Do You Have a Jeff?

Posted on February 9, 2024 by way0utwest

In the Phoenix Project (worth a read), there is a character called Brent, who is to go-to person for everything in IT. I don’t know if this character was modeled after Brent Ozar, but I always picture him when I re-read the book, and I suspect he was that person in previous positions. I’ve been that person as well, and it’s both exciting, fulfilling, and very stressful. At Redgate, that person has been Robert C, who is my go-to person for many questions.

In the DBA world, I think of Jeff Moden. He’s been a prolific and incredible author over the years on many things SQL-related and is a huge proponent of others learning to write better code and better utilize the database platform more efficiently. I suspect in his company, he is the go-to person for most database-related questions and problems. I also suspect he solves most of them very well and has the influence (or power) to effect change.

However, are you Jeff in your organization? Do you have a Jeff? In many of the customers I work with, there is no Jeff. Sometimes there are very smart people, but they cannot effect change. Or they don’t know how to go about making change happen. In other companies, there isn’t anyone who is an expert on the database or related technologies. Too often, I think people aren’t often aware of what expert really is and they just do the best they can without knowing if it’s a great job or a poor one. That’s my opinion, but it’s based on decades of experience (and success) working with lots of others on database code.

The good news is that most of you can learn to be Jeff. You can work to improve your skills, both technical and interpersonal (soft), to raise the quality bar at your organization. Maybe you can get more work done and get a huge sense of satisfaction from your job (and a raise). Maybe you just want to get things done more efficiently and get away from work more often.

There are many ways to do improve the quality at work, but essentially the idea behind platform engineering is to produce tools that make developers and operations groups more efficient. The goal is to get more work done, easier, reducing the cognitive load on everyone involved with software. Not because they can’t do the work, but because we want them focused on their specialty. Whether that’s writing C# code for an application, writing zero downtime database changes, or making beautiful reports. The hassles of actually capturing and moving code should be something provided by a platform. A person can do some of this by sharing their knowledge, not just in conversations, but providing templates, models, standards, and other code elements that might help their co-workers become more productive.

DevOps is about producing code quicker, reliably delivering that to the customer, and raising the quality bar (don’t forget this) and platform engineering is the next evolution here, where the tools, process, and flow are set to make the implementation of DevOps easier for most developers and DBAs. Even if your organization doesn’t want to produce a platform, the idea of building and deploying tools (samples, models, snippets, etc.) to make someone else’s job (or yours) easier and smoother is something we all can do. We can all aspire to be Jeff and get there with a little investment in our skill across time.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.

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A New Word: Wellium

Posted on February 9, 2024 by way0utwest

wellium – n. an excuse you come up with to rationalize a disappointing outcome – telling yourself that you weren’t in the mood for that sold-out show anyway, that your safety school is actually a better fit, that your dream job might have been too stressful.

I come up with wellium all the time. I think it’s a very human reaction to try and make yourself feel better with some justification of why you are OK something didn’t work out.

As I’ve gotten older, I do try to just feel bad or disappointed, and then move on. I tell myself that often decisions made by others aren’t necessarily a rejection. Often it can be a preference for something else, or the competition was better.

It’s OK if others beat you at something if they’re better. That’s what we all want from competitive situations in sports, in jobs, in music. If they win, they win.

Hopefully that also spurs you to learn to be better.

From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

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Using the T-SQL Error Functions–#SQLNewBlogger

Posted on February 7, 2024 by way0utwest

I was working with a customer that was doing some error handling in procs and helped them do some error tracking. As we were working through things, I realized that some of functions working with errors operated differently than I expected.

Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.

The Error Functions

There are a number of error functions available to you in modern SQL Server. We have:

All of these functions have the same clause in their docs, which says, “ xxx returns NULL when called outside of the scope of a CATCH block.”

That was something I didn’t realize. I’d assumed I could run this: 

SELECT 1/0

SELECT ERROR_SEVERITY(), ERROR_MESSAGE(), ERROR_STATE()

However, if I run this, I get the error, but my results are NULL, NULL, NULL.

If I want the values, I need to do this:

BEGIN TRY
   SELECT 1/0
  

END TRY

BEGIN CATCH
   SELECT ERROR_SEVERITY(), ERROR_MESSAGE(), ERROR_STATE()

END CATCH;

This will return my 16, Divide by zero error encountered., 1

In general, you ought to be using TRY..CATCH blocks for error handling. We do want to ensure that we are doing our best to deal with problems in code and not just expect all errors will be managed by the application. As much as possible, we should try to gracefully fail and give the application or client something useful.

Along with TRY..CATCH, learn to use THROW, and ensure you’re adding some error handling to older code. This is an easy refactoring add to existing code, and it’s simple to enhance future code to make it more maintainable.

SQL New Blogger

This is a quick look at the functions that capture error information, and noting a limitation I didn’t realize. It’s short, simple, and took me about 10 minutes.

This is one of those topics that dev managers, especially front end based ones, appreciate. Doing a post on this topic on your blog might get someone to ask you about error handling, and with a little practice (and a few posts), you’ll be able to talk about this topic confidently.

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Ransomware vs. AI

Posted on February 7, 2024 by way0utwest

Ransomware has been a growing and shrinking problem in the modern world. Every time I think that some new defenses and protections are preventing ransomware from being a problem, I see another issue. Recently, I saw Subway got hit with with an attack and a few friends have recently noted their companies were restoring systems after a portion of their network was locked down.

With the advent of Rasnsomware-as-a-service, where criminals deploy software and then sell access to others, better detection and protection become more important. As with any software, criminal human operators will use the ransomware software in different ways. That means that we don’t necessarily have a simple threat that can be easily programmed against with anti-virus technology.

Microsoft has been using AI technology to help them track and combat ransomware campaigns. Since there are similarities between how ransomware is used by different individuals and how it appears in systems, AI technology can be helpful here. There aren’t the same simple signatures on files that we’ve seen in the past with viruses, but rather more complex patterns. Humans might discover how ransomware appears in their environment with lots of knowledge on what their network ought to look like, but this pattern matching across many different networks and organizations is something that AI/ML might do quicker and at scale. Once successful, ransomware can be hard to recover from, so early detection is important.

In the article, it seems that Microsoft is capturing lots of traffic and analyzing it for patterns, with multiple types of anomalous activity, and then aggregating this across devices to guess whether this is an attack or not. In some of their testing, they find the ability to stop an attack with only a few percent of assets getting encrypted. That’s not perfect, but better than finding 90% of your nodes are encrypted over morning coffee.

I suspect this is just the latest escalation in cyber attacks and defenses. I’m sure that hackers will come up with new and novel ways to cause problems, but I do think that this is a place where AI, especially ML, technology can be useful to provide better security. I also think that database technology, especially graph queries, is particularly helpful here. I hope we learn more about how they are building protections as I think this is likely a great data analysis story.

Once again, the database is critical to making software better because all of that data has to be stored and queried somewhere.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.

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