Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • A Vacation and Traveling to Sacramento

    I’ve got a couple days off, starting today after my webinar on Preparing for When Disaster Strikes. I’ve got some family in town, and since I haven’t taken vacation in some time, I’m looking forward to being unwired for a couple days.

    On Thursday my daughter and I head to Sacramento where we’ll have a SQL in the City Seminar on Development Friday before we attend SQL Saturday #222 in Sacramento. I have a session there on Full Text Search before I take a few more days off and spend some time with my daughter in the Bay Area.

    It will be a quiet blog for a week, and I’m looking forward to it.

  • Hiring Heterogeneously

    I wrote recently about tech interviews and hiring, and even on an interesting interviewing technique for senior people. However we need to hire more than just senior people. We need to hire junior people, and intermediate people. Those roles are important for both growing the experience of your staff, and not getting caught with a “” as a bottleneck or single point of failure. Not that’s not Brent Ozar, though someone with his talent might be the single point of failure in many organizations.

    Not everyone can be a superstar-expert-architect that decides how the system is built. Not all architects should spend time coding basic insert/update/delete code or adding clustered indexes to tables. We need a variety of talent levels that can get complete different types of tasks. There is tedious administrative work, supporting roles, necessary, though unexciting work like reviewing security, logs, audits, and more. While you can automate much of this busy work, there are still tasks that we must assign to people.

    There’s another consideration as well in hiring that all too often people overlook. Hiring too many people that are too similar, who may think alike, who may view problems the same way can lead to an environment that doesn’t grow and expand, that loses it’s creativity over time. There’s a great quote that says “Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much” (Walter Lippmann). It’s important to have a diversity of opinions, and when you hire new people, you should consider this. You want talented people, and people that get along, but not necessarily all thinking about problems in the same way.

    The world is a richer place for the diversity we have, and varying opinions, thoughts and ideas. We don’t all get along, but many of us can work together with mutual respect, considering each others’ viewpoints as we work to build solutions to the problems we face.

    Steve Jones

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  • DR Failovers

    failureAlmost everyone struggles with setting up disaster recovery plans and resources. There are a few companies that take their DR seriously, but for most organizations, it’s an afterthought. It’s an insurance premium that can easily be avoided if there are not pressing problems and your past experience with disasters is minimal. After all, it’s rare that any of our data centers shuts down because of an earthquake, hurricane, fire, or other similar large scale event.

    However most of us try to have some type of disaster recovery in place. We may have cold or warm systems available. Our companies have funded an AlwaysOn Availability Group, or more likely, mirroring and/or log shipping for critical systems where data is moved to a remote location on a regular basis. We monitor these processes, and we try to keep them running, though I’m sure if they break, many people don’t give the repair top priority in their daily work.

    A DR environment is like a backup. If you don’t test it, you’re never sure if it really is something you can use in a disaster situation. You may periodically test your fail-over, like you test a restore, but do you ever really lean on the secondary system? This week, I wanted to ask you this question:

    Do you fail over to your DR system and run your business from the system for a day (or week or longer)?

    I know a few companies that consider secondary systems to be critical and will actually fail over, and then run the other system for a few months, failing back to then retest the primary system. In this case, there really isn’t a primary and secondary system, but rather two systems that can work, being alternately used throughout the year.

    This is actually moving closer to a cloud architecture model, where you don’t place high importance on any particular system, you assume any system can fail, and you have redundant systems that can pick up the load. In a cloud environment you might have more than two, relying on dozens of systems instead, any of which could fail, but with a small interruption in service.

    I’d hope that SQL Server, the version of the platform I can install in my data center, would get close to this, allowing me to serve database services to clients, but seamlessly moving those services across instances, with clients unaware when physical machines have crashed because their services just moved to another host.

  • Energy news that caught my eye

    I’ve been a big fan of nuclear energy ever since I worked at a power plant. Before that I was terrified and didn’t think it was a good idea, but I learned quite a bit about how it works and while there are issues, I think it’s a good source to consider.

    If we redesign the reactors. Right now we use old designs, old technology, and we could make them more efficient and much more safe.

    I ran across this piece on Small Nuclear reactors. These are in the 200-300MW range, as opposed to the 1,000-2,000MW reactors that we use today. Those large ones cost $10b, as opposed to a $1-2b investment, a much more manageable cost for many power companies. I could see smaller companies putting these up, with much lower operating costs and potentially giving us true energy independence.

    I have a fascination with wind power. I’ve wanted to get a vertical axis wind turbine (VAWT), but few companies make them, and there are mixed views on whether or not these are efficient. I caught a piece on a field of VAWT. These are much less noisy, and potentially the wakes from them don’t interfere with the other turbines, resulting in more density. I hope these work, and become affordable enough for me to get one.

    Barring the VAWT, the HAWTs now can come with batteries, to keep power flowing more consistently. This isn’t really for residential users, but for large commercial users, giving power vendors the chance to ramp up more expensive (and dirty) alternatives if the load is growing.

    Also, some auto news. Finally I see something on fuel cell vehicles. I had high hopes for these years ago, with thin platforms. This is similar to what the Tesla has, and the idea would be that you could actually purchase multiple bodies (sports car, truck, sedan) and change them out on demand.

    fuelcell

    With hybrids and fuel becoming cheaper (after two wars), this idea dropped off the radar.

    Perhaps it’s back. I know the hydrogen infrastructure is an issue, but the same thing holds true for natural gas vehicles, and I have friends buying those now. There are only a few stations in Denver, but they make them work, especially for commuting.

    I like the Tesla, and I loved the 90s battery change. The economics don’t make sense, but the idea is great. I would love to see this for fuel cells as well. Rather than fueling to start, what about changing out jerry-can sized “fuel” cells at a station. The station and refill them as needed, and drivers wouldn’t spend too much time filling their cars.