Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • A Walkabout

    A great read. My wife and I considered this at one point.

    At one point when I was in college, I spent a few weeks touring around Europe. I had a bicycle with me, a backpack with a couple changes of clothes, and wandered throughout parts of France, Spain, and Italy, staying in hostels and living a carefree life. However my few weeks were nothing compared to what many students in Australia often do. I met a few dozen students at different times from down under that were on a walkabout from school, traveling around the world for a year, experiencing life on their own terms, far away from home.

    I was somewhat jealous, and I even considered joining them for an extended vacation of my own. I never did, but I’ve always wondered if I should have. My wife and I read One Year Off about seven or eight years ago and debated taking a walkabout the world with our kids, but decided against it. As I’ve gotten older, I’m not sure it’s the way I would want to live my life, but I admire those that can live like that. Personally, I’m not evens sure what I would do on a sabbatical, something that my company, Red Gate Software, has provided to a few of my co-workers.

    James Moore of Red Gate, is combining the idea of a sabbatical away from work with a walkabout in another country. As James looks forward to the future of software tools, he’s decided that reading feature/bug requests and doing customer surveys isn’t enough. James is actually touring the US, meeting with customers, watching their developers in action and trying to learn how database development is evolving in a rapidly changing modern world with cloud services, new version of SQL Server and ever increasingly complex applications.

    I don’t know how this walkabout will turn out, but I think it’s great that my company is actively trying to make sure that they solve the right problems, in the right way, for their customers. I think Red Gate has done a great job in building simple, intuitive, but incredibly useful tools over the last decade and I’m looking forward to seeing what James comes up with after this trip.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • A Matter of Life or Death

    In this book a data breach, identity theft, causes a death

    It sounds like something out of a fictional story, but could there be a data breach that might result in a person’s death? I read a book recently called Medical error in which a patient dies because of an allergy. The physician checked their records and noted the patient had been prescribed the drug earlier that year at the hospital, administered it, and the patient reacted and died. It turns out the patient was a victim of identity theft and the thief was the one that was seen at the hospital. The thief  didn’t have an allergy, but the victim did and died.

    According to this story, there hasn’t been a case of a data breach resulting in someone’s death, but the recent attacks against law enforcement agencies could change that. Informants and undercover detectives depend on their anonymity. A release of details from active cases could result in a death since the people that would be most interested in the information might be willing to kill those named.

    We seem to have no shortage of people that hack and attack systems for fun, often without much forethought about the potential effects of their exploits. As criminals get more sophisticated, I would expect more attacks to occur against law enforcement agencies. We’ve already had attacks that cross national borders, potentially sponsored by governments and I suspect we will see even more in the future.

    The data professionals working in the industries where life and death are dependent on technology should be worried. In law enforcement and medical fields, data professionals should be constantly educating themselves about security and working to regularly ensure their systems are protected, and audited . Auditing may even be more important in order to respond to breaches quickly.  It is asking a lot, but the potential results from a security lapse could haunt you for a long time if you haven’t done your best.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • The Apprentice

    Vader's Apprentice: Hope tech work isn't this hard.

    It used to be that most serious developers went to college and studied CS. Those people that wanted to make a living programming computers became grounded in theory, struggled through assembler class, and understood the classic waterfall development technique. They could write bubble sorts and quick sorts, and could create and destroy pointers in thin air. At least in theory.

    As computer science curriculums evolved, they became more practical. Students no longer had to learn C or emacs (a shame, IMHO), but learned Java and .NET, working in nicely crafted IDEs like the ones they would use in the corporate world. Practical programming classes allowed students to build more rich and interesting applications, instead of just building virtual linked lists that  weren’t visualized outside of one’s imagination.

    At the same time, I’ve found that a larger and larger percentage of developers haven’t gone to college for a CS degree. Some have gotten other degrees, some just learned to program outside of school, and in both cases, they aren’t necessarily any better or worse than those developers with CS degrees. That leads me to this week’s question:

    Should we move to vocational developer training?

    We’ve asked the question before about whether a degree is required for a technology career, and I think most people agree it’s nice, but not necessary. However I’m wondering today if you think we ought to build better training for those people who are interested in computers, but don’t want to go to college (or can’t afford to). Should there be vocational schools that teach programming, maybe including apprenticeships with experienced professionals in the field.

    I think there is a place for some formal training in development, preferably including some C programming, but I’m not sure that I think a four year college degree is needed. I’d like to see a more practical, more affordable way for people to get bootstrapped into technology and begin a career, preferably with some apprenticeships that might build practical experience and good habits among younger coders and DBAs.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • The Robot DBA

    Manna, a fun, and scary, sci-fi story.

    This is the story of Manna, the manager of a fast food restaurant. It’s a great read, and perhaps a little shocking. Manna is a piece of software, reading sensors, reacting, and letting employees know what to do with a synthesized voice through a set of headphones that the everyone wears in a fast good restaurant. In this tale, Manna evolves into a software system that is spread throughout many industries, essentially displacing managers and many workers at all levels in all industries. With the ability of these different “Manna” variants to communicate and negotiate contracts among themselves, the US devolves into an Orwellian nightmare place to live.

    It’s a science fiction story, but the fears that it evokes are similar to those I’ve heard expressed from many people in the IT field across my two decades in this industry. A friend of mine left IT a decade ago, while working as an Exchange admin for a company with 50,000 mailboxes. He was sure in 5 years his job would be automated and eliminated. I knew a few people that moved out of DBA work in the early 2000s, after Microsoft released SQL Server 7 and 2000, with some marketing messages that the products didn’t require a DBA. A few years ago I heard a few people arguing that PowerPivot would kill most BI development jobs because it was so easy for end users to build their own analysis applications.

    The one constant in all of those stories is that they never came true. I hope that Manna never comes true either, but I’m not worried. I’m very confident that if there’s one truth to all the computer development we do, it’s that we make constant mistakes and there is very little chance that we will be able to automate any significant percentage of IT jobs away.

    We do build better software, and we do allow an administrator to manage many more systems than in the past, but we also seem to constantly eliminate most of the efficiencies in two ways. One is by adding many more systems and applications, and the other is by introducing more complex systems that create new problems that need to be solved.

    The bar for IT knowledge needed is always being raised, but I just can’t see us getting to the point of having automated or robot DBAs running SQL Server in my lifetime.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts