Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Goal Progress–Wrapping up 2020

    This is the final look at my goals for 2020 and how I did. I am writing this a few days after the end of the year, and examining what I accomplished for myself.

    Rating for the year: C

    Details below, but really, I let the pandemic get me down, I didn’t focus, and I took lots of opportunities to get away from work and technical topics when I could.

    That being said, I didn’t take advantage of the lack of travel to focus more on myself. I could have improved more skills in a focused way, especially around my goals. I also think that my goals were more of the “this would be fun” nature than carefully tailored around my career and the things that are helpful.

    In short, I don’t think I thought enough about myself and where I am in my life when I started planning 2020, thinking about the practical aspects of moving my career forward, but in an evolutionary, not revolutionary way.

    I’ll have to do better next year trying to set and work on goals.

    Reading Goals

    Here were my goals for the year.

    • 3 technical books
    • 2 non-technical books – done

    Books I’ve tackled:

    I didn’t finish one technical book. I had a few ones I was looking at, but never really dug into any of them. They were easy to put off, with my constantly citing current work and the pandemic. To be fair, I did also read 70+ fiction books, which helped me cope with the year.

    All in all, I am happy with my reading progress here, getting away from fun fiction or literature and doing some reading in areas that will help my career.

    Project Goals

    Here were my project goals, working with software

    • A Power BI report that updates from a database – 30%
    • A mobile app reading data from somewhere
    • A website that showcases changes and data from a database – 20%

    I did manage to get Power BI hooked to a database, and some minor visuals, but nothing like I wanted.

    I did build a few websites, using data from a database, but as static sites. It was simpler to just get things working like this, and I was worried about costs and value. The whole PASS failing thing also threw me at the end of the year when I anted to focus more on goals.

    Nothing done on the mobile app. I think this was an aspirational goal at the beginning of the year, a chance to just try something, and I never took the chance.

  • Daily Coping 8 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 make time to do something kind for yourself.

    For me, I do little things for myself, but not enough. I’m more interested in doing things for other most of the time. Often those dovetail, and so I’m doing that today.

    While it won’t be actually today, I have some time this weekend, so I’m going to set aside a few hours and get back into the wood shop and start a project there. I’ve been wanting to make something, so I’m going to do that. I’ve had a plan to do something for my daughter and I haven’t made time.

    I will this weekend. It will be good for my soul to spend some time making sawdust.

  • Speaking at C# Corner’s Virtual Conference

    C# Corner is holding a virtual SQL Server conference on Jan 29-30, 2021. This is a charitable event, aimed at raising money for children affected by COVID-19.

    I’ll be speaking on databases and DevOps, so if you want to kick off some learning, join me for a session or ten at this event.

    You can register, and donate to help raise money for children.

  • The Best Way to Protect Sensitive Data

    I was listening to someone talk about data privacy recently, and the ways that you can protect the sensitive information in your databases. They had a great quote about something you might consider. They said, “The best way to protect data is not hang onto the raw data at all.”

    If we don’t have sensitive data, then a loss of data can’t occur. Hacks won’t cause issues, we can’t accidentally send out data or leave it lying around. There’s a good case to be made that keeping less sensitive data around is a good idea.

    For some applications, we can’t avoid keeping sensitive data. Medical databases keep private health information. E-commerce systems likely need financial information. Many of us will definitely have to deal with some sensitive data, and protect it, but we can minimize our struggles.

    We often don’t have a good reason for keeping lots of data around. Lots of queries run by users end up looking at only a small portion of data. Often recent data is needed, and some aggregates for older data, but we don’t actually look at the details of old data often. We may even have older data around that we’ve forgotten about, and our users don’t even know is available.

    We certainly don’t often need sensitive data in non-production environments. Plenty of people use scripts or tooling to obfuscate, anonymize, generate, or otherwise ensure sensitive data isn’t in unprotected environments. We can archive, or even change, old data to ensure it isn’t a liability. We can even do this in production, preserving metrics, but delinking data from any individual.

    I’ve always been someone that kept more data than necessary, just in case I needed it. However, over time, I find that the costs, and the potential risks, just aren’t worth it. Moving forward, archival, anonymization, and other strategies need to be a part of any system I manage.

    Steve Jones

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