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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

02:57

The Stretch Database Retirement

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/07/09

Stretch Database is finally going away. It is being retired. It was deprecated on Nov 16, 2022, from SQL Server 2022. Effective Jul 9, 2024, the supporting Azure service is retired. I saw this in an announcement on Jul 3, though I hope anyone using this service has been seeing lots of reminders over the last couple of years. I know I'm getting MySQL retirement notices for one of my services and need to migrate some workloads this month. If you tried this service, you might have realized that the

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03:16

An Upgrade Slog

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/07/07

I saw a blog post from Randolph West recently that asked How do you restore a SQL Server 2000 database in the year 2024? It's a bit of a process, involving an intermediate version and two restores. He also points out the need to run DBCC after the first restore, which is a good idea. I wonder how many people would take the time to do this, or even think about it as an upgrade step? This was interesting to read as I had a customer ask me about doing this a few months back. They were trying to clean

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04:41

Midsummer Fun

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/07/04

Yesterday was Independence Day in the US and a day off for me. Today, I'm back to work. Same for my rocket engineer son, one day off. My wife remembers a few of her companies giving a 4-day weekend when a holiday falls on a Tuesday or Thursday, but that hasn't been my experience and isn't this week. I know we're barely into summer, which technically started Jun 21, but most of my life has measured summer between the end of one school year and the beginning of another. That's usually late May

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02:43

Xp_cmdshell Use Cases

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/07/02

I had someone ask me recently how to run xp_cmdshell on a Linux version of SQL Server. I told them you can't, as it's an unsupported feature and not one that I expect to see released. I had to double-check, since I did think that supporting a BASH shell was a possibility, but it wasn't added to the product. In the feedback forums, I saw a request for xp_powershell, though the feedback from MS is to use CLR for this. They suggest external access permissions, but those aren't supported on Linux. I

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04:47

The Cost of Rework

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/06/30

I often deal with customers who are looking to improve the way they build and manage database software. These could be small companies or large enterprises, with teams of developers trying to enhance their application software to solve new business problems. Often those enhancements require new data, with the related schema changes in a database. Even if there isn't any new data, often we need to query data in new ways, combing, filtering, aggregating, and otherwise transforming data into extra

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03:39

What Metrics Do You Collect?

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/06/27

One of the hot terms in software these days is observability. There are a few definitions (Splunk, RadixWeb), but essentially this is the insight into how your software runs and performs using metrics, logs, traces, etc. In DevOps, we do this with an eye toward improving performance and identifying the root cause of issues. The focus is slightly different from monitoring, where we often focus more on resources and health. We need both, but often in trying to improve software and the behavior for

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03:28

Where to Test Your Code

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/06/25

The last 10-15 years in software development have seen a widespread embracing of unit testing. Before the popularity of mobile phones and their apps, most of the organizations I'd worked in gave lip service to automated unit testing, and often even more complex integration/system tests. These days, it seems more and more people embrace unit testing, and I hear about that often from customers and attendees at events. I don't often hear about more comprehensive integration and system testing, I found

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02:55

What Do You Want to Learn?

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/06/23

There are lots of resources for learning: articles at SQL Server Central, blogs, user groups, SQL Saturday and other events, conferences, and more. In most of those cases, the editor, author, or speaker is deciding what they want to write about. If you want to learn something different, you need to go search out that information. You can certainly request topics from others, but they may or may not listen to you. At least not as an individual. Read the rest of What Do You Want to Learn?

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02:52

Cloud Transformation

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/06/21

In the last few months, I've been traveling around at a few of the Redgate Summits (one more in NYC coming) running panels on cloud journeys. I've had industry experts, both technical and managerial, discussing their approaches and journeys with advice and caveats for others. It can often be more than just migrating systems, so a lot of people have started to talk about cloud transformation. However, in some cases, this is just a migration. A lot of companies just lift-and-shift their databases into

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03:20

SQL Injection is Not Acceptable

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/06/18

SQL Injection has been a problem for my entire career. Thirty years ago I could have easily just blamed this on ignorance, as most of our developers didn't think about the nefarious ways that hackers enter data in our applications. These days, there isn't a good reason for this to keep happening, and the problem is us. I think that we don't provide good examples or training on secure coding or secure architecture as a normal part of teaching programming. In many organizations, we don't check for

