The Voice of the DBA
Steve Jones has spent the majority of his career working with technology and computer databases. His show brings you a look at some aspec...Technology
Video Episodes:
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13:14:00 05/24/12
A Break from Data
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This Friday is the start of the Memorial Day holiday in the US. Many companies allow employees time off, making this a long weekend to celebrate the start of summer. Cooking outside and camping have been ways in which my family has enjoyed the holiday in the past, though this year we are likely to spend most of the weekend tending to the plant life around the ranch. For me that means hours in the tractor seat as I try to get the grass under control.
One of the other traditions we have had is seeing a movie over the weekend. This is one of the times that potential blockbusters are usually released. The Avengers movie opened a few weeks ago, and my kids were excited to go see it. In fact, we saw it twice in two week and enjoyed it immensely. This weekend, I suspect that Men in Black 3 will receive a few votes from the kids for a family outing.
Read the rest of " A Break from Data " at SQLServerCentral.
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12:44:22 05/23/12
Making New Infrastructure Investments
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people are starting to use cloud services. To be clear, I know that the cloud is nothing new , but it does have the potential to change the way we make decisions about infrastructure, and it absolutely will change the way we invest in IT if we choose to use cloud services.
I had the chance to talk with three companies that were using the cloud. One was a startup that had foregone all investment in IT infrastructure. They had laptops for employees and one local server to keep copies of development code, but the rest of their "IT stuff" was in the cloud. As a new company, with no existing hardware, this makes sense. Their ability to offload all the sysadmin work meant that their developers didn't have to worry about IT services; they just wrote code.
Read the rest of " Making New Infrastructure Improvements " at SQLServerCentral.
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14:21:02 05/22/12
Use Tools
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As someone that works with Information Technology, I usually work on applications designed to make work easier. For example, we have accounting systems that ease the handling of debits and credits, they detect mistakes in data entry, and in general require less people to handle the accounting needs of many firms. Do we have less accountants?
I suppose we might have less, but it seems that the finance departments, handling AP and AR in many companies is as large as I remember from my younger days. Perhaps the department is smaller than it might otherwise be, but it's usually not small.
Read the rest of " Use Tools " at SQLServerCentral.
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12:34:38 05/21/12
The TCO of the Cloud
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I know that many of you don't want to put your databases in the cloud. There are definitely concerns for many applications that might have identity, financial, medical, or other data. However there are many other types of applications that might make sense for cloud computing, and I am sure that many of you will encounter pressure to move to the cloud at some point in the future.
When you do, how do you determine if the cloud makes sense? Amazon has a nice whitepaper for NoSQL databases , which examines a scenario of varying traffic for a system whose usage peaks and then declines. I don't know how many of us have applications that follow this pattern of traffic, but I think there are plenty of our systems that are over-provisioned and have hardware sitting idle over time. Virtualization helps recover some efficiency from hardware, but the study was interesting to me in showing that the majority of the costs were in administration, redundancy, and support costs (power, space, cooling).
Read the rest of " The TCO of the Cloud " at SQLServerCentral.
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12:49:00 05/20/12
Continuous Releases
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One of the interesting things that I find with my iOS app is that they are updated fairly regularly. I have 20-30 apps, and I would guess that 3-4 of them are updated on any given week. Some of those are bug fixes, some of those are enhancements, but they are regularly changing. I don't update them all every week, but I try not to wait too long between updates.
Plenty of other software works like this. Windows Update provides fixed to various software on my desktop, I get a list of patches I can download when VideoStudio starts, and SQL Prompt lets me know about updates when I start SSMS. Those are all channels that allow a company to easily deliver patches to customers that improve the software. Usually these are patches, but sometimes there are improvements, like Experimental Features . In SQL Server, we have usually frowned on feature enhancements in patches, but is that what we really want?
Read the rest of " Continuous Releases " at SQLServerCentral.
