Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • A Data ID

    It sounds good. A universal ID that can be used for your identifiable data, in case you happen to lose your paperwork. Paperwork? When will that term become lost to history? These days, less and less of anything is available as a physical media, and if it is, it’s often because someone generates a copy from a printer. How secure or valid is that? After all, with Photoshop and other tools, we can reproduce almost anything that’s indistinguishable from the original.

    The UN wants a universal ID for humanitarian reasons. In case you can’t get your personal documents because you’re a refugees. They’re lost, they’re stolen, or just still in the desk drawer because you had to flee your residence. Digital representations of these papers might be the only way for many people to prove anything about their lives. Certainly a concern in today’s world.

    As we should know by now, anything that can be built in the digital world can be stolen. In fact, I’m fairly convinced that the vast majority of people that come up with good ideas don’t know how to evaluate them in terms of the horrible ways that others will abuse the system. Creators are optimistic and look to solve problems. They’re not nearly devious enough to think of the various permutations that a hacker mind might envision.

    A universal way to track and verify identity information would be great. I already worry about losing track of digital assets, and some way to query a number of systems to verify I own them would be great. However, the security aspects worry me. Even having governments or the UN provide digital lockers that entail backups of records is problematic. Any centralized system can be abused, and certainly this data would be abused. Or leaked. We see data breaches from government all the time. Can you imagine losing control of passport verification at a large scale?

    Each individual needs to come up with their own backup of precious documents, in a way that ensures they are encrypted and protected. However, we do need ways to authenticate and verify these digital assets. Maybe free signing certificates should be used when assets are provided to individuals, with public keys being disclosed by the government and escrowed by the UN, or maybe every other government. We ought to be able to verify a digital document in an open, transparent way, while leaving the storage to the individual. That would allow us to develop ways to protect our own assets, but ensure multiple entities can verify authenticity.

    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.

  • Failed Projects

    This editorial is from way back, published in 2005, but perhaps still a good one today. This is being re-run as Steve is at the Data Platform Summit.

    Friday is poll day, at least as long as I can be creative with them. And of course, remember to put them out on the right day Smile This week is more of a software development issue than a strictly SQL Server one, but take it how you will and get your post in here for everyone to see. Humility and responsibility are the keys this week. So without further ado…

    Have You Ever Failed In A Software Project?

    A simple yes or no would suffice for the poll question, but I’ll set an example and give you my answer with an explanation. The short answer is yes. The longer one is abbreviated in the interests of space, but I have made an attempt to set things as I best remember them.

    When I came to Denver 7 years ago, it was with a startup company in the financial services market with a few simple software products, but some trouble getting them stable and focusing the IT group. I was excited at the opportunity, the dot com boom was, well, booming, and I was thinking I’d make a million with this company. Fast forward 2 years and I resigned, somewhat burned out, and thinking I’d done everything I could.

    Thinking back I think I had done lots and given a lot, but I still failed and part of it was me not taking a leadership role more than I did and part of it was getting burned out and part of it was not really forcing the company to stop and make good decisions regardless of the time involved. I instead put up a bit of a fight, but then went along with the constant “just patch it” and we ended up burning most of a year getting nowhere because the underlying base products were a mess. I resigned, the company lost about 30% of the development staff, floundered for a couple years and was sold. Not sure anyone made money on that deal.

    As I’ve looked back, I realize it was a dysfunctional company, but I think I could have made a difference, stepped up as CTO (it was offered to me) and driven things forward. Oh well, I learned quite a bit from the experience and grew from it.

    Steve Jones

     

  • Opinions and Votes

    This editorial was originally published on Aug 19, 2013. It is being re-run as Steve is away at the Data Platform Summit.

    When you work with a vendor, you may report bugs, issues, or strange behaviors in software. These area facts, and are valuable pieces of information that vendors do care about. When you exclaim that a particular bug or missing feature is critical, you’re stating an opinion. The importance or priority you place on an item is not necessarily the same priority the vendor places on the item.

    We see this every day in our work, as clients and customers send us issues with our applications and systems. We triage the items and may or may not fix them in the order the customer would like them fixed. Our management may set priorities that we don’t agree with. It’s a complex interaction that involves many factors, all of which are weighed differently by different people.

    However the end user (client, customer, etc.) often doesn’t understand why the priorities are different and why can’t we just see how badly an item needs to be fixed? I see this all the time, though from the end user perspective. I use lots of software, and I find lots of issues and failings, especially in SQL Server. My priorities aren’t Microsoft’s priorities, and I accept that. I provide them with an opinion of what I think, not a vote. If they don’t agree with my opinion, or choose to work on other priorities, I don’t think they aren’t listening to me. I think they disagree with my opinion.

    Like it or not, politics is important here. The art of influence is important, and while an individual opinion doesn’t matter, lots of opinions can have influence. Again, however, these are opinions and influences, not votes. We can convince Microsoft to change direction at times, or work on certain issues, but it takes participation and rational, reasonable debate, not childish exaggerated complaints and insults. We want to influence and convince, not upset and anger.

    Steve Jones

     

  • Hiring Heterogeneously

    This editorial was originally published on Jul 22, 2013. It is being re-run as Steve is on vacation.

    I wrote recently about tech interviews and hiring, and even on an interesting interviewing technique for senior people. However we need to hire more than just senior people. We need to hire junior people, and intermediate people. Those roles are important for both growing the experience of your staff, and not getting caught with a “” as a bottleneck or single point of failure. No, that’s not Brent Ozar, though someone with his talent might be the single point of failure in many organizations.

    Not everyone can be a superstar-expert-architect that decides how the system is built. Not all architects should spend time coding basic insert/update/delete code or adding clustered indexes to tables. We need a variety of talent levels that can get complete different types of tasks. There is tedious administrative work, supporting roles, necessary, though unexciting work like reviewing security, logs, audits, and more. While you can automate much of this busy work, there are still tasks that we must assign to people.

    There’s another consideration as well in hiring that all too often people overlook. Hiring too many people that are too similar, who may think alike, who may view problems the same way can lead to an environment that doesn’t grow and expand, that loses it’s creativity over time. There’s a great quote that says “Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much” (Walter Lippmann). It’s important to have a diversity of opinions, and when you hire new people, you should consider this. You want talented people, and people that get along, but not necessarily all thinking about problems in the same way.

    The world is a richer place for the diversity we have, and varying opinions, thoughts and ideas. We don’t all get along, but many of us can work together with mutual respect, considering each others’ viewpoints as we work to build solutions to the problems we face.

    Steve Jones