Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • iOS v Android–A Short Term Update

    I ordered my first new new phone this year. I’ve never purchased a new, unreleased model of a cell phone before. I’ve gotten some nice phones, but always 6-12 months after other people have had a chance to use, review, and complain about them. However my wife’s Galaxy S3 was nice enough that I was willing to consider changing from an iPhone (4S) to Android.

    I went to the store and tested a Note 2 and a Galaxy S4, comparing them with the iPhone 5. I liked the S4 enough in some initial toying around in the store after probably 45 minutes across a few trips. I decided to give it a try. I had a lot of friends with the Note 2 that liked the device, but the size worried me slightly since I’m traveling regularly. The S4 seemed like a nice upgrade from the 4S and large enough to use.

    I pre-ordered the phone from Verizon, before it was available, and it arrived a day earlier than I expected it. As with many modern devices, it was fairly intuitive to get turned on, powered up, and switched onto my service. Verizon has made this part really easy.

    Within a couple days I realized that battery life was an issue. I’ve had a Mophie case on the iPhone and that’s allowed me to last through long conference days. I wasn’t getting through days at home (though I was close) with the standard battery. I ordered a 5200mWA battery replacement for the S4, which was cheap and arrived in a few days. It’s thicker than the original battery, but it came with a new back that fit nicely on the device. Not only does the device now last all days, usually with > 20% battery after long days, but it also fits nicely in the same holster that carried my 4S/Mophie case.

    It took me a few days to get used to Android, though much of the setup is similar and as easy as the iPhone. Google Play works as well as the App Store, though it responds much quicker. Background downloads, updates, and notifications are better.

    However overall I have a mixed reaction to the device. I’ll talk about things I like and things I don’t, and give my impressions. I’m not trying to be objective here, or give you deep technical differences. I really don’t care about those. I care about how the phone works as a multi-use device for work and personal life.

    Note that in my past Smartphone experience, I’ve had a Sidekick, a blackberry (original, very briefly), a Windows 6 device, an Android 1.5/1.6 G1, iPhones 3, 3S, 4, 4S, and now this device. My wife has had a G1, G3, iPhone, and newer (non touch) Blackberries I’ve used. I used iOS 4, 5, 6 on devices.

    Likes

    Screen – The screen on the S4 is amazing. It’s way beyond the 4S and G3. No contest. Even for a guy that doesn’t think HD is always worth the money and has no interest in 4K for media, this screen is amazing. At times I’m in awe of it. Blows away any monitor, TV, or laptop I’ve had away, including the brand new Lenovo T430 I have.

    Notifications – I’ve been jealous of my wife’s notifications bar and window for some time. It’s just way better than the iOS stuff. I use it all the time, and it makes it easy to find what’s been happening on my device. I especially love the ability to get to Bluetooth, GPS, etc. at the top. I turn those on/off all the time.

    Keyboard – Swype is amazing. I have tried a few keyboards, but I love the Swype one and it makes it much easier to “type” one handed. If iOS had this I might never have even considered another phone. It’s freaking amazing how well it works and how fast I can compose things. It’s better for short messages than long notes, but it works really, really well.

    Selecting Text – Hands down, this crushes iOS. If I select the wrong spot, I can move the pointer easily. iOS could learn here. I still double tap to paste, and if the text is at the beginning or paragraphs, I sometimes can’t get to the top, but overall it’s great.

    Widgets – Having larger widgets, and not just icons, on screens, is great. I don’t have a lot of needs, and I’ve found lots of junk widgets, but I have a few I like. I hope iOS adopts this.

    Wi-Fi on/off – Dirt simple, and in notifications, I can turn it on very easy with one press.

    Navigation – True GPS, and the turn-by-turn directions are amazing. They warn me of changes, and the display shows me what’s next (turn, merge, etc.) AND shows me what’s after that. In unfamiliar cities, this is very pleasing.

    Google Now – Not perfect, maybe not great, but neat. If I drop appointments for things like hotels, it gives me one click navigation. Weather’s handy, sports scores, it’s a nice service. Saves me time.

    Voice – Better than Siri. I don’t use it a lot, but it works better for me.

    Speaker – I debated where this goes. The speaker is better, but it’s on the bottom, so I need a surface or cupped hand to hear it at times. Mixed emotions, but overall it’s a much better speaker.

