Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Hiring Heterogeneously

    I wrote recently about tech interviews and hiring, and even on an interesting interviewing technique for senior people. However we need to hire more than just senior people. We need to hire junior people, and intermediate people. Those roles are important for both growing the experience of your staff, and not getting caught with a “” as a bottleneck or single point of failure. Not that’s not Brent Ozar, though someone with his talent might be the single point of failure in many organizations.

    Not everyone can be a superstar-expert-architect that decides how the system is built. Not all architects should spend time coding basic insert/update/delete code or adding clustered indexes to tables. We need a variety of talent levels that can get complete different types of tasks. There is tedious administrative work, supporting roles, necessary, though unexciting work like reviewing security, logs, audits, and more. While you can automate much of this busy work, there are still tasks that we must assign to people.

    There’s another consideration as well in hiring that all too often people overlook. Hiring too many people that are too similar, who may think alike, who may view problems the same way can lead to an environment that doesn’t grow and expand, that loses it’s creativity over time. There’s a great quote that says “Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much” (Walter Lippmann). It’s important to have a diversity of opinions, and when you hire new people, you should consider this. You want talented people, and people that get along, but not necessarily all thinking about problems in the same way.

    The world is a richer place for the diversity we have, and varying opinions, thoughts and ideas. We don’t all get along, but many of us can work together with mutual respect, considering each others’ viewpoints as we work to build solutions to the problems we face.

    Steve Jones

    Video and Audio versions

    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.

    Follow Steve Jones on Twitter to find links and database related items and announcements.
    Steve Jones Windows Media Video ( 14.8MB) feed

    MP4 iPod Video ( 19.6MB) feed

    MP3 Audio ( 3.6MB) feed

    Feeds are available at iTunes and Mevio

    To submit an article, rant or editorial,
    log in to the Contribution Center

  • DR Failovers

    failureAlmost everyone struggles with setting up disaster recovery plans and resources. There are a few companies that take their DR seriously, but for most organizations, it’s an afterthought. It’s an insurance premium that can easily be avoided if there are not pressing problems and your past experience with disasters is minimal. After all, it’s rare that any of our data centers shuts down because of an earthquake, hurricane, fire, or other similar large scale event.

    However most of us try to have some type of disaster recovery in place. We may have cold or warm systems available. Our companies have funded an AlwaysOn Availability Group, or more likely, mirroring and/or log shipping for critical systems where data is moved to a remote location on a regular basis. We monitor these processes, and we try to keep them running, though I’m sure if they break, many people don’t give the repair top priority in their daily work.

    A DR environment is like a backup. If you don’t test it, you’re never sure if it really is something you can use in a disaster situation. You may periodically test your fail-over, like you test a restore, but do you ever really lean on the secondary system? This week, I wanted to ask you this question:

    Do you fail over to your DR system and run your business from the system for a day (or week or longer)?

    I know a few companies that consider secondary systems to be critical and will actually fail over, and then run the other system for a few months, failing back to then retest the primary system. In this case, there really isn’t a primary and secondary system, but rather two systems that can work, being alternately used throughout the year.

    This is actually moving closer to a cloud architecture model, where you don’t place high importance on any particular system, you assume any system can fail, and you have redundant systems that can pick up the load. In a cloud environment you might have more than two, relying on dozens of systems instead, any of which could fail, but with a small interruption in service.

    I’d hope that SQL Server, the version of the platform I can install in my data center, would get close to this, allowing me to serve database services to clients, but seamlessly moving those services across instances, with clients unaware when physical machines have crashed because their services just moved to another host.

  • Password Ninjas

    For the time being, passwords are the way that we authenticate users and secure most of our systems. There might be a better system in the future, but for now everyone needs to manage a series of logins and passwords, even if you have authentication for many systems linked through an internal domain or external system, like OpenID.

    I think password managers are almost required these days to manage passwords for most people. I recently ran across an article on ArsTechnica where five security experts were asked how they manage their complex passwords across a multitude of services. Four of these experts use password managers of some sort, though there is quite a variety of them. One actually remembers passwords, though he tries to use proximity tokens and one time passwords when possible.

    Bruce Schneier, one of the security writers I’ve followed for a long time uses Password Safe, which is what I use. However he also likes to use his own advice of long sentences turned into passwords and keeping backups of passwords on physical paper. I don’t like writing down passwords, but if you can keep the paper secure (not stuck on a monitor or under a keyboard), it’s an easy solution to use.

    There are various ports on different operating systems and different methods to keep your files in sync, if you choose to do so. Two others use competing products (1Password and KeePass), but one uses a text file in an encrypted virtual disk image that he keeps on a USB key. I’m not sure I like that, but with proper backups, it’s not a bad solution.

    There is a variety of advice, but overall there’s one thing to keep in mind: security is serious business. All the more so as we use various services more and more to conduct business in our daily lives. Losing a password that you share across multiple services could severely compromise your life. Whatever method you choose, stick to it and be careful in choosing your passwords.

    Steve Jones

    Video and Audio versions

    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.

    Follow Steve Jones on Twitter to find links and database related items and announcements.
    Steve Jones Windows Media Video ( 14.5MB) feed

    MP4 iPod Video ( 20.2MB) feed

    MP3 Audio ( 3.6MB) feed

    Feeds are available at iTunes and Mevio

    To submit an article, rant or editorial,
    log in to the Contribution Center

  • Data Philanthropy

    philanthropyThe idea of philanthropy is giving back to the world, doing some good because of the success you have had or gifts you’ve received. Imagine that we thought not about giving our time or money, but our data instead.

    I read this piece on data philanthropy that talks about the possibilities of improvement in the public service and applications we have from philanthropy. However the piece talks not about more resources, but more data, coming from the private sector. Data from cell phone companies, transportation companies, and more that can help us better understand how the world is functioning, how it interacts, and how that might affect the public goods and services.

    I like the idea of Open Data that exposes more information from our government to the private sector for incorporation in applications, for additional analysis by private entities, and for the transparency that our government is acting in our collective best interests. However you believe government ought to function, without more data about how it does function and uses its resources, we can’t know about which things we should seek to influence.

    However I think we have a tremendous amount of data being collected by companies that can help government run more efficiently, and making the corporate decision to share that data can help improve the communities in which a company does business. We know that much of our data has information, but we can’t take advantage of all the information, and may not want to. Perhaps donating some of this data to the collective good is a way to adhere to, and reinforce, the social responsibility many companies include in their annual reports.