Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

  • Advice I Like: Experience and Aptitude

    Experience is overrated. Most breakthrough accomplishments were done by people doing them for the first time. Therefore when hiring hire for aptitude and attitude and then train for skills. – from Excellent Advice for Living

    I like this advice. It’s what I’ve tended to do when I have been a hiring manager. I look for people that have potential, can learn, and fit with the team. Not necessarily think or are the same, but they will grow with us. I think aptitude and attitude matter more than experience often.

    There are exceptions. Sometimes we need skills and help in a certain area, and experience can be important. In those cases, I need someone that can teach others and is willing to do so. I still want aptitude and attitude, because even an experienced person will need to grow and learn (and get along).

    The other trait I find important is curiosity. I need someone that wants to learn more.

    I’ve been posting New Words on Fridays from a book I was reading, however, a friend thought they were a little depressing. They should be as they are obscure sorrows. I like them because they make me think.

    To counter-balance those, I’m adding in thoughts on advice, mostly from Kevin Kelley’s book. You can read all these posts under the advice tag.

  • Capturing Ideas for Blogs

    As we close out the year, I decided to drop this post here and maybe inspire a few of you to write in 2025. This post looks at some examples of how I capture ideas for later and jot notes that turn into these blog posts.

    Everything is an idea

    Let me start with how I look at the world. I was in a meeting with some of our solution engineers and Kathi Kellenberger. Kathi was showing how to get started with the Redgate Monitor PowerShell API, which is something relatively few of our customers use. However, it’s very powerful and as she started, I noticed a few things.

    1. She pointed out how to download and load the module
    2. She showed how to make a basic connection
    3. There was a section on adding tags to a list of servers
    4. There was a section on reading in a CSV with server names and settings
    5. There was a section on changing settings for alerts based on the csv

    In this list, there are 4 blog posts at least. Here is what sketched out. Each of these sections is the draft title of a blog post with the items I captured inside.

    Getting Started

    purpose of PoSH with RGM

    download module

    get an auth token

    make basic connection with your monitor server

    Get data from a query

    Adding Tags to a Server

    check sample scripts

    Pick group of servers, get group list from

    load csv, loop, applying tag to group

    Load CSV

    Basic PoSh

    Load CSV, show how fields are represented

    loop through different rows

    Change Settings from PoSh

    Get list of servers and settings in csv

    load and loop through

    alter alert setting for server based on csv

    Summary

    Those are light sketches, but they capture the idea. I’ve got 4 draft posts now that I can flesh out when I have time. While I was doing this, I grabbed a couple screenshots as well, which help me remember the context of what I saw.

    This is the way I grab lots of ideas when they occur to me, without worrying about finishing these right now. From these descriptions, I can build a larger blog post, in this case, a series that I’ll add to my other Redgate Monitor posts.

    Try grabbing ideas for tools, fixes, patches, changes, etc. during your workday. Drop them in a folder somewhere, use Open Live Writer, Word, whatever. Then when you’re looking to blog or improve you career or fix something, you’ll have a list.

  • A New Word: Lilo

    lilo– n. a friendship that can lie dormant for years only to pick right back up instantly, as if you’d seen each other last week – which is al the more remarkable given that certain other people can make every lull in conversation feel like an eternity.

    I’m very lucky that I get to travel and meet so many people, and that I have the opportunity to see many of them time and time again at different events. I’m truly blessed in this way.

    I have lilo with many people, close friends, good friends, casual acquaintances, even new-I-just-met-you-for-five-minutes-once friends.

    With many people, when I see them again, we can pick up a conversation or a familiarity right away. I don’t have a great memory for names, which is why you might see my look at your name badge, but I remember faces well. When I was a bartender, I knew many people by what they drank, but few names.

    In the tech world, I pick up friendships once a year with some people, less often with others. A quick story.

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    I met Nate many years ago at the PASS Summit. I can’t remember if we met in the convention center or in the hotel up the hill, but we got to chatting and enjoyed a few minutes together. Since then, I’ve seen him at a number of Data Community Summits, and we always take time to stop and catch up and see how we’re doing.

    I look forward to lilo every year, thinking I’ll get the chance to see Nate and get a hug, a picture, and a conversation. I’ve missed him the last couple of years, but was delighted to see him in 2024. I hope we both keep making the Summit or some other event until we both get to retire.

    From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

  • Monday Monitor Tips: CIS Compliant

    A new feature added to Redgate Monitor Enterprise automatically. CIS compliance is something many enterprises think about as their auditors use this as a benchmark.

    If you’ve never looked at the Center for Internet Security, you ought to glance at them, and check out the benchmarks they have for many systems.

    This is part of a series of posts on Redgate Monitor. Click to see the other posts

    The CIS SQL Server Benchmark

    You might get asked by an auditor how you know your SQL Server estate is secure. There are lots of things you can do, but an easy one is being CIS compliant. There are benchmarks from CIS for many SQL Server versions. You can download the benchmark from CIS as a PDF, go through it, and then start to compare that to your SQL Server instances.

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    That’s not complex, but it is complicated. Lots of moving parts, where do you keep the benchmark data, how do you compare it to your instances, how do you ensure it’s up to date or get notified if it’s not?

    This is a simple job, but labor intensive, boring, and tedious. There’s a better way.

    Redgate Monitor Compliance

    We’ve added a compliance section to Redgate Monitor, which I’ve written about in terms of looking for older versions. However, we also have added to this section with a CIS Benchmark template.

    At the top of Redgate Monitor, there is a Security section and Compliance is under this.

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    When I get to the compliance screen, on the right side, I have a drop down for the templates. We’ve pre-loaded the CIS Benchmark in here. I can select that to see how compliant I am.

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    In this case, I’ve filtered to the SSC servers and when I do that, I see that I’m mostly compliant, but just barely. I say me, but this is our IT group that manages the config.

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    There is a disclaimed at the top, which you should note. It links here, where the docs note that this is a template that cannot be deleted or changed. It can be duplicated. Note, this is only for SQL Server 2022.

    If I click a server, I see the details of where and where not I am compliant. In tis case, things like database mail ought to be disabled.

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    I can’t change things from here, but I can export this as a report and work on remediation. If I want to set a template that is like CIS, but I have a good reason for an exception, such as the Cost threshold for parallelism set to something different, I can duplicate this template and alter it.

    Summary

    Auditing and compliance are becoming more important at many organizations, especially in light of the main data breaches and other issues that many organizations have experienced. This might even be required by insurance companies who want to ensure that you have not left open configurations that might become attack vectors.

    If you haven’t tried the compliance templates in Redgate Monitor, give it a try, or have a play at monitor.red-gate.com..

    Redgate Monitor is a world class monitoring solution for your database estate. Download a trial today and see how it can help you manage your estate more efficiently.