Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Maybe It Is DNS

    There are jokes about how often DNS is a problem. There are stickers, shirts, and mugs you can buy. There’s a classic haiku, which leads into a rant about the struggles of sysadmins. I will admit that I know a little about DNS, but I find myself confused at times and usually seek assistance from others when something doesn’t work. The old days of a single MX record and a few A records to map names to IPs has grown into a much more complex system.

    DNS usually works. In fact, it’s lower on my list of things to check these days, though I do often get a quick DNS check when I ping an address. There are some failures, and these days when large companies have issues, it can affect a lot of people. Akamai had an issue and knocked off a large chunk of the Internet. When Facebook had an issue recently, it not only affected customers, but the engineers that were trying to fix things. Some couldn’t even get into buildings. I guess relying on a single domain might be a bad idea.

    Most of us rely on DNS in our organizations, which means that a rising level of DNS based attacks is disconcerting. These are still behind the issues we have with ransomware and DDoS attacks, but when DNS doesn’t work, a lot of stuff shuts down. I could see a lot of people that work inside a company’s domain for most of their work being unable to accomplish anything.

    I tend to use a number of domains for my daily work. Evernote and Dropbox are essential, but if one were down, I could still do things with local copies. Red-gate.com is certainly important, but as long as SQL Server Central is up, I can do something different. Actually, if both were down, I could still write or create questions. I’m more bothered by slowness in my connection or machine than losing any particular service.

    I haven’t every been too worried about DNS security, but I left sysadmin work when it was a simpler time. These days, I suspect many organizations might want to be sure they are paying attention. If they use a lot of services connected to one domain, I might think about having a secondary domain connected to a few. If I were in charge, a sqlservercentraladmin.com might be one I’d set up.

    Steve Jones

  • Complex Searching

    Searching for data in our systems is sometimes hard. If you’ve ever needed to generically search a lot of text, it’s not easy to write code to do this in an efficient manner. It’s even harder if you try to embed this in an application. If you get into full-text searching, likely you would look beyond SQL Server as the built in full-text indexing and searching isn’t great.

    What if you had to search in more complex data? Imagine that your users were looking for words in audio files, or they wanted to find images that matched other images. Those are even more complex searches, and I expect that few people have had to deal with this. I know some, and I do expect it to be something customers will do demand across time.

    I saw an article about Google Lens coming to the desktop, allowing you to clip an image and then search for similar items. While I haven’t used this for searching, my kids have. Often they are looking for matches of a product or a place, and they like being able to search for related images. Image search is interesting, as you are looking to match patterns of numbers, but not exact matches. The idea of fuzzy matching parts of an image, which is a series of numeric values, but not all of the values, has to be a very challenging process. I would find this even more complex than doing a speech-to-text translation from audio and searching for words. Many of us would know how to do produce a solution for searching audio recordings.

    The theory of how to search for images based on another image is a complex field of study. I don’t pretend to know how this might work, and I’m not sure I care. If I have a need for this, I wouldn’t expect to need to understand how the system works as this would really be an API call of some sort. I might need to work with the API and understand how to better use it to produce the results my clients need, but that might be the most I’d care about.

    As with a lot of deeply technical things, I care more about practical applications. On a recent trip, I watched my wife use Google Lens to translate some menus, something I hadn’t considered. I usually would type in text and look for meanings, but using the image is much easier. I expect we’ll see the need for more complex searches in the future, but for most of us, it will be another service we consume without really understanding how it works, which is probably fine in these situations.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Going Cloud Native

    I am constantly surprised at the migration of workloads to the cloud. It seems that many of the customers and clients that I speak with are moving some of their assets to the cloud. Some are moving the majority of their systems, and they are pushing to do this sooner than later, including database assets.

    I ran across an article that noted that while many companies love the on-demand provisioning of cloud resources, they don’t always get improvement in their software performance. In fact, quite a few might experience worse performance, though often not horribly worse. Instead, what they often get is a bit more unpredictable performance, and sometimes a bigger bill, which makes perfect sense. After all, the cloud is really just someone else’s computer, and the one you’re using might have other people doing the same thing.

