Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Planning for a Bad Day

    Are you ready to get a new job? I’m not talking about you deciding you want a new job and working towards that goal, but rather getting surprised by a layoff or termination today. If your boss called you into his/her office in the next 10 minutes and told you that you were being terminated today, are you ready for that? Kendra Little wrote a nice post recently asking who might be prepared.

    Most of us aren’t. In fact, in my branding presentation, one of my slides has a screenshot of a post from LinkedIn. A friend noted that they walked into work and found out his company had been purchased. It wasn’t a good day because they were also notified they were being laid off, hence the post on LinkedIn letting others know of their need to find one.

    The modern work world, especially for technology workers, isn’t stable and certain. While we have lots of positives in our jobs (work environment, low physical needs, remote possibilities, etc.), many of those can be detractions. Outsourcing IT jobs is something many companies do, and whether it’s a good idea for the company or not, it’s a reality. We also have lots of acquisitions in different spaces, and when sets of IT groups come together, there isn’t always the need to keep everyone employed. Even with double the workload, many in management would rather save money and give more responsibility to fewer people.

    Side note, this is one reason a good knowledge of DevOps, ITOps, GitOps, etc. is valuable for your career. When a manager is trying to decide who to keep, those with these skills may stand out.

    Unless you are ready to retire and merely padding your assets, you ought to have a plan for changing jobs. Even if you like your job, circumstances might force that upon you and when lots of people are scrambling for new jobs, competition can be fierce. Like Kendra, I don’t know you need a detailed plan, but documenting some skills growth and keeping your resume or CV up to date is always a good idea. I recommend everyone touch their resume every quarter. At least spend 5 minutes looking over it and thinking about it.

    Kendra has other suggestions, and I like them. In fact, I’m looking to think about a few of these. Not that I want another job, but you never know what might happen, and I’m not that close to retirement. Close, but not close enough. Certainly thinking through a few options at a high level is something I want to do with my wife.

    And make sure my resume is up to date.

    Steve Jones

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

  • A New Word: Licotic

    licotic – adj. anxiously excited to introduce a friend to something you think is amazing – a classic album, a favorite restaurant, a TV show they’re lucky enough to watch for the first time – which prompts you to continually poll their face waiting for the inevitable rush of awe, only to cringe when you discover all the work’s flaws shining through for the very first time.

    I’ve felt this quite a few times, often with my kids. Usually it’s an older movie or show that I loved and I try to introduce to them. Only to realize that in my naiveite of youth, I loved it more than it deserved and ignored the shortcomings.

    I also think that the cinematography and storytelling in media has improved so much over the years that many shows I loved as a kid don’t resonate anymore because the skill of media has grown.

    From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

  • Typing Strange Characters–#SQLNewBlogger

    I’ve had to type a few non-English characters lately, and this blog talks about how to do this.

    Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.

    The Need for Non-English Characters

    Recently I wrote a blog on using Chinese characters. While you can copy/paste from Google, perhaps you want to actually type something regularly. For example, I have been learning French, and I sometimes need to

    Another one I’ve used fairly often is the British pound symbol.

    Typing Unicode characters

    There are Unicode characters for these symbols. While some keyboards may include these, the US ones do not. I can switch keyboards, and I have a Japanese keyboard, but

    A few commons ones for me are:

    • é (French e with acute (forward) accent) – 0233
    • è (French e with the grave accent) – 0232
    • ô (French o with the circumflex) – 0244
    • ç (French c with the cedilla,hanging thing) – 0231
    • £ (British pound symbol) – 0163
    • はい (Japanese yes, hai) – a little harder

    To type these, I press the ALT key and hold it. Then I enter the number. So, holding ALT and entering 0163 gives me this: £

    The Japanese is a little harder. There I needed to enable the Microsoft IME keyboard that lets me type the phonetics for Japanese characters. There are other ways to do this, but that’s what I did.

    Learning to work with other languages and characters has been interesting to me, and it’s nice to be able to type São Paulo instead of Sao Paulo. Especially when I communicate with people whose names contain non English letters.

  • Securing All Your Connections

    I read an interesting blog from the cyber security team at Microsoft, noting you should use TLS for your SQL Server connections. I would assume most professionals know that using TLS and secure protocols across the network is important. I would also assume few of us are willing to get real certificates for all of our SQL Servers, especially those in dev and test environments.

    Setting up a certificate for a server instance isn’t hard, but it’s also not easy. It’s also something that I don’t know how easy would be to automate in many environments. I know that you can use APIs from somewhere like Let’s Encrypt, but integrating that into a server setup process would be something. What about integrating this into instances in containers? I don’t know that I think many SQL Server organizations have DNS integrated for most of their database servers, much less asking them to also get certificates set up.

    I do think that Microsoft likely has better infrastructure in place, and better staff resources, than most of us. I can see this being something needed for Azure SQL DB and Azure MI. Heck, this might be something we want for all services that we get in the cloud. Since we don’t control much of anything other than the service, and Microsoft can automate the process of generating certificates, this makes sense.

    I think this might be something that is a good idea for production systems as well, ensuring that when a DBA or system makes a privileged connection to a database server in production, the person or process is sure of which database server is at the other end of the connection. I don’t know that I’ve seen an exploit in the wild where someone impersonates a prod server and captures credentials in some man-in-the-middle attack, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it happens.

    Do you think you also ought to avoid trusting the server certificate? I don’t think this is practical in many orgs, but I’d be curious what you think today.

    Steve Jones

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