Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • The Half Day Experiment

    Check out the half day sessions at the Summit

    At conferences and events I have found that the vast majority of sessions are one hour long. Sometimes events have experimented with 75 or  90 minute sessions, but the majority of talks I’ve heard were an hour, short enough to get an idea of how to use a feature or have an idea about why you might use something, but too short for in depth learning. More in depth sessions are usually all day sessions, or multi-day classes, which are very focused, and expensive. It seems that it’s rare the many employees get the chance to attend this type of training.

    This year the Summit is trying something new, with a few half day sessions that should provide a deep dive in a number of areas during one focused three hour time slot. There are sessions on a variety of topics including performance tuning from Tom LaRock, and Scaling SQL Server from Glenn Berry. The sessions take place on Wed and Thur in the afternoon, so check the schedule if you’re interested.

    I like the idea of combining some longer training that is focused along with the wide variety that most events offer. To me this is a way to better justify the ROI of attending an event by allowing you to focus in a deeper way on a specific subject. It also is a great way for some of the more expert speakers that offer training or pre-conference sessions to give attendees an idea of what they can teach, and why that specific training can be worth the expense.

    I’m hoping that some attendees will come away with skills they can use, or refine when they get back to their jobs. I’m hoping they can tie that back specifically to one of these half day sessions and even blog about what the reaction was from their management. I’m also hoping that this helps to get more training sessions scheduled as pre-cons at SQL Saturdays or other events, bringing lower cost training to more people and improving the skills of the SQL Server community overall.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • A Nice Refund

    Why don't these kinds of mistakes happen to me?

    This editorial was originally published on Sept 12, 2006.

    How’d you like to be the DBA for a system thatmistakenly gives out $318 million? It probably wasn’t the database, but more likely the code for some application that caused this to occur in the IRS system, but it’s something that becomes more likely in SQL Server all the time.

    SQL Server 2005 is the first time that SQL Server can be easily used as a complete application development platform. With the addition of the CLR, the Service Broker, Database Mail, web services, and more, SQL Server 2005 could be your database server, application server, and only server, with no other software running.

    While application developers will likely write most of the code, including lots of the CLR functions, procedures, and other constructs, who do you think will be responsible for the system? That’s right, the DBA. You’ll be the first and last line of defense and the one that will likely shoulder a lot of the blame for issues. Fair or not, I expect that DBAs will become more likely the scapegoats for issues.

    This means that as a DBA, you really want to beef up your skills as well as clearly delineate lines of responsibility. You should be able to read the code behind assemblies you add to your server, as well as understand how the SQL Server subsystems fit into an application. But you also need to be sure that you let management know when you are overloaded, when you can’t review code, or when you are concerned about possible issues with code.

    I’ve felt for years that it was a matter of time before some computer professionals will need to become bonded because of their responsibilities. I’m not sure when or where this will start happening, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it starts with DBAs.

  • The DR Test Schedule

    You never know what disaster will strike.

    It’s hurricane season on the East Coast of the US right now, and after Hurricane Irene, I’m sure there are more than a few IT workers that are worried about their disaster recovery (DR) plans. Irene didn’t cause much damage, but it was a reminder that there are situations which are completely out of our control, but could easily end up causing us problems with our infrastructure.

    SQL Server gives us numerous ways to prepare for disasters with different technologies like database mirroring, log shipping and more. The new Always On features in Denali will give us even more options, and may be worth the cost of an upgrade. While DBAs seem to regularly practice backups and restores, recovering a full application often requires more than a SQL Server restore. This Friday, I wanted to ask how often you practice your recovery.

    How often do you perform a full DR test for an application?

    I think it’s very unlikely that you would lose all your servers at once. It’s possible, especially with an event like a hurricane, but it’s very unlikely that you would have to recover all your systems at once. However that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be prepared to recover a complete system. If new hardware arrived, could you rebuild your Windows hosts, your SQL Server instance and application or web servers? I’ve found out the hard way this isn’t as easy as it sounds.

    I used to perform a complete test of our one critical system once a year. We set aside a day, sending the IT staff needed to a secondary location with media, backups, and unformatted hardware to perform a test. If we couldn’t recovery the system in a day, we usually reviewed the issues and tried again in a month. Unfortunately, if we failed that test, we didn’t usually get another chance that year. Not exