Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • The Mechanical Turk

    The original Mechanical Turk
    The original Mechanical Turk

    Today’s editorial was originally published on Apr 17, 2007. It is being re-run as Steve is at SQL Server Connections.

    I stumbled across Amazon’sMechanical Turk while helping search for Jim Gray. As a side note, Jim is still missing and presumed dead after an exhaustive search by the Coast Guard and many of Jim’s friends.

    The Mechanical Turk is based on the mechanical chess playing machine created in the late 1800s. It turned out to be a fake, with a human inside, and that is what Amazon has built. They have a way for you to distribute a workload and let humans work on the problem, or a very small piece of the problem. Similar to a super computer, but this process uses humans for things that artificial intelligence can’t handle.

    The basic idea is you create some task, for example one of the items I looked at was reviewing a list of vendor names associated with a contract for the city of Tulsa. It’s a data task that might not be easy to implement in something like SSIS, but a human can easily complete it. And get paid!

    Maybe not much, in this case $0.02 per item, but it’s a good way to distribute the workload.

    If you can find someone to work on the task. I guess if you wanted to fund a book habit at Amazon, it might be worth taking a few minutes here and there to look through data tasks and earn some money.

    I completed two and earned myself $.07 🙂

  • Contained Databases in SQL Server 2012

    Abstract:

    One of the problems with databases in SQL Server is the dependency of the database on various parts of the host instance. In SQL Server 2012 there is an enhancement to the database format that allows for partial containment of your database, and will make the movement, migration, and management of the databases much simpler. This session introduces the new database structure and explains how it can be used in your environment.

    This talk looks at the new partially contained databases in SQL Server 2012.

    Agenda:

    • What is a contained database
    • Contained databases in SQL Server 2012
    • The Future

    The talk will demonstrate the issues with uncontained databases, provide demos on how to create and alter contained databases, look at security and collation issues in SQL Server and speculate on the future.

    Level: 200

    Length: 60 minutes

    Slides:

    Demo Code: ContainedDB.zip

    Related Posts

    You can read all the posts I’ve written on contained databases by examining that tag

    Presentations

    You can view my complete speaking schedule here: http://wp.me/P14wgJ-1tV

  • Is Computer Science Dead?

    I enjoyed studying Computer Science in school.

    Today’s editorial was originally published on Apr 27, 2007. It is being re-run as Steve is at SQL Server Connections.

    There are less people entering Computer Science in colleges and less people interested in traditional computer science practices. There’s concern among adademians and one questions: “Is Computer Science Dead?”

    I heard something similar from my brother-in-law about 8 years ago. At the time he was a mail admin for a large company in Texas, running multiple mail servers handling somewhere in the 50,000 account range. At the time, that stressed a lot of the mail servers out there and it was a challenging job. But he worried about advances in automation and better software and thought that sysadmins would be mostly outdated in the next 5 years.

    It’s 8 years later and I see DBAs and even SMS guys finding work in companies with less than 100 employees. So much for automation.

    I took computer classes in high school in the early 80s and spent 2 years in a Comp Sci degree and two additional years in computer engineering and while I haven’t done a lot of programming, I’ve written enough software and been involved with developers to know that most of the fundamentals I learned with BASIC and Pascal still apply. Some of the C techniques involved with optimizing code and being very structured in your development still apply today in .NET, Ruby on Rails, or LISP. Even LISP, which I’ve never used outside of a academic world, still taught me how to program better.

    Because it taught me to think about computing. And algorithms, and how things are processed.

    I think CompSci is still a good major, as good as any other. I also think that we should require C programming to incoming students, force them to work with memory, understand pointers, solve the Tower of Hanoi, and other things without all the benefits you get from frameworks like .NET and J2EE. I don’t believe that much has changed in computer programming in 30 years. We have Procedural and OOP programming and the concepts in either can be applied to any environment. Maybe you could learn relational logic and SQL on top of that, but everything else is new ways of combining these old techniques.

    All the rest is just syntax.

  • The Encryption Primer

    This talk deals with SQL Server encryption options. I have given a few variations, and you can get the different decks below.

    SQL Server has a number of encryption features that allow you to better secure your data. This session will examine the basics of encryption and cover the various ways in which you can encode and decode your data to protect it from unauthorized access. Cell level encryption, Transparent Data Encryption, and backup encryption will all be discussed. This session is designed for those who want to learn the basics of how to protect their data.

    This talk looks at the encryption options in SQL Server that are available, including the changes in SQL Server 2012. The agenda is:

    • What is Encryption
    • Encryption in SQL Server
    • Transparent Data Encryption
    • Hashing
    • Symmetric Keys
    • Asymmetric Keys
    • Certificates
    • SSL Communications

    The presentation features basic demos of how these features are implemented in SQL Server.

    Level: 200

    Length: 60-75 minutes

    Demo code:

    Slides:

    Presentation Schedule

    You can view the my speaking schedule here. The upcoming and past deliveries of this session are:

    1. Apr 27, 2013 – SQL Saturday #175 – Fargo
    2. Apr 10-12, 2013 – SQL Intersection, Las Vegas, NV
    3. Apr 9, 2013 – SQL Saturday #197
    4. Mar 9, 2013 – SQL Saturday #187
    5. Mar 7, 2013 – Richmond SQL Server User Group
    6. Nov 15, 2012 – Denver SQL Server Users Group
    7. Nov 13, 2012 – Boulder SQL Server Users Group
    8. Nov 5, 2012 – SQL in the City Seattle, WA 2012
    9. July 28, 2012 – SQL Saturday #144 Sacramento, CA
    10. June 9, 2012 – SQL Saturday #132 – Pensacola
    11. Apr 28, 2012 – SQL Saturday #131 – Phoenix
    12. Mar 26-29 – SQL Connections, Spring 2012

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