Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Ransomware May Get Worse

    I’ve never had to deal with ransomware, but across the last couple years I’ve been surprised how many friends and customers have dealt with this. For those that are prepared, it’s a time sink and a hassle. For those that aren’t, there is the addition of finger pointing, anger, fear, and often lost data as well.

    I hope things don’t get worse, but I think this might be a sign they are. There is some speculation that criminal groups are working together, in a sort of computer hacker cartel. Apparently four criminal groups announced they would be working together. If that isn’t a sign of the craziness of the world, I don’t know what else would be. Criminal groups announcing they are collaborating? Apparently they must think they are businesses like the targets they attack.

    There has been some investigation, and there haven’t been signs this is a cartel, with no revenue sharing or coordination, but the fact that they are cross posting data and sharing techniques is bad enough. Helping each other out may help them find more targets and develop better techniques to get around security.

    The one concern I’d have with all of this is that these different groups may attack the same companies. Can you imagine getting through an attack, either paying a ransom or not, only to be attacked again? I do think that organizations ought to be worried about their security against ransomware, have good, air-gapped backups, and ensure if they are attacked, they plug any holes in their systems.

    Surviving one attack might be hard for an organization, but if there are two or more, I suspect someone’s career will be in trouble.

    Steve Jones

  • Swimming Servers

    Microsoft put a data center on the bottom of the ocean, and it appeared to be a successful experiment, but now they’ve brought the water to the servers. Rather than sink a data center, which means cumbersome maintenance if there are issues, Microsoft is just sinking server boards.

    Their latest experiment takes liquid cooling in a new direction. In a vat of fluid, they have dozens of servers submerged. The liquid has a low boiling point and turns into a gas when contacting a CPU. The gas circulates like a miniature water cycle, condensing back into liquid when hitting a cool lid.

    I’ve always assumed all liquid would be bad on an electrical server board, but I guess this isn’t the case. I’ve heard of liquid cooling for home PCs, and my son actually added a system to his game machine, but I’ve always been nervous about doing so. I think my limited, and often error prone, experience with home plumbing repairs has be scared.

    I’ve rarely enjoyed being in a data center, especially the more modern designs that have a hot aisle and a cool aisle. Moving from one to the other is quite an experience, and one that I can’t think it good for your health over time. The older “cool” rooms I’ve been in weren’t much better, where I wore a winter coat all day when outside temperatures were 90F/30C and higher.

    I don’t know that this will impact me, or if I’ll ever actually see another server machine in my career, but I do know we continue to demand more computing capacity and capability. Perhaps at some point a data center for Azure or AWS will look more a like a warehouse for freezers and anything else. At least the people servicing the systems will likely have a better work environment when the entire space doesn’t need to be cooled down.

    Steve Jones

  • A Cloud Database for Statistics

    Baseball is an interesting game from a data perspective, with lots of numbers being tracked, and lots being generated every year. I used to have a sample database for demos that I used, since it was fun to run various numerical queries on the data. I should set that back up.

    Recently I saw that an analysis site, FanGraphs, was adopting MariaBD, but in a cloud version of the database. They gather a lot of statistics, more than most places publish. Not only do they have the various aggregates from games, but they have tracking for things like the velocity of pitches thrown. Add that to odds, projections, and more, and this is a lot of data.

    For a fan, that’s a lot. For database people, maybe not so much. They are projecting a million records each season for pitches, which might be the largest data set. However, for a database, even with 100 years of baseball, 100mm rows isn’t that large. There can be, however, lots of queries on this data.

    The founder used to manage the database himself, and has been on MariaDB for a long time. He started on Windows, but has been looking to outsource some of the administration. They left dedicated servers to move to a vendor running on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Now they are looking at data warehousing and other options to continue with deeper data analysis options.

    The move to the cloud, removing some of the headaches and hassles of managing servers is something many executives think about. Certainly it isn’t cheaper than buying your own machines, but with the cost of people, benefits, and the inflexibility of being limited by past decisions, I get why companies do this. Especially those that aren’t so focused on the technology, but are more interested in what technology can enable them to do.

    Many of us working might find opportunities to work with data at a company like this, without the need to actually manage the systems. I can imagine for a data analyst or developer that enjoys baseball, this might be a fun type of challenge. Learn to apply technology at a company that doesn’t really care about the software itself, but wants to use it to build something new and exciting for their customers.

    Steve Jones

  • Open APIs

    The US Supreme Court ruling in Oracle v Google was released recently, with Google winning and removing, or reducing, copyright protection for APIs. That means if you use the same method names, parameter names, etc. as some other software, it is unlikely that the vendor for that software can sue you or force you to change. I think that makes sense, as in many cases, someone might accidentally copy an API in something like PowerShell. Already I’ve seen companies and individuals build “Get-ClusterName” calls.

    I don’t know all the ins and outs of this case. It’s complex, and I’ve seen some notes that Google had permission from Sun Microsystems to use Java. After Oracle bought Sun, apparently things changed, but I’m not sure how this agreement was structured or the legalities of how things evolved.

    In any case, I’m glad Google won. I think the specification of an API isn’t something that should be protected and limited. If a company implements a list of method names and parameters, I don’t feel those deserve protection. The actual code that runs should be protected, but the names in the interface shouldn’t be. This might mean that if I interfaced with, say a piece of retail software that had “GetOrder”, “NewOrder”, etc., and I wanted to switch from vendor A to vendor B, I could without modifying my app.

    This prevents lock-in, which isn’t something I want to see enforced in software. In fact, for things like medical software, I’d want the same API for all of them. This is something that I think will encourage interaction of software, and likely reduce costs for many types of COTS systems that allow connections from PowerShell, bash, and other scripting systems. I think this also helps developers that might work across platforms or systems and could use the same code structures to switch from one to the other.

    This also means that vendors implementing APIs need to do a good job with their software. They can’t hold customers hostage with their system over the cost of reworking code the connects with their software. I think that pressure to be better, whether in features, security, or maybe in all ways, is important for software to evolve and improve.

    Steve Jones

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