Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Daily Coping 15 Dec 2020

    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 notice when you’re hard on yourself or others and be kind instead.

    This is one of those skills I’ve worked on for years, maybe a decade. I have tried to learn how to balance acceptance with drive. I want to accept, or maybe just experience, a situation where I am not achieving or accomplishing enough. I need to do this without suppressing my drive, but rather more realistically viewing situations.

    I see many driven, type-A type people never willing to give up, and often chastising themselves to do more, to do better. Maybe the example for me that springs to mind if Michael Jordon. He’s amazing, likely the best ever, but a jerk. Not someone I’d want to emulate. I’d take a more balanced, a more polite approach instead.

    I’d rather be Tim Duncan, if I were a high achiever. But maybe I’d just be happy being Luol Deng, a semi-successful player, but not a huge star, but a nice guy.

    What I want to do is drive forward, in a way that balances all parts of my life with success. With my wife’s success. With the support and love I give my kids or friends. If I don’t accomplish something, I try to stop and realistically examine why.

    It might be I had other commitments, or no energy (which happens a lot in 2020). It might be I chose to do something else and didn’t have time. It might be because I was just being lazy or not putting in effort.

    The former items are places I give myself a big break. The latter, I try to think about how to do better, how would I do something different in the future in the same situation. I accept what happened, I experience it, and maybe feel disappointed, but I don’t chastise myself. I move forward.

  • Setting Defaults for New SQL Compare Projects

    Recently I wrote about ignoring comments in SQL Compare. That seems like something I want to do in all my projects, so I went looking for how to set this as a default. It wasn’t obvious to me, but since I can ping the Redgate Software developers and support staff, I found an answer for this post.

    If I start SQL Compare by clicking a project, it opens and my settings are there. When I start SQL Compare, it brings up the New Project dialog, shown here:

    2020-12-01 10_01_10-New project_

    However, if I don’t want a new project, and close that, I have a basic interface. Going through the menus, I don’t see any way to set global options.

    2020-12-01 10_02_01-SQL Compare

    There are Application Options, but these aren’t anything to do with projects.

    2020-12-01 10_02_09-Application options

    However, I realized that I missed something a support person pointed out to me. On the options tab for any project is a button that says “Save as my defaults”.

    2020-12-01 10_03_55-(local)_SQL2017.SimpleTalk_1_Dev v localhost.SimpleTalk_1_Dev.scp

    I can set things from any project, or I can click the “My Projects” button in the toolbar, which gives me a list of projects (I don’t save many).

    2020-12-01 10_03_38-Microsoft Edge

    At the bottom of this is an “edit” button, which opens the familiar project dialog. I can click Options from there and see options.

    2020-12-01 10_08_22-(local)_SQL2017.SimpleTalk_1_Dev v localhost.SimpleTalk_1_Dev.scp

    When I do that, I can now set the items that I care about. The Ignore Comments is one, but there a few others I think cause issues. I do want to ignore encryption objects. I shouldn’t have the same ones  in dev as prod, so I’ll check that. Others:

    • Use database compat level (likely better than server version these days)
    • Online = ON
    • Ignore identity seed and increment (this could get changed)
    • Ignore WITH ENCRYPTION

    I can then click the “Save as my defaults”. This will ensure new projects have these options. If I have old projects I want to update, I can always click the “My defaults” in the project to load what I’ve saved. This animation shows how the button works.

    compare_options

    Now I can easily ensure that projects work as expected on my machine. Unfortunately, these defaults are stored in the registry, so this is a client by client basis, but you can ensure all your projects are set up the same by default.

    SQL Compare is a fantastic product to make it easy to see what has changed in a database. If you’ve never used it, give it a try today.

  • Prized PII

    If I asked you what specific type of information criminals would like to capture about you, what would be your response? Take a minute and think of something and then leave it in a comment after reading the rest of this.

    I know that usually more than one piece of data about me is needed, and while most of this data is probably somewhere in a database, and perhaps leaked in a breach, it’s not necessarily organized. I still think it’s good to protect information where I can. Every year my wife laughs as people wish me Happy Birthday in Facebook, on a day that’s not my birthday. I think any day is as good as any other to wish me well, and so I disclose April 1 to my friends. In fact, I often disclose a slightly incorrect birthday when sites and organizations ask me, unless I have some legal obligation to type in my real date.

    There was an article that caught my eye about the data that thieves most often want. It opens with a story about pharmacists using personal data to bill insurance for non-existent medications, which is criminal activity for sure, but there’s not much you can do about these people using your data. The piece then goes on to talk about the value of healthcare fraud and how data related to this is even more valuable than credit card numbers.

    That isn’t something I’d have expected, though, I do live in the US. With the high cost of healthcare, I shouldn’t be surprised. Fraud is big business, and there is a large volume of claims, providers, and statements that people have to review. If you’ve tried to go through your statements, they often don’t seem to be easily relate-able to the treatment you may have received. I think this creates opportunity for fraud, as it might not be something an individual can catch.

    I haven’t worked with healthcare data, but I suspect anyone that does will need extra protection on their systems, and certainly encryption along with the prevention of PII in non-production environments is important. I also think this is the type of data that you may want to be more careful about in your own life. Though how you can be more careful escapes me.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • Daily Coping 14 Dec 2020

    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 do something helpful for a friend or family member.

    This one is for my wife, her employee, my daughter, and for me.

    I installed an electric winch last winter to raise and lower the arena door. We use this almost daily to move hay in and out.

    Attach7512_20200221_134709

    Someone ran it too far and bent the drum axle. As a result, the winch didn’t work and I had to go out late one night, and hook up the manual winch again. A pain for me one night, but an ongoing pain for everyone.

    It’s been broken for a week, and it’s been cold, so I haven’t worked on it. However, I ordered a new winch a few days back and when it arrived, I took a few hours to remount it and hook it up so that everyone can enjoy the convenience of electricity rather than the 70 turns the crank takes to open the door.