Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • T-SQL Tuesday #134–Taking a Break

    I’m a day late for T-SQL Tuesday this month, literally because I was taking a break. Yesterday I took a holiday to go snowboarding with a friend. The weekend was a break from life, as I twisted my back Thursday night and spent most of the time since Friday in bed, healing over the weekend.

    This month, the invitation is from James McGillivray, and the topic is “Give Me a Break”, which might be appropriate as we have left 2020 behind, but not the pandemic. While I had a break, I’ll give you a few things that help me unwind.

    My Breaks from Work

    I’ve been stuck at some somewhat, but not completely, during the pandemic. The lockdowns in Colorado were shorter, and easier, so I haven’t had the challenges of others. Plus, I live on a horse ranch, so I’m not as restricted as many others.

    I am used to traveling, however, and despite the space we have, I felt somewhat trapped last year. I haven’t been used to spending more than 3-4 weeks in my office without a trip, so there was a different adjustment from many others. Some of my breaks:

    • horseback riding with my wife. We can ride off the property and through some nearby fields for a 2-3 mile trip
    • guitar – I spent more time learning some songs and sitting outside. I’ve even taken some breaks during the day when I need them.
    • language – I picked up Duolingo, and started relearning Japanese with my oldest. He studies on his own, but we text to practice.
    • cooking – my household went from

    Vacation

    For vacations, I have been trying to do more of this over the years, and more with my wife. My children are adults, so my wife has joined me for a number of trips in the last few years, some dedicated to vacation, some just extending work trips.

    The bucket list vacation for me is a big tour of Japan. I’ve never been, and for no good reason.

    Last year we were planning on Machu Piccu in the summer, which got cancelled. That’s still on the list, as is some sort of trip to Africa, likely Kenya/Tanzania. Hiking Mt. Kilmanjaro is on my list.

    As for the best vacation, it has to be with family. We’ve had a number, but I think our 12-13 day camping trip up through Yellowstone National Park and Glacier National Park was epic.

  • Security in the Aftermath

    Not too long ago was a very sad and embarrassing day for the US. The US capital was breached and rioters had hours inside without authorities. Ignoring the reasons and politics behind the event, think about the security of the building and systems after the criminals were removed from the building.

    Someone else brought up this point, which I think is fair. Can you trust any system in the building? Keyloggers, cameras, who knows what devices might have been planted. As a friend noted, anything with a plug should be thrown out. Who knows what might have been replaced or altered to create a security vulnerability.

    I haven’t had intruders in an office, but I have had to evacuate offices and returned to find unsecured systems. I’ve seen unlocked computers, when there were law enforcement or fire department staff walking around unsupervised. I doubt they did anything, and certainly never heard of any breach, but it is something to think about before you have to deal with the event.

    Have you thought about this or had to deal with this situation? Are you ready to audit systems and ensure nothing happened? Forget about spy devices, though those are certainly possibilities in this day of hot-plug USB keyboards, what about someone accessing information? If someone left a machine unlocked, would you think to check the history of the machine? Look at sites visited or emails sent? I don’t know I’ve ever thought about this, though in today’s world, this is something to consider. We are seeing some crazy types of attacks on systems, and I suspect it will continue to get worse.

    I learned a long time ago to lock my machine when I leave for any reason. A large group of administrators took delight in changing configurations, wallpaper, even sending embarrassing emails from unlocked machines to the group. After making a couple mistakes, it became a habit to lock a machine before you stood up for any reason.

    Most of us won’t deal with criminals walking around our office space, but we certainly should be careful and aware that unsupervised people around privileged systems is always a bad idea. I used to hate taking out the trash from a computer room I worked in, but I now appreciate that allowing cleaning staff into that space might not have been a good idea in a nuclear power plant.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Daily Coping 13 Jan 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 take 5 minutes to sit still and just breathe.

    Five minutes. It’s quick. Not a big impact in my day. Yet, I find stopping everything for 5 minutes and relaxing to be very, very hard.

    It’s silly, especially as this is often a part of the beginning and/or end of yoga classes in a group. However, if I’m doing yoga by myself, or even with a video, I struggle. I seem to always stop and look forward, look at the next thing I need to do.

    However, I tried this. I set a timer, and I sat on the front porch, just enjoying a sunny day, doing nothing. No distractions, no computer, no phone.

    It was very nice and relaxing.

    It was also very hard. My mind kept wandering and I kept thinking of something I could do in this 5 minutes.

    I’m not sure I could do this every day, but I am going to try and make it a point to stop and no tackle some different chore or task away from work, but just sit for a few minutes a couple times a week.

  • Reassess Your Configuration

    It’s the start of a new year, and while it might feel like COVID-19 has us stuck back in March 2020, I hope that will start to fade as we move into the new year. Certainly our employers want to move forward, and I suspect that there is some hope that organizations will start to thrive in 2021.

    I saw a post from Kenneth Fisher recently that talked about an end of year, new year checklist. It’s a basic set of things that you might do as a type of review and cleanup of some of the instances and databases that you manage. Checking things like end of year processes and performing some review of potential items that might no longer be needed.

    In the past, I didn’t do this type of work at the end of the year, or even that often, but when there were slow times, I did have a list of things to periodically review. We had canned queries and reports to help us evaluate resources. Many were automated to ensure the data about systems was available if I had time.

    One area that I was check once or twice a year was the configuration, trying to determine if any hardware had changed, the workload had altered, or there were proactive configuration changes we could make. This might include removing unused security logins or turning off services that weren’t being used.

    Certainly I was always cognizant of the load that managing lots of databases can have on a DBA. Every additional database is a potential customer that can call or file a ticket. I couldn’t often remove any, but I did find ways to remove unused objects and archive data at times. Reducing resource usage often pays itself back over time, especially when the need for more storage arises, which was more of a battle than it needed to be.

    I might add one thing to Ken’s list. I would ensure that you should check on cloud resources that might not be used. One thing I see too often is that cloud resources are easy to spin up and leave up, even if they become unused. Finding a few of these might earn you some points with the people paying the bills.

    Steve Jones

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