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14:52:50 05/17/12
Password Handling
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I thought this article on Best Buy PC setup was amusing. Here's a company that's trying to provide a service. They're offering to set up most of your new machine for you. To make sure that things work right away for you, they ask you to provide your password, so they can set a login password to your Windows/Mac. However the form has password below email, which might imply they will set up your email as well. That's something I know many non-technical people might appreciate.
Consumers probably think this is a good idea. Computer gets set up for them, and they pick a password. Technical people cringe. Password written down, given to stranger, stored by large company. What could go wrong? You can guess, or read the comments in the article.
Read the rest of " Password Handling " at SQLServerCentral.
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10:48:00 05/16/12
Do Interviews Work?
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It's hard to hire good people in the technology business. I know good people get hired, and many of us work with good people that know their jobs. However it seems there is no shortage of people that complain about the lack of knowledge their co-workers display, and the dismal performance of interviewees. I'm sure the truth is somewhere in the middle, but it does seem that the various methods of attempting to choose the best hire from a group of potential candidates is not the science many people think it is.
"Choose the best person for the job" is a mantra that so many people espouse, but we never have a repeatable, logical method for determining who the best person is, in any industry. Most of us use some type of interview to choose a new employee, with mixed results.
Read the rest of " Do Interviews Work? " at SQLServerCentral.
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08:51:04 05/15/12
What is Big Data?
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This industry is full of some very smart people. We tend to get some very strong opinions, and some rather snarky comments at times about the way the technologies that we use are presented. Karen Lopez ( @datachick | blog ) recently made headlines with her comments on big data . "What the heck kind of definition is that?" she asked when looking at the Wikipedia definition of Big Data . If "big data" is data that is "awkward to work with" then I know lots of people that have had to deal with big data anytime they had to work with outer joins.
While I'm not sure big data is well defined, I do know that there are large data sets which can overwhelm relational databases, both in scale and the speed at which the data is collected. Microsoft added StreamInsight to SQL Server to help deal with the speed problem, but I'm not sure that relational databases can handle the size issues at the same time. Some large computing and analysis problems don't lend themselves well to non-relational soluttions, and other technologies are needed.
Read the rest of " What is Big Data? " at SQLServerCentral.
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15:33:38 05/14/12
Self Service SQL
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I was looking over the Microsoft Virtual Academy recently, and went through one of the courses they have on SQL Server for the private cloud. I was curious how this solution is being both implemented and presented. It was interesting, and I learned a few things, including the fact that Microsoft is looking to build self-service into this idea, where users can build a virtual machine from a template, with Windows, SQL Server, and more already setup. They receive a SQL Server they can use as long as they like, and can delete it when they are done with it.
There are a few problems here, and they are similar problems that we've seen in the past as we pushed out more capabilities to individual users. The first one is that allowing people to create their own SQL Server instances can be problematic as they don't do a good job of setting up maintenance. SQL Server is easy to set up, but a little more complicated to manage over time. I suppose templates could potentially have backups and maintenance built in, but if you do this with any scale, you might end up with storage and space issues as well. There's only so much automation can do with limited resources, and I could see this ending up causing more infrastructure problems over time for IT staffs.
Read the rest of " Self Service SQL " at SQLServerCentral.
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12:45:00 05/13/12
Is Software Engineering Dead?
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Is Software Engineering dead? It's a premise that's in this article from Bloomberg . It calls the job a career dead end where job prospects decline after one reaches 35 years of age. I think that's a naive view of the industry, despite the quotes from Craig Barrett and Mark Zuckerberg. While the best of the best might peak in their careers at the same age as many athletes, that doesn't imply that the career choice is a poor one.
There's a discussion on Slashdot as well, and I was struck by a few of the comments, which seem to suggest that if you are still just a "software engineer" at age 40, you aren't very good at your job. It seems that some people seem to think that everyone in this business is constantly looking to move to a new job and advance into management or they aren't successful . I saw analogies with other industries thinking that same thing, that experienced people would not still be doing the same job after 20 years.
Read the rest of " Is Software Engineering Dead? " at SQLServerCentral.
