Voice of the DBA Steve Jones

Many organizations have been trying to find better ways to build and deploy software for their customers. Whether they deal with the general public or internal customers, we know that delivering software that customers use can be a competitive advantage. That's the goal of DevOps.
 
While most developers and management want to do this, they sometimes forget what the goal is. Instead, they want to continue to work in a similar manner themselves while giving lip service to actual change. They often do this while pushing others to somehow produce more and better software inside the same system. I see this over and over inside various companies.
Read the rest of Metrics and Measures.

The last three years have felt like a bit of a time warp. I'll run into someone or reach out to a friend, thinking that I haven't talked to them in a year or two. Then I realize that it's been 4 or 5 years because the 2020-2022 time frame felt like a year or less. A long year, but still, less than the three years that passed.
Life is mostly back to normal for me, with travel, events, vacations, coaching, work, etc. all similar to the way things were in 2019. At the same time, I've changed and my life has changed. Some of this is aging, some is life moving on, but some is from the pandemic.
Read the rest of How Normal Is Your World?

Almost every time that I attend an event, I'll end up meeting someone that has had security issues at their company. I'm always surprised how many people have had ransomware or other security problem that didn't get well publicized. It's not like everyone has had one, but out of 100 people, it seems there is at least one issue.
Many of us work with third-party companies for either products or services. It's become standard to use other firms for specific things your organization needs. However, since that's the practice, many of those firms you partner with have their own partners. After all, they're using other companies for specialized work just like you are.
Read the rest of Has Everyone Had a Data Breach?

One of the very common expectations from many SQL developers involves transactions. Many developers (database or application developers) think they can open a transaction, do something, open an inner transaction (nested), and then commit or rollback the inner transaction separate from the outer one.
If you've worked with explicit transactions and experimented with this a bit, then you know that this doesn't work. Recently Brent Ozar wrote a post on this as he had a client think that committing the inner transaction would release locks. It doesn't.
Read the rest of Nested Transactions

Security has become better and better in many organizations. At the same time, hackers and malicious actors are doing a better and better job of finding new ways to attack systems. Some work to target specific individuals, often because of government or industrial espionage. Most of us aren't likely to deal with those issues, unless we work with (or are) someone that is very important in a particular situation.
Instead, many of us deal with wider spread attacks that look to exploit vulnerabilities in technology or humans at scale, hoping to find the weak links. Lots of people I know have dealt with viruses in the past that shut down systems, and more recently, had to rebuild systems crippled by ransomware.  Despite their best efforts, this often means lots of extra unexpected work, combined with the stress of falling behind on our commitments. We have plenty of other work to do.
Read the rest of Stale Data Causes Security Issues

The short answer is no.
The longer answer is it depends, and perhaps to be more complete, ChatGPT likely will help us produce the simple, tedious queries with much less effort.
There has been a lot of news about AI and ChatGPT and how well it performs for a computer. That last phrase is important because while it's impressive, I don't know that any of us would consider ChatGPT to be in our list of the Top 5 Dream Dinner Guests. The tool isn't that impressive compared to most people, especially our friends.
Read the rest of Will ChatGPT Write Our Queries?