Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • The Hybrid

    I’m off to SQL Server Connections next week and looking forward to the conference. This is my first time attending, but I have wanted to go for some time. This is one of the few events that is not specifically focused on one technology. In fact, it’s actually 7 conferences in one, co-locating events on ASP.NET, Silverlight, SQL Server, Visual Studio, Sharepoint, Windows, and Exchange.

    It seems that more and more of us working in information technology are called upon to work with a variety of products and platforms. While you might primarily be a DBA that deals with T-SQL or SQL Server administration, you probably are called upon to use other skills as well. You might need to help with Windows security, or Exchange administration, or even do some .NET development. As wide as the SQL Server platform is, it seems that often we have the need for skills with other technologies.

    Even if you don’t actually work in other areas because of regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley, understanding those other technologies can really help your career. You might better understand how to integrate SQL Server into your environment or better secure an application. You might even be able to offer ideas that  help a co-worker in their job troubleshoot a problem.

    I’ve felt that the most talented people in IT usually have a varied background and understand a wide variety of technologies. They bring that wide view of the forest to bear on a problem, and often find a solution because they can think laterally and are not tied down to the boundaries of a specific product.

    Steve Jones

  • MERS

    Imagine you have this idea. You’ll build an electronic database designed to record rapidly changing data for assets that move between companies. You make contacts with the various companies and your system acts as the middleman. You are the central database, reducing the costs these companies have by trying to keep their own systems in sync. But what happens when your database becomes the legal record and it’s not up to date?

    That is what might have happened with the MERS system. It is supposed to record the mortgage titles, linking homeowners with their mortgage holder. Since mortgages are often sold many times during their lifetimes, MERS was supposed to reduce the costs and time involved with each sale. By having MERS maintain title, recording fees and time is reduced as everything is centralized. Theoretically, this is what we want centralized databases to do: make things more efficient and accurate.

    But that’s not always what happens. We make mistakes, we have coding bugs, and a single database could easily have many mistakes in it. In fact, this is why having a single database for a distributed system could be a bad idea. Multiple databases can allow you to compare data, and perhaps track down any discrepancies between systems.

    This is one reason that a data warehouse can be a valuable addition to your company. By taking feeds from multiple systems, and standardizing the information, it’s easier to use. However that ETL step can provide a valuable double check of your data, and a good feedback look can enable you to find data quality issues and correct them.

    I don’t know if the MERS system has data quality issues, but if they are going to be a legal system of record, their data has to be accurate.

    Steve Jones

  • Remote Security

    Telecommuting is taking off. It seems I have been reading that for years, but more and more I run into people that are at least able to telecommute part of the  time for their jobs. There are still lots of people that don’t telecommute  at all, especially in Information Technology, but I do think more and more businesses are becoming open to the idea that some portion of their workforce going about their daily tasks from a remote location.

    And that means security is a bigger issue. I ran into this short piece on two ways to provide security for home workers and found it interesting. It mentions VPNs with network access controls as one solution and remote terminals as the second solution. Both of these can work, but both can also be complex to implement.

    The lines between what is private and what is corporate are blurring often on our machines, just as the line between private time and company time is hard to discern. No matter what your company policy is, chances are that for IT workers, some of their personal life will bleed onto their corporate hardware. That’s even more of an issue when you have people working at home.

    While the infrastructure people will  concern themselves about good network security, I think it’s important that DBAs question the data security as well. Is database access protected? Can the user download and save critical data to their machines? Is any encryption employed? It’s important to ask the questions and be sure that those involved with securing corporate systems are aware of potential data security issues.

    Steve Jones

  • SQL Slammer

    Seven years ago I was in the mountains of Colorado, taking advantage of the a school break to get away for a long weekend. There wasn’t good cell phone coverage up there, and I was surprised as we drove back Sunday evening with a voice mail indicator on my phone. I dialed in and found a message from work to call ASAP. SQL Slammer had struck.

    I wasn’t expecting to get back to work so soon, but as soon as I got kids out of the car and into bed, I headed into work to deal with the issues. A crisis team was assembled, with the other production DBA already having spent much of Sunday at work. We worked late into the night, patching servers and trying to eradicate the worm.

    However we had literally thousands of infected MSDE instances that had been installed with custom paths and the patch Microsoft had released would not fix them. We had an engineer fly out from Seattle and help work through the issues, finding workarounds and understanding our environment. A combination of creativity and scripting allowed us to finally develop a solution late Monday night that we deployed into the wee hours of Tuesday morning.

    That was seven years ago and it was a memorable time for me. I had thought that the Slammer worm was dead, but apparently that’s not the case. Traces are still detected at times and this month the SANS Institute is trying to work with ISPs and companies to eradicate the worm once and for all. They are asking system administrators to spread the word and help them try and remove SQL Slammer as a threat. They are not confident that they’ll succeed, but I think it’s worth a try.

    I’m sure many of you encountered the Slammer worm if you were working with SQL Server at that time. Any great memories? Any stories to share? Let us know in the discussion below and if you can help eradicate the worm, make sure you pass the word to the administrators of SQL Server 2000 instances.