Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Remote Sharing and Learning

    Lots of technical people have spent time learning something on a computer. The idea of remote learning isn’t new to many of us that have watched events online for some time. Many of us have had the chance to watch some remote session from Microsoft, Redgate, or some other software vendor. We might learn online from some site like Pluralsight, or maybe we even attend some of the virtual chapters that PASS supports.

    At this time, more of us than ever are remote from others, not just for learning, but most of our daily work, meetings, reviews, discussions, and more. Learning to be effective, and ensure you still perform at the level your employer expects, can be a challenge. I ran across a piece on how to run great workshops, which I think contains some good advice for many meetings, not just workshops or training sessions.

    Much of the advice in the piece revolves around prep and practice. You should ensure your tools work, have documents available, ensure everyone can connect and access the technology. Things we probably should do for in person meetings.

    We tend to do a lot of group work in my company, and I’ve found that being remote is sometimes a challenge. Everyone is now remote, which makes this more equal, and we’ve adapted well. I attend some of the group standups and reviews, where each team shares some progress. We’ve gotten good at switching presenters and keeping things on track, though this is more a one-way delivery of information rather than a discussion.

    While we can share documents, it is hard to sometimes tell what other people are looking at or referring to when they are speaking. Asking them a question is helpful, but it can also be intimidating for some people to ask for clarification, especially if three other people have already asked at different times before. Communication is a challenge when people are remote, and over communicating can be important. Explain what you’re looking at or doing, and ensure you have a summary or a recording to re-watch. This can be invaluable in ensuring that everyone can access the same information.

    I attended a conference a little over a month ago that used a shared whiteboard, which I thought was a great idea. I wonder if that would be useful in some of our meetings. Having someone take notes is good, but being able to review to ideas on a whiteboard is something I’ve often appreciated. I’ve used whiteboards to explain or clarify things in live meetings in the past. A virtual one might be nice to use, though with some easy way to tie together thoughts from different individuals. We sometimes group edit Word or Excel docs, but that often has us looking at different sections of the document, not the same one. Likely a communication issue, but still an issue.

    We need to learn to get better and working together remotely. It’s a skill that will matter more and more over time. After this pandemic ends, I suspect many more organizations will adopt more remote work, which means more remote meetings. Learning to effectively present and absorb information from virtual events of all sorts is going to matter more in the future.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • Smarter Design

    I have build a lot of PowerPoint decks over the years. Many of presentations, some for explaining a process, and once in awhile, I use it to create an image that’s simple, but beyond my skills. Even putting some geometric shapes together in a clean, aligned manner, is something I’ve found easier to do in PowerPoint than Paint.Net.

    Some of you may have noticed the PowerPoint Design Ideas that pop up when you create a new slide. At first I didn’t pay much attention, but I’ve started to take advantage of the ideas at times. The way that slides are put together is often much more visually appealing than any I’d think of by myself. Sometimes I take an idea and modify it slightly. At first I thought most of these were just standard templates, but Microsoft is starting to use more ML in the examples that pop up on the side.

    There’s a good AI Show episode at the bottom of this post that explains some of what they do. From image recognition to intelligent cropping to natural language processing, they are finding ways to make better design ideas available. the episode is only minutes and worth watching if you want to know more about how they use technology in their recommendations.

    To me, this is a good example of how technology and humans work together. Someone needs to come up with some good designs, based on certain situations. Users then provide them feedback on if they’re useful or not, and they can modify things. I even learned how to change the icons for the designs if I don’t quite like them. My changes (and yours) get fed back to new models as training for the future.

    Would this make all presentations look alike? I think there is some danger here that we start to coalesce into certain patterns. We might see lots of slides with dates become timelines, but they won’t be exactly the same, and there are different ideas based on content. Even the words in the titles. I made two slides, same content with a different title and I got slightly different recommendations.

    I think AI and ML have good futures, but not as the sole decision makers for how to react to data. Instead, I think humans constantly providing feedback, input into models, changing weights, and yes, helping with more complex things like design, will improve the results that more of us get from our tools.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • Defending Against Ransomware

    I don’t manage production systems at Redgate, and I’ve not seen us have any disruption in the access to systems across the last few years. At a number of events, however, I’ve spoken to friends that have told me about the problems they’ve had with ransomware. I’ve been quite surprised how often this happens, as I see headlines, but none of the half dozen or so people I spoke with have worked at any company in the headlines. This is likely a bigger problem than I thought.

    I don’t know if you’ve been attacked, but you should be prepared. Denny Cherry has had to deal with this at at least one client, and he wrote a few things down in this article. He doesn’t necessarily recommend you pay, though that’s certainly an option. If you do, you should be prepared for future attacks or other issues. Anyone that wants to hold your data hostage once might be inclined to do it again.

    Apart from backups, air gaps, and other preventative measures you might take, including limited access between some workstations and servers, you ought to be sure you can rebuild systems that work in a similar manner to the current ones. Do you know what the specs and settings are for all your systems now? So many people assume they could just go get that information from the system itself, but what if you VMs and VM host are compromised? What if your monitoring system is encrypted? Do you really know all the settings that have been changed from defaults? If your DR plan somewhere outside the network and can you get to it?

    This is a good reason why DevOps and infrastructure as code (IaC) are important in a modern organizations. In these cases, a VCS can hold the data you need to rebuild systems. This is a good reason by using GitHub or some remote VCS might be better than self-hosting your code. If you routinely rebuild systems for dev/test, you’ll have some idea of how to deploy, and if you think about IaC as a part of your DR process, you should be able to redeploy on new hardware (or existing hardware that’s wiped clean).

    Ransomware is a part of the new world we live in, and we ought to be prepared to defend against it. Ensure you’re ready today, because there will likely be a ransomeware or other types of attack in the future. The more prepared you are with better practice now, the more likely you’ll be ready to adapt to some other security need in the future.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • What does the Future DBA Do?

    The database administrator (DBA) role has always been a strange one to many organizations. Some companies embrace the role, some don’t. Some hire DBAs, some expect others to handle those duties. The others could be sysadmins for other systems or developers, or maybe everyone might just assume someone else is handling backups, index maintenance, and more. Often those latter companies will have issues at some point when they need to recover a system or performance is extremely poor.

    As cloud computing has become more popular, there have been quite a few pieces about how the DBAs job is changing. Often the response to these items is one of two things. Either people agree and talk about a completely new way they will need to work and new skills they must acquire, or they are sure nothing will really change.

    I think both things are true. I’m not sure that if you are a DBA now that your work in your current role will change that much. Sure, the company might add some new tasks, new resources, ask you to learn now things but often if your company hasn’t embraced a lot of change, your job isn’t changing. Even if your company adopts some cloud computing.

    I just wonder if this is your last job. I hope this is mine, but for many people, they can expect a new employer at some point. If that is likely, then are you positioned for your next job?

    I ran across a piece on how the DBA job might change, and I think there are things to think about here. There are five items to look at, and all of them relate to the cloud’s influence on DBAs. While I don’t know that most, or even lots, of companies will adopt the Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) or have their DBs be a utilty in the PaaS sense, I do think DBAs should strive to make the database a utility for both ops staff and developers. There is a surprising amount of effort here, and I do hope things like the Spawn project from Redgate change the way we work with databases in the future.

    I do think that if you need to seek a new employer, and new opportunities, your general skills will matter. Being an amazing T-SQL guru or incredible AG admin might be highly valued in your current role, but often hiring managers might want to be sure you know something about a wide variety of things, from AI/ML to Power BI to working in the cloud. Your ability to learn, collaborate, and discuss intelligently different aspects of database work will be important.

    If you think you might need another job, think about acquiring the skills for your next job today.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.