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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A Supercomputer in my Pocket
02/15/2019
A Supercomputer in my Pocket
I work with data on a regular basis, and I really depend on my cell phone to help me with both work and life. I regularly make notes and get ideas for articles and editorials from things that happen when I’m on the go. Without a smartphone, I’d be juggling a notebook and pen, perhaps pulling over and making notes that I’d transcribe later. Since I'm in different cars and vehicles with different bags, I'm not sure how well I'd be able to keep track of notes on paper. In the last decade, as I’ve purchased and upgraded mobile devices, it’s been amazing to me that I can use many services to help me. I can log into something like Instapaper to save an interesting article I might write about later, or capture a few thoughts in Evernote. Or even send myself an email with an idea for a Question of the Day. I’ve done all of those things while in various points when inspiration has struck. Read the rest of A Supercomputer in My Pocket
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Someone Lost My Data
02/14/2019
Someone Lost My Data
It was bound to happen. I'm sure it's happened before, but this event was interesting to me as it wasn't a customer issue, but a cloud vendor problem. There was an outage in Azure on Jan 29, which happens, but in this case data was lost. There was problem internal code in the Azure cloud that dropped some customer databases using the Azure Key Vault with TDE encryption. That was slightly disconcerting for me as I was setting up and testing Azure Key Vault this week. There are frequent snapshots and Microsoft was able to restore the databases from one that was about five minutes old. Microsoft acknowledges that five minutes of data loss might be an issue and is asking customers that lost business or were affected by the drops to raise a support ticket. I have found Azure support to be pretty good about crediting my account when issues occur, and I hope they do the same here, though I wonder if they'll compensate anything beyond the charges normally assessed to customers. They are offering credit for the restored and original databases for a few months as well. Read the rest of Someone Lost My Data
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Google's Expensive Confusing Rules
02/13/2019
Google's Expensive Confusing Rules
I worked through the Y2K crisis. I call it a crisis because so many of us were worried and millions, probably hundreds of millions of dollars were spent by companies trying to ensure their software systems would work when the date changed to 2000/01/01 00:00:00. I was on call that night, celebrating the new year at home, not drinking because I was slightly worried my paranoid boss would call me in. He didn't and there were few issues around the world in systems, perhaps because of the build up of the crisis and lots of prep work. I went through a similar set of concerns when the Sarbanes-Oxley act was passed in the US. Not much came of it, and companies spent a lot of time and money preparing. Over the last two years, it has been deja vu as the GDPR moved towards the enforcement date last May. Lots of companies, including my own employer (Redgate Software) were concerned and spent time and resources getting ready. The enforcement date came, with some early complaints being filed, but few fines. Perhaps the preparation paid off, but more likely it just takes time for audits to occur and complaints to be investigated. Read the rest of Google's Expensive Confusing Rules
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Hard Drive Reliability
02/12/2019
Hard Drive Reliability
Do any of you still use hard drives? I'm sure some of you do, and I'm also sure plenty of you aren't sure if you're using HDDs or SSDs. For some of us, the hardware is just a set of resources with a certain quantity, capacity and performance. While we used to spec, purchase, and assemble database servers in the past, these days may of us just specify cores, RAM, and IOPs or some storage capacity, not worrying about how our resources are actually implemented. I know that I assume SQLServerCentral is using SSDs in our hosted systems, but I honestly don't know, much less care about the type of drives in use. I saw Backblaze release their 2018 hard drive stats recently, looking at the reliability of their storage. Since BackBlaze is in the business of storing data, they need to ensure that they have quality storage. I'm a customer, and I appreciate that they're not just buying and using devices, but also tracking how well the different brands and models work. Since they have over 100,000 drives, this means they can provide some interesting information on reliability. Read the rest of Hard Drive Reliability
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DR Prep Can Miss the Little Things
02/11/2019
DR Prep Can Miss the Little Things
The other day we had a blizzard in Colorado and we weren't quite prepared. My wife and I were away on a trip and watching the weather. We were concerned about flights and about the conditions at the ranch with someone else in charge of horses. We were lucky in that the weather didn't come as quickly as predicted and we made it home before the snow started. Depending on moisture and temperature, we sometimes put blankets on horses, which is a chore that I'm not very good at completing. Fortunately the kids were around and at 8pm, we all dressed in warm clothes and headed out to the barn. The horses depend on us to provide for some of their needs, so we each had jobs to do. One kid secured a temporary holding area to keep horses nearby. One gathered 14 or 15 blankets from storage and laid them out. My wife made grain to facilitate attracting the horses and giving us a way to hold them while blankets went on. Read the rest of DR Prep Can Miss the Little Things
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Learn More than Technology
02/08/2019
Learn More than Technology
I've been lucky and successful in life in many ways. Certainly I've worked hard, may long days and nights, but plenty of others have as well. In fact, there are plenty of people I know that have worked more hours, but been less successful. Conversely, I know some that have worked much less and been more successful. It's hard to know what the best way is for each of us to examine how to move forward in life, but it's also not really helpful to compare yourself with others as a measurement. What I'd note you should do is decide if you think you're becoming more or less successful and find your own path. This could mean very different things to different people, and that's fine. I don't want to live other people's lives. I want to live my own, learning from positive and negative things that happen to others, but following the path that best suits my wife and me. I include my wife because we're a partnership. We decided to spend our lives together, and that means we work with each other, sharing success and sacrifice, making joint decisions. It's worked out well for us, and I am looking forward to the next few decades of continuing on that path. Read the rest of Learn More than Technology
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Forgiveness
02/07/2019
Forgiveness
We are frail, fragile creatures. I think this is one of the main reasons I push for and try to work in an agile, DevOps style of development. I know that I make mistakes, as do others. My goal is often to ensure our system, our process, our way of working can transcend those mistakes and we can still be effective. We can use automation and regular examination of what works and what doesn't to ensure our system works well and isn't overly dependent on one person. Part of dealing with mistakes and failures is learning from them. Not only do we need to learn ourselves, and avoid repeating mistakes, but we also need to learn to forgive others. I thought about this as I was reading Derik Hammer's post on Active Forgiveness. In his post, he covers the situations where we acknowledge mistakes without a punishment. Instead, we forgive the act and go to work on finding ways to prevent the same situation from happening in the future. Read the rest of Forgiveness
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Why Change?
02/04/2019
Why Change?
I was reading Change is Hard from Jeff Hackert and I started to think about the ways in which I both change and resist change. I then started to think about the ways in which I ask people to change what they're doing. I do this both at work and in life, with mixed levels of success. The one thing the article got me to think about was the idea that in asking someone to change, I'm implying they are doing something poorly, or wrong, already. In some cases, that's true. When I coach volleyball, I am often telling someone they are not practicing a technique correctly, and they need to change. The trick here is showing them what they are actually doing, since many of us don't realize when we are moving our body incorrectly. We think we're doing what we were told, and often it's only with video evidence do we realize what we're doing wrong. Once we do, it becomes easier to make corrections. Read the rest of Why Change?
