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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

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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02:43

A Simple Solution

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/09/12

In general, I like simple solutions to problems (and simple songs). They can take work, but a simple solution means it's easy to explain to others, easy for others to refactor/modify, and we limit the amount of effort required to ensure others can use the solution. Sometimes I see very clever engineering solutions, but they become cumbersome to implement and maintain, or worse, no one other than the author understands how they work. In any size organization, that's a piece of technical debt that can

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02:46

Casino Night is Back

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/09/10

We are bringing back the SQL Server Central Opening Night party at the PASS Data Community Summit this year. This was one of the most fun things I've been a part of at the Summit for many years and I'm looking forward to the conference even more. The party will take place Tuesday night, after the Welcome reception. from 8pm-10pm, once again catered as a casino themed party. I'm using the same company we've used in the past, and we'll have a cash bar and lots of prizes. I've already started to make

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03:11

The Invisible Disk

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/09/08

I saw a post recently about the incredible shrinking computer, where a software consultant had written down his predictions for the future. In this case, he writes about a computer shrinking smaller than today, essentially to one chip, with docking stations wherever you need them. We're already at the place where many of us have an extremely powerful computer in our pockets in the form of a mobile phone. I'm still amazed that I bought a phone recently with half a terabyte of storage. A few years ago

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03:15

Container Development Work

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/09/05

On my new laptop, I only use containers as database servers. I made the decision not to install SQL Server or PostgreSQL and instead work on containers only. I've written lightly about this, but I set up docker-compose files to load different instances of SQL Server and PostgreSQL (and others) and batch files to start and stop them. I've also set dedicated places on my disk where I can drop backup files and access them from the host. It's 2024. I moved to containers on my laptop exclusively for

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03:56

Fifty Percent

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/09/03

Most of us will have more than one job in our career. In fact many of us will likely find a new job in the next five years. I hope I'm not in that group, but I recognize that it's a possibility. We never know when our situation will change, or our employer's situation will change. That is one reason I recommend you keep your resume up to date and continue to work on improving your skills. I saw an office hours short recently from Brent Ozar, in which someone had asked him if they should apply for a

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04:13

Trying New Technology

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/08/29

I had someone ask me about DuckDB recently. Would I think that's a good choice for a database. I don't really know. From their blog and some online research, maybe, but it's also a minority player in a niche space. I had a chat recently with someone that had implemented ArangoDB, a graph database. Why that and not Neo4J I asked them? Someone at the company had tried it and recommended it. Not a bad reason, as I think experience with tech is important, but it's not the only thing. Read the rest of

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03:38

A Kafka Introduction

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/08/27

I've heard of Kafka before. I know it's an Apache project and you can download or read more at https://kafka.apache.org/. I knew it was a way of moving data around, some sort of ETL tool useful for moving things around. More like a message and queueing system, which is a tool that seems like a great idea, but one that everyone struggles to work with. And one that seemed complex. The overview is that Kafka is "a distributed system consisting of servers and clients that communicate via a

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02:59

Your Computer Science Education

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/08/22

I know a lot of people in this business do not have computer science degrees. While some do, I suspect it's a minority. I'm certainly curious, so if you want to share your education experience in a comment, tell me if you have a degree and what the focus was, as well as answer a few other questions. At DevOps Days in Minneapolis recently, professors Fox and Sen from Macalester College talked about their computer science curriculum for growing the next generation of professionals. Along the way, they

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02:36

A Lack of Architecture and Planning

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/08/18

A few weeks ago, I was sitting in the audience, waiting for my turn to speak at DevOps Days in Minneapolis. Just before me, Xe Iaso delivered a funny and thought-provoking talk on building a social network on a whiteboard. It was very well done and had me feeling nervous about following that session. The talk is a bit of a satirical look at an interview Xe had for a company that tried to get them to derive an architecture for a large distributed system. It was interesting to hear Xe note that often

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03:10

What Do You Drop?

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/08/15

Many years ago I was training for a triathlon. I had competed in the Sandman Triathlon the previous year in Virginia Beach and wanted to do it again. I had a young child, work was busy, and I was struggling to find time to swim, bike, and run every week. One night, I was at a work event with a customer who was also a triathlete. He was much more competitive and successful than I was at competing in triathlons, and he told me I should just get up earlier and find time to train or ensure I spent time

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02:58

Prevent Complete SQL Injection

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/08/13

I would hope most of you reading this know what SQL Injection (SQi) is and how you can prevent it. Or at least what patterns cause problems. If not, here's a short explanation that is worth reading. If you have more questions, ask in our forums. SQL Injection has been, and continues to be, a problem in many systems. In fact, I chatted with Mike Walsh recently after he'd published this post on an attack for one of his clients. He has some notes that explain how your database server might be

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03:00

A Checklist for Learning

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/08/12

One of the challenges many people have is focusing their learning efforts along some path. The best way to move forward is with steady effort that guides you through steps to build knowledge or skill. However, with so much information out there on the Internet, how do you decide where you focus your efforts? Lots of people choose a random method, but the world is full of those people, many of whom never develop strong skills. That might be fine if you are an hobby guitarist or piano player, but it's

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02:55

Send Metrics Not Logs

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/08/08

This is part of a series on observability, a concept taking hold in modern software engineering. One of the interesting things I saw in an engineering presentation on Observability from Chik-Fil-A was that they are sometimes bandwidth-constrained at remote sites. In an early version of their platform, they sent logs back to HQ, and their logs used all the available bandwidth, so they were unable to process credit card transactions. While most of us don't deal with lots of remote offices sending data

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03:52

Responding to a Disaster

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/08/02

Ryan had a planes, trains, and automobiles situation a few weeks ago. On the same day, I didn't. A delay for a few hours, but an easy trip home. Lots of other people didn't have a smooth trip, and I had a few friends who spent an extra night somewhere or had flights canceled and decided not to take a trip. The Crowdstrike outage hit the entire world, causing problems everywhere. Just before that happened, Azure had an outage in the central region. If you were affected by these, you have my

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326 results

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