Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Vocation or Career

    Career: an individual’s journey through learning, work, and other aspects of life.

    Vocation: an occupation to which a person is specially drawn or for which he or she is suited, trained, or qualified.

    Which one describes your current employment situation? How do you feel about the technical work you do? A career is a good thing, and I hope that you all have long, successful careers, I hope you continue to learn and maintain a balance between work and your life outside of your job.

    However a vocation is what I’d hope drives you forward. You find some endeavor that you are drawn towards, and at which you have some skill at performing. As much as I never planned to be a technical writer, I find that I am really drawn to it, and I enjoy the work quite a bit. I’d say the same thing about speaking and presenting to groups of technical workers. My employment is more of a vocation, and certainly much more than “just a job.”

    As you go to work, accomplish tasks and finish projects, think about what you like and don’t like. Think about whether you look forward each day to the challenges you face or you dread each hour. If it’s the latter, then I hope you are making plans to change something. Find a new employer or position. Life is short and you need to remember that you’ll spend a lot of your time at work. Make what you do a vocation and work becomes an exciting piece of your life that enriches your time here.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 1.8MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. feed

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

  • The Gadget Itch

    Many of the people that work in technology are interested in gadgets and hardware as much as software. Not all of us, but many of us have had side projects where we’ve melded hardware and software together. For those of us that are older, and started working with computers decades ago, that might have been the only way that we could get a computer system to work.

    I’m glad that I still find people interested in hardware. My son recently built his own gaming computer from parts, and I’m hoping to distract him from some games and get him to help me build some robots with a Raspberry Pi computer and BrickPi add-on board. However it’s not just kids as I’ve seen a number of people at Red Gate working with hardware to build a variety of interesting projects.

    This week I’m wondering if any of you are interested in creating your own devices. If you had the chance to build a device or gadget for work, what would it be? A panic button when there’s a problem that you can press and instantly set of Star Trek “red alert” sirens? A status display based on your continuous integration builds? The question this week is:

    What would you build if you had a parts list like this one?

    Whether you’ve started actually assembling things or you’re just dreaming of something, or perhaps even just seen something that’s intrigued you, let us know. I actually think this might be a fun competition of some sort for an event, perhaps a hacking competition across a couple hours at a SQL Saturday or conference.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 1.8MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. feed

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

  • The Subtle Push to the Cloud

    With SQL Server 2014 released, there’s the temptation to upgrade for many DBAs. However the licensing costs and debatable improvements in the product will temper the DBA’s enthusiasm with the reality of the ROI seen by management. While reading about the licensing changes, I also saw this note from Tom LaRock, where he wrote about the features most of us aren’t using. It made me think about upgrades, and perhaps the strategy Microsoft is employing.

    As Tom mentioned, the features not being used are Enterprise Edition features. This prevents many of us from upgrading to use them because Enterprise Edition is so expensive. Actually, even Standard Edition is expansive these days, given the per-core licensing, and I suspect lots of companies with SQL Server 2008, 2005, even 2000 are debating whether or not the upgrade is really worth the cost.

    The piece also mentions that Azure is much less expensive in the short term, and you should consider it. Of course at some point the money you pay will be more than buying a license and a server, but that assumes you run them for the same length of time. You’ll likely upgrade at some point, and if you upgrade both hardware and software, the cloud starts to look more attractive.

    It’s not simple to move into the cloud, nor is it appropriate for some applications, but it does seem that Microsoft would prefer to have most companies running in Azure, on a single platform they run, they patch, and they support. Many companies might prefer the same thing, though I do worry that we might find the on-premises version of many products becoming second class citizens. Vendors will spend less on development and support if too many customers move to the cloud.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.0MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. feed

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

  • The Danger of Algorithms

    There is a report that came out recently that shows how you can predict Social  Security numbers, an important piece of identity information in the US. This, according to this C|Net article, could result in massive fraud taking place if someone’s birthday is disclosed.

    So many sites want to get this piece of information from you, often to ping you on your birthday or give you some gift. I’ve always been wary, however, and usually put in April 1 instead of my real birthday. It makes for lots of birthday wishes on that day, but that’s OK. I appreciate the thoughts, even if they are a few months off.

    This does highlight the danger of using an algorithm to generate data. Unfortunately there are plenty of people out there that will maliciously find ways to mis-use data, and if they can guess how you generated the data, they can extrapolate that out to calculate what other data might exist in your system. I know most people that need to generate codes often don’t spend a lot of time ensuring they’ve picked a good method from a security point of view.

    The key here is to keep pieces of information somehow separate, to make it more difficult for a criminal of some sort to perform the extrapolation. That gets harder and harder to do, primarily because of the job many of us do. We gather data into SQL Server and other platforms, and make it easy to put this data together.

    As with many of the problems I see in today’s world, I don’t have a perfect solution to this problem. However I think that many of us handle data insecurely, often comparing actual values when a hash, or digital signature might work instead. I know some of that is because we don’t have great tools for working with digital signatures, but also because it’s a complex process.

    Credit card companies, banks, and other institutions often have complex rules for how they handle and process data. I think this more of their secure methods of handling data should be published and taught so that other companies can better learn how to build more secure applications.

    Steve Jones