Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Better Writing from Hemingway

    These are five rules for writing from Ernest Hemingway, which I like and recommend for use in your communications. Definitely try to incorporate them into your writing, especially being short and positive.

    (Cross posted from The Modern Resume)

  • More Bloopers for Memorial Day

    It’s Memorial Day, and as usual, I have a blooper reel for the editorial. However I couldn’t fit everything in there, so I’ve pulled out a few more items. Mostly body mistakes or movements and some speaking issues. Enjoy!

    The editorial blooper reel is here: http://m.podshow.com/media/15351/episodes/282544/sqlservercentral-282544-05-26-2011.mp4

  • The Backup Passwords

    Hopefully you have better password management

    One of the things that my boss was excited to implement a few years back were passwords for our backups. Actually we were using a third party backup utility, like SQL Backup, for our SQL Server instances. We purchased the tool because of the compression, but the encryption feature was appealing to management in the wake of so many data loss reports in the media.

    It seemed like a good idea, and we started to make plans for the backups. However we quickly ran into a concern: how would we manage the passwords for the backups? After all, if we lost track of the passwords, then the backups couldn’t be restore and that would be a problem. Keeping the same password forever was only slightly better than not having a password given the turnover we had seen at the company.

    We used Password Safe to track current administrative passwords for our team, and that worked well, but backups introduced  the new dimension of time into our password storage.  We wrestled with the problem and came up with a solution, but I thought it would make an interesting Friday poll:

    How do you deal with key management across time?

    This mostly applies to backups because most other systems or accounts only have one password at any given time. However backups could exist for a long time, and even in a short period of time, you might have 3 or more passwords to manage. If you changed passwords one day and had an administrator quit the next day, you might end up with another change and 3 passwords across 3 days of backups.

    I want to know if you’ve thought about this and how you deal with it, or if you ignore it, keep the same password, avoid encryption or any other ideas.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Greed Is Good (for IT)

    I think that the lottery mentality that so many executives of companies have these days is bad for business. The idea that someone can be promoted from a director or vice president to CEO and then earn enough money in bonuses, benefits and stock options to retire is silly. People that lead a company should make more, but their jobs should be no more secure than anyone else’s in the company, and they shouldn’t be paid multiples more than their direct reports. If they lose their jobs, they should have to get a new one, just like the rest of us.

    Last week LInkedIn had an initial public offering (IPO), which was very successful. The company raised money, which hopefully will help it grow, and many stockholders and investors became rich. That might not be important to data professionals, but the news may have caught the attention of your management, and that could be good for IT.

    The CEO of TheLadders.com wrote a blog about the event, and he brought up an interesting point. Executives and management in many companies probably are thinking that social networking, or just online engagement with customers,  has an impact on their business. How do they get better engagement? Better Information Technology.

    While I’m not sure this will be pervasive throughout all companies and industries, there will be executives that want to build new systems and move faster. They will want new applications, which means new databases, and for some of us, this will be the chance to get a better job, build a strategic application, or just get a little more budget for our group.

    It’s also potentially an opportunity for you to be pro-active. Maybe you can suggest a few new ideas for projects or enhancements that you might want to tackle which would improve customer engagement. Maybe you’ll even get the chance to have some fun at work.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts