Voice of the DBA

Tag: Friday Poll

  • Change Management

    Hurry up and wait.

    Hurry up and wait.

    In a couple of the large enterprises I’ve worked in, that might have been the IT motto. It seemed as though the internal developers were always under pressure to get applications finished as soon as possible. However we often found that when applications were finished, there would be a delay in deploying the new code to the production servers, usually because of a strict change control process that required documentation and testing of the changes on related systems. In many smaller companies I’ve worked in, we had no change control process at all and could deploy updates at any time.

    I’m not sure which of those two systems I prefer. In general, I prefer to have some change management process to ensure that I can easily determine what changes were made at any time. However I’ve found that any change management quickly becomes a bottleneck devoid of common sense and full of bureaucratic nonsense. This Friday, I decided to ask a question about change management, but not about your opinion of whether it’s good or not. The question this week is:

    Do you follow a change control process 90+% of the time?

    By this question, I mean is change control a habit, an ingrained sense of the way you work and deploy updates to a live environment. I’m not asking if you have a formal process, if it’s a team process, or anything about the details, but rather do you actually follow some methodology to track and manage changes?

    I’d like to think most of us would, if for no other reason than to answer the common “what changed?” question that always comes up when something breaks. However I’m curious to see the results.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We are still having hosting issues with the podcasts. We hope to resolve this and be back to releasing the podcast versions of the editorial next week.

  • WWBOD

    What Would Brent Ozar Do?

    I’ve titled this for Brent Ozar (web |@brento), What Would Brent Ozar Do, since he was the one that turned me on to this post about calculating your FU money. A polite way of describing FU money would be the money that allows you to live your life on your terms, without having to work again and without having to kowtow to anyone else, including your employer.

    When I was younger, I was very money driven, looking for new jobs or ways that would allow me to earn more money. I have been in and out of consulting, always looking to move up in the world. As I grew older, had a family, and (hopefully) grew wiser, I realized that most of the time I hadn’t be happier by making more money. Finding more money became a game, but the things that really helped me enjoy life were the challenges, the people, and the experiences I had in different places. It’s not my advice, and it’s not often followed, but it’s advice I think it well worth following: do something with your life that you enjoy.

    Most of us are not likely to get FU money early in our careers, but hopefully many of us will get close enough to live life on our terms when we retire. However this Friday, let’s have fun for a minute and think about what it would mean if you had the winning lottery ticket next week and received a check equal to your FU money.

    What would you do if you had the choice?

    If you didn’t have to work at your job anymore, would you go crazy like so many athletes. Would you keep your life relatively sane and embark on some other pursuit? Maybe you’re follow your musical dreams, like Allan Hirt. Maybe you’d go back to school and study something that interests you, maybe you’d move to Hawaii and surf every day. Drop a note in the discussion that lets us know how you’d change your life.

    I had this question put to me on vacation with some friends, and the first thing that popped into my mind is that I’d go work for Habitat for Humanity. I enjoy building things, working outside, and their mission is one that speaks to me. I hope that someday I’ll retire from technology and go work with them, and I feel confident it will happen. Someday.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Read-only Data

    We keep gathering, storing, and managing more and more data. Many of our systems could use an archiving plan to migrate older data to another database or system where it can be accessed, but it won’t impact the performance of queries against our current data. If you don’t have any type of archive plan, you might consider building one for any future tables you design.

    Do you manage read only data differently?

    Once you migrate data to a new set of tables, typically you would consider that older data to be read only, and potentially mark it as such in it’s own storage location, perhaps even adding more indexes than you have on the current data. And if the data is static, then it doesn’t change from week to week, and you can reduce the amount of backups that you create from this data.

    However you can’t eliminate backups. There is still the possibility that you might have a disaster situation and need to recover the data. If your last backup of the read only database or file group is 18 months old, will you be able to find it? That can be quite a challenge, and I wanted to get some opinions this Friday about how to handle this situation. The poll this week is:

    How often do you back up read only data?

    I am also curious how you manage tracking these infrequent backups and recovering them if you must perform a restore. I’ll admit that I don’t have a great solution other than scheduling some regular backup interval, something like once a quarter and documenting the location someplace that would be accessible in a disaster.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • A Welcome Intruder

    Have you every tried to get past your own security?

    One of the things that many large companies do is hire companies to evaluate their security. This often involves some sort of test of the security systems by an individual whose experise is breaking into companies. There are some experts who study the techniques used to break security, but I suspect that often former hackers/crackers are hired because they have practical experience breaking into systems.

    However for most companies, the security is only examined when there is an actual issue. I know most IT people that manage web systems are told about security lapses when the site si defaced, or when your data is discovered posted in some other location.

    This Friday I wanted to ask this question:

    How many of you have attempted to penetrate your own systems?

    You could do it yourself or get a friend to try, but have any of you actually performed some type of penetration test and what did you do? I typically haven’t at most of my jobs, but I have spent time thinking about how I would penetrate the systems and then made an effort to close any holes.

    My feeling is that most of the data breaches or losses occur because of attacks against the weakest links in the security system: humans. Social engineering, which taking advantage of most people’s good nature and desire to help others, is usually the biggest problem. Theft of laptops is also an issue, but I think the targeted attacks specifically aimed at your company is fairly rare. The exception would be SQL injection attacks, which spring up constantly at site after site, mostly because of poor development practices.

    We can get better at securing our systems, but it takes some effort, and a belief that we are vulnerable. Maybe setting up a test against your own systems will convince you, or more importantly, your boss, that it is worth the time spent better securing your systems.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts