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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

02:38

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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04:13

Who's Licensed?

Voice of the DBA ·

2017/08/01

My employer licenses software to users. Many of you might have SQL Compare, SQL Prompt, or one of our other handy products. If you do, you might have noticed that we have a Redgate login for you that shows your licenses and lets you activate/deactivate them. This was surprisingly a big project across the last year to streamline and smooth our licensing process. Early on, I realized this was an issue in one company I where I worked. This was during the 1990s and I started working at a small company

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03:43

The Cloud is Just a Tool

Voice of the DBA ·

2017/02/23

The cloud is a term that's full of hype. We hear from various media outlets all the time: the cloud is the answer, the cloud is cheaper, the cloud is the way of the future, the cloud handles your DR, the cloud managers availability, and more. Microsoft has been pushing the message of "cloud-first" (and mobile-first), which has many SQL Server professionals confused, concerned, or even angry. There are also plenty of professionals that dismiss the idea of cloud anything when it comes to data. I've

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03:32

Keyboard Hardlines

Voice of the DBA ·

2016/08/10

A few years ago, I had a keyboard die. At the time, I needed something quickly and ended up with a Logitech wireless model that included a mouse. I'm not sure of which model, but I've ended up getting two or three more Logitech devices over the years. I think I go through a keyboard every 18-24 months, though the mice seem to last longer. For me, having devices available without cords is more important for the mouse than the keyboard, but since Logitech will bundle them, I get both at the same

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03:05

Failover

Voice of the DBA ·

2016/08/05

I saw a note from someone that had a database set up in a High Availability (HA) configuration for production. This person had received an 823 error on the primary server, but a failover hadn't occurred. This wasn't a critical error, but one that noted some anomolies in a few pages, which potentially could be fixed by the automatic page repair in SQL Server. In this case, the individual would have liked to have had the system fail over, just in case there were a chance this would impact

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03:11

The Relentless Cloud

Voice of the DBA ·

2016/07/20

The march to the cloud is inevitable. No, I don't think all your services will be run from a cloud service, but I do think that some of them will be. Maybe 10% for your company, maybe 90%, but likely somewhere in between. In the efforts to reduce costs, and maybe more likely, the idea of shifting costs to expenses, I would bet that most organiztions will take serious looks at the cloud in the next decade for a significant portion of all new services. They might not move most applications, but

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02:09

The Clustered Index is not the Primary Key

Voice of the DBA ·

2016/05/24

I was reading through a list of links for Database Weekly and ran across this script from Pinal Dave, looking for tables where the clustered index isn't the PK. It struck me that this is one of those facts I consider to be so simple, yet I constantly see people confusing. If you click the Primary Key icon in the SSMS/VS designers, or you specify a PK like this: "The Clustered Index is not the Primary Key"

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02:50

Track Your Consultants

Voice of the DBA ·

2016/03/29

If you pay attention to security issues in software, you've probably heard about man-in-the-middle attacks. These can occur more frequently than you expect, though inside of a company, it's more unlikely that you'll experience one if you have some fairly basic security controls on your network.However, if you invite someone inside of your network, such as a consultant of some sort, you should be more vigilent. There's a great post showing how someone can execute a MITM attack against SQL Server

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02:50

Rogue Software Changes

Voice of the DBA ·

2015/11/16

Could a group of software developers make changes that fundamentally alter the way a software system should work without management being aware? That's the question being asked of VW right now. Most people are skeptical, but I ran across a piece that wants to lend credence to the idea that a few software engineers acted with few people being aware. They did this, not because they wanted to defraud everyone, but they wanted a solve a problem that they couldn't do in other ways. They also didn't see

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02:37

The Command Line is Back

Voice of the DBA ·

2015/11/09

I grew up using a command line for all of my computing. I started with a Commodore VIC-20 as a youth, moving on to Apple IIs, TRS-80s, and then OpenVMS in university classes. It wasn't until I started doing graduate work that I started to enjoy graphics in the X Window System, though many of my windows just ran bash and korn shells on SunOS. Since that time, I've mostly made my living in Microsoft Windows and OSX, using graphical programs. I've still been quick to open a command shell at times, but

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01:49

Adjusting Model

Voice of the DBA ·

2015/09/04

In July the T-SQL Tuesday theme was defaults. There were lots of posts about various items, but I found one by Kevin Kline interesting. Kevin noted that the settings for model are not necessarily what many of us would want in production. Is that really the case? This week I wanted to take a poll and see if many of you actually do create defaults for your new databases by changing model that are different than what Microsoft has done. Read the rest of "Adjusting Model"

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02:43

Source Code Security

Voice of the DBA ·

2015/03/31

I'm not surprised, and I had expected to read about something like this much sooner. Apparently someone at the ride sharing company, Uber, posted a security key online in a GitHub distribution. I assume this was some sort of code repository for Uber that may or may not have been supposed to be shared publicly, but having used GitHub, I could see someone making a mistake and accidentally putting private code in the public space. Uber is worried as the key is a security authorization key used to

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02:09

Software Engineering in Practice

Voice of the DBA ·

2015/03/30

I ran across a review of a developer's first year at a company. The company is endjin and the poster describes their first year as a "software engineer apprentice," which is an interesting way to look at one's early career. While it's not for everyone, I suspect that many developers in this business could actually use a bit of apprentice time to solidify their foundation of knowledge. The post talks more about the way in which the work is done than the actual tools involved. A few are mentioned, but

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02:12

Testing

Voice of the DBA ·

2015/01/13

It seems that software always contains bugs. No matter how much time and effort is spent building an application, there will be issues. Sometimes this is because of a lack of testing, and sometimes this is because of poor testing, but in any case, the expectation that we will test our code is becoming more prevalent as we depend more and more on computer software. Users expect our software to work. It seems there is never enough time to properly test software after it is complete. Perhaps your

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02:39

Holiday Struggles

Voice of the DBA ·

2014/12/09

It's the slow time of year. As I saw tweeted recently, "And now for the month when nothing gets done." I haven't usually felt this way at a few jobs as the budget and planning process has typically been a part of a busy month. As I've run SQLServerCentral, I've also been looking back and forward this month, trying to think about our industry and data in a long term way. I have found December to be frenetic as times as I try to get in some ski days while still getting work done. However this year

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327 results

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