Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Opening Up Data

    Tim O’Reilly has been an advocate of open data access and standards for some time, especially from governments. He’s pushed for more interoperability and certainly more accessability from all sorts of groups. He gave an interview earlier this year to LinuxVoice where he talked about a variety of things, but data was foremost on his mind.

    There are some good thoughts, but I was pleased to see him looking for more software to adapt how it works with data rather than asking data to match the application. An interesting thought he had was in the area of control systems. Does every device or sensor need a separate application and way of interacting or should we have some guiding design principles that let similar applications work in similar ways with different data? That almost sounds like good data modeling and normalization principles in action, backing a data driven application.

    I also liked his acknowledgment of the fact that so much of our data isn’t very portable. Between social networks and proprietary storage, it becomes hard to move data around. The pattern of downloading data, perhaps editing, perhaps not, and then uploading elsewhere works great with ETL tools, but it’s cumbersome for many users and applications to deal with. Building ways for us to interact with disparate data, allowing for queries to remote sources, sometimes transforming and copying data, all of this needs to be easier to implement and integrate inside software.

    In some ways, I think the 3.0 model of our Internet interaction will take place around data. I think SSIS will continue to be one of the most valuable tools in SQL Server (along with lots of demand for work), but it still needs improvement and enhancement to catch up to other ETL tools. I really hope Microsoft believes this and continues to invest in the tool.

    I also think that the data professionals that really stand out in the next decade will be those that learn to make the choices about when to use R, JSON, XML, HADOOP, or whatever non-RDBMS tool to meet a need. But also when not to use these tools. The better data professionals will make good decisions about when to query data, and when to move it to another system.

    It’s an exciting time to work with data as the opportunities and rewards continue to expand and grow. I look forward to what the future will bring us.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.2MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

  • The Service Pack Fiasco

    I remember getting a Service Pack years ago that caused a blue screen of death on Windows 2000 servers when it was installed. In fact, a quick search shows that quite a few operating systems (and SQL Server 2005) have had issues with SP2 over the years. Perhaps we shouldn’t be waiting for the first service pack to upgrade, but upgrading and then skipping SP2 for various products.

    Microsoft has responded fairly well to problems with service packs by removing them quickly from their download sites and re-releasing them. This occurred recently for SQL Server 2014 SP1, where an issue was discovered with the SSIS Catalog. This is disconcerting to me, not because of the bugs, but because these mistakes and problems seem to lead Microsoft in the direction of abandoning Service Packs. The idea floated in the past, and still pushed by many people, is that the Cumulative Updates are good enough for patching SQL Server.

    That seems crazy to me. If we have problems with a service pack, wouldn’t we still have problems with a CU? Or is Microsoft hoping that the smaller group of people that are impacted with CU issues are good beta testers and limit the impact of issues to the community? I’m assuming the testing is similar for all patches, if not the same. However as we all know, testing can’t cover every possible scenario. Microsoft notes this as their latest documentation includes these quotes:

    I really prefer that a service pack is released every year for each product. It can contain all the CUs up to that point, with no additional patches, thought hopefully a bit more testing. It should be a line in the sand that helps administrators manage their systems to keep up with patching and reduce support requirements. I’d actually even suggest Microsoft require vendors that want to certify their products on SQL Server and use any logo, validate their software on an SP within four months of release. In most cases, there isn’t any work for vendors, merely the effort to re-run all their tests.

    We pay a large licensing cost for SQL Server, and the lifecycle support policy under which many of us purchased our software notes that we’ll get ten years of support and the term “service pack” is embedded throughout the SQL Server support pages. We should receive a service pack every year to provide continuing support for our platforms.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.8MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

  • A Week to SQL Saturday #393 – Redmond

    Only my second SQL Saturday of the year (wow), but SQL Saturday #393 is next week in Redmond, WA. This is my first time at a SQL Saturday in Washington, though I’ve been to the area many times. I’m looking forward to the trip up with a couple days in the Seattle area and getting the chance to catch up with some friends.

    I’ll be talking tSQLt and testing at the event, and the full schedule has a lot of great sessions to choose from. If you’re in the area on May 16, 2015, I’d urge you to register and come by for the day.

    If you can’t make it, hopefully I’ll see you at another event soon.

  • How Virtualized?

    I went to a talk recently where I saw this statistic: “50% of all workloads were virtualized in 2009. That number is 72% today.”

    That’s a really big number, at least in my mind. That implies the vast majority of all servers, file, print, database, email, etc. are virtualized. Inside of companies that have their own data centers and machines, they must be heavily virtualized. I’m sure that all those instances in the “cloud” also count, but still, 72%? That’s big.

    However I’m sure that’s skewed towards those machines that don’t require a lot of resources, like file and print servers, DNS hosts, etc. This week, I thought I’d see what the percentage is inside of your organization.

    What percentage of your SQL Servers are virtualized?

    Give us numbers of physical v virtual if you can. I’d combine all instances, from development to test to production, not worrying about size or workload. If you have a single guest on a host, using almost all the resources, that’s a virtual server.

    My suspicion is that the percentage of SQL Servers is much lower than that of other workloads, but I’m curious. With the low overhead of modern hypervisors, and the free (or low) cost, it makes sense to virtualize servers. If for no other reason than to remove any weird hardware dependencies for DR purposes. However I’m sure that there are large workloads that require more resources than the current hypervisors can expose, at least for some database instances, and those need to remain on physical machines, but my guess is more often than not, it’s the human concerns or lack of confidence that prevents virtualization.

    Let us know this week how your organization is doing in the trend towards virtual servers.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.4MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.