Voice of the DBA
361 episodes - English - Latest episode: 17 days ago - ★★★★★ - 8 ratingsA series of episodes that look at databases and the world from a data professional's viewpoint. Written and recorded by Steve Jones, editor of SQLServerCentral and The Voice of the DBA.
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Episodes
When Are Your Breaks?
April 11, 2024 23:00 - 2 minutes - 3.17 MBAs 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 t...
The Code Freeze
April 09, 2024 23:00 - 3 minutes - 4.6 MBOne 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 mean...
When is it time for a new job?
April 04, 2024 23:00 - 3 minutes - 4.08 MBI 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 opportu...
Under the Bus
April 02, 2024 23:00 - 3 minutes - 4.66 MBI'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...
CosmosDB APIs Inside SQL Server 2024
April 01, 2024 01:00 - 2 minutes - 2.61 MBCosmosDB 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
The Journey to Change
March 28, 2024 23:00 - 3 minutes - 3.95 MBI 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 lear...
The Cloud Database Cost Analysis
March 26, 2024 23:00 - 3 minutes - 4.5 MBThere 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 ...
Another View of DevOps
March 24, 2024 23:00 - 2 minutes - 3.34 MBChocolatey 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....
An Experimental Mindset
March 21, 2024 23:00 - 2 minutes - 2.95 MBI 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 ...
Re-platforming
March 19, 2024 23:00 - 4 minutes - 4.99 MBRe-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...
Protecting Off Hours
March 17, 2024 23:00 - 4 minutes - 4.78 MBLegislation 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 ...
Growing Skills at Work
March 14, 2024 23:00 - 3 minutes - 3.82 MBRedgate 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...
Navigating the Database Landscape
March 12, 2024 23:00 - 3 minutes - 4.04 MBThe 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 approac...
Is This a Good DBA Job Description?
March 08, 2024 00:00 - 3 minutes - 4.16 MBI 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...
Assistants in the Age of AI
March 06, 2024 00:00 - 2 minutes - 3.55 MBWhen 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...
Creating Candidate Interest
March 04, 2024 00:00 - 3 minutes - 4.33 MBIt 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 yo...
Using AI for Security
March 01, 2024 00:00 - 3 minutes - 3.88 MBAI (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 ...
The Art of the Code Review
February 28, 2024 00:00 - 2 minutes - 2.86 MBThe 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 o...
The Dangers of Not Upgrading
February 26, 2024 00:00 - 4 minutes - 4.82 MBAbout 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 upgra...
Free SQL Server
February 23, 2024 00:00 - 3 minutes - 4.58 MBNo, 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 organiz...
Visual Design for Safety
February 21, 2024 00:00 - 2 minutes - 3.68 MBI 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, wh...
Am I Good At My Job?
February 16, 2024 00:00 - 2 minutes - 3.51 MBI was talking with a friend recently about some of their co-workers. In this case, they were complaining that another person couldn't do some tasks that my friend considered relatively easy things. Deal with an unusual restore situation, write some PowerShell to reconfigure servers, build somewhat complex (to them) queries, etc. Things that my friend thinks most database people should be able to do after a year of experience. However, my friend questioned whether they were evaluating co-wo...
This is Why You Use Git for Scripts
February 14, 2024 00:00 - 4 minutes - 5.36 MBGit has become a fantastic tool for me, and many other technologists, over the last ten years. It's almost ubiquitous in most of my clients, and so many people are comfortable with it. Many others aren't, which is why I started a Git series for DBAs (and other Ops people) on my blog. Quite a few people asked me why I recommend git over a file share for storing code that a team of Ops people or DBAs might use. Why isn't a global file share a better choice in an organization? I think I have ...
Un-Stable Teams
February 12, 2024 00:00 - 3 minutes - 4.15 MBI've always valued having a team of people I know and can work with. While I haven't had a lot of long-term jobs before Redgate, I have had a few positions that lasted more than a year and appreciated working with the same group for a long time. We might gain or lose a person, but overall, the structure of the team was the same day after day. This was a comfortable atmosphere, and I liked knowing who I was working with each day. At Redgate, we have had some stable teams of people, but in o...
