Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • The Tech That is Gone

    The world of technology has undergone an amazing revolution in my lifetime. Things that I thought were incredible in my youth have come and gone in the world. I’m sure that there were dramatic changes in technology across lots of other generations, but I wonder if they were as dramatic for others as they feel for me.

    As I watch older movies, I’m amazed at the evolutions. I was watching an older sitcom recently and saw someone using a cordless phone. While we have these cordless mobile devices, there was a time when having a phone in my house that wasn’t tethered to a spot on the wall was incredible. And I haven’t seen one of these in years.

    My Mother worked in real estate and getting an answering machine was critical technology for growing her business. These were essential in every home for a long time (along with call waiting). First tape-based, then SSD, but now these devices are really gone and exist in the cloud. Now you get voice mail and call waiting on a mobile device. Does anyone have an answering machine anymore? For that matter, are there still public phones? I’ve seen a few booths in my travels, but they seem to be mostly standing as tourist attractions for pictures or repurposed as small libraries or wi-fi hotspots.

    One of my big career steps was working with an import company that lived off faxes. When I was there, we went from a single computer-based fax service to upgraded multi-line fax add-in boards with not only digital fax reception but the OCR of the actual recipient to email the images to the appropriate department. It was an amazing job where I learned a lot about imaging and large-scale storage of data. I know there are companies that still have fax machines, but emailing images around seems to have overtaken this in much of the world.

    We still have mainframes and lots of older applications, but one piece of software I expected to see around was Lotus Notes. I know some people might still use it, but IBM doesn’t support it. They’ve outsourced. I guess a lot of software I used early in my career is gone: Ami Pro, WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, and more.

    Maybe one interesting device my wife loved was a Palm Pilot. There were lots of PDAs for a while, but the advances in mobile phones completely did away with that category of devices. I’m actually still amazed that Blackberry couldn’t survive the transition to screen-based devices. For a time it felt like everyone in business carried one around.

    Hard disks and tape changers seem to be fading, though I’m sure someone still uses them. Anyone bought a tape drive for their personal or business use anytime in the last few years? Or for that matter, do you still use CDs or floppy disks anymore? VHS tapes? Dot-matrix printers?

    What about a modem? The sound of a modem connecting was both amazing for me as a young man and an annoying sound early in my career. Same for pagers. I loved getting one but hated carrying it. While there might be these devices in use somewhere, for the most part this technology has been removed from our lives.

    Perhaps one of my favorite devices, which came late and died quickly, was the iPod. I had a few digital music players, but they were hard to manage. The iPod was revolutionary, and I had quite a few over the years. I still have a waterproof Shuffle I use when I swim, but for the most part, these devices are just memories.

    What tech do you miss, or remember fondly? Or perhaps, what old tech do you still work with that you enjoy?

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.

  • Looking Back at 2022

    This is the last workday of 2022. Next week starts a new year, and as I’ve often done, I wanted to look back at the year. This time I decided to look back month by month, at some of the headlines and memorable data-related topics. I’m tackling things month-by-month.

    In January there was a set of “tech experts” who shared their thoughts on the best database management systems. This one is worth a read for the humor involved. I wouldn’t really consider many of these to be DBMSes. I thought about including this one as an April 1 joke, but it was a real story. I get asked for my opinion at times by writers researching a topic they don’t understand. I hope I don’t come across like a few of these people.

    February was another sad data breach story. In this case, from the state of Washington where many tech people live and have startups. It wasn’t clear initially what happened, but later articles noted this was from a stolen device. To me, this was a great reminder why dev machines (and databases) should NOT have PII. Mask/obfuscate/anonymize that data please. Or at least delete my name from your dev systems.

    March had another humorous story (to me): Oracle is going to lure people away from AWS and SAP with their new offering. I could believe the latter, but not the former. Oracle hasn’t ever been good about pricing and it seems more people are leaving Oracle than coming to it.

    April is the month of April Fools, but this isn’t a joke. Another data breach, again from a dev system. This one from Fox News, which included information of not only employees, but guests and celebrities. The claim that this was a dev system and not production doesn’t matter if the data is real. Please people, keep prod PII out of dev.

    May had a funny post from Hacker News. Someone put their whole life in a database. The comment that caught my eye on HackerNews: “Men will literally devote hundreds of hours to building a bespoke database tracking every moment of their lives instead of going to therapy.”

    I worked a lot on my weight and diet in 2022. June had me finding a public database to help me choose better food. A public database on processed foods. Great idea, but everyone has an agenda. I hope this has some crowdsourcing and reasoning and isn’t just one person’s opinion.

    In July, another data breach. This time in China with information for 1 billion people. Wow. I dislike large databases for this reason. It’s also a good reminder why you ought to remove information from your databases over time, at least the PII part. Again, delete my name, if nothing else.

    There are so many types of database platforms. Have you heard of a vector database? Apparently, it’s for managing vector embeddings, whatever those are. An August article on the strange growth of the database market.

    September started this crazy AI art craze. There was a call to remove living artists from the database of works that an AI uses. Makes sense to me. I think artists deserve support and while I like AI doing new things, maybe wait until the artist isn’t producing work.

    October showed a good reason why we need ongoing patches or open-sourcing of code for retired systems. There was a 22-year-old vulnerability reported in SQLite.

    In November, what other news could there be than Lego Steve? It was a tiring week.

    December is just ending, but I’m ending on a reason why databases without auditing are a problem. Men behaving badly in this one. Gathering public information (or even semi-public) at scale can be problematic, and the information gets abused. Better controls, but also more auditing and triggering of some actions to prevent this (and other) sort of abuse.

    Let me know if you remember these events, or perhaps if there’s a favorite memory of the 2022 data world that you wish I’d included.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.

  • The End of Year Career Evaluation

    This month’s T-SQL Tuesday invitation asked about end-of-year operations that you might take on your databases. I don’t know how many of you follow any specific end-of-year routine, but you may.

    However, that got me thinking about an end-of-year career evaluation. It’s not something I’ve done, but I do often look back and forward and build some career goals. That has been helpful in ensuring I do some work on my career each year, even though I’m much closer to the end than the beginning.

    If I were younger, I would look at my career in three ways: what I need to learn, what I want to accomplish, and how to move toward my goals. I’m actually going to tackle these three areas myself, but since we’re near the end of the year, these might be things you think about as well.

    Technology changes so much, and we are often challenged by new requests, requirements, or circumstances to work with new software. I think the cloud has spurred this on, and as a result, I expect most people find they need to learn things constantly. Having a plan, and keeping a list of the technology is a good way to capture the entire bundle of challenges you face. Whenever someone asks you about something new, or you hear in a review that you should improve, add those things to your list. It’s likely you’ll never get to them all, and certainly, you won’t be an expert in them, but you can develop lots of competence and fluency in different areas.

    The second thing to look at is how to take this big list of skills, languages, software, etc. and prioritize it. Cut the list down to something manageable this year. Or maybe just this quarter. Being organized can help you deal with the overwhelming number of items on your big list. In this stage, I’d order things by what’s interesting to you. This might be an understanding of YAML to update pipelines as code. It might be solving some types of complex queries in SQL that you struggle with. It might be learning to better express yourself clearly and succinctly in email. List the things you need to work on.

    This isn’t easy, and this is really a prioritization of what is most important to you. You might talk with co-workers, your boss, or your partner to help decide what you can do. You should also think budget here, in terms of your time. Can you spend more than 8 hours a month on something? Carving out 2 hours a week is likely manageable, but more can be hard. Think hard about this, especially if your employer doesn’t give you any time while at work.

    The last evaluation should be easier. It’s taking the things you are working on and building a plan to actually improve yourself. Do you need to draft better crafted emails and have people review them and give suggestions? Are you going to pick specific problems to solve in SQL? Maybe you want to tackle a specific Power BI report? All these are examples I’ve used myself, but you might have different things from your second list. This is the short-term plan you’ll implement.

    I wouldn’t make this too detailed a plan, but I would include enough to guide you. Maybe this is actually spending a month of lunches on something? Or just two lunches a week? I wouldn’t schedule them all out, but I’d have some specific things I need to tackle, in some order, which at least gives me a plan. I wouldn’t include timelines here, but rather, what is the first thing to do, the second, and so on.

    This sounds like work, and it is. That’s how you move forward, and how you shape your career to be what you want. Be deliberate, make decisions that are best for you, and then execute on those decisions. That will help you find the best career and job for you.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.

  • Republish: The Multilingual Programmer

    A day off after Christmas, so I’m re-running The Multilingual Programmer