Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • How Much Can You Learn?

    One of the things we’ve tried to do at SQLServerCentral is provide a way for SQL Server professionals to continue to learn more about the platform over time. Andy Warren and I have debated how to best do this over the years, and Andy has built a great presentation on Building a Professional Development Plan that I’d encourage you to watch or attend if you can.

    One of the parts of any good plan is finding time to learn. While there are many ways in which to learn, many people seem to want an organized way of working through a particular topic. Books provide one method, while online courses such as those provided by Pluralsight are another.  There are also pre-cons at SQL Saturdays or other conferences, weeklong training classes, and other methods available. Which you choose might depend on how you best learn.

    Any of these methods work, but all require some investment, both time and money. Setting aside the money for a minute, how much can you learn in a year if you use some on-demand method such as books or on-demand video. Is there some limit to what you can absorb and work with in any particular month or year?

    I think there is. Certainly the amount you learn depends on how much you can practice and focus on a topic, as well as how closely the new skill is to your existing capabilities. The further you move away from an area you’re already comfortable with, the slower you may learn, and the greater investment to become competent in a new subject. Given that a month (or year) is a fixed amount of time, and we all have other responsibilities, how much can you actually learn and retain?

    I used to think that a few months would build some competence, but I’m finding that after I learn for a few months, I really need a few months, or at least some time, of not learning, where I can practice and work with new skills I’ve been developing. I find that if I don’t take this time, too much of what I’ve learned becomes hard to remember, and even newer skills are hard to acquire.

    Is it the same for you?

    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.

  • Naming Is Hard

    I ran across Aaron Bertrand’s naming post recently, which I liked overall. Your team needs to agree how things are named, and be consistent, but I agree that some of the rules I’ve seen put down by people aren’t practical. However I also know that naming things becomes hard, especially over time as your systems evolve and the scale grows.

    I’ve run into some strange naming patterns in the last few years that struck me as odd. I grew up in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, and with a parent selling real estate, I traveled all over the area, often reading a map to navigate. I can rarely remember seeing the same names used over and over, despite the fact this was a relatively populous area.

    However when I came to Colorado, I found things to be different. Either the people in charge of naming weren’t creative, or they were very, very lazy. In some of the developments I entered, I’d find the same name used many times on adjacent streets. You can find Wolfe St, Wolfe Pl, Wolfe Ct, and more all next to each other. While a computer can easily differentiate these sets of characters, this can easily create confusion in humans.

    On a note closer to our livelihood, I have seen some strange databases objects. The tables in a JD Edwards system were coded with a short alpha sequence and then a 4 or 5 digit number. Always fun to remember what “FS3401” means. However I saw one recently that stunned me. I ran across a SQL Server database that was quite large, not in data size but in the number of objects. Apparently a developer or DBA at some point decided it wasn’t worth trying to name tables to match some entity and used GUIDs are names instead. I don’t know about many of you, but comprehending which GUID stores which data might have me resigning from that position relatively quickly.

    We won’t all necessarily agree on how we should best name objects and entities, and that’s fine. However I would implore you to at least consider the humans that will have to work with your database. Use some creativity to build names that are easy to differentiate and pronounce for the future DBAs and developers that need to enhance and query your system.

    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.

  • Track Your Consultants

    If you pay attention to security issues in software, you’ve probably heard about man-in-the-middle attacks. These can occur more frequently than you expect, though inside of a company, it’s more unlikely that you’ll experience one if you have some fairly basic security controls on your network.

    However, if you invite someone inside of your network, such as a consultant of some sort, you should be more vigilent. There’s a great post showing how someone can execute a MITM attack against SQL Server. It’s in depth, showing exactly how packet captures lead to the ability to hijack a session and create a new login.

    If this seems like a lot of work, it is. However once the attack is built, this could easily be run by anyone inside of your network. I could see consultants running this type of attack and storing credentials they’ve created for use many months later. These could be sold later to someone that might use them in a website or other application to gather data from outside of your network.

    Defending against these types of attacks is hard. Certainly not allowing free access for consultants is key, though a quick command line execution of a script might not be something that’s easily noticed. At the very least, sysadmin logins should be monitored, and any changes to this list investigated immediately. However, I’d also say any built in server role changes should be checked and verified as being valid alterations. Even your SQL logins shouldn’t change without administrators being aware.

    Monitoring your systems is a big part of security. You might not prevent many of the attacks, but knowing they’ve taken place allows you to respond and potentially protect sensitive data.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.6MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

  • SnowCrash for SQL Server

    Years ago I read Snow Crash and really enjoyed the novel. In it, a virtual reality world exists, where many people connect to and roam about in a virtual world, experiencing various 3D type views of applications, systems, and data. There are numerous other novels that enjoy similar worlds, like Ready Player One and Warstrider. It’s an idea that many people look forward to as virtual reality systems grow in power and capability.

    With Microsoft’s HoloLens, there’s a project underway to bring more virtual reality to our everyday world, including the management of IT systems. There are various people at Microsoft Research looking to allow us to navigate the complexity of our IT installations, including SQL Server instances, to better understand the relationships between our servers.

    This is exciting in some sense. Can you imagine being able to “move” through space to a Production SQL Server, viewing the real time access of queries, users, and data. We would be able to grab a query and pause it, cancel it, even follow chains of blocking to find the sources of issues in a way that is likely to be more natural for many of the people that will enter the technology field in the next 20 years.

    It’s April 1, and I’m somewhat joking and somewhat not. I’m not sure if there is any project underway specifically for managing IT systems, but I could see this as a way of better visualizing and working with large amounts of data. Certainly there might be visual analysis of Big Data that makes sense, but I could see large amount of security data, logging, auditing data that is better dealt with in some sort of virtual reality interface.

    I know this might seem strange to some of us. I’ve tried the Oculus hardware and Samsung VR systems, and they have a long way to go before I’d want one, but I have dreams of being able to more easily navigate the complexity of our systems in a way that might feel more natural and intuitive than the ever growing list of folders and dialogs in Management Studio.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.8MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.