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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

04:08

Large PRs are Bad

Voice of the DBA ·

2023/07/27

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

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02:46

Better Communication Through Less Messaging

Voice of the DBA ·

2023/06/01

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

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02:39

The Danger of Sharing Data

Voice of the DBA ·

2023/02/22

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

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03:12

The Rise of Vector Databases

Voice of the DBA ·

2023/02/01

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

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03:10

The Complexity of Metrics

Voice of the DBA ·

2023/01/30

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

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03:40

Forgoing Tech Investments

Voice of the DBA ·

2023/01/09

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

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02:37

Look Beyond What You See

Voice of the DBA ·

2022/08/08

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

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04:03

The Future of Certifications

Voice of the DBA ·

2022/05/12

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

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03:01

Teams Security Issues

Voice of the DBA ·

2022/01/14

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

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02:19

Acknowledging Success

Voice of the DBA ·

2021/12/13

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,

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03:08

Pulling Together

Voice of the DBA ·

2020/10/07

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

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02:28

Build the VCS Habit

Voice of the DBA ·

2020/03/16

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

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03:37

Data Challenges and Travel

Voice of the DBA ·

2019/07/22

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

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02:06

Who are your authenticated users?

Voice of the DBA ·

2019/03/22

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

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02:38

The Devil is in the Monitoring Details

Voice of the DBA ·

2019/01/28

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

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02:36

Are Indexes Actually Changes to the System

Voice of the DBA ·

2018/10/02

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

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03:56

DevOps is Helpful

Voice of the DBA ·

2018/07/02

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

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03:28

A Great Case for PowerShell

Voice of the DBA ·

2018/05/21

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

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02:31

The Best Ever

Voice of the DBA ·

2018/04/10

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

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03:01

An AI Loophole

Voice of the DBA ·

2018/02/22

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

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321 results

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