Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • UX Matters

    When I was early in my career, VB v4 was popular, and easy. So many basic apps were built by not only software developers, but people in other departments with an interest in programming. Through VB v6, I found so many apps being built, often with complex and un-intuitive interfaces.

    I was reminded of these apps when I saw a story about a mistake made by Citibank. Apparently an employee was supposed to send interest payments of US$7.8mm to creditors, however, the employee paid $500mm to Revlon, the entire amount of the loan. A mistake, and one for which Citibank is likely liable.

    Apparently there was a UI (user interface) issue. If you read the article, you’ll see a bad user interface, and one that is confusing. If you use this application regularly, it not be a big deal, but staff changes, and having useful UI matters. As I get older, and use more and more software applications, I really see the value in UI being well designed.

    Most of us data professionals tend to work with our tools, some of which are well designed, some not, but often we’re in a code editor, so we might not care as much. Writing code is code, though many of us do appreciate add-ins or extras that make it easy to organize our code.

    I do think for administrators, or anyone that is looking at the status for their systems, good UI helps. Even if you deal with just data and text, having things displayed in an easy to understand format is important. This is also certainly true for most end users of software.

    I’m not a UI/UX (user experience) person, but I know people that I can all for questions or hire for their experience. Over time, I’ve learned that paying attention to the UI/UX can make the difference between customers really enjoying what you’ve done and them feeling that you haven’t really finished your product. I’m sure that Citibank, and many other large orgs, might be re-thinking the emphasis, or lack thereof, they place on this part of software development after hearing about this story.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Shared Security

    When I worked in a large Operations team, we had various passwords for some systems that we stored in a password vault. This was on a network share that only the administrators had access to read. We used this for keeping a number of passwords for various services and systems that required sysadmins to access.

    However, we tried not to use shared accounts whenever possible. We wanted to ensure an audit trail, for both compliance and understanding of what happened in our environments. All sysadmins had two accounts, which allowed them to access most services. We only had a user/password stored for certain systems that needed some sort of separate account, and we did change those passwords regularly.

    Our customers didn’t always do this. In fact, I regularly found different groups using a single account, always logged in, for which everyone knew the user name and credentials. They never seemed to consider this a problem, despite regular security warnings from administrators.

    I was reminded of this story about a water treatment facility in Florida that was hacked. They had a shared account, used by many people, the same password for everyone, and a lack of a firewall. An intruder caused a release of chemicals, but no one was injured.

    Firewalls prevent a lot of issues, if they are configured to limit access. In addition, ensuring that each user has different passwords is important. This allows you to turn off access for certain people, which includes former employees. That’s basic security, and I’m surprised how often people forget about this, often because they worry about some system breaking.

    The tools we have to enforce stronger security have improved over the years, but we need to take advantage of them, and we need to ensure that good, if not best, security practices are followed. It’s easy to become lax over time, but remember that there are lots of threats out there, from hackers to malware, to former employees.

    Far too many people are attacked, more than are in the news, so don’t get complacent. We are all at risk.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Being Professional

    I often write about data professionals, meaning those people who work with data and are paid to do so. Certainly some of you might be amateurs, doing data work as a hobby, but most of the people that visit SQLServerCentral work with data as a part of their career.

    The second part of that title is the “professional” part. What does it mean to be a professional? I saw some thoughts from Randolph West recently that caught my eye. He talks about treating others as you’d like to be treated, which is a good place to start for most of us.

    However, there are other considerations for being a professional in Internet age. Randolph covers a few, in terms of respecting others’ form of address, their time, and their own struggles. The world of work has blurred with personal time, especially when most of us are not in the same physical location, and our “environment” might include people that don’t actually work for the same organization.

    I’ll add a couple more items here that I think are important to being a professional these days. While we do understand that children, pets, and more might interrupt meetings, understand that security and privacy for our organization (and its data) is important. Lock your machines, watch what you share out loud, and caution your “co-workers” against sharing things that might be secure or sensitive.

    In line with that, be aware that you might accidentally share something from your personal life on a video call. While you don’t need to wear a suit and tie, you might ensure that you are not wearing something inappropriate. Certainly there is a running joke that people at home might not wear pants. Whether you do or not, be aware that standing up without pants wouldn’t be very respectful. It might also be career limiting.

    As we continue to move forward in work and life, with the challenges of both always and never being at work, for some or all of us, be professional to each other likely means being respectful, understanding, appreciative, and sensitive to others.

    It’s not my world; it’s not your world. It’s our world.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Coding Tips

    I really like Visual Studio Code. The more I use it, the more I get comfortable in it, and the more I appreciate the design and flow of using the editor. I didn’t feel that way early on, preferring the comfort of Visual Studio, but now I most often use VS Code.

    The other day I saw an article from one of the PMs for the product, with a number of tips and tricks. I like some of these, and have already found a few to be handy in my work. I’ve even started to search out a few more of these, and found this repo with items in it.

    This reminds me of a few articles at SQLServerCentral on SSMS (tips, tricks). I’ve written a bit on Azure Data Studio and git, often to help cement some skills in my mind, as much as to help you learn more.

    I’m sure many of you have your own tips and tricks today, for both data platform tools and others, so I’m asking you to share a few in the comments. If you have a large collection of tips, on tools or just how to write code, write us an article. I’m sure others would love to know how to be more productive.

    Steve Jones

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