Do You Have a Jeff?
February 09, 2024 00:00 - 3 minutes - 4.46 MBIn the Phoenix Project (worth a read), there is a character called Brent, who is to go-to person for everything in IT. I don't know if this character was modeled after Brent Ozar, but I always picture him when I re-read the book, and I suspect he was that person in previous positions. I've been that person as well, and it's both exciting, fulfilling, and very stressful. At Redgate, that person has been Robert C, who is my go-to person for many questions. In the DBA world, I think of Jeff M...
Ranomware vs. AI
February 07, 2024 00:00 - 3 minutes - 3.82 MBRansomware has been a growing and shrinking problem in the modern world. Every time I think that some new defenses and protections are preventing ransomware from being a problem, I see another issue. Recently, I saw Subway got hit with with an attack and a few friends have recently noted their companies were restoring systems after a portion of their network was locked down. With the advent of Rasnsomware-as-a-service, where criminals deploy software and then sell access to others, better ...
Serious Software Glitches
February 05, 2024 00:00 - 6 minutes - 7.27 MBRecently Robert Sterbal pointed out a podcast to me. This link is for Apple Podcasts, but it's for the Journal, which is on other platforms (I listened on Spotify). It's the story of a computer glitch in UK post office software, which resulted in quite a few local postmasters being criminally prosecuted, many convicted, and even a few committing suicide. It's a sad story, and it's complex, but there are some technology-related elements. First, the overall story is Fujitsu sold the UK a po...
How Often Do You Update SSMS?
February 02, 2024 00:00 - 2 minutes - 3.23 MBI got a message recently that SSM S19.3 is out. I am wary of major versions, especially with a few add-in tools, but I have tended to try and update SSMS regularly when it patches, which is about once a quarter. As I checked my desktop, I saw I was still on 19.1 (my laptop was 19.2), so I downloaded and updated both machines. I wonder what the rest of you do. I know many of you have corporate rules and restrictions and you may not be able to update regularly, but in many places, I've worke...
Mind Over Milkshake (Thoughts Matter)
January 31, 2024 00:00 - 3 minutes - 4.38 MBLast year I went to THAT Conference in Wisconsin. It was a fun event, very community and family-friendly, and I enjoyed it. So much so that I recently went back to the Texas event in January. It's more developer-focused, but it does have some data related sessions. I recommend this conference if you're looking for some fun training and want to combine that with a family vacation. Your kids will love it. In any case, I watched a keynote talk that referenced an NPR article, called Mind over...
A Great Place to Work
January 26, 2024 00:00 - 4 minutes - 4.93 MBI have had quite a few employers in my career. Of the ones that paid me for computer work, I'll say that there were 3 great ones (1 I owned), 2 average ones, and 3 poor ones. I've had a few other minor times or contract situations where I didn't really judge or care one way or the other. A lot of time is spent at work, but if it's days/week/(few months), I can deal with most situations. That being said, even at the poor places, I learned a lot and I grew, so I don't regret them or wouldn't w...
Take A Vote and Accept Your Loss
January 24, 2024 00:00 - 2 minutes - 3.62 MBI feel differently today than in the past about many of the things I've seen technical people argue about. I've written about Tabs vs. Spaces and Singular vs. Plural, and others have debated commas before or after among other topics. While these might be interesting sidebars at lunch, I see them sometimes devolve into time sinks with teams revisiting the issues over and over during their daily work. These types of religious wars stifle a lot of productivity and often can linger for years. ...
Hire Well
January 22, 2024 00:00 - 3 minutes - 4.32 MBIn the last few years, I've noticed that the quality of technical workers can vary quite a bit in many organizations. I think most people get things done, but often not at a high-quality level. It's one reason that I write, speak, and try to motivate more of you to work on your skills and your career. I want to see better software being built. I tend to work with more database developers than application developers and I tend to see more SQL code than C#/Java/etc. And I see a lot of poorly...
Learning NoSQL
January 17, 2024 00:00 - 2 minutes - 3.37 MBIt's a good idea to learn more about different technologies. I've been amazed throughout my career, and even now as someone working for a software vendor, how many different technologies I run into. I'm also amazed at how little bits of knowledge comes in handy, either to help me understand a problem or to help guide others with a recommendation of how to proceed. Many of us have experience with relational databases and tabular data. We are comfortable with it, even if we might struggle wi...
Portable Data Storage
January 15, 2024 00:00 - 3 minutes - 3.76 MBI saw a review on a rugged SSD, and it got me thinking about local storage. Over the holidays I needed to scan something from a device at the ranch, but to get the image to my computer, I needed a flash drive. It took me 10 minutes of searching around to find one because I rarely use them anymore. In fact, I couldn't remember the last time I'd used one for a transfer between computers. I just send stuff through OneDrive/DropBox/GDrive or some other mechanism. Today I'm wondering if the res...
Continuity Across Restarts
January 12, 2024 00:00 - 3 minutes - 4.31 MBThere are a lot of database platforms, and each tries to convince you theirs is better. As Brent points out in that link, sometimes they just skip comparing themselves to other platforms because it makes them look better. They only look at the platforms they compete well against. For most of us, we often just need basic CRUD operations. I know that most RDBMS platforms would work for us, and sometimes NoSQL ones work as well, though I think that NoSQL isn't necessarily better for many appl...
Re-evaluating the Cloud
January 10, 2024 00:00 - 4 minutes - 5.91 MBLast year 37 Signals (makers of Basecamp and Hey) announced they were leaving the cloud. I wrote about the decision, and wondered if they'd look back at this as a great decision or one they'd regret and backtrack to the cloud again. They planned to build their own tooling, buy a bunch of servers, and run their own data center (or rather, rent space in someone's data center). Recently there was an update, in an FAQ, about how the transition has gone. In short, very well. One of the founder...
Advice for Business
January 08, 2024 00:00 - 3 minutes - 4.45 MBDuring the last few months, I've seen a few different advice posts that caught me eye. One was Kevin Kelley's blog (and his book) on life advice that I previously wrote about, I look at the book once a week or two, read 1-2 items, and think about them. I think some of them are geared more for younger people growing into life, but quite a few are still things that I appreciate as learnings or reminders. Recently I ran across another one, Sam Altman's post looking back from a business poin...
Projects To Showcase Your Skills
January 05, 2024 00:00 - 3 minutes - 3.84 MBIt seems I've heard from a lot of people looking for jobs lately. I had a friend reach out and when I posted a note on LinkedIn I had someone looking for a job, I heard from a few dozen others that they were in the same situation. The last year has seen a lot of turnover in IT. There have been lots of big (and small) companies that have let staff go, for a variety of reasons. The why doesn't matter to you if you've lost employment. You just need a new job. At the same time, I hear from lot...
Fixing Poor Programming Practices
January 03, 2024 00:00 - 3 minutes - 4 MBI see a lot of poor programming practices in real-world code. I'm sure I've written a few myself. I'm also sure that many of you see the same thing and sometimes wonder how that code got deployed. One of the things I told myself over the last few years was that I had to accept the reality of situations. It's easy to complain and say that code should be written differently or entities should be modeled in another way, but I (or you) can't change that situation today. And it ignores the fact...
The 2024 Plan
December 29, 2023 00:00 - 3 minutes - 3.71 MBToday is the last working day of 2023. Next week we start with the New Year's holiday on Monday and then many of us go back to work, starting a new year. This is the time of year where many people make New Year's Resolutions, most of which will be abandoned by March. Some of you might keep to your goals, but it is hard to make substantial changes in your life all at once, especially based on a calendar date. Instead of making a resolution this weekend, I would suggest that you think about ...
Some Relief But Still Some Concern
December 27, 2023 00:00 - 3 minutes - 3.64 MBYears ago Andy Warren and I were talking about the Database Weekly newsletter and what we wanted to include in each edition. We knew there wasn't enough news on a weekly basis, so we decided that we'd add blogs from various individuals as well as press releases, patches, and other items related to databases and SQL Server. At some point, we realized we were getting older and one of the unfortunate things that happen is people pass away. We thought about including obituaries as well since we ...
Building CyberSecurity Skills with an Advent Challenge
December 22, 2023 00:00 - 3 minutes - 5.03 MBI've been working on the Advent of Cyber challenge this December. It's more of a walkthrough of some puzzles than it is solving them yourself, but it has given me a brush up on some skills and helped me learn some basics of how people in charge of (or looking to break) security look at the world. Plus it's been a little fun with a silly storyline each day. The first challenge starts with a chatbot and trying to social engineer answers out of it. This was interesting to me, even though it w...
AI In the Nov 2023 Enterprise
December 20, 2023 00:00 - 4 minutes - 5.99 MBAI is everywhere. I can't seem to get away from stories on the technology in 2023, and while I don't know that I've found it that helpful, I keep looking at it because it's becoming a pervasive technology that most enterprises will experiment with in some way. There is a look at generative AI in the Enterprise in the O'Reilly Radar, which tracks how technology is changing and influencing the world. The report talks about most of the respondents to a survey using AI, which makes sense as th...
Migrations are Worth the Effort
December 18, 2023 00:00 - 3 minutes - 4.16 MBI work with a lot of customers that are trying to find better ways to build and deploy database code. Some of them use a state or model method with SQL Compare or another Redgate product, and some want to use Flyway and its hybrid migration-based framework. It's always interesting to me how customers lean one way or the other, for various reasons. No matter which choice people make, we know that using migrations is more effort than a state-based approach. However, I think that it's a bette...
Try, Try Again, Until It's Right
December 15, 2023 00:00 - 4 minutes - 5.68 MBOne of the challenges with making changes in a database environment is that undoing those changes can be hard. What's often preferred is rolling forward with a new change to correct the issue, but that's often done with limited analysis and thought. Instead, we hope our staff makes a quick patch and a better decision under pressure than they did with more time to examine the problem. That works if it's a simple mistake that was made in implementation but not if we haven't designed our soluti...
Who Still Uses SP_ for Naming?
December 13, 2023 00:00 - 2 minutes - 3.33 MBAn interesting post recently from Chad Callihan on the reasons why someone shouldn't use sp_ to prefix their stored procedures. This is advice that I've seen for years, but I haven't run into this lately with many customers. It seems I do see some usp_, but not sp_. I think that's good, and if you're not sure why, read Chad's post. I think my main reason for not doing this is that I sometimes create procs in master. Not because it's a good idea (it isn't) or I want to, but because I'll mak...
Breaking Biometrics
December 11, 2023 00:00 - 2 minutes - 3.19 MBIn the movies, when someone needs to bypass some sort of fingerprint biometric system, they use tape to lift a fingerprint, or in the more gory films, cut off a body part. In any case, there have been a lot of attempts to replicate this in the real world. Sometimes these work, though the consensus is modern hardware isn't as susceptible as older hardware. I don't know if that's true, but I did see an interesting look at the main three sensors used in most laptops. All the laptops had their...
Focus on Growth in Your Career
December 08, 2023 00:00 - 3 minutes - 3.71 MBI find there to be a lot of value in actively managing your career. This is part of a series of editorials based on advice I've read from Raylene Yung (Facebook and Stripe) on your engineering career. I write a lot about growing your career. I think it's important to find a good career, but also learn to be good at whatever you choose to do for employment. While I do think that learning is a skill and each of us ought to sharpen our saws, I sometimes find people chasing new things all the ...
The Stagnant Career
December 06, 2023 00:00 - 3 minutes - 4.29 MBDo you feel stagnant in your career? Or maybe the better question is do you care if you feel stagnant in your career? You might need to define what that means to you, as what might feel stagnant to one person could be comfortable to another. Apparently, there was a study of tech professionals, who despite a tight labor market, are citing lack of salary increases and dim promotion prospects as reasons to leave their jobs. The survey was across a number of larger technology companies, and l...
Be Careful with Missing Index Requests
December 04, 2023 00:00 - 2 minutes - 3.16 MBOne of the things that has been interesting to watch over time is how the SQL Server platform has expanded the amount of information that we get back about the performance of the query optimizer and query processor. While it's not perfect, and there is room for improvement, the advances made with intelligent query processing are helping many systems run faster. Not all queries, but some. As I've done a little work on other platforms, there are ways to look for potential missing indexes in ...