Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Amazing Margaritas in Austin – SQL in the City US Tour

    Photo Sep 17, 9 44 23 PMThe last time I was in Austin was last year, for a weekend trip with my wife to see Stevie Wonder and Kanye West (on separate days) at the Austin Music Festival. My wife and I have been trying to see Stevie Wonder for over ten years, and we finally got the chance and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. It’s something I’ll never forget, and I’d be tempted to go down there again for the ACL Festival weekend.

    On that weekend we stopped by Guero’s Taco Bar near the Festival and had some amazing margaritas. The food was great, and we enjoyed our time there. As I arrive in Austin on Sept 30 to get ready for SQL in the City 2012 – Austin, I’m hoping to get two things done.

    • Run along the Red River
    • Get some great Texas margaritas.

    I arrive in Austin around 1:00pm in the afternoon and I should be able to get both done before some prep for my sessions on Oct 1.

    If you’re in Austin on Oct 1, come join me, Grant Fritchey (b | t), Aaron Nelson (b | t), Tim Radney (b | t) and a number of developers from Red Gate software for a free day of training – The Red Gate Way.

    We had fantastic events last year in LA and London, and this year we’re touring the US. Austin is stop #2 after New York and I’m looking forward to it. Red Gate throws a first class one day event, with plenty of knowledge, discussion, debate, SQL Server tips, tricks, great food and drinks. It’s a great one day event, and it’s free, just register to come.

    We’ll be at the AT&T Executive Education Conference Center and we’d love to have you come and meet us. We’ll talk about things you do every day, or should be doing, in your environment. We’ll give you ideas about how you can improve the way you work.

    If you want to run with me, watch Twitter around the event. Once I get to the hotel on Sunday, probably around 1:30-2:00, I’ll post some details on where I’ll be running. Perhaps near Zilker Park around 2:30-3:00. Join me for a short 2 mi run if you’re so inclined.

    Register today and come shake my hand in Austin.

    This is part of my SQL in the City series, covering a few thoughts on the US tour.

  • Learning about Driving with Big Data

    This is nice, a year long safety pilot from the University of Michigan. Quite extensive, using 3,000 cars to gather data. I don’t know what they’ll get out of this, and if you read the comments, there’s all kinds of speculation, but it’s a good idea, in my opinion.

    Many of the commenters are trying to come up with results before the data in this case. Do we need better driver training? Better design? Driverless cars? Who knows? We should get the data and then decide how to proceed.

    This study is a good idea, because I think we realize there are some things about driving we don’t know enough about, but there are also a lot of things we don’t know we don’t know. The unknown unknowns are likely going to impact how we interpret this data later.

    I like to see more studies along these lines, but with really anonymous data. Do some work to try and disconnect people from the data, which will be hard and likely not work well. Perhaps we just need to map the coordinates of the cars and their interactions to a neutral space, maybe some coordinate system that doesn’t necessarily correspond to lat/longitudes.

    However there will be good data out of this that can help us understand how we might better change driving. I just wish this were with more than 3,000 cars. That seems like too few to me. I’d like to see more like 300,000 cars in a study.

  • Make a Backup First

    Mat Honan
    Are you protecting your digital life?

    I was reading in detail about the Apple / Amazon hack that targeted a Gizmodo writer.  A hacker used a few techniques to get from his Amazon account to his Apple account, his GMail, Twitter, and more. His iPhone, iPad, and Macbook were remotely wiped, and he ended up losing quite a bit of data that wasn’t backed up. That’s a horrible situation, and I know every time I’ve lost a picture or document at home, I regret not making another backup.

    The situation caused some discussion and comments on Twitter about the various things you should do to prevent this type of issue. Updating your security, choosing better passwords, and other ideas are great, but the number one thing you need to do is make a backup of your data. No matter what happens to your security or even hardware, if you have a second copy of your data somewhere else, you can recover from the situation.

    While listening to a Brent Ozar, PLF webinar recently, I heard this interview question: what is the first thing you do on a new server you’ve never worked with? The answer is ensure it’s being backed up. Not run a backup, since you can cause problems, but make sure there is a backup plan in place, or get one started as soon as possible. Why? Because if you have a backup, you can recover.

    I think this is the number one priority for any data professional, and perhaps for anyone using a computer. I know I have backups of my home machines run to a Windows Home Server. I take a backup of my Macbook regularly, and leave a copy at home when I’m traveling. I also carry backups of my VMs on separate disks, in a separate suitcase when I travel. I know that if I have one of those copies of my data, I can recover from almost anything.

    What’s the saddest part of this story? There wasn’t any intent (allegedly) to target the writer’s work or his data. The hacked just wanted to use his cool Twitter account, @mat.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

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

  • Disabling DDL Triggers

    Suppose you want to stop using a DDL trigger for a short period of time, such as the login trigger I created recently. If you want to disable an index, you use

    ALTER INDEX xxx DISABLE

    That doesn’t work for triggers. The ALTER TRIGGER syntax is used for changing code.

    You could use ALTER TABLE on DML triggers, but not for DDL triggers. The DISABLE TRIGGER DDL can be used.

    To stop tracking user logins, I can use:

    DISABLE TRIGGER CatchLogins ON ALL Server
;

    There is an ENABLE TRIGGER syntax as well to turn the triggers back on. These two commands allow you to save the trigger code, but have it enabled or disabled as needed.