Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • The Creepiness of AI

    Last year, I watched a keynote talk from Matthew Renze about AI. In his talk, there were examples of the amazing things that Artificial Intelligence can do, as well as some of the creepier things have have been developed. It was an interesting talk, one that gives me inspiration and hope for the benefits of better computer algorithms as well as the concerns for various issues that we may be unprepared to deal with as a society.

    One of the more controversial items that occurred recently with AI was the Google phone call, where a computer answers a call and interacts with a human. What’s disconcerting here is that the person doesn’t know this is a computer, and there are speech patterns the computer uses, like um interspersed in the answers, that deceive someone. While this certainly might be helpful in scheduling situations shown in the call, there is a downside. Could you imagine artificial personas used in telephone scams or phishing situations? A help desk knowing some information and then asking for verification of other data?

    There are perhaps greater concerns, such as the work done with imitations of President Obama. There are fake speeches, generated by computer. While movie studios might want fake actors used to reduce labor costs, do we worry about the implications of a computer actually being able to imitate one of us in a video call?

    The use of AI and ML, with lots of data an organization might have gathered could be good and bad, but certainly opens the world to more problems than benefits if there isn’t mandatory disclosure of the cases where this is used. Since there are always going to be criminal elements that don’t obey rules, this might be very scary.

    There are certainly other issues, such as Target predicting a pregnancy, which was the first really, creepy data analysis thing I saw. That one is a few years old, and still bothers me as it was accurate, but an unrefined use of the data. A good example of where marketing groups are a bit too excited to use AI/ML technologies and don’t think through the implications. Fortunately this case seems to have dampened some of enthusiasm for prediction in retailing.

    Perhaps this item that is a bit funny, but it is also very worrisome for me. It’s the case of an AI system playing video games. The AI system decided the best way to get the best score was to pause the game. Rather than compete and try to do better, the computer decided to just stop. A completely unexpected outcome, probably because the feedback and expectations weren’t explicit. Since it seems quite often humans don’t specify their requirements or expectations very well, I could imagine this being a very large issue in AI systems as they are used more often. It could even be deadly or problematic when a system does something we didn’t anticipate, and impacts human health.

    Most of us won’t work with AI much as a technician, other than providing or managing some of the data. I do expect AI and ML systems to touch more and more of our lives, perhaps using our data for good, perhaps not. Hopefully we can help steer applications into the former more than the latter situation.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 4.7MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • Parameter Fun

    Recently I was editing a document about SQL Server on Linux and the author noted that if you type “sqlcmd” without any parameters, you get the list of possible parameters back. I tried that on my Windows laptop and immediately got an error that no credentials were supplied. Apparently sqlcmd on Windows attempts to connect to the default instance.

    I thought the author had made an error, but sure enough, when I connected to Linux and ran just “sqlcmd”, I got a list of parameters. What was more fascinating to me was that if I ran “sqlcmd -?” on either platform, I got the parameter list, as I would expect. However, if I ran “sqlcmd /?”, this worked on Windows, but returned an error on Linux.

    A long time ago I wrote some command line utilities to help our network team manage a Netware 3.x environment. I was proud of my work and knew that the team would appreciate a few of my tools. When I first showed me boss and started to explain what it did, he stopped me and ran the name of the utility with a /? at the end. Nothing returned, and he told me to redo the work and ensure that /? always returned help for the tool.

    I’ve kept that habit for years and I’ve often tried that with new programs. Most have worked, including bcp and sqlcmd. Somehow, that hasn’t continued to this day. For sqlcmd.exe on Linux, only -? works. If you run Docker, you need a –help, though -help works. Other programs might be more strict, but it’s surprising to me how many different ways we’ve implemented help and parameters.

    PowerShell has Get-Help, but then uses single dashes for parameters. A number of newer cli tools, especially for Linux, seem to want two dashes for parameters, though a single dash often works. I’ve seen a few tools that mix single and double dashes, depending on which parameter. I did find this note that on Unix a few single dash parameters can be combined, so the double dash indicates we are using one parameter, not multiple ones. That makes sense, though I would argue that -abc meaning -a -b -c is a fundamental design problem in and of itself.

    The evolution of help and parameters seems funny to me. It’s likely caused by someone implementing the parameter short cutting in Unix at some point that now requires double dashes for multi-character parameters, which is really a case of a short-sighted design in Unix. In any case, understanding the behavior of parameters and help is a useful skill, especially in the current environment that tends to implement more scripts with command line utilities.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 4.1MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • The Android Car

    I’ve been a car guy for most of my life, admiring them, owning quite a few (20+), and enjoying lots of time behind the wheel of a vehicle. I’ve been lucky enough to own my dream car for a few years and even had the chance to drive a few unusual cards. While I haven’t driven a Tesla, I have ridden in one when the pedal was mashed to the floorboard (thanks, @GlennAlanBerry). That’s quite an experience, and one I’d recommend if you don’t have heart issues.

    This week I ran across a note that Volvo’s spin-off brand, Polestar, was unveiling an all electric car. This is their answer to a changing world where it seems every manufacturer wants to combat Tesla with an electric version of something. I might consider the Porsche Macan in an all electric version at some point, but the Polestar 2 is interesting for a reason besides the electric drive train. It’s the first production car that is build around Google’s Android system as the operating system for the car. There are entertainment systems using Android Auto, but this is a step higher.

    What I find interesting, and perhaps disturbing, is this move to more electronic integration for our vehicles, and the potential for issues if the operating system fails. I already think that we’ve built a few too many integrations in mechanical cars at times, where we can’t easily open doors, tow cars, or more if the electrical system fails. While I trust a plane or ship more because they are better maintained by mechanics, I worry about the durability and potential issues with updates for cars that are in daily use by users that might not take the best car of them. After all, people drive every day with small mechanical issues. I worry what this will mean for autos.

    There’s also the trust that we must have in both Google and Volvo to ensure that security is tight, patches are extremely well tested, and perhaps just as important, our privacy is respected. Google already gathers lots of data about us; do we want to give them more about how lifestyle? Will they sell data to insurance companies or others? I don’t know what other data might be captured, but I do worry that there are issues I haven’t considered, especially around security. Maybe even more disconcerting might be the charges for keys, updates, and more that will get added onto already expensive vehicles. What if systems become locked down to the point that only vendor mechanics can work on them?

    I like the idea of better designed and more efficient vehicles, and think that all electric is the future. This despite my longing for a manual transmission in my next car. However, I’m not quite sure I’m ready to trust a phone operating system to run lots of parts of my car. Already I think there ought to be open-source, embedded systems for any mechanical control  and security features that are completely separate from entertainment, without any access to the outside world. While I like DevOps and innovative software, what I worry about is the focus from many companies on features and costs, and not on security and quality.

    Steve Jones

  • Schema Security

    How many of you grant access to schemas in your databases? I’m curious because I slowly am starting to see more and more people using schemas in their designs and not defaulting every object to “dbo”. That was the default action for many developers for years, and it’s still a habit of mine. Without SQL Prompt to add the schema to my queries, I’d still be producing code that followed that practice.

    Schemas exist to allow some separation of different types of objects. In early versions of SQL Server, we didn’t have schemas, but considered the third of four part naming to be the owner. In other RDBMSes, the use of a schema was to allow grouping and separation of different objects. This was also, and still is, a security boundary that helps ensure that authorized users can be easily limited to data access for certain objects.

    This is also a nice organizational boundary for related objects that have the same schema, or even name. I have seen auditing or etl schemas that maintain the same named table that exists in a dbo schema, but is separated by placing this in a separate schema. I have even seen some archiving schemas that move data to a related table that exists in a different schema, making it easy for new administrators and developers to find (or remove) older data.

    This week, let us know if you manage objects and security with schemas or if you stick to granting access at a database/object level the two more common ways of working with databases. If you have never used schemas and stuck with the defaults, perhaps you want to learn a bit more about how schemas work and the ways in which they may make your work easier.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.9MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.