Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

Friday Flyway Tips–Comparison Options
Recently a customer asked how they could get index changes to be captured in Flyway Desktop. In their case, they wanted a different fill factor, but I decided to investigate a bit more how things work.

This post looks at how to control the comparison options in Flyway Desktop (FWD).

I’ve been working with Flyway Desktop for work more and more as we transition from older SSMS plugins to the standalone tool. This series looks at some tips I’ve gotten along the way.

The Setup

I’ve got a table and an index, which I created with this script.
```
CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Customer]
(
[CustomerID] [int] NULL,
[CustomerName] [varchar] (75) NULL,
[PrimaryContact] [int] NULL,
[PrimaryAddress] [int] NULL,
[PurchaseLimit] [numeric] (10, 2) NULL,
[Status] [tinyint] NULL
)
GO
CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX [nci_customer_custname] ON [dbo].[Customer] ([CustomerName], [Status])
GO
```
I saved this in Flyway Desktop, which we can see here in the filesystem:

and here in VS Code.

If I refresh the schema model tab in FWD, there are no changes.

Making Index Changes

I’m going to alter this index. Specifically, I’m changing the pad index, fill factor, and statistics options. Here’s the script I’ll run.
```
ALTER INDEX [nci_customer_custname] ON [dbo].[Customer] 
REBUILD PARTITION = ALL 
WITH (PAD_INDEX = ON, STATISTICS_NORECOMPUTE = ON, SORT_IN_TEMPDB = ON, ONLINE = OFF, 
       ALLOW_ROW_LOCKS = ON, ALLOW_PAGE_LOCKS = ON, FILLFACTOR = 80)
```
Once this runs, I’ll refresh FWD and I see this. Note that I see an index change, but only one option is captured: STATISTICS_NORECOMPUTE.

What’s happening is that FWD is using the SQL Compare engine and the default options set in the engine. Among these are to ignore fill factor and pad index. However, I can change this.

Changing Configuration

In the past, I would need to edit a config file to make this change, but the team has enhanced FWD to add new options. In this case, notice the button near the top of the Schema model tab: Static data & comparisons. Not a great name, but it’s there:

Once I click that, I get a new dialog. This starts with static data, but I’ll click the second tab, which is Configure comparisons. This shows all the options available in the Compare engine

Rather than scroll, I’ll type in the search box, and I see fill gets me the “Ignore fill factor and index padding” option.

I’ll uncheck this and click OK.

Once I do that, I’ll refresh the comparison, and now I see my options.

Try it out today. If you haven’t worked with Flyway Desktop, download it today. There is a free version that organizes migrations and paid versions with many more features.

Video Walkthrough

I made a quick video showing this as well. You can watch it below, or check out all the Flyway videos I’ve added:
December 8, 2023
A New Word: Guiltwrights

giltwrights – n. the imaginary committee of elders that keeps a running log of your mistakes, steadily building their case that you’re secretly a fraud, a coward, a doofus, and a douche – who would’ve revoked your good fortune years ago had they not been hampered by their own bitter squabblings over proper grammar and spelling.

I have anxiety at times about the mistakes I make. I tend not to dwell for too long, but I do sometimes find myself wondering if there are others who’d find me lacking, fire me, stop being a friend, etc. if they knew how many times I’ve made mistakes.

Across my career, and across decades, I’ve learned to admit mistakes often and expect them. I’ve learned that I am frail and faulty, and I have to accept that. I also need to try to not make easily-preventable mistakes, or big ones, but accept that those might happen.

I don’t think I’m often concerned about the guiltwrights at my age, but I did feel they were watching me often in my teens and 20s.

From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

December 8, 2023
TryHackMe Advent of Cyber

I posted that I was thinking about the AdventOfCode this year, but wasn’t sure I’d spend the time. Someone then posted a link to the TryHackMe advent calendar.

I decided to give it a try.

There’s a fairly long (10min) video intro and then you sign up.

