Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • SSD Lifetimes

    Samsung 840 SSD
    This looks like a nice SSD upgrade that’s reliable.

    One of the things that has concerned many DBAs looking at SSD drives is the possible limited life of these drives. In the past, many consumer drives have had issues, and can fail without warning. However there are plenty of people that still love them for the fact that they are crazy fast and can dramatically speed up your system. Just make sure you keep good backups of your data since it may not be recoverable.

    For servers, a number of manufacturers have been working hard to build more reliability and longer lifetimes into their drives. FusionIO has listed 2 million hours and 6 years write endurance for their cards, which is a quite a long time. Other manufacturers are working hard as well and I suspect we’ll see more and more SSDs architected into SQL Server instances over the next few years. Microsoft has a white paper on using FusionIO cards in tempdb, and I know a few SQL Server installations have been quite pleased with their results of using these cards in production systems.

    This week I saw an analysis of the Samsung SSD 840 over at AnandTech. They examined the wear of this drive and came to the conclusions that writing over 10GiB a day, you’re still get many years of service from this drive. That gives me a lot of confidence in the drive, and with Amazon listing the 250GB version for $180, it’s an upgrade you might consider for your laptop.

  • The Cost of Storage

    SAN disks
    The cost of storage per GB drops, but the cost to companies seems to keep going up.

    One thing that we can be sure of as data professionals: we will need more storage over time. We gather more data in our organizations and more data is sent to us by partners or automated systems. At the same time we must ensure all our existing data is always available for users. I don’t know how we solve any of these problems, but I do know that any solution will require likely more storage in the future.

    As DBAs, we aren’t too often involved in the cost of storage. These days as many companies move to SAN-based storage, there are separate administrators are involved in the specification and purchasing of the actual hardware. That means that as DBAs we are removed from the impact of our requests for more storage. We don’t necessarily know what the cost to the organization is when we request another 400GB LUN. However this week I’m curious if you know the answer to this.

    What’s the cost of storage in your organization?

    I’m wondering if you know the actual cost in dollars or the impact to limited IT resources of enterprise level storage in your company. Does this impact the way you do business as a DBA? We often don’t have control over the growth of our data, but we seem to regularly be pulled into the discussions on how to best manage the amount of data and even archive data or reduce its impact on the organization’s storage.

    Let us know this week if you are impacted by the cost of storage in your organization.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

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

  • The Encryption Primer Resources

    I delivered my Encryption Primer talk this past Tuesday at the Boulder SQL Server Users Group and last night at the Denver SQL Server Users Group. Great questions and discussions, and I hope those of you that attended found it interesting.

    I’ve updated my deck and code samples, and here are the updated files for download:

    Powerpoint: The Encryption Primer v8.ppt

    Code: EncryptionPrimer.zip

  • Better Secure Hashing – SHA3

    I’ve been giving an encryption talk over the last year, focusing on educating DBAs on the various features and capabilities available in SQL Server. One of the things I note in the talk is that SHA1 is not considered secure. You should avoid SHA or SHA1 if you are using SQL Server 2012. If you’re on an earlier version, you don’t have a choice.

    Hopefully we’ll have more choices in the future. NIST has selected an SHA-3 algorithm as a new standard. This should provide more security, though there will be some time before we find out if there are any problems or potential attacks against this algorithm.