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Enjoying a Down Weekend
02/01/2019
Enjoying a Down Weekend
The Oscar nominations were released recently, with quite a few nods to The Black Panther. I did see that one on a plane, and despite the small screen, I enjoyed the story and the visual action. It's one that I may try to watch again on a larger screen at some point, likely with kids. The family is a group of Marvel fans, and while I've mostly stuck to the mainstream movies, the kids have enjoyed some of the series that complete the Marvel Universe. We've gone as a group to most of the theatrical movies, and I expect we'll see the next Avengers when it releases. I also saw the best geek movies of 2018, most of which I had not seen. I'm more of an episodic, TV show fan, but I get to a few movies with my wife, who loves them. A good movie is sometimes a great break on the weekend from life, and I wanted to get some recommendations from others. Winter time in Colorado keeps me busy, and I love reading books, but sometimes curling up to watch a movie with the family is something I look forward to enjoying. Read the rest of Enjoying a Down Weekend
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The Downside of Tool Autonomy
01/31/2019
The Downside of Tool Autonomy
I am a big believer in letting teams of people work in a way that allows them some autonomy to solve a problem. I think this is especially important in the software world, where developers need to experiment and learn from the new ideas that they investigate. They need to be able to try new techniques, technologies, and platforms. Yes, that includes NoSQL data stores. At the same time, this can lead to developers becoming captivated by new tools and techniques, all of which are good for advancing skills and code maturity, but can also lead to a very disparate environment where there are no best of breed solutions, or no standards for writing features. As the number of developers grow, this also raises the bar for each individual to know and understand more languages or technologies. Read the rest of The Downside of Tool Autonomy
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Reserved Space
01/30/2019
Reserved Space
Many of us that work with SQL Server are familiar with the idea of reserving space that our system might need later. This is normal operation in SQL Server, where we pre-allocate space to data and log files, knowing that SQL Server will manage and use this space over time. This can often be a strange concept for newcomers to the platform, who expect our database behaves like a text file, only using the space it needs for data. Choosing the amount of space to reserve is an art that many of us both struggle to articulate and explain to newcomers. It's also a problem that we often solve by guessing high and implementing monitoring. Lots of people worry about storage, even in this era of TB sized drives. I ran across an article noting that Windows is reserving 7GB of space for updates, which makes sense to me. I've had a few updates for smaller devices, like mobiles, fail because of space. I think the idea of having some space reserved for temp storage and then using that for updates is a good one. I also recognize that I'm in a different place than others. Most of my devices have plenty of free space. Well, not my phone, but that's a separate issue. Read the rest of Reserved Space
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A Large GDPR Victim
01/29/2019
A Large GDPR Victim
During the last two years, Redgate has been preparing for the GDPR to take effect in the European Union. As a company based in the UK, we recognized that there were both challenges and opportunities for our business. We needed to ensure we were compliant with the regulations, which would likely require us to change processes and educate our employees. At the same time, our customers would face similar challenges and there was an opportunity to help them achieve their own compliance with software tools. The GDPR enforcement began last May, though fairly slowly with few fines and decisions being handed down. Across the EU, it seems to have been a quiet period with few companies told they were non compliant. Most organizations likely think all their preparation has been worth the effort and likely believe that they are prepared for any complaints from customers or investigations from regulatory authorities. Read the rest of A Large GDPR Victim
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The Devil is in the Monitoring Details
01/28/2019
The Devil is in the Monitoring Details
Monitoring a database server is something that many of us know is important, but we often take the process for granted. Whether we've purchased a tool, like SQL Monitor, or we've built our own system, we often set up a watcher for our systems and rarely view the details unless something goes wrong. I'm not sure that's the wrong approach as part of the reason monitoring is set up is to allow data capture in the background and remove one more task from our daily workload. Monitoring isn't necessarily simple, however, and while I still debate the best way to do this in many organizations, I realize that monitoring isn't necessarily something I want to build in house. There is enough work to just work with the data that other systems might output that I really want some other software in place that is built to perform monitoring for specific technologies. In reading about the complexity for the Stack Overflow monitoring systems, I realize that this can become very complex for a "set it up and let it run in the background" configuration. Read the rest of The Devil is in the Monitoring Details
