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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

03:12

Fixing Poor Programming Practices

Voice of the DBA ·

2024/01/03

I see a lot of poor programming practices in real-world code. I'm sure I've written a few myself. I'm also sure that many of you see the same thing and sometimes wonder how that code got deployed. One of the things I told myself over the last few years was that I had to accept the reality of situations. It's easy to complain and say that code should be written differently or entities should be modeled in another way, but I (or you) can't change that situation today. And it ignores the fact that we

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03:12

The 2024 Plan

Voice of the DBA ·

2023/12/29

Today is the last working day of 2023. Next week we start with the New Year's holiday on Monday and then many of us go back to work, starting a new year. This is the time of year where many people make New Year's Resolutions, most of which will be abandoned by March. Some of you might keep to your goals, but it is hard to make substantial changes in your life all at once, especially based on a calendar date. Instead of making a resolution this weekend, I would suggest that you think about your

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03:08

Some Relief But Still Some Concern

Voice of the DBA ·

2023/12/27

Years ago Andy Warren and I were talking about the Database Weekly newsletter and what we wanted to include in each edition. We knew there wasn't enough news on a weekly basis, so we decided that we'd add blogs from various individuals as well as press releases, patches, and other items related to databases and SQL Server. At some point, we realized we were getting older and one of the unfortunate things that happen is people pass away. We thought about including obituaries as well since we knew a

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03:58

Building CyberSecurity Skills with an Advent Challenge

Voice of the DBA ·

2023/12/22

I've been working on the Advent of Cyber challenge this December. It's more of a walkthrough of some puzzles than it is solving them yourself, but it has given me a brush up on some skills and helped me learn some basics of how people in charge of (or looking to break) security look at the world. Plus it's been a little fun with a silly storyline each day. The first challenge starts with a chatbot and trying to social engineer answers out of it. This was interesting to me, even though it was likely

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04:47

AI In the Nov 2023 Enterprise

Voice of the DBA ·

2023/12/20

AI is everywhere. I can't seem to get away from stories on the technology in 2023, and while I don't know that I've found it that helpful, I keep looking at it because it's becoming a pervasive technology that most enterprises will experiment with in some way. There is a look at generative AI in the Enterprise in the O'Reilly Radar, which tracks how technology is changing and influencing the world. The report talks about most of the respondents to a survey using AI, which makes sense as the people

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03:19

Migrations are Worth the Effort

Voice of the DBA ·

2023/12/18

I work with a lot of customers that are trying to find better ways to build and deploy database code. Some of them use a state or model method with SQL Compare or another Redgate product, and some want to use Flyway and its hybrid migration-based framework. It's always interesting to me how customers lean one way or the other, for various reasons. No matter which choice people make, we know that using migrations is more effort than a state-based approach. However, I think that it's a better

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04:33

Try, Try Again, Until It's Right

Voice of the DBA ·

2023/12/15

One of the challenges with making changes in a database environment is that undoing those changes can be hard. What's often preferred is rolling forward with a new change to correct the issue, but that's often done with limited analysis and thought. Instead, we hope our staff makes a quick patch and a better decision under pressure than they did with more time to examine the problem. That works if it's a simple mistake that was made in implementation but not if we haven't designed our solution well

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02:45

Who Still Uses SP_ for Naming?

Voice of the DBA ·

2023/12/13

An interesting post recently from Chad Callihan on the reasons why someone shouldn't use sp_ to prefix their stored procedures. This is advice that I've seen for years, but I haven't run into this lately with many customers. It seems I do see some usp_, but not sp_. I think that's good, and if you're not sure why, read Chad's post. I think my main reason for not doing this is that I sometimes create procs in master. Not because it's a good idea (it isn't) or I want to, but because I'll make

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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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