Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Daily Coping 25 Oct 2021

    I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.

    Today’s tip is to recognize that you have a choice about what to prioritize.

    This seems like an obvious tip, but I see myself, and most others, often not prioritizing work. We tend to work on a FIFO method, first in first out, or within the squeeky-wheel methodology where the loudest voice wins.

    I am guilty of this at times, though I certainly get caught up in working on the thing that is due soonest, letting deadlines drive my workflow.

    At times I do find better ways to work, and occasionally I remember that I can set priorities. A couple weeks ago I was slammed, running from thing to thing (literally as I was in the Redgate office), and letting others dictate my schedule.

    This week I aim to do better. I have things due today, some tomorrow, some Wednesday. Then things open up a bit from a deadline perspective. However, I know that there are some items I can do today, which will relieve some pressure. I’ll prioritize a recording today, then a review of something for tomorrow. Those should eat up half of today. From there, my plan is to focus on the question of the day for a few hours. I need to build up a queue, and I know that tight focus time here will likely get me a couple weeks of questions, which reduces lots of stress.

    I’ll worry about Wednesday tomorrow or Wednesday.

  • Maybe It Is DNS

    There are jokes about how often DNS is a problem. There are stickers, shirts, and mugs you can buy. There’s a classic haiku, which leads into a rant about the struggles of sysadmins. I will admit that I know a little about DNS, but I find myself confused at times and usually seek assistance from others when something doesn’t work. The old days of a single MX record and a few A records to map names to IPs has grown into a much more complex system.

    DNS usually works. In fact, it’s lower on my list of things to check these days, though I do often get a quick DNS check when I ping an address. There are some failures, and these days when large companies have issues, it can affect a lot of people. Akamai had an issue and knocked off a large chunk of the Internet. When Facebook had an issue recently, it not only affected customers, but the engineers that were trying to fix things. Some couldn’t even get into buildings. I guess relying on a single domain might be a bad idea.

    Most of us rely on DNS in our organizations, which means that a rising level of DNS based attacks is disconcerting. These are still behind the issues we have with ransomware and DDoS attacks, but when DNS doesn’t work, a lot of stuff shuts down. I could see a lot of people that work inside a company’s domain for most of their work being unable to accomplish anything.

    I tend to use a number of domains for my daily work. Evernote and Dropbox are essential, but if one were down, I could still do things with local copies. Red-gate.com is certainly important, but as long as SQL Server Central is up, I can do something different. Actually, if both were down, I could still write or create questions. I’m more bothered by slowness in my connection or machine than losing any particular service.

    I haven’t every been too worried about DNS security, but I left sysadmin work when it was a simpler time. These days, I suspect many organizations might want to be sure they are paying attention. If they use a lot of services connected to one domain, I might think about having a secondary domain connected to a few. If I were in charge, a sqlservercentraladmin.com might be one I’d set up.

    Steve Jones

  • A New Form of Address: Mx

    When I was presenting at the dataMinds Connect conference, I called on someone in the audience. At the time, I called on someone raising their hand and said something like, “yes, miss.”.

    I got dinged in feedback for assuming someone is a he or she.

    At first I wasn’t sure how to take this, but like much of life, I decided to try and learn something. I set aside my feelings and started to look at how I’d address the individual in the future.

    I should have asked then, but I didn’t think about it. I keep my “he/him” pronouns on my bio slide, and I’m happy to refer to someone as he, she, or they, as they prefer. It’s a simple thing and I look for the forms of address in other people’s slides and signatures.

    However, I’ve grown up with sir, madam, miss, and other forms of addressing someone I don’t know well. I’ve always considered is polite to say sir or miss.

    That’s not good enough for the current world and I learned there is a title: Mx. According to a few sources, this is pronounced mooks, as rhyming with books.

    Something new for me to think about as I call on people. Certainly I should ask, though asking everyone seems like overkill. Certainly, however, if I’m not sure, I ought to ask.

  • Complex Searching

    Searching for data in our systems is sometimes hard. If you’ve ever needed to generically search a lot of text, it’s not easy to write code to do this in an efficient manner. It’s even harder if you try to embed this in an application. If you get into full-text searching, likely you would look beyond SQL Server as the built in full-text indexing and searching isn’t great.

    What if you had to search in more complex data? Imagine that your users were looking for words in audio files, or they wanted to find images that matched other images. Those are even more complex searches, and I expect that few people have had to deal with this. I know some, and I do expect it to be something customers will do demand across time.

    I saw an article about Google Lens coming to the desktop, allowing you to clip an image and then search for similar items. While I haven’t used this for searching, my kids have. Often they are looking for matches of a product or a place, and they like being able to search for related images. Image search is interesting, as you are looking to match patterns of numbers, but not exact matches. The idea of fuzzy matching parts of an image, which is a series of numeric values, but not all of the values, has to be a very challenging process. I would find this even more complex than doing a speech-to-text translation from audio and searching for words. Many of us would know how to do produce a solution for searching audio recordings.

    The theory of how to search for images based on another image is a complex field of study. I don’t pretend to know how this might work, and I’m not sure I care. If I have a need for this, I wouldn’t expect to need to understand how the system works as this would really be an API call of some sort. I might need to work with the API and understand how to better use it to produce the results my clients need, but that might be the most I’d care about.

    As with a lot of deeply technical things, I care more about practical applications. On a recent trip, I watched my wife use Google Lens to translate some menus, something I hadn’t considered. I usually would type in text and look for meanings, but using the image is much easier. I expect we’ll see the need for more complex searches in the future, but for most of us, it will be another service we consume without really understanding how it works, which is probably fine in these situations.

    Steve Jones

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