Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • The Geek Costume

    It’s Halloween, and while many of you are too old to dress up in a costume, some of you may be planning on joining your kids for trick or treating, or even attending a party of some sort. It can be fun, though I have to admit that I’ve rarely dressed up as an adult. However if my kid asked me to, as Patton Oswalt’s did, I’d probably join in on the fun.

    There are not shortage of fictional heroes available for us as geeks. Many of us have admired characters from the science fiction, comic, fantasy, and other worlds. The various SQL Bits conferences have included some great themes, with steampunk this year and the medieval theme last year. There was even a Jedi sighting on Pass TV last year.

    This week, with the holiday in full swing tonight, I wanted to ask you a question on which costume you’d pick. Whether you have one ready or not for tonight answer this:

    Which costume would you choose to dress up in for an event?

    It could be a character from fiction, or even a device of some sort. Maybe you want to use technology to build an awesome costume? While I’d be tempted by the Indiana Jones look, I think I might choose something in the Batman genre if I had to.

    Let us know this week what you’d pick, have a safe holiday tonight, and have a great weekend.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 1.9MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. 

  • Have You Been Hacked?

    I am glad that I don’t work in the retail industry as a DBA. It seems that I read about a new security breach every few weeks from some company. Home Depot, Target, Staples, the list goes on and on, and includes more and more businesses that at least some of us use regularly. It’s gotten to the point where I expect that I’ll need to replace at least one of my cards every year because of some data loss issue.

    However it’s not just retail companies that are getting attacked. According to the Q3 Dambella report, companies are having dozens of devices infected daily and seeing increasing numbers of point-of-sale (POS) attacks all the time. Even those companies that don’t deal directly with credit cards and consumers are finding that they are targets of network attacks more and more. Some of these are merely vandalism, but many are intended as some sort of industrial espionage or data breach that can be used for profit.

    This is the other edge of the data professional’s sword. We have low unemployment and high salaries, but we are also becoming responsible and the target of blame when data is stolen. I really believe that theft detection is becoming more important for data professionals. We won’t be able to prevent attacks, but we surely need to know when they have occurred and be prepared to respond.

    I don’t know how our profession will move forward in the future to meet these needs. Perhaps we’ll become bonded like locksmiths. Perhaps we’ll be bound by insurance requirements to adhere to best practices. I’m not sure any of that will help increase security, but it might help reduce the liability that we may face.

    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.

  • Packing for Seattle

    This will be a long trip, and I’ve got some extra items to pack. A new hat

    argenis

    and, of course, my leggings for the Argenis Without Borders campaign (you can still donate).

    41U2h4mV8uL

    No, those aren’t my legs, and you’ll have to wait for pictures next week with me wearing these things.

    This is going to be an interesting trip. It’s 6 days for me, which is something I’ve done with one bag, but I’ve got to manage a few extra items, including some Red Gate swag and get the rainbow stuff, the kilt, and more ready. This might be one of those times I need to actually check a bag, though I’m going to try and avoid it.

    Maybe I’ll pack less and do some laundry, especially for workout clothes. 6 days of running gear won’t be pleasant to pack after it’s been used.

  • Quick Schema Auditing

    I was working on a demo recently and needed to show that a little monitoring can help you catch schema changes. At first I looked at SQL Audit and DDL Triggers, but then I ran across a short custom metric on the SQL Monitor Metrics site that my company, Red Gate Software, put up to help people share their custom monitoring metrics and alerts.

    The metric is called Schema Modified, and it uses a really simple query. This is all is does:

    SELECT DATEDIFF(ss, '1970', MAX([modify_date]))
 FROM [sys].[objects];

    It calls this query every minute for each database on which you have it enabled. This gives you a count of the number of seconds between 1970 and the latest schema modification in your database.

    Now that’s not terribly useful, but if you look for changes in this metric, then it becomes interesting. For example, in one of my tests, I got this value

    1413904788

    If I continued to run the query,  the same value was returned if nothing changed in the database. However once I added a new object, then the value changed to

    1413905295

    That’s an increase, and my alerting was looking for changes in the value, so when this new count of seconds appeared, an alert was raised.

    Using the Information

    What good does it do you to know that something changed? Admittedly, this may or may not be useful. This doesn’t tell you what changed, and certainly help you determine who changed things.

    However, in more than a few of my development jobs, we knew people would change things. That wasn’t the issue. Really we wanted to know that something changed, and if so, we would investigate further. Often we could easily determine who made the change, based on what it was.

    This is really a trigger more for something like production, where I don’t expect changes, except when I deploy things. Any other change is cause for concern, and I might have alerts set to ping people when there’s a change. If we’re making the change, then we ignore the alert, because we’re aware of it.

    If we aren’t deploying changes, then we start investigating immediately.