Day 1

One of the good things was that the video has some spoilers to help you solve the challenge. If you skipped the video, watch it now. Or try.

There are three questions we need answered, and we then have to fool the AI/ML chatbot. The video shows how, but essentially you need an email address, a server room password and a project name.

The interesting thing is this shows how a poorly secured and trained chatbot might disclose this information. For the email address, you just ask. For the password, you need to find an employee’s name and then tell the chatbot you’re that person and need the password. It seems silly, but I bet this works on some chatbots people have created with wizards or templates and not secured or limited the training data.

The last one is interesting, you ask the machine to go into maintenance mode and you get the name of a project. Getting into the maintenance side of applications or mainframes used to be a way to attack them. Unfortunately, too many people didn’t secure many early systems and this was too easy.

Day 2

Day 2 is about using Jupyter notebooks. A good portion of the tutorial is helping you understand how notebooks work. Hopefully you’ve read my article on notebooks. If not, this helps you figure out how to use them. It also has a short tutorial on some python that you use to perform data analysis on a csv. While many of us might like to do this in SQL, the experience in python isn’t bad.

This ends up helping you understand how to count, summarize, and group data in python.

Day 3

This day was interesting. Now we are learning about some security tools. In this case, we learn about hydra, which is a tool to brute force logins against a web page. This is a fantastic tutorial that should teach you that unlimited retries on a page without some timer is a bad idea. This should also help you understand that you need to track failed logins and do something about them, especially from weird IPs.

Day 4

Continuing on, we learn how to use cewl to create customized wordlists and then use those to brute force in a smarter way.

Again, scary for a non-security person. These tools are likely good for security folks, but terrifying in that perhaps criminals use them every day.

Summary

The first few days of the challenge were interesting and it was neat to spend some time thinking about the world from a cybersecurity point of view.

December 6, 2023
The Stagnant Career

Do you feel stagnant in your career? Or maybe the better question is do you care if you feel stagnant in your career?

You might need to define what that means to you, as what might feel stagnant to one person could be comfortable to another. Apparently, there was a study of tech professionals, who despite a tight labor market, are citing lack of salary increases and dim promotion prospects as reasons to leave their jobs. The survey was across a number of larger technology companies, and likely answered by more talented employees. After all, good talent can usually find jobs and is less worried about leaving. Less talented people usually cling to their jobs.

A lack of salary increase could be a problem. Everyone, or most everyone, wants regular raises. However, depending on where your salary bracket is and your living expenses, you might not rate this as a very important criterion for sticking with a job. Someone making USD$40,000 might be more concerned about a raise every year than someone making USD$200,000, but perhaps not.

Having a career progression was more important to me at 30 than it is after 50. Again, the varies among people, but I find a lot of people like their jobs and don’t really want to change. Many of them would likely be happy to keep working at their level as long as they can get raises. I see people complaining about their current position when they’ve bumped up against a salary limit for that position, but otherwise, they’re satisfied.

The work matters. I do think there are plenty of people who are unhappy with the work they do and want to be challenged, or at least interested, in the work. At the same time, lots of people are happy to just do a minimal variety of work day after day. I think this is why I encounter lots of people who seem to have 4-6 months of experience repeated 10+ times.

My view is that you ought to make your career what you want, and that means actively managing it. Spend time thinking about what you want, ask others about their work, and make plans to move in the direction that matters to you. Implement those plans and find a balance between advancing your skills and living your life. It’s easy to do too much of one or the other, but often that’s not the problem, it’s the motivation and effort to actually improve yourself.

I can’t tell you how to structure you career or what to learn or what to improve. You have to decide what is interesting to you and what fits in your life, and then make an effort to move in that direction. Sharpen your saw, improve your craft, and learn those soft skills that help you work with others. That’s how you find the career you want, which will never be stagnant.

Note: We do have a career forum on SQL Server Central. If you want advice or have questions, post something and I (or someone) is happy to answer.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.

December 6, 2023