Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Can Azure Stack Reduce Software Development Costs?

    There’s a piece, called The Real Value of Azure Stack, that caught my eye recently. This seems a little promotional, as lots of vendors are mentioned in the piece, but the gist of the piece is that one of the largest line items for most enterprise IT shops is software development and maintenance. Part of Microsoft’s strategy to address this is with Azure Stack, a hybrid solution that allows you to build a platform in your data center that can extend to the cloud if you need it.
    Software development is hard, and from what I can see now, Azure Stack still doesn’t have a great data story. While one can develop against SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, etc., these databases instances used would be the same standalone services that we would use without Azure Stack. The platform does provide some features that smoother the use of SQL Server or MySQL, but it’s a far cry from the Azure SQL Database or Azure MySQL Database offerings or even CosmosDB. I hope to see those on Azure Stack at some point, perhaps with lower performance capabilities and promises.
     That doesn’t mean that there aren’t advantages to Azure Stack because there are. The consistent development platform, the use of functions, known VMs or App Services mean that your developers can build and test things inside your data center or in the cloud, knowing that these services will run smoothly when deployed on Azure Stack. I’d expect that we will see container and k8s support at some point as well, which will further help us smooth the process of moving software from one machine to the other.
    I don’t know of any customers for Redgate that are using Azure Stack right now, but I am hopeful to meet some and see the system in action. I don’t hear about it often, but every time I do, I get a little excited. I think this is the type of platform that could get more people interested in writing more cloud native software, with all the requirements to build more fault tolerant, resilient and scalable applications.
    Of course, moving to Azure Stack is likely most beneficial for new applications. While existing ones might port into an IaaS infrastructure and reduce some sysadmin costs, I doubt that there would be significant savings without a lot of development work that takes advantage of more modern software frameworks. There likely isn’t going to be any software maintenance savings on those old thick client applications or ASP websites.
    If any of you are moving to Azure Stack, let me know. I’d be interested in your experiences.
    Steve Jones
    Listen to the podcast.

  • Changing Context and Data Reuse

    One of the points of the GDPR that I thought was very interesting was the idea that users needed to give consent for data use for specific purposes. This had many companies trying to reaffirm consent last year while others assumed previous consent was valid. No matter how you viewed the law, any change in the way that a subject’s data was used required new consent.
    We don’t have a law like that in the US, and that allowed IBM to scrape images from Flickr to use in facial recognition software. This isn’t dramatically different from lots of scraping that goes on from other sites, where plenty of data is aggregated, but there is certainly some private data being used for new purposes. When Netflix created a contest to help build a recommendations engine, they shared data, albeit in a way they thought was anonymous. It wasn’t  and Netflix stopped trying to run contests.
    The article from Tim O’Reilly and Mike Loukidesi is an interesting look on privacy, rights, and consent for data use. Many of us click through overly broad rights agreements, many of which I think should be more limited by law and regulation. Unfortunately we seem to allow data to be aggregated, reused, and re-sold, often without any input or redress for the individuals to whom the data refers. The article notes that often the context of how the data is used changes, so it’s not whether the data is public or private, but rather how the data is used.
    I think this is a better way to examine data, and perhaps one that courts and arbitrators ought to be charged with protecting. Too many companies play fast and loose with data usage, and in an area of larger and larger data driven companies, I’m not sure I see a public interest for the rights of companies to trump those of individuals. Especially where privacy and security are concerned. Even when this might impact commerce.
    I rejoice in the tremendous amount of data in the world and the opportunities it brings for many to learn more about their lives. I appreciate the opportunities I have to work with data. I think data helps companies provide better services and build more efficient processes. I also think that many companies take advantage of the data to increase their revenues without understanding that there should be some rights for the people that did not agree to, and do not want to participate in the new uses of data.
    Steve Jones
    Listen to the podcast

  • Protecting Data Between Services

    I saw an announcement this week that Microsoft is shutting down their HealthVault service, where someone might have chosen to store their medical records in a way that it could be shared with health professionals, but an individual could maintain control of the records. They could share them out to friends, download them, etc. It was a good idea, and I was interested in it for the future. Since I have been fortunate to mostly avoid doctors and hospitals, I never signed up, but I still could as of this week.

    Google used to have a similar product, but shut it down a few years ago. I suspect that this commercial space just isn’t as lucrative and valuable as either company thought, as I don’t really see any competitors out there that might allow a user to transfer their records. While I don’t know that there needs to be a service for this, I did think of the hassles and potential issues that might exist if there were. Imagine your mother or grandmother keeping their health records here for the last decade and now needing to download them and manage them before they could be used again. What if someone downloaded these to a PC and had a hard drive failure?

    Backups are needed, we know that, and I’d hope most consumers know that, but in a rush or in the worry that these need to be copied, but securely, would you want to keep this data on a tablet or PC? Or would you want an encrypted drive. If that’s the case, would you want to ensure you have 2 (or more) of them? Easy to plan this out, hard to think about if you get a notice about the service shutting down. Imagine that your spam filter knocks this down or you’re inundated and miss it and get a final notice on Sept 1 or Oct 1? A real hassle.

    The higher level view of this in my eyes is that we need better data formats for capturing and keeping lots of our data in systems. Those of us that are impacted by the GDPR (or similar laws) might be thinking about this already, as we have a need to provide data in response to requests. Providing a report, and packaging this up, is no small task. I assume I’d use a .zip file, but maybe a .nuget with a manifest is actually a better idea for customers.

    As the use of services grows, I expect that we will want to get more portability for data over time. Certainly vendors that provide services have an incentive for tooling. WordPress has import/export for other blog services, Microsoft will help you move data from Oracle (as will Oracle in the other direction), and there are specialized vendors in niche applications doing the same, but really I’d like to see us have more open, and extensible, data formats that relate to the types of data in our lives. I know we’ll have more disparate types of data, in various formats, so why not an easy way for each of us to store text, images, and more as a service that contains some metadata, some indexing. A personal data lake of sorts.

    We could have other services, like image services, visualization services for numbers, and more be authorized (or de-authorized) for our data. Imagine a way for us to allow a company to hold our data, but we disperse that to other vendors as needed for services. I could easily imagine various “storage” vendors competing and allowing us to “port” our data to a new service as easily as we port phone numbers for mobile phones. Perhaps a whole new era of data storage and management is coming.

    Or maybe we’ll just stick with the current separated, proprietary, limited view of data that we manage on hard drives and USB sticks. It’s more likely, but much less preferable in my mind.

    Steve Jones

  • Protecting Data Between Services

    I saw an announcement this week that Microsoft is shutting down their HealthVault service, where someone might have chosen to store their medical records in a way that it could be shared with health professionals, but an individual could maintain control of the records. They could share them out to friends, download them, etc. It was a good idea, and I was interested in it for the future. Since I have been fortunate to mostly avoid doctors and hospitals, I never signed up, but I still could sign up as of this week.

    Google used to have a similar product, but shut it down a few years ago. I suspect that this commercial space just isn’t as lucrative and valuable as either company thought, as I don’t really see any competitors out there that might allow a user to transfer their records. While I don’t know that there needs to be a service for this, I did think of the hassles and potential issues that might exist if there were. Imagine your mother or grandmother keeping their health records here for the last decade and now needing to download them and manage them before they could be used again. What if someone downloaded these to a PC and had a hard drive failure?

    Backups are needed, we know that, and I’d hope most consumers know that, but in a rush or in the worry that these need to be copied, but securely, would you want to keep this data on a tablet or PC? Or would you want an encrypted drive. If that’s the case, would you want to ensure you have 2 (or more) of them? Easy to plan this out, hard to think about if you get a notice about the service shutting down. Imagine that your spam filter knocks this down or you’re inundated and miss it and get a final notice on Sept 1 or Oct 1? A real hassle.

    The higher level view of this in my eyes is that we need better data formats for capturing and keeping lots of our data in systems. Those of us that are impacted by the GDPR (or similar laws) might be thinking about this already, as we have a need to provide data in response to requests. Providing a report, and packaging this up, is no small task. I assume I’d use a .zip file, but maybe a .nuget with a manifest is actually a better idea for customers.

    As the use of services grows, I expect that we will want to get more portability for data over time. Certainly vendors that provide services have an incentive for tooling. WordPress has import/export for other blog services, Microsoft will help you move data from Oracle (as will Oracle in the other direction), and there are specialized vendors in niche applications doing the same, but really I’d like to see us have more open, and extensible, data formats that relate to the types of data in our lives. I know we’ll have more disparate types of data, in various formats, so why not an easy way for each of us to store text, images, and more as a service that contains some metadata, some indexing. Something like a personal data lake of sorts.

    We could have other services, like image services, visualization services for numbers, and more be authorized (or de-authorized) for our data. Imagine a way for us to allow a company to hold our data, but we disperse that to other vendors as needed for services. I could easily imagine various “storage” vendors competing and allowing us to “port” our data to a new service as easily as we port phone numbers for mobile phones. Perhaps a whole new era of data storage and management is coming.

    Or maybe we’ll just stick with the current separated, proprietary, limited view of data that we manage on hard drives and USB sticks. It’s more likely, but much less preferable in my mind.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast.