voiceofthedba's podcast
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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Chopping Off Data
10/18/2020
Chopping Off Data
Do you know the difference between XLS and XLSX? They're both Excel formats, and many of us might just use one or the other. After all, the latest versions of Excel work with both, and if you've been using a spreadsheet for years, perhaps you stick with the older format when exchanging data with others. As many of you might have seen, Public Health England recently learned there is a difference with large amounts of data. They found because they were using the old XLS format, which only supports 65k rows. The newer XLSX format will support a million rows, but both numbers are far below what SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and other platforms support. Those platforms support billions, and most are limited only by the storage available. Read the rest of
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Career Goals and Inspiration
10/15/2020
Career Goals and Inspiration
Many of us start working in technology because we enjoy programming or software or data or some other aspect of computing. We usually have some excitement that gets us motivated to start learning or apply for a job. Over time, we may move our area of focus, pick up new platforms, change jobs, and more. I'd like to think that most people actively make choices, rather than fall into the next situation, but I see the latter more often than the former. People take jobs quickly, when offered, even if the opportunity isn't one for they were aiming. This certainly isn't all bad, as there are times when we get opportunities we weren't expecting. We may not realize what possibilities are available. However, I do regularly see people not thinking about the next step in their career until they need a job or they hate the one they are in. With that in mind, asking you to think about where you might want to go or what to achieve, I have a question for you. Read the rest of
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The Degradation of the Turing Test
10/14/2020
The Degradation of the Turing Test
The from Alan Turing was proposed as a test of an intelligent system. Could a human determine if the other party in a conversation was a machine? This was an interesting way of imagining how powerful a computer might grow and the types of answers it might give to a human. Interestingly enough Turing didn't argue about the correctness of the answers, just that they appeared to be from a human. In some sense, I wonder how many people would have been fooled by the GPT-3 bot on Reddit. It to a variety of threads. You can look through the posts by the "" user, but this one caught my eye, and as I read it, I was surprised how much I've seen posted on the Internet. Read the rest of
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The App Compatibility Promise
10/12/2020
The App Compatibility Promise
I was listening to one of the Ignite keynotes, and I heard an executive say something about "if your app doesn't work, we'll pay to fix it, or fix Windows." I had stop and rewind and check, and then go look around. Sure enough, there is an for Windows 10 and apps. This isn't just for commercial software, but it lists custom line-of-business apps, third party apps, and more. Now, this doesn't appear to be for everyone. for at last the FastTrack portion of this is 150 or more licenses of Windows, Office, etc. However, it is a guarantee that they will help you. Read the rest of
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How Important is a Conference?
10/11/2020
How Important is a Conference?
The PASS Virtual Summit is coming up next month, and Andy has a few thoughts on . As someone that has been through this many times, Andy has good advice, and his thoughts are the types of things I've done in the past at various jobs I've had. Having a good reason why was important before I started speaking. Once I started speaking, I often made a deal with my boss that I'd cover some parts of the event and they'd cover others. We both made a shared investment in my career, which made sense to me. I often used Andy's line, which is what I was thinking about today. This is important to me. Read the rest of
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What's the Lunch Factor?
10/08/2020
What's the Lunch Factor?
A few weeks ago I wrote about the bus factor. This is the number of people that could cripple your organization if they got hit by a bus. Maybe a better way of looking at this is the lottery factor. If these people won a lottery and quit, would they cause problems? There were some interesting answers in the discussion.There is another factor that I heard about in a presentation that I found interesting: the Lunch Factor. This is the number of people that have to get involved for you to deploy changes to production. Today, I wonder what your lunch factor is? Leave a note in the discussion. 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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AI Data
10/06/2020
AI Data
At the Microsoft Ignite conference recently, I saw a talk that mentioned the Microsoft Garage Project, , which is designed to help people provide data for AI projects in a new way. You can and get the app for Android mobile devices. Trove is built to help AI researchers find images and use them in projects. However, the data they get is provided by users, who make the choice to include their data. This is different than many AI projects, where anyone doing AI work often just gets data from various sources, sometimes without permissions, but often without the individuals who own the data understanding where their data is being used or for what purposes. Read the rest of
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DevOps and Exhibits
10/05/2020
DevOps and Exhibits
Last month I did a with the on DevOps and databases. I was on a panel with a few government employees talking about the COVID-19 pandemic and how this may have changed work inside the US government. One of the panelists is a full stack developer for the Smithsonian. Ravyn Manuel talked a bit about her work in trying to build new exhibits for the African American History and Culture Museum, which will look to open up soon. Many of the exhibits in the museum were built to be interactive and touch capable. With the COVID-19 pandemic, they need to revisit their approach, finding ways to avoid having visitors touch shared surfaces. Read the rest of
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Detecting Logins
10/04/2020
Detecting Logins
Do you have a login on any of your SQL Server instances that is named "default"? If you do, you might have an issue with . This adds a login with the name of default and the password of "@fg125kjnhn987.". Stop and double check your instances now. If you use , you can also add to your alerts to look for this on an ongoing basis. Read the rest of
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Moving in the Post Pandemic World
10/01/2020
Moving in the Post Pandemic World
After a few months of the pandemic lockdown this year, my company gave people the option of leaving the local area where our headquarters is located and moving to another part of England. Actually, since we aren't planning on anyone coming into an office in 2020, we allowed people to move away from the cities where we are located, with a request that they remain in the same country. A number of companies have followed similar suit, most notably a number of big tech companies. Google has said that , while . Facebook is allowing workers to leave Silicon Valley, but . All are disruptive actions, and may forever change the culture for these companies. Read the rest of
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DR As a Service
09/30/2020
DR As a Service
It's not the first task when I start a new job, but often as a DBA or developer, I usually ask about Disaster Recovery (DR) plans sometime within the first six months. If I'm a DBA, of course I need a plan. If I'm a developer, however, I still need to understand how this might work as it can affect how I build the software and prepare for networking, machine changes, etc. Even if I don't concern myself with production DR, I usually do want to make sure the VCS repos are being protected, which is something I've found isn't always being handled. I have had to build and test DR plans as a member of an Operations team in the past. While my plans and practice are nothing like Google's large exercises, they often reveal some issues, even when we duplicate the service without touching production. I've usually found the brainstorming and debating of the various ways to build a plan to be fun. Arguing for money and then actually implementing plans is less interesting, but the testing is a great challenge. I've had some fun days offsite where we try to recover systems and find all the little things that we take for granted in our production environment. Read the rest of
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The Value of Metadata
09/29/2020
The Value of Metadata
A long time ago, nearly two decades ago, I had a manager come ask me about metadata, specifically, what it was. This was a technical manager, who understood software well but wasn't a data expert. I tried to explain data about data, but at that time, the world primarily dealt with client-server type technologies, with data being something that was primarily about a think. Metadata like types, scales, etc., weren't seen as that useful. Descriptive items, like we might store in the MS_Description extended property, were rare. Today, we use metadata quite often, and I think in many ways we've "consumer-ized" metadata with tagging and other structures that let the users of our software add descriptive attributes to the data they store in our systems. In some sense, we get metadata at a deeper level, almost the row or cell level from actual users, as if we were tracking column or entity level markers. Read the rest of
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Do You Know What the Settings Should Be?
09/27/2020
Do You Know What the Settings Should Be?
One of the is in estate management, trying to better understand how people manage an estate of servers. These could be physical servers you own, VMs in a hosted or cloud situation, or even a platform service like Azure SQL Database or AWS RDS. In today's world with a myriad of choices, it's easy to lose control of your estate of servers. I saw a quote recently from someone that was struggling with their estate. They said: "The moment it goes red, if you don't know what it should be, then you're clutching at straws." Read the rest of
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The Habits of Better Teams
09/22/2020
The Habits of Better Teams
