Read the rest of "Morphing Microsoft" at SQLServerCentral.

There is no excuse for not using version control, even for a small project developed by single developer. Setting up local version control is beyond trivial, benefits huge. Any developer not knowing that cannot be considered good nor experienced."

Read the rest of "The Control Poll" at SQLServerCentral.

If a hacker manages to gain access to your password hashes, and it's not a stretch these days to think that they might, wouldn't you like to know if they manage to find the plain text that corresponds to the hash? There's an idea that systems could be written to store multiple passwords for user accounts, but only one of which is valid. A separate system detects attempts to log in with the false passwords and alerts administrators to a hacking attempt.

Read the rest of "Honeywords in SQL Server" at SQLServerCentral.

SQL Server has had a few competitors over the years that tried to provide compatibility and enable easy or seemless migration from SQL Server to a new database engine, but none of them seem to have been very popular.

Read the rest of "The Challenger" at SQLServerCentral.

However I can't see many customers migrating the majority of their applications to the PaaS Azure service for one reason: there's no competition.

Read the rest of "The Platform Problem" at SQLServerCentral.

I would guess that if many of us profiled our code, and examined the CPU and network bandwidth we consume, we might be surprised at what we find. CPU and network usage isn't something we are often concerned about. We assume that we've bought a machine and we should be able to use as much of it as we can at any point in time. That's not the best approach, but since we often have more hardware than we need for many processes, it works. It also explains why so many applications struggle as the load increases. They're not coded efficiently.

Read the rest of "Better Coding, More Savings" at SQLServerCentral.

Visualizations can help us understand and consume a large amount of data quickly. They don't always provide all the information we need for a decision, but they make it easier for us to understand where we should look deeper. There's a great piece on how visualization tools help us understand big data, and also a tour of visualization methods (thanks to Brent Ozar, PLF).

Read the rest of "Visualizations" at SQLServerCentral. 

Whether you think we'll reach a point where machines are sentient or not, we do know that for single tasks, or a limited domain of tasks, machines can excel at some tasks. We've seen tremendous improvements in any number of fields where computer technology combined with machinery has greatly improved the way in which a business can function. These improvements have sometimes come at the cost of jobs, which can be a problem in some cases as humans must adapt to the changing ways that organizations function.

Read the rest of "Our Race with Machines" at SQLServerCentral. 

The problem with big data, however, is that it while it contains more information, it can also contain more irrelevant information. That's noted in this piece on small data (from Brent Ozar, PLF), where the author states the signal to noise ration may be decreased when you examine very large data sets. You may find that there are correlations that appear to causations. With enough data, with enough things to examine, you can often start seeing patterns that aren't really there. These ghost patterns can lead you to draw incorrect, or at least less correct, conclusions if you do not investigate further and test your ideas on portions of your data set.

Read the rest of "Small Data" at SQLServerCentral.

There are people that think corporations like Microsoft and Google should focus on their core businesses and maximize their profits. However I think the investments that these companies make in various research areas allow them to learn about new opportunities that may become products at some point. It can be hard to determine if a technology area is viable for products, and the targeted research these companies engage in can help them improve existing products, or invent new ones.

Read the rest of "Microsoft Research" at SQLServerCentral.

The presentation wasn't what I expected, with Bono embracing his "inner nerd", as he put it. He talks not only about the state of his cause, but he uses data to present his case and inspire people to continue to work to make things better around the world. The term he used was not activism, but factivism. This is the idea of using facts and knowledge to further a cause. Whether you agree with Bono's vision, his case, or his goal, the idea of using data to make changes is something most of us embrace as data professionals.

Read the rest of "Factivism" at SQLServerCentral. 

I'll have a quick turnaround after this trip as well, coming home for a little over 24 hours before I turn around and head to the UK for meetings at Red Gate next week and SQL Bits XI next weekend. I'm hoping that none of the airlines have data issues since those can severely impact my travel times. Last week American Airlines had computer issues, and while United hasn't had any in awhile, my fingers are crossed that this won't be the weekend their systems go down.

Read the rest of "Flight Data" at SQLServerCentral.

As data professionals, we usually think of the mechanics of dealing with the various pieces of data in our organizations. We must protect data, ensure it's integrity, make it available and more. A large part of our careers is spent manipulating or managing the bits and bytes stored in databases. We must extract information out, and often need to understand what the data represents to do this, but most of us haven't been exposed to the issues of ownership or rights with data. I think that will increasingly change as government rules, regulations, and laws scramble to catch up with the digital world.

Read the rest of "Natural Data" at SQLServerCentral.

The seventh item on the list notes that you should spend 10-15% of your time working on a project that's outside of the scope of your job or team. That might sound crazy, and even dangerous, but it's a good idea if your boss isn't opposed to it. Having knowledge about the way your business works, the way they use data, or solve a problem, could be valuable in your existing job. You might notice a pattern or way in which you could improve either your job or someone else's. Over time, helping in a variety of departments builds friendships, increases your networking, and might show your boss you deserve a raise.

Read the rest of "Accelerating Your Career" at SQLServerCentral.

The Microsoft corporate headquarters in Redmond consists of over 100 buildings on 500 acres. It's grown over the years from its original 88 acres, which is also the title of a story about Microsoft and the relatively unknown work in automating their infrastructure. Not the computer systems their software developers use, but rather their facilities and physical buildings. It's a fascinating story that outlines the way in which Microsoft saves millions of dollars in maintenance and repairs by using software.

Read the rest of "A Billion Transactions" at SQLServerCentral.

In the last three years, we've continued to run the site on SQL Server 2008 because it works well. We don't need the newer features, and since we have a clustered pair of instances, an upgrade would be a substantial cost. That cost is hard to justify when there isn't a business benefit I can point to. I'm sure we could write more efficient code with the new T-SQL enhancements and improve performance, but since we've invested in beefy hardware, I'm not sure we would gain much with an upgrade. Quite a few of the people I've talked to in the last couple years feel the same way.

Read the rest of "Upgrading to 2012" at SQLServerCentral.

However there are other sides to this question, and I'm torn as to how I feel. If you haven't interviewed in awhile, or if this is your first interview for a database job, wouldn't you want to get an idea of what somoen might ask you? I wouldn't want anyone to misrepresent their skills, but I'd also want them to be able to talk about the skills they have had. Perhaps realizing that they should think about their experience in T-SQL more than their experience with replication might be valuable information.

Read the rest of "Asking for Interview Questions" at SQLServerCentral.

It seems to have worked well for Apple, which has sold billions of applications across their devices. It works so well that Microsoft seems to have adopted a new process for the "Metro" style applications for devices and Windows 8. According to this article, the "Black Tuesday" for patches might be going away. All of the things I don't like about the iOS patch system seem to be coming to Metro apps. I wouldn't care, but since Windows Server 2012 has some of the Windows 8 characteristics, I'm a little concerned. Are we doomed to get more "Metro" style interfaces for Windows features and potentially third party applications that will send patches mixed in with enhancements? Will we get stuck "upgrading" systems with new features in order to get security patches?

Read the rest of "The Patch Wild, Wild West" at SQLServerCentral. 

I'm not the only one that thinks you should have some brand out there. Troy Hunt wrote a piece about being a ghost programmer and how it hurts your career. It basically talks about how a programmer that doesn't leave any kind of trail on the Internet is not likely one you want to hire. There are all sorts of reasons someone might not have a blog, or participate on a site like Ask SQLServerCentral, but many of the reasons are signs that a person isn't really working efficiently. I'm not sure I completely agree with this interpretation, but I do think that the less information a potential employer can find about you, the more reason they might have to ignore your resume and move on to someone who they can perform more due diligence on.

Read the rest of "Don't Be a Ghost" at SQLServerCentral.

No matter what your position, it seems the Microsoft Research isn't trying to make a stand for either position, but rather attempting to clear the technical hurdles that would allow other groups to compare and debate about their models with regards to any global issue. Their goal isn't to push users in a direction, but give governments or other organizations tools they can use to either consider future actions, or react to new data or information that can be added to a model. There's a short interview from CNN with one of the researchers.

Read the rest of "Modeling the Earth" at SQLServerCentral.

For me, the ideal environment has varied according to the job that I did. Software development seems to require more quiet and separation than operational work. The more I coordinate with others, the more I like an open floor plan. The more I have to concentrate on my own work, the more I prefer a peaceful, solitary environment. As a DBA, I've had to work in both environments and I've had my own office, a shared office, a hot desk, and an open plan. I often haven't had a choice of the arrangement in most jobs, so it's a good thing I'm adaptable.

Read the rest of "The DBA Office" at SQLServerCentral.

However PCI and HIPAA are not the same, and you shouldn't expect that passing one would mean you could pass the other. For most of us, we wouldn't be bound by both of these, since they are applied to the financial and medical fields respectively. However as we look to move forward and use new partners in business, including cloud services, we should be aware that just because a company has one certification doesn't mean they have the other. If your business partner is PCI complaint in some way, I wouldn't assume that this means they are in any way HIPAA compliant, and vice versa.

Read the rest of "Double Compliance" at SQLServerCentral.

However the services have to work and work well.

Read the rest of "Development, Operations, or Accounting" at SQLServerCentral.

It's also somewhat of the way the world works now, although without all the disclosure. In today's world it's actually much easier to hide your flaws and poor performance because the information isn't always readily available to potential employers. Some of us see this in the poor performance of colleagues, who were hired with good recommendations or interviews. We may find out later that these were exaggerated, though we often can't (or won't) do anything about this, suffering through poor performance from the individual or company.

Read the rest of "Data Darwinism" at SQLServerCentral.

However the security around this procedure has been improved over the years. Non system administrators cannot execute xp_cmdshell by default. Administrators can open up access using a proxy account, but this requires specific configuration changes by administrators. This means that a lot of the danger of using xp_cmdshell for administrative tasks has been removed.

Read the rest of "The Command Shell" at SQLServerCentral.

I am guessing that Brent Ozar, Kevin Farlee, and Mat Young will have lots of answers for me and others. I'm also guessing most of the questions will be met with references that are already out there, and I hope that the presenters will publish a list of questions and answers for attendees. That's fine, as there are lots of times when I'm looking for information that has been published, but I can't find in the ocean of Google results. Attending a session given by experts can be a way to shortcut some research and searching to find where the answers are located.

Read the rest of "What Do You Want to Know About I/O?" at SQLServerCentral.

Recently Evernote had a security breach and they forced all users to reset their passwords. It was slightly annoying, but it was a comforting response for me. Two week after the incident I had to change the password on my iPad, which I rarely use. It was ironic since I was working on this particular piece when I reset my password.

Read the rest of "A Good Security Response" at SQLServerCentral.

Cars have implemented a wide array of technology over time, some of which drivers are not even aware. These days cars gather an impressive amount of data, though probably not quite at the scale of the new Dreamliner. Or maybe they do. According to this article, cars can produce "hundreds of MB/s" in data acquisition. I would guess most of that data is thrown away, but some may not. I was quite impressed with the amount of data Tesla logged during the recent test drive controversy with one of their vehicles.

Read the rest of "Car Data" at SQLServerCentral.

However the number of tuning options, and the wealth of information exposed by SQL Server to developers and administrators has grown tremendously over the years. We have DMVs and DMFs, many more tuning options, new hints, isolation levels, and more that enable the DBA to manage SQL Server fairly in a very granular way when they want to do so. From what I understand, there are still less options than other platforms have and often the best advice I seen given from various people is to write more efficient code and let SQL Server still determine the optimal plan for query execution.

Read the rest of "Toggle Switches" at SQLServerCentral. 

Think back 30 years ago, as computers were just starting to become household items. The high density floppy disk (not really very floppy) was a 1.44MB disk. At the time, this held what felt like lots of data in terms of text pages. However many songs we listen to today wouldn't fit on this media. As we've progressed through CDs and DVDs to flash drives, we've grown the storage capacity of our hardware by unbelievable amounts. My phone has 64GB of storage, which is a level of growth so far removed from the Apollo guidance computer's 2kb that comparisons don't do it justice.

Read the rest of "Zettabytes and Beyond" at SQLServerCentral.

That server, which cost something like $280,000 in 1991 was the biggest one on our network, with something like 8GB of storage. That seems like a pittance today, especially compared with the sale EMC just made. The Vatican is getting 2.8PB of storage from EMC for its library. EMC is also providing consulting services to digitize some of the historic manuscripts and documents that have been deteriorating from user and handling. It's an ambitious 9-year project, of which this is just the first 3 years.

Read the rest of "Serious Storage" at SQLServerCentral.

All too often I run into DBAs that seem to trust and assume their backups and processes are very reliable. After setting up a backup process, usually to disk, and testing it with a restore on another system, they assume it will work in the future. It should, but there is always the chance something will fail at some point in time. There's the chance that some hardware failure or software reconfiguration will cause an issue with your process. There's also the simple chance that your I/O system might introduce corruption into your backup files.

Read the rest of "The Backup Process" at SQLServerCentral.

I've also followed the rise fo 37 Signals, and Jason Fried, who I think has built a company the right way. In many ways the things I admire about that company are also things I admire about Red Gate Software. These are companies that not only run successful and profitable businesses, but they do so in a way that inspires people and gives them more than just a paycheck.

Read the rest of "Inconsistency" at SQLServerCentral.

I was at in a session recently and heard a speaker recommend that the audience run DBCC checks regularly. That's good advice, and it's what I recommend in my sessions as well. A person in the audience raised their hand and politely disagreed, saying that they almost never run DBCC CHECKDB. This person found it to be a waste of resources since they'd never encountered corruption in their career, and hadn't known anyone in over a decade that had experienced on a SQL Server system. This person asked the speaker how many times the speaker had seen corruption (five was the answer) and then said across thousands of days of backups, it just wasn't worth the resources to run DBCC CHECDB.

