Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Never let a good crisis go to waste

    There have been quite a few jobs in my life where my first day was complete chaos. Some were technical and some were not. I had a first day as a bartender (in more than one job) where someone was sick or the place was busy and I was left on my own to figure things out. Fortunately, I know my way around a keg and a bottle of liquor. I’ve also started at a couple tech jobs where we had a crisis in a system. I’ve been able to pitch in and help solve problems, or even get other work done on my own. In all these cases, the boss was impressed, and I often started out my tenure with quite a bit of credibility.

    When we look to make changes, it can be hard to convince someone that the change is better for the organization. This might especially be true when working in software development and trying to convince someone to change their process or habit. I see this all the time as clients look to adopt DevOps, with no shortage of naysayers. There are always plenty of people that want to maintain the status quo.

    I heard quote from a presentation by Comcast execs on DevOps: “never let a good crisis go to waste.” The quote has been attributed to others in history, but I think it’s an apt description of how to drive your processes forward when you know there are problems and issues and no one wants to spend time fixing them. Pain often allows an opening for a better solution to be considered.

    Too often when there is no problem, no immediate pain, there is a lack of will from management to spend time improving things. Certainly there are some executives that believe in improvements, but far too many focus on adding something new rather than improving the underlying infrastructure of software development. When you see a problem, if you can’t make an improvement at the moment, keep an improvement or solution handy. You never know what a crisis might give you the opportunity to pitch a better way forward.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • Prized PII

    If I asked you what specific type of information criminals would like to capture about you, what would be your response? Take a minute and think of something and then leave it in a comment after reading the rest of this.

    I know that usually more than one piece of data about me is needed, and while most of this data is probably somewhere in a database, and perhaps leaked in a breach, it’s not necessarily organized. I still think it’s good to protect information where I can. Every year my wife laughs as people wish me Happy Birthday in Facebook, on a day that’s not my birthday. I think any day is as good as any other to wish me well, and so I disclose April 1 to my friends. In fact, I often disclose a slightly incorrect birthday when sites and organizations ask me, unless I have some legal obligation to type in my real date.

    There was an article that caught my eye about the data that thieves most often want. It opens with a story about pharmacists using personal data to bill insurance for non-existent medications, which is criminal activity for sure, but there’s not much you can do about these people using your data. The piece then goes on to talk about the value of healthcare fraud and how data related to this is even more valuable than credit card numbers.

    That isn’t something I’d have expected, though, I do live in the US. With the high cost of healthcare, I shouldn’t be surprised. Fraud is big business, and there is a large volume of claims, providers, and statements that people have to review. If you’ve tried to go through your statements, they often don’t seem to be easily relate-able to the treatment you may have received. I think this creates opportunity for fraud, as it might not be something an individual can catch.

    I haven’t worked with healthcare data, but I suspect anyone that does will need extra protection on their systems, and certainly encryption along with the prevention of PII in non-production environments is important. I also think this is the type of data that you may want to be more careful about in your own life. Though how you can be more careful escapes me.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • Reflections

    It’s nearing the end of the year, and usually this is a time where I look back at the current year and then forward to the new one. I’ll do some of that from a technical standpoint the last week of the year, but this week I wanted to do this from a personal standpoint.

    I read Jen McCown’s “Reflections Not Resolutions” recently and it stood out to me as a way to look back at my life and career. Jen takes a moment to think about how her life and career may have gone, without much judgment, but with some appreciation. A positive view.

    For me, I think professionally I turned inward a bit this year. Without events to go to, no travel, and struggles to cope at times, I could view my professional year like this:

    • I didn’t travel at all for work, but I did keep presenting at virtual events, and even learned to enjoy the experience, something I’ve disliked in the past.
    • I am amazed that I’ve written over 180 coping tips as part of the Redgate Community Circle, and used them to help me maintain productivity.
    • I struggled with maintaining connections with individuals and teams at Redgate, but I learned to appreciate how valuable those connections are. I am also looking forward to finding ways to improve this.

    Personally, I found some insightful things.

    • The only airplane trip I had this year was before the pandemic, getting family together for my wife’s birthday in Las Vegas. Despite the effort, hassles, and money, I see the value in celebrating events together
    • I learned to listen, sympathize, and allow my kids to struggle with virtual school while just enjoying the chance to be with them
    • Coaching is a real joy for me. Having the spring season cut short, and next year’s season move was a challenge, but I really have enjoyed the limited opportunities I had to work with 2 groups of young athletes.
    • I rode horses more this year than ever before, acquiring a small modicum of skill, but enjoying the time to be with my wife in nature.

    I’ll save my wishes for another day, but it was good for me to think about the losses, changes, gains, good times, and bad as I tried to put these thoughts down. I hope you take a few minutes and try it as well.

  • Data Sovereignty Issues

    Many people think about the cloud for cost reasons first, often because they can transfer the expense from a capital to operating budgets. Others think about the flexibility the cloud vendors offer to spin systems up and down, change configurations, and adapt to requirements quicker than many internal groups can. A few consider scalability, where we can grow or add systems to meet our needs.

    What about data sovereignty? I ran across an article recently that talked about the new SAS cloud on Azure, but located in different places for different reasons. Customers in the EU can use the German version of this. Those customers in the UK, because of Brexit, might choose the UK data center.

    It’s an interesting idea, where we might not think about just which specifications and services we use, but where they are located. That can pose challenges for architects and software developers, who may need to route customer requests to different data stores, based on their location. I’d think this is easier for database professionals, as we just duplicate stores in different places.

    This does mean that we’d need to manage backup, integrity, ETL flows, etc. in multiple locations, and we’d had the need to roll some data up across different data connections, but technology is making this easier all the time.

    The legal requirements and protections of having data in different places are still being argued and worked out. Microsoft fought a battle, and there was some resolution for how to handle cross border data issues, but I’m not sure this is settled law yet. Time will tell, but if there is any value to customers in where data is located, I suspect some of us will need to consider how we store data in different physical locations.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.