Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Geeky Oscars

    Skyfall is recommended, but be warned, it's long.
    Skyfall is recommended, but be warned, it’s long.

    Last fall I heard an interview with one of the people who had worked on Skyfall. I can’t remember who it was, but this person mentioned the director had made the film with an eye towards the Best Picture award. It’s less than a month away from the Oscar awards, and Skyfall wasn’t nominated. I’m not sure it should have been, but I did very much enjoy the film.

    Last year was a good year for geeky films. The top grossing films of 2012 were dominated by those topics that we might see as appealing to the nerds, geeks, and technologists. I greatly enjoyed the top 4 and would recommend to others. However the amount of money a film makes doesn’t necessarily mean it’s worth watching, and if a film doens’t earn much money, that shouldn’t mean you want to avoid it.

    This Friday, as a break from the software and database discussions we have, I wanted to ask you

    What sci-fi, fantasy, or geek-oriented films do you recommend from 2012?

    Did you think John Carter or Total Recall (the remake) were worth watching? Are there other films you’d recommend that might not have been well marketed or widely distributed? With the streaming video services and online rentals, it’s easy for many of us to watch films that we might have missed in the theater.

    Let us know this week what you recommend and give us an idea for how we might relax over the weekend or throughout the year. At least until the Dr. Who 50th Anniversary special.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.

  • Building Better Software

    The Do Not Disturb bug would have seemed to be easy to fix, but perhaps there wasn't time before it fixed itself.
    The Do Not Disturb bug would have seemed to be easy to fix, but perhaps there wasn’t time before it fixed itself.

    Why is programming so hard, especially on seemingly simple problems. Here’s a short piece on the Apple iOS6 Do Not Disturb bug that surprised me. The bug is fixed, as of Jan 7, because it was a date issue. According to the article, the programmers that implemented the Do Not Disturb function used the ISO calendaring dates, which do not work as expected this year. The details are in the article, and it reads like an edge case, but it’s not one I’d expect to have slipped by Apple’s QA department.

    These types of programming errors seem to regularly slip by developers. The situation has gotten better since the days of VB6 when it seemed everyone that could complete a week long course was building buggy applications at a frightening rate. While I still think there are plenty of hack developers out there, it seems that with all the publication and information available, there are better programs being built in many organizations.

    However simple bugs can still slip through. The maintenance plan bug in SQL Server 2005 showed Microsoft that there’s no such thing as a simple fix or patch. In this case, even the Apple documentation for developers (Fixed Format section) notes that the ISO date should not take precedence when there is a conflict. Apparently not all of Apple’s developers are following their own documentation.

    Developing software is easy to do, but hard to get right, especially when you are building software that you expect to last a long time and get used in a variety of ways. Experience, practice, learning from your mistakes, and a deep understanding of the business you are working in help developers write better software over time. It’s a reason why you should ensure you work to retain your talented developers. They are much harder to replace than the lines of code they produce. A new developer may produce the same amount of work in a short period, but I’d wager they produce many more bugs as well.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.

  • Encryption Not Restriction

    Encryption will be more important in cloud computing
    Encryption will be more important in cloud computing

    I believe in encryption. I have an encryption talk that delivers the very basics of what encryption options exist in SQL Server, and I would think that most data professionals that develop or manage databases should understand encryption and how to enable it. I find lots of people don’t understand, and I’m glad that I can try to teach them a few things about when encryption is and how it works in SQL Server.

    Cloud computing use is growing, and while we don’t have a good definition for what a cloud computing means, more and more organizations are considering looking at moving some of their applications, and data, to the cloud. As we move this data, many DBAs have concerns over the security of the data they are supposed to protect. These are valid concerns, and they should be at the forefront of your mind if you plan on moving anything to any type of service provider.

    One interesting point brought up in this op-ed is that customers ought to have their data encrypted, but the keys used for the encryption should be controlled by the customer, not the service provider. That’s sound business strategy, and it should be the case with all your data, not just data sent to the cloud. If you use a service to rotate and store your tape backups, you ought to have encryption on those tapes, with keys managed by your company. Just as you ought to have the keys inside your company if you use locks on the shipping containers holding the tapes.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.

  • The Growth of Storage

    Will we see this in a laptop in our lifetime?
    Will we see this in a laptop in our lifetime?

    Over the holidays I had a chat with my son about computers. His laptop died, and he wanted a new one. It isn’t needed for school and my wife and told him he’d need to earn the money for half of a machine and could take the rest from his savings. I’m happy to say that he has been working hard to earn money, out in the 10-20F temps caring for horses, and is getting close to making his first computer purchase.

    In setting his target amount of money to earn, we talked about specifications for various machines, looking online and in local stores. We talked about the various CPU, RAM, and storage values, and what they might mean to him in terms of the performance of a laptop. While we were talking, he asked me some interesting questions about the growth of storage. I thought they were interesting, and decided to ask you this week what you think.

    When will we get 1TB of RAM in a mainstream laptop, and when will we get 100TB of storage?

    Those are large numbers, though I know some DBAs who have one, or even two, terabytes of RAM in large servers. My first thought was that we were a long time from getting those values in consumer machines, but as I look at my phone with 64GB of storage in flash, and this recent announcement of a 2TB SSD, perhaps they aren’t as far away as I might have thought.

    My first professional computer had 4MB of RAM and 200MB-ish hard drive in the early 90s. Today I have a desktop with 24GB of RAM and 2TB of storage. Extrapolating that and I’d expect that I’d have over 1TB of RAM and 20PB of disk in 20 more years.

    What do you think? When will we have laptop machines with the specifications of the largest SQL Server instances today?

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.