Voice of the DBA

Tag: Microsoft

  • Data for Defense

    It’s a dangerous world out there. Many of us hear about data breaches on a regular basis, and we often blame poor security at various organizations. Certainly there are a lot of silly mistakes made, whether in configuration or the mishandling of data in insecure environments. Security is a tough business, however, and most organizations don’t have the budget to combat all the threats they face, at least not as effectively as a larger organization could.

    I have more sympathy for organizations after reading about the work of some Microsoft security teams that go up against the world’s best hackers on a daily basis. To truly understand the vulnerabilities in software, someone must also understand how to attack it. Those of us that only have a defensive mindset are inherently limited in how we design protective measures.

    There is a group, the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC), that looks for and tracks hackers around the world, trying to understand how they attack organizations. This is a group of multiple teams looking at nation state attacks, as well as complex software tricks, using the tremendous amount of data they gather from telemetry to analyze the different techniques and vectors used to exploit holes in our systems. They notify customers, letting them know when a customer need to be prepared to defend themselves.

    This is a fascinating read, and one that makes me think that most of our organizations are going to be at cyberwar for the foreseeable future. Already we know that any system on the Internet is likely to be probed and attacked if it has vulnerabilities. Most of us are careful about what we expose, but we also know the weakest link in our organization could cause us issues.

    We do the best we can, but often we do depend on other organizations, like Microsoft, to actively be identifying and helping us understand what to patch or change to protect ourselves. I assume Google and Apple have similar groups, notifying their customers of potential threats. These large vendors are likely the best positioned to help, given all the data they collect about their platforms. Certainly I worry about data privacy with these vendors, but I do think that their massive troves of data on how their software works can also benefit all of us.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • New HA Licensing Benefits

    Microsoft announced recently that they were changing the way licensing works for HA and DR situations. I think this is a great change, and the summary is:

    • You can have up to 3 other un-used secondaries for free
    • You can a sync on-prem replica, async on prem replica, and a remote DR replica.
    • You can run DBCC, backups, monitor resource data on the secondaries

    This is a huge change, mostly because most of us expected these would be acceptable uses already, but they weren’t. And many of us had to go ask for more licensing money.

    The Caveat

    There is a caveat here, actually two. You need:

    • Software assurance
    • A supported version of SQL Server

    Those two things mean you need to be under a support contract, but also that this benefit isn’t just SQL Server 2019, but back ported to all supported versions.

    That’s good new.

  • A Mindset Shift

    I’ve been working with people at Microsoft for nearly two decades in different circumstances. It’s been interesting to me to work with developers, Microsoft consultants, and community people across the lifetime of SQLServerCentral, especially the last 5 years. For a long time, I never wanted to work there, but I’ve started to think I might find it to be an interesting company in the last couple years.

    There are two good articles that talk about the ways that Microsoft has changed. The first is from the high level culture perspective and tries to explain how the mindset has changed. If I hadn’t been witness to it, I wouldn’t believe it. These changes really happened, and they were amazing to me. I’ve been going to Redmond for 15 years, often working with a couple groups and since Satya Nadella took over, I’ve seen these changes get implemented. I’ve watched teams grow and change, and learn to re-frame the way they look at their work. I think it’s been a change for the better.

    The second one is a little more technically detailed, and perhaps more interesting to anyone that would like to get their organization to adopt DevOps. There are some specifics with tools, but really read about the mindset changes and the feedback they use to improve software. I think too many managers think automation and features are all you need to implement and forget that quality, experimentation and learning are keys to this working well. Make sure you point those out to managers if you pass this along.

    Not everyone at Microsoft made the transition. Some left, some were probably asked to leave. New people came, but plenty adapted, altered their mindset, and have bought into the way that the company has evolved. They’ve certainly gone from a company I wouldn’t want to work for because of the stacked ranking and competition to an organization I’d now consider employment within. That’s if they want someone remote in Denver.

    I’m proud that Redgate is also moving in this type of direction. We’ve learned a lot from DevOp and we’re learning that culture is important. We hire those that work well with us and help us build better tools for software developers in a team culture. Those that don’t want to work with a team, work in a DevOps flow, and be accountable for their autonomy will probably move on. That’s fine. We’re learning who we are and implementing that into our staff. I’ve tried to do the same in my life, know who I am and be that. I hope you can do the same.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • OK, Microsoft Teams is cool

    I’ve had a lot of video collaboration tools come across my desk over the last decade. I’ve depended on many of these to communicate with Redgate in the UK as well as Microsoft for feedback, coordination, etc. I’m regularly on calls with people where we need to present or share a screen.

    Probably a few I’ve forgotten, but I’ve used:

    • Oovoo
    • Broadcast.net
    • GotoMeeting/webinar
    • Webex
    • join.me
    • Skype
    • Skype 4 Business
    • Slack
    • Teams
    • On/24
    • Zoom

    For awhile, we settled on Skype for Business at Redgate, where most meetings (scheduled or impromptu) were on this platform. It worked well for my on both my Windows 10 machines, and I got used to it. However, it was an issue for the OSX people. At Redgate, we’ve somewhat settled on Zoom as the current in house platform, but I still get Skype and Slack calls.

    Recently I got a note about an MVP call with Microsoft. It was on Teams, which is their standard. I didn’t think I’d make it, so I deleted the invite from my computer. Then, plans changed, and I was scrambling.

    I did see the meeting invite on my phone calendar, so I clicked that and started Teams on my Android phone. I could hear, but I struggled to see. Even a 5.5” screen isn’t great for 50+ year old eyes. I opened Teams on the PC, thinking that maybe the invite was there, but to my surprise, the meeting opened, with a “join” link. I could see in the timeline that “Steve Jones” had already joined. I clicked the link and got the screen share on a PC where I could see.

    That was cool. Skype will track a call I’ve had and scheduled meetings, but it doesn’t seem to always sync between my phone and PC. Very cool.