Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Sleepless in Seattle – SQL in the City 2012

    seattle_20081115_cA few years ago I went to Seattle a few days before the PASS Summit started. I took my middle son and we spent 3 days wandering around Seattle, seeing some amazing sights. We went to the Museum of Flight and the Underground Tour, along with a few other places and had a great time. This year I’ll be going early again, and I’ll get to spend a day with my oldest son, who lives in Seattle.

    However I’ll also be getting to work early. SQL in the City is coming to Seattle on Monday, November 5, 2012 at the Bell Harbor International Conference Center. It’s just a short walk from the Convention Center on the water, and we’ll have another great lineup of speakers.

    If you are coming to the Summit, and would like a free day of sessions on Monday, sign up and come down. We’ll do training the Red Gate way, with great speakers, topics, discussions, debates, and food.

    This will be the end of our 2012 tour, but I’m sure we’ll have plenty of our SQL Star beer available at the end of the day. Register and come on down if you will be free on Monday.

    I’ll likely be in town on Saturday, and I’ll be going hard. I will likely get a run in early in the morning before the event, but I’ll be jogging along the water on Tuesday as well, so catch me on Twitter if you want to tag along.

    Register today.

  • The Dream Machine

    I could replace my desktop since I have a similar setup

    Hardware is usually important to techies. I see now shortage of discussions and debates about this laptop or that. I see people asking about this machine or that ( the W530 looks niiiiiiiccccceee) and as various Surface tablets are announced, I often find people blogging about what they like or debating the merits on Twitter. In the SQL Server world, there are a few very impressive hardware setups at people’s homes.

    I ran across this post about life at Stripe and there was one benefit listed that caught my eye. In the post, the author says “New employees are asked to send in specifications for their dream machine, which is then built and waiting for them on their first day.” I think that’s a great benefit, and it shows that the company values their employees and wants to ensure they start off with a little excitement.

    This Friday I wanted to ask you what you’d do if that were offered to you. Most of us working for corporations get the same type of machine as all other technical employees, but imagine that isn’t the case.

    What machine would you specify if your boss gave you the choice?

    Personally I like my MacBook Air. It’s small, light, comes on instantly, and I find myself really enjoying OSX. The one thing it lacks is some horsepower, and if I need more I’d have to look at either one of the new Macbook Pros or the Lenovo 530. The former is very tempting right now, but the latter would allow me to replace my desktop as well since it can drive four external monitors.

    If you could spec out your machine when starting a new job tomorrow, what would you want?

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.

  • This is Big Data

    I’m sure some people have bigger data, but Facebook has some serious daily growth. The highlight? 500TB a day.

    A day.

    That’s serious data. I’ve never had a database that was a TB, must less growth by over a TB a day.

    To be fair, lots of the Facebook data is unstructured, stored in Hadoop or NoSQL structures for images/video, but there’s a ton of database-like status updates, links, comments, etc. that have to be managed.

    Rather impressive, but not something I want to administer.

  • Privacy

    Privacy icons
    We may be classifying all our data like this at some point.

    If you gamble online, you might be gambling in more than one way. It’s not surprising to me, but many online gambling businesses are located in places where the legal protections are more relaxed than in other places. However it’s not just the laws around the games themselves, but also the laws around data protections.

    Whether or not you have any sympathy here, or you think that companies engaged this this activity are worse than others, consider the fact that more and more companies in general are ignoring, flaunting, or just failing to keep up with data protection laws in other countries. What’s even worse, in my opinion, is that many of our laws are ill suited to dealing with the digital world and often don’t provide any protections for data that is more accessible, and greater in scale, than that which has ever been available.

    I have rarely known about data law changes, and have found myself ignorant of the laws in other countries at times. Not because I am looking to avoid any compliance, but because I’m too busy to keep up. I suspect many data professionals are in the same situation. We are unaware of problems in our data handling until there’s a complaint or someone notices.

    Privacy is important to many people in the world, despite the fact that all too often people aren’t sure how they would define the rules of privacy for their data. It’s a complex subject, and I understand the problems of passing or updating laws when various companies, advocacy groups, and even friends of lawmakers have opinions. I don’t know how things may evolve over time, but I do suspect that privacy and data handling will become more of a part of data professionals’ jobs in the future.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.