Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • How Many Times Will This Happen?

    Laptops are being stolen with important data on them. Unencrypted.

    This editorial was originally published on Jun 6, 2006. Steve is traveling in the UK this week and we are reprinting a few pieces.

    Or is it a sign of the times and something that we’ll have in the news on a regular basis for the next few years? Another laptop theft with data, this time from Hotels.com. It was actually an Ernst & Young laptop, the firm that audits hotels.com, but still.

    This makes me feel silly for complaining about JD Edwards laptops and the required Pointsec encryption we had to put on every laptop. I didn’t like it at the time, but it wasn’t a horrible intrusion and these days I think a necessary one.

    With all of the hype on identity theft, data privacy, and portable computers, I cannot believe that every company that allows any data to go outside of their physical office, whether on a backup tape or a laptop, doesn’t require encryption or some type of protection. At least do something to protect it. Most thefts are random and the thief probably wasn’t looking for credit card data, so a simple password might protect the data in most cases.

    If governments want to do something about identity theft and privacy, pass that law. Force everyone to encrypt their data and us in IT to come up with good ways to protect it. I didn’t like encrypting backups with Litespeed, the only choice a few years ago, but it was worth it to protect backup tapes. Now with more choices at very reasonable prices, and MSDE/SQL Express able to use them, every database that contains individual data, and especially financial data, should have its backups encrypted.

    Steve Jones

  • Outsourced = Laid Off?

    Offshoring has been used in many industries, including technology

    This editorial was originally published on May 3, 2006. Steve is traveling in the UK this week and we are reprinting older pieces.

    It seems like career week in the editorial department, but I found a bunch of articles recently on careers. According to the Department of Labor employees whose jobs are outsourced should be treated the same as laid off workers. Maybe we shouldn’t be helping factory workers if their industry moves, though I think I’d argue that point, but if we treat the guy rolling steel or sewing fabric this way, why not software developers?

    Losing your job just stinks. I’ve had it happen and it’s a horrible feeling and really can impact your family, emotionally and financially. As the economy moves more globally, corporations increasingly look for ways to become more competitive. The price of moving goods, once way to keep things slightly more level, has fallen so low in the software business that on straight a dollar comparison, everything should move to India or any other country where the wages are lower.

    But it’s not that simple. As many companies have learned, the savings have costs that are not worth it.

    I think providing more benefits for the relatively few people that get outsources is a good thing. It helps to keep the economy going here because those people have assistance to keep buying food, paying their rent, keeping their car, etc. All things that benefit this country locally.

    However if you are out of work for over a year in the IT field. Perhaps you should change the type of job you are looking for or move to a new field.

    Steve Jones

  • DRI or No DRI?

    This editorial was originally published on Feb 19, 2006. We are reprinting pieces this week as Steve is traveling in the UK.

    There is a great debate going on in the forums about using PKs/FKs to enforce RI, in other words, declarative referential integrity (DRI) as opposed to using code logic to ensure that proper relationships are maintained in a schema. The opening post is a DBA stunned that developers in his new company do not use DRI. The reason given is performance is degraded, and that’s one that I can buy. There is additional overhead for checks with DRI, but it’s minimal and actually David Poole has a great article about this topic coming soon.

    It’s interesting that one of the questions is about how many 3rd party applications do not use DRI in their databases. Who knows why, though my suspicion is that they can easily “fix” issues with the applications with backend updates rather than maintaining good DB design practices. Or that they can easily alter the application to meet changing needs at various customers’ sites.

    I think it’s mostly the latter reason. That and laziness. I think the vast majority of developers are lazy by nature and dealing with DRI constraints when building an application is a pain. It’s a pain for me, but I still think it’s a good idea. Just like stored procedures add some overhead, so does DRI and many developers I have seen, both building shrink wrap and corporate software, don’t want to deal with the overhead.

    Personally I like having DRI implemented for the same reason that developers use objects, libraries, functions, and other consolidation techniques. It centralizes the “rules” about your application and ensures that they are always used. I agree there is overhead, but it’s a minimal amount and if you are seeing this on most servers then you are probably underpowered.

    My big concern is that often multiple applications or even multiple modules of a single application often need the same business rules: like no orders unless we have a valid customer number. If you depend on the application to enforce this, then you are gambling that every developer will do it correctly and the same way. In small, tightly controlled and managed environments, this works great. But as you grow your development teams, then it is easy for someone to forget to implement some RI rule or implement it differently than others.

    And those bugs are hard to find.

    I don’t think that every application needs DRI setup in it, but if you choose to not implement it, be sure you understand the consequences of your actions. And your boss does as well.

    Steve Jones

  • Here’s a Reason to Document

    A search engine for code

    This editorial was originally published on Feb 17, 2006. Steve is traveling in the UK this week and we are re-printing some old pieces.

    A new search engine, Krugle, set to launch next month, is supposed to focus on code. Mostly open source code, but also places like SQLServerCentral.com, which has scripts and other types of code available. Wired has a good article on the idea behind this search.

    It’s an interesting idea, though given the types of comments and the wide range of ways that things are described, I wonder if it will work. I know that we get lots of posts in the forums that I easily find answers for using Google when other don’t. I suspect that I am just searching on better terms than others. Course that doesn’t always work for my own questions, so perhaps it’s a second set of eyes that really help.

    However this also depends on the actual coders spending some time to properly describe their system. That’s always a difficult task. But even assuming that they will describe their code well, how will you know if it will “plug in” easily to your system? I’ve seen lots of code that wouldn’t easily integrate with something I was writing.

    And if I checked out 3 or 4 of these incompatible, or not easily integrated systems, from a search engine, I’d be tempted to just write my own. Actually I think lots of developers write their own code, or build on a base and then do everything themselves because it takes so long to integrate disparate code at times.

    Still it’s a great idea and I hope it works.

    Update Jul 13, 2011: Has anyone used, or is using, Krugle?