Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Backup and Restore

    Rainbow Six
    The team at Rainbow Six has to be prepared for a disaster anytime.

    Today’s editorial was originally published on May 13, 2007. It is being re-run as Steve is at SQL Server Connections.

    I think that it’s important to practice restoring and rebuilding your systems. You never know when you’ll encounter problems and need to restore your data onto another piece of hardware. It’s definitely something that people don’t often practice and with documentation not usually being up to par, it’s something that people should be comfortable with performing.

    I saw this article for CIOs that seemed to suggest that IT people aren’t testing their systems enough. The statistic in the article was that 89% only test once a year. Also that 67% were only minimally confident that their disaster recovery system would work as planned.

    I think it’s pretty good that 89% test their systems. I’m guessing that 11% do it more than once a year, but I’d be concerned if 89% hadn’t tested it at all! I think once a year is a pretty good plan given the hectic scheduled, heavy workloads, and the lack of buy-in by many executives for a DR plan. It’s not like we’re the guys from Rain bow Six that could be called on multiple times to perform this year. In all likelihood most of us will never encounter a disaster in our careers.

    And if you do, it won’t go as planned. I’ve had disasters and disaster tests in my career and none of them goes as planned. It’s like I’ve seen quoted: “No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.” We could easily paraphrase this for IT and note that no DR plan will every survive a disaster. You need people that can adapt, think in the heat of the moment, and get things working when the plan doesn’t cover every contingency.

    As DBAs I think most of us tend to practice the DR stuff on a more regular basis as part of our jobs. Many of us are constantly restoring databases for QA and development, getting practice that sysadmins don’t usually get. We also have the advantage of being separated from the hardware and we can install SQL Server and restore databases on any Windows server host.

    I think you should practice your DR skills in little bits. Maybe grab the tail of the log and do a point in time restore for your next QA cycle. But practicing a full plan more than once a year isn’t practical for most of us.

  • The Mechanical Turk

    The original Mechanical Turk
    The original Mechanical Turk

    Today’s editorial was originally published on Apr 17, 2007. It is being re-run as Steve is at SQL Server Connections.

    I stumbled across Amazon’sMechanical Turk while helping search for Jim Gray. As a side note, Jim is still missing and presumed dead after an exhaustive search by the Coast Guard and many of Jim’s friends.

    The Mechanical Turk is based on the mechanical chess playing machine created in the late 1800s. It turned out to be a fake, with a human inside, and that is what Amazon has built. They have a way for you to distribute a workload and let humans work on the problem, or a very small piece of the problem. Similar to a super computer, but this process uses humans for things that artificial intelligence can’t handle.

    The basic idea is you create some task, for example one of the items I looked at was reviewing a list of vendor names associated with a contract for the city of Tulsa. It’s a data task that might not be easy to implement in something like SSIS, but a human can easily complete it. And get paid!

    Maybe not much, in this case $0.02 per item, but it’s a good way to distribute the workload.

    If you can find someone to work on the task. I guess if you wanted to fund a book habit at Amazon, it might be worth taking a few minutes here and there to look through data tasks and earn some money.

    I completed two and earned myself $.07 🙂

  • Contained Databases in SQL Server 2012

    Abstract:

    One of the problems with databases in SQL Server is the dependency of the database on various parts of the host instance. In SQL Server 2012 there is an enhancement to the database format that allows for partial containment of your database, and will make the movement, migration, and management of the databases much simpler. This session introduces the new database structure and explains how it can be used in your environment.

    This talk looks at the new partially contained databases in SQL Server 2012.

    Agenda:

    • What is a contained database
    • Contained databases in SQL Server 2012
    • The Future

    The talk will demonstrate the issues with uncontained databases, provide demos on how to create and alter contained databases, look at security and collation issues in SQL Server and speculate on the future.

    Level: 200

    Length: 60 minutes

    Slides:

    Demo Code: ContainedDB.zip

    Related Posts

    You can read all the posts I’ve written on contained databases by examining that tag

    Presentations

    You can view my complete speaking schedule here: http://wp.me/P14wgJ-1tV

  • Is Computer Science Dead?

    I enjoyed studying Computer Science in school.

    Today’s editorial was originally published on Apr 27, 2007. It is being re-run as Steve is at SQL Server Connections.

    There are less people entering Computer Science in colleges and less people interested in traditional computer science practices. There’s concern among adademians and one questions: “Is Computer Science Dead?”

    I heard something similar from my brother-in-law about 8 years ago. At the time he was a mail admin for a large company in Texas, running multiple mail servers handling somewhere in the 50,000 account range. At the time, that stressed a lot of the mail servers out there and it was a challenging job. But he worried about advances in automation and better software and thought that sysadmins would be mostly outdated in the next 5 years.

    It’s 8 years later and I see DBAs and even SMS guys finding work in companies with less than 100 employees. So much for automation.

    I took computer classes in high school in the early 80s and spent 2 years in a Comp Sci degree and two additional years in computer engineering and while I haven’t done a lot of programming, I’ve written enough software and been involved with developers to know that most of the fundamentals I learned with BASIC and Pascal still apply. Some of the C techniques involved with optimizing code and being very structured in your development still apply today in .NET, Ruby on Rails, or LISP. Even LISP, which I’ve never used outside of a academic world, still taught me how to program better.

    Because it taught me to think about computing. And algorithms, and how things are processed.

    I think CompSci is still a good major, as good as any other. I also think that we should require C programming to incoming students, force them to work with memory, understand pointers, solve the Tower of Hanoi, and other things without all the benefits you get from frameworks like .NET and J2EE. I don’t believe that much has changed in computer programming in 30 years. We have Procedural and OOP programming and the concepts in either can be applied to any environment. Maybe you could learn relational logic and SQL on top of that, but everything else is new ways of combining these old techniques.

    All the rest is just syntax.