I posted a note on Twitter/X with this quote: “The content updates had not previously been treated as code because they were strictly configuration information.” This is from testimony given by Crowdstrike to a US Congressional committee in trying to explain how they grounded much of the airline industry a few months ago. That was a mess of a situation, and apparently, the vendor didn't think their configuration was part of their code. That's an amazing viewpoint to me. The fact that any develop...
Oct 10, 2024•3 min•Season 10Ep. 96
I get a tech newsletter most days, which has news that I enjoy, but interspersed among the news and ads are projects, frameworks, or repos, most of which I've never heard of before. I used to read these, but it seems that there is an endless list of these, which all have marketing descriptions that somehow claim this set of code solves problems that others don't or that this code is easy to use and integrate with, or well, I don't know what other promises. I'm usually turned off by the end of th...
Oct 08, 2024•5 min•Season 10Ep. 98
If you have a data warehouse, what do you think your ratio of reads to writes is on any given day? Do you think 1:1, as in one read for each write? Is it 10:1, with 10 reads for each write? 100:1? Do you track this in any way? One would think that most of the databases we work on in the transactional world have many more reads than writes. I'd have assumed the ratios might be higher for data warehouses, where we load data that is queried (read) as the primary use case. After all, I expect that t...
Oct 06, 2024•4 min•Season 10Ep. 97
When is the last time you read an article/blog/etc. on the Internet and saw a button for a print friendly version? That used to be something on every page, and one people often shared on social media (or email) because it didn't have all the advertisements in it. I remember having to help code this feature on SQL Server Central when we started as plenty of people wanted to print articles out and read them later. That desire led to Andy brainstorming that we should release The Best of books each ...
Oct 03, 2024•3 min•Season 10Ep. 95
How many of you have objects in your database that aren't being used? What about something in a schema with a _old in the name? Or _2 or _3 or _delete? There is a lot of old, deprecated stuff I see in production databases. In fact, I've been somewhat amazed as I work with clients that many of the scripts we can build from a database with SQL Compare won't actually execute on an empty database because the script is full of broken code. I also find plenty of DBAs that want to clean things up, but ...
Oct 01, 2024•3 min•Season 10Ep. 94
I'm not the smartest developer or DBA. I find myself mystified at times by Itzik's posts on T-SQL queries and I'm amazed at times by the complex systems that I see the DCAC people put together. I can usually figure things out (sometimes by asking the authors a question), but it's not always easy to do. We have some truly gifted, incredibly intelligent people in this business. I am, however, effective. I have been very successful in my career at getting things done well enough, things that work w...
Sep 29, 2024•3 min•Season 10Ep. 93
I saw a note from someone recently that reminded me of Policy-Based Management . This was (is?) a technology in SQL Server that I thought might have great potential. I even had a few presentations on the subject, but sadly I've rarely seen anyone implement it. I'm sure some do, but I think for me, this is dead technology. There have been other tech items from which I've been turned off or abandoned over the years. It seems in SQL Server, we have some tech that even Microsoft has abandoned and do...
Sep 26, 2024•3 min•Season 10Ep. 92
On a recent weekend, I got a text from my bank that they had declined a charge to one of my business accounts. I called them back and they let me know there had been a couple of weird charges on the account that their AI system detected. This seems to happen every year or two so I wasn't overly worried. I cancelled the card and ordered a new one. A day later, my wife got a call about our credit card with the same issue. She cancelled the card and got new ones ordered. However, I use that card to...
Sep 24, 2024•3 min•Season 10Ep. 91
Every once in awhile I hear about someone in law enforcement sure that tech people can build in a safe, secure way for data to be unencrypted by the company or vendor. The latest appears to be from Australia, where the Security Intelligence Organization wants tech companies to build this into products . Backdoors never work. Anytime an encryption key is stored, it could be stolen. We see this all the time. Keys are just data, and companies lose data all the time. At scale . Governments are certa...
Sep 22, 2024•3 min•Season 10Ep. 90
I saw a post recently about the incredible shrinking computer , where a software consultant had written down his predictions for the future. In this case, he writes about a computer shrinking smaller than today, essentially to one chip, with docking stations wherever you need them. We're already at the place where many of us have an extremely powerful computer in our pockets in the form of a mobile phone. I'm still amazed that I bought a phone recently with half a terabyte of storage. A few year...
Sep 08, 2024•3 min
