Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Liable for Data Loss

    When I first installed Windows 7, I was thrilled. Finally, Microsoft had slimmed down and improved the OS performance rather than continuing to bloat it larger. After Vista, Windows 7 was a welcome change. Windows 8 was different, but for me as a desktop user, it wasn’t much different. I moved to Windows 10 as a beta user and thought it performed well. A little slower than 7, but overall a good move. I was glad to get the upgrade notice on a second machine, but it was annoying. Trying to easily delay or avoid the change in the middle of some travel was hard. I certainly could sympathize with the users that complained they didn’t want the upgrade and couldn’t easily avoid it. I’m glad Microsoft changed this process a bit.

    There were people that accidentally, or felt forced, to upgrade. Among those, some of them lost data and decided to sue Microsoft. Let’s leave aside the Windows upgrade process, Microsoft’s decision, and the merits of this particular case. Those are separate issues from the one I want to discuss, which is the liability for data loss. At the core of the lawsuit, the time and information that people have lost is an issue that few of us have had to deal with in our careers. At least, most of us haven’t had to worry we are liable for the issues our software might cause.

    Are we moving to a place where a person, or more likely a company, is going to be held liable for the data loss from upgrades or patches? There is the ability of customers to initiate legal actions, but strong EULAs and prior legal decisions seem to indicate that much of the liability resides with customers and vendors aren’t at fault. Is that a good thing? I’m not sure, but I do think that as data becomes more important and is used to justify decisions or drive business actions, there will be a push to ensure that anyone performing data changes with their software during patches and upgrades is liable for issues.

    I’m surprised we haven’t seen more of accountability from software firms to date, but I think much of the legal issues have been settled without much fanfare and strong non disclosure agreements. I’m not sure this is the best solution for anyone, as to force some improvement and better quality for software, we need to take better care of our data. I don’t want us to move slower with software development or deployment, but I do want quality to improve.

    Steve Jones

  • More Power in Your BI

    I’ve seen lots of data visualization tools over the years. Cognos, Microstrategy, ProClarity, and more. While I haven’t been a BI person for most of my career, in many of my positions, someone has wanted to try some new tool and eventually I’ll get involved somewhat. I remember first seeing the OLAP cube browser in SQL Server 7, and showing my boss a quick demo. While it wasn’t something that you could let an end user have, it also got my boss excited, and they started a project as I was leaving to implement some OLAP for the sales department.

    When I first saw Tableau years ago (2008?) at TechEd, it was the first tool I’d seen that was really slick for the end user. I expected they’d grow quickly, and they have. Many people have looked at the Tableau tools as the standard for data visualization. For years nothing looked close, and as much as I appreciated Microsoft moving PowerPiviot and other tools to Excel, they weren’t as nice to use as the graphical tools.

    That changed with Power BI. When I first saw this tool, instantly I could start to see the power of the tool. Even altering and changing a tool had an ease and power that I hadn’t seen since the Tableau tools. The initial release had lots of limitations and was just on the web. It was slow, and refreshes from remote data weren’t great. There were security limitations, and I wasn’t sure that the vision for the product made sense from Microsoft, even though I could see tremendous potential.

    Things have improved, and I am somewhat amazed with the power of Power BI. A simple sales report is interactive. I can click on something intuitively and the values I see will adjust to focus on that item. What’s more, other graphs on the screen adjust. However, I don’t have to stick with simple graphs, I can add better imagry, such as this wine report, or this airline maintenance report that drives work. I was especially impressed with the analysis of Stephan Curry (which won the contest). Some of those reports I couldn’t imagine trying to build with other tools, especially SSRS.

    Power BI is a great tool, and if you need to provide visualizations for end users, I’d urge you to take a look. The Power BI Desktop tool is great for modeling and working with data. I find myself using that for quick looks at data, building a graph in a way that’s easier than in Excel. I went through Microsoft’s EdX course, and was somewhat amazed to see the vast capabilities available in the product. Guy in a Cube, Adam Saxton, has a YouTube channel where he and Patrick LeBlanc (@PatrickDBA) bring you constant training and tips on how to get the most out of the tool.

    What’s more, I keep finding more and more Power BI blogs and posts that I can add to Database Weekly every week. So many people are experimenting and finding ways to better analyze data with Power BI. This week we have a continent slicer, data privacy, collaboration, and more. With montly releases, I find that people are constantly digging into the possibilities and helping you learn with them. There are even developers building custom visuals that you can download. There’s even one for acquarium lovers. If you want to learn about these, Devin Knight blogs regularly about custom visuals and we include many of those links here and on SQLServerCentral

    Power Bi is a great way to empower your users, reduce your reporting load, and make everyone happier. Power BI is a great way to let users experiment with data and actually decide what reports are worth investing in more with IT resources to perhaps optimize the performance of certain visuals. Give it a try to day, especially the desktop version, and see how you can easily start to examine data that might be important to you. Even the SQLDBAWithaBeard finds Power BI helpful.

