Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Learning Goals–January Review

    In December I participated in T-SQL Tuesday #97 and wrote a post about 2018 goals. I promptly spent two weeks out of the country and then a relaxing holiday season. Actually, holidays extended slightly with a ski trip and a wedding in January.

    This is a look back at my goals, since I have a monthly reminder to do so. This is the first review, a little late as I’ve struggled to focus a bit on work in January, but here goes.

    Progress

    I picked two things to work on this year: Python and Extended Events. I’m failing miserably in both.

    I did work on a little Python in solving a few of the Advent of Code puzzles, but I’ve only read a few pages in the Machine Learning book and not much else. I’ve gotten distracted by other items on my list.

    I haven’t done anything on Extended Events.

    I did play with a little more Pester, and I set up an MVC site in a project for a demo, so I tackled things that interest me, but not in the extra areas I wanted to learn.

    Planning and Moving Forward

    I didn’t actually do my planning in December. When the appointment came up, I was a little buried with other items and let it pass without rescheduling.

    Moving forward, here’s what I want to do. I’m going to set a reminder for Tuesday afternoons to spend an hour on XE. I’ll set that for 3 months and see where we stand. I’m hoping to work through a bit of Pluralsight courses and then some of Jason Brimhall’s series on his blog.

    For Python, I’m going to take some time on Friday mornings here. That’s likely a slower time for me, so I’m scheduling a half hour to work on something with Python. I need to refresh some core skills and then move on from there. I’ll likely go back through a bit of the Dive into Python book, then try moving to a bit of ML stuff. This is good as I’ll get some content, at least questions of the day, out of this work.

    I also realize that I continue to spend some time on R, as this is a part of SQL Server and it’s an area that generates some content for SSC. That along with my MVC project are things that will distract me a bit, but I’ll try to push forward in all these directions.

    Hopefully this will result in a better review next month.

  • Finding the Right Data

    For a couple years, Big Data was heavily hyped, and Hadoop became incredibly popular. In fact, so popular that Microsoft build HDInsight and Polybase to allow us to take advantage of these technologies and integrate them into our own systems. While the year has seen less hype on “big data” specifically, more and more of us are dealing with large amounts of data every day. There isn’t a good definition of Big Data I’ve seen, but whatever you thought it meant five years ago has surely changed to mean larger volumes today.

    One of the important things that many organizations are learning is that they don’t necessarily need more bits and bytes of all their data. They’re increasingly learning that they need more of the right data, which is the data that is useful to them. Often this is the data that lets them make decisions that improve their revenue, profits, efficiency, etc. As we move to GDPR this spring, it might also me more auditing data that prevents problems or satisfies regulators.

    I ran across an interesting article that talks about companies needing the right data, which can often mean unstructured data outside of their traditional OLTP databases when dealing with customers. The article focuses on NLP (natural language processing) and social media data, but it could just as easily mean audio/video data from customer calls (or emails) or even sensor data from systems that are managed and track the ability of customers to use your product or service.

    As the world of computing advances, many of us know that we need to find new and better ways to provide value to our employers. This might be with managing and gathering or tracking a wider variety of data, perhaps meaning that some of us need to keep some of those tweets or posts inside our systems. It could be that we need to provide new ways of analyzing data, maybe with some sort of ML (Machine Learning) or AI (Artificial Intelligence) processing. Perhaps it’s that we need to collate and collect detailed auditing information we can produce on demand to ensure our organization complies with legal requirements.

    Perhaps there’s some other way that our work as data profressionals will change, but I’m sure it will continue to change and evolve across the next decade. I’m also sure this means lots of new and different data opportunities for us, if we’re willing to grab them with the right data.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.9MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • We Do Need To Upgrade

    I advocate that we should get a long life from our database platforms. In fact, I like to think about a 7-10 year lifetime for many of my database instances. That means I’ll get beyond the 5 year lifetime that Microsoft provides and move into the extended support. Actually, for most of my career, I’ve run instances without support and haven’t had issues. We invest a lot in databases, and I want companies to invest a lot because they are important. That means I need a good payback.

    Microsoft should provide security patches for products throughout the Extended Support period, which means that I should be able to run SQL Server and Windows securely for 10 years. that probably stretches the lifetime, but certainly that gives me time after five years to begin planning and prepping for an upgrade.

    The problems for many customers come when other vendors don’t bother to keep supporting older software and providing patches. Even if Microsoft releases a security fix for your OS, the vendor that makes software you run on top of Windows or SQL Server might not. That’s an issue, and it’s one that will become more of an issue as companies become reluctant to change software that works well.

    This article shows that older ATM machines running XP and Windows 7 are having issues. Some of this is physical access, but some is related to issues in the OS. While Windows 7 should be getting patches, Windows XP is not and needs to be upgraded. In fact, I’d argue that any losses here should be born by ATM owners and not covered by insurance for not having upgraded their systems.

    While I like to get as much time as I can from a system, it’s irresponsible to expect software to run without security patches being actively applied, which includes any upgrades from vendors. In some cases, this might be negligent by the companies doing so, especially for embedded systems. I don’t know that I want governments to force vendors to provide patches, but I’d like companies to write contracts that ensure that patches will exist for come lifetime of the products. In the event the company can’t provide patches (or certification), then they’d need to release their code as open source so that someone can provide a patch.

    The world becomes more intertwined and dependent on computing, from things like convenience services or core systems. We can’t have those systems becoming more vulnerable because companies are unwilling to upgrade and vendors abandon older software. Some sort of compromise is needed to ensure that computer systems are protected from known vulnerabilities.

    Steve Jones

  • Summit 2018 Program Survey

    PASS has a survey out asking for your thoughts on the  2018 content. Take a few minutes and fill it out, and maybe you’ll win a registration.