Category: Editorial

The Need for Tape
This editorial was originally published on Mar 26, 2009. It is being re-run as Steve is away at DevConnections.

One of our SQLServerCentral authors sent me this post, which I found to be pretty amazing. Apparently hackers broke into a backup server at WebHostingTalk, which is a community for hosting providers to discuss issues. They deleted backups first, and then moved on to deleting tables from the database. It resulted in some downtime, and then a restore of an old copy of their database prior to trying to restore more recent copies. More information from the admin is here.

Now that’s just malicious and nasty.

Hopefully this wasn’t an inside job, though I could see that as a possibility. For a service like this, that just provides a place for a community, let’s people interact and talk, this is just vandalism. It serves no purpose. It’s likely no one even knows it was “M@M@sB0Y” or some other hacker, so there’s no fame, and it disrupts people who just want to converse with colleagues.

I’d hate to think about this happening here. We have lots, and lots of posts from people all over the world, and while it wouldn’t kill us, it would really annoy many people that have volunteered their valuable time to help others by losing their work. We definitely need to make sure we don’t have an issue here.

I see two takeaways from this incident for most DBAs and administrators. First be sure that your backup servers are just as secure as your production ones. There is production data in the forum of backup files here, and you should be providing as much security for them, and perhaps more, as on other servers. Don’t treat these servers lightly.

Second I think this shows that there’s a need for tape backups, or some type of non-linked backup. A tape grabs the files from your server, completely separately from the SQL Server (or other application). It is a pull link, and it’s not obvious from the source server where these files have gone. That’s good in that it prevents some type of attack on the main server from propagating on. Most people use a push from their server to a remote device as part of the backup process. That’s OK, but it provides an easy link for someone to attack the backup server from the main one.

And one more benefit of tape? Usually they’re rotated out, so even if a hacker or insider knows how to get to the backup system, without physical access they can’t touch your tape.

Steve Jones

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October 1, 2013
Hybrid Databases

SQL Server already handles hybrid data.

We are dealing with more and more data all the time, and in more and more formats. As noted in this piece, companies are receiving data in new formats, from a variety of sources, and the traditional relational database isn’t always the best fit for the processing, storage, and management of the information.

However SQL Server isn’t just a relational database. It handles unstructured data well, with the Filestream and Filetable enhancements to varbinary columns. We can even read into this unstructured data with iFilters that we install on our instances. In fact, I’ll be talking about these filters at DevConnections on Wednesday.

SQL Server has StreamInsight for complex event processing, allowing you to handle very quick streams of data that could overwhelm your OLTP architecture. If that’s not enough, there are connectors that allow you to integrate with other data processing architectures, like Hadoop.

With all the various subsystems like SSIS (ETL), Reporting Services (exports to other formats), Service Broker (messaging), spatial data, and more, I think SQL Server is an amazing hybrid database platform in and of itself, without any extra charges for the various features (like some other platforms). That’s not to say you shouldn’t use any other platfoms. If they work, use them and integrate with SQL Server, but if you don’t have other databases in place, I’m not sure you need to look past SQL Server for many of your needs.

September 30, 2013
Scripting

One of the directions in which Red Gate Software is to build more tools and utilities that all of you can use for working in cloud environments. We aren’t ignoring the desktop tools like SQL Compare and Prompt (v6, yeah!) that you’ve come to appreciate and depend on, but we are investing in expanding these tools to work with a remote, services style architecture since there are plenty of companies looking at AWS, Azure, or other providers for a portion of their applications.

I’ve been learning a bit more about the way cloud services work and one of the things that becomes important in an IaaS environment is scripting. The environment you get is a base install and if you need more software or processes to run when a new VM starts up, you need to script the various installations or configurations.

There are some great scripting features for SQL Server, like Finebuild for installs and Powershell for most everything else. Scripting is a great way to accomplish tasks, but like most skills, it needs to be used in order to be efficient and practical for most tasks. I’ve struggled with this, and I’m sure many others feel the same way.

However I am starting to think that Powershell might be the best investment in my future skills. The quicker I can write it and build scripts to accomplish tasks, the more I’ll be able to do over time as I build a library of commandlets and scripts. That’s if I remember to document them well so I can easily search for what I need.

September 26, 2013

It Happens

Your code is wrong.

Or it’s bad, or it won’t work as intended. I’m not sure that’s the viewpoint I’d like to take when I first start working on a project, but that’s what Nathan Marz told the attendees at the NoSQL2013 conference recently. He says that our code should be treated as something that might or might not work, and we should embrace the idea that the code can be wrong. It’s not intended to disparage developers or paint too bleak a picture of our skills, but to just be realistic in the sense that all projects have problems and software isn’t perfectly built at the first compile.

I think most of us do realize that our software also might not work as intended. Even simple projects can have bugs and holes that we’ll find when edge cases are introduced or the software is used in a way we didn’t expect. At least I hope it’s just unanticipated, edge cases and not general cases for most of us. If an application doesn’t work for the cases we’ve designed it for, then we need to work on our coding skills.

We know that building software is hard. We know that outside of a narrow domain for which we’ve often designed our software, it might not work as intended. Most of us expect to find bugs or problems in our software, and are mentally prepare to patch and enhance our work as needed. It’s almost inevitable, and even occurs when you design your own software, to do that one thing you need done. You’ll still maintain (meaning patch or enhance) the software over time.

I hope that’s not too gloomy a view of software.

Steve Jones

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Today’s 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.