Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Bronze Age Development

    I was watching a presentation on testing recently where the speaker noted that on one project he’d spent twice as much time testing as coding. That sounds like an outrageous amount of time, but my concern was tempered when he said the release to production produced no bugs. I’m sure some bugs surfaced later, but I have often seen that most of the bugs, especially the incredibly annoying ones, are typically discovered quickly.

    I was reminded of that presentation when I saw this quote: “…the result was a two-year development process in which only about four months would be spent writing new code. Twice as long would be spent fixing that code.”

    That’s a quote on the development of Visual Studio a few years back. I wonder if the “twice as long fixing” time would have been reduced with better testing efforts earlier in development. It’s hard to know since all evidence on the value of testing is based on disparate projects with different teams working at different levels of experience, but I’ve run into a few people that think more testing reduces overall development time.

    The consultant who gave the presentation believes strongly in testing, not only at the application level, but also at the database level. This person has tried different levels of testing on different projects, and found that building and writing tests throughout development results in many fewer issues at release. Perhaps more telling is that when the person has performed less testing in later projects (because the clients declined to pay for it), there were more bugs in production.

    I don’t know if the total time spent on building software is less with testing occurring early than with allowing clients and customers to test and report bugs. Certainly some of that might depend on how many bugs you fix and how many bugs people must cope with, but I do know that the fewer issues people find with your software, the more excited they are to ask you to write more code in the future.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.2MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. feed

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

  • Two in Two Days

    It’s a busy week for me. I’ve got quite a few articles to review, feedback to write for Stairway Series authors, review and changes of some PowerPoint decks for later this month, and two User Group presentations.

    This is on top of a busy first week of school in the household. I feel like I’m playing catch up all week.

    Boulder

    I’ll be at the Boulder SQL Server User Group tonight. My presentation will be on Unstructured Data in SQL Server, looking at Filestream and Filetable and how they can be setup and used.

    Fortunately I’ve done this before, and a little practice this week was enough to get me ready.

    Hopefully I’ll see a few of you there as I haven’t been to Boulder in over a year.

    Denver SQL

    The Denver SQL Server User Group usually asks me do a presentation or two each year and this time I have a new one. They get to be my guinea pigs for the first delivery of this talk.

    Get Testing with tsqlt, a preview of a talk I’ll be doing at SQL in the City, is on the agenda. I’ve been going over this one a few times this week, so hopefully it goes smoothly.

  • Updating tsqlt

    I was looking to write a new test with the tsqlt framework recently. I wanted to isolate a stored procedure’s logic and planned on using the FakeFunction procedure available in tsqlt.

    I wrote my test, using a template from the Pluralsight course on tsqlt and the documentation. I tried to execute the test and get a “tsqlt.fakefunction does not exist” error.

    I was slightly confused at first, but checking my list of functions and stored procedures showed that I didn’t have the FakeFunction procedure available. It’s a relatively recent addition to tsqlt, so I needed and update.

    After downloading the framework (a zip file), I opened it up to find this:

    tsqlt_a

    A number of files there, but the tsqlt.class.sql is the important one. I double clicked it from the zip and it opened in SSMS.

    tsqlt_b

    It’s a standard T-SQL script, albeit a long one. I executed it and it ran fine. My framework was updated to the latest version and I now had the function I needed.

    tsqlt_c

    Of course, I used my test to ensure this worked as expected and I was pleased to see it work well.

  • Yet Another Attack Vector

    There’s a new movie that’s just come out in August. It looks funny, and I’m planning on going to see Let’s Be Cops. I know it’s a movie, it’s not real, but it concerns me, even with a ruling on warrant-less searches of digital devices. I’m sure you think the an arrest wouldn’t breach your digital security, but how much of a stretch is it for someone to impersonate a police officer (it happens), pull over an executive or engineer, and “search” their cell phone. It’s especially possible if most of us expect that the police have the right to look in our devices (they don’t).

    What concerns me is that this is another attack vector into our lives, and potentially, into our companies and organizations. We store more and more information, and access, in our digital devices. We use VPNs, and even authentication tokens, but we often store those on our devices because we can’t memorize everything. If someone has control on of our devices, the potentially have access to anything we do.

    How hard would it be for someone to access our mail, or some resource through our work VPN? How quickly could determined attackers perform some malicious activity, or worse, copy information that we’d never be aware was lost? It’s not likely, and perhaps it’s far-fetched, but it seems criminals are becoming more and more creative all the time.

    I worry about our data, but more importantly, I worry about the rights and privacy of our digital information. I hope we update our expectations and rights to meet the challenges of our digital future.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.2MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. feed

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.