    Steve Jones

  • AI Helpers or Replacements

    It’s interesting to look at the data business and how companies view DBAs, database developers, BI developers, data scientists, and more. There are some companies that really see value in our services, and I’m grateful for that. I’ve been gainfully employed for well over two decades to work with data. There isn’t much standardization in our jobs or what we’re expected to do, but I’ve grown comfortable with that. That’s one of the reasons the people working with me, my coworkers, are more important than the work. The work is the work.

    As our systems become more advanced, there is concern over how much less some of our skills might be needed with new AI type systems. Will the move to smarter systems mean there will be more opportunity for us? Or less? Certainly in the long term there might be less jobs if systems become really capable, but in the short term I don’t think so. As much as Microsoft has improved SQL Server, and they’ve done great things with easier HA configs, the Query Store, Adaptive Query Processing (coming) and more, they aren’t replacing many of us. Maybe a few, but I think there’s still lots of technical work.

    Darmesh Shah wrote a nice piece on AI and how it will help many of us in our jobs, providing the easy information and guidance for us to focus our skills. He sees bots as helpers, which to me presents new opportunities to interact with and work with customers and data. We will find ourselves more capable with help from AI, not replaced. As we get better machine learning or other adaptive algorithms, we’ll actually find new ways to work with data. This should provide us with new opportunities and new types of jobs that we might grow into. Plenty of people want to dismiss the data science jobs as a popular area where anyone can claim those skills if they know a statistical function and can query data in R, but there are real jobs in those areas, and there are opportunities in new companies that might not have existed in years past.

    There are going to be some amazing new ways that data and more intelligent algorithms will help us see our world in the future. There will also be scary ones, and many we don’t know if we can trust. Somewhere in there, the world will become very, very interesting for those of us that work with data on a daily basis, looking for new ways to extract information from all the bits and bytes that we store. Once again, this is something I do look forward to as a data professional.

    Steve Jones

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  • The Value of Your Personal Data

    Years ago I read Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte of MIT. In the book, he relates a story about crossing the border from the US into Canada and a Border Patrol agent asking the value of his laptop. He said millions, not because of the hardware, but because of the data. I thought that was interesting, and I somewhat agree. The data I have on my machines, or really now, in cloud services, is more valuable than the hardware. The hardware is barely worth anything to me, including the time it takes to reinstall my applications, because I really treat my laptop as a piece of cattle. I could drop it, render it completely unusable and I’d be back up, running, and productive with new hardware in less than 4 hours.

    Then I saw this article on ransoming data for iCloud users, where the request is for US$75,000. This is for Apple itself and not individuals, but what if it were for each user? What would I pay to avoid losing all the data on my mobile device?

    It certainly wouldn’t be $75,000 despite the fact I think some of the data I have is precious. I love the pictures and video of my family most of all, but if I lost some of them, maybe all of the digital storage, would I just pay a ransom? Probably not. What about all the code in a VCS for my company? Would we pay a ransom for that? Likely we would, though perhaps not. We might think about reconstructing the code, especially if we were a small company.

    Ultimately I think there isn’t a lot of money to be made with individuals’ data. Too many of us older folks remember when we did lose physical objects and they were just gone. The idea of losing things is painful, but not inconceivable. For younger people, it seems that much of the data we produce and consume is transient and isn’t necessarily that valuable to us. My kids love Snapchat for the ability to create and lose memories. I dislike it for the same reason.

    Much of the data we personally have can be backed up, and possibly recreated if it isn’t. Many of our digital records have the characteristic that while we may have a copy, often some business or organization has another copy. Requesting new data is easy, and while it might cost some time and money, it may be preferable to the idea of paying a ransom, and potentially having to continue to pay again in the future with some virus still on our systems.

    I don’t quite know what to think about ransomware and how this might evolve. I suspect that this will always be a problem in some way, just as hardware failures will likely plague us forever. The only solution I have is to create backups regularly that contain versions, and can be restored to separate, clean devices. I’ve gotten away from my own personal offline backups, mostly because of data size, but I do continue to try and keep at least 2 or 3 backups going to different locations and with different services because my data is at least that important.

    Steve Jones