Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Data Quality

    Beautiful Colorado

    Today we have an editorial reprinted from Dec 12, 2005 as Steve is on vacation.

    My wife and I were out looking at new houses this past weekend and I was amazed at the data quality issues that we found in various listings. These weren’t new houses as I’m not quite in the place where I can afford a new house with some land, at least not the 30+ acre plots we were looking at.

    What we found as we went from place to place was an amazingly inconsistent amount and quality of data in the listings. Before all the IT guys that work in real estate come after me, I’m not blaming the applications, the developers, etc. This is really a data quality issue probably from the data entry people.

    As we’ve researched properties and looked at the information online, we’ve often encountered conflicting information between what we’ll actually see in the listings and what the property looks like. More often, we don’t see the same information in each listings. We tend to look for acreage, and it’s amazing how many listings leave off the size of the property, or leave off the garage spaces. It’s usual in Colorado to have 3 spaces in newer homes and it seems that unless the house has more, the count is often left off, even when there are only two spaces.

    My Mom is in real estate and I’ve been around agents my whole life, so I’ve seen the issues first hand. Each agent writes up their own listing, using forms that are preprinted. Most agents seem to still work on paper, which means transcribing the data into the computer. Which means the chance for lots of mistakes as the human factor is involved. I don’t think it’s all laziness or lack of effort, but we all just make mistakes. And the more of us involved, the more chances it will occur. Just think of how many times you mistype something in email.

    I think this business could get a lot better, especially with more standardization and more IT tools in use. Using PDA-type applications or Java powered phone apps that could take listings in real time where the owner could double check things and ensure all the data is accurate. After all, better data quality will likely help the owner more than anyone.

    This isn’t limited to real estate, as many industries and processes suffer from data quality problems. There isn’t much that DBAs and other data professionals can do about the quality of the data we get; we can only ensure that the quality and integrity remains the same.

    But we sure get the blame when it’s not accurate.

    Steve Jones

    (published at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Editorial/72364/)

  • Careful Blogging

    The Supreme Court Building – Will blogging rules get decided here?

    Today we have a reprint of an editorial from Sept 22, 2005 as Steve is on vacation.

    There are official blogs, like Jonathan Schwatz of Sun and others that are corporate preaching/marketing/promotional efforts. Not that this blog or others aren’t what the authors think, but I feel that they are probably checked and monitored by someone at the corporation to be sure that the message doesn’t bring any liability or unexpected issues out.

    Then there are unofficial blogs, like the guys at MSDN that are handled by employees, they are asked to post, but they are not really monitored. I’m sure there are guidelines and regulations, however, that have been posted, emailed, snail-mailed, etc. to everyone.

    I ran across this article on potential legal isues with blogs. It doesn’t appear the courts have been involved yet, but I’m sure it’s coming. At some point there will be someone that sues or gets sued over a posting and then we’ll really find out how “private” those blogs are.

    I made a note on the SQLServerCentral blogs page, but it’s something to think about whether you use a corporate site or your own private one. Be wary of what you post in a blog. To me the same rules that apply with you at Happy Hour apply on the blog. If you don’t want it getting back to your boss, don’t post it.

    Steve Jones

    (published at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Editorial/72348/)

  • A Variety of Interpretations

    What have you automated?

    Each month I look forward to T-SQL Tuesday week when there is a blog party. This is the brainchild of Adam Machanic (Blog|Twitter), and is usually hosted by a different person each month. I hosted December 2010, and that was probably the first time I wrote a post more than a day before the post date. It seems more people

    This month Pat Wright chose the topic of Automation, leaving it simply as that word to inspire people. His summary showed that 34 people participated and left trackbacks on his blog. I read through a number of them, and was struck that this month is seemed that people interpreted the topic very differently.

    You might expect that many people talked about SQL Agent, and they did, but there were some fascinating thoughts on how automation impacts an environment. Jason Bacani talked about data driven subcriptions in SSRS, which many people might not be aware of. These solve the problem of deliverying reports automatically to people, but in this case, the reports were not working. A little automation solves the problem and keeps the business running. Ted Krueger helps the DBA out by giving us a script to remove NOLOCK from code. An interesting way to enforce the rules that you might want to have in your environment. Grant Fritchey talks about keeping server side traces running all the time with a little automation to manage the process.

    There are a variety of other techniques, including getting a testing environment setup with Powershell. These ideas are inspiring, and they are the reason that I think events like T-SQL Tuesday are a great idea. They make me think widely, and re-examine the tools that I have with SQL Server, and how I might deploy those tools in a new way.

    Check out T-SQL Tuesday next month, and contact Adam if you’re interested in hosting one in the future.

    Steve Jones

  • OldSQL

    Support is expiring for SQL Server 2005. Does it matter to you?

    Support for SQL Server 2005 is due to expire in a few months, which means that no new patch work will be performed on that version for the general public. Some people might sign extended support agreements, but most won’t. If you are unsure of whether you should, this blog post might help you understand the implications of not having an extended support agreement.

    There have been quite a few blogs, tweerts, etc. about this date, asking people to  consider upgrades to SQL Server 2008 or SQL Server 2008 R2. It is good to see some awareness being brought to the situation, since many DBAs do not think about their version falling out of support, and assume they can get patches from Microsoft at any time.

    They can’t, but does it matter? I know there are still plenty of people running SQL Server 2000 right now and it performs well. They have stable applications, and stable hardware, and with virtualization, they could potentially run stand-alone systems on old versions of Windows or SQL Server forever. I even know of people still running SQL Server 7, or SQL

    Server v6.5 today in support of some applications.

    If you have a stable codebase, and your application has been running on SQL Server 2005, or even SQL Server 2000, I don’t think that support timelines necessarily mean you should upgrade. At some point you should upgrade, to ensure you can take advantage of new connection technologies, or better security, or some other feature, but not just because support is ending.

    Evaluate your environment, and upgrade when you think it benefits your business and you get value from the new version. Otherwise you are allowing your budget to be managed by someone else, on their timetable, not yours.

    Steve Jones

    (published at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Editorial/72436/)

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