Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Social Data Analysis

    Tufte Poster
    A great visualization from an Edward Tufte seminar.

    Today we have an editorial originally published on June 24, 2007. It is being republished as Steve is traveling.

    I haven’t been a big proponent of BI as a technology that I think will catch on and become the focal point for many businesses. It’s not that it doesn’t work, but it’s expensive, it’s complex, and it requires a long term investment. While I’m not sure what to do about the last two with today’s IT folks and executive management, I do know that Microsoft and others are helping with the first one. So when I was this item about social data analysis using a new tool from IBM, I became a little intrigued. It’s an interesting idea for the amateur BI person that may be looking for an easy way to examine their data. It’s certainly better from the manual calculations I did in Economics to do regression analysis of data. We often didn’t even have graphics. That is if you don’t count my pencil and graph paper.

    This is a good outgrowth of the open source ideas of programming. It’s often said that many eyes on a program in the community model, produce a better piece of software. After all, developers work harder if they know hundreds or thousands of people will look through their code and more bugs are likely to be found because more people are working on the problem. I think that’s what IBM is trying to do here: get many people to examine data.

    While the sample visualizations tend to look like something just thrown together by people, I can see as graduate students, government officials, and others looking at lots of public data, and data that doesn’t necessarily need to be secure, you could possibly get some real help on problems.

    And maybe the most important thing, this gets a lot of people using the same tools. From what I’ve seen of many BI tools, they’re expensive and there are lot of choices, so trying to facilitate a wide reaching data analysis program could be hard, even among universities, each of whom might have their own software.

    While I’m not sure about BI catching on as a mainstream, every company has it, technology, I do think it’s very cool and it’s application to a wide range of problems is likely to give us some new solutions.

  • The Best of the Best

    Today’s editorial was originally pubished on June 26, 2007. It is being re-run today as Steve is traveling. 

    Men in Black
    The best of the best of the best, sir.

     

    Of the best of the best, sir! (remember that one?)

    Where’s the best place to work? Here’s the list from Computerworldfor 2007. I’m not surprised that a few of these companies (University of Miami, Quicken Loans) were in last year’s list. After all, if you’re a great company, you should be able to maintain that in the short term.

    What’s more interesting, is that in the various lists (Best overall, Diversity, Benefits, etc.) is that a number of companies show up multiple times. For example, the University of Miami shows up in 4 of the 5 top tens. With the weather, maybe that’s the place to be.

    I’m not sure I’d use this list as a way to seek out a job, but I’d certainly check it if I were applying somewhere because it shows that there are people that like the company. That’s important since I’m of the opinion that the people you work with and their attitudes are extremely important to having a good term of employment.

    But most important is that you need to find the best fit for you. I interviewed with Pulte Homes (#69) a few years ago (2002?) and wasn’t impressed with the people. In fact, I wouldn’t have wanted to work there. Maybe things have changed since then, but I know I’d be wary of going back there as the culture didn’t seem to fit me.

  • Key Storage

    keys
    Hopefully your digital key storage is more organized and secure than this.

    One of the issues with encryption, perhaps the biggest issue, is the management of the keys that protect the encrypted data. I have been an advocate of keeping the backup of the keys far away from the backup of the encrypted data.I usually want them on separate media, or a separate tape, just so that a loss of my backup of the data (or the data itself), doesn’t include the key.

    However this presents a problem in a DR situation, especially over time. If I make a backup, and lose my server in a year, can I easily find the copies of the asymmetric keys or certificates? Can I easily match up the proper key with the encryption if I rotate keys periodically? There hasn’t been a great solution I’ve seen to solving this issue.

    Recently I saw a talk on security, and the speaker mentioned they kept copies of their certificates on the backup tape with the backup of the data. This person felt that since a password was needed for the certificate, that this was secure enough. Perhaps, but you still have the problem of securing that password over time as well. This week, I wanted to ask those of you that use encryption, how do you handle the issue.

    Would you store a secure asymmetric key protected with a password on your backup drive or tape?

    If so, then how do you handle the security of the password? If not, then what other solution do you have? I know key management is a struggle in many organizations, but if you have something that works for you, let us know how it works.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

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

  • Transfer Times in the Cloud

    SQL Azure
    Can you get your data out of the cloud if it goes in?

    There are many reasons not to move your data to the cloud. You might be concerned about the performance of your system, you might be concerned about the reliability of the service, you might worry about any number of regulatory or legal factors, or you might be worried about security. However I think most of those issues aren’t as important as another one: moving your data.

    I like the freedom to choose how I want to run my business. I like to be able to choose to run Oracle, or NoSQL, or SQL Server. I like to be able to purchase my hardware from Dell or HP or Apple. And more importantly, I like to be able to change my mind and move to a new vendor if they have a better product, or if the price saves me money, or if I just change my mind.

    The ability to get my data back is critical to me. Despite all the triple redundancy of Azure and the backups avaible from AWS, I want to be able to move my data if the need arises. There are transfer options, but they might not work as well as expected. A test moving data from AWS to Azure didn’t work as well as expected, which unfortunately, isn’t surprising. Part of this may be Azure and not Amazon, which is a little disappointing.

    I suspect that cloud companies would not be as helpful when you are closing your account as when you first sign up. They have no financial incentive to do so, but I would hope that they would act maturely, and let customers go if they cannot meet their needs. Our requirements may change,  and being able to get our data back is important. If you want to charge a fee to expedite the removal of data, state that up front, but make sure that we can get our data back.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

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