Voice of the DBA

I've got a few certifications and quite a few more that have expired or aren't relevant. Does anyone think Windows NT 4.0 or SQL Server 6.5 matter? If you need help in those areas, ask someone else. Unless you have a crazy budget with a willingness to pay a ridiculous hourly rate.

Kamil Nowinski had a recent video discussing why IT certifications are still relevant. He had ten reasons, and if you want to watch the entire show, you'll hear his reasons and some rationale why he thinks they matter. It's a good set of reasons: keeping up with tech, practicing learning, demonstrating a commitment to some technology, finding a community of certified colleagues, and more.

Read the rest of Are IT Certifications Still Relevant?

One of the things that I've found with cloud computing services is that the people involved with managing these resources sometimes get asked to become financial accountants.

I saw an interesting post from SQL Rod asking about this new task as something all of us might need to consider a part of our job in the modern world. He asks if we are Techouncants or Accountechs? This isn't in the sense of being the Financial DBA trying to manage costs in the cloud, though that is part of his post. It's more about making smart financial decisions. Certainly, as more workloads move to the cloud, and they are for many of us, we likely need to keep an eye on costs, usage, and tuning.

Read the rest of The DBAccountant

For most of us working in technology, I think we understand that if something is broken we might need to work. Not that we have to, or we need to, but we might need to. Perhaps you feel differently, or your company approaches on-call in another way. If so, let me know today how you deal with staff being on-call.

In my career, there are jobs with formal on-call, informal on-call, or even no on-call. In the latter situation, there isn't anyone who is prepared to handle issues outside of normal working hours, but that doesn't mean if management calls you can ignore them. It's that the organization didn't expect issues. I worked in a small company (< 50 people), where we primarily had systems for people who worked in the office, and nothing was running at night (outside of backups). Normally no one knew if there was an issue overnight or on weekends, but I did get called by the owner when he went in one weekend and couldn't receive a fax on our computer system. So I guess I was the emergency-on-call person.

Read the rest of The On-Call Load

I saw a quote recently that resonated with me. It's not something I've often struggled with, but I have at times. Here's the quote:

"Life rewards action, not intelligence. Many brilliant people talk themselves out of getting started, and being smart doesn't help very much without the courage to act. You can't win if you're not in the game." - @JamesClear

Read the rest of Action Over Knowledge

Last year, I read Surrender, a book by U2 lead singer, Bono. Bill Gates listed this as one of the top books to read at one point, so I picked it up and dove in. I have enjoyed U2s music since I was in high school, and was interested to hear what made Bill Gates recommend his book. The book is partially a journey of U2, but mostly a look at how Bono's view of the world and life has changed over time.

Bono grew beyond music in his life to become an activist and try to shape the world into a better place. Whether you agree with his efforts or focus or not, it's admirable that he has tried to be more than a rich and famous singer. He's had to build more skills around how to communicate with others, convince them to take a course of action, and educate himself about the world. In trying to build these skills, he's founded or worked in organizations around his time with U2.

Read the rest of Seagull Management

Recently I traveled to visit a customer who has an in-the-office culture. They have multiple large buildings outside a major US city and almost all their employees (7000+) live nearby and are expected to be in the office the whole week. More senior people can opt for 4 10-hour shifts rather than 5 8-hour shifts, but with few exceptions, they have people in the office.

I hadn't seen that in a long time. Almost every customer is mostly remote or some level of hybrid (usually 2-3 days a week in the office). What's more, they have an open culture, with rows of desks for teams and spaces between the rows for managers and directors. No cubes!

Read the rest of Missing the Office

As I work through 2024, I found myself doing a little more vacation planning this year than in previous ones. In 2022 I traveled quite a bit, but my wife went with me often. We went to Europe 5 times that year and added quite a few vacation days around my work trips. My wife thought that was a great year.

Last year, 2023, was different. I traveled more (36 trips), with most of them being short. When I traveled that much, I wanted to end trips quickly and get back home. I learned that was too many, and also too disruptive for life. I got behind on things I needed to do at home, my wife went with me less because many trips were all work, and I lacked energy from the pace of moving all over the world.

Read the rest of When Are Your Breaks?

One of the ideas behind DevOps is that we minimize the time between code commit and deployment to production. We want to avoid work-in-progress and bottlenecks to getting our software into the hands of customers. This has led a lot of companies to release more often, albeit with smaller sets of features. The total number of things delivered under DevOps might not be greater, but it often is more targeted to those things our customers want/need/use.

However, the idea of releasing often means that we try not to stack up too much work before deploying it. What does that mean for holidays and the code freezes or no-deploy periods that many companies have? How do you implement a code freeze under DevOps?

Read the rest of The Code Freeze

I subscribe to quite a few newsletters, and one of them is for job hunters. I have a great job, maybe the best job for me, but I like to keep in touch with what's going on because I, well, I have job insecurity and worry about being without a job. I think this is leftover from childhood. I also want to know how to help others in finding their dream job.

Recently there was a question asking when it was time for a new job How can you tell (for yourself) when you should be seeking new opportunities? It might not be easy to recognize for many of you. Perhaps you don't realize there are other opportunities you might appreciate because you're comfortable. Perhaps you're the frog in water that's being heated so slowly that you don't realize how poor your current situation is for your health.

Read the rest of When is it time for a new job?

I've had a good career in database work. I've had success, and I've had some failures, fortunately the former far outpacing the latter. In my career across many companies, the code I've written has tended to work well, or at least well enough. I've managed systems and ensured a high uptime, and solved issues quickly. I have left quite a few jobs in technology, some because I was unhappy, some for better opportunities.

I was asked to leave one job. I disagreed with my boss, thought he was a jerk, and our CTO told me this person was more valuable than I was at that time. The CTO suggested I move on, so I did. That day.

Read the rest of Under the Bus

CosmosDB has been a great data platform in the Azure cloud that helps companies deal with disparate types of data. The CosmosDB APIs include those for MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, and Gremlin. These wire-level protocols let you work in a way that is compatible with those systems for storing data.

That's coming to SQL Server.

Read the rest of CosmosDB APIs Inside SQL Server 2024

I assume most of you reading this work with SQL Server, at least for some of your workday. I know there are plenty of you who also support Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, or some other database platform. The results in our (Redgate's) State of Database Landscape report showed that many organizations, indeed most, have more than one database platform in production.

This was also a theme in our Data Community Summit and Redgate Summit keynotes, where Ryan and Grant discussed their journey to learn a new platform (PostgreSQL). One, a requirement (Ryan) for a new job, and another, an opportunity (Grant) as the company focus shifted. I assume some of you out there have had similar experiences either moving towards, or away from, SQL Server.

Read the rest of The Journey to Change

There is a skill that I think DBAs and sysadmins will need to develop: cloud cost analysis. I've thought this was important for quite a few years, and I've been (unsuccessfully) lobbying for cost information to be gathered and analyzed in Redgate Monitor. Hopefully, this work will get done soon, as I see more companies asking their technical people to provide analysis and justification of the resources being billed for in the cloud.

