I’m busy today, in the Redgate office, rehearsing and practicing for the SQL Privacy Summit.
Today I’m republishing The Value of Data.
Category: Editorial
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Interviewing Avatars
Imagine that you go to interview a candidate over Skype or even a phone call and the first thing you see or hear is: “Hi, my name is Hank, and I am an avatar. I will answer all your questions about Nick factually and completely, as if you’re talking directly to Nick. Are you still looking to fill this position?”
That’s a quote from a blog post about HR and hiring issues. In this post, the author talks about a new system that allows a job seeker to use an avatar as a way to quickly apply for thousands of jobs. While this might be nice for the applicant, would any of you want to interview an avatar? Maybe you would a few times, or maybe you’d even start to like this as a way to get some basic information about a candidate. Of course, if the candidate has loaded up all sorts of technical facts from Inside SQL Server or How Would You Move Mount Fuji, then maybe you’re less interested.
One one hand this is scary. On the other it’s awesome. I’d love to be able to answer some questions and provide some data about my career and goals and let an avatar go through initial screens. I wouldn’t want this to be used anywhere past the initial interview, but certainly it would help me to present a little more of myself in an interactive format. It could be a nice brand, and how fun would it be to interact with Steve’s avatar?
In some sense, we might move in this direction. After all, this just levels the playing field between candidates and employers. Plenty of recruiting and HR people use their own software or algorithms to make quick decisions about a large number of applicants. I certainly know that you need to stand out with your brand and ensure your resume and online profile attract attention and this could help with that.
Think about this. Is there a way to better present the data and information about ourselves, using technology to respond and help ensure that the position is a good fit for each of us? Hiring managers might use this, why not us? Actually, they are using Alex and Mya. Would this be a better way for you to control and show off some of your work? Even have the avatar show how you solved problems or responded to different situations? While this seems silly or science fiction, I wouldn’t be surprised to see this type of avatar-avatar interaction being used early in the process to decide if both parties should move forward.
Steve Jones
The Voice of the DBA Podcast
Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.5MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.
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Power BI Desktop on the Mac
Power Bi is one of the neatest tools that Microsoft has built for data professionals. It allows anyone to build fantastic interactive visualizations that can help tell a story and help someone make decisions. There have been some amazing demo visualizations from Microsoft customers. I’ve seen a predictive maintenance visualization for airplanes, one for diabetes trends and a fun basketball visual. There are also a fantastic set of custom visual controls, quite a few of which are described in Devin Knights blog series.
If you don’t know anything about Power BI, there are lots of resources, including some amazing tips from the Guy in a Cube. Adam Saxton has an amazing channel and puts together some impressive videos with Patrick LeBlanc. They might be one of the best sources for learning to work with the tools. You might want to spend some time playing with Power BI as I can almost guarantee that you’ll build better reports with this tool than you would otherwise. You’ll impress your customers, clients, and boss with your design work.
Plenty of people have Mac laptops, especially business people, and for quite some time they’ve had to deal with a lack of native tooling. Certainly there are lots of software ports, and no shortage of web software, but there are always places where a lack of a native solution is problematic. I don’t know that we’ll get lots of software ported to a new OS, but there is a better solution. Containerization can help smooth the way.
A few years back I met the Kenji Obata, founder of Turbo.net. He was doing some interesting work with containers, and I was fascinated by their work. Since then, they’ve grown and refined their technology, and now they have Power BI for Mac available. As soon as I saw their walk-through video, I wanted to share the experience. It’s pretty amazing, and if I were still running OSX, I’d be looking to use some of the Microsoft tools I want on the native desktop.
This isn’t really native, but the experience feels native. The use of containerization technology might be debatable for databases, but for client applications, it’s amazing. The way that Turbo.net packages up applications is incredible. I like Turbo, and if you need to use Microsoft client applications on a Mac, you might give them a try. It’s not free, but it’s way better than virtualization and has some really cool features as well. I’m sure lots of non-technical people, especially management, that might build reports would love the experience of running Power Bi Desktop on their Mac.
They even have SSMS available as a turbo container for the Mac, if you’re interested.
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.
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Anonymisation Confusion
The GDPR starts getting enforced in a few weeks. It’s been law for a couple years, but the authorities have given companies time to comply. I know various entities are frantically working towards compliance as I keep getting updates to Terms of Service. My company is among them, and we are diligently ensuring we can prove that we aren’t violating any rules. That’s good because I’m sure fines will reduce any bonus we might earn this year.
As I’ve been reading over the law and talking with customers, I’ve learned quite a bit. Redgate Software builds products to help with compliance and we’re updating guidance and information on how to work with data. As I’ve helped to update information and explain concepts I keep running into the term “pseudonymisation”. If you listen to the podcast, you’ll probably hear me struggle to pronounce it, but more importantly, I was initially confused about what this actually meant.
The Data Protection site from Ireland has a great description of how this differs from anonymisation. You can read through the document, but anonymisation means that the data can’t be some how reverse engineered to find the original data. In terms of privacy, an anonymised set of my data wouldn’t allow anyone to determine the data is about me.
If the data is pseudonumised, data about me would be replaces with a token, but there might be other means of discovering a data set is about me. As an example, in an eCommerce system, you might have an order key in a dev data set that’s copied directly from production. However, my name would be replaced with something else, like Bob Smith. It’s not apparent that it’s my data, but the protection is limited. If the data were anonymised, the order key would be replaced as well to prevent reverse engineering.
Many of us have gotten used to being lax with dev and test data, often just restoring from production. It’s handy, convenient, and allows you to find problems in production or verify changes using known values. The downside of this is that we have poor data security. There are no shortage of data breaches from dev and test systems. Certainly plenty of data has been lost from developer laptops as well. Even if you had your laptop encrypted, there’s no real excuse for using real data in less secure environments.
We need to learn to use anonymised data, and become comfortable with the idea of working on secure data sets. That also means we need the skills to ensure we build good, useful, valid datasets with production-like characteristics.
Steve Jones
The Voice of the DBA Podcast
Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 4.2MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.