    To truly embrace the cloud and get the power of the cloud, you do need to consider being cloud-native, which is often a change in how your software is architected. It is also a change in your entire software lifecycle, meaning not just buying DevOps tools or renaming a team, but also embracing the entire way that DevOps works. Not just fast releases, but experimentation, learning, adapting,  testing, and changing how you build and release software. This is also changing how you manage the teams that build software.

    If you think this is just for the Netflixes and Spotifys of the world, that’s not true. Stripe and Capital One are financial companies completely in the cloud. There are plenty of other examples as well, and the successful ones, in all industries, are embracing a new way of building and operating software. Docusign has had a lot of success, and quite a bit with a lift-and-shift to IaaS resources as they continue to build and rebuild their software to embrace the cloud and adopt more PaaS services. They didn’t move systems and expect everything to just get better. They started a journey that they continue to travel every week. The move is a journey, not a quick move, another item that the article points out and many managers forget.

    That being said, not everyone is moving their systems to the cloud. Even organizations that adopt some cloud services, implementing Salesforce as a CRM, might continue to run plenty of systems on-premises. Lots of companies use the cloud for IaaS, but with the architectures and software that used to run in their own data centers. They just moved their  VMs.

    The cloud can be successful in many ways, but you need to understand how you adopt the technology, what capabilities can help, and how limitations can hinder your software. There is no magic bullet, but there are a lot of opportunities if your organization takes advantage of them.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Growing and Keeping Up

    I keep busy. My wife and I tend to be type-A people, tackling lots of things and keeping very busy. We work hard, and often, a lot. Our spare time in the winter is spent with second jobs, coaching youth volleyball. My kids think that we can be a little unbalanced at times, not taking enough time off or getting away from work. I agree. They are better balanced in life than my wife and I.

    The thing I tell me self is that keeping busy and being driven has helped me have a great life and a great career. It’s also created lots of stress, perhaps more than I should have. I thought about this balance as I was watching I Can’t Keep Up!, Catherine Wilhelmsen’s keynote from Data Saturday Oslo. It’s a great talk and worth your time to watch. She tells you that while you can do anything, or almost anything, that you want, it’s not necessarily easy. You have to work, but you have to find some balance.

    The world of technology has grown at a crazy pace during my life. As I’ve watched the growth of cloud capabilities from vendors, I’ve felt the same things Catherine has. I can’t keep up, I don’t have time to keep up, and everyone likely knows more than me about many things.

    All of those things are mostly true.

    I can’t keep up, I don’t really have time to try, and certainly, there are plenty of people who know more than me about any particular thing. However, I should learn to accept those things, not worry about them.

    It’s easy to get stressed or feel discouraged at your lack of being an expert in your field. There is good advice in the talk, but the thing that I try to remind myself of often is that I know more than last year. I am good at some things, and I continue to improve my skills in some areas. Most importantly, I can prioritize, pick a few things, and then work on those across time, which is enough to help me succeed.

    I have learned to set a few reminders each month and focus at those times on something that I want or need to learn. I also allow myself some free time to improve myself in a general way, without an agenda. I struggle with distractions, but I do try to remind myself to focus when I have time. The key in technology is learn how to learn. Don’t worry about picking the perfect technology or being as efficient as you can. Just learn something and get comfortable with regularly learning about new skills. Even if you choose something you never use later, you are building the skill and habit of learning.

    It’s good to challenge yourself, but be realistic, and more importantly, find balance. If you are starting out in your career, without many external obligations, you may have more time to work on your career, but you also have more to learn. Be patient with yourself and learn to enjoy life outside of your career field, even if you spend lots of hours trying to grow your career skills.

    If you are older, perhaps you pick something related to your work, or perhaps you pick something that interests you. Either way, exercising your brain and gaining new skills, however slight, is helpful.

    Always remember, we work to live, not the other way around.

    Steve Jones

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