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Your Recovery Time
01/25/2019
Your Recovery Time
Disaster Recovery is both an exciting challenge for many DBAs and also a dreaded event that many hope they never experience. When a true disaster befalls your system, there is a tremendous amount of stress as we work to get things running again so clients can access data. Even the best laid plans will often have a glitch, and while it's a great technical challenge, most of us would rather keep practicing and gaming possibilities than actually experience a disaster. The majority of our system disasters are localized to the actual machine handling our workloads. We often don't have outside disasters, like hurricanes, with disruption and damage to other parts of our infrastructure and ever our lives. When that happens on top of a down system, it's a level of stress that can affect our health. I've been lucky in that I've experienced both kinds of disasters, but never at the same time. I hope you can say the same thing. Read the rest of Your Recovery Time
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Faster Cloud Warehouses
01/23/2019
Faster Cloud Warehouses
I think the cloud is a perfect place for a data warehouse. In many organizations, I've found that a data warehouse system is often the largest SQL Server database, both in size of database and also in terms of resources allocated. These systems often handle many complex queries for business users and are allocated a large number of CPUs as well as lots of RAM. Even then, many ad hoc BI tools or lots of "what-if" queries can bring the system to its knees, often causing lots of stress for database administrators during the periods of time when the system is in heavy use. Fortunately, many of these systems aren't in use all the time. Often these are systems used by financial departments to "close the books" at month, quarter, or year end. It's at these times when lots of resources are needed. Outside of these times, the data warehouse might be one of the least used systems, which makes it a perfect choice for a cloud, scale on demand, environment. Scale up when needed, down when not, limit your costs to the resources you need, when you need them. Read the rest of Faster Cloud Warehouses
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The Lost Time
01/22/2019
The Lost Time
Last year when Daylight Savings Time moved clocks back, I was wondering how the time change might affect different devices and situations in the world. One area that I wondered about was medicate and health care devices. While I'm sure most (hopefully all) medical device software developers have thought about this, it was something that struck me this year as I was fighting a cold. I was taking a medicine designed to help reduce the length of illness and was supposed to take this every four hours. That meant if I took this at 10pm, the next dose should be 2am. However, if I woke up at 2:10am, it would actually be 1:10am since the clocks would have moved back an hour. If my clock adjusted itself, then it would be 3:10am. Not a big deal for my dosage, but for some people, this might really matter. Read the rest of The Lost Time
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The Justification Database
01/18/2019
The Justification Database
I saw an article on the security at various Department of Defense facilities that control the ballistic missile systems in the US. It's interesting reading, especially if you want to shake your head at bad practices. I think this article summarizes just how quickly the digital world has grown faster than the ability of humans to keep up and adopt new practices, especially where constant staff turnover is the norm. This is a good read for anyone in an organization that must plan for security and account for new staff on a regular basis. It certainly made me think a bit about how information is presented, disseminated, and the view from the other side. It's easy for me to consider security and focus on that from my position, but for others that are tasked with other jobs, their view is completely different. Read the rest of The Justification Database
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Ensuring Designs have Flexibility
01/17/2019
Ensuring Designs have Flexibility
One of the biggest complaints from developers about RDBMSs is that they are inflexible and hard to change. This has led to many developers in the past using existing fields for a variety of purposes, sometimes putting data from multiple places into one field. In more recent times, this has led to adding or migrating data to new data stores, with the idea that the system can adapt easily to changing requirements. I ran across a post on system flexibility that somewhat illustrates the issue. The writing is a little hard to understand, but the author is thinking about the process of ordering food and how a system might need to handle some of the exceptions or additional changes. While the employees in a store might deal with this in an ad hoc manner, those of us building software need to think through the possible issues and account for (at least) some of them in code. Read the rest of Ensuring Designs have Flexibility
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Fun with Dates and Times
01/16/2019
Fun with Dates and Times
