Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Traveling in 2013

    It was a busy year for me. As I look back at my speaking CV for 2013, here’s what I see:

    What a year. I also had two trips for Red Gate in here that didn’t involve any speaking.

    For the year, this gives me totals of

    • 30 events
    • 20 trips (2 non-speaking)
    • 58 talks

    Wow. The busiest year by far for me. Almost 60k miles in the air, which is the most I’ve ever flown. I know some people do a lot more, but this was quite a bit for me.

    The upsides of the year were meeting lots of neat people, getting to 6 or 7 new cities I’ve never seen, and not traveling in January, and only a short, business trip in August.

    I don’t know what next year will bring. In the first quarter of 2014, I’ve already got 3 or 4 trips tentatively planned along with a couple local events. I suspect I may end up with more trips next year, but likely no more events or days gone from home as I aim for shorter trips whenever possible.

  • Powershell in a Month– Day 4 and 5 – Providers

    This is part of my Powershell Challenge, to learn more about PowerShell (PoSh) using the Learn Windows Powershell 3 in a Month of Lunches book by Don Jones.

    Day 4, and 5. This wasn’t a long chapter, but it came right around travel and vacation, and as a result, I ended up taking about 2 hours across multiple days. Mostly because I had to re-read things and re-type them. As a result, I’m marking this as two days. Plus, this will now line up the chapters.

    Providers are the “drivers”, I guess for Powershell. They allow you to interact with various systems through the Powershell commands. Another way of putting it is that they take some item and make it look like a file system. This means you can navigate the registry (with the registry provider) like your disk with CD, DIR, etc. It’s also why you can move through SQL Server in a folder-like hierarchy.

    This was a short chapter, and I’m not sure why it took so long, but I moved slow going through the exercises to creates files and folders, learning to use the New-Item or Set-Location commands instead of the mkdir or cd ones.  I did find this interesting.

    The lab exercises were easy, and once I could focus, I got through them quickly.

    The next chapter is pipelines, which is where I think the power of PowerShell starts to come through.

  • Symmetric Keys

    One of the encryption options in SQL Server is symmetric key encryption. This is the type of encryption most people think about when they consider encrypting data. In symmetric key encryption, we use a key to encrypt data, and then also use a key to decrypt data.

    The key used for encryption and decryption is the same in Symmetric Key Encryption. This is why we call this symmetric. Just like with a house lock,

    image

    the key that locks (encrypts) also unlocks (decrypts). This is a picture of my front door and the lock uses a single key.

    In SQL Server, we create a symmetric key and use that to encrypt data and also decrypt it. Here’s a simple example:

    DECLARE @plain VARCHAR(200), @cipher VARBINARY(5000), @decrypt VARCHAR(200)

SELECT @plain = 'This is the plain text.'

-- encrypt
SELECT @cipher = ENCRYPTBYKEY(key_guid('MyFirstSymKey'),cast(@plain as NVARCHAR(200)));

SELECT 'Plain' = @plain
     , 'Cipher' = @cipher

-- decrypt
SELECT @decrypt = CAST( DECRYPTBYKEY(@cipher) AS nVARCHAR(200))

SELECT 'Plain' = @plain
     , 'Cipher' = @cipher
     , 'decrypt' = @decrypt

     

    That’s it. If you run it, you see the original text, the encrypted text, and the decrypted text.

     

    symkey1

     

    In another post, I’ll go into more options that are available for symmetric key encryption.

  • Regrets of the Last Decade

    Microsoft was never an exciting company to me as a kid. I grew up excited by Commodore with their GEOS, early Atari computers and consoles, and the original Macintosh computer. I was fascinated by Sun and Silicon Graphics workstations, running X Windows across multiple machines. The NeXT workstations made early Windows machines seem primitive. When I first worked with SQL Server, it felt like a half-finished product that wasn’t stable on OS/2. Microsoft felt like a pedestrian company that was good for my career, and was trying to grow, but they weren’t exciting.

    Some of that changed in the late 90s as Microsoft embraced the Internet and helped it grow with the ActiveX system. For better or worse, ActiveX seemed to bring life to web sites in a way that Java and other techniques couldn’t. We could argue about the damage that systems like ActiveX and Visual Basic 6 did in terms of application performance and maintainability, but without a doubt these tools caused an explosion of development and no end of work for those of us in technology.

    Developers, developers, developers was exciting and was a great mantra. I believed that Microsoft had really hit upon the key when I heard that. Woo developers, help them build applications, and let the excitement grow. I watched SQL Server mature with it’s expansion into BI areas. I saw Microsoft create the XBOX platform, and build a much better Office Suite than I’d had with Lotus, AmiPro, and others. Microsoft had a time during my career when I thought they were really going to dominate the world of computing.

    However I wasn’t thrilled when Steve Ballmer took over. He wasn’t a geek, and wasn’t one of us. Slowly I felt that the company lost its way. Mr. Ballmer talks about some of his regrets in a piece this week, one of which was Longhown. That project dragged on for years and become the debacle that was Windows Vista. During this same time, SQL Server dragged, taking 5 years to get SQL Server 2005 released. Office seemed to stagnate, offering little reason to upgrade, other than because others were upgrading. The company felt lost, and paled in comparison to the excitement generated by Google and then Apple during the last 12 years.

    As I read the quotes and thoughts in the piece, I have to admit that Microsoft really has quietly advanced. They have had successes and lots of growth, even if the stock price hasn’t skyrocketed. They’ve invested in platforms, research, and technology, internally and through acquisitions, that may help the company maintain its position as a technology leader for some time. For every misstep like aQuantive, Danger and Ray Ozzie, there are advances like Azure and Dynamics. Windows has continued to grow inside enterprises and I rarely see the complaints over scale and capabilities that I remember from early in my career.

    Were the Steve Ballmer years a success or failure for Microsoft? I think I’d call it a maintenance time. Like the manager he is, I think Mr. Ballmer managed the company, without ruining it, but without creating much excitement either.

    Steve Jones