Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • A New Word: Ochisia

    ochisia – n. the fear that the role you once occupied in someone’s life could be refilled without a second thought, which makes you wish that every breakup would include a severance package, a non-complete clause, and some sort of romantic placement program.

    I struggled with this one. I have had quite a few friends in the last few years that got divorced and my heart goes out to them. Some ended up in financial hardships, so oshisia seems like a poorly-timed joke.

    However, I get the idea. I’ve been attracted to someone, enjoying the dating, and then had it end. I’ve also ended it. I get that there is not only the loss, but the anger, the sadness, the wandering, the fear that someone else can easily replace you.

    I think many teenagers who’ve been in love go through ochisia at some point.

    From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

  • Rename a Database: #SQLNewBlogger

    I had someone ask me how to rename a SQL Server database recently. They were doing some development work and wanted to rename databases to test an application. I thought I remembered, but in this post, I show I learned something.

    Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.

    Using sp_rename

    I thought sp_rename would work, and sure enough, it did.

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    However, I need to object type. If I remove that parameter, it fails:

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    The command is looking for an object in the current database by default.

    Technically, I ought to do this to be explicit, naming the parameters.

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    I have a better way, however. Note: it’s not sp_renamedb, which is marked for deprecation.

    ALTER DATABASE

    I don’t know when this changed, or if, but you can use ALTER DATABASE to change the database name. There is a MODIFY NAME option for this command that works well. You can see this below.

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    This is very clear and seems like better DDL For this process, which can easily be captured as code without worrying about parameters or ordering or anything else. I’d recommend using this.

    SQL New Blogger

    This post took me about 10 minutes to write. Easy. I had done a few experiments and I had code ready (which went to the customer), so I didn’t spend time there. Just rewrote what I did and learned in a few minutes.

    You could do this, add to your blog, and maybe get an interviewer to ask you about this after they saw your post.

  • Separate Reads

    Recently I was watching a presentation on how to scale performance in your SQL Server environment and one of the suggestions was setting up Availability Groups (AGs) and having read-intent connections that would query the secondary and not the primary. It’s not a bad idea, and the SQL Native Client (and other drivers) support this and make it easy to implement.

    The pattern of using multiple connections in an application, one for reads and one for writes, has been suggested often. However, in practice, I’ve rarely seen this work. Apparently having a connection variable, named dbConn, for writes and a second one, named dbConnReadOnly, for reads is too complex for most developers or teams.

    Or maybe the idea of having to pick the right access point is a human problem? I’ve seen no shortage of problems in restaurants when we have specific “in” and “out” doors. Lots of people go through the wrong one and we end up with plates and food on the floor. Even broken noses or fingers at times. Perhaps I shouldn’t pick on software developers too much.

    How many of you use two connections from apps? Meaning, do you think about reads and writes in separate connections. Even if you read and write from the same database, this can be a nice practice that future proofs code. It’s a small change, but it gives you room to grow if you get a read replica for analytics or reporting.

    Of course, you could take it too far with different connections for different “services”, aiming for a microservice-style architecture. We could have dbUser for user stuff and dbOrders for the business side, and other connections for other services. I wouldn’t do that, as I think many of us will get confused, and we’ll often be doing two different type of service things in the same code. If I need something from a customer to write an order, do I have two connections in my method? I could, but I bet lots of developers would try to re-use a single one.

    Plus, if developers get into trouble with two connections, then what will they do with 5 or more? There are lots of ORMs that might even support this, or if they do, not make this easy to code.

    I’ve always liked the idea of separating reads and writes, but maybe the better solution is using one connection whenever we have simple CRUD work and another one for any sort of complex querying or reporting. That would make more sense as I suspect many of us will eventually offload reporting or analytics in some way to another system. A Delta Lakehouse of some sort seems likely if the current trend takes hold in more organizations.

    Let me know today if you used (or have tried) different connections for reads and writes.

    Steve Jones

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  • Simple Talks Episode 9–Data masking and subsetting

    The episode on data masking and subetting is out. You can see it here:

    Watch and check this out. This is especially close to my heart as I’ve been pushing for subsetting from Redgate for a long time. I think subsetting is incredibly important for development agility.

    Some interesting thoughts on the problem space, which isn’t a simple thing to solve. It’s not that complex (hard to understand), but it is complicated (lots of moving parts). As I’ve talked with others and worked on the problem, it’s not something that you can just knock out quickly.

    What’s funny to me is that Andy Warren and I asked Redgate for this in the early 2000s and they didn’t build it.

    We have a subsetter and masker at Redgate in our Protect/TDM area. Check those out if you need a solution for your org.