The other day I got a Github issue that asked if we should set our dates as YYYYMMDD in the new SQLServerCentral site. The issue noted that there were some inconsistent dates. Article dates are in a similar format, YYYY/MM/DD, but we do have some DD MMM YYYY and a few places where I think the American MMBBYYYY has lived on. In any case, I made a joke on Twitter of asking if people were alright moving to YYYYMMDD. Most people were in favor, though someone asked about MMMM DD, YYYY, which is easily read. I have to say that I somewhat like that for reading, but as data, as something I'd work with, I prefer having the year month day format. I do want separators, and while I grew up using slashes ( as in YYYY/MM/DD), I know the ISO format is dashes (YYYY-MM-DD). ISO 8601 has dashes, so I decided to add that to the GitHub issue as a way of formatting. Read the rest of Fun with Dates and Times
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Measuring Effectiveness
01/15/2019
Measuring Effectiveness
I've never been the guy that produced code the fastest, or the most code in a day. I haven't been able to show that I work the most hours, or that I even keep great hours. I'm often late or erratic in the times I come and go from work. I don't show that I am closing tickets in consistent times as I often will be slow to close new issues. I haven't ever been the employee of the month. What I have been is effective. I get things done. I leave the organization and the job better than when I found it. I work to deliver value for the salary I'm paid. That isn't something you can easily measure with many traditional metrics that people use, but there are ways to decide that I'm a good employee. It's a little ephemeral and sometimes uncomfortable to have an employee that doesn't seem to fit the same model as most other employees, but that doesn't mean you wouldn't want me working on your staff. Read the rest of Measuring Effectiveness
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Thinkers and Doers
01/02/2019
Thinkers and Doers
When I was first starting work in the data space, we had an architect at the large company that employed me. This individual reviewed new application proposals, decided on platforms and technologies, and mostly went to a lot of conferences. I think this was a smart person, but they never seemed to do much work, mostly just talk about technology and ideas. As a young person in a career, I both coveted the job (good pay and hours), and thought it ought to be eliminated. These days I think architecture is important, at least at a coordinating level. I don't know that it needs to be a full time job, but we need a person not too distracted by daily work examining how we build our systems. Perhaps this is the type of position that someone with a lot of experience that wants to work part time ought to hold. If you have such a position, call me in about 15 years. Read the rest of Thinkers and Doers
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My Favorites from 2018
12/31/2018
My Favorites from 2018
Recently we had a webinar with Grant, Kathi, Kendra, and myself to discuss the year in review. We talked about our favorite things from the year and made a few predictions for 2019. I like to do this myself every year, usually in a general sense, looking over the entire data platform and technology world. In our webinar, Kendra asked us about some favorites, and I thought I'd look back at memorable items for me in 2018. I was lucky to attend a number of events this year. My speaking schedule was 25 events and 37 talks, a few of them virtual events. Around this I managed to get to 4 other events where I didn't speak, 2 volleyball tournaments, and went on 5 family trips. A busy year, but with some exciting highlights. My two favorite talks were at security events in Cork and Washington DC. I had the chance to speak to a different audience about Database DevOps, and they were very interested and anxious to spread the word to their organizations. Read the rest of My Favorites from 2018
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Looking Forward to 2019
12/28/2018
Looking Forward to 2019
It's the final Friday of the year, between the Christmas and New Year days off that many of us have as holidays. Since this is often a very quiet workday, I thought it would be a good day for many of us to stop and think about our future plans for next year. I write often about career topics, encouraging you to improve your skill sets and actively manage your career. I think too many of us have been passive in our careers. We learn what our boss asks us to learn. We change jobs when we need to, often just accepting the first offer we get. We let ourselves be interviewed without interviewing the hiring organization. In most cases, we fall from position to position, which often might not be what we did if we actively managed our career. Read the rest of Looking Forward to 2019
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Porting SQLServerCentral
12/27/2018
Porting SQLServerCentral
Like a few of you, I've been working with Wordpress as a blogging platform. Over the years I've tried a few different pieces of blogging software, but I really like Wordpress. I'm not alone as there are estimates that 20-30% of all websites run on this platform, including a few you might not expect. I thought UpperCup and Krispy Kreme UK are sites that don't really look like they're powered by Wordpress. Those make my own blog and T-SQL Tuesday look pretty bland. Maybe I'll do a little design work at some point on those. That's after SQLServerCentral moves over to the platform. SQLServerCentral started as a custom ASP site many years ago, then upgraded to ASP.NET at some point. This was a joint effort from the founders to build in new functionality and features as we needed them, purchasing components (like the forums) where we found a suitable product. This first evolution of the site lasted for many years until Redgate Software acquired the property. We then underwent a second platform shift to NHibernate, which has been underpinning the site for a decade. We now move forward with our third evolution. Read the rest of Porting SQLServerCentral
