Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • Have an Extra Beer!

    Fat Tire is Steve's favorite beer

    Today we have an editorial reprinted from Dec 13, 2005 as Steve is on vacation.

    Geeks,

    Have an extra beer tonight. Or your adult beverage of choice to relax and unwind after a long day. After all, it appears that caffeine helps your liver, so don’t worry about damaging it with a couple relaxing frosty mugs.

    The study from the article linked above apparently says that coffee and tea can help reduce the risk of damage from alcohol. So maybe that coffee you drink trying to sober up does more good than just keep you awake?

    As with any study, you should be careful of reading too much into this and don’t go out on some great 12 pint binge and expect a few extra cups of coffee in the morning will repair the damage. After all, in another year we’ll be reading that beer undoes the good that coffee does to your liver 🙂

    But for the geeks in the house that enjoy a cold one, this is certainly welcome news.

    Steve Jones

    (published at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Editorial/72349/)

  • What Sarbanes-Oxley Won’t Do

    Sarbanes-Oxley Act

    This is interesting. Another case of corporate fraud under the title of “What Sarbanes-Oxley Won’t Do”. Apparently someone got loans, blah, blah, fraud, blah, blah, etc. You get the idea and I’m tired of having to hear and write about it.

    But since S-O affects most IT groups and many of us are dealing with it, it’s worth talking about and writing about. S-O has required more documentation, processes, and accountability for how corporations deal with their financial data. It is intended to prevent another Enron or MCI like occurence by making high level executives accountable for the company’s actions.

    But it doesn’t prevent fraud. It doesn’t prevent dishonesty, and it certainly doesn’t guarentee that your investment is safe in some company. It should make it easier to send people to jail, but even that hasn’t been shown to be the case yet.

    It does, however, make a lot of work for many companies. I was talking with a professional services company recently and they said that many of their clients, public and private, are trying to adhere to S-O because public companies have to, but private ones are either looking for an IPO or to be bought by a larger company, and S-O compliance is often part of the due diligence they’d need.

    If you’re an ISO company, you probably can use one set of docs for both certifications, although you’ll need to dive deeper in certain areas for each one. That’s the good thing since we know how much you IT folks love documenting your processes, procedures, and environments.

    I’m just happy to say that SQLServerCentral.com is not complying and I, for one, am thrilled 🙂

    Steve Jones

    (published at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Editorial/72358/)

  • 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/)

  • You Should Know

    Are you building your knowledge?

    What skills don’t you get taught about being a good database developer? If you are like most people, there is a whole list of things that are good practices for writing code, but you weren’t aware of. And like most people, you might be confused about what things you ought to start learning because of the huge amount of advice from people that are sure “their” way of building software is the best way.

    I ran across a great article that tackles this subject, and talks about a few fairly critical things that many developers don’t learn. Or maybe they learn them, but don’t believe they provide benefits (like version control). It’s amazing how often I find developers, and DBAs, reinventing some process, or struggling through the same tasks over and over because they haven’t bothered to build a repeatable process.

    The best quote in the article is this one:  Setting up a staging server should be easy.  If it is not easy, you already have a problem in your infrastructure…” It’s absolutely true, and if you don’t think this is an issue for your company,  I have two words for you.

    Disaster recovery.

    A staging server is the equivalent of setting up your system again in a DR scenario. If that’s not easy, then the likelihood of you doing it in a timely, efficient, and acceptable-to-your-boss manner in an emergency is pretty low.

    Do yourself a favor at get a staging/QA/UA server set up in your environment. In today’s multi-code, hypervisor-ridden technology shop, there’s no good excuse not to.

    Steve Jones

    (published at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Editorial/72413/)

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts