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PODCAST

Voice of the DBA

A 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.

technology tech news

All Episodes

04:03

The Cloud Security Problem

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/10/29

Your management gets a great demo from a cloud vendor and decides that the organization needs to implement the new service/application/etc. quickly. Your team tries to comply, furiously learning and experimenting with integrations, software changes, infrastructure configuration, and more. Things get deployed are working. Clients and management are happy with the new capabilities and you breathe a sigh of relief. After a bit of time there's a security issue and all of a sudden there's blame pouring

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03:10

Databases for Executives

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/10/27

There's an article at Forbes about the Five Things Business Leaders Should Know about Databases. Disclosure, it's by my boss, but I think it's still a good read. These are points we've learned from research and work with customers and prospects at Redgate Software. These points come from you, as well as from executives with whom we work, but there are so many people in organizations who don't think about the complexity of data, so it's a good one to pass along. The five things are (if you don't

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03:43

Knowing Your Total Reward

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/10/24

For much of my career as a younger person, I was mostly concerned with salary at a job, along with the opportunities for my career. I really wanted to know how much money would hit my bank account and cared most about that. I also wanted to know if I would learn something or get a better title or work with a technology that might help me in the future. That drove me through quite a few jobs in my 20s and 30s, leaving some for more money and more opportunity. As I got a family, I became more

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02:48

When Companies Fail

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/10/22

I own a Tesla, which is essentially a computer on wheels. Much of the way the car works is driven by software, which I love. New features have appeared and minor fixes come through in the same way that they do for apps on my mobile device. It can be annoying to wait for an update to install, which has happened when my wife or I start the update remotely and don't realize the other is planning on driving. Fortunately, I can set these to run overnight from my phone and they mostly disappear into the

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03:20

Tech Debt Perils

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/10/20

My wife and I have been thinking about some new audio equipment. We've been a little unhappy with our Bose soundbar because of the software flakiness and sporadic network connectivity issues. In looking around, I saw a Sonos product, but after reading a bit about the company's recent history, I decided to look elsewhere. Sidebar: if any of you have recommendations that aren't high-end $$$$ audio, let me know. Read the rest of Tech Debt Perils

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05:36

The Vast Expansions of Hardware

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/10/17

At the Small Data conference recently, one of the talks looked at hardware advances. It was interesting to see a data perspective on hardware changes, as many of us only worry about the results of hardware: can I get my data quickly? In or out, most of us are more often worried about performance than specs. However, today I thought it might be fun to look at a few changes and numbers to get an idea of how our hardware has changed, in the march towards dealing with more and more data. Big data

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04:20

The Modern Algorithm of Chance

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/10/15

These days algorithms rule much of the world. From how supply chains are managed to how vehicles run their engines to the media that many of us watch on the various streaming services. I assume that most of you know that algorithms drive what you see on social media, on YouTube, and even the search results you get, and what you see might be different than what I see. There is a constant search for a perfect, or at least, very targeted way of getting you what you want. Or at least what the algorithm

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04:11

The Role of Databases in the Era of AI

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/10/13

I'm hosting a webinar tomorrow with this same title: The Role of Databases in the Era of AI. Click the link to register and you'll get some other perspectives from Microsoft and Rie Merritt. However, I think this is an interesting topic and decided to try and synthesize some thoughts into an editorial today, partially to prep for tomorrow and partly because I'm fascinated by AI and how it will be used in the future. Read the rest of The Role of Databases in the Era of AI

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03:17

Everything is Code

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/10/10

I posted a note on Twitter/X with this quote: “The content updates had not previously been treated as code because they were strictly configuration information.” This is from testimony given by Crowdstrike to a US Congressional committee in trying to explain how they grounded much of the airline industry a few months ago. That was a mess of a situation, and apparently, the vendor didn't think their configuration was part of their code. That's an amazing viewpoint to me. The fact that any developer

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04:59

Keep. It. Simple.

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/10/08

I get a tech newsletter most days, which has news that I enjoy, but interspersed among the news and ads are projects, frameworks, or repos, most of which I've never heard of before. I used to read these, but it seems that there is an endless list of these, which all have marketing descriptions that somehow claim this set of code solves problems that others don't or that this code is easy to use and integrate with, or well, I don't know what other promises. I'm usually turned off by the end of the

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03:52

The Load of Real Time Data Warehouses

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/10/06

If you have a data warehouse, what do you think your ratio of reads to writes is on any given day? Do you think 1:1, as in one read for each write? Is it 10:1, with 10 reads for each write? 100:1? Do you track this in any way? One would think that most of the databases we work on in the transactional world have many more reads than writes. I'd have assumed the ratios might be higher for data warehouses, where we load data that is queried (read) as the primary use case. After all, I expect that there

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02:57

Where's the Printer Friendly Option?

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/10/03

When is the last time you read an article/blog/etc. on the Internet and saw a button for a print friendly version? That used to be something on every page, and one people often shared on social media (or email) because it didn't have all the advertisements in it. I remember having to help code this feature on SQL Server Central when we started as plenty of people wanted to print articles out and read them later. That desire led to Andy brainstorming that we should release The Best of books each

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03:19

Cleaning Up Your Database

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/10/01

How many of you have objects in your database that aren't being used? What about something in a schema with a _old in the name? Or _2 or _3 or _delete? There is a lot of old, deprecated stuff I see in production databases. In fact, I've been somewhat amazed as I work with clients that many of the scripts we can build from a database with SQL Compare won't actually execute on an empty database because the script is full of broken code. I also find plenty of DBAs that want to clean things up, but they

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03:22

Effective Engineering

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/09/29

I'm not the smartest developer or DBA. I find myself mystified at times by Itzik's posts on T-SQL queries and I'm amazed at times by the complex systems that I see the DCAC people put together. I can usually figure things out (sometimes by asking the authors a question), but it's not always easy to do. We have some truly gifted, incredibly intelligent people in this business. I am, however, effective. I have been very successful in my career at getting things done well enough, things that work well,

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02:49

Dead To Me

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/09/26

I saw a note from someone recently that reminded me of Policy-Based Management. This was (is?) a technology in SQL Server that I thought might have great potential. I even had a few presentations on the subject, but sadly I've rarely seen anyone implement it. I'm sure some do, but I think for me, this is dead technology. There have been other tech items from which I've been turned off or abandoned over the years. It seems in SQL Server, we have some tech that even Microsoft has abandoned and

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03:13

AI Is Great and Tech is Failing

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/09/24

On a recent weekend, I got a text from my bank that they had declined a charge to one of my business accounts. I called them back and they let me know there had been a couple of weird charges on the account that their AI system detected. This seems to happen every year or two so I wasn't overly worried. I cancelled the card and ordered a new one. A day later, my wife got a call about our credit card with the same issue. She cancelled the card and got new ones ordered. However, I use that card to

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03:06

No Backdoors

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/09/22

Every once in awhile I hear about someone in law enforcement sure that tech people can build in a safe, secure way for data to be unencrypted by the company or vendor. The latest appears to be from Australia, where the Security Intelligence Organization wants tech companies to build this into products. Backdoors never work. Anytime an encryption key is stored, it could be stolen. We see this all the time. Keys are just data, and companies lose data all the time. At scale. Governments are certainly

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03:02

Bad Stored Procedures

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/09/19

I don't see a lot of SQL at The Daily WTF, but this one was great. It's a stored procedure that was likely just converted from embedded code, as noted by the poster. It's a strange set of code, that doesn't quite make sense to me, and I can't imagine why someone wrote it. Arguably, this is no better than having this code in a C# or ASP.NET application. Or is it? Read the rest of Bad Stored Procedures

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03:01

When Do We Worry About Scalability?

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/09/17

"We need to get the code written for feature X. Can you finish this query today?" We've all heard some variation of that request. We have a request or demand, and we need to get it done. We need to get code out so our business can advance, sell more things, get more customers, etc. There's always some reason to get new code pushed to production quickly. Read the rest of When Do We Worry About Scalability?

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02:59

Technology and Privacy

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/09/15

There can be a big divide among tech professionals on how they view data privacy. Some don't worry too much, and some are very upset about the lack of data privacy and poor data handling practices from many organizations. Most people are probably in the middLe. I do know that every time I post about a Tesla, there are many people who mention the incredible amount of data Tesla collects, and how that makes them nervous. Tesla discloses that they collect, and I get copies of my data with my own

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320 results

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