Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • A Patch Disaster

    This isn't the dialog box you want to see on a server.
    This isn’t the dialog box you want to see on a server.

    Can you imagine sending the wrong patch to the wrong machines? That’s what happened with an Australian bank. Am OS patch was sent to many more machines than it should have. The patch was designed for desktops, but managed to get deployed on servers and resulted in some sort of software corruption.

    SQL Server users are fortunate that we rarely have security patches for our platform. There are cumulative updates every other month, but the majority of them aren’t aimed at SQL Server, and many of them may not even be required for the host Windows OS. Your organization’s policy may require the OS patches, and if they do, you should be aware of when and how they are being deployed.

    Even if patches are not supposed to be deployed to your servers, you should plan on being aware of the deployment date. You never know when an administrator will make a mistake and deploy a patch to your database server and necessitate a restore. I would recommend that you double check your backups and ensure restore scripts are handy on any patch day.

    Our computer infrastructure becomes more complex all the time. At the same time, many of us become more specialized, working in a more focused area, and counting on others to manage the parts of our system we do not have time to worry about. People will make mistakes, and we should ensure we can recover our systems from those mistakes.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

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

  • sp_Blitz, v16, on SQLServerCentral

    Brent Ozar Unlimited released v16 of this sp_blitz script, which is designed to run on a SQL Server instance and give you a quick, comprehensive report of the state of the instnace. It’s a great script, and if you have the chance to see Brent present on the script, go see it. It’s a great show and a good explanation of why you might want this type of script.

    I haven’t had to manage the SQLServerCentral instances, but I decided to run this and see what jumped out at me. I started a series at SQLServerCentral where you can follow along with my results. The first article went up today.

    • Security
    • Reliability
    • Performance
    • Query Plans
    • Backup
    • Global Trace Flag
    • High Availability
    • Informational
    • Non-Default Server Config

    You should think about auditing your servers periodically with something like the sp_Blitz script, which will allow you to ensure your servers are running at peak performance.

    Administering your instances is an ongoing job. It’s not a time intensive daily job, but it’s something you should be doing periodically on all your instances, with monitoring setup on your servers to let you know when things might be causing problems.

  • Is Big Data Good for Data Professionals?

    Big Data isn't well defined, but it makes a lot of people sit up and pay attention.
    Big Data isn’t well defined, but it makes a lot of people sit up and pay attention.

    There’s a lot of hype around “big data”, a term being thrown around so much in the media that I’m not really sure what it means anymore. Is 1TB “big data”? Is 10,000 transactions/sec big data? Or does it mean that you have more data than your systems can handle, causing queries and reports to run slow?

    I almost hope it’s the latter. I hope that our managers start to think that when our systems run slower that we’re dealing with big data, and we need more resources. The whole big data phenomenon could be a way for data professionals to start a new hardware renaissance, where hardware budgets grow and we begin to replace our current systems with bigger, faster servers.

    Or perhaps it’s a way to offload some of the system administration for individual servers and move to cloud services. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad move for many DBAs as it would allow them to focus on data management, and information extraction rather than dealing with storage and hardware management.

    Big Data is in the news, and it’s being used by vendors to sell new products and services. From Hadoop to new SANs to BI interfaces, there’s no shortage of places where the term “Big Data” might be used to try and shorten the sales cycle. As a data professional, it’s important that you understand what your needs really are, and if the term is being in a way that actually provides some value to your company for the money spent.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

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

  • A Learning Experiment

    I’ve been looking for ways to improve the way I do my job, which is mostly writing and editing, but at a higher level it’s teaching people. That was the goal of SQLServerCentral, to help people learn about SQL Server and become better at their jobs.

    Last summer I was looking at a few of the other online learning techniques, and decided to give one a try. I signed up for a Single Variable Calculus class at Coursera. It was delivered by Professor Ghrist from the University of Pennsylvania. There were some problems getting started, and the course was delayed from August until January. I had forgotten about this during the busy fall, but the first week of January I received an email that the class would start on Jan 7, and sure enough, I got a welcome email with a note to start.

    The class is set up as you might expect for a college class. I received a syllabus, some introductory remarks (8 minutes, about what I’d get in class), grading instructions, and an initial exam to see how prepared I am. I’ll be starting this week, setting aside a little time a few nights a week to work through this.

    I thought this would be a good class to understand the delivery mechanisms and structures as I have had 7 or 8 semester of calculus, though that was over 20 years ago. I’m hoping this won’t take too much time, but it will give me a chance to review some skills I’ll need to help my son in a few years, and it should be fun. I like math.

    I’m also looking for ideas that might help me build some better features for my regular job.