As a developer, I've often worked with a team of others, where we discussed the software we were building, what architectures and patterns to adopt, etc. While we all learned to work together, there were plenty of times that it felt as if we were working separately on code, but arguing often about how to make a decision about a technical approach or a priority. As a DBA, I've often worked alone, though usually interfacing with different teams as needed. In these cases, I've often had to learn to make my own decisions and then justify those to others later. The few times I worked with a team of DBAs, it seemed as though this was still the model, independent work, though with everyone deferring to the senior DBA. Read the rest of
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The New Normal Annoyances
09/21/2020
The New Normal Annoyances
Recently I re-ran . The world of work has changed for many of us. For the last few months, many of us have previously worked in offices have had to work at home. We often have partners, roommates, spouses, kids, pets, and more that distract us from the environment we're used to being in while working on the data platform. I don't know how the world of work will change, but I do know it will. As I write this, I'm not sure when I'll actually be able to go back to an office to work. While I don't go often, I am looking forward to spending a few days here and there with others when I'm able. What I'm not sure about is whether I'll see lots of people or just a few. Will there be rotations of who's in the office during the week? Will I, as an outsider, be able to meet with the large variety of developers I'm used to seeing, or am I an infection vector to be avoided? Read the rest of
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Compatibility Level Confidence
09/20/2020
Compatibility Level Confidence
SQL Server databases have had a compatibility level in them for a long time. This is a number that essentially corresponds to a version. We had 70 for version 7.0, and then we went to 80 for SQL Server 2000, 90 for 2005, and we currently are at 150, which you just have to know maps to 2019. I really miss real version numbers. In any case, there is this statement on the that says this: " As long as the application does not need to leverage enhancements that are only available in a higher database compatibility level, it is a valid approach to upgrade the SQL Server Database Engine and maintain the previous database compatibility level, with no need to recertify an application. " Read the rest of
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Aiming for Better Data Governance
09/15/2020
Aiming for Better Data Governance
At Redgate, we have customers all over the world. I'm lucky that I get to work with, and sometimes meet, people dealing with all sorts of situations, environments, and even regional challenges. As a dev and DBA, I've never worried about anything other than varchar(). Now I have customers that have lots of languages and other issues that need to be accounted for in their designs. One of the areas that has become more important in the last few years is . Between the GDPR and other legislation, and growing concern from customers, many organizations are starting to pay more attention to this area. Less so in the US, where we seem to be behind most of the rest of the world. Read the rest of
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The Challenges of Splitting a Table
09/15/2020
The Challenges of Splitting a Table
I ran across a about splitting a table. In this case, the original post had to do with a , which is a technique that can help you better manage data in your database. However, I haven't often seen this technique employed in the real world. I wonder how many of you have considered a vertical partition when you are modeling data. Often we may not think about this early in the lifecycle of an entity, but as it grows, you might think about reducing the amount of data you often query in some way, and a vertical partition can help. Read the rest of
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Choosing a VCS
09/13/2020
Choosing a VCS
As someone that speaks and promotes DevOps, I get asked for recommendations and specifics all the time for tooling. One of the questions I'll get asked regularly is about version control. First, use it. There's no excuse for not using version control these days, especially as most of the software out there is free. My view is that is really the choice these days. Most IDEs and software tools work with git, and if they don't, likely they don't support version control. While there are lots of choices out there, and I've used a lot in my career, it seems that Git has really won and is the default choice for so many organizations. What's interesting is so many of the surveys and tracking of version control systems tend to rank the most often used hosting services, all of which use Git. Read the rest of
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Remote Work Benefits
09/10/2020
Remote Work Benefits
It seems as though many of us that have been remote working will continue to do so. I see some offices opening, but not many. I had one friend that had everyone go back to their office in Denver, but they tend to all close their office doors so they don't have to wear masks and they do their meetings over Zoom. Seems crazy to go into the office for that. The weight of this type of work continuing for the next six or more months has been a little tough for me at times. That sounds crazy, for someone that's been a remote worker for over a decade, but I used to regularly go to offices, visit people, or even go work in Starbucks. Those types of things aren't happening for me now. I am going to try and see if I can get a few more lunches with friends, especially when the weather changes a bit. Read the rest of
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The Real Life Software Movie Plot
09/09/2020
The Real Life Software Movie Plot
It wasn't that long ago that was released. In it, a security executive has his family taken hostage, with the plot being that the executive will help the criminals rob the bank that he's spent years protecting or his family will be killed. While I haven't heard of this extreme happening in the real world, I wonder how far away we are from this. Recently, there was a less violent attempt at hacking, with someone to slip ransomware into their network. The idea would have been to threaten Tesla with data release unless they paid up. The details are interesting, and supposedly the ransomware cost US$250,000 to build, but to criminals, so maybe this would have been very profitable. Read the rest of
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Do You Have Big Data?
09/08/2020
Do You Have Big Data?
