Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • The Wisdom Department

    If only wisdom were this easy to come by

    The more that I work in business, the more that I think that there truly is more to a company just maximizing the amount of money you can make. We often say that a business exists to maximize profit, but we never seem to care about the profit we can create outside of the money on the bottom line. There are all sorts of goodwill, long term growth, market share and more that often aren’t considered when running the business.

    This blog post tries to talk about how the business ought to get a makeover and establish new habits each year, just as many of us try to do with New Year’s Resolutions when the calendar changes. It’s a great goal, and while I’m not sure how many companies would try to evolve beyond the next quarter’s bottom line, I do think this is worth passing along to your management.

    In our departments, we often talk about maximizing our value to the company. Getting an amount of work done that helps the business and justifies the costs that we incur in technology and staffing. I would like to think that most of us in technology do look forward, consider the applications we build and the systems we develop as long term investments, and we build them with the idea that they will provide a long term value, not just for the next quarter.

    It might be worth setting up your own wisdom committee inside of your IT department, with the goal of ensuring long term value from the department.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Back from the MVP Summit

    Back home after three days in Seattle at the 2011 MVP Summit. As I wrote in an editorial this week, I can’t really talk about much, but the SQL Server development team at Microsoft is doing good work and I’m looking forward to the next few versions of  SQL Server.

     

    Relaxing at the MVP Summit

    The Summit was mostly in the Commons building at Microsoft this year. I’ve been to the building complex before, but never spent more than a few hours there. It’s a nice central location with a  variety of restaurants and shopping options for the employees. It’s a beautiful looking building, as you can see here.

     

    The Commons

    Inside it’s almost like a high end food court, where you can get all kinds of food (you have to pay), including a nice coffee shop where I managed to get coffee each morning. There were plenty of places to sit and chat, or relax, and even an inpromptu band that I saw one day.

    A good time, and valuable to me since I had the chance to meet and catch up with a number of people. As I mentioned in the editorial, we do get good dialogs with Microsoft and I think that MVPs do a great job advocating for their clients and the rest of the community.

  • SLA Contracts

    What's your contract?

    One of the things that is important for developing a high availability or disaster recovery is knowing what commitments you need to honor for your clients. After all, if you don’t know how quickly you need to be back up, or what protections for data are required, how can you plan to recover systems?

    Yes, I know everyone always wants 100% uptime and 100% data recovery, but those things are very expensive, and sometimes not possible on you systems, so doesn’t it make sense to have some idea of the relative importance of data in each system?

    For this Friday, I wanted to ask the DBAs out there about the contracts that should exist between the technology infrastructure and Its business clients. The question this week is:

    Do you know what your SLA is?

    Do you actually have a written contract for various systems with the clients that spells out specifically the acceptable uptime and data loss parameters? If so, do you know what those numbers are?

    You do need to have some idea of what is acceptable, even if it’s not a guarantee in a contract. It’s necessary in order to efficiently plan what level of resources will be devoted to your systems. Without this, you might be making investments on the wrong systems, leaving those systems that are more important from the business perspective, exposed to more data loss than can be tolerated.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Bad IT People

    Know Your Enemy – A tenet of IT Security

    It’s going to happen. Someone, somewhere, is going to deliberately compromise security and abuse their position as an administrator. Hopefully it doesn’t happen at your company, but the longer you are in IT, the better chance you have of being around when a “security DR event” occurs.

    This article talks about IT people going bad, and it happens more often than we hear about. Many companies don’t want to disclose these types of events, and it’s possible one happened in your organization already.

    This is nothing new. In every industry in which I’ve worked there have been people that take advantage of loopholes in systems and processes to engage in criminal activity. I have had liquor stolen from bars and lumber from a warehouse. We can’t prevent all of these activities, and companies know this. Usually there is a line in your accounting system that marks these losses as some cost of doing business.

    As with many external hacking issues, companies are likely to try and prevent anyone from finding out about these activities outside of the company. That’s not a great solution for anyone, since often these employees are let go and hired by the next company who has no idea what the person they just hired has done.

    You shouldn’t participate in these activities, and you ought to turn in those that do. However I know many people find that harder to do when confronted by this situation. At the very least, if you turn a blind eye, don’t help prolong a bad IT person’s career in this business. Don’t give them any sort of recommendation, and don’t include them in your personal network in any way.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts