Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Getting Local Books Online

    One of the things that’s annoyed me in the last few versions is that Books Online isn’t smoothly installed for me. I often seem to forget to run through the process, and I’ll find myself on an airplane without being able to check documentation. It’s frustrating and while I’ve muddled through the process, I’ve never documented it.

    And I’m not going to. Aaron Bertrand did it for me for SQL Server 2014. I recently ran through this in a VM that didn’t have the docs installed and it worked great. Along with the 2014 documentation, I also added the 2012 documentation at the same time as I’ve been using this demo VM with 2012 for quite some time and I want to be able to check if behaviors I see are different between 2012 and 2014.

    It’s a simple process, though a touch time consuming. Don’t do this while you’re waiting for a plane. In fact, I’d recommend that you do this early in the morning, when you can let it run for awhile. In a VM, mine took over 30 minutes to get BOL 2014 and BOL 2012.

    When I finished, I could launch the help viewer from 2014 and see both versions of the docs. If I launched the 2012 documentation, I saw thing, this despite seeing both book as “up to date” in the help configuration. I suspect there’s something in the shortcut that would fix this, but ultimately I don’t care. I have BOL installed, and I can just move the 2014 shortcut to the taskbar, since I use it often.

  • Security Sadness

    I got this offer in email today.

    security_a

    My wife likes the X-Men, I’m not traveling, and this seemed like a good idea. I clicked and saw this page:

    security_b

    It’s from the Fandango domain, which I’ve used before. I have a United VISA. However I just can’t trust that I can actually enter this data in this form. It’s entirely possible this is a man in the middle attack, and that worries me.

    It’s sad that I can’t trust things like this anymore. It’s the same reason I don’t even talk to telemarketers anymore. Even when it’s a good cause, I just can’t trust any random “offer” that comes to me. I’m sure that I can’t even trust those offers I find myself, but it’s going to be a problem more and more. Whether it impacts commerce, I don’t know. Entirely too many people don’t care about security and $20 in free movie stuff would have them typing in their credit card number.

    I went to the United site and didn’t see the offer. I went to Fandango and same thing.

    Oh well, I guess I’ll buy my own tickets.

  • Secure Coding

    I was looking recently for some sort of guideline that would help me ensure that code was securely written. I stumbled upon the CERT standards, of which there are few, but one that seemed interesting was this one on Oracle and Java. I thought this first standard was a great explanation of good and bad code that you could use for this particular problem.

    I looked for something similar from Microsoft. I found this, which seems more like a random collection of links that don’t teach, or lead, anyone through the ideas of how to write better code.

    In some ways, Microsoft has produced a microcosm of the Internet. A mish mosh of lots of information with no organization applied at all.

  • Managers

    Most of us have managers that are picked from the ranks of our technical staff. Often the most talented technical person, or most willing technical staff member, is promoted to manager, given a few hours of training on the various tools that he or she will use to deal with the administrative paperwork a manager fills out, and then cut loose to “manage” a group of people.

    And they stink at it.

    Most of them are bad. Not only are they bad managers, they are often bad leaders, and many find their technical skills suffer as they split their time with managerial tasks. That certainly puts them in a bad mood and creates worry about their future. It’s not even just in the technology industry, as we find that many managers are bad, yet still languish on for years. This despite the fact that research shows they are costing their companies profit.

    Personally I think we are still evolving from the factory-like mentalities where managers needed to oversee workers and give them little leeway or choice in how they perform their jobs. Even in “knowledge work” or creative endeavors, managers too often feel the need to “do something” when they could often do less and get more accomplished. A big part of this is managers want to be paid more because they are responsible for people doing work. However they often don’t accomplish more than their subordinates.

    I doubt much will change, but I’d like to see managers for technical people (and directors even) paid less than their technical people, with less responsibility over workers’ efforts. Help them get delays, issues, and problems not related to their tasks out of the way and let them get work done.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.0MB) 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.