Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • The Financial DBA

    I’ve got an Azure subscription. At least, I think I have just one. I know I have a few Microsoft accounts, across 4 (or more) different email addresses, that I use for various VSTS development purposes, but only one should have any Azure resources. When  I check each of them, I find that I do only have resources (and charges) for one. However, I also found a strange charge on my credit card statement from Microsoft Azure. It was just a couple dollars, but as I started digging through the various statements, I couldn’t determine where the charge was from, or what it was for. As of now, I’ve opened a support case with Microsoft to track down my usage.

    This has me thinking of the future of many data professionals, some of whom will certainly have a few assets in a cloud based environment. I have a small subscription, but plenty of resources, and keeping track of which items belong to which resources and what I need isn’t always easy. It’s quite the challenge, especially when billing and finance aren’t my job. In an organization like Redgate, I’d guess we have lots resources, some of which developer provision, need, and then might forget about. Who reconciles this and ensures the assets we have are those we need?

    As we move to a world where services are used as often as assets, perhaps interchangeably, I expect that many of us will need to be accountable for not only the usage, but tracking why we’ve engaged that service. Over time, we need to retire and get rid of assets, but ensuring we remember exactly what we’re using and why can be hard over time. With a little employee movement, many of us might find ourselves in charge of services that we don’t understand, and might not be sure are necessary. We also might not be sure these services can just be discarded. The last thing we want is some uptime disruption because we terminated some service contract.

    A whole new dimension to our job is likely coming, and for many of us, this will test our documentation and organizational skills. I wouldn’t be surprised to find many DBAs or lead developers having a standing monthly meeting with someone in finance to be sure we aren’t wasting money.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.3MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • FizzBuzz–#SQLNewBlogger

    Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers. This is also a part of a basic series on git and how to use it.

    There’s been a programmer test that was used for awhile to see if a simple program could be constructed. It’s FizzBuzz, after a kids game, and designed to see if someone knows some logical program construction.

    The test is to produce a list from 1 to 100 and for multiples of 3, write “Fizz”, multiples of 5 produce “Buzz” and multiples of both produce “FizzBuzz”. This means you get:

    2017-07-06 10_18_44-SQLQuery1.sql - (local)_SQL2016.WideWorldImporters-RR (PLATO_Steve (64))_ - Micr

    It’s a simple test, but I wonder how long it would take you to write it in T-SQL? It took me about 2 minutes.

    Give yourself a little quiz today. For a challenge, also produce this in PoSh or some other language. I took about 5 minutes in PoSh, mostly because I had to look up some syntax.

    In case you think this doesn’t matter, I agree with Jeff Atwood. I’d like to look at someone’s code before I interview them for development. They should have some public code, maybe something they recommend.

    SQLNewBlogger

    If you’re looking for a blog topic, show us you can write this code.

  • Spread the Word about Basic Security

    I went with my daughter the other day to set up her bank account. She’s becoming a young adult and this is one of those items we need to get done, especially in today’s world of electronic banking and money transfers. It’s time she takes another step towards being responsible and accountable for her finances.

    As we went through the process, one of the steps was her setting up an account with the online presence of this bank. I told her to be sure to use a new password, one not in use anywhere. She agreed, but then said she has 3 or 4 passwords that she uses in different places. I told her that’s not enough, and explained why. This week, we have an article about a MySpace security flaw in 2017.

    Most of you don’t use MySpace, but you might have. Even if you haven’t, your kids or parents might use some popular tool, such as Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, etc. Tomorrow we might discover a similar security issue, or worse, a disclosure of your passwords. If you think it can’t happen, go try a few emails over at https://haveibeenpwned.com. You might be surprised at the results. My kids were.

    It’s not that your bank is necessarily vulnerable to hacking a password. However, if you’ve used the same (or very similar password like PasswordCNNdotcom) for your news reading at CNN, then if that company is hacked, it’s not too difficult to take all emails  and then try PasswordChasedotcom at Chase National Bank’s site.

    Reusing passwords is a bad idea. I do it for demo accounts across virtual machines, and even that bothers me. Everywhere else, I use a password manager and I have hundreds of passwords, separate ones for each site. My wife is annoyed if she needs a password for any of our accounts and I give her something like “4Gbv8A^f8” on my phone, but I’m not going to make simpler ones or reuse them.

    Separate accounts and separate passwords are a mantra I’ve used for years at work and at home. Please spread the word and get those in your life to use separate, strong passwords for their online activities.

    Steve Jones

     

  • Looking Back

    Someone sent me this post on 40 years of programming. It’s a read that laments a few things and complains about many others. Most of the thoughts are opinions, and as such, you may or may not see validity in them. I suspect most of you, like me, see some things are mostly true and some as just false. Since I’ve been in this business for nearly 30 years, many of the comments bring back memories and thoughts about my career as well.

    One of the things I do lament is the declining quality of documentation. I’ve seen the volume and detail decline over the years. I wouldn’t want to go back to paper, but I would like to see better examples and more complete examination of the ins and outs of the various functions and features. Far too often I find that there are examples, explanations, or behaviors that are missing. I see the same thing in blogs and articles, which often leap and skip steps in their race to publish.

    Focus and detail on a specific topic has been forgotten by too many. Even understanding the way your code works, or the ways the dependencies work has been lost. As more and more people move to using NuGet and pulling down packages, I find too often that many developers don’t quite understand how their systems work. The divide between those that practice DevOps well and those that just release code faster continues to grow. Few learn from their efforts and produce smoother software development pipelines. Most release code faster, losing track of which versions and dependencies that are required.

    I still see projects from GitHub and other sources that lack explanations of how to actually compile and setup the project. It seems far too many developers half release software, expecting others to spend time learning what works and what doesn’t. What versions were used, and might be needed again. Maybe in some places the software evolves so quickly, adopting new methodologies and technologies constantly, that developers never need to truly understand the system. They just get things working and then change them.

    Maybe that’s why so many people want to rewrite and reproduce software rather than using some existing project and improving on it.

    The one thing I do wish was in all languages is a standard way of handling data types and comparing them. I constantly struggle with = and == when I move away from SQL. The comparisons in PoSh make no sense, and I regularly get errors from > until I change to -gt. It seems plenty of language designers want to make their own creation and cause divergence for no good reason. I do wish SQL had implemented == for comparisons, or that they would in the future.

    As I look back, some things in computer science haven’t really changed at all. Speed and scales have grown, but many concepts remain the same. However, in other ways, I think we’ve come so far, building amazing systems that are interconnected in ways that we might never have imagined a decade ago, much less 30 years ago.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 4.4MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.