Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Big Gaps

    Emacs was my favorite editor in college

    I saw this piece on Learning Unix from Miguel  de Icaza that brought back memories. Michael is a well known developer that is working an open source implementation of .NET called Mono. He worked at Microsoft and continues to bring .NET to other platforms, but he primarily works on Unix based systems. The post laments the lack of basic Unix knowledge and tricks from many of the developers he meets. His recommendation is a few books and tutorials to learn shell commands, emacs, and more.

    Those bring back memories for me since I learned to use emacs early in college. I went through tutorial and enjoyed the editor much more than vi and learned to take advantage of shell commands for quick scripts or tools that would make my programming tasks easier. Those skills helped me when I moved to the DOS/Windows world and scripted many tasks, and even helped in SQL Server with the scripting tasks is SSIS and SQLCMD. As I look over PowerShell scripts these days, I find myself seeing the same constructs as I saw in Korn shell, but with different syntax.

    As I read the piece, I asked myself a question over and over, which I couldn’t answer completely. I did, however think it would make a good Friday poll and decided to ask the rest of you for your opinion:

    What basics do you find many data professionals lacking and what do you recommend to help them?

    I know people need to learn how to back up a database, and they should learn T-SQL to some extent, but what basic skills would you point people towards? What books or resources would you recommend?

    I know we have some great basic articles here at SQLServerCentral that everyone should read, like Managing Transaction Logs. I think we’ve tried to address the basics with the Stairway series on various topics. However I’m sure there are holes in our catalog as well as some very common things that many of you would like to recommend to every DBA or developer. You have your chance today to help compile a list.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • A Secure Application Model

    I like the AppStore, but would like to be able to choose from other stores besides Apple's.

    Amazon introduced a Cloud Reader for the Kindle, and the Financial Times pulled their iPhone app out of Apple’s store and introduced an HTML5 web application. All of these moves point to the fact that companies are finding Apple’s 30% fees for revenue to be a bit onerous and want to find a way to reduce their costs. That makes sense, and my suspicion is that Apple will ease their terms at some point as companies move to their own web model of building and deploying applications instead of building native iOS apps.

    I don’t think the AppStore model is dying, however. One of the things that I have noticed in the apps between the iPhone and the Android devices at the ranch is that the quality of the iOS apps is higher. It’s rare that I have crashes, there is more consistency between the various interfaces, things work as you expect, and they run well. It’s not that Android apps are horrible, but outside of the large company apps, the quality of any particular app is likely to be lower. That’s expected because there is no gate that prevents someone from building a poor quality app and deploying it in the Android marketplace.

    However there’s another thing I take from this. The most important part of the app is the data or the content. Companies are arguing over who gets how much of the profits from various content delivery methods. Some companies think 30% is too much, some don’t. However, it doesn’t change things for the consumer since many of us will pay the same price, though I suspect we might pay more in an open market. If they could, companies might give away apps for free, but then charge a small amount for the information, which will add up over time to be more than the cost of an app right now.

    One of the things I like about the AppStore is that quality control check. While anyone can submit an app, Apple has been slow, and sometimes inconsistent in how the approve or reject the items. That’s good for quality, bad if you want an app that doesn’t meet Apple’s vague standards. I’d like a more open market, but I also want some quality standards. Windows has been open in that we’ve been able to download applications that anyone has written and install them. Windows has also suffered from the proliferation of malware as well as the poor quality of so many pieces of software that are available for download.

    In my ideal world, we’d have some secure application models, essentially app stores that were run by different companies. Amazon has an Android store, but I wish they had an iOS one as well (and WP7). Microsoft could run a store, but so could any other enterprises that had the resources to vet the software, manage a marketplace, and gain the trust of consumers. I could even see eBay getting into the game, allowing developers to auction off their software after it had received some stamp of approval from the company.

    That’s the direction I hope we are moving in, but I’m not sure if we’ll get there.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Data Quality on the Open Web

    Input from customers like this must include data quality checks

    I used to hear that one of the strengths of Linux was the thousands of volunteers that would help you get a patch or a fix in record time when you reported an issue. That worked well, but not well enough for many companies that really wanted a company to stand behind patches. A few companies, like Red Hat, sold support agreements with the “free as in beer” OS that ended up costing companies almost as much as a regular license of another OS. While Linux is a great system, it hasn’t taken over the world like many people thought.

    Lately there’s been a different flavor of open-ness on the Internet. It seems that so much of what we read and is pushed out to us as news or information is based on the crowd-sourcing of what’s popular. Facebook shows a “most active” view, Twitter has trending topics and re-tweets, and many news sites like Reddit use a crowd voting mechanism to help determine what you see first on their front page.

    However there’s a downside to using these open systems. There’s the potential for abuse when a group of people get together. Google started using the open model on it’s map services to allow people to add businesses to maps. A very handy feature, butthe addition of a “mark this as closed” button allowed people to abuse this privilege. Whether it was competitors, vandals, or some criminal element isn’t known, but apparently the quality of data Google is providing on maps isn’t necessarily accurate. With many people using maps on iPhones and Android devices, this could damage businesses that add themselves to the mapping service. I think Google is playing a little fast and loose with their crowd voting on data points, but with so many companies looking to capitalize on the social networking phenomenon, I’m not surprised it’s being abused.

    Whenever we build systems that take input from users, we have a maxim: garbage in, garbage out. Essentially we aren’t responsible for bad data, but many companies won’t feel that way. They will still feel that we ought to be better policing the data quality and not showing bad data in reports or downstream systems. As more and more companies look to incorporate data from customers into their systems, it becomes more important that data professionals incorporate automated scans and manual workflow checks before data moves from staging areas to prevent incorrect data from affecting our production systems.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Free as in Beer

    My Favorite Beer

    This editorial was originally published on Feb 7, 2006.

    It’s amazing to me that someone can take the words from another and publish them as their own. I guess that’s why sites such as essayrelief.com. And why other sites like turnitin.com have sprung up to help combat that type of behavior. Actually if you want to get a great Christmas Present for your kid’s high school, get parents to raise money to subscribe to some plagiarism prevention service.

    Actually a Google search on “essay help” turned up entirely too many places where you can get an essay written. Amazing how many of these tout their essays as “100% non plagiarized”. I guess if you hire writers to write something, but that’s a small step away from stealing someone else’s work for profit or gain. It’s just plain wrong to hire someone to do your work, as is starting to happen on Rent a Coder, where people are paying to get computer science assignments completed for them. There was a great Wall Street Journal article on this very topic.

    And unfortunately, another article today from me on the same topic.

    This is a great quote from the WSJ:

    “This is a fairly simple program,” wrote “Goradia” of Sammamish, Wash. “It is my homework, but since I am busy, I want someone to do this for me.”

    If it’s so simple, just do it. It’s your work, you are paying (in college) to learn, or investing in yourself in high school. Just do the work and accept the grade for your work. I cannot fathom why people do not want to earn their own accomplishments. I guess there always will be people that cheat, but it’s still amazing to me.

    The only things you have in life are those that you earn and the mistakes you make. Enjoy them, relish them, learn from them, accept your failures and work to do better.