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Introducing the F# Programming Language
The F# programming language an object oriented and functional multi paradigm programming language (combines the best of the best features of other languages) based upon OCaml, is freely available from Microsoft. It is a functional programming language that can be executed on top of Microsoft .NETs managed platform and provides a lot of powerful features. We will discuss these features later in this article. Microsoft has already announced that F# will ship as part of Visual Studio 2010. It has announced that the support for F# programming language will be fully integrated in Visual Studio. This article discusses the features and benefits of F# with a simple code example that illustrates how one can get started with F#.
Small Shop DBAs and Due Diligence for Your SQL Server
Ben: "A company that has leadership not requiring some form of backup, allowing a DBA to cause them to go out of business, is missing the necessary due diligence. Indeed, how a DBA would have access to the systems after being notified of termination is beyond my ability to fathom. I am thinking this statement is a form of hyperbole or simply a poorly run company. If the latter, that company was doomed to go out of business anyway; the fact that the actions of the DBA caused their demise is simply chance.
The real question here, in my mind, is should we hold the role of DBA up to higher degree of honesty other positions in a company?
*^%$!@#&!@ NO!!!
Any employee who is not committed to the success of the company has a detrimental impact. Clearly this is not a black and white issue. We even find ourselves performing different from one day to the next. If you think about it, a bad receptionist will have a huge impact for a company success or failure simply by their ability to be friendly and show reasonable interest in the needs of the customers.
However, a responsible company should expect that there are going to be dishonest or incompetent people. Hope for the best; plan for the worst. The key issue here is that bad things will happen, one of which is a dishonest employee. A company must have appropriate processes in place to detect and mitigate those events guaranteed to impact them. At a high level a company having employees must at least consider the following:
Annual Financial Audit – especially helpful if anyone other than the owner manages financial resources
Daily Backup Procedures (Database, files, and software)
Restoration Tests (Semi-Annual or Annual)
Larger companies should consider the following added mitigation strategies:
Data Change Auditing
Change Management/Control Processes
Audit Change Management/Control Processes
These high level activities provide a company with the ability to detect and mitigate intentional or un-intentional catastrophic events."
Nick: "In a smaller shop I would suggest having someone responsible for your applications and reporting against your databases. That same person would even be responsible for setting up new and maintaining existing databases. I would have someone else, such as, a network admin performing back ups and moving them to an offsite location. This could easily be contracted out. This way you at least have some sort of separation of duties.
My last job was an IT shop of 2 and this is how we had things arranged. I took care of most of the care and maintenance of the data and the other IT person handled backups with some direction from me."
David: "Actually, professional DBAs aren’t insulted when their organization verifies what they are doing. I have been doing this for 14 years and I am okay with verification procedures, as long as they are reasonable checks. Don’t have the janitor check what I am doing. Have another DBA, yours or a contractor, check it and verify. If someone is insulted, because they are too good to be checked up on, you might want to rethink that person’s career track. This stuff matters. Oversight is actually desirable to keep you from blowing your foot off, and killing the organization in the bargain."
…and finally this from Richard, the most bothersome (the article reference, not Richard):
"It boils down to a matter of ethics of the people you hire and the future does not look good. Take a look at this article: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/tech-manager/?p=668&tag=nl.e106
The result is that if a person was going to lose their job, 15% in the US would try to blackmail their boss and those who would take a copy of the customers and contacts database of US workers is in the 50% range.
Before we hire, we need to do background checks, but even those are basically worthless anymore. Check grades, is the person a hard worker and got good grades (But they might have cheated there too!).
It’s a basic problem with our society today, everyone is out for themselves. I don’t know what the answer is. I’m trying what I can do… I’m a Boy Scout leader and try to teach the scouts in my troop to abide by the scout law, to be:
Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean and Reverent. Perhaps we need a similar law to guide technology people.
Back to the real issue, I think there is no choice but to check up on people constantly, put them in minor situations where they need to make “the right” choice and see how they react.
Go to lunch with them, talk to them and understand them. I think then the true character of a person will reveal itself. Character Counts."
Interestingly, we did have a pretty lengthy back and forth about ethics quite a while back – you can read the article here that resulted.
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