Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • LinkedIn and Connections

    I don’t use LinkedIn a lot,  but I do try to go over there once every week or two and update my status, add a link, and accept connections.

    I have a simple philosophy on connections: I accept them all. I don’t worry if I know the person or not, if they’re a recruiter or fellow technical pro, I just accept them.

    My thoughts are that the more people I can touch if I need help, the better off I am. It doesn’t matter where they are, or how I know them. A broadcast for network help is a broadcast that I want to reach everywhere.

    If the person is someone I know well, I do take a moment and move them into my A or B networks.

    I feel differently on Facebook, which is for real friends and family and I rarely accept friends there.

  • Serverless Software

    Developers may never see groups of servers like this again in the future.
    Developers may never see groups of servers like this again in the future.

    I love the words “loosely coupled.” At times in my career, I’ve built software and have aimed to ensure that processes, workflows, and components worked well on their own. In the places where I had to work with data or services on different physical machines, I tried to ensure that each item would run separately, and communicate when needed, but wouldn’t fail if another machine was down.

    That’s kind of the idea proposed in the article that says the future of software is serverless? It’s an interesting read, talking about the advances in cloud services that can change the way developers build applications. Developers should think about liking services, and pieces of applications, ignoring the idea their systems are tied to specific servers.

    It’s a future that I think makes sense for most environments. Development shouldn’t be concerned about the size or care of physical machines. Instead they should think about building on a platform of services, and expecting the scale to grow or shrink as needed, without code changes.

    I do think this could be the future in which development proceeds inside companies, as well as for commercial software. However vendors need to sell “private clouds” which function in the same way as the public ones, for those companies that want to control, and invest in, their own hardware.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.

  • Geeky Oscars

    Skyfall is recommended, but be warned, it's long.
    Skyfall is recommended, but be warned, it’s long.

    Last fall I heard an interview with one of the people who had worked on Skyfall. I can’t remember who it was, but this person mentioned the director had made the film with an eye towards the Best Picture award. It’s less than a month away from the Oscar awards, and Skyfall wasn’t nominated. I’m not sure it should have been, but I did very much enjoy the film.

    Last year was a good year for geeky films. The top grossing films of 2012 were dominated by those topics that we might see as appealing to the nerds, geeks, and technologists. I greatly enjoyed the top 4 and would recommend to others. However the amount of money a film makes doesn’t necessarily mean it’s worth watching, and if a film doens’t earn much money, that shouldn’t mean you want to avoid it.

    This Friday, as a break from the software and database discussions we have, I wanted to ask you

    What sci-fi, fantasy, or geek-oriented films do you recommend from 2012?

    Did you think John Carter or Total Recall (the remake) were worth watching? Are there other films you’d recommend that might not have been well marketed or widely distributed? With the streaming video services and online rentals, it’s easy for many of us to watch films that we might have missed in the theater.

    Let us know this week what you recommend and give us an idea for how we might relax over the weekend or throughout the year. At least until the Dr. Who 50th Anniversary special.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.

  • If You Need To Fix Database Filename Extensions

    In a recent post I showed how the file extension for a database doesn’t matter. It can be confusing, however, and you might wish to “fix” the filenames to conform to the proper extension. How can you do this?

    Well, to change a file name, or location, you need to take the database offline. This is noted in the Books Online Move Database procedure. Why? Well, the files need to be physically changed in the file system (either a rename or copy), so there is downtime here. Locations are one thing, but what about renames?

    The rename is simpler, and if you script this, downtime is minimal. The procedure is the same as listed in BOL:

    • set the database offline
    • rename the file
    • run the ALTER DATABASE command
    • set the database online

    This is pretty simple. We want to run this code:

    ALTER DATABASE [NameTest2] SET OFFLINE
GO
ALTER DATABASE [NameTest2]
 MODIFY FILE ( NAME = NameTest2
             , FILENAME = N'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQL\DATA\nametest2.mdf' )
GO
ALTER DATABASE [NameTest2] SET ONLINE
GO

    However that code misses item #2 from above. I can manually perform that step, which is pretty easy, or I can script it if I allow xp_cmdshell changes. I know this is a security risk, but I can enable it and disable it all in the script:

    EXEC sp_configure 'show advanced options', 1
GO
RECONFIGURE
GO
EXEC sp_configure 'xp_cmdshell', 1
GO
RECONFIGURE
GO 
ALTER DATABASE [NameTest2] SET OFFLINE
GO
EXEC xp_cmdshell 'rename C:\"Program Files"\"Microsoft SQL Server"\MSSQL10.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQL\DATA\nametest2.ldf nametest2.mdf'
GO
;
ALTER DATABASE [NameTest2]
 MODIFY FILE ( NAME = NameTest2
             , FILENAME = N'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQL\DATA\nametest2.mdf' )
GO
ALTER DATABASE [NameTest2] SET ONLINE
GO
EXEC sp_configure 'show advanced options', 1
GO
RECONFIGURE
GO
EXEC sp_configure 'xp_cmdshell', 0
GO
RECONFIGURE
GO

    Note in here that I need some quotes in the RENAME command inside the shell so that Windows handles the spaces correctly in the path.