Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Intertia

    Inertia can be hard to overcome

    This editorial was originally published on August 22, 2006.

    My son asked me about physics the other day and what it meant. He’s been on a bit of a science kick, looking to understand and explain his world. I can understand that because most of us are curious about how things work in our world, not necessarily in a scientific way, but just in general.

    I somewhat butchered the definition because I was caught up slightly in the actual concepts, but one of the things we talked about was inertia. Maybe because I’d seen this article on overcoming institutional inertia the same day.

    We all have things at work that we do a certain way. Maybe we learned it that way, maybe we’re more comfortable, or maybe someone yelled at us daily until we did it that way. Regardless, fighting the way people work is a difficult thing to undertake. The article gives a few examples of process changes and how they were effectively moved forward and how the issues were resolved at a high level. It’s common sense if you’re wondering, use diplomacy and take your time.

    I’ve seen changes occur from both sides of the fence, from someone trying to implement change and from someone who was told changes were occurring. I was never completely comfortable in either situation mostly because with change there’s usually conflict. Someone doesn’t want to change.

    As DBAs we often try to control our world and ensure a high degree of stability, often at the cost of slowing or severely impeding changes in our systems. While I think it’s good to aim for a stable, reliable environment, I don’t think this should necessarily impede change.

    Understanding the business needs and goals is critical both for DBAs in protecting their systems and developers in building new applications. In either case, it also means that the needs of your organization need to dictate how quickly things change.

    Not an employee’s personal feelings.

  • Dreaming of Windows

    What will Windows 8 bring?

    I haven’t been too excited about the Windows OS in some time. For the most part, I consider the OS a tool, and I was happy to run Windows XP for nearly a decade. The main reason I switched to Windows 7 was a friend noted it ran much more lean on hardware, and it was built as a 64 bit OS from the beginning. I’ve been happy with it, but overall I don’t care. It’s a tool that allows me to interact with the important things in my job: the data I use or create.

    Windows 8 was semi-released this week at the Microsoft Build conference. Microsoft gave away 5000 tablets to attendees, proving once again that I am attending the wrong conferences. I almost wish I had had an excuse to go to this one. I’ll have to come up with one for the next potential hardware release event.

    There are a number of reviews out there of the early preview from various people, and so far the initial impressions are positive. I read Jamie Thomson’s thoughts on the conference early in the week and found myself a little interested in what Microsoft has done. I wasn’t thinking to upgrade to Windows 8 in 2012, given that I mostly deal with writing, email, and SQL Server, but I do know what I’d like to see in the OS.

    I’ve come to really appreciate the interface on my iPhone/iPad. The scrolling, pinch/zoom, and a number of other features are very handy. For tablets, they are important, not because they’re cool, but because they’re intuitive. For a time I had a Windows 7 tablet, and the touch response, as well as implementation was horrible. In Win8, I really hope that they improve the experience with touch, and use similar gestures to what iOS/OS X use. However I don’t want a touch screen in many cases. Having to pull my hands off a keyboard to use a touch interface is hard, unless they implement a pad like the MacBooks. That interface I like.

    The live tiles interface works well for phones, but what I’d really like is an extension of the familiar ALT-TAB that will quickly flip among applications, which can easily run as full screen applications. I would also like to see a simpler development/deployment model that allows me to COPY an application to a machine, any machine I have, and connect to “the cloud” somewhere (or even insert a USB stick/HDD/SDD) and have my data populate the application. The idea of requiring local machine configurations should be a thing of the past. Moving my “experience” among machines ought to be as simple as moving a SIM card or signing into some service.

    Lastly, be more open. I like the idea of a Microsoft “Virtual Store” where I can buy software, and I like the idea of using SkyDrive to move my data, but don’t force me to use those. Give me a choice of Dropbox for storage, or Amazon as a software store. That’s the one thing I think Apple could do better. Keep the AppStore, and I’ll still use it, but give me a choice of other trusted vendors that can operate stores and manage the review of applications.

    Windows is a tool for me, and one I interact with very little. The only thing I’m really looking forward to is getting SQL Server on Windows Core, where I can minimize the footprint and resources required to host the important stuff: data.

  • Cloud Common Sense

    Common sense is needed in, or outside of, the cloud.

    The byline for this piece about cloud computingis great. It a sarcastic comment about problems in the cloud, and if you read it, then maybe you won’t think every problem in the cloud is cause for the complete abandonment of cloud computing as a tool in your technology toolbelt. As cloud vendors grow, they often standardize and build more homogenous infrastructures that could have cascading failures. We’ve seen this in the past with hosting companies that provided data center services, and we’ve seen it in large companies that centralize and standardize their systems.

    When I started my career, I saw in in mainframe computing as well. That was more amusing as we would all stand up in our cubes, and if you saw a significant number of others standing up, you knew the entire mainframe was down. These days I think Twitter lets us know as quick as any monitoring software when there’s a large outage. That’s assuming Twitter isn’t down.

    Whether you move to the cloud, outsource any services to another company, or even host your physical servers in someone’s data center, you need to use common sense for your architecture, security, and monitoring. If you don’t control the physical hardware, you must be more diligent about security. If you move data around, be aware of security controls and implement tunnels or strong encryption. Above all, make sure you have good backups at your location, and away from the cloud provider. If the worst case scenario happens, you should still have your data.

    The cloud isn’t for every situation, just like outsourced data centers or IT services aren’t for every company. However there are a lot of advantages to moving to a cloud environment, and it may reduce costs. That last item might be enough for your company to force moves to the cloud, despite objections from sysadmins and DBAs. Learning more about cloud computing and services like SQL Azure is a skill that DBAs ought to consider. Even if cloud computing isn’t likely in your industry, you might find yourself in a different industry next year.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Not on the Same Page

    Are DBAs not on the same page as security staff? DBAs don’t get security? That’s surprising to me, but it’s the first line of this piece on the gap between DBAs and security staffin many companies. Apparently according to a survey, most DBAs don’t apply security patches very often, don’t manage change control, and don’t have tight controls or an understanding of how to detect and respond to unauthorized changes to data.

    That might be the case in the Sybase world, or even the Oracle world, where it seems that I hear the DBAs do more management of corporate fiefdoms than database platforms. In the SQL Server world, however, we haven’t had too many security patches, and I know most DBAs are diligent about applying the service packs, if they’re allowed to by software vendors.

    I think that too often the technology workers that don’t work in security are lax about paying attention to strict security controls. They often tend to have a very loose change control process, and that’s not even counting the fact that the majority of developers and DBAs I know don’t bother to do any obfuscation of production data that is restored on development environments. Many of them don’t even think about implementing any type of security for dev instances at all, much less the same level of protection applied to production systems.

    It’s not all DBAs and developers, however. Most of the fault lies with management, in my opinion. Too often management wants to get work completed quickly, wants rapid changes to configurations in the hope that applications will run quicker, and doesn’t want any resources devoted to changing data in development environments. They often barely want to devote any resources to testing, and don’t understand the value of security for development systems.

    Security has rarely been well implemented by management in many industries and areas. Too often the lack of understanding of risk along with the impatience for the delays associated with security result in a halfhearted effort. I can only hope that at some point the ease with which digital assets can be exposed will force priorities to change and make security more of a requirement rather than an option.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts