Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Sabbatical – Back to College

    My employer, Red Gate Software, offers a sabbatical to their employees, and this year I’m taking mine. I’ll be gone from June 2 – July 14, away from work, but I’ll be blogging here about my experience.

    I wrote recently that I had decided on what to do for my sabbatical, and the first item on the list was learning something at a local college. Red Rocks Community College is renowned for their Fine Woodworking program, and I decided to take a class this summer from them.

    The first step, however, was to register for college. That meant filling out an application and hoping that this would be smooth. While I wouldn’t mind taking the ACTs and seeing how much knowledge I’ve retained over the years, I’d prefer to have this happen quickly.

    The process was fairly easy. I applied online, filling out lots of forms and the submitted them.

    And waited.

    I had thought I’d be moving in a day or two, but it took a few more than that. However finally I had my acceptance to college and I could get moving. Registering took a bit more time as I had to get through an orientation and take a quiz that helps new students get ready for college, but eventually I was able to register for Fine Woodworking 101.

    It’s an intro class, but all of the really cool classes require this one and the summer actually didn’t have a lot of choices. I thought about woodturning, but decided that with my other project, I should make sure my fundamentals were sound. This also gives me the chance to ask questions if I have issues on my own.

    Step 1, done.

  • Backup Responsibility

    One of the most important things that you can do as a DBA, or really as any sort of system administrator, is back up your system.Ensuring that you have have backups, and of course, that you can restore them, is the number one priority for sysadmins. Everything else that you need to do is second to backups. After all, backups ensure you still have a system after a disaster. If you can’t do that, then security, performance, features, none of that matters.

    I have worked in large and small environments, and in all cases, I’ve assumed that as the DBA, I need to be checking that backups are occurring, and that I can restore them in case of any issues. Often this has meant I need to work more closely with others that have the actual responsibility for performing backups. This week, I’m wondering how many of you work in similar situations.

    Who is responsible for backups in your company?

    Is it the sysadmin of each particular application? Does the DBA ensure database backups while the Exchange administrator handles mail backups? Do you have a centralized system for backups? If backups fail, who’s going to get yelled at? Or perhaps more importantly, who will notice that backups have failed?

    There are any number of ways to handle backups, and honestly, the best way I’ve seen had a centralized person responsible for running backups every day and checking on automated tasks, but the individual system owners (DBAs, Exchange admins, application managers) checking that backups had been made. These individuals also test restores periodically. In this way there was always someone to double check the person responsible.

    Let us know this week how things work in your environment.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.2MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. feed

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

  • No Handwaving Away the DBA

    There’s a great quote I read, at the end of this article. It says: “…if you think that switching to NoSQL will just let you hand-wave away all of the challenges of running a database, you are terribly misguided.” The context is that all too often people looking to move away from some of the hassles of working with RDBMS platforms, which includes working with the DBA, haven’t completely thought through the issues.

    I do think NoSQL has a place in the world. There are domains of problems that I’m sure Riak, MongoDB, and others, solve in a more efficient way than SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, and other relational systems. I’m not sure what they are, and to some extent, I haven’t seen good guidance on where particular platforms excel. Most of the articles and pieces on choosing NoSQL seem to be trying to sell me “why a particular platform can replace my other one”, and telling me to add in things like transactions, but not explaining the drawbacks.

    However in all platforms, we often forget that there are really two frames of reference that matter. We need quick ways to work with data, insert it, update it, query it, etc. This is the development frame of reference, and it often dominates discussions of platforms. For good reasons, as developers are expensive, but that’s only part of the system. We also need to consider the operational portion of managing data and applications. When I have those needs to rebuild indexes in relational platforms, or the requirement to periodically merge/remove old versions of documents, or even manage clustered, horizontally scaled resources, we need operational maturity.

    In some sense the DevOps movement is built around merging these two frames of reference into the minds of all those involved. I hope that movement continues to grow and mature, and we learn that developers and operational staff are both necessary, and both need to function in a symbiotic, harmonious fashion.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.6MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. feed

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

  • Getting Local Books Online

    One of the things that’s annoyed me in the last few versions is that Books Online isn’t smoothly installed for me. I often seem to forget to run through the process, and I’ll find myself on an airplane without being able to check documentation. It’s frustrating and while I’ve muddled through the process, I’ve never documented it.

    And I’m not going to. Aaron Bertrand did it for me for SQL Server 2014. I recently ran through this in a VM that didn’t have the docs installed and it worked great. Along with the 2014 documentation, I also added the 2012 documentation at the same time as I’ve been using this demo VM with 2012 for quite some time and I want to be able to check if behaviors I see are different between 2012 and 2014.

    It’s a simple process, though a touch time consuming. Don’t do this while you’re waiting for a plane. In fact, I’d recommend that you do this early in the morning, when you can let it run for awhile. In a VM, mine took over 30 minutes to get BOL 2014 and BOL 2012.

    When I finished, I could launch the help viewer from 2014 and see both versions of the docs. If I launched the 2012 documentation, I saw thing, this despite seeing both book as “up to date” in the help configuration. I suspect there’s something in the shortcut that would fix this, but ultimately I don’t care. I have BOL installed, and I can just move the 2014 shortcut to the taskbar, since I use it often.