Data sizes are always growing. Stats on world data are astounding, as are the stats many of us experience in our lives. Plenty of us have moved from MB management to GBs, and I see plenty of people dealing with TB storage at home. Most of that data is likely from images and video, but I wouldn't be surprised to find some people capturing lots of IoT and other random data about their lives. As data professionals, likely we don't quite have the explosion of data inside our organizations, but we certainly do have increasing database sizes. I see this with customers all the time, often with continued or expanded collection of data and no archival plans. The number of customers with > 1TB databases increases every year. Read the rest of
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Long Term WFH
09/01/2020
Long Term WFH
I'm not sure I've accepted that we're still in a work from home pandemic that is going to continue for the next six months. It does weigh on me at times, and I've struggled to cope with the same four walls the last few weeks, mostly because I don't think I've accepted this fact. Redgate's offices are closed for the rest of the year, with no real plans to open anything anytime soon. Many people are pleased with the current status, and we're hiring people on a regular basis. Is long term work from home the thing that many companies will adopt? Certainly some can't, and lots of jobs around the world don't lend themselves to remote work, but for those of us in technology, it's possible. Lots of our management has realized this, and plenty of people like it. Disappointing for me, and maybe for some of you, but good for lots of others. Certainly I see more and more companies every week extending their WFH practice. Read the rest of
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The Evolution of Windows
08/31/2020
The Evolution of Windows
I like Windows 10. I've used every Windows version since 3.1, abandoning Windows 98, Windows ME, and Windows 8. That last versions I used very briefly, didn't like it, and quickly returned to the previous version. I thought Windows 7 was amazing, using less hardware resources for the first time ever, and I've enjoyed Windows 10 since I upgraded. In fact, I think at this point I've built 4 or 5 different Windows 10 machines from scratch. I don't change hardware, but Windows 10 has evolved, essentially growing without changing versions. It had its 5th anniversary recently, and I was surprised to see a few articles like , that all talked about Windows 10 not being a success. News to me, since I've been happy with it. Read the rest of
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The Challenges of Resetting Databases
08/30/2020
The Challenges of Resetting Databases
I was working on a demo recently where we had a database in version control and a development database. This was a team environment, with a few of us making changes and syncing them across our dev systems using git. We had some advanced technology with our , , and GitHub. Once we had our scenarios working, someone wanted to reset our git repo and capture a new database image. However, when we reset the repo back, we had some issues with the database. In this case, there were changes in the database that didn't exist in the repo, giving us a mismatch. Not a big problem, but cleaning things out to get the db to match the repo, without putting those changes into the repo, was a challenge. Read the rest of
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Microservices
08/26/2020
Microservices
Recently I wrote about and how applicable they might be today. One of those was microservices, which I don't see implemented that often with relational databases. I do see developers wanting to use them, but I don't see them often with a RDBMS backend. I did see , which mirrors that view. Lots of talk about the architecture, but not a lot of implementation. O'Reilly did a survey in Feb 2020, just before the world changed, and the found that only 10% reported complete success, but 54% felt mostly successful, and 92% some success. That's better than I thought. Read the rest of
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Better Government Security Through DevOps
08/25/2020
Better Government Security Through DevOps
Most teams building software seem to go a little too fast to ensure their code is both secure and of high quality. I don't think it really matters whether you are working in a waterfall process, agile, lean, or any other methodology. Whether fast or slow, humans will make mistakes, new code can introduce a vulnerability. Even if you follow great practices, it seems that hackers and criminals find new attack vectors all the time. I'm not sure we really can go slow enough and stay in business.Those of us working as data professionals know that protecting the data in our databases is important. We are reluctant to allow too much change too quickly, especially when there might be changes that affect security. However, is limiting change the best idea? Read the rest of
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Data Analysis Without a Server
08/24/2020
Data Analysis Without a Server
Most of us that subscribe to this site are data professionals, and we work with large amounts of data for our organizations that is usually stored on a server class system, with TB sized, high performance storage systems. Whether on premises, in the cloud, or another data center, our employers have made an investment to provide high quality data services for our clients. This large investment is often a big decision, and setting up a new system to handle lots of data as an experiment with data analysis can often seem to take ages.The R language has been popular for data analysis for years, though the data sets examined were often limited in size, usually because of workstation limitations. One of the reasons Microsoft added R services to the data platform was to move analysis closer to big stores of data and increase the ability of organizations to "operationalize" or deploy their analysis and models to a wider audience. Read the rest of
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Looking Back at Software Development Trends
08/23/2020
Looking Back at Software Development Trends
In some ways, the world of software development hasn't changed much. The same sorts of skills and techniques I saw people using on COBOL programs hitting DB/2 and C++ over Oracle 6 are used today in React and C# against Azure SQL database. On the other hand, it does seem that we are more mature in how we work together and the flexibility with which we design systems. I saw from 2019 that ran for software developers. This was a look at what modern trends might exist, though over a year later, perhaps the world is dramatically changed again. Let me look at each of the four trends they point out. Read the rest of
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