Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

The Vacation Conundrum

Would I want unlimited time off? It’s an interesting question. I think I might like something more like a minimum time off, or perhaps an allowance, with the tracking and offer to work with employees that need more. There are problems with unlimited vacation, and it’s often because of poor management and social pressure of colleagues.

Or, of course, workaholic syndrome, which is common in the technology industry.

Really, I’ve never had an issue with technology, personally. I work mostly the stated hours, but because I’m productive, I never have had problems with managers if I come late or leave early. To be fair, that’s my experience, and if everyone acted as I did, perhaps that would be problematic.

At Red Gate, I’ve been able to take days off for something, usually skiing, as I want. Actually, I usually only take a partial day off, and have to work part of the day to be sure the SQLServerCentral newsletter is prepped and going out. Or answering email, dealing with site issues, etc. I’ve even taken meetings on the road, or halfway to the mountains, pulling over to chat.

The last few years I’ve not wanted to deal with that and typically book a day off in our HR system and plan to be away. If things break, I ignore them. Or someone else needs to be ready to handle them since I’ve taken vacation and I’m not going to be pushed into working when I have booked time off.

The downside of this, which is more specific to my job, is that I have daily things that need handling, like the SSC site. As a result, if I take a day off, that usually means I’m putting in more time before the holiday to prep things. I’ve never done that as a DBA or developer. I had deadlines, but I didn’t work extra because of vacation, unless I had put myself behind.

If someone else sends an unrealistic schedule, I’m not killing myself, or skipping vacation.

It’s a tough question, and I need to think more about it. The pieces linked above are interesting and worth reading.

February 17, 2015
SQL Injection, Still?

It seems as though SQL Injection issues are still around. Attacks from SQL Injection are on the uptick as we begin moving through 2015. As noted in that piece, the constraints put on software developers usually mean that testing and security are the first things to let go when time becomes short. That’s sad, and in some sense, I think this means that we aren’t teaching secure coding early enough to developers, and certainly not often enough.

I ran across a piece from Kevin Kline that asks why this keeps happening. After all, as Kevin shows, much SQL Injection is easy to prevent. The coding patterns and tools we use are simple to write. There are lots of articles out there that show a variety of techniques you can cut and paste into your code. However there are two big problems that prevent us from eradicating SQL Injection: aging code and bad habits.

There’s no shortage of code that comes from frameworks and application templates, not to mention naive or ignorant developers. Lots of this code is vulnerable to SQL Injection. Since so many of these existing applications work, there is no great pressure to go back and change them to be more secure. Since data theft may not even be noticed, there are plenty of companies (and technologists) that have no idea their systems are vulnerable.

The other problem is bad habits. Far too many developers and DBAs have spent years writing insecure code. When they prototype, mock, or quickly knock out code, they often rely on their experience to get work done quickly. And they do this poorly if they aren’t writing in a pattern that prevents SQL Injection. They haven’t updated their templates, tools, or their knowledge in a way that ensures all their future code will be secure.

Ultimately we as an industry need to take SQL Injection seriously and write better code. Whether you use an ORM, a framework, or anything other shortcut to build applications, if you don’t create secure software, you’re part of the problem.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.3MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

February 17, 2015
Salaries and Experience

This editorial was originally published on Aug 31, 2010. It is being re-run as Steve is on vacation.

One of the main reasons that I got into IT was the salary. Honestly, there were relatively few places where I thought I had a skill AND could make good money. I graduated with an economics degree, with the idea that I’d go to Wall Street, follow Gordon Gecko, and work 140 hours a week and make a few million.

That was until I wrecked my shoulder playing rugby my senior year, realized that I wasn’t invincible, and decided there were more important things than my salary. However I still wanted to have a good living, I had some skills in technology, and I moved in that direction. When I heard that our DBA was making $90k a year at a time when I was making $45k, I decided I should learn more about databases.

Across the last two decades of my career, I think I’ve been fortunate in my career. It’s been a lot of work, , and a lot of fun. I’ve tried to grow my career, learn new things, and find better opportunities over time and in new positions. I’ve had success, and I’ve found the experience has resulted in higher salaries for me. I founda blog about salaries recently that says it’s not only experience, but also location that matters in terms of salary. That’s probably true, though I think industry, the particular company, and other factors are important as well.

For most of us, we don’t necessarily want to change locations, but we can do something about our experience. I’ve seen it written before that for people that have 10 years of experience, it could be gained two ways. They could have one year of experience ten times, or ten different years of experience (or some combination). The point is that you should be continually expanding on your experiences, not just relying on skills you learned a long time ago.

You may or may not be able to get a job that pays you more with more experience. I’d like to think, however, that any investment in improving your skills and learning more about your craft, is never wasted.

Steve Jones

February 16, 2015
Desktop Repairs – Power Supply Issues

My desktop didn’t restart after vacation a few weeks ago. That wasn’t what I wanted to have happen with a lot of work to get done before some travel. Needless to say I wasn’t thrilled when it happened.

I was worried that something major had died. However I’d replaced the main boot drive recently and I had the old one. If I could get power.

I emailed Glenn Berry, who’s my go to hardware consultant. He suggested I check the power supply since I couldn’t get anything to happen. On his advice, I went to the local Microcenter and bought a new 650W power supply. Here’s the old one, with a stock CPU cooler. I bought a new one of those as well, since I find the heat alarm going off during some video editing.

I didn’t remove the old power supply at first. I actually disconnected it and connected the new one to the motherboard from outside the case and powered things on. Sure enough, everything came on. Lights, drives, etc.

I then powered things down again and set about replacing the power supply. It’s actually easy, and I’m surprised I’ve never had to do this before in my life. Probably because I’ve tended to replace machines so often.

In any case, it was a matter of removing 4 or 5 screws from the back of the case, carefully slipping out the old PS and then putting the new one in there.

The CPU cooler was trickier. The tabs push through the motherboard and hook, but they are somewhat fragile. I was worried, and sure enough, the first time they weren’t tight. The cooler needs to be held tight to the CPU to pull off heat. It was loose and I got heat alarms once I started using the machine.

However I kept messing with it, slowly trying to get the tabs in there and eventually they are holding fairly tight. I still get heat alarms during heavy duty video processing, so I think this cheap $25 cooler isn’t good enough. Or I don’t have enough thermal grease. Either way, I’ll probably replace this soon.

Here’s everything together.

And a happy Steve.

February 13, 2015