Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Tricky Questions

    What tricky questions have you been asked?

    I suspect that most of us have been on many interviews in our career. Unfortunately today’s technology business doesn’t seem driven towards having decades of employment for individuals at one job, so most of us will have more interviews sometime in the next five to ten years.

    I’ve had many interviews in my career, of all types with many different formats. I’ve had technical interviews with multiple people, tests to take, and interviews by managers that didn’t include a single T-SQL question. I’ve had a lot of success, and much of what has worked for me is a part of my presentation on branding, which you can see at the PASS Summit in 2011.

    With that in mind, I thought this Friday poll might be a good place to help you get prepared for your next interview by asking about the questions that others have been asked. The question this week is:

    What’s an interview question that has thrown you for a loop?

    It’s rare that I’ve actually been surprised by interview questions. I typically prepare for interviews, using a process that has worked for me since I was in college. I research the company, trying to understand what the business is, and if possible, the person that might interview me. I look for blogs or other information written by employees, and any information I can get to prepare for questions about the business or technology used in the company.

    There have been a few times I’ve been thrown by a specific technology question, usually asking for some switch, definition, or other detail that is easily gleaned from some documentation. For those questions, I practice making sure I know where to get the information and use to show that I understand what needs to be done and where to get the answer.

    Let us know today if you have any great questions you get asked, especially if you’ve been asked any of them more than once.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Data Matters

    A very interesting book about technology and business – from inside Google.

    I recently finished reading In the Plex, which is a great look inside Google and how they operate. For a company that has had so much secrecy around it’s internal workings, this was an amazing look at how the company operates. If you’re interested in Google, or even in how a technology company might grow and operate, or even just curious about the decisions that might affect our lives with regard to digital information, this is an interesting book to read.

    There are lots of things to talk about in there, but one thing in particular seemed to stand out to me. I n many cases, the justification for getting some project approved, or moving forward, is different than in many companies. It’s not the personal relationship with the person in charge, or because it seems like a good idea, but because the data matters. That’s a quote used quite often in the book.

    Those of us that work as data professionals know that data is important. We spend lots of time and effort to cleanse, standardize, and organize data in a way that allows it to be used as information for better decisions. That’s the fundamental idea behind business intelligence and data warehousing: extracting information from data and using it to run your business better.

    However I suspect that many companies don’t have management that really understands or truly appreciates the value of the data stored. They don’t often devote the resources, especially time, to allows data professionals to build better systems that people can use. We struggle to purchase enough storage and struggle to make writing better T-SQL or tuning the systems a priority. Most importantly, we often don’t have the time to spend just working with data in different ways to try and build patterns.

    Data is important, but without having the ability to turn it into information, most of that value remains locked away.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • The Window Is Shrinking

    Security is important, but perhaps doubly so in the cloud.

    There have been a number of issues with Dropbox and their encryption process for files stored on their systems. This highlights some of the issues with cloud services, as I’ve talked about as well. I use Dropbox, but for any files that have identity information, I encrypt them locally and only store the encrypted versions.

    There have been quite a few issues with cloud-type services related to security, and at this point, I think it’s good. The press about the Sony hacks, the RSA issues, and others should be scaring consumers and management in companies into demanding better security from vendors. Without a strong emphasis on security from clients, cloud vendors have no reason to spend more effort on security than they do now. I am actually hoping that insurance doesn’t cover the Sony issues, which will help force companies to consider purchasing insurance specifically for security issues. That will force insurance companies to demand better security as well.

    That means the window for throwing together a service without a well thought out security plan is shrinking, and that’s good. We should have security on the mind as we write code. Building that habit takes training, but it also takes practice and requires management to buy into the need to spend some time implementing security throughout our code, and testing for potential issues.

    I look forward to the time when strong security exists in all applications, not bolted on as an afterthought, but designed in from the very beginning.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Hardware Hacking

    How safe are our chips?

    One of the reasons that we have so many gadgets at low costs, with a regular re-fresh and re-tool of the internals is that many of our computing chips and circuit boards are built overseas in factories that are optimized for low costs and rapid evolution to new technologies. That works fine for consumers, but it presents a problem for a government concerned with security.

    Since the fabrication plants are under the control of a foreign government, that means that the military and governments that want to use the same chips that consumers use must vet the designs, and then the end product. This piece talks about the problems with the supply chain that can come from foreign suppliers that might have incentives to allow hardware hacks into the designs at the request of their own governments.

    The world continues to grow closer economically, but we still have our own national patriotism and loyalty . We want our own countries to grow and do well, and our companies to grow inside of our own borders. As the stakes raise, will foreign supplies think about introducing backdoors or other hardware hacks into more of our chips? Imagine the problems we might have if our x64 chips contained a way for foreign companies to access our data?

    Criminals certainly would love these hardware hacks and as they get more and more sophisticated, I wouldn’t be surprised if this becomes an attack vector in the future. We might find in the future that we will not only have choices between Intel and AMD, but also choices between domestic produced and foreign produced chips.

    Steve Jones

     

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts