Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Test Your SQL Memory Setting with dbatools

    I really like the dbatools project. This is a series of PowerShell cmdlets that are built by the community and incredibly useful for migrations between SQL Servers, but also for various administrative actions. I have a short series on these items.

    One of the settings that has caused me problems at times is the max memory setting for a SQL Server. Overall, I like to have dedicated hosts for SQL Server and may not care about limiting SQL Server in way way. However, there are places where I may have multiple instances, or other applications, and I should be setting memory to some level.

    Jonathan Kehayias wrote a post about calculating max memory, and that was the inspiration for Test-DbaMaxMemory. This is a great little resource that you may use rarely, but it saves some time and makes the memory check quick and easy.

    It’s a simple command, with a parameter for the instance. The Format-Table is a great place to pipe this output. For one of my instances, I see:

    2017-09-28 13_29_48-powershell

    Not great, since I have other instances running. I wouldn’t want this to take over my workstation. My other instance is a little better configured.

    2017-09-28 13_30_38-powershell

    There are all sorts of filters here to use with this. The doc pages shows filtering to find instances where the setting is greater than total  memory. Maybe a better one might be looking for instances greater than (total memory –2GB), or 4GB. Or maybe you want some deviance from the recommended value.

    You can run this with any list of servers as well, and get a nice report. Maybe even one that you can use to convince your boss that you need a bit more RAM for that busy instance.

    As with the other dbatools, this fulfills a simple function. It’s quick, easy, and helpful. Give it a try today.

  • This Made Me Laugh: SQL v NoSQL

    It’s a humorous history lesson on SQL (and product promotion), but it opens like this:

    battle

    SQL awakens to fight the dark forces of NoSQL

    From there it looks at the beginnings of SQL and the growth of NoSQL, going through a few sections, like

    newhope

    Part 1: A New Hope

    and

    strike

    Part 2: NoSQL Strikes Back

    before moving to

    return

    Part 3: Return of the SQL

    They finish with the idea that SQL is the most important, and common, tool for data analysis. In this era of Python and R, many may disagree, but I think they’re overall right.

    Perhaps this last part proves that?

    yoda

    Master Data Scientist Yoda

    It’s an interesting read, and I may have to watch some Star Wars this weekend.

  • The New New World

    Star Trek Discovery premiered this past week as a new entry in the Star Trek series that has been a part of my life since I was a kid. I was enamored with the idea of exploring the stars, meeting new civilizations while maintaining a strong ethical stance about not interfering with their development. The idea of beaming up to a ship instead of dealing with long shuttle flights seemed like something I’d like, especially as I sat on a long bus ride to and from school for most of my youth.

    Since then I continue to dream about Star Trek technologies, which are still likely as far in the future as I thought as a kid. These days I wouldn’t want to go to space without artificial gravity, and I feel that the HoloLens, which interesting, is still miles away from any sort of Holodeck. Even the advances in speech technology, across many devices and slowly becoming more and more ubiquitous, don’t seem to be anywhere close to the fictional computers on board the starship Enterprise. I still can’t see how a general purpose speech device in a crowded area would work. Unless we all have our own moment to speak our lines.

    There are so many ideas about the future of technology and where we might go. I know that in some ways my imagination of the Jetsons, Dick Tracy, and Star Wars aren’t anything like what we have today, well, maybe Dick Tracy has come true. We are barely in space, we haven’t gotten anyone to another planet, much less explored other galaxies. We have computers that are way more reliable, but software that is maybe not quite as reliable, and certainly VR far behind what many science fiction writers imagined. Communications occur at a rate I’ve rarely seen in fiction, though with a darker overtone than I ever expected or like.

    There are still dreams out there, and plenty of thoughts and views of the future. Some sad ones, some scary ones, maybe some exciting ones. Most views are so far in the future, with plots that are too outlandish, but there are slices and glimpses of technology that could come true. Maybe instead of quick subspace orbital elevators we might get lots of hyperloop transport. Perhaps we won’t have warp drive, but is it possible to get people onto Red Mars?

    I don’t have any great predictions about the future. I tend to see more the downsides and problems that technology can bring us, especially with more data being captured. However, maybe you have some ideas. Can you come up with something that you think our children might experience?

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 4.0MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • All Day DevOps–A Free, Virtual Conference

    All Day DevOps is coming on Oct 24. This is a 24 hour event, with 100 sessions live, online. You can register now and join in the event, watching from work, home, or even the train on your commute.

    The schedule is packed, with speakers from all over the world covering a variety of software development topics from a DevOps perspective. You can learn:

    • CI/CD
    • Security
    • Databases (me)
    • Serverless
    • and more

    Most of the speakers deliver these talks at other events, and if you’d like to get away and talk DevOps in person, join me in Orlando in November for DevOps East.

    Register today and join me for this online event on using DevOps to build better software, faster.