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03:22

Five Years and Counting

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/06/16

I almost called this "chasing a new laptop" since that's what I'm doing, but I decided to add the date because the current laptop I've using was built in March 2019 and got to me in May 2019. I've had an HP Spectre x360, my second HP Spectre, and I've really enjoyed it. I'm also amazed it still runs. On the last few trips, the two rubber strips that run along the bottom (acting as feet) started to peel away. I've never seen that before and I tried to re-attach them a few times, but that didn't work

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02:49

Poor Database Design Realities

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/06/06

One of the interesting things that I see at Redgate Software is how idealistic our developers and engineers can be. They often build our database DevOps products with the idea that customers will use well-designed databases. The systems will have primary keys, foreign keys, defaults, constraints, indexes, and more. Developers will use coding standards, and naming conventions, and will understand what data is stored in tables. Not in every case, but often. After all, that's how we build software, as

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03:06

Using AI for the First Draft

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/06/04

At the Redgate Summit in London, I ran a panel talking about Platform Engineering and how we can make developers more productive. One of the questions from our audience revolved around AI (Artificial Intelligence) technologies and how they might assist. As a note, AI tech includes a lot of different things, like machine learning (ML) among other things, but a lot of people seeing the media and hype around LLMs (large language models) think those are AI. They see AI as what is implemented in ChatGPT

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02:54

DBCC CLONEDATABASE is Semi-Discontinued

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/06/02

I saw a tweet that DBCC CLONEDATABASE was being discontinued for production databases, which both scared me and didn't make sense. I've used this a few times for a quick copy of a database and like how it works. Discontinuing it seemed strange to me. Then I read the blog post, which notes that it's not being supported for production deployments. The post doesn't explain why, but I'm guessing this is because all the stats and other metadata moves, and this might mess up the optimizer if different

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04:06

Life in a Startup

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/05/30

I have worked for a few startup companies, including SQL Server Central. Each has been a different experience, and I learned a lot at each stop. However, I'm not sure I'd want to go through that process again at my age. I was thinking about the challenges and the excitement of being at a startup while reading about the founding of Reddit. The post doesn't go a lot into the technical details or the working life, but it is an interesting read from a VC investor. I also found this post on Choosing

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03:53

Common Algorithm Concerns

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/05/28

When we build software, many of us use the same algorithms to solve problems. We might choose a similar method for a quicksort or a lambda validation or a regular expression. For database work, your code for a running total (or other common challenge) is likely very similar to many other people. At least on the same platform. You might solve this differently in SQL Server and Oracle, but for the same type of database, many of us write very similar code. Actually, for many developers, they copy and

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03:12

Managed Instance Impressions

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/05/26

Several years ago, I heard about a new product coming in Azure that would provide an IaaS (infrastructure as a service) VM to run SQL Server, with Microsoft managing most of the admin tasks for the instance, like patching and backups. That didn't seem like a big load to me, and I wondered if anyone would actually pay for this product. After all, don't most companies find managing patches and backups? That product became Azure SQL Managed Instance, and I've been surprised at the adoption. Quite a

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03:45

The Costs and Rewards of Speaking

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/05/23

Most of the people I know who speak at a SQL Saturday or user group aren't paid for their efforts. At many of the community events, the speakers are volunteering their time. Many are also paying for their own way to those events not located in their area. A few, such as me, might get a company to cover their travel expenses, but often this doesn't include time. If I attend a SQL Saturday, I still have a bunch of work on M-F that needs to be done. No comp time for these events. That being said, I'm

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02:37

Invisible Downtime

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/05/21

This article has a concept I've never heard about: invisible downtime. This is the idea that there are problems in your application that the customer sees. Your servers are running, but the application doesn't work correctly or is pausing with a delay that impacts customers. From an IT perspective, the SLA is being met and there aren't any problems. From a customer viewpoint, they're ready to start looking at a competitor's offering. Lots of developers and operations people know there are issues in

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04:10

Kubernetes is Cool, But ...

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/05/19

Kubernetes is cool, and I think it's really useful in helping us scale and manage multiple systems easily in a fault-tolerant way. Actually, I don't think Kubernetes per se is important itself; more it seems that the idea of some orchestration engine to manage containers and systems is what really matters. As a side note, there are other orchestrators such as Mesos, OpenShift, and Nomad. However, do we need to know Kubernetes to use it for databases? This is a data platform newsletter, and most of

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320 results

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