Read the rest of "The Gambler" at SQLServerCentral.

That got me thinking. Why is this data removed? I'm sure some of the data is stored in memory and automatically reset, but is this the best way to handle this data? Wouldn't it be better to persist this data and allow the DBA to reset it when they were ready? I know we can store this data in a table periodically, but I think this would make sense as an option in SQL Server. When we shut down a database, persist this data inside the database. That would be closer to my vision of self-describing databases, which contain all their own metadata.

Read the rest of "Resetting DMVs" at SQLServerCentral.

There are many things that we need to manage with databases: maintenance, backups, auditing, performance statistics, alerts, and more. Most of these are set up at the instance, but I've never quite understood why. Software should help us work more efficiently, and work with us, not against us. So many of these administrative items are dependent on the needs of a particular database or application, but we perform all these actions at the instance level.

Read the rest of "Self Describing Databases" at SQLServerCentral.

I've worked at home for over a decade; my wife for over two decades. In that time we've learned a few things. One of them is that telecommuting isn't for everyone. It's hard. We alternately struggle trying to stay motivated with understanding we need to stop working. We realize that the ability of telecommuting to work is job dependent. The more your job involves just you, the more likely it is that you can do it remotely. The more it involves collaboration, the more you'll struggle to get things done. We have also learned that periodic face-time is important in almost all situations.

Read the rest of "Productivity and Accountability" at SQLServerCentral.

I ran across this piece on the culture and hiring at Valve, a gaming company that makes Steam and Half Life. They have a very free flowing culture, depending on the individuals to make good decisions for the company and their own teams. I'm not sure how scalable this is, or even how easily this can be replicated to other companies. As I've watched Red Gate grow over the years, it's been an amazing place to work, but it's not without some pain points. We've done well, though I don't know that the ideas from Valve would work there.

Read the rest of "Two Plugs Away" at SQLServerCentral.

That's a denial of service type attack that I hadn't expected, but it is an interesting attack vector. I wouldn't expect this to impact servers, but if servers are consuming web services, and using controls based on browsers, there is the possibility this type of attack might affect them. I'd hope this were limited to web servers and not impact database servers, but it's certainly a concern if you have processes running on your database server that might retrieve data from a remote source.

Read the rest of "Data We Don't Want" at SQLServerCentral.

Connect was supposed to be a place where users could report bugs and make suggestions. Some people file a lot of bugs and suggestions, though more than a few seem slightly silly. Others file what appear to be support requests, and I've had a number of documentation notes. There are even Connect items filed on Connect itself, though I can't understand why this particular one is "postponed". There are some items that have been open for years, even with hundreds of votes.

Read the rest of "Does Connect Work?" at SQLServerCentral.

That's how I started, but I'm wondering if that's how most of you started. I would guess most of us didn't necessarily choose to work with this platform, but since that time, many of us have had other choices. This Friday, I wanted to ask about your work in the SQL Server world and participation at SQLServerCentral.

Read the rest of "Why SQL Server?" at SQLServerCentral.

As I heard about changes and additions, it occurred to me that while some of the features and functions become easier for people managing platforms, others become more difficult. The tuning decisions we might make with regards to resources become more complex. We have new knobs to turn, and more decisions to make on how to best balance the hardware available on our servers.

Read the rest of "More Evolution, More Complexity" at SQLServerCentral.

There was a time when Microsoft courted developers, and created an excitement that resulted in many individuals and companies writing new applications for the Windows platform and caused an explosion of growth, not just for Microsoft, but for everyone in the ecosystem. The last six or seven years it seems Apple has taken over that crown with the excitement generated by iOS. Even as Microsoft made a fantastic update to its core OS with the lean and fast Windows 7, and even as SQL Server has grown to become a platform that can power almost any application in the world.

Read the rest of "The Microsoft Sideshow" at SQLServerCentral.

However is this a valid way to present the data? From the business side of things, this makes sense. If you identify a trend, you may look to exploit it or incorporate the potential results into your decision making. I could even see some sort of business intelligence system making this decisions automatically, without human intervention. As we build more sophisticated software, using a large set of inputs, I could see exactly this type of thing occurring more frequently.

Read the rest of "Look Beyond the First Result" at SQLServerCentral.

Read the rest of "The Dark Side" at SQLServerCentral.

We each have our own experiences, successes, and failures, but we aren't bound by what's happened in our career so far. We have the ability to shape our brand for the future by making changes in the way we approach our career from this day forward. I have a talk and blog on this subject, but I certainly don't have all the answers. I'm always looking for more ideas and suggestions to help people and wanted to ask for your ideas this week.

Read the rest of "Impressive Accomplishments" at SQLServerCentral.

That isn't always the case. There will be times that things break, that bugs crop up or systems fail. When that happens, people don't want to hear about the problems, or what went wrong. They might ask, and they might be curious, but really what they want to know is when will it be fixed and what the cost will be.

Read the rest of "Bring Solutions" at SQLServerCentral.

I was reminded of the hard work we do with security when I read this piece on family accounts and the lack of support from Amazon and Apple. There are any number of comments and criticisms of the idea from people that ecosystems are bad ideas, or supporters of this idea have trust issues. Those are valid criticisms of the process, but that doesn't change the fact that as our digital world has grown more closely linked, and many of us do want ways to share some of our digital assets with others, while retaining our privacy.

Read the rest of "The Group Account" at SQLServerCentral. 

Many of us in the data industry develop software in some way. Whether we write queries in T-SQL or build projects in .NET, we produce code to accomplish some task. I'd like to think that many of us improve our skills over time, preferably by practicing new techniques and learning form our mistakes. I know some people stick with the tried and true methods without gaining skill over time, which not only hurts one's career, but also doesn't give your employer a reason to value your work.

Read the rest of "Practicing Deployments" at SQLServerCentral.

This article talks about the HIPAA laws being a floor, not a ceiling, and a patchwork of laws in various states superceed what HIPAA requires. However in doing so, they create inconsistent regulations and rules that people struggle to understand, and with which technology cannot keep up. I'd take issue with the comment that "Digital systems to move information need simplicity". It's not true. Our digital systems are very adept at handling exceptions and variable routing and security when they are programmed to do so. The problem is ensuring the people writing the code understand all of the rules for the exceptions.

Read the rest of "Data Freedom and Regulation" at SQLServerCentral.

A Watson supercomputer is being sent to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York to go to school. In it's quest to defeat the Jeopardy champions, this type of computer was fed a tremendous amount of information from general sources. A clone of Watson received specialized medical data to help doctors diagnose patients better. This last incarnation of the computer system will be fed information from various researchers in different fields at RPI. What will come out of this, experiment nobody knows.

Read the rest of "A Computer Goes to College" at SQLServerCentral.

I ran across a piece on data journalism that talks about a few projects around the world. This is the idea of adding a story, along with context and clarity, to facts. That is what many people are showing in the various projects in the O'Reilly piece, and it got me thinking. Perhaps this isn't just something that can be done with open data and public services. Perhaps this is something we could be doing more of within all our organizations.

Read the rest of "Data Journalism" at SQLServerCentral.

However many of those strategies don't match the situation for large companies. Once you've hired an IT staff and made an investment in hardware and facilities, can the cloud really help you? I had my doubts, but this article about Toyota makes me rethink those doubts, or at least many of them.

Read the rest of "The Cloud in Large IT Shops" at SQLServerCentral.

A short while back I was talking with a friend that was under pressure to complete a deployment that was proceeding poorly and their manager stood next to their desk, watching, commenting, and asking how long each process would take. I've had to deal with that situation in the past, and it was  maddening to me. It's hard enough to focus and work on a task when there are problems with the technology. Having someone that can't contribute but is in a supervisory role nearby usually makes things worse.

Read the rest of "Dealing with Supervision" at SQLServerCentral. 

Good DBAs know that baselines are essential. If you don't know what values to expect from your server, it's often hard to determine if the system is running slower than normal. Normal is something you need to define for each system, preferably in an automated way that updates your baseline over time.

Read the rest of "Baselines" at SQLServerCentral

I remember having a dedicated room so cold that I kept a coat in by cube, even during the 95F summers. These days I have space in a Denver center that has hot and cold aisles. The latter still requires me to carry a coat, but any significant amount of time in the former means I'm down to just a t-shirt.

Read the rest of "A New Type of Colocation Facility" at SQLServerCentral.

One of their other projects seems more ambitious. The Knowledge Graph project aims to use a database of everything in the world (according to this piece) and provide even more information to people using the Google search engine. In addition to search results, the idea is that you can get other facts and information about the topic you are searching for.

Read the rest of "The Knowledge Graph" at SQLServerCentral.

The preparation for an audit required a lot of work, meetings, and organization. The first time I suffered through an ISO audit, I was amazed at how much of our daily work was interrupted and the time spent ensuring we would pass the audit. The second time wasn't much better, though I'd instituted some processes and controls for the DBA group that did reduce the amount of preparation needed for our portion of the audit.

Read the rest of "Acing an Audit" at SQLServerCentral

Do they? How many servers in large companies are still running on the x86 architecture? I know I have old laptops still running those processors, though I'd like to think that most companies have a hardware refresh rate that's no longer than 5 years, and most laptops and servers would be x86.

Read the rest of "Still 32" at SQLServerCentral. 

Last year was a good year for geeky films. The top grossing films of 2012 were dominated by those topics that we might see as appealing to the nerds, geeks, and technologists. I greatly enjoyed the top 4 and would recommend to others. However the amount of money a film makes doesn't necessarily mean it's worth watching, and if a film doens't earn much money, that shouldn't mean you want to avoid it.

Read the rest of "Geeky Oscars" at SQLServerCentral. 

That's kind of the idea proposed in the article that says the future of software is serverless? It's an interesting read, talking about the advances in cloud services that can change the way developers build applications. Developers should think about liking services, and pieces of applications, ignoring the idea their systems are tied to specific servers.

Read the rest of "Serverless Software" at SQLServerCentral.

These types of programming errors seem to regularly slip by developers. The situation has gotten better since the days of VB6 when it seemed everyone that could complete a week long course was building buggy applications at a frightening rate. While I still think there are plenty of hack developers out there, it seems that with all the publication and information available, there are better programs being built in many organizations.

Read the rest of "Building Better Software" at SQLServerCentral. 

Cloud computing use is growing, and while we don't have a good definition for what a cloud computing means, more and more organizations are considering looking at moving some of their applications, and data, to the cloud. As we move this data, many DBAs have concerns over the security of the data they are supposed to protect. These are valid concerns, and they should be at the forefront of your mind if you plan on moving anything to any type of service provider.

Read the rest of "Encryption Not Restriction" at SQLServerCentral.

In setting his target amount of money to earn, we talked about specifications for various machines, looking online and in local stores. We talked about the various CPU, RAM, and storage values, and what they might mean to him in terms of the performance of a laptop. While we were talking, he asked me some interesting questions about the growth of storage. I thought they were interesting, and decided to ask you this week what you think.

Read the rest of "The Growth of Storage" at SQLServerCentral.

Most people are never hacked and don't have issues. Even if they do experience some problem, they can often recover fairly easily. Lots of hacks are just annoying, like using your email account to send SPAM, akin to random vandalism. As a result, many people don't bother to change their habits. It might also be a tendency that's hard-wired in our personalities. I've educated friends on passwords and given them Password Safe. A few use it religiously, but others keep forgetting, preferring to keep regenerating and changing passwords or re-using them.

Read the rest of "Serious Security" at SQLServerCentral.

I ran across a piece on 10 uses for a message queue that points out a number of possible ways that queuing could help you. There are some great ideas, including a few suggestions for scalability and resiliency for your application. One of the more interesting ones to me is the idea of using a queue to buffer the slower processes that may be a bottleneck in your application.

Read the rest of "Message Queues in Software" at SQLServerCentral. 

In general, I don't mind helping people learn more about their craft. I's how I learned, and I think honest effort should be rewarded. If you spend some time trying to learn something or understand a concept and have questions, I am more than happy to try and clarify things. However I don't think that anyone on a phone interview, completing some type of employment exam, or even just memorizing a number of new concepts is doing themselves, or the employer, any good.

Read the rest of "Cramming for Interviews" at SQLServerCentral.

I also wonder how many of them have old versions of software with known vulnerabilities that can be exploited, not just by dedicated hackers, but by script kiddies. Lots of people have excess time available, powerful computing resources, and mischief in their hearts.

Read the rest of "Global Insecurities" at SQLServerCentral.

This week I'm curious to what extent you have auditing in your environment. For some of us it's included in the software we write, for others we might have to retrofit auditing when some issue occurs, but most applications I've used have very limited auditing or logging capabilities.

Read the rest of "The Auditing Poll" at SQLServerCentral. 

SQL Server users are fortunate that we rarely have security patches for our platform. There are cumulative updates every other month, but the majority of them aren't aimed at SQL Server, and many of them may not even be required for the host Windows OS. Your organization's policy may require the OS patches, and if they do, you should be aware of when and how they are being deployed.

Read the rest of "A Patch Disaster" at SQLServerCentral.

I almost hope it's the latter. I hope that our managers start to think that when our systems run slower that we're dealing with big data, and we need more resources. The whole big data phenomenon could be a way for data professionals to start a new hardware renaissance, where hardware budgets grow and we begin to replace our current systems with bigger, faster servers.

Read the rest of "Is Big Data Good for Data Professionals?" at SQLServerCentral.

I ran across an article that talked about protecting data in statistical databases. These are the databases that contain data from multiple sources, and are used to analyze the information from these sources. The security of these databases becomes important when the data contains information about individuals that we consider sensitive. Interestingly enough, it seems that the security protections being used are query restrictions.

Read the rest of "Statistical Protection" at SQLServerCentral.

There was a large study competed recently, called The Billion Dollar Lost Laptop Program, which examined 329 organizations. The idea was to try and find out the economic costs of lost laptops to various public and private entities. The conclusion? The average value of a lost laptop, just one laptop, is $49,000. The conclusions say that least expensive part of losing a laptop of replacing the hardware.

Read the rest of "The $50,000 Laptop" at SQLServerCentral.

However as I was reading a note from Richard Douglas about being hacked, it brought back memories of working at JD Edwards. Richard was hacked at work, on his personal system. At JD Edwards, we were required to lock our workstations at all times when we were not physically in front of them. We also had two accounts: a normal user and a domain admin "privileged" user. As you might expect, there were numerous lapses of people walking to the kitchen or bathroom and forgetting to lock their workstations. It was considered fair game to change settings, send email to our group, even place semi-SFW pictures on someone's desktop. It was quite embarrassing to be caught, and was much more a an effective security reminder than a reprimand from our boss.

Read the rest of "Hacked" at SQLServerCentral.

Mobile devices will continue to grow in popularity. No great surprise there for many of you, but I think that we will see more smartphones sold than regular phones in 2013. With a large market of used devices and the constant push of new devices, new form factors and sizes, I truly think that we will be in a very data centric world most for most of the time in 2013. Between tablets and laptops sporting cellular connections and pocket sized smartphones, most of us (including non-technical people) will have some type of data consumption device in our lives.

Read the rest of "The Year 2013" at SQLServerCentral.

We had more opportunities to use SQL Server in new ways, many of them with the expansion of cloud services. Amazon added SQL Server to its RDS platform, allowing quick and easy deployment of SQL Server in the AWS cloud. SQL Azure lost its name, as it was folded into Windows Azure, but it was enhanced throughout the year with a number of releases.

Read the rest of "2012 in Review" at SQLServerCentral.

As this year ends, I'd like to ask you to think smaller, and think about your career. For the last poll of 2012, I wanted to ask this:

Read the rest of "2013 Goals" at SQLServerCentral.

However it's been awhile since I worked on a variety of systems as a consultant. I often see the forums at SQLServerCentral showing only tens of transactions/sec, based on the performance data that you can see at monitor.red-gate.com. This is the actual data from our servers and it seems like a low number to me.

Read the rest of "The Load Poll" at SQLServerCentral.

For much of automotive history, the advancements have taken place under the hood or in the mechanical systems of the car. Computers have been a part of design and even operation for a long time, but primarily to keep the mechanical systems operating at a high efficiency. The interactions with drivers have often come from entertainment or climate systems.

Read the rest of "The Auto OS" at SQLServerCentral.

I was reminded of that by this piece: Those Who Can Do, Those Who Can't, Get Ceritified. It compares IT workers to the computer systems they manage, and it points out that if all that's required is to pass a test, that's something a computer can do very well, perhaps even replacing those that can just answer questions in their daily work.

Read the rest of "Those Who Can, Do" at SQLServerCentral

Multiple cores, virtual environments, and the restrictions for different editions of SQL Server mean there are often no simple answers. I know Microsoft is trying to earn a profit and these days hardware advances complicate matters, but I do think that Microsoft can make this much easier to understand than it currently is.

Read the rest of "Better Licensing for SQL Server" at SQLServerCentral.

That was the smoothest deployment system for vendor patches, but I worked in another place that deployed changes to a web application (the system that generated all our revenue and paid our salaries) every Wednesday night. We did this for over 18 months, over 70 deployments, pushing out changes on a consistent basis. We only rolled back three times, but we did roll back three times.

Read the rest of "Deployment Failures" at SQLServerCentral.

However security may not be your number one concern. Outages and business continuity should be your primary concern. As noted in this article, cloud service outages have been more common than lost data. It's much more likely that the service will go down, and if it does, what do you do? Contacting a cloud services company, and receiving fast answers aren't likely when a cloud outage usually affects a large number of customers.

Read the rest of "Cloud Concerns" at SQLServerCentral.

Encryption is serious business, and if you are going to implement it in your databases, you had better be sure you understand how the various keys and certificates work. You better be sure you have protected your passwords, and that you can find them in the event of some issue.

Read the rest of "Test Your Restores" at SQLServerCentral. 

I was in the data center, surprised by the sudden quiet. Unfortunately one of our senior executives was also in the data center and proceeded into the raised floor area. As various technicians and sysadmins attempted to restore power and reboot systems, this senior executive watched, commenting, questioning, and often berating the employees. Not a good situation for anyone, least of all the people trying to reconnect high voltage wires together.

Read the rest of "Grace Under Pressure" at SQLServerCentral.

Perhaps there's a better way for SQL Server to request this information when it is installed. If one part of the setup program asked for default mail information, it would be easy to pre-configure the instance to setup alerts and enable them for communication with a DBA. Personally I'd prefer that setup get a mail profile and a default DBA group email address that receives information about the operation of the instance that the DBA should be aware of.

Read the rest of "The Default DBA" at SQLServerCentral.

However the news isn't all bad. There are some systems that will always be managed inside of a company. Whether because of regulatory requirements, performance needs, or even just the stubbornness of management, I am sure that some percentage of systems at most companies will remain in-house. Those will be the minority of systems in some places, and since many of us change jobs at some point in our careers, we should be concerned.

Read the rest of "Grow Your Skills" at SQLServerCentral.

Making database changes can be challenging since we must ensure that our data is not lost as objects are altered. We have to ensure that any application functions that depend on a certain schema receive the data they need, without unnecessary errors. The timing of changes becomes more important in the database than in applications in many situations. This Friday I am curious how many of you decide to stage these changes in your environment. If you have dependent changes, I'm wondering if you might alter the database first and change the application in a later deployment.

Read the rest of "Staging Deployments" at SQLServerCentral.

Management should be concerned with the higher level goals. Clients need a simple scripted backup. Period. The implementation of that isn't something that management should be discussing with developers. This is the perfect example of where the software development goes off the track with micro management. Managers becoming deeply involved in technical decisions and implementations is a sure way to ensure that less than optimal decisions are being made.

Read the rest of "Don't Explain Too Much" at SQLServerCentral.

If you are covered by HIPAA law, you may have gotten some increased scrutiny this year. There are audits underway from the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) for 115 organizations that will help them to ensure they comply with regulations. Penalties aren't supposed to be assessed unless there are serious violations, but starting in 2013, the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act requires that the auditing program will be enforced with surprise audits.

Read the rest of "Regulators, Mount Up" at SQLServerCentral.

After a few years of attending the Summit and being inspired, taught, and excited by the immersion, it was time to up the ante. The idea was simple, even if the execution would be a challenge. Simon wanted to do more than attend a variety of talks and have interesting conversations. In seven days in Seattle he planned on learning to build an OLAP solution.

Read the rest of "Targeted Learning" at SQLServerCentral.

Read the rest of "Review Your Indexing" at SQLServerCentral

As DBAs, we aren't too often involved in the cost of storage. These days as many companies move to SAN-based storage, there are separate administrators are involved in the specification and purchasing of the actual hardware. That means that as DBAs we are removed from the impact of our requests for more storage. We don't necessarily know what the cost to the organization is when we request another 400GB LUN. However this week I'm curious if you know the answer to this.

Read the rest of "The Cost of Storage" at SQLServerCentral.

It seems that there were a number of problems with this system, which is almost stunning. I'd think this is a well known process that includes a number of pieces of technology that are built into so many systems these days. Integration is never smooth, and the short time frame of an election campaigns doesn't leave a lot of time for testing, much of which apparently didn't get completed. The article talks about many of the same things that I've seen mentioned in the past when applications don't work as expected. A lack of training, a dearth of hardware, tooling that doesn't work, all of these have been reported for years in many software engineering journals and articles.

Read the rest of "Failure Lessons" at SQLServerCentral.

One really interesting question was asked. Do you know the skills needed for modern Microsoft data centers? Truck driver. A truck driver can drop off a shipping container with servers pre-configured inside and just plug it in to power and network, often with no cooling needed. A fenced in parking lot, open to the atmosphere, makes a nice, inexpensive, low maintenance data center.

Read the rest of "The Future of DBAs" at SQLServerCentral.

Some companies are taking the idea of managing their data more seriously. Boeing and Nike are talked about in this piece about coping with large amounts of data. With the vast amount of growth in the data stores these two companies work with, they had to find ways to ensure that business people could effectively find the information they needed in a sea of data.

Read the rest of "Too Much Data" at SQLServerCentral. 

As someone that has worked in a variety of production environments managing all different types of platforms, I have found it extremely career-enhancing to have knowledge about the entire environment. Knowing what is happening at any point in time has allowed me to answer pointed questions about the applications. With comprehensive monitoring set up in database servers, I have often found myself in a position to proactively prevent issues, or make preparations for a quick response when I do find problems.

Read the rest of "Monitoring is Essential" at SQLServerCentral.