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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

02:39

Breaking Biometrics

Voice of the DBA ·

2023/12/11

In 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

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03:12

Focus on Growth in Your Career

Voice of the DBA ·

2023/12/08

I 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 time. In

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03:36

The Stagnant Career

Voice of the DBA ·

2023/12/06

Do 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 likely

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02:38

Be Careful with Missing Index Requests

Voice of the DBA ·

2023/12/04

One 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 PostgreSQL

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03:22

The Balanced Technical Manager

Voice of the DBA ·

2023/12/01

I 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. In the last few years I've started to see a number of organizations find ways to build technical career growth paths that don't require someone to become a manager. A lot of technical people don't want to manage others, and I'd argue that making the best technical person the lead or manager isn't often

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04:23

Advice To Be a Better Person

Voice of the DBA ·

2023/09/14

As a hobby, I coach volleyball for kids. Each year I meet new kids and parents and talk about my philosophy. Part of that is that I teach skills, athletics, how to compete, and more. However, I do emphasize as well that I'm trying to build better people, not just athletes. I want these kids to be better prepared for life, for job interviews, for future teachers and coaches, and for better relationships. While I'm not perfect, or maybe not even a great person, I do try to improve myself on a regular

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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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327 results

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