Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Protecting Data

    Is it really true that we can’t anonymize data? If that’s true, then are we wasting time in looking at any type of obfuscation process or scripting for data that we restore to non-production environments? If that is true, then we then need secure development environments and treat them like production servers as far as security and access controls go.

    It’s somewhat amusing that the reason we can’t likely anonymize data anymore is because we have too much of it. All the different data sets that can be cross referenced, suing public data, make the success rate of anonymizing techniques low. I don’t know how practical it is for someone to actually combine data sets from public sources and using the information to determine the identities of people from other data sets. I do know, however, that there are lots of smart people out there with access to cheap computing resources and lots of spare time on their hands. This might be 21st century vandalism, and we, as data professionals, will be the people that have to deal with it.

    Does this mean that we should not bother to obfuscate or change production data that is copied to development systems? I don’t think that’s the case. In many environments there might not be enough information for someone to identify the original rows. Especially if you protect all of your data systems, ensuring that web logs and other potentially related source of information are not readily available. Even a rogue developer might not be able to unravel the anonymization if you keep separate data sets secure and limit the number of people that could combine them.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Give us all the features

    I'd rather by by scale than features

    When you look at the various editions of SQL Server available from Microsoft, there is a strange combination of restrictions at each level. Features, maximum amounts of hardware, database size, and even licensing change from edition to edition. A DBA making the decision on which edition to buy is faced with a choice that is more complex than it needs to be in order to solve a problem. The DBA not only considers the scale of their hardware, but also the mix of features present in that particular edition. It becomes even more complex for third party vendors, who may not be able to request that Enterprise or Data Center editions must be used for their product and must often choose to develop an application with a minimal amount of features.

    I would rather see all features in all editions and change the licensing model to charge by the scale of server I want. Charge me one price for a single socket, 2GB of RAM machine and more for a dual socket, 8GB machine. Let me pay by the scale, or the amount of performance I’m willing to pay for. I don’t know that Microsoft will change, but I think it would be a better way to license their software.

    As data professionals, we get paid to solve problems. We should learn to use the various tools that are available to us. For SQL Server professionals, that means choosing features like partitioning that prepare your system for archiving data. Using Resource Governor appropriately to manage disparate workloads and improve the performance for different groups of clients. Appropriately deploying online indexing operations to prevent downtime for your systems, or impacts to production processes. Better security with TDE isn’t available in Standard Edition, which is something that every company could use. Yet for many DBAs, the many customers that choose to deploy Standard Edition, these features aren’t accessible.

    Streaminsight is one of the features that follows a more logical license. It’s available in Standard Edition, but at a lower processing rate and higher latency. It scales higher if customers find the need to pay for it in Data Center, but customers are free to choose a lower level of performance, with all the same features, in other editions. This isn’t perfect since I think I’d like to see a third level of performance in Enterprise Edition, but it’s a start.

    I don’t think these choices actually convince many customers to purchase Enterprise Edition over Standard Edition. The features missing from Standard Edition aren’t necessarily hurting customers as much as they’re hurting Microsoft and the SQL Server platform. Adding those features in would improve the performance of all applications. They would allowed DBAs to perform better at their jobs, and build more robust systems that would ultimately make SQL Server a better choice for most customers than other RDBMSes. They would, IMHO, improve sales and revenue over time, not reduce them.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Password Help

    Ensure you keep shared passwords safe when people leave.

    Today we have an editorial that was originally published on Oct 9, 2006. 

    Yesterday I wrote about compliance tips and one of the things I mentioned was using encryption and passwords for your backups. It’s a good idea that you should use even with disk backups. You never know when someone might get socially-engineered and hand over one of your .bak files to the wrong folks.

    But using encryption isn’t enough; you need strong key management that changes the passwords on a regular basis to prevent data losses from the passwords getting released over time. I’ve worked in a dozen companies and there are many cases where a password has been used for some shared function, some application, some particular feature, whatever. If this password has remained the same for over a year, it’s been almost common knowledge throughout the company what the password is. I’ve seen business people, executives, even secretaries that knew the password to the point where it was useless.

    Shared passwords will be a fact of life in many cases. Administrative teams grow, help desk people may need access, consultants help out and learn them, and others overhear them. It’s going to happen, so you need to mitigate this risk.

    I used to manage a nightclub and we had similar risks with the alcohol. Since turnover was a fact of life, we had a simple policy. When a manager left, for any reason, all alarm codes were changed. On the third occurrence of a manager leaving, we had all locks re-keyed. It was a simple policy to reduce risk.

    The same thing needs to happen with your backups. Use one or even a few passwords to protect the various database backups. But then change those passwords every month or two and escrow or archive the old ones. You may not be able to prevent losses of the backup files, but by ensuring they are protected and the passwords changed regularly, you may just protect the data.

    And your job.

  • Does It Help

    This editorial was originally published on Oct 12, 2006, published today as Steve is out today at the PASS Summit. 

    Years ago I used to work for an import company and we dealt with all types of distributors and wholesalers for the products we brought in from overseas. One of our divisions dealt with metal products, mostly door hinges, from China and we had workers whose job it was to arrange for inventory from various warehouses to be shipped to fulfill orders.

    At the time, circa 1996, we were pretty high tech. We mostly dealt with faxes and phone orders at the time, phone orders being the easiest because the workers would just enter an order and match it up with inventory from the closest warehouse. Faxes were more challenging, but we had a high tech fax server that caught every fax coming into our company and saved it to an imaging system.

    When I got there, Windows had just been deployed, so workers would pull up an image on the screen, look at it, and then alt-tab to the order entry system and enter some information, alt-tab back to read, alt-tab back, etc. They could also make notations on the image, and would do so with an order number, ship date, etc. and save the image back to our high tech, SQL Server 4.2-based, image server.

    We were looking to rewrite the order entry system when I got there and as we did so, we spent a lot of time with the workers trying to figure out how to speed the process up for them and make their job easier, and get them to process more orders per day.

    Recently a study said that one 30inch monitor would increase productivity, though some people disagreed. The alternative presented was two 19″ inch monitors instead. The type of work you do probably has some impact on which is more productive, but I know that either of these is better than a single 17″ monitor.

    This brings me back to my little tale because I actually tested this a decade ago. At the time most people had 14″ or 15″ monitors on their desks, each of which could cost $300 or so. I proposed moving to two monitors for the workers that needed to see two applications at the same time and got permission to buy an extra 15″ monitor and a fancy $500 video card with two VGA outputs. I also got permission to spend $800 on a single 20″ monitor and we spent a few months swapping the setups among all the workers and even a few others to see what they thought. The result?

    Two monitors hands down.

    As much as I’d like to have a monitor the size of my desk, like on The Island or Minority Report, I know it’s not as productive as multiple monitors. You just spend too much time moving things around, resizing, etc. to make them fit your current task. You might work with Outlook and Query Analyzer now, but then need Excel and Outlook, or Word and Query Analyzer, or Outlook and Word, and all the sizes and locations you set don’t always work.

    You’ll still resize and move applications with multiple monitors, but there’s another key. You can full screen an app on multiple monitors and it will stick to just that screen. So even if you have to drag something from one to the other quickly, you can maximize it and cover everything else up. I use that a lot and it’s helpful.

    If you’ve never tried it, get a $30 video card and borrow another monitor. You won’t go back. I have a 19″ LCD and a 20″ CRT on my desk and love it. Unless I was some type of artist, I’m not sure I’d go to one monitor, even a 42″ wide one.

    So what do you think for the Friday poll? Do information workers, or more importantly, DBAs do better with a large monitor?