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Better Static Code Analysis and Security Scans
12/26/2018
Better Static Code Analysis and Security Scans
I was listening to a talk from Stefan Simenon on their CI/CD transformation within ABN AMRO, a large financial company. One of the interesting things he noted was that they consider open source to be less secure, possibly with more vulnerabilities than in house written software. Their build pipeline will fail if a developer starts using new OSS components. I find that interesting, as the DORA 2018 State of DevOps report sees more use of OSS software in companies that are adopting DevOps. In general, I think that having many people able to view the source and find errors makes companies feel that open source is more secure. I think that's likely more true, though it's a bit of a philosophical argument. We can look at some data, but it's hard to prove that one or the other is empirically more secure. Read the rest of Better Static Code Analysis and Security Scans
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Christmas DevOps
12/24/2018
Christmas DevOps
Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the place, Not a server was stirring, ‘cept the database, The DBAs sat in dim light, typing with care, In hopes of how well the deployment would fare. Their developers were nestled all snug in their beds, Whilst visions of non-clustered indexes danced in their heads, And low user traffic, connections, activity of all kind, Gave the DBAs plenty of confidence in mind. Read the rest of Christmas DevOps
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The Full Stack DBA
12/21/2018
The Full Stack DBA
The last couple of years have seen the job title "full stack developer" posted quite often. With the popularity of DevOps, companies are hoping to hire a developer that can work on the database, understand some networking, and continue to build front end applications. In my career, I've done all of this while being just titled a programmer, but apparently with more specialization these days, some want to differentiate themselves as being able to do it all. I saw this tweet from Erin Stellato, asking if people manage multiple items. Specifically, she asks about "the virtualization, the server admin, the storage, and system security". No networking, firewalls, etc. in there, but I'll add those in as well. This week, can you answer this question: Read the rest of The Full Stack DBA
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Spend More on Security
12/20/2018
Spend More on Security
In technology, quite a few companies are doing well. In fact, it's a regular race among Apple and Microsoft to see who's the world's more valuable company. However, quite a few other companies in other industries are also doing very well. Many have reported strong earnings in the last couple years. Many of those same companies have had data breaches. I saw this tweet from Buck Woody, which says " Another day, another breach. C'mon companies, get your act together. Spend a bit of that record profit on security. We're tired of this." Read the rest of Spend More on Security
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Get Patched if Unsupported
12/18/2018
Get Patched if Unsupported
There are plenty of reasons not to upgrade your SQL Servers to a new version. Perhaps you know the system is working and don't want to disrupt activity. Often we don't want to take a chance that some change in functionality causes us issues. In many cases, the new functionality might not be used in your current system, and you don't see the ROI for the cost of upgrades. Costs certainly are a concern as SQL Server has gotten more expensive across time. In all these cases, it makes sense to stay on your current version. Software Assurance might negate the upgrade cost in money, or even give you a reason to upgrade, but it doesn't prevent any of the other time and resource costs. Patches don't cost money, however, and they are included in your cost. While I am nervous about applying patches right away, I do want to apply them at some point. If for no other reason, I do want to ensure I'm going to get into a position where I have to apply a patch to fix something or get support in an emergency and not have done any testing. I am more nervous now after the recent Windows Fall Update issues, and definitely want to let others test patches for a month or two before I apply them. Thanks to those of you that patch early and report issues. Read the rest of Get Patched If Not Supported
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Trust But Verify
12/18/2018
Trust But Verify
Npm is the default package manager for the Node.js runtime. Most of us have heard of of Javascript, which is used extensively in writing applications. When developers write code using this framework, they often include code from other packages and developers, just referring to the functions they need. This allows applications to build on the work of others, without having to re-implement functionality that is commonly used. Many languages have libraries that are available for use, but most require that a developer download them, include them in their software and then publish the resulting software. In many node.js applications, the developer does some of this, but when they publish the application, the users pull down the versions of the packages that they need at that time. This allows developers to avoid including a lot of code in their applications, reducing file sizes, bandwidth, etc. Read the rest of Trust But Verify
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