Basecamp analyzed its costs in 2023 and decided it could save money by leaving the cloud. I've seen other companies decide they were saving money in the cloud. Many, however, are likely unsure of the total return they get compared to the costs of cloud computing. I have seen some posts (like this one) that try to help you get a handle on your costs, but there is often a lot of complexity in cloud costs when multiple departments have different accounts (AWS) or subscriptions (Azure) with a provider.

Read the rest of The Cloud Database Cost Analysis

Chocolatey Solutions Engineer Stephen Valdinger said, "DevOps isn’t something you do, but rather, it’s a way of doing things. What works for us here, may not work for you there, so you adjust." He then went on to say that DevOps is a way of working that reduces time to introduce changes, while at the same time making changes traceable, accountable, and revertable.

I've seen many companies try to copy what another company has done, especially with regards to DevOps and software development. I see companies copy the organization of teams from Amazon, Spotify, or others. Often quite a bit of time and effort is spent changing the way your development team works, and often without a lot of success.

Read the rest of Another View of DevOps

I wrote a post about Git recently since I've found far too many people who didn't know Git well (or at all) and they seemed hesitant to experiment and learn.

Is this because of being too busy? Do we have so many people who are working in tech where "it's just a job" and not because they enjoy technology? Or has management in too many places beaten people down to the point they don't want to try things? Perhaps your coworkers are resistant to change (or lazy) and you don't want to discuss new ideas with them.

Read the rest of An Experimental Mindset

Re-platforming is the process of moving a system to a new platform. Imagine taking an ASP.NET/SQL Server website and moving to Azure Functions on Azure SQL Database. Or maybe taking a Java client/server app with Oracle and moving it to a series of microservices against MongoDB. Those changes could be a net benefit to your organization in the end, but they aren't quick or easy. They're often fraught with various challenges that can cause a lot of stress while creeping over budget.

There's a post that talks about some of the things you might think about if you embark upon a re-platform. Often this takes place when an organization is looking to modernize their tech stack. Quite a few of the technology DevOps success stories take place when the older structures are not maintainable, but also not able to handle increased workloads or performance requirements.

Read the rest of Re-platforming

Legislation was introduced in Australia to allow employees to protect themselves from unreasonable calls and emails from work during off-hours. You can read more about it, but a bill was passed to allow employees to ignore calls and messages without repercussion  It is expected to pass, though I don't expect this to do a lot for bad bosses. They'll find ways to hint or imply that you need to respond, and might even remove your chances of advancement/promotion/raises. While you can sue, that rarely works out well for anyone.

From the various reports I've seen, I'm not sure if this includes salaried workers or just hourly workers. I certainly think hourly workers ought to be paid if they're called after hours. I've even been paid as a salaried worker if the calls outside of core hours exceeded a certain amount per week. That seemed fair to me, and in our team, there was always someone willing to work more for extra money, so I could trade on-call work if I didn't want to do it.

Read the rest of Protecting Off Hours

Redgate released the results of their State of Database Landscape recently, and I was part of a webinar where Beca Parker, Ryan Booz, and I discussed the results. As we were talking, one of the things that struck me was the high number of people who had picked skills as being a challenge for their organization. In a single environment, skillset requirements and training were the number one challenge, and it was listed as the number one obstacle to implementing a DevOps approach.

While this industry is full of self-taught individuals who have spent time learning new technologies and tools, it's somewhat amazing that training continues to be an issue. Many organizations limit their training budgets and time allocated to employees while continuing to expand the number of technologies and platforms they use. This is one reason why I think changing database platforms to avoid licensing costs is unlikely to save you money anytime soon. Retraining staff and developing competence takes time. Perhaps this is also one reason why many companies look to the cloud, thinking that they can reduce the amount of upskilling needed by their staff if the cloud vendor manages the systems.

Read the rest of Growing Skills at Work

The title of our keynote session at the Redgate Summit in Atlanta is Navigating the Database Landscape, and I'll be delivering part of the talk, along with Grant Fritchey and Kathi Kellenberger today, Mar 13. This is based on the State of Database Landscape Survey results, as well as our experience working with customers and implementing DevOps solutions over the last decade. The talk was mostly written by others, but as I rehearsed the session, I found myself wondering about how I'd approach my job if we returned to being a DBA or developer.

When working in technology today, there are many challenges outside of actually learning about any of the particular products, languages, platforms, etc. We have the politics of working with others, ongoing work, emergency requests outside of channels, random questions asked by others, code reviews, and probably a few other things I'm forgetting, all outside of learning any new skills. While I consider myself a lifelong learner, I know that finding time (and energy) to acquire the basics of any new technology is challenging.

Read the rest of Navigating the Database Landscape

I saw this on one of the syndicated SQL Server Central blogs: Job Description of a DBA. This is mostly a list of things, but it covers a lot of the general types of things that many of us expect a DBA to do. However, my question is whether you think this is a good description for a job opening. Would you ask someone to fill this list of things?

Maybe a better question is whether you could use this to evaluate candidates, and how would you go about asking questions or gauging a fit based on this. Perhaps you should ask yourself how you evaluate others and if there is a good way to rate them against a list of daily tasks.

Read the rest of Is This a Good DBA Job Description?

When I started working for a living, there were secretaries in many organizations. These were people who actually did a lot of correspondence (written or verbal) and busy work for managers or executives. Over time, as email and computers became commonplace on desks, I saw fewer of these positions. As more people started to send email, we had to actually alter software to allow assistants to impersonate their bosses and manage the volume of communications that many of us deal with.

We're in a new age of assistants with the emergence of Generative AIs powered by LLMs that can appear to respond in a conversational style to requests and perform actions on our behalf. In this new era, will AIs function as old-style secretaries, handling simple, but important tasks? Are they the trusted helpers that secretaries used to be for many executives? Are we all going to have an assistant, and do we want one, or need one?

Read the rest of Assistants in the Age of AI

It can be hard to find candidates for positions these days. I know there are a lot of people looking for jobs, but are they the ones you want? Are they a good fit for your team? Those are hard questions to answer when culling through resumes, conducting phone screens, and sitting in interview rooms asking questions from a template. What can be even harder is to compare different candidates when multiple people may interact with the candidates. Even if you do all the work, you're busy. Can you make good comparisons of different individuals that you've spoken to across a few weeks, in between all the real work you're trying to get done?

I know I've struggled to do this, no matter how many notes I take or how long the discussions are with other team members. I have had a very mixed bag of success in hiring.

Read the rest of Creating Candidate Interest

AI (Artificial Intelligence) systems and technology has been all over our industry for the past year or so, ever since ChatGPT released the initial public version in late 2022. It seems that there is a lot of hype around the possibilities, with plenty of excitement and skepticism, depending on who is talking about the tech. However, there do seem to be some places where the technology is working well, and security is one of them.

There is an article about how Microsoft is using AI to help spot ransomware, which seemed to have run rampant a few years ago. It's still around, though it seems fewer exploits are being publicized. That might be because systems are better protected, perhaps there are fewer attacks (unlikely), or maybe more organizations are getting better at covering up their issues. They might be better prepared to restore backups or quicker to pay a ransom.

Read the rest of Using AI for Security

The inspiration for this was a piece about the art of the good code review. Throughout my career, I've seen code reviews grow and change. From formal meetings to automated notifications and asynchronous discussions to complete lip service to the process. I'd like to think that most organizations are beyond the latter and there is some sort of review beyond the developer, but I still see a lack of other eyes looking at code before it's deployed, especially database code.

The article above opens with the idea of why we review code. The main reason is to create ownership, or more specifically, shared ownership. I had never thought of it in these terms, even though I think the ideas of standards and patterns are certainly shared items. Having everyone take ownership not only keeps quality high but could help you share knowledge and also ensure everyone feels a responsibility to safeguard all the code. This also helps everyone keep an eye on the larger picture of the entire codebase.

Read the rest of The Art of the Code Review

About ten years ago my sister-in-law broke the screen on her mobile phone. She'd had an older iPhone and when she went to upgrade, none of the upgrade processes worked because her OS was so far behind that they couldn't transfer her information smoothly. She had been avoiding OS updates because they interrupted her life, but that was now a problem because the world had marched so far beyond her version that there weren't tools, or at least, no one was interested in trying to perform an upgrade across multiple OS versions (I think it was 3 or 5 versions).

I ran into this recently with someone else I knew, but not for a mobile phone. For TFS 2015. This customer had been working along with this older system and is finally ready to upgrade to Azure DevOps in the cloud. They wanted to know if they could somehow upgrade the TFS database and move all that data easily into the cloud. I said this wasn't likely easy as this isn't an upgrade, but an export and import of a lot of data. Microsoft offered a path, but it was multiple upgrades before an export/import, which was deemed too expensive. Right now, I'm not sure what they're doing to do.

Read the rest of The Dangers of Not Upgrading

No, I don't have a way to license a SQL Server instance for your application for free. Microsoft still charges for production workloads. However, there are several ways that you can do development or testing for free, or at a greatly reduced cost. Bob Ward spent a bit of time researching options and he's written a post that outlines a number of your options. It's very comprehensive and I know a lot of us are grateful to Bob for summarizing our options.

As I work with developers in organizations, there are often questions about the licensing for dev editions. This comes up more with Oracle than other platforms, but SQL Server does get asked about. We made a decision to support SQL Server Developer Edition in Redgate Clone, which is in line with what Bob's post above says: this edition is for developers (and it's free). There is one caveat here, which I never knew. The licensing guide says you cannot build test data and move that into production. I'm assuming this doesn't mean you can't create a list of US states, countries in the world, or statuses. I think this means something more substantial, but if anyone knows, let me know.

Read the rest of Free SQL Server

I drive a Tesla Model Y and love it. They're not for everyone and not for every situation, but I think it's the best car I've owned. My wife feels the same way, and if we had a need for two cars, we'd likely get another one. The car is fun, and I look forward to getting in and moving around town. If you have questions about owning an EV or a Model Y, please feel free to ask.

The car isn't perfect, and there are things I wish I could change. There have also been a few recalls on the car, which is interesting for a Tesla. A few of these recalls meant that I got a software update a few days or weeks later and something changed. There was another recall recently, which affects most Tesla vehicles in the US. I'm sure that by the time you read this, I'll have a software update applied and the issue will be resolved.

Read the rest of Visual Design for Safety

As a hobby, I coach volleyball for kids. Each year I meet new kids and parents and talk about my philosophy. Part of that is that I teach skills, athletics, how to compete, and more. However, I do emphasize as well that I'm trying to build better people, not just athletes. I want these kids to be better prepared for life, for job interviews, for future teachers and coaches, and for better relationships.

While I'm not perfect, or maybe not even a great person, I do try to improve myself on a regular basis. Or at least learn to be a better person to others. This isn't because of any ideal or goal, but because life is more fun when I have more skills. Whether that's working with objects or interacting with people. The smoother things go, the more I enjoy the world.

Read the rest of Advice To Be a Better Person

I heard a joke years ago that went something like this. When a developer gets a pull request for code review that's 100 lines long, they will open the file(s), look at the code, and ensure standards are being followed. They might run some code, they'd walk through the algorithm in their mind, and spend 10, 20, or more minutes examining how the change is built. If you give them a code review of 1000 lines, they'll just assume it's great and approve it in seconds.

I know that many developers don't find that funny. Often I meet people that think they're professional and they spend the time needed to examine the changes and ensure they work. I'm sure that many people do this often, and some people are very meticulous about their evaluation of the change. However, everyone gets busy and I know that often depending on who submitted the PR and how busy the reviewers are, the joke does reflect reality. The longer the PR, the less likely someone will either a) spend the time to carefully review it, or b) catch small mistakes.

Read the rest of Large PRs are Bad

I have learned to really appreciate and enjoy Slack as a messaging tool. It's something I use daily, and a place where many inside my company communicate about all sorts of issues. There certainly can be an overload of channels, but for me, I add and prune channels regularly and it's a good way to segregate conversations.

I didn't feel that way when I started. At first, I resisted using it. Now I couldn't imagine not having it, but not everyone feels the same way. There's an article about a SaaS provider moving their company off Slack and instead using the Basecamp project management platform and keeping communications inside there.

Read the rest of Better Communication Through Less Messaging

In the past, many businesses hired employees whose role was deciding which prices to charge for their goods or services. At one point, organizations largely set prices based on their costs, though over time they tend to look at their competitors and set similar prices. If, however, management from multiple companies went into a room and determined prices, this would be price-fixing.

Price fixing is illegal. In many countries, we would not allow different companies to work together in a way that might reduce competition or take advantage of consumers. However, that might be a struggle in the future as we find companies using various services to help them manage their systems.

Read the rest of The Danger of Sharing Data

I had never heard of a vector database. I assumed this was a specialist type of database used for a particular problem domain, like a streaming database or graph database. There is a need for specialized platforms in certain situations, but I wasn't sure what a vector was. The description I saw for a vector database was that they "... are specifically designed to work with the unique characteristics of vector embeddings. They index data in a way that makes it easy to search and retrieve objects according to their numerical values."

That sounds like any database. However, I saw a few more articles on the hype and then some details about the ways in which this type of database is helpful. Essentially, this is a database designed to store the outputs from various Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) models that examine unstructured data. Things like images, video, audio, and even text are turned into numerical values, or vectors. The vector database is designed to help index and then search these vectors.

Read the rest of The Rise of Vector Databases

Monitoring your SQL Server instances is important to ensure you can meet your SLAs. Availability, performance, reliability, quality, whatever you care about, it's important that whoever is responsible is looking at how the database is performing. At Redgate, we have multiple teams working on SQL Monitor to enhance and grow it to meet your needs.

A short while ago there was an internal conversation recently about page life expectancy. We've had some customers ask about this and setting alerts to watch this value. Our developers and sales engineers asked for a few thoughts from Grant and others on how to respond. There are a variety of opinions, some saying monitor it, some saying don't bother.

Read the rest of The Complexity of Metrics

The US was hit with a number of storms over the Christmas holiday weekend. This disrupted air travel for many airlines and their customers, but one of the worst hit was Southwest Airlines. They accounted for most of the cancellations, over half of their scheduled flights at one point.

A number of places reported talking with Southwest employees who blamed the lack of tech investment by Southwest over time, noting this caught up with them. The Chief Operating Officer disagreed, saying that their scheduling system is the best in the world, even as the CEO noted that their scheduling software couldn't keep up and they fell back to manual operations.

Read the rest of Forgoing Tech Investments

One of the sales managers at Redgate Software posted an origin story about how he came to work at Redgate Software. It's an interesting story, and while I don't work in sales or have the same origin story, I don't know that I could have seen the place I'm in now early in my career.

When I saw the video, it made me think of this movie scene, where Rafiki asks us to look beyond what we see. I think this is a hard thing for many of us, especially when many of us have been leaning on our skills in the past. What we know and what we are good at doing has led us to this place. Picking a new direction, or thinking in a new way might be hard.

Read the rest of Look Beyond What You See

Hacker News is a forum for experienced developers. While I think plenty of beginners lurk there, the discussions seem to be dominated by those who have worked in the technology or software industries for years. I saw an interesting article that noted Hacker News doesn't seem to discuss certifications and backed up the claim with some search results that show few results for various terms.

I think that many experienced people working in technology are wary of certifications. With a little practical experience, one quickly realizes how little certifications actually do to prove you know how to work with a platform, or with code. Most companies that hire someone with a certification will need to allocate some time to training them how to work on their systems. To be fair, this is the case with a college degree as well.

Read the rest of The Future of Certifications

At some point during my career sharing files and links in email became a security concern. There were all sorts of malware problems and issues that spread throughout organizations because someone unknowingly clicked on or forwarded a malicious item. At a couple of large organizations, we had to turn off email for days while we cleaned out systems. Fortunately, antivirus and other types of scanning software improved to prevent most of these problems.

It seems that not all developers learned the lessons of the past. Microsoft Teams has a few vulnerabilities inside it based on link sharing in the chats. One of the issues is that the preview features aren't well implemented, though Microsoft security doesn't think this is a problem as a user would notice the link would be incorrect. I think that's a huge leap and not a very safe one to make.

Read the rest of Teams Security Issues

Today is the Redgate annual award event, and I'm honored to be hosting again. I've been asked a few times, and I used to look forward to the gathering in Cambridge followed by our annual Christmas party. Last year this was virtual, as it is this year, so I'm hosting again from my home office. Not what I had hoped would happen, but I'll have some fun. Last year I had a number of shirt changes between my parts, and I may do that again.

I know there are often annual sales awards in many companies, usually with some vacation or prize being given out, but not a lot outside of the sales department. In most of my jobs, we've usually had some sort of holiday party, but nothing else for most employees.

Read the rest of Acknowledging Success

When the COVID-19 Pandemic grew rapidly in early 2020, medical supplies were in short supply. Different areas and organizations struggled with different types of issues, and one of the higher profile issues was with ventilators. In March, the projections were dire and quite a few hospitals were worried about the supplies of these devices. This was especially disconcerting given how many people were being placed on them and how long it takes to produce them.

I met someone at that time that said getting a car company to produce these wasn't possible. The factories were specialized and converting machinery and people wasn't something that could be done in months. This was someone that claimed to have over 30 years of manufacturing experience.

Read the rest of Pulling Together

I've preached the value of Version Control Systems (VCS) for many years now. In various writings, in the talks I've given on development, CI, DevOps, and more, I always talk about the value of a VCS. One thing I often say is that if someone won't use version control, they aren't a professional. I don't say professional developer, professional DBA, or anything else. You're not a technology professional without knowing how to use a VCS in 2020. You certainly can't work for me if you won't use one.

I saw a nice, short post from Kevin Chant on the ways in which a SQL Server professional can benefit from a VCS. Many of us working with SQL Server aren't developers, we may not be some DevOps engineer. We might be someone that manages systems or handles backups. We might be someone that deals with complex HA, DR, or replication processes. We may be report writers or ETL developers.

Read the rest of Build the VCS Habit

I made a quick trip to Pensacola recently for SQL Saturday #884. I had a great time and consider myself honored to be picked to speak, as well as lucky that I can make the trip. I didn't have a smooth trip, as I wrote on my blog, but things worked out. These were really first world problems and minor hassles for me.   When I wrote my blog, I was thinking about all the data I received, and didn't receive on the trip. Across the last few years, United (my primary airline) has enhanced their apps and services to share more data with travelers. I get text reminders two hours before flights, which is usually my drop dead time to leave the house for the airport. A good reminder for me. I get an announcement when boarding starts. I'm usually there, but if I'm late, or busy in an airport trying to find food, coffee, or a restroom, this is a great reminder.

Read the rest of Data Challenges and Travel

I ran across a data breach at Dow Jones, the parent company of the Wall Street Journal newspaper. Apparently there was a database export that was stored on an Amazon S3 bucket. A security researcher discovered this and notified the company. Once the issue was corrected, the article linked above was published.

The details note that the security on the bucket was set to authenticated users, which is good. So, some security was set up. To me, if I were operating in an Azure or AWS environment, I would assume this meant authenticated users in my subscription/account/etc. In other words, my business partners and employees.

Read the rest of Who Are Your Authenticated Users?

Monitoring a database server is something that many of us know is important, but we often take the process for granted. Whether we've purchased a tool, like SQL Monitor, or we've built our own system, we often set up a watcher for our systems and rarely view the details unless something goes wrong. I'm not sure that's the wrong approach as part of the reason monitoring is set up is to allow data capture in the background and remove one more task from our daily workload.

Monitoring isn't necessarily simple, however, and while I still debate the best way to do this in many organizations, I realize that monitoring isn't necessarily something I want to build in house. There is enough work to just work with the data that other systems might output that I really want some other software in place that is built to perform monitoring for specific technologies. In reading about the complexity for the Stack Overflow monitoring systems, I realize that this can become very complex for a "set it up and let it run in the background" configuration.

Read the rest of The Devil is in the Monitoring Details

I haven't thought about this in some time, but Brent Ozar raises an interesting question: should index changes require change control? I've worked in an organization that didn't consider an index change to be an item that was presented as an official change. They were seen somewhat like adding new users or changing a firewall rule. These were ticket requests that could be triaged and made by an individual group without notifying the rest of IT.

I've also worked in organisations where an index change was viewed as a deployment and subject to change control procedures. Not that the network or security people cared about the details of the index, though the help desk might. These just wanted to be aware as any deployment change could affect their departments.

Read the rest of Are Indexes Actually Changes to the System?

A few weeks ago I gave a presentation at the 24 Hours of Pass Summit Preview. During my session, a demo broke and I had to ignore it. Later I found the issue and blogged about it. What was neat for me is that I didn't need to keep my code up or apps open, but I still found the issue quickly. I found it because I have a DevOps process that instruments and tracks everything.

This happened to me a few years ago. I was at a SQL Saturday and demoing one of the Redgate tools. There was an error and I couldn't move changes to a downstream database, which threw me off. That was the point of the talk. I decided to debug on stage (or behind the podium in this case), looking through the logs. Within a few minutes, I had found the issue and solved it. A real life DevOps story in action.

Read the rest of DevOps is Really Helpful

I think PowerShell is a great addition to the Microsoft stack. Given the previous versions of VBScript, Perl and Python ports, and more on Windows, PowerShell is a great improvement. Even for someone that spent a lot of time in the C Shell and Bourne Shell as a student and young professional, I think PowerShell is an improvement. There are certainly still things that make me crazy about PoSh, such as the -eq, but I'm getting more comfortable with the structures and flow.

In SQL Server, we had the old SQLPS module, which was, well, a start. Then we got the SqlServer module, which is better. However, the best thing I've seen for us data professionals is the dbatools project from Chrissy LaMaire (@cl) and company. To me, this is incredibly useful for anyone that wants to use PoSh with SQL Server, but it's really indespensible for SQL Server migrations from instance to instance. I'm not sure I'd even try anything else at this point.

Read the rest of A Great Case for Powershell

Every few years, or every year now, we see a new version of SQL Server proclaimed as the best ever. A few weeks ago, I saw a number of people leaving hte MVP Summit, rating it as the best ever summit. At SQL Bits or the PASS Summit every year, there's no shortage of people posting about that event being the best conference.

Is this a human view, that the latest one is often the best one ever if we enjoyed it? Perhaps we learn something and we're excited about the latest new SQL thing and so we're excited to proclaim it the best?

Read the rest of The Best Ever

I've been working through some of the GDPR legislation, trying to find ways to explain this more clearly to customers and ensure that our products make sense in light of this law taking effect. Redgate is focused in this area and not only do we need to ensure we are compliant, but we also want to ensure we are building tools that help ensure you are compliant.

In article 14, there's this text: "the controller shall provide the data subject with the following information... the existence of automated decision-making, including ... meaningful information about the logic involved." That sounds a little concerning for those of us that work with data. It's not always easy, but we can explain how a SUM or AVG function works, even with a complex OVER() clause and lots of joins and criteria. 

Read the rest of An AI Loophole

My employer licenses software to users. Many of you might have SQL Compare, SQL Prompt, or one of our other handy products. If you do, you might have noticed that we have a Redgate login for you that shows your licenses and lets you activate/deactivate them. This was surprisingly a big project across the last year to streamline and smooth our licensing process.

Early on, I realized this was an issue in one company I where I worked. This was during the 1990s and I started working at a small company with a fancy imaging system. We had purchased software to receive all our faxes as images and file them in a digital system. I'm sure we had one of the smallest (and cheapest) installations of this software, which one of our executives had managed to negotiate. However, the exec had left the company and a few months into my tenure, I needed support.

Read the rest of "Who's Licensed?"

The cloud is a term that's full of hype. We hear from various media outlets all the time: the cloud is the answer, the cloud is cheaper, the cloud is the way of the future, the cloud handles your DR, the cloud managers availability, and more. Microsoft has been pushing the message of "cloud-first" (and mobile-first), which has many SQL Server professionals confused, concerned, or  even angry. There are also plenty of professionals that dismiss the idea of cloud anything when it comes to data.

I've felt similar emotions, and certainly I have been skeptical of the cloud versions of databases. I remember the first cloud service, a key-value store, which seemed woefully inadequate for most purposes. Since they I've seen the Azure SQL Database grow, and many other products get released. Across that time, I've become more and more impressed with what Microsoft has done, and as Visual Studio Team Services has expended, I've come to really embrace and get excited by the cloud. It's still not something I'd always recommend, but I would always start there.

Read the rest of "The Cloud is Just a Tool"

A few years ago, I had a keyboard die. At the time, I needed something quickly and ended up with a Logitech wireless model that included a mouse. I'm not sure of which model, but I've ended up getting two or three more Logitech devices over the years. I think I go through a keyboard every 18-24 months, though the mice seem to last longer. For me, having devices available without cords is more important for the mouse than the keyboard, but since Logitech will bundle them, I get both at the same time. I'm currently with a K350 keyboard and an M510 mouse, both of which seem to hold up well.

However, I'm at home, usually working alone, so I haven't been concerned much about security. In corporate environments, I remember playing jokes by moving someone's mouse to my desk, and giving them a disconnected replacement, trying to mimic their movement. Or doing the same with a keyboard. That's a great typing challenge if you ever try it.

I thought about those times when I read this piece on the security of wireless keyboards, or maybe the lack of security. Apparently a relatively simple device can intercept and replace, or just record, keystrokes made on a variety of keyboards. These devices use their own dongles, not a Bluetooth connection, and security is non-existent. Perhaps I'll take one to the Redgate office this fall and see who's actually vulnerable.

Read the rest of "Keyboard Hardlines"

I saw a note from someone that had a database set up in a High Availability (HA) configuration for production. This person had received an 823 error on the primary server, but a failover hadn't occurred. This wasn't a critical error, but one that noted some anomolies in a few pages, which potentially could be fixed by the automatic page repair in SQL Server. 

In this case, the individual would have liked to have had the system fail over, just in case there were a chance this would impact production. To make this happen, an alert on the error would be needed, which then forced a failover. This wasn't part of the native SQL Server configuration, and this individual was concerned. However, there are certainly cases where a failover might not be warranted when there is some sort of reaction such as Automatic Page Repair. 

Read the rest of "Failover"

The march to the cloud is inevitable. No, I don't think all your services will be run from a cloud service, but I do think that some of them will be. Maybe 10% for your company, maybe 90%, but likely somewhere in between. In the efforts to reduce costs, and maybe more likely, the idea of shifting costs to expenses, I would bet that most organiztions will take serious looks at the cloud in the next decade for a significant portion of all new services. They might not move most applications, but they'll think about it.

I saw a note recently on Geekwire that Azure is estimated to exceed  Amazon Web Services (AWS) by 2019. Most of us might not care about the race between these two tech giants to build large cloud infrastructures, but their capital expenditure is based on the idea that your organizations will want to use some of those services. They have good reasons to think this with surveys and conversations with many of their customers.

Read the rest of "The Relentless Cloud"

I was reading through a list of links for Database Weekly and ran across this script from Pinal Dave, looking for tables where the clustered index isn't the PK. It struck me that this is one of those facts I consider to be so simple, yet I constantly see people confusing. If you click the Primary Key icon in the SSMS/VS designers, or you specify a PK like this:

"The Clustered Index is not the Primary Key"

If you pay attention to security issues in software, you've probably heard about man-in-the-middle attacks. These can occur more frequently than you expect, though inside of a company, it's more unlikely that you'll experience one if you have some fairly basic security controls on your network.

However, if you invite someone inside of your network, such as a consultant of some sort, you should be more vigilent. There's a great post showing how someone can execute a MITM attack against SQL Server. It's in depth, showing exactly how packet captures lead to the ability to hijack a session and create a new login.

Read the rest of "Track Your Consultants"

Could a group of software developers make changes that fundamentally alter the way a software system should work without management being aware?

That's the question being asked of VW right now. Most people are skeptical, but I ran across a piece that wants to lend credence to the idea that a few software engineers acted with few people being aware. They did this, not because they wanted to defraud everyone, but they wanted a solve a problem that they couldn't do in other ways. They also didn't see the alteration of test results as much of an issue because they thought the tests were too stringent.

Read the rest of "Rogue Software Changes"

I grew up using a command line for all of my computing. I started with a Commodore VIC-20 as a youth, moving on to Apple IIs, TRS-80s, and then OpenVMS in university classes. It wasn't until I started doing graduate work that I started to enjoy graphics in the X Window System, though many of my windows just ran bash and korn shells on SunOS. Since that time, I've mostly made my living in Microsoft Windows and OSX, using graphical programs. I've still been quick to open a command shell at times, but not too often.

However there have been times when I've needed PuTTY to access remote machines, or I've had to struggle with some PowerShell remote commands. What would be nice is to have some of these tools on every machine. I love PowerShell available, but it's often a pain when I encounter a new machine.

"The Command Line is Back"

In July the T-SQL Tuesday theme was defaults. There were lots of posts about various items, but I found one by Kevin Kline interesting. Kevin noted that the settings for model are not necessarily what many of us would want in production.

Is that really the case? This week I wanted to take a poll and see if many of you actually do create defaults for your new databases by changing model that are different than what Microsoft has done.

Read the rest of "Adjusting Model"

I'm not surprised, and I had expected to read about something like this much sooner. Apparently someone at the ride sharing company, Uber, posted a security key online in a GitHub distribution. I assume this was some sort of code repository for Uber that may or may not have been supposed to be shared publicly, but having used GitHub, I could see someone making a mistake and accidentally putting private code in the public space.

Uber is worried as the key is a security authorization key used to access their databases. Someone apparently downloaded Uber database files and now Uber is attempting to track them down. The whole situation is a mess, but there are a number of problems here that we could learn from.

Read the rest of "Source Code Security" at SQLServerCentral.

I ran across a review of a developer's first year at a company. The company is endjin and the poster describes their first year as a "software engineer apprentice," which is an interesting way to look at one's early career. While it's not for everyone, I suspect that many developers in this business could actually use a bit of apprentice time to solidify their foundation of knowledge.

The post talks more about the way in which the work is done than the actual tools involved. A few are mentioned, but this is really a look back at the philosophical way in which the company solves problems. More importantly, it's the view of an apprentice learning a trade.

Read the rest of "Software Engineering in Practice" at SQLServerCentral.

It seems that software always contains bugs. No matter how much time and effort is spent building an application, there will be issues. Sometimes this is because of a lack of testing, and sometimes this is because of poor testing, but in any case, the expectation that we will test our code is becoming more prevalent as we depend more and more on computer software. Users expect our software to work.

It seems there is never enough time to properly test software after it is complete. Perhaps your deadlines are too tight, perhaps there aren't enough resources to devote to comprehensive testing processes, but it really doesn't matter. We will never have enough resources in our QA and testing teams to do as much testing as we would like. We need to expect this and find ways to raise the quality of our work, given those constraints.

Read the rest of "Testing" at SQLServerCentral.

It's the slow time of year. As I saw tweeted recently, "And now for the month when nothing gets done." I haven't usually felt this way at a few jobs as the budget and planning process has typically been a part of a busy month. As I've run SQLServerCentral, I've also been looking back and forward this month, trying to think about our industry and data in a long term way. I have found December to be frenetic as times as I try to get in some ski days while still getting work done.

However this year I've been in a situation that I think many people get into. I had a number of vacation days I needed to take, so I scheduled them a day here and there across the weeks. Between being off for Thanksgiving week, and missing almost the complete last two weeks of the year, I'm finding it a bit difficult to get into the swing of things as I have a few days back at work. It seems that work naturally slows down in teams as various people take holiday time off, but this is the first time that I've struggled to actually get my own work done as I'm in and out of the office on an irregular schedule.

Read the rest of "Holiday Struggles" at SQLServerCentral.

I ran into someone recently that told me they were scared at their job. This person had built a number of ETL jobs to move data around between systems. They were trained as a developer, but had a little experience, got sucked into working with SQL Server, and had made a career without really considering themselves a DBA. They seemed a bit bewildered that they hadn't messed up the data in any of their employer's systems.

I've met quite a few people like that, who seem amazed to be trusted to accomplish the work they do on a regular basis. It's good that many people can go through a career in SQL Server and successfully accomplish the things their employer needs done. However there's no shortage of "scary DBAs" out there that are in over their heads and do cause damage to data and systems.

Read the rest of "The Real Scary DBAs" at SQLServerCentral.

Most of us that are data professionals think the best way to make decisions is to use data to justify some course of action. We look for patterns in data, some guidance that the information we have will lead us to make the best choice for our organization. Google has talked about making data driven decisions as a part of their success and they think more organizations should do this. Any number of other companies also use data to power their BI systems and dashboards that help their employees make better choices.

That seems in contrast to this piece from the Harvard Business Review that says that great decisions don't start with data. It talks about using stories and emotions, with a few key facts sprinkled in, to help sell ideas and get decisions made. On one hand I agree that stories help to sell decisions, but I often have found that successful salespeople use this technique to deceive and convince by plucking emotional heartstrings, and using relatively little data.

Read the rest of "Data Decisions or Instinct?" at SQLServerCentral.

The DevOps movement is supposed to promote a closer collaboration between developers, testers, operational people, and really anyone else that must help software gets build and deployed. The developers need to coordinate their needs and requirements with operational staff. They should work early on with any staff performing testing to help them ensure that bugs are caught quickly and fewer slip through to production. At the same time, operational staff should be responsive  and helpful in all the environments software moves through. Operational staff should help build and automate the configuration of development and testing environments, ensuring that systems are built in a repeatable fashion as well as the same way in each stage of the software development pipline.

This is my last day of work this quarter as I start my sabbatical at 5 o'clock today. I'll be gone for the next six weeks, away from SQLServerCentral, trying to improve and grow myself while staying as unwired as I can during that time. The rest of the staff here at SQLServerCentral will pick up the load, and I'm sure everything will be fine.

This is a bit scary for me. I've pretty much been employed full time since I was 17, only taking a few, short, involuntary stretches of unemployment in almost 30 years. Even during those times without a job I was focused on finding a job almost every day, so it felt as if I still had the job of finding a job during those times. I'm nervous about taking the time off, and certainly worried a bit about SQLServerCentral as I'm not sure I've been away from the site for more than a week since it was founded.

Read the rest of "Farewell" at SQLServerCentral.

I applied the Windows 8.1 update a few weeks ago and had some issues with my machine. Windows was fine, but I lost my SQL Server service. A few other users, including some of the SQLServerCentral community also had issues and sent me ideas, but their fixes didn't work for me. That was OK because the problems gave me a chance to use PoSh to solve a real problem. I'll be blogging about that in the next week.