    Dislikes

    Touch response – My wife swears it’s good, but for someone that has enjoyed the crisp, immediate response of iOS, it’s not there. It’s good, it’s nothing like older models, including my G1, but it’s still behind the iOS/iDevice integration. My wife thinks Android might be multi-tasking at times, but that’s annoying to me. Sometimes things are slow to select, or they’re hard to select with my fingers, or there’s a delay that causes me to do something else and I get messed up in my phone interactions. After months, I’m still bugged by this.

    Back Button – The “back” button on Android is handy. However on the S4 it’s a soft button. And it’s in the lower right. I can’t tell you how many times my palm has come close enough to this to trigger it. This is especially true when I’m doing things one handed. It’s not constant, but it happens enough to annoy me. This should be a hard button, IMHO.

    Camera – The camera works great, but a few things. One, it doesn’t remember the last mode I selected. Two, when I take pictures, the music stops briefly. A couple annoyances with the way it works, but those are rare, so they’re not worth complaining about. (if you must know, I don’t always know when a picture is taken, the camcorder seems to have a weird delay in starting and I sometimes don’t realize it has/hasn’t started, taps don’t seem as crisp as in iOS).

    Music – The built in music app is crap, but when I loaded all my iOS music (unconverted) onto the SD card, it played it. However the performance, the display, the integration with the OS aren’t great. I’ll also note that I use Spotify, Pandora, Google Play, and they have inconsistent integration with the OS. when I open the lock screen, sometimes I can pause/forward music, most times I can’t. That always worked in iOS. For me, this is a major fail since it can be slow to turn off or pause music. In addition, sometimes when I yank headphones or kill my headset to get music off (like at airport security), it starts playing from the speaker. Maddening.

    Lock Screen – This has been one of the most annoying things. A smartphone needs a security lock. If for no other reason than to prevent a friend from posting something stupid on Twitter/FB, texting, etc. If I enable this, then I lose the ability to get quick access to my camera. I’ve tried a few third party locks, but they are slow to open for the camera. I like taking pictures, and speed matters here. The quick flick up of iOS to take a picture and quick launch worked great. This feels like a generation or two step backwards. This might be the most annoying thing to me.

    App Quality – I’ve probably only installed 20 apps on this phone. There were the 12 or so that I really cared about, and 3 were the reason WP8 didn’t make my list. Most of the apps I’ve installed were copies of apps I had on iOS.

    Quality is worse. I can’t quite explain it, but I think coding is worse, as I have regular crashes of apps. The S4 itself might be to blame as it’s restarted itself in an abend 4 or 5 times since I’ve had it. That never happened on iOS. I probably rebooted with a power off, the 4S once every 4 or 5 months. It just worked and rarely did apps crash.

    I find navigation (in menus) weird in some apps, I find behaviors strange and annoying, and overall quality seems worse. It’s not horrible, and I may have a crash every couple or three days, but they’re annoying.

    As a few examples, Bejeweled crashes every other day, the Kindle app once a week or so. Evernote at times. However the Twitter app sometimes lets me quickly press and get a reply/retweet list, sometimes it doesn’t (see touch response above). If I select a note in Evernote, I can’t press on the note to edit. I need to pick the edit button, then press on the note. I know that’s an Evernote decision, but it affects me, on Android and not on iOS. Things like that are examples of strangeness. Spotify behaves well, but operates in ways that aren’t intuitive for me and I need to think about things. That’s not what I want in a smartphone.

    Screen Rotations – A minor thing, but an annoying part of iOS was that I’ve get 4 or 5 screens of apps and I had to scroll through them to find things. I started searching, but that felt slow as well. My wife’s G3 has 4 or 5 screens, but if you keep flicking to one side, it goes through all of them, rotating from the last to the first, as in a circle of screens. iOS didn’t do this, with a linear layout of screens, and the S4 is like that. Annoying. Going from screen 1 to screen 5 is annoying, both on the S4 and in iOS.

    The Future

    The things the S4 does well, it does really, really well. The things I dislike are little annoyances, but they add up to constant minor irritation for me. I’d trade some of the great things to get rid of the annoyances.

    I’ve decided I’m going to give the S4 to my wife when my 6 month commitment is up. She’s still drooling over it and I don’t have enough of a reason to keep it. In the short term my expectation is that I’ll try the G3 and if I don’t like it, go back to the iPhone 4S.

    However, I am looking at what Apple does with iOS7 and any device updates later this year, and I’m keeping an eye on the Windows Phone devices. I’m tempted to buy a used WP8 device and give that a try. I like the interface from limited experience and the new direction (iOS/Android feel similar) intrigues me.

  • Who Wants to Be Rich?

    This editorial was originally published on Oct 18, 2008. It is being republished as Steve is on vacation.

    I think everyone would like more money, but I’m not sure how many of you really want to be rich. In reading through my list of blogs, I stumbled upon Mark Cuban’s entry on How to Get Rich and thought it was an interesting read. He gives you some of the advice I would, the most important being “there are no shortcuts.” If you remember nothing else, remember that.

    I remember years ago, driving around with my Mom in the car. We were on some errand or something, I can’t remember, but I know that I was saying I wanted to do something. She told me an interesting story she’d picked up from somewhere, perhaps Reader’s Digest since it sounds like something they’d publish. It goes like this: a famous violinist was giving a concert and afterwards attended a party nearby. People were all there to basically see him and one lady was gushing with praise for his performance and told him “I’d give anything to be like you.” The violinist stopped and looked at her, saying “No, you wouldn’t.”

    Naturally people stop and stare and the lady is a bit flustered, “oh but I would, ” she protests. The violinist then repeats she wouldn’t and continues. “You wouldn’t give the one thing you must, time.”

    He meant practice, effort, dedication, etc., and that’s really the secret to being rich. You have to really invest in yourself, believe in yourself, and put lots of effort in. Most people don’t really want to do that, instead looking for some way to shortcut the process. There are ways to do it, but they either involve picking the correct 6 numbers on the correct week or placing a big bet on a single number, card, roll of the dice, or stock. And it’s far more likely that you’ll end up losing big with big bets.

    I saw an article recently that said half of all US taxpayers make less than $32,000 a year. I’m not sure if that’s true, but the article cites the IRS statistics for taxes paid. If you make more than $65k a year, you’re in the top 25%. In many places that might be considered rich, and if that’s the case, I think the majority of people in IT, especially DBAs, are doing well. It might not be what you want, but it’s a good living you’re earning.

    I think there’s a lot more to life than money. Not that I don’t want to make good money, but there are definitely important things that aren’t related to money. Now it’s easy for me to say that, I’ve been successful, my wife works, and we don’t have trouble paying our bills, but I’m a long way behind the Cube. Hopefully most of you are in a similar situation.

    If you want to get rich, and crack into the top 5%, earning more than $150k a year, likely you really need to start your own business. If that’s a goal, good luck and I’d love to hear about your trials and success. I’d also you to build a business you enjoy, make decisions you’re proud of and would tell your kids about. Be fair, honest, and work hard, and send me a note. Maybe I’ll even start featuring a few of those down home efforts here.

    If that’s not your goal, I really hope you enjoy your life and get to do what makes you happy. That’s what’s important, or should be, to all of us.

    Steve Jones

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  • Patch Problems

    I ran across this article a week or so ago, but hadn’t had a chance to put anything out. There were three patches put out in July for various products that caused issues with other software, one of which was SQL Server.  can cause issues with SQL Server 2012, though it looks like the patch was pulled. Be careful if you have administrators that tend to apply the monthly security patches.

    Overall, despite the tone of the article, I’m not sure how bad this is in terms of patches. While the errors are problematic and annoying, I’m not sure these are critical issues. These aren’t causing reboots or re-installations of Windows. I’ve certainly seen worse patches released, though not in quite some time. The most disturbing item in the piece was the fact that the Windows 8/RT servicing stack update cannot be uninstalled. That’s a bit of an issue, and it concerns me as we move towards a more automated, bulk patch process.

    It’s one thing for me to uninstall an application on my phone and reinstall a patched one when there’s an issue. I’ve had this happen, with vendors releasing a new version in a day or two (or for all I know, the old version), that I can reinstall. It’s quite another thing for a large vendor like Microsoft to release a patch that cripples large numbers of devices. It’s easy to pick on Microsoft, but imagine Apple, Verizon, Dropbox, etc. releases a version that crashes machines or devices. It might be significantly harder to even reconnect these devices to recover from patches that crashed core, kernel level software.

    Software has bugs, and it will always have bugs. Patches will always be needed, and IMHO, should be included as part of some warranty for digital goods. However I think patching needs to be considered at the beginning, with installation and removal, as well as user option-to-install, built into all software for sale.

    Steve Jones

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    Today’s 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.

    Follow Steve Jones on Twitter to find links and database related items and announcements.
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  • T-SQL Tuesday #45–Follow the Yellow Brick Road

    tsqltuesdayIt’s T-SQL Tuesday time again, and this month Mickey Stuewe hosts the party. It’s an interesting topic, and one that I think is important, and will be more important, as we capture, store, analyze, and depend on more and more data.

    The topic this month is auditing, and you can read the invitation on Mickey’s blog. I think it’s amazing no one has asked us to write on this in the past, and I expect we’ll see some interesting stories that people will share.

    This is a monthly blog party and all you have to do to participate is write a post on the 2nd Tuesday of the month. The topic comes out about a week before, and you can schedule something to go out on the appropriate day. Be sure you leave a comment on the host blog or a pingback.

    Auditing

    I’ve never been bound by regulatory requirements for strict auditing. When I worked in industries that had bounds, they weren’t really updated for computer systems, and lots of our practices slipped by because no one thought to look. A few times that was scary.

    However I’ve implemented auditing in various systems, in various ways. The most common way to do this in the past was with triggers, though I had a situation where I had to build a unique solution that would capture changes being made to systems.

    I worked for a small company one time and we had a few critical systems our clients regularly accessed remotely for various functions. This was in the era of client server systems, and we delivered software to our clients that connected to our servers. We had lots of buggy software, and when we released new features, I’d cringe as I knew we would have calls and complaints for a few weeks as we patched things.

    I ran a team of 3 DBAs, and we had 5 or 6 developers working for another manager, including a few remote developers. We had agreed to limit changes to known times, and document the packages being deployed so that we were aware of changes and could better troubleshoot issues. Our environment was complex enough with multiple processes communicating with each other and SQL Server without adding the issues of unknown changes. We communicated things to our development staff, and though they grumbled everyone agreed.

    One day I came in to find that a process that had worked the day before had failed. We were struggling to get it working, and eventually discovered that a schema had been changed. This was in response to another enhancement, but it caused an import process to change. We hadn’t scheduled a change, which must have occurred overnight. No one admitted to making a change, and after a long day, I had to drop it.

    But not completely.

    I went back and set up a server side trace to run and capture information for object changes. I let this run constantly, rolling over the files periodically. It was a bit of a load on our system, but I felt it would be short term and it was important enough to understand what was happening.

    A few days went back and we were having an issue with another part of the system. Clients were screaming at my boss, who was coming to the development area to complain to DBAs and developers alike. As we tried to reproduce the problem on test systems, suddenly it started working.

    Relieved, but concerned, I decided to check my trace. Sure enough, I found a change to an object logged, by none other than that craft “sa”. Digging in further, we discovered that a piece of middleware had a timestamp of a few minutes before the system started working.

    It can be hard to track down who is using an “sa” account, which is why it is not recommended as an account to use by individuals. Cross referencing some information from the network team, we discovered our remote developers were slinging code changes on the system whenever they felt like it, using sa and “Administration” on Windows.

    They patched systems at times, but often these were patches to fix issues in poorly written software they’d deployed in the first place. They were also patching patches when thing didn’t work. Whether this was in reducing the time of problems or not was difficult to determine, but it certainly meant a lot of wasted time when we tried to troubleshoot issues with no idea what had changed. We also found lots of their changes weren’t being added to version control.

    My boss agreed this was an issue, and it allowed me to change all system administrator passwords, as well as revoke all rights to production systems from developers. Eventually we achieved more stability in our systems than the company had ever found. I’d attribute this to preventing cowboy coding changes to systems, which seem to cause as many issues as they fix.

    Auditing is something I’ve depended on, especially for myself. As I’ve worked with more and more systems concurrently, I find that it’s easy to forget about changes made in a hurry, or forget which change occurred on which systems. Logging and auditing allows me to retrace my own steps, as well as those of others.