Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • The Pros and Cons of Terabyte Phones

    A few years ago I wrote a piece about the growth of storage in many devices and the large quantities of data that can be kept. I speculated that we might see terabyte mobile phone storage in a decade. That was 2014 and this past week Samsung announced they had created a 1TB embedded Universal Flash Storage chip for phones. You can already get a Note9 with 512GB of storage, so this isn’t a huge leap, but it does feel like a milestone.

    For many of us, that seems like a good move. We can keep all the photos, videos, movies, and more that we want on our phones. I take a lot of pictures in life, and lately I’ve struggled with a 32GB phone. I keep debating upgrading, just because I’d like more storage. There are certainly challenges with keeping all this imagery and video backed up, but that’s a separate discussion. I’d like to just be able to capture data and make decisions about how to protect it later. There are also plenty of transient items (movies, Pluralsight courses, and more) that I just want to keep on temporary storage for a limited time.

    More is better, but it also creates potential problems. With a 1TB, or potentially larger, storage on my phone, what about the problem of data loss and theft by insiders? Very few of us work in jobs where we can’t keep our mobile device with us. Many of us also work with sensitive data, and there is a potential for transferring a lot of data to a relatively innocuous device. These days we might not even need to plug in our mobiles with bluetooth file transfer programs. Even if we plug in a phone, that’s innocent and expected? Modern smartphones often need charging during the day.

    It’s not just us, but also contractors, consultants, and non-privileged users that might be able to move data. Certainly someone might act maliciously, but what about the potential for new types of malware? Android is more open and iOS, and there have been viruses. How long before there are some virus programs that try to connect to every SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, etc. database when plugged into your laptop?

    That might seem far fetched, and certainly our databases grow larger and larger, but much of the data is text, and more ERP/CRM programs are in use that contain known schemas where worms, virii, and other malware might target specific tables. A terabyte can store a lot of text data, especially if it’s usernames and password hashes.

    I don’t know of any mobile to PC infections yet, but I do know there are lots of smart people out there. It’s just a matter of time before someone starts to try and exploit the capabilities of modern mobile devices, especially those with large storage capacities.

    Steve Jones

  • Enjoying a Down Weekend

    The Oscar nominations were released recently, with quite a few nods to The Black Panther. I did see that one on a plane, and despite the small screen, I enjoyed the story and the visual action. It’s one that I may try to watch again on a larger screen at some point, likely with kids. The family is a group of Marvel fans, and while I’ve mostly stuck to the mainstream movies, the kids have enjoyed some of the series that complete the Marvel Universe. We’ve gone as a group to most of the theatrical movies, and I expect we’ll see the next Avengers when it releases.

    I also saw the best geek movies of 2018, most of which I had not seen. I’m more of an episodic, TV show fan, but I get to a few movies with my wife, who loves them. A good movie is sometimes a great break on the weekend from life, and I wanted to get some recommendations from others. Winter time in Colorado keeps me busy, and I love reading books, but sometimes curling up to watch a movie with the family is something I look forward to enjoying.

    There are more and more movies being released all the time, of all sorts, but it seems the geek, fantasy, science fiction genre has grown quite a bit. As a kid it felt like we had few of these style movies, and settled for the comic book genre to explore amazing imaginary ideas. Now it seems between Amazon, Netflix and other major studios, there are more new sci-fi or tech films than I have time to watch.

    Are there films you enjoyed in 2018? Perhaps there are a few you’re looking forward to in 2019 that you await. Take a minute today and give a quick review of what you’ve enjoyed and what films with technology, fantasy, or just thrilling sections that you think others might enjoy on a night away from work.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.6MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • The Downside of Tool Autonomy

    I am a big believer in letting teams of people work in a way that allows them some autonomy to solve a problem. I think this is especially important in the software world, where developers need to experiment and learn from the new ideas that they investigate. They need to be able to try new techniques, technologies, and platforms. Yes, that includes NoSQL data stores.

    At the same time, this can lead to developers becoming captivated by new tools and techniques, all of which are good for advancing skills and code maturity, but can also lead to a very disparate environment where there are no best of breed solutions, or no standards for writing features. As the number of developers grow, this also raises the bar for each individual to know and understand more languages or technologies.

    While I do think it’s easy to pick up logic and syntax, when writing production code, we want to ensure we’re optimizing the way we work. The way in which we might write some code when we start with a new API, SDK, language, etc. is often not the way we’d write that code after a year or experience. At least, I hope it’s not the same way. There are nuances, tips, and tricks in how to better structure code that we learn as our experience grows.

    When I was at the Redgate Software office last year, I noticed that there was a short article posted on our internal blog. This noted that there is a set list of tools and technologies to use when building our products. This isn’t intended to be a long term immutable list, and the post noted that other choices are possible, but we want to avoid an unending growing list of tools when we have identified there is a good tool in a space. There is an approval process to propose and new tool and explain why it really is needed.

    At Redgate, we’re pretty flexible and open, so I’m sure this isn’t a tough process. However it does prevent every developer from implementing their special little code into a project. We’ve had people use various different data stores, different types of web technologies, and it becomes a maintenance issue over time. Even the VB.NET component we used for years at SQLServerCentral caused headaches as there wasn’t any experience in the company in this language.

    I think it’s worth having some light overview that ensures an organization isn’t adding technology just for the sake of making one or two developers happy. There is a finite amount of time to spend learning and growing, and while it’s important that technology workers do this, we also want to developer more experience and expertise in a few areas. Limiting tools and technologies helps preserve a balance that allows for growth, but ensures the expansion isn’t unchecked.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 4.6MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • Reserved Space

    Many of us that work with SQL Server are familiar with the idea of reserving space that our system might need later. This is normal operation in SQL Server, where we pre-allocate space to data and log files, knowing that SQL Server will manage and use this space over time. This can often be a strange concept for newcomers to the platform, who expect our database behaves like a text file, only using the space it needs for data. Choosing the amount of space to reserve is an art that many of us both struggle to articulate and explain to newcomers. It’s also a problem that we often solve by guessing high and implementing monitoring.

    Lots of people worry about storage, even in this era of TB sized drives. I ran across an article noting that Windows is reserving 7GB of space for updates, which makes sense to me. I’ve had a few updates for smaller devices, like mobiles, fail because of space. I think the idea of having some space reserved for temp storage and then using that for updates is a good one. I also recognize that I’m in a different place than others. Most of my devices have plenty of free space. Well, not my phone, but that’s a separate issue.

    From the comments of the article, it seems that many people feel as I do. Reserving the space is a good idea. There are plenty of complaints about older, small storage devices, and I feel bad for those people. I’ve own a 32GB Windows device and over time it’s a pain. Those devices likely need to have some sort of network/cloud storage to be usable, so There are also no shortage of the “Windows is already too large” complaints, but to me, those are separate discussions.

    Ensuring enough space is around for normal operation is one thing. Keeping extra around for emergencies and critical functions is another. I’ve been a big fan of placeholders on drives, especially database servers. I keep a few on all my drives, both on desktops and laptops. If I run low on space and really need some, I can make the decision to remove these without thought. Something I can’t always do with other files.

    Like the DBCC SHRINKFILE, which lets us get out of situations where we’ve made a mistake in allocation, I’d like all OSes to include some options that remove older files, such as updates, temp files, etc. that we might not need, but could make a difference in our space usage. I know modern Android helps me when I’m low on space, and would like to see that in Windos. My other hope is that  we get quantum, PB sized storage devices that can fit in our phone. I can’t ever remember anyone on Star Trek running out of storage space on their drives. I look forward to the day in my life when that won’t happen to me.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 6.3MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.