Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • From Vandalism to Serious Crime

    It seems that there are relatively few very talented hackers that can break into your systems. The vast majority of data breaches and issues are from one of two attack vectors: social engineering or script kiddies. Social engineering is hard to fight, especially in large companies where everyone doesn’t know everyone. Script kiddies are more numerous since they don’t need any talent and merely deploy scripts written by others to attack your systems.

    Recently it seems that there have been quite a few hacker attacks on systems, often using fairly simple SQL Injection techniques, that aren’t vandalism, and aren’t for profit. These attacks are motivated by hackers who are offended by the companies or organizations and are standing up for customers. That might be worrisome to DBAs and data professionals since you can’t hide data breaches if the attackers publicly post the data they’ve copied and you will certainly receive some of the blame for any breach of security.

    In the past it seemed most attacks were DDOS attacks, which were embarrassing for IT folks, but not overly damaging in the long term. The last year or two, however, the attacks have turned to the copying of data and its release. Embarrassing for the company and potentially costing it business, but also worrisome for the system administrators who might be held accountable and possibly lose their jobs.

    These days when there is never enough time to test and resources for security are sparse, what is a technical professional to do? One would hope that we would not be held responsible when we cannot perform adequate testing of applications, or we cannot implement strong security, but that is not what happens. We are blamed for being too slow to deploy applications, blamed if security impedes access in any way, and assuredly blamed if there is any successful hack of our systems.

    In my mind each technology worker should educate themselves on recommended security techniques and request those techniques be implemented. They might not be, but the documentation that you attempted to do so might save your job.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • The Growth of Data Types

    What data types will use the most space in the future?

    In the relational databases we have all different types of data that we store. We have the basic types of integers, character data, dates and times, and more. As the RDBMS platforms have evolved, we have also added spatial, XML, and other types of data that build on these base types. By classifying them as different types, even if we are storing numbers, or characters, we can more efficiently work with these data types.

    As the world changes and expands, I think we will end up with more and more data that takes advantage of different data types, and perhaps even adds more. This week, I wanted you to look forward, and predict what changes we might see in our data storage in the future.

    What types of data do you think will occupy the most space in our future databases?

    Will we see more video files in our databases? More audio, spatial, or will plain numeric data continue to dominate the majority of the space we use in our data files? I used to think that numeric data would dominate, but the sheer sizes of some of the binary data types, along with the increasing use of these formats in applications makes me think that some type of binary data will dominate in the future.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • The Special Cloud

    A new Amazon cloud for the US government

    It’s not a short yellow bus special cloud, at least I hope not. Amazon is introducing a cloud for the US government, designed to meet their regulatory and compliance requirements. The idea here is that there are different needs for some sensitive information that the US government deals with, or at least some departments. I think most of us recognize this might be the case, and the same cloud infrastructure that some company like SQLServerCentral needs wouldn’t be appropriate for OSHA or some other department.

    Amazon introduced this US only cloud that is physically and logically accessible in the US only and adheres to some alphabet soup of regulatory requirements. It should allow more government organizations to store or process data in a cloud environment. I think this is a good move on Amazon’s part, and a potential benefit for some US agencies that might process lots of data at times, but not want the overhead of a large IT infrastructure to maintain permanently.

    This is a good step in the evolution of cloud computing, and I hope that Microsoft and other vendors start to develop specialized clouds as well. There are PCI compliant hosting services, but I can imagine that there might be semi-private clouds for medical, research, or other specialized data sets, which conform to the specific security and regulatory need of that industry. At some point I can imagine that Amazon or Microsoft might have parts of their data centers partitioned into different industry verticals that provide services according to different criteria.

    The cloud can provide a great place for periodic and bursty workloads for many applications and companies, but there are definitely security concerns that need to be addressed. The development of specific clouds for specialized needs seems to be a positive step in allowing more companies to take advantage of cloud computing in the future.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • An Investment in Knowledge

    Benjamin Franklin was an amazing and insightful person

    “An Investment in Knowledge Pays the Best Interest.” – ~Benjamin Franklin

    Most of us are working to provide for ourselves and our families. We go to a job every day, earning money that we use to pay our bills and, hopefully, enjoy our lives outside of work. Most of us should be saving for retirement as well, for the future when we might not be able to work, or we’ve reached that age where we want to slow down. Given the recent issues in our economies around the globe, perhaps we ought to be saving even more, and not just for retirement. The chances that any of us will be out of work at some point are going up and we might need that savings for that kind of rainy day.

    The quote above is one that I saw years ago, and while I intuitively knew it was right, I’m not sure that it made the impact on me it should have. One of the reasons that it is important to save and invest now for your retirement is that your savings grow, compounding the interest over time to provide amazing growth. I might argue that the investments you make in your knowledge do the same thing.

    If you learn to write better T-SQL now, you will write much better code in the future, making everything you build run a little faster. Learn to eliminate simple  bugs, or avoid SQL Injection-able code, and your work will need less maintenance, or cause less issues. Over time you’re build the reputation, or brand, as someone that is worth hiring. You’ll be worth 50 average employees, and likely never on the market. If you do great work people will be looking to hire you, friends will recommend you, and your former bosses will call you whenever they need someone.

    We can’t all be superstars, or be amazing programmers, but we can all improve our skills and the more we invest in ourselves, the more it’s likely to pay off for us in the future. Just remember that it’s not just hard skills like T-SQL, clustering, etc that matter. Those soft skills of communication, networking, and getting along with others are just as important.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts