Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

  • Daily Coping 10 Nov 2021

    I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.

    Today’s tip is to get outside and observe the changes in nature around you.

    It’s getting cold in Colorado, and I realized that I wasn’t really outside the last week. I got in the car, drove to the gym or store, and came home. I decided to take a break and go out to watch my wife and son feed the horses. They’re nature, right?

    It was good to be out in the world a bit more than I have been, watching how the animals behave, seeing the changes of the property in fall, feeling the crisp, albeit chilly, wind.

  • SQL Saturday at the Summit

    At the PASS Data Community Summit today, I’ll be in the Community Zone to talk about SQL Saturday and answer questions from people. I have a few other times reserved as well, and the room will be open today through Friday. My time commitments are:

    • Wed, Nov 10, 2021 – 16:00-17:30 EST
    • Thu, Nov 11, 2021 – 12:00-13:30 EST
    • Fri, Nov 12, 2021 – 10:00 – 11:13 EST

    Stop by then and let’s talk about how to build local events in the future.

    Pass the word to others as well.

    When you enter the Community Zone, the list of rooms is on the right. Look for the SQL Saturday room.

     

     

     

     

  • Daily Coping 9 Nov 2021

    I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.

    Today’s tip is to respond to a difficult situation in a new way.

    My winch broke. One of the rollers broke, but the wire was also wound in a strange way, which allows the door enough, but it’s a mess.

    This means I have to take things apart, futz with the wire, which sometimes has metal bits hanging off, reassemble it, get back mounted, test, etc. In other words, it’s a decent part of a day, plus some parts.

    I got mad a few times with the staff doing the work (others and my kids), because they weren’t really paying attention. I decided to not get upset, or even vent to my wife. Instead, I ordered a new roller, and a new mount to experiment. I used this as an opportunity to try something better, and just allocated some time out of my week to get this fixed.

    Once I changed my attitude, things went smoother. Maybe I can “helper-proof” things this time.

  • T-SQL Tuesday #144–Data Governance

    tsqltuesdayThis month’s topic is something I wouldn’t have considered a decade ago. Especially in the US, this isn’t something that I’d actually have cared about for most of my career. Even when companies talked about governance, it was more a checkbox exercise.

    Dr. Victoria Holt brings us this invitation from the UK, and I think it’s a great one. This is a data topic that will impact more and more of us in the future. Not all of us, but certainly plenty of us.

    If you haven’t thought about this topic, I’d urge you to write something, even if it’s a view that this isn’t necessary. Share your thoughts, this month or in the future.

    Data Governance Effort

    My employer, Redgate Software, has been interested in this for a number of years. We are a UK company, and when the GDPR passed, we knew this would be a concern for us and our customers.

    We built a product to help customers classify and understand their exposure in databases. I hope this expands out to other sources, because I feel this is a constant challenge. While lots of data is in database, we are constantly pulling it out and sharing it in files, reports, and more.

    Security is hard, and I don’t know that we’ll end up completely controlling the access and data, but I do think that we need to understand where our risk and exposure are as we share data.

    This is a hard job, and a boring one. I can’t see many people enjoying the process of dealing with data governance. We need to make this easy to do, in a distributed fashion by many people as they notice something is not being managed. At the same time, I think that we need to be regularly reviewing and examining security against policies. We have far too many public access points being used to share information when things should be secured.

    I don’t know how we reconcile those things, and decide on the value of doing them. Some products may work well, some I think are too targeted, and some too expensive.

    I believe data governance matters, but not sure how we actually get to a place that it’s well done in many organizations. Especially in the US.

    I hope I’m wrong.