Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • The Best Days

    I recently asked about the worst days in your career, so today let’s turn it around. What are the best days of your career? If you can give us a list of 2 or 3 days, projects, accomplishments, etc., it might be fun to read.

    Throughout my career, I have lots of little successes where I accomplish something that a client needs. Those add up, and they’re good, but by nature there are so many and the numbers tend to blur the lines in my mind. Unfortunately, the mistakes I’ve made tend to be more memorable and stick in my mind. I really have to think about what I would consider the best days.

    There are a couple software deployments that I consider to be successes, though none overly memorable. Getting my code into production is great, but rarely is a change a huge win. Instead, it takes time for clients to use the code, to understand the impact, and for me to be sure that the code works as expected.

    I remember getting our first automated deployment done, almost twenty years ago, when we had moved from a manual process of collecting scripts and trying to ensure they were correctly ordered and contained all the changes we needed. After weeks of working on an automated process to collect, order, and execute scripts, we tested things in QA. Then a day later in production. Overall this was a non-event, with the deployment taking minutes. The change from constantly checking scripts, results, and manually executing code was amazing and the reduction of time spent getting ready was notable.

    I also remember a great day as a DBA, when we experienced a server crash and had to rebuild new hardware. I was away with family, but I knew my backup and restore procedures were ready. I walked a manager through restoring a database, using a script to automatically build the log restore scripts, and then executing those scripts. While driving with my family, completely hands off, I helped recover a database.

    I hope you have some good memories of your career, and can share one or two today.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.0MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

     

  • What Data is Really Needed?

    The GDPR took effect in May of this year, at least with regards to enforcement. A few days after the May 25 date, a German court ruled against ICANN, the company that registers domain names on the Internet and manages the global WHOIS database. The case revolves around the information collected when you register a domain. ICANN wants multiple contacts, which they’ve required for decades. However, a company in Germany that is a partner, argued that the additional technical and administrative contacts were not required for fulfilling the business that both ICANN and EPAG (the German registrar) are engaged in. ICANN Is appealing the ruling, citing the need for clarification of what this means with regard to the law.

    This is interesting to me, because a) it concerns data, and b) there is an interesting argument here to be made about what data is needed for a business purpose. I could see this being argued successfully either way, and not just in court. As a domain holder, does the registrar really need multiple different sets of personal information from me? Arguably, this is a convenience for them, one that is based on tradition. However, one could argue the other way.

    It is a little scary that a court, with no expertise in some industry (Internet domain registration, in this case), will decide if there is an actual business need. After all, can a lawyer or judge really understand what data a business needs in their daily activities?

    Maybe, maybe not, but I do think this forces businesses to actually stop and think about what data they collect, have a justification, and document that. That’s a good thing, because often I find business people just asking to collect data without any idea what they’ll do with the information. I also find technical people collecting data, not maliciously, but often to anticipate what might be asked of a system, or because they want to avoid rework and just decide to collect everything they can.

    Data is precious, and while I don’t want to put many limits on what data businesses can collect, I also don’t want to them be able to collect anything, not disclose what they’ve collected, and not secure it properly. Having some limits, or at least forcing them to consider the risk of holding old, useless data, is likely a good thing for all of us.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.7MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • Maintain Your Trustworthiness

    Many of us that are DBAs and/or sysadmins find ourselves with privileged access to many systems. We can often read the data that’s stored in these systems, whether that’s a relational database, a NoSQL store, or even a mail system. As a result, it is incumbent upon us to be trustworthy and maintain confidentiality with privileged information.

    Overall I think most of us do this, but there are always some rogue administrators out there, some of which might take malicious actions. There have been a few people that were arrested or sued for hacking into systems, trashing backups, or causing other issues. Often those are emotional outbursts that disrupt operations, and many people are aware there is an issue. However, what if people weren’t aware they were being hacked in some way?

    I ran across this story about some “admin” software being sold on a hacker forum site, which was marketed as sys admin software, but used to control other people’s computers without their knowledge. This is essentially a remote access trojan application that a developer sold to others who used it to steal data from their victims. The software developer was arrested and signed a plea agreement, knowing that it was used in a malicious manner.

    For those of us that have privileged access, we might learn passwords of users as we watch them enter the value over and over. We certainly might work with their data to help them solve an issue or understand the manipulation taking place. We We may have auditing systems or logs that allow us to replay or examine the data values people have entered into applications. We do this with their permission and understanding, or at least someone’s permission. A user might not know we have substantial instrumentation, perhaps even the equivalent of a keystroke logger, but there will be some management that is aware of the existence of these tools.

    While I’ve played a few pranks on people, moving keyboards or mice, I’ve always ensured they knew it was me in a short period of time. Using admin software to spy on others without their knowledge is a breach of trust and ethics, in my opinion. Even being asked to use this by management would be immoral for me.

    Knowing this type of software exists, is important, and if you find it, I’d make sure you report it to management immediately, preferably to a few different people. If anyone is using tools to spy on users, they’re likely up to no good and I’d hope we would all attempt to put a stop to the practice.

    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.

  • The Master of the Schema

    “The database … should be the master of the schema”.

    It’s not often I see an application developer talk about the importance of the database, or at least that the database (and data) are very important to the success of the application, but in this case, that’s what I saw. The quote is from this blog, which talks about the problems of the code first approach to building an application. It’s from a Java development company, though it’s their jooQ product blog that actually generates Java code from the database, so they get the need to pay some attention to the database.

    The thrust of the article is that using an ORM is fine, but this isn’t necessarily the best way to design your datastore if you need a relational system. There will be mistakes made in naming objects, in structuring them and ensuring indexes exist and more. The longer you go with generated database code from some code-first type system, the more issues you might have later as you try to modify both the application and database, especially the database, since you can’t drop it and recreate it.

    If we could drop the tables and rebuild them, life would be great. Maybe we should keep copies of data on the clients, and just reload the necessary data after a deployment… It would make my life easier as a database professional, but I suspect this isn’t the best way to ensure data quality and consistency (not to mention completeness).

    I agree that if you’re building an application, you should go database first. At least start with some basic structures and learn to modify them. The practice you get modifying code, with scripts not GUIs, will be invaluable later to both developers and DBAs/admins. You’ll start getting practice and understand what it means to deploy scripts to your database. After all, making schema changes with scripts in your development database is the first “practice” you get for deployment. If you can’t get the scripts to work here, how would you have any confidence they’ll work in production?

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.1MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.