Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Teambuilding and Bonding

    old manual printer
    The roller that printed my etching.

    It’s a joy for me to go to work. Of course, I have the advantage of working at home, a 50ft commute, and working with my wife, someone whose company I enjoy. In all of the places I’ve worked over the years, it’s been refreshing to go to work with people with whom I get along, and distressing to go see those I don’t like. In places where I have a preponderance of the latter type of people, the job is a grind that wears me out. I only keep going until I can find another place of employment.

    Recently I was in Cambridge, UK for a meeting with my group at Red Gate Software. I go over once or twice a year and spend a few days with my department and a few days in the office. This time one of the days I was planning on being in the office was a “day out” for our part of the company. Twenty-some people took a bus to another town where we etched a picture and printed it during the first half of the day, and then toured the GainsBorough house and museum in the afternoon.

    It wasn’t quite the trip I had in mind, and I was tempted to try and skip the trip and return home a day early, but I went along. It turned out to be a fun day, and I had the chance to meet new people in the company, and get to know others that I had met before. In some ways it reminded me of previous jobs where we had excursions to movies, baseball games, miniature golf, and even cookouts. All those events, often during work hours, were nice breaks from work.

    However they also made the job more enjoyable. I got to know co-workers better and bond with them in a way that never happens in the office. I established common rapport with people, getting closer to people I liked, and often finding that I wasn’t so different from others that I didn’t get along with. These events made the job better, even when we were all back to our normal routines.

    It seems that fewer and fewer companies actually bother to set up team-building, even at the department level. It also seems that many people would rather skip these events, and take a day off rather than spending time with co-workers in a social setting. I felt that way on this trip, but I also realized that sharing those common experiences is valuable, and can help promote synergies among a team of people that result in better work in the future.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

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

  • SQL Server on RDS

    Amazon RDS
    SQL Server 2008 R2 is now on RDS

    A database service in the cloud.

    Imagine being able to connect to SQL Server on a remote machine, without having to administer the underlying OS, and without having to change the database code that you build against your local instance? Amazon has provided that with it’s Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle and MySQL, and has just added SQL Server 2008 R2 as well. Red Gate Software and SQLServerCentral are happy to partner with Amazon to announce the launch of this service.

    RDS gives you the chance to deploy a SQL Server instance that’s essentially the same as the one you install on your local servers, allowing you to developer and test the same code you will deploy to the cloud, without compromising the features that are available. There are a few restrictions at the instance level since you don’t have access to the underlying host OS, but the benefit is that you don’t need to administer the OS, and if you just need a database service for an application, this  is one way to get it setup and running quickly. Specify a few parameters, and Amazon will handle the rest. In a few minutes, you have an instance that you can connect to and use. We’ve tested the Red Gate Software tools against RDS and they work just like they work on any other instance.

    The cloud isn’t for every database, and this service won’t work for every type of application, but for many people that need a database and a simple web application deployed, this is a great way to get started with a minimal investment in your public infrastructure. And you can leverage your local SQL Server 2008 R2 Developer instance to develop code that will work, without worrying about the services in the cloud.

    It’s a little scary to me to think about letting go of the control of managing my own database, but there are good capacity limits, security improves, and for many applications, just having a database service available would work great. And they’ll even handle the backups automatically for your new database. How many system administrators have you worked with that didn’t do that?

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

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

  • The Colocated Dangers

    Titanic Poster
    It’s not “if”, but “when” you will have a disaster.

    We went down.

    It was quite a surprise for me, and something that hasn’t happened in a long time. It wasn’t for long, but a month ago, there was a period of time when SQLServerCentral was down. It’s also one of the very few times it’s happened since I was in charge of the servers. The exact reason was something to do with out hardware, and it was fixed relatively quickly by our hosting provider.

    Early on in the site’s history we had a few hiccups. I was the one that drove out to a co-location facility to replace hardware or fix something that was broken. There were a few times where all that was required was a reboot, but we didn’t have the “remote hands” service available at a few of our hosting facilities. Fortunately for me I had an understanding boss that would allow me to flex and extend my lunch time during these emergencies.

    Since Red Gate purchased SQLServerCentral, we’ve had excellent uptime. A few outages for upgrades of the site, a minor DNS issue, and a few hiccups from maintenance by our hosting facility, but all very short. This hour-or-so long outage was the first unplanned outage in years. However it reminded me of a somethings: it’s not if a disaster will occur, but when it will occur?

    Putting all your data (and the servers it lives on) in one place is the fact of life that most of us have to live with, but we ought to have some idea of a DR plan if our data center goes down, or our hosting company has an issue. It might not be a thoroughly documented plan, but it ought to be a thoroughly thought out one.

    At least if expect your enterprise to continue to function during the disaster and your employment to continue after.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

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

  • Mobile Password Protection

    mobile phone lock screen
    Please put a password on your smartphone.

    I recommend people that have smartphones install a password on their phones. Not that it provides a lot of protection, but it does limit the access that a casual phone-picker-upper gets if they take the phone as a target of opportunity. I’d like to think that the average smartphone thief would wipe, or throw away your phone rather than mess with the password, and move on to easier targets.

    However thieves that target your phone as a different story, and for them, getting past a four digit lock on your phone might be trivial. There are firms that help police get past codes, and I’m sure there are plenty of instructions and utilities around that a thief with decent computer skills could use. It’s also likely that there are more than a few utilities available to duplicate this functionality.

    As more and more of our customers use mobile devices, including tablets, to access systems, we need to be more conscious of security on these devices. Passwords are a start, but remote wipe or disabling are also important. However the thing you might want to invest in most as a data professional is monitoring and analysis of the access to your database. If you can’t completely secure your database, the next best thing is detecting security breaches.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

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