However the 8.1 update has caused lots of issues, and Microsoft is acknowledging these problems. That's good, but the process gives me pause, and to a large extent, I think this makes more and more people suspect about all of Microsoft's patching processes. I bet there are companies that feel even more justified in waiting for SP1 for SQL Server 2014 before upgrading, even though there is a chance that the patch itself will cause problems.

Read the rest of "Patching Problems" at SQLServerCentral.

The Surface 3 was announced last week, and I was underwhelmed by the event, especially the presentation itself. The entire spectable didn't seem to compare to some other companies' announcements. I did, however, find myself thinking about replacing my laptop with a tablet that's lighter and allows me to forgo a keyboard. As much as I use a keyboard and depend on a responsive set of keys to get work done, there are definitely times when I'd like to just have a screen, and certainly a lighter form factor.

Today is Memorial Day in the US, and I'll be outside in a variety of situations today. Every year my son recognizes and remembers our soldiers at a Memorial Day ceremony with his fellow Boy Scouts. I like to capture some photos and video of the occasion, as well as track which Scouts are supposed to be there and have actually shown up. I can do it on a phone, but a laptop is too cumbersome. A tablet is actually the best option. It seems funny to use a larger device, but being able to capture and playback video on a tablet for others is much nicer than using a small phone.

Read the rest of "Laptop Dreams" at SQLServerCentral.

Have you ever had a development server crash? Have you lost work because of this? Had delays or had to recreate code? You shouldn't, or at least you shouldn't lose much work or time..

There was a time when I offered to manage backups on all development servers. This was in a large environment with hundreds of instances.  I wasn't worried. I had scripts to do the work of setting up, running, and reporting on backups for instances. I knew how to deploy these scripts to hundreds of servers.

Read the rest of "The Development Backup" at SQLServerCentral.

Tim O'Reilly has written some great pieces over the years on many aspects of technology and change. I've followed him for years and I've enjoyed many of his thoughts and views on our industry. I think he's thoughtful and truly envisions the amazing things that technology can do to change the world, mostly for the better. I think it's worth randomly reading through (or listening to) some of his thoughts.

He recently wrote a long piece on the failures he's had in business with his company, O'Reilly Media. It's an interesting tale that looks at process, at mis-communications, and business. I think about my career, looking back on past decisions, looking at the way in which companies I've been associated with are run, and at the way that others around me have worked. I realize that there are many failures to go with the successes in my life. The piece made me take a good, hard look at my past, drawing parallels to the ways in which leadership at O'Reilly has worked as well as how it has come up short.

Read the rest of "Failure" at SQLServerCentral.

This essay isn't quite Safe For Work (SFW) and might offend a few people, so be warned, but I found it somewhat humorous. It's a look at all the insanity and problems with programming and software in the world. It certainly makes me glad that those of us working on software don't actually build tangible objects like bridges.

However the piece did make me think a bit. Why do we have so conflict and strange practices in many software systems? Why haven't we decided upon more good security practices that we widely disseminate? Why doesn't much of our code follow established patterns, like those that we might use to build a bridge?

Read the rest of "Why Don't We Have Better Practices?" at SQLServerCentral.

I was talking with some data professionals recently about training and the value of college, work, or some other method of entering the technology business. I have a few thoughts about the different ways of teaching people about this business, and I'm curious what you think.

What do you think of traditional computer science? Colleges have students study computer science theories, languages, and more. Build small software projects, write pieces of operating systems and more as part of their curriculum. Students also still have the requirements of other core classes like science, language arts, etc., but does this train them well? I almost think that students ought to be charged with working on real projects, perhaps open source projects, and tackling some small part of the system. Perhaps an older student needs to do project management work, or architectural specifications for less experienced students that are actually programming. Is that good preparation for the real world?

Read the rest of "Better Training" at SQLServerCentral.

There's likely a call for speakers open somewhere near you. When I was early in my career, I'd see these calls at large conferences like Comdex, TechEd, even the PASS Summit, and I'd think I'd never get the chance to present, with the best of the best speakers being accepted and no chance that I would be chosen. Things have changed in the world with the growth of SQL Saturday, there are a dozen open calls right now, all around the world, with many opportunities for new people to give a presentation.

When Andy Warren came up with the idea for SQL Saturday, the idea was that we would mostly find local speakers to help present at the event. We thought it might be expensive, and hard, to get the same speakers that present at larger conferences. This event would give many of the talented DBAs in local areas the chance to speak to larger audiences than they get at many user groups. SQL Saturday has been so successful, and the growth is amazing. We've started to see more and more well known speakers traveling substantial distances to attend events. That's great, but I do worry about the lack of local speakers at some events I've attended.

Read the rest of "Calling Local Speakers" at SQLServerCentral.

One of the most important things that you can do as a DBA, or really as any sort of system administrator, is back up your system.Ensuring that you have have backups, and of course, that you can restore them, is the number one priority for sysadmins. Everything else that you need to do is second to backups. After all, backups ensure you still have a system after a disaster. If you can't do that, then security, performance, features, none of that matters.

I have worked in large and small environments, and in all cases, I've assumed that as the DBA, I need to be checking that backups are occurring, and that I can restore them in case of any issues. Often this has meant I need to work more closely with others that have the actual responsibility for performing backups. This week, I'm wondering how many of you work in similar situations.

Read the rest of "Backup Responsibility" at SQLServerCentral.

There's a great quote I read, at the end of this article. It says: "...if you think that switching to NoSQL will just let you hand-wave away all of the challenges of running a database, you are terribly misguided." The context is that all too often people looking to move away from some of the hassles of working with RDBMS platforms, which includes working with the DBA, haven't completely thought through the issues.

I do think NoSQL has a place in the world. There are domains of problems that I'm sure Riak, MongoDB, and others, solve in a more efficient way than SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, and other relational systems. I'm not sure what they are, and to some extent, I haven't seen good guidance on where particular platforms excel. Most of the articles and pieces on choosing NoSQL seem to be trying to sell me "why a particular platform can replace my other one", and telling me to add in things like transactions, but not explaining the drawbacks.

Read the rest of "No Handwaving Away the DBA" at SQLServerCentral.

Most of us have managers that are picked from the ranks of our technical staff. Often the most talented technical person, or most willing technical staff member, is promoted to manager, given a few hours of training on the various tools that he or she will use to deal with the administrative paperwork a manager fills out, and then cut loose to "manage" a group of people.

And they stink at it.

Most of them are bad. Not only are they bad managers, they are often bad leaders, and many find their technical skills suffer as they split their time with managerial tasks. That certainly puts them in a bad mood and creates worry about their future. It's not even just in the technology industry, as we find that many managers are bad, yet still languish on for years. This despite the fact that research shows they are costing their companies profit.

Career: an individual's journey through learning, work, and other aspects of life.

Vocation: an occupation to which a person is specially drawn or for which he or she is suited, trained, or qualified.

Which one describes your current employment situation? How do you feel about the technical work you do? A career is a good thing, and I hope that you all have long, successful careers, I hope you continue to learn and maintain a balance between work and your life outside of your job.

Read the rest of "Vocation or Career" at SQLServerCentral.

Many of the people that work in technology are interested in gadgets and hardware as much as software. Not all of us, but many of us have had side projects where we've melded hardware and software together. For those of us that are older, and started working with computers decades ago, that might have been the only way that we could get a computer system to work.

I'm glad that I still find people interested in hardware. My son recently built his own gaming computer from parts, and I'm hoping to distract him from some games and get him to help me build some robots with a Raspberry Pi computer and BrickPi add on board. However it's not just kids as I've seen a number of people at Red Gate working with hardware to build a variety of interesting projects.

Read the rest of "The Gadget Itch" at SQLServerCentral.

With SQL Server 2014 released, there's the temptation to upgrade for many DBAs. However the licensing costs and debatable improvements in the product will temper the DBA's enthusiasm with the reality of the ROI seen by management. While reading about the licensing changes, I also saw this note from Tom LaRock, where he wrote about the features most of us aren't using. It made me think about upgrades, and perhaps the strategy Microsoft is employing.

As Tom mentioned, the features not being used are Enterprise Edition features. This prevents many of us from upgrading to use them because Enterprise Edition is so expensive. Actually, even Standard Edition is expansive these days, given the per-core licensing, and I suspect lots of companies with SQL Server 2008, 2005, even 2000 are debating whether or not the upgrade is really worth the cost.

Read the rest of "The Subtle Push to the Cloud" at SQLServerCentral.

Would you post your password on a wall in your office? Of course not, because other employees, the cleaning crew, even guests walking around your office would be able to access your system with your account. When I read Brian Kelly's post on passwords in files, that's what I thought of. Sticking credentials in a file, where they're subject to any kind of search, is a bad idea.

However this happens all the time. Combine this with a few other "common practices" like using sa to connect to a database and building dynamic SQL, and you might as well just set blank passwords and invite someone to have fun with your database. It's sad that we continue to see these types of software development practices in 2014, and especially poor to see them from companies that sell software.

Read the rest of "Good Practices for Software Development" at SQLServerCentral.

It's over. There's no more MCM program or certification from Microsoft. The last MCM test was given last year and no upgrades are planned for SQL Server 2012 or SQL Server 2014. That's a little sad, though there are quite a few of our SQL Server professionals that can still proudly wear the MCM title for the rest of their careers.

The MCM tests were designed differently than all the other MCP type tests, requiring more thought and deduction, as well as practical skills. The lab in particular was daunting to many of the MCMs, most of whom would tell you about the difficulties in getting through the scenarios in the limited time alloted. All of the people I've talked to found the challenge refreshing and also informative, enabling them to learn a few things about their knowledge, even from the problems they didn't complete.

Read the rest of "Open Source the MCM" at SQLServerCentral.

I often talk with people about building their brands and finding a way to ensure they are a highly desirable employee. One of the ways that I think people can do this is with a technical blog about their career. Having a technical blog allows someone to show off their skills in a particular area. The blog doesn't have to be ground breaking work or extremely innovative solutions to complex problems. While employers need those people, they also need people that do solid work every day on regular problems.

An interview isn't a great way to find good employees. Many of us have had experience with either (or both) side of the interview table and realize that interviews aren't necessarily that helpful. If we bothered to track the impressions we make of candidates and compare that to the actual work they accomplish over the first year or two, I suspect we'd find that we have no evidence that we were making great decisions. The success of employees seems to be a bit hit and miss and not based on our choices in interviews.

Read the rest of "Due Diligence" at SQLServerCentral.

Throughout my career I've been looking to consolidate SQL Servers when I find them. The typical employer I've had usually grows their IT infrastructure over time and many projects look like this:

Over time this means I find lots of individual servers running at much less than full capacity. That's something that DBAs like, because it means that we can handle the inevitable spikes in resource usage that our workloads will encounter. However that's not what the rest of the business, especially the financial management, wants. Underused resources mean money that isn't spent well.

Read the rest of "Consolidation Matters" at SQLServerCentral.

A friend recently was asked to give a presentation on their career to a group of 12 year olds. It was a challenge to engage the students, and my friend was surprised that very few of the kids were interested in technology. I was disappointed as well since I think this is a great career choice, and worth a little investigation, especially at that age.

It's hard to convince people to enter this business if they don't have any interest, but if they do, I'm wondering what you might tell them. Today I'd like you to think about your words of wisdom to someone interested in your job.

Read the rest of "Advice for Newcomers" at SQLServerCentral.

This is what you build to juggle 6,000 tweets a second. That's the headline that caught my eye and it's about the challenges of Twitter and the data that they handle. Twitter definitely has a tough problem, one that few of us have, but perhaps they can help us learn to better deal with our own data from their experiences on an edge case.

The story is journalistic, not so technical, but it is interesting. Twitter has struggled with a blend of data that is partially crucial and must be consistent now (usernames) and other data that can be a bit out of date (tweets). They also have lots of unstructured data (photo/video) that is combined with more traditional, structured data. They've used a few different database platforms to store this data and assemble it with their application. That's the same things that most of us also do when we deal with many different types of data.

Read the rest of "One Database To Rule Them All" at SQLServerCentral.

It's 2014. SQL Server 2000 is 14 years old, but there are still quite of you managing instances. SQL Server 2005 is 9 years old, and I'm sure more of you still deal with that version. I know because I work for a software vendor and I'm constantly asked if our software will run against those two versions of SQL Server.

For many of you, however, if you're managing a SQL Server 2000 instance, it might only be 9 or 10 years old. Your company might still have been installing SQL Server 2000 in the year 2005. The same is true for SQL Server 2005. I wouldn't be surprised to find companies still installing 2005 instances in 2008 or even 2009.

Read the rest of "How Long Before You Upgrade?" at SQLServerCentral.

I saw this post recently about security and preparing for a data breach. The title caught my eye because it implies that we're all doomed. Do the rest of you think that? Is it a question of when we'll have a security breach not if?

Given the headlines, the news we find out about companies not disclosing security issues, the back doors and poor code in much software, is it any wonder that people think it's a "when" and not an "if"? Given the lack of realization from many companies that suffer incidents that they were even attacked, perhaps that's an assumption worth making.

Read the rest of "If or When?" from SQLServerCentral.

Big Data is constantly in the news. We've been asked at SQLserverCentral to try and develop some articles, perhaps even a stairway to explain what Big Data is and how we might use it. I'm still trying to grasp the concepts myself, and unlike the amorphous cloud, I'm still looking for some good examples of what Big Data really is.

When I ran across this piece warning that Big Data isn't the final solution to all our questions in the world, I wasn't surprised. The piece notes that Google Flu hasn't been very accurate in its predictions of outbreaks. At first glance, this gives lots of credence to the idea that the good, solid data analysis and mining techniques we've used for years are just as good as any new Big Data fad.

Read the rest of "Problems with Big Data" at SQLServerCentral. 

The Connect system from Microsoft doesn't work that well, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't continue to press Microsoft for change.

Read the rest of "Lobbying for Change" at SQLServerCentral.