And I'm not the only one. There are quite a few people in the SQL world whose advice is trusted, but not universally. How is that trust earned? How can you earn the trust of others? There is no secret, and it's the same way you do it every day in your life.

Here at SQLServerCentral, we've been attacked a few times. Our database has been the victim of SQL Injection attacks in the past, though I hope that we've closed all those holes by now. I haven't seen anything go awry recently (knock on wood), but I'm sure that we are probed or even attacked on a regular basis.

That seemed like a hard question to me. How do you know when someone is ready to be a DBA? There's no test to take, no definite measure. As many people have pointed out, we aren't even likely to agree on what a DBA is, much less what skills they need to have. Let me say that I'm talking about being a DBA in skill, not title. Plenty of people get stuck with the title and have no idea what they're doing.

One of the very few success stories I'd seen back in college was from NASA, that often criticized group for various failures. The group that writes the software for the US Space Shuttle was put forth as a model of software development, earning a CMM level 5 from the Software Engineering Institute. I was reminded of this recently with an article in FastCompany magazine called They Write the Right Stuff.

Read the rest of Grown Up Software at SQLServerCentral.com

In SS2K5, we got a subsystem based on SSIS that allowed more complex maintenance plans than existed in SQL Server 2000.

That got me thinking. Do you really want to see the best minds when you go to a conference? What about a SQLSaturday? Do you want to see the best, or are you happy to see someone that's put an effort into learning about a topic and can teach you something? What about at user groups?

It did get better as I went through the entries. I read some interesting stories, and found there are some great DBAs out there doing amazing work. And I realized they're mostly people that many of you have never heard of.

I have learned a lot about many things in my time working for various companies, and I've learned a lot about myself as well. I've made good and bad choices, and I don't think I have many regrets about my decisions. I think all of them have helped me to either succeed directly, or learn what not to do and succeed indirectly.

I'm really not sure what the truth is in some cases. Things have gotten so complex that often I think even if everything worked as expected, if every API was solid, we'd still have "bugs" from these complicated interactions that no one had thought of between the various components and parts of the system.

Some people have decided they don't want to stay, and quite a few executives, and Google wants to try and see if they can keep them. So they are looking for signs that a person might think about leaving, and then hopefully doing something about it. And in typical Google fashion, they've built an application that crunches data to identify those people likely to leave.

I'm not sure what impact that has on us as SQL Server professionals, but it should mean that Microsoft can afford to continue to invest in its products for some time. The profitable ones, like SQL Server, should continue to receive a lot of this investment for a long time, along with plenty of marketing, sales, etc. Your company might not be doing well right now, but improving your SQL Server skills should pay dividends for some time to come in the overall job market.

So this being Friday, I wanted to see what others thought out there.

And I agree with this blog post:sometimes the problem is you.

When SOX was introduced I was working as a corporate DBA, and the interpretation of the law at that time meant we had to do a lot of documentation to comply. It sounded like a huge hassle for all the employees and management. We all expected this process to cost a lot of money, and reduce revenues a little. Not a lot since everyone would be expected to work more!

We have active forums at SQLServerCentral, there are plenty at MSDN, and various other sites where people ask questions and get answers. Heck, I even use TractorByNet, which recently helped me fix a troubling bush hog problem. The people that answer questions on these forums are experts in their fields, but there are also plenty of people just like you that take a few minutes out of their day to contribute some of their knowledge

How many of you know what your colleagues make? How many of you are upset with what your colleagues earn? Or how many of you suspect that someone you know is overpaid? I think many people have these types of feelings at different points in their careers.

I've worked for a couple start ups in my career and had one literally fold while I was working there. I helped carry out equipment on a Monday morning after the doors were locked and employees were turned away. In the weeks that followed, I helped to move some equipment around, and even install our software at a few former clients (we hosted their data previously) and helped them get up and running.  Those customer's data went to them, at least a usable copy of it, and they had negotiated the right for an escrowed copy of our system.

With that in mind, for a Friday poll that has nothing to do with SQL Server, technology, or work, I wanted to ask:

One of my thoughts is that it's hard to do this because people don't often know they have issues. We see so many people buy hardware that's overkill for the SQL Server instance that 4 people connect to and while it might be horribly inefficiently written, 4 people can't kill the server. Or not enough to matter. Or, hopefully, not that often.

The message from Brian today was that we ought to give our best and not abide by some certain minimum amount of effort. Effort can be measured however we choose, but our goal ought to be to do our best for that time, and not necessarily abide by some measuring stick we've arbitrarily set.

There actually are other industries for all of these cases, but they're not numerous, and they differ from software. The business of building and selling software is fascinating, and I'm always learning more about it. I constantly see great questions in the forums at the Business of Software social network site. I'll also plug the Business of Software 2009 Conference; if you're a software person, consider attending this event. I went last year and found it very stimulating and educational, forcing me to think a lot about how that industry works.

In the IT world, you'd think that ones skills should continue to grow. We are constantly learning new things, there is value to experience, it's not a physical effort (in general), and so you would think the wise old DBA or programmer would be able to perform better than the young turks. And do so in less time.

Recently I've been plagued by back pain, specifically lower back muscles that have knocked me out of some activity. In fact, last weekend I spent a good portion of the weekend lying in bed, watching basketball on TV. While I enjoyed the basketball, it got old, and I felt guilty for not getting some chores done around the ranch I live on. I couldn't even get ahead much on work; being unable to sit up made it hard to type in bed.

Recently I've been plagued by back pain, specifically lower back muscles that have knocked me out of some activity. In fact, last weekend I spent a good portion of the weekend lying in bed, watching basketball on TV. While I enjoyed the basketball, it got old, and I felt guilty for not getting some chores done around the ranch I live on. I couldn't even get ahead much on work; being unable to sit up made it hard to type in bed.

Traditional interviews where you ask lots of questions typically haven't necessarily proven to be a great way to do this. Some people give tests, but they often are thrown together, and might contain multiple choice answers to make them easy to grade. However the other day someone posted a technique they used that I liked.

Read the rest of Testing Skills at SQLServerCentral.com

But where is a good place to look? That really depends on where DBAs go to look for jobs, so where do you look?

What's worse is that I see it in third party applications as well. If you're selling a product, I think you ought to know how to tune it for a database. If you don't, I'd like to see some recourse for clients. Maybe some common settlement in a lawsuit. A few of those and I bet you'd have more DBAs hired by software firms.

So what can you do? Do your best, is really all you can do. Learn about security, try to follow best practices, and follow your own procedures, even when they are a pain. What does that mean? I wish I had a detailed security guide for you, and I'm working to get one set up.

In the SQL Server world, there' s a new Flash. It takes the form of Solid State Drives (SSDs) and I see more and more questions and comments from people starting to use these drives. Most of the notes I've read are from people putting them into laptops, which is definitely something I'd like to try. Anything that makes my laptop run quicker is something I'm interested in.

But how do you find other expert advice? I've been asked about where the OracleCentral or MySQLCentral is to help you learn more about those products. What about where you find answers, or even ask questions, on other subjects?

But where do you store the keys?

Clustering is the technology is seems most people have heard of, and it's the one that management usually wants IT people to implement. However it doesn't solve all high availability problems, and it's certainly not the "best" HA solution.

Years ago I worked at a small firm in Denver. I was the primary DBA, and we were re-architecting some of our applications. I found myself in need of a modeling application to help coordinate all the changes to tables. At the time ER/Win and ER/Studio were my two choices, with ER/Studio being almost half the cost of ER/Win and I convinced my boss at the time to spring for the $2,000 or so for the license.

I think those people are also those least likely to stray from proper behavior, so maybe they don't see the need.

I found an interesting article on computer interfaces and it highlights some of the ways that have been designed to work with computers and put data into, as well as get data out of, computer systems. Most of these are probably familiar to you and there's nothing really groundbreaking in the article.

I think that too many technical people drift along in their careers, not really thinking about how to grow their career, or move it in the direction they want. That's not to say that you must manage your career, you might do fine just moving along from job to job and be relatively happy. There are plenty of great DBAs and developers out there that are happy to go to work and fairly satisfied with their jobs.

People respond to these challenges differently. Some see opportunity, and some see doom and gloom. You can't necessarily control the way people naturally look at a downturn, but you can find ways to influence their perspective, and perhaps turn them around to seek new challenges.

When you get a chance to give back, I think you should. Not every time, but when you can, and feel comfortable, you should give something back to help others in your community. Charity is a common human drive for many people, and I like seeing people help others. Whether it's opening a door, answering a question, donating time or money, or something else, it's a great way to help out society overall.

So it's Friday, and I usually run a poll on Friday to sound out how readers feel. This week I've stated I think SQL Server will move to the cloud, and given some thoughts on how that might happen, the good, the bad, and tried to paint a picture of why this is a good idea. I like the idea of abstracting things out more making them easier to connect, and moving SQL Server to the cloud wants that. So for the Friday poll:

Read the rest of Lassoing a Cloud at SQLServerCentral.com

I want to define the cloud as a set of services in the network, which is a very broad definition. The network can be your corporate network, a private network with some hosting company, the public Internet, etc. It can take many forms, as can the services that are hosted there, so think broadly here.

There are a lot of concerns that people give about moving to cloud computing services for databases, and security is at the top of the list. People worry that their data will be insecure, hacked into, lost by a third party, regulatory agencies won't allow it, and more. Personally I think a lot of that is unfounded. We routinely share sensitive information with companies, usually financial information, to allow those companies to provide us a service.

Today I wanted to talk about how SQL Server will look in the future. At the PASS Summit last year, there was a demo shown of a prototype cloud deployment of SQL Server. The idea would be that you would have a "fabric" of SQL Servers, actual physical or virtual installations that did exist somewhere. However for the deployment of applications, and for users, they would not know, or even care, on which SQL Server their application was deployed. They would deploy to a URL, or network location of some sort and the SQL Server platform would manage everything else.

But like absolutely everything else with databases, "it depends" applies as well. I am sure that we'll have support for SQL Server in the cloud, something much more advanced than the current state of SQL Server Data Services, before too many more releases.

Paul Nielsen says inside of 2 years, and in 5 we'll be leaning cloud first, local server second. I think that's a bit aggressive, and I do think Denis Gobo has some great thoughts about a few things that need to be done before SQL Server can move into the clouds, but it's going to get there for many people. Not everyone, but many people.

Actually it was good to see this Service Pack come out in a timely manner. The Release Services team for SQL Server promised that we'd see the first service pack 6 months after RTM, and then one every year after that. They were slightly late, but this SP went into testing in a timely manner, so I'm guessing there were things that needed to get worked out. I'm much happier with a month or two delay and a buggy Service Pack, as I'm sure those of you working in the real world are as well.

Apart from the hassles of getting this to work, I asked by would they bother. There are decryption routines available and this isn't meant to be a secure way to hide your code. Heck, even application code can be decompiled, and if they're likely to mess with the code, they likely have the skills to get the source.

It seems I get busier every year, and some days I look back and am not sure how I got everything done. Especially for work where it seems I'm constantly behind and racing to catch up. I'm not the most efficient person, and I need to get better at it, but some of the problem is that I work in a creative area and can't be so tightly wound with my day or I'll never think of things like this.

Risk is essentially the probability of a variety of outcomes, our guess about what is likely and how much of a gamble we are willing to take in some situation. The vast majority of the time we internalize the analysis and just make a decision based on what we think is most likely to happen. If we didn't do that and considered too many outcomes (forget every outcome, that's too hard), we'd be paralyzed and slow to make any decision.

We have "The Thread" on the site. I won't link it in here since if you haven't heard of it, I see no reason to disturb it with lots of extra reads. It might be the longest thread on the Internet, and certainly is the longest one here at SQLServerCentral. It's got thousands of replies and tens of thousands of reads. The thread started when someone asked the regular contributers on the site if it seemed that the questions being asked were getting worse. The first poster wondered if people were trying less, unable or unwilling to search, and unwilling to try and help themselves before posting a question.

My first programming was done in BASIC. From there I played with a little assembler before going on to Pascal and C in high school. The came LISP, APL, Fortran, more assembler, C++, and a little ADA in college. My professional career had me programming in Lotus 1-2-3, dBase, FoxPro, C, VB, and finally SQL with minor dabbling in HTML, XML, ASP, and some .NET.

I like the idea of loosely coupled systems, of flexibility, and the ability to easily reconfigure things as needed. I think it's one reason that virtualization is so appealing to me. It not only makes your resource usage more efficient, but it means you can easily move to new, and more powerful, hardware as needed. Portable data centers do this for hardware.

I had a whole other editorial written, but with some recent auto events, I wanted to comment on them. With the resignation of Rick Wagoner from GM, the short leash Chrysler is on to merge with Fiat, and Obama questioning the viability of the industry, there will be a lot of changes before I get to write another one of these.

It's only natural that over time, even those of us that get along well, will get into arguments and disagreements. Often over little things that don't even matter. So for this Friday's poll

Now that's just malicious and nasty.

I was reading Joel Spolsky's latest Inc. Magazine article, and it struck me that "it depends" applies here very well. He was talking about management and the decision of when to implement middle management for his company, Fog Creek Software. They had been a small company, primarily being run by Joel and his partner, Michael Pryor, as co-CEOs. They made joint decisions and tried to keep an open door policy and encourage people to come talk to them.

No one likes layoffs, but they're a fact of the modern corporate world. Companies grow quickly to take advantage of opportunities when they exist, and hire people to do so. When growth slows, they may find they've hired too many. If things slow too much, like they have recently, then companies have to lay people off. It's never a good event, executives try to avoid the bad publicity, and there's no good way to handle things. I've been a part of a few layoffs, and they have always sucked.

Apparently someone is trying something similar on the web. Stephen Wolfram, of mathematica fame, is building Wolfram Alpha, a computational engine for the web. This interview describes some of the features and the ideas behind this new type of engine. It does more than an Ask Jeeves type of search engine or even Google. Instead it should supposedly calculate answers.

That technology was the wireless network. I can move my laptop from the bedroom (where it wakes up) to the basement for shooting podcasts to the kitchen for cooking dinner with kids. It travels with me on the road, I've parked in front of a Starbucks to get quick wi-fi access from my car and I've had it at Paradise Bakery while eating lunch to read or work a little. I've written parts of 4 books on various laptops, in various locations around Denver, grabbing access to information online. I've even tweeted from the slopes while snowboarding using the wi-fi access in the resorts and my iTouch.

And that's the code that often gets used by developers.

But that could change. And I think that Microsoft is in a bit of a downward spiral. One of their main products, Office, is essentially done. What more can you do to those applications that people need? Even Outlook hasn't really added much value for a few versions. Most of us view these types of products as commodities, and a few more features don't really add a lot for us.

When someone is let go, typically they are asked to leave the premises on the day. I've seen escorts that walked people out or watched them pack up. In some extreme cases I've seen people escorted out the door while another employer packed their things and brought them out. For IT workers, it's a little different since they often have privileged access to systems. In addition to removing their personal belongings, having an IT worker leave means that passwords and possibly accounts need to be changed to ensure that the company is safe.

This week I noticed that Microsoft is taking a different approach, at least with some of their software. They're offering discounts on Software Assurance (SA) contracts, including CALs for server software. The idea is to retain customers that might be thinking of dropping the maintenance to reduce their costs. Many larger companies that have Enterprise or Open license agreements are required to keep SA, which can be expensive. This move helps to lower the chance that Microsoft would lose those agreements from their larger customers.

But Is that really a good idea? If you back up all databases every hour because you can, is that waste of resources? What about indexing? Do you need to rebuild only those indexes that need rebuilding? After all, we can rebuild in a smarter way, so it makes some sense there, but then we also need to track data about the indexes so we know what's changed, or what state things are in.

It is difficult to guess the influence and effect that NorthWind has had. I can think of real businesses being run using databases that cheerfully morphed from NorthWind. Whole books use NorthWind as the bedrock for code samples. Despite its limitations and age, it has insinuated itself into IT culture. It is neat, it is simple and it looks real. The data structures are sensible. Whereas Adventureworks looks like it was devised by a committee, NorthWind has the air of clarity to it.

However what about your test and development environments? I've seen people obfuscate data here, but not always. In fact, not usually. This is despite the fact that you might turn over developers often, expose that data to testers, or other people that might not normally have access, and the fact that these environments almost never have auditing enabled.

My prediction is that most DBAs will need to support more versions of SQL Server in the future. Instead of supporting 2 versions of SQL Server, as many people do now (a "current" version and as you move your instances to the "new" version), I think most companies will end up having 3 or 4 versions of SQL Server living at the same time.

Suspend those thoughts for a moment. Not because you're wrong, but because I want you to have a bit of fun this Friday. For this Friday's poll:

I noticed that I'm not the only person thinking about this and read a great blog by Kendal Van Dyke on Showing Your Value that covers some similar ideas. He talks about showing your value to your employer, which is something that I bring up in my presentation, and I think is important in these turbulent times.

That's good since what I saw of SQL Server Data Services last year left a lot to be desired. When I saw a demo from the SSDS team at TechEd, I was incredibly under-whelmed with that capabilities. At that time I would have barely even called it a database.

President Obama was inaugurated in the US this week as the 44th President of the United States. Elected on a platform of hope, it's now his job to lead the US for the next four years, hopefully solving some of the problems we have. People hope he can turn around our economy, and many people both in and out of the US are watching carefully as he takes office. This week I've been in the UK and I was surprised how closely citizens there were following the US and how many watched the events on Tuesday. I feel fairly uninformed since I don't even know who are leaders of the UK, much less who ran in their election and here they are watching my President being sworn into office.

With all of the issues in the economy, and with all the various groups and industries calling for bailouts I was wondering where our SQL Bailout is? Can we get money for tools to allow us to monitor more servers? Ensure our backups are compressed, copied to remote disks, and couriered to safe deposit boxes? Can we find funds to keep our IT staffs employed? After all, IT in the US employs millions of people and there are plenty of layoffs occurring already in our industry.

The standard answer is there is no good way of knowing this, set up a trace, track the usage, and similar suggestions. As I was looking over one of these posts the other day, I stopped and decided to question the poster. Why do you want to trim stored procedures? I can understand removing, or archiving data in tables that might not be used, but even then, if they're not really large, is it worth the effort? Do you need to try and clean things up?

I ran into this article on weatherizing homes, talking about this being a potential new growth area for homebuilders. I think that's a great idea, and it's something we should be doing more. It might cost more to build a better house, and I understand at the lower income levels this can be an issue, but we should be considering the TCO for a house, and trying to reduce the cost of living there. It's always easier to plan for one large payment (your mortgage) than plan on your mortgage and forget to include the electricity, water, gas, etc.

For most of my career it's been a political process. Either someone convinces my boss to allocate them more resources or they're a squeaky enough wheel that I decide to do it. In either case, it's been a subjective decision as to how many resources each department gets from IT.

Why is this? Do some DBAs have a false belief that database backups are always perfect? Perhaps these DBAs don’t know the mechanics of to how to verify a backup? Maybe, they just don’t have the time to perform the verification? Most likely, the haven't even given the issue any thought because they have not – yet – had a restore fail, and had to explain to an irate manager why their data is lost.

Why is this? Do some DBAs have a false belief that database backups are always perfect? Perhaps these DBAs don’t know the mechanics of to how to verify a backup? Maybe, they just don’t have the time to perform the verification? Most likely, the haven't even given the issue any thought because they have not – yet – had a restore fail, and had to explain to an irate manager why their data is lost.

I've usually tried to help answer questions, and point people to the appropriate resources on the Microsoft site, but when I sawthis post from Andrew Fryer on the SQL Server editions I started to think about why there are different editions.

As we were chatting, it got me thinking about the cost of downtime and the value of products like the

Asempra Business Continuity Server in both limiting downtime and ensuring that data is protected. I guess business still being conducted is up there as well. However I was curious how much of a risk this can be for companies and thought this would make a great Friday poll.

I also saw a note awhile back that many of these cameras are un-manned because of the cost of doing so and the lack of funds from some departments. An investment was being made in the infrastructure and process to handle all this "data," but perhaps it wasn't a good investment if there's no one around to view the information.

The CEO of a 3,000+ person company had to approve a $1,500-2,000 trip for a sale worth tens of millions of dollars in revenue.

This week I saw an announcement that How We Test Software at Microsoft, a new book by Alan Page and BJ Rollison, was released. There's even a website to go along with the book. Sadly there was no Kindle version, or sample on Amazon, so I couldn't get much more than some excerpts on various blogs about the book.

As I read the book and draw parallels to business, I'm struck by how closely many of the companies I've worked for are to the structure in the Navy. I'd always assumed that they would operate extremely differently, but I see now that's not really the case. There are definite differences, and actions can have very serious, and dire, consequences in the Navy, but the leadership and management of people is similar.

What does this have to do with Business Intelligence? I'm getting there.

Global warming has been talked about since I was a kid in the 70s. With the energy crisis we had then, people were concerned we would not only run out of fossil fuels (wasn't that supposed to happen by now?), but that we would irreparably harm the environment and melt the polar ice caps, flood the coastlines, change the weather and more. There is a lot of research that talks about changes in the environment and the potential consequences.

When I heard Red Gate was moving, I was curious to see the new spaces. Lots of emails have come through the company-wide email system talking about the changes and new features. Apparently a lot of thought went into the design, so I wondered how it might turn out.

I was flipping around the Internet and ran into this blog post on trust. It's short and at first I didn't really think much of it, but as I reread the second paragraph it struck me that this person is upset with the apparent decline of western civilization. I think this person is the minority, or at least I hope so, but it started me thinking about the way we trust each other in business.

Since it's a holiday, I like to get your opinions, and Oscar season is here, I have an easy Friday poll for you.

We used to keep those numbers monthly as a way of tracking progress and the old site had an administrative report that showed these. A few of the numbers that were there from the end of some months:

This week we had an article published on 3 tips for rookie DBAs. The article has been removed, but it was pointed out by a few people that it had information very similar to another article, Tips for New DBAs by Craig Outcalt. My apologies for Craig for not catching the similarities in the articles.

What's new in the car world? A lot since the last update considering the US auto industry is on the brink of failure. First, I want a new car. Not a new, new car, but a new-to-me car, or truck rather. As well as the Prius has done, it's a little crowded taking it to the mountains and my wife's Ram 2500 seems to be permanently attached to her horse trailer. As I go boarding, so goes riding and while I could take the trailer to the mountains, it's a bit more space than I need. What I'd like is an old Trooper to get to the mountains as needed, but that's not likely to come to fruition.

I don't think that a carpenter gets pay deducted when he's changing butane in his nail gun. I don't think that a mechanic gets charged for restarting the equipment he uses to check exhaust or alignment. Does a doctor stop charging you while he's changing the films in an xray machine? Or while they're rendering? Equipment doesn't always function at the speed of humans.

That's not terribly surprising as I'm sure very few people use any aggregates beyond SUM, COUNT, MIN, and MAX, but with the addition of the CLR in SQL Server 2005, there's no reason that you can't write your own routines. I'm not sure how well these perform in large scale situations, but they are a great way to expand the capabilities of the platform.

Read the rest of Slack SQL Server at SQLServerCentral.com

Often the people building IT systems go through an extensive evaluation to determine the needs and wants of their users. It's an attempt to identify exactly what to build so that the user is pleased, a good estimation can be made, and everyone finishes the project happy.

However because of national security concerns, people are recommending that he not use a Blackberry and rely upon aides for information. This is the first time we've had a President that has really grown into the information age, so it will be interesting to see what happens.