Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • T-SQL Tuesday Topics

    I was asked to host a T-SQL Tuesday, and I accepted.

    Once again, my fingers move a bit faster than my brain. “Sure, be happy to host one. Send me a date” flew out of my fingers before I thought through the implications. I’m happy to help the community, and I think Adam Machanic (Blog|Twitter) had a fantastic idea with the T-SQL Tuesday blog party, and I look forward to them every month.

    But I’m busy, and this is a very busy time of year for the next month, with the hope that most of December will be quiet for me. It’s been a crazy year for me and I’m looking to try and better manage life next year.
    Adam immediately responded to my email with a date, and I have December. I was thinking he’s a busy guy, and my mail might get lost in the shuffle. However it didn’t and I ended up with not only an acceptance, but a date that’s not too far in the future.

    So I need a topic.

    There are any number of topics out there, and after all, T-SQL Tuesday has only been around for a year. However I was somewhat stumped as to what a “good topic” will be. After all, I want this to be a good one.
    The ones I’ve seen so far are:

    I’ve got a few ideas, and some work ahead of me to develop something in the next month around SQL Connections, SQL Saturday #59 and a week of family vacation. If you have any ideas of your own, don’t post them. Save them for your own T-SQL Tuesday and contact Adam to host one.

    I’m not sure what will happen in November, and I’ll be jammed up with a post since I’ll be at Connections next week, so whether it’s the first Tuesday or second, I’ll be hustling a bit to participate.

  • Remote Security

    Telecommuting is taking off. It seems I have been reading that for years, but more and more I run into people that are at least able to telecommute part of the  time for their jobs. There are still lots of people that don’t telecommute  at all, especially in Information Technology, but I do think more and more businesses are becoming open to the idea that some portion of their workforce going about their daily tasks from a remote location.

    And that means security is a bigger issue. I ran into this short piece on two ways to provide security for home workers and found it interesting. It mentions VPNs with network access controls as one solution and remote terminals as the second solution. Both of these can work, but both can also be complex to implement.

    The lines between what is private and what is corporate are blurring often on our machines, just as the line between private time and company time is hard to discern. No matter what your company policy is, chances are that for IT workers, some of their personal life will bleed onto their corporate hardware. That’s even more of an issue when you have people working at home.

    While the infrastructure people will  concern themselves about good network security, I think it’s important that DBAs question the data security as well. Is database access protected? Can the user download and save critical data to their machines? Is any encryption employed? It’s important to ask the questions and be sure that those involved with securing corporate systems are aware of potential data security issues.

    Steve Jones

  • SQL Slammer

    Seven years ago I was in the mountains of Colorado, taking advantage of the a school break to get away for a long weekend. There wasn’t good cell phone coverage up there, and I was surprised as we drove back Sunday evening with a voice mail indicator on my phone. I dialed in and found a message from work to call ASAP. SQL Slammer had struck.

    I wasn’t expecting to get back to work so soon, but as soon as I got kids out of the car and into bed, I headed into work to deal with the issues. A crisis team was assembled, with the other production DBA already having spent much of Sunday at work. We worked late into the night, patching servers and trying to eradicate the worm.

    However we had literally thousands of infected MSDE instances that had been installed with custom paths and the patch Microsoft had released would not fix them. We had an engineer fly out from Seattle and help work through the issues, finding workarounds and understanding our environment. A combination of creativity and scripting allowed us to finally develop a solution late Monday night that we deployed into the wee hours of Tuesday morning.

    That was seven years ago and it was a memorable time for me. I had thought that the Slammer worm was dead, but apparently that’s not the case. Traces are still detected at times and this month the SANS Institute is trying to work with ISPs and companies to eradicate the worm once and for all. They are asking system administrators to spread the word and help them try and remove SQL Slammer as a threat. They are not confident that they’ll succeed, but I think it’s worth a try.

    I’m sure many of you encountered the Slammer worm if you were working with SQL Server at that time. Any great memories? Any stories to share? Let us know in the discussion below and if you can help eradicate the worm, make sure you pass the word to the administrators of SQL Server 2000 instances.

  • Efficiency

    There was a debate recently about older IT workers and the fact that there is some age discrimination going on in this industry. While that’s probably true, it happens in other fields as well. Especially blue collar fields where the amount of work done often relates to some physical activity. Older workers might make less, or be paid less, because they do the job differently.

    Without getting into the debate about age discrimination, I wanted to get a feel for how you feel about your career progressing. I’m sure those of you in your 20s can’t conceive of being 60 and programming any differently than you do now, but times will change for you.

    One of my feelings is that there is a lot of value in experience. The latest .NET changes aren’t harder to use or understand than the previous ones, and the changes to T-SQL bring about new things to learn, but they aren’t really any more complex than previous features, commands, and constructs. For this Friday, I wanted to ask this:

    Are you becoming more efficient as you progress in you career?

    Maybe you can answer how you are getting more efficient. Are you developing skills that allow you to produce higher quality code in less time?

    I hope that most of you are, and the explosion of blogs, books, and events like SQLSaturday mean that you have more chances than ever to learn how to become more efficient in whatever type of technology you work with in your career.

    Steve Jones