Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • More Time to Certify

    With all of the shutdowns and quarantines with the COVID-19 pandemic, Microsoft has extended their deadline to finish the MCSA, MCSD, and MCSE certfifications. Previously old certification exams were due to expire on June 30, 2020. You had until then to complete your work. Now the timeline has been extended to January 31, 2021. This gives you more time to earn the cert you started.

    I haven’t held an active certification for years. I found them useful for studying and focusing my learning early in my career, but less so now. Working towards a test is also a time sink for me, when I often don’t quite have as much time as I’d like to get other things done. Life is busy, and I haven’t been as focused in a single area in a long time.

    However, I do think that certifications can be helpful in a few ways to many people, in addition to focusing your learning. Scheduling an exam puts pressure on you and will drive you to learn more. The semi-vague requirements will force you to learn more things than you might otherwise work on, which broadens your knowledge. I’ve found that to be particularly helpful in my career, when I have a wide variety of skills in different areas. I can often solve more complex problems.

    Maybe the one area that you can use to further your career and open doors is to point to the certification not as a measure of knowledge and skill, but of desire. It takes active effort to learn and pass a certification exam, and employers need people that are hungry to learn and grow, and most importantly, willing to do this on their own time. It’s a good point to make if you talk about your work in an interview or write something on your blog.

    In addition to extending the deadline, Microsoft has changed the fees for rescheduling and cancellation, which is good. They’re also working for more remote proctoring of exams, which will allow more people to take these tests from work or home instead of having to drive to a facility. They are also extending out voucher and discount dates.

    If you’re interested in pursuing something, let us know today. I’m considering some of the Azure role based certifications, mostly because they may focus my learning. Now I just need to find time and make the decision to actually move in that direction.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • Encryption Libraries

    One of the ways we work to implement better security is through the use of encryption. I remember the early days of PGP, VPNs adding end to end encryption, IPSec becoming available, and more. I was excited to see column level encryption come in SQL Server 2005, but it was a bit complex to implement and had issues. The evolution over time with TDE and Always Encrypted were welcome additions, but we can do better.

    Handling encryption in the database can provide some protection, but really, we’d like to see an end to end solution, that ensures data is protected on the wire as well as in the db. Microsoft does a lot of research, and released a Simple Encrypted Arithmetic Library (SEAL) as open source code. This is a C++ library that developers can use to protect their communications. Last year they also released a .NET wrapper to make it easier for a wide variety of developers to use.

    There is a lot more to deal with when handling encrypted at scale. Indexing and search operations are difficult and complex, and can require lots of resources. I think that the Always Encrypted in SQL Server 2019 with Secure Enclaves is a good evolution, but it’s complex to set up, tooling is poor, and maybe more disconcerting, there are potential vulnerabilities with secure enclaves on Intel chips.

    Certainly a combination of developers being able to use something like SEAL and a linkage with a secure enclave on the server for set-based operations might be something we can look forward to in the future. I hope so, as security continues to be a challenge for many of us.

    I’d also like to see more software that is built to ensure users can’t access huge amounts of data, and perhaps easier ways to control the export of large amounts of data. We do need this capability, but we also want very few people, or no people and only a process, with rights to do so.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • Daily Coping 7 Apr 2020

    I’ve started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here.

    Today’s tip is to rediscover your favourite music that really lifts your spirits.

    I love music. It’s one reason I resisted the change from iOS to Android. The music experience is just better on iOS. If they had kept the headphone jack, I’d likely still use an iPhone today.

    I grew up listening to lots of music and playing some on guitar. I attended lots of concerts before I was 25. My first was Andy Gibb. My second was Kiss. I had varied interests.

    Over the years, I get into moods, and will listen to lots of one genre for a period before I change. My wife didn’t love the rap phase, dealt with a Pop phase well, and doesn’t quite love my retro 70s guitar phase now.

    When I’ve traveled often for work, I will usually pick an artist and download a few albums to play on the plane. No real plan, but I try to discover, or rediscover, music from someone. I’ve had trips where all I listened to was Stevie Wonder, Elton John, Bob Dylan, Journey, Common, Kanye, Prince, the Beatles, and others. I sometimes realize I never real heard something in the past and sometimes rediscover a new thing I like.

    Spotify is my preferred platform, and I decided to pick something I really liked in the past. For me, there was a year of high school where I really liked Duran Duran. I grabbed a few albums (old and new) and created a playlist. I put this on random and let it play. Alternately tapping my feet, singing along, and really enjoying old tunes, and discovering new ones.

    It was a welcome break from current life.

  • T-SQL Tuesday Live–7 Apr 2020

    Last week went a little crazy, and I learned something: don’t post a Zoom link on Twitter. My apologies to anyone that wanted to join and had things go sideways. It took me about five minutes to mute everyone and kick people off.

    We ended up having a great call with just 4 of us, and it was good to touch base and talk through some of the changes in the world.

    This week I’m going to continue with the call. We had very little technical discussion, and I’m going to skip a technical theme this week and stick with a general touch base, health check, and community connection focus. We’re going to try and keep things civil and interesting.

    To try and prevent any craziness, I’m going to put a password on the meeting. Those of you that are data professionals should be able to answer this question for the password: what is the name of the type of index that isn’t stored in a row store? Enter just the first part, lower case (Hint: ______store index).

    The meeting isn’t hotlinked on purpose, as it’s not a complete URL. Zoom security is a thing.

    Call Details: