting up a server and database? There can be a lot more to database development than the programming code. Read the rest of
/episode/index/show/voiceofthedba/id/17640479
info_outline
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
/episode/index/show/voiceofthedba/id/16239635