Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • SQL Saturday Advice–Upload Decks Early

    One of the neat features for the SQL Saturday site is that it allows the speakers to upload a deck that is attached to their session. If you go to the schedule after the event, and pick a session you attended, you can get the Powerpoint deck, the code, anything the speaker has uploaded. That’s handy, and too often I’ve been at events where speakers point you to some location they use and it’s easy to forget where this is, or where the information is stored.

    However the organizers have to send this note to speakers, and in most events, this has come after the event. I’ll admit that sometimes I’ve been busy and have forgotten to upload the deck, or I’ve been slow to do so. However Saturday night, Sunday, or early the next week is when the attendees are thinking about the event, and if the deck isn’t there, they might not go back.

    This week I got the link early for SQL Saturday #60 in Cleveland. I was changing a couple slides in the presentation, based on feedback from previous events, and was a day late in uploading, but I have finished, and my deck is uploaded. Now I don’t have to worry about it, and the link is live, people can get the deck for themselves.

    I know some speakers are working on their decks at the last minute. I don’t think that’s a great idea, but I understand people have busy lives and they might be trying to add something on Friday that they learned recently. Or they remember to correct something from the last session as they’re reviewing the night before. That’s OK, and the organizers can always replace the code with a new download.

    I do think, however, that most attendees would appreciate having the downloads available right away, and by sending the upload link to speakers before the event, you can improve the chances you’ll have all the downloads uploaded and ready.

  • Cloud Hacking

    Hackers are training for the cloud challenges

    Not everyone is down on the cloud. Apparently someone found a great use for pay-as-you-go computing in the cloud by using it to hack wireless networks. What’s next, someone using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to find security holes in police patrols of local businesses? It constantly amazes me just how someone will take a technology that is very handy and turn it into a tool used for criminal purposes. I suppose we just have to live with this use of technology and learn to protect ourselves as much as possible.

    I think that security will be one of the bigger impediments to cloud adoption than anything else. Sure there’s the cost factor of data transfers, and trying to determine how to manage the costs of large bursts. There’s the need to integrate local and cloud development codebases, and potential patching/version issues. However those are not large issues when compared with the potential security issues that come with cloud computing.

    Even as we move to private cloud structures, we may have security issues with more resources being grouped under one large services umbrella and the difficulties of managing security for large numbers of users. We want to use groups to make management easier, but the more people you manage and the more groups that become involved, the more likely it is that you will have some security hole in your system.

    I think we’ll start to find more hackers that will discover, and take advantage of, hole in cloud security that we haven’t thought of. As they do, we’ll see more resistance from companies in migrating their infrastructures. At least until it becomes more cost effective to do so. Then we’ll discover that many of those security issues don’t seem to matter quite as much.

    Steve Jones

    (published at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Editorial/72385/)

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • A Full Backup can Impact a Log Backup–MCM Prep

    In the early days of SQL Server you could not run a log backup while a full backup was running. In fact,you tried to schedule them apart from each other early in my career to prevent collisions. Nothing bad happens, but it does cause failures in your monitoring and those are annoying.

    In modern versions of SQL Server, you can run log backups and simultaneous full backups. They don’t collide or block each other, but there is a way that the full backup impacts a log backup.

    If you start a full backup, once all data pages are written to the backup device, the log records that were created since the start of the full backup are added to the full backup file. This allows the redo/undo process to complete and this gives you a full backup set that is intact as of the point in time in which the data pages finish writing.

    If you run a log backup, typically the log records are written out, and then the VLFs in the log file that were written to disk are marked as inactive.

    However since those log records are needed for the full backup to be complete, the log backup cannot clear those VLFs when the log backup finishes. That process still occurs, and technically this is part of the log backup, but it is deferred until the full backup completes.

  • Hybrid Hires

    I'd like to see more of these in the US

    There was a lot of talk about various hybrid technologies at the recent Detroit Auto Show, with many new models being displayed that use some type of hybrid technology. There are plenty of people that don’t love the technology, but my Prius has performed well for me over the last three and a half years I’ve had it. Who knows, I might even buy another one.

    The past two or three years have been a down economy around the world. As I’ve traveled to meet many SQL Server professionals at events all around the US, I’ve found that many of them have struggled with having more work and less resources to get it done. There are also many people who have lost their jobs or had trouble finding a job. Quite a few others have a hard time trying to get work done while worrying about their own job security. The downturn has not been pervasive, however, and there are plenty of technical professionals for whom the last two years have been business as usual as they go to work every day.

    At some point most of us will need to look for another job, and when we do, I think those of us that are well rounded DBAs will be in a good position. Data professionals often understand technology, and the business impact of data. There was some data on recent good trends in IT hiring summarized in this article that talks about job growth. In the article it mentions how there are lots of potential IT related positions where people are being hired to analyze data and statistics, as business/IT hybrids.

    I’m not sure that the idea of being a hybrid worker appeals to me, but I can see where technical and business skills are valuable for a data professional. You want to use these skills to market yourself and bring attention to your resume. It’s why a good IT worker will learn about the business of their employer and how it works.

    When you’re looking for a job, showing off your business skills alongside your technical skills can give you more opportunities to choose from and hopefully help you find the job that fits you best.

    Steve Jones

    (originally published at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Editorial/72344/)

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts