Author: way0utwest

Effectiveness

I saw a great quote recently on an internal email at Red Gate. We had deployed a new feature to a website, the application seemed to be working, but someone questioned the architecture of the implementation. The person that was in charge of the project sent this back at the end of an explanation:

“It’s a little clunky, but we decided it was better to get it done than make it perfect.”

That’s a great quote. In fact, that’s what I’ve aimed for in most of my career. Move things forward, get them done in an effective manner. That’s what I’ve tried to do as long as I’ve been in technology. Examine a problem, consider various solutions, and then choose one to move forward with. At the end of the day, as has been said by many people, “shipping is a feature“.

This doesn’t mean giving up on quality or accepting anything, but it does mean that you continue to move forward. You may make compromises on code quality, but small compromises. Your code has to still solve the problem. Your database still has to handle the load. You still need quality work, but a solution you can get done quickly that performs 10% worse may be better than a faster solution that takes twice as long to develop.

Lots of code lives in systems for years. We want this code to be “good” in that it needs to work, handle the load, and contain few bugs. However lots of code also gets refactored over time. We should minimize bad code as much as possible, but less than perfect code isn’t bad. Sometimes it’s just a little clunky, but it gets the job done.

Steve Jones

Video and Audio versions

Today’s 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.

Follow Steve Jones on Twitter to find links and database related items and announcements.

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November 7, 2013

The Powershell Challenge
I’ve been wanting to do more with Powershell (PoSh). I’ve seen Allen White present on it for years, and I’ve dabbled in various ways, using it to handle small tasks. However I haven’t really committed to learning a bunch of PoSh.

Last month I was with Grant Fritchey on the 2013 SQL in the City tour and in one of his sessions, he uses some Powershell to audit his SQL Server instance. I thought that was pretty cool, and it made me want to dig in further. At the end of his talk, he mentioned a book, and I decided to grab it.

It’s Learn Windows Powershell 3 in a Month of Lunches from Don Jones. The name alone made me want to grab it, and it has a catchy title.

My plan is to take time every day or two and read a chapter and work through exercises in the book. I really want to get more comfort in PoSh because I do believe in it and I think it’s a fantastic way to get things done. I don’t work at scale, but I suspect with a little practice I’ll be using PoSh more often for simple things and saving those scripts.

I’ll blog along the way and see how things are going. Once I get through, I expect that I’ll be digging into more with other articles and books that deal specifically with SQL Server.

The days in the Challenge:
November 7, 2013
Transactionally Consistent

What does this mean? I had someone ask me in a session recently, and I think I have a good explanation, but I thought this was worth a blog.

Transactionally Consistent means that there is a snapshot of the database at a point in time that ensures committed transactions are actually reflected in the database and uncommitted transactions are not. I haven’t found a better concise definition, but Paul Randal has a great longer explanation.

This is reflected in the ACID RDBMS model as the C for consistent.

In a SQL Server backup process, this is accounted for by including some amount of the transaction log in the full database backup. The amount included depends on your workload and the amount of data you back up, and if you read Paul’s explanation, you’ll understand more.

Make sure that your backups are transactionally consistent. Don’t export, don’t use open file managers, don’t use anything that doesn’t respect transactions. The native SQL Server backup process does this. If you want a few other features, my employer makes SQL Backup Pro, which also respects transactions.

November 6, 2013

Project Hekaton

If you haven’t heard about Hekaton by now, you should think about reading up on it. There’s some information from TechNet, a keynote video, and more. Despite the ranting from Oracle’s Bob Evans in 2012 that this was “vaporware”, it’s coming in SQL Server 2014. The latest demos don’t show 100x increase in query speed, but they 30x or so numbers I’ve seen are very impressive.

Hekaton is an in-memory database technology, actually called In-Memory OLTP in Books Online. This isn’t a re-invention of the pintable concept from SQL Server 2000. Instead it’s a very well though out architecture and rather interesting in the way it’s implemented. The keynote video gives you a deep overview, though to use the tables, most of us don’t need to know the internals of how they work.

However we do need to look at the restrictions, err requirements. Since these tables will exist in memory, obviously you need more memory, but more than you thought. The recommendation is twice the expected table size, to account for versioning. In addition, this memory is in addition to the buffer pool and other memory your instance already needs. That means much more complex memory calculations and monitoring for DBAs.

The complexity of SQL Server continues to grow over time as more and more features are added to the product. Many of us don’t need much more than the core relational database functionality for many applications, but the in-memory OLTP tables might be one feature that can help dramatically increase the speed of your application.

Steve Jones

Video and Audio versions

Today’s 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.

Follow Steve Jones on Twitter to find links and database related items and announcements.

Windows Media Video ( 15.3MB)

MP4 iPod Video ( 18.1MB)

MP3 Audio ( 3.7MB)

Feeds are available at iTunes and Mevio

To submit an article, rant or editorial,
log in to the Contribution Center

November 6, 2013