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14:42:00 05/10/12
Time for Your Career
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When I was at SQL Saturday #131 recently, I attended Will Sisney's ( @HanSQL | blog ) talk titled "6 Steps to a Stellar Performance Review" . It was a very interesting session and I agree with most of the advice that Will presented. A lot of it feels like common sense, much like my Branding presentation, but it's helpful to have someone talk you through the ideas and get you organized. I'd recommend you attend this session if you get the chance to do so.
However there was one thing in the session that struck me. One of the steps is for you to take control of your own training and make an active effort to learn more about your craft, tracking your time and efforts to present to your boss. Will says that he spends an hour a day on professional development, which sounds like a lot at first glance, but it's only 12.5% more than a 40 hour work week.
Read the rest of " Time for Your Career " at SQLServerCentral.
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14:03:00 05/09/12
Teambuilding and Bonding
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It's a joy for me to go to work. Of course, I have the advantage of working at home, and with my wife, someone whose company I enjoy. In all of the places I've worked over the years, it's been refreshing to go to work with people with whom I get along, and distressing to go see those I don't like. In places where I have a preponderance of the latter, the job is a grind that wears me out. I only keep going until I can find another place of employment.
Recently I was in Cambridge, UK for a meeting with my group at Red Gate Software . I go over once or twice a year and spend a few days with my department and a few days in the office. This time one of the days I was planning on being in the office was a "day out" for our part of the company. Twenty-some people took a bus to another town where we etched a picture and printed it during the first half of the day, and then toured the GainsBorough house and museum in the afternoon.
Read the rest of " Teambuilding and Bonding " at SQLServerCentral.
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10:46:00 05/08/12
SQL Server on RDS
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A database service in the cloud. Imagine being able to connect to SQL Server on a remote machine, without having to administer the underlying OS, and without having to change the database code that you build against your local instance? Amazon has provided that with it's Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle and MySQL, and has just added SQL Server 2008 R2 as well. Red Gate Software and SQLServerCentral are happy to partner with Amazon to announce the launch of this service.
Read the rest of " SQL Server on RDS " at SQLServerCentral.
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14:22:01 05/07/12
The Colocated Dangers
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We went down.
It was quite a surprise for me, and something that hasn't happened in a long time. It wasn't for long, but a month ago, there was a period of time when SQLServerCentral was down. It's also one of the very few times it's happened since I was in charge of the servers. The exact reason was something to do with out hardware, and it was fixed relatively quickly by our hosting provider.
Read the rest of " The Colocated Dangers " at SQLServerCentral.
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14:36:30 05/06/12
Mobile Password Protection
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I recommend people that have smartphones install a password on their phones. Not that it provides a lot of protection, but it does limit the access that a casual phone-picker-upper gets if they take the phone as a target of opportunity. I'd like to think that the average smartphone thief would wipe, or throw away your phone rather than mess with the password, and move on to easier targets.
However thieves that target your phone as a different story, and for them, getting past a four digit lock on your phone might be trivial. There are firms that help police get past codes , and I'm sure there are plenty of instructions and utilities around that a thief with decent computer skills could use. It's also likely that there are more than a few utilities available to duplicate this functionality.
Read the rest of " Mobile Password Protection " at SQLServerCentral.
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12:25:00 05/03/12
The Best Way to Learn
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I constantly see people asking the question about how they should learn more about some aspect of SQL Server. We have lots of articles here on SQLServerCentral, and there are any number of other sources on the Internet, but I've typically recommended that people buy a book. I've been an author, and I like to support authors, but that isn't why I recommend books.
When you try to learn some new topic, say Reporting Services , there is so much information you can find on Google, but it's all unorganized. It can be hard to learn without a plan, and books are usually organized in a way to walk you through a technology. That along can be valuable, and you can supplement chapters with articles you find around the web. This was the inspiration for our Stairway Series of topics, which we'll eventually compile into books at some point. The Stairway on Reporting Services , by Jessica Moss, is excellent, and if you read through it, you'll see what I mean.
Read the rest of " The Best Way to Learn " at SQLServerCentral.
01/24/12