Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Tell Me a Joke

    It’s April 3rd today, and I’m a little sad. We missed April 1 here at SQLServerCentral. The date was on a Saturday, and we don’t send a newsletter on that day, so there wasn’t any opporunity for a prank. Running one today just doesn’t seem right, so we’re foregoing our fun in 2017.

    Over the years, we’ve had some good ones. My favorite was SQL Server on Linux, one of the most popular articles for years, unitl it finally came true. There was my decoding of the DTUs and MySQL supporting T-SQL from last year. Where was also the time we took over PASS. In previous years, I’ve shown you how to throttle a query in mid-execution and  how to get your Service Broken messages in order, and let you enter C# into stored procedures. Do you remember the Easter Egg in SSMS?

    We’ve learned about SQL Server having an open source alternative and the way an index really works. That last one made me proud since I suckered in a few SQL Server experts.

    It’s not just me, Gail Shaw, Paul Randal, Grant Fritchey, and more have participated in April Fools, with some funny ideas, just real enough to be true. I’m always looking for more people to come up with creative April 1 prank, so if you have a good idea, think 2018…

    With Apr 1 being on a holiday, and since I was by myself in the UK (I did run a 5K and work on presentations over the weekend), I thought I’d ask if you had any good links or jokes that appeared on your screen. Anything sucker you in? Anything disappoint you because you wished it were real? Let me know today.

    Steve Jones

     

  • Big Companies are Improving with DevOps

    One of the comments I’ve often heard from people that work in IT and haven’t adopted DevOps is that the principles and changes required won’t work at their organization. Quite a few people think that only small, new companies, like Flickr and Spotify can use the ideas. Plenty of others look at only high-tech, progressive companies like Amazon and Facebook able to change.

    That’s not true.

    In fact, there are four Fortune 500 companies using DevOps, including a large (though young) bank, Capital One, and another, older one, WestPac. I’m not sure anyone would consider American Airlines or Hertz to be small, agile companies, though certainly they are in highly competitive industries and need every advantage over their competitors that they can get. I suspect that is the driving reason for many of these companies to adopt fast, quick software development. They can’t afford to have an idea take months to implement.

    Those companies aren’t like yours? What about Maersk or Nationwide? Ticketmaster? Maybe Norstrom (and a few more)? I actually had the chance to speak with a number of Nordstrom employees that had taken a POC concept for the mobile group and proved that DevOps has value. From there, almost the entire IT department, hundreds of employees in groups from internal IT to mainframe to web, all have adopted various types of DevOps processes, starting with value stream analysis. Over a few yeasr, they have dramatically transformed their delivery of software. When someone in the business proposes an idea or need, it used to take over 6 months for something to get deployed. That’s down to a couple of weeks, and it’s released in a true, get-something-useful-to-the-customer fashion. This isn’t alpha or beta software, but a basic item that can be used and is then grown and changed according to customer feedback on a daily or weekly basis.

    The transition to DevOps really requires some belief and understanding of the ways in which you can deliver better software, faster. This requires some slow growth, which seems crazy, but the the cultural changes take time, and even the technology tools you choose, require some patience, trust, and experimentation from your technology staff. While it might take months or even a year to get a DevOps process working well and one you’re comfortable with, the gains grow and grow over time.

    Even if you don’t believe in DevOps now, why wouldn’t you try to get someone in management to set up a proof-of-concept and build something. It’s a small investment, that could have huge payback with limited risk.  You’ll learn a lot and can then decide if it helps you delivery value to your customers in a better way. And if you do adopt DevOps, don’t forget to include the database in your process.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 4.0MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • Hacked

    Hacked

    By Steve Jones, 2013/01/02

    This editorial was originally published on Jan 2, 2013. It is being rerun as Steve is out of the office.

    I’ve been hacked before. My personal web site has been hacked with a variety of injection and XSS attacks over the years. None too serious, and I’ve had backups that allowed me to fix things fairly easily, especially once I had a copy of Data Compare, which saved me a lot of time. At SQLServerCentral, we’ve been hacked as well, though not in a long time. I think we’ve closed most of the security holes, and I haven’t had any issues to deal with in quite some time.

    However as I was reading a note from Richard Douglas about being hacked, it brought back memories of working at JD Edwards. Richard was hacked at work, on his personal system. At JD Edwards, we were required to lock our workstations at all times when we were not physically in front of them. We also had two accounts: a normal user and a domain admin “privileged” user. As you might expect, there were numerous lapses of people walking to the kitchen or bathroom and forgetting to lock their workstations. It was considered fair game to change settings, send email to our group, even place semi-SFW pictures on someone’s desktop. It was quite embarrassing to be caught, and was much more a an effective security reminder than a reprimand from our boss.

    However there is a serious security problem here. Many of us would use our privileged account all too often, since it was a hassle to log out and back in. The “run as” option didn’t work well for some applications, and we were less secure than we probably should have been. If someone walking by, whether an employee, guest, consultant, or someone else noticed SSMS running, how long would it take them to type:

      sp_addlogin 'joeuser', 'joeuser'
  sp_addrole 'joeuser', sysadmin

    I type quickly and that took me less than 30 seconds. I’m sure even a slow typist could get that entered, and erased, inside of a minute. That might result in a serious security breech, if the system to which you were connected contained HIPAA, PCI, or any identity information. Perhaps even worse these days is the chance someone might attach a USB key logger to your keyboard.

    You might be safe in your environment, but you can never be sure. A little care in ensuring you are not unnecessarily exposing security holes, and making sure that outsiders are always escorted can prevent embarrassing incidents from occurring.

  • Change Approvals

    Part of a developer’s or DBA’s career is getting their work released to some system where others can use the system. Some of us may do this more than others, but we all usually have some role, whether in packaging changes up or actually pushing the button that runs a script or copies files to some live server. This can be an exciting and stressful time, depending on how you feel about the quality of the work.

    Releasing software often isn’t something done in a vacuum. Even in the highly agile, DevOps companies like Amazon and Facebook where developers release code many times a day, there is often some sort of approval process, whether implicit or explicit, before code goes out. Even if it’s just a peer that code reviews something, or a business person that examines a test version and pronounces it correct, another person often weighs in on our changes.

    That’s not always the case, as I know in emergencies, some of us make quick decisions and change or run code that only we have examined. I’d hope that’s the exception, rather than the rule, with most database changes.

    Today I’m curious. Who approves your database changes? Is there a formal process? An informal one? Does the person making the decision even understand the code or do they depend on you to have written and tested solid T-SQL?

    It’s been said that the person closest to the work is often the best person to judge if it should be released, but that’s only partially true. Deploying code is often disruptive. It introduces change, which customers may or may not like. There may be good reasons to release at discrete intervals, rather than whenever the developer things things are working. This may change with heavy use of feature flags or feature toggles, but in general, code releases are interruptions and we want to limit them.

    Unless something is broken, in which case, we often want the change as quick as it can be released. Does that mean we want a different change process? Let us know 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.