Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • The Data Driven Event

    This Thursday, March 10, 2016, at 10am, EST, MIcrosoft will host Data Driven, a live virtual conference. This is slated to be the launch event for SQL Server 2016, though there has been no information released about whether this is also when the platform will RTM.  To date we have had a number of CTPs (CTP 3.3 is the latest), but no Release Candidates (RC) (as of the time of this writing), which we usually see before the final product is released.

    However the CTP has been running well for me. The areas I’ve been testing and looking at seem to work well and I’m rather excited about this version of SQL Server. I don’t think I’ve looked forward to a new version this much since 2008. The in between versions have been somewhat meh, without a substantial number of changes. SQL Server 2012 was better than the R2 and 2014 releases, but still, a limited number of changes.

    However SQL Server 2016 really feels like Microsoft has refocused on the platform, made substantial engineering investments, and is really changing the capabilities of the product. From the Query Store to Always Encrypted to the Stretch Database, we’ve got quite a list of thing to learn about SQL Server 2016. I know I’ve been working through some of these areas and each time it seems I’ve caught up with the changes, there are more items to learn.

    This event is scheduled for two hours on Thursday, so it’s not an all day commitment. I’m sure many of you aren’t looking to upgrade to SQL Server 2016 right away, but this is a chance to learn a bit about what you may look forward to in the future, as well as an opportunity to get excited about the new Data Platform changes from Microsoft. Satya Nadella, the CEO will speak, as well as other executives, and I’m sure, a number of demos. So consider scheduling a meeting for yourself this Thursday and getting excited about the future of data on the Microsoft platform.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.3MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

  • Saving Time Through Automation

    Recently I ran across a nice post from Joey D’Antoni about not installing SQL Server from the GUI. It’s a good post, and it reminds me that I should be using this technique each time I build a new VM, but what really struck me was the cartoon from XKCD he linked in. Here it is:

    When I look at the cartoon, it seems that it’s easy to waste a lot of time on repetitive tasks. And it is. This is one of the great pet peeves of programmers who look to automate tasks so that they don’t have to worry about repeating them. The power of computers is in repeating instructions over and over again, something that humans struggle with. We make mistakes, we get bored, and this isn’t a good use of our time.

    However the cartoon distorts things a bit since the time lost is across 5 years. I don’t know how many tasks I have that take 5 seconds, but I do have some 30s tasks, and certainly a few that take a couple minutes. Even if I do them daily, that means if I automate them in less than a day, I’ve saved time. However, some of my automated tasks still require me to spend some time on them, so my savings aren’t always realized.

    That doesn’t mean they aren’t worth automated in some way. I work on an Excel sheet almost daily, and each time I do, I change dates, which takes 10-15s to do. I spent about 5 minutes automating this, so I save time, but more importantly, I reduce tedium and stress, and that can be one of the best reasons to automate. Those simple tasks we dread might be the best items to automate. Of course, keep things simple, since you have to support your automation over time.

    There are also the tasks that are better handled through automation. Many of us know that checking to see if all our SQL Agent jobs succeeded or if there are any errors in log files is something best handled through automation. Those simple tasks that many of us may consider part of our jobs are items that are easily automated, and more importantly, if those are the only tasks we perform, it’s entirely possible we’ll be considered redundant and obsolete over time.

    I would urge you to learn to automate those pieces of your job you do regularly. Use Powershell, T-SQL, Agent, whatever, but make your job  less stressful and less tedious. It’s good for your career, for your job retention, and it’s fun. Besides, I’ve never run out of work, so removing tedium from my job hasn’t resulted in me being less valuable as a DBA or developer.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.6MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

  • Open is Not Necessarily More Secure

    Researchers found a bug in glibc. This library has been around for a long time, used in lots, and lots of software. I’m sure there are some programmers unaware that they coded in software that itself used glibc. However, despite all the people that must have looked at this library over the years, no one noticed the bug and disclosed it.

    The maintainers missed the bug, though they took quite some time to patch code once they were aware. That’s disconcerting, especially because many of the routers we use are potentially vulnerable. What’s worse is that many of the consumer based router firmware likely won’t be upgraded as companies would prefer you to purchase a new router rather than actually patch their existing products.

    I wouldn’t be surprised if someone found the bug and didn’t notify anyone publicly. Perhaps they decided to use this bug to attack software with some criminal purpose in mind. What might be scary is that I am sure that criminal organizations, or even various governments, might actively look for issues such as these and take advantage of them.

    I’m glad the issue was found and it can be patched. Certainly having code open for viewing means that researchers and organizations can examine the code, looking for issues. However the fact that software is open doesn’t mean it is more secure. Security depends on careful examination of all code, which may or may not be the case for plenty of FOSS software. I’m not implying FOSS is better or worse than closed source, vendor written software. Just be aware that you can’t assume it’s more secure.

    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.

  • Learning from Microsoft

    I know that many data professionals out there are skeptical of the cloud. Certainly there are problems with reliability, security, and more that prevent many of you from migrating to some online database. However that doesn’t mean that everything being done in platforms like the Azure SQL Database is a bad idea.

    One of the interesting things that has occurred at Microsoft is a completely new engineering effort for SQL Server. It seems there is one SQL Server development team that works on the Azure SQL Database. This is (I guess) the main branch in version control, and what we see with SQL Server 2016 is a subset of the code being built for the on-premises, boxed product.

    Certainly there are some features that exist in the box that aren’t in Azure, but relatively few of them. Those features, and many new ones, have to be included in the version control system, but they can’t be activated. Microsoft must be making extensive use of feature flags, allowing their developers to build and test features in the Azure cloud, but not make them available to customers, or potentially even other parts of Microsoft.

    If you really think about the effort to build a platform like Azure SQL Database and allow it to be a development environment as well as a production environment, that’s an amazing engineering effort. From the outside, I’m amazed at how far the SQL Server team has come in the last few years. I’ve seen a number of features released in the cloud first, and then appearing in the SQL Server 2016 CTPs.

    I think there are some amazing lessons here for software development. Certainly I think many of us could learn from how feature flags and multiple versions of software can co-exist in systems. That would certainly help many of us deploy new software in a way that minimizes interruptions to customers and clients. Or manage those multiple clients with different requirements from the same codebase.

    I hope that Microsoft will continue to evolve, as well as share their knowledge with the world. There are other companies that seem to be accomplishing amazing things at scale, Netflix, Amazon, Google, and more. Some of them share their techniques, but I truly hope that the methods they all use for building software become spread throughout the industry and help all of us build better, more secure applications.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.3MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.