Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • 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

  • Killing IE

    Sort of. Apparently, Microsoft will kill off IE in Feb 2023 in Windows 10. The lifecycle page notes that IE will be permanently disabled with an Edge update. For earlier OSes, it isn’t quite clear what will happen. However, extended support ends this month, Jan 2023, for Windows 7 and 8.

    Does anyone use Windows 8?

    I have used IE many times in my career, but the last decade of so I’ve shuddered every time I need to run it on a server or remote machine. It’s ancient technology that feels cumbersome, much like trying to get something done on a Palm Pilot instead of a modern smartphone.

    I know there are lots of websites and apps that use technology that works in IE, and Microsoft is adding an IE Mode to Edge for those cases.  Microsoft has a “what you need to know” article you can read, but it seems more like an advertisement for Edge than an informative article.

    I could care less about IE, and I mostly don’t think I’ve needed it in years, but I do encounter that technology in a few places. Outlook is the main one where some sort of IE-based control is still being loaded for some authentication mechanisms. I think removing IE is one thing, but getting rid of embedded controls based on IE is going to be a much harder and longer-term issue.

    I know so many developers that used various versions of the browser control in their apps, and I suspect there is no shortage of places that IE tech will continue to be a problem. I’m sure it works most of the time, but probably not always.

    Hopefully, most of you out there use a modern browser for your work, and if you need one inside an application, you use something besides an embedded IE-era control. If you need an alternative, there’s an older Stack answer that might help. Please, use anything by an IE control. It’s time we let that technology retire gracefully in a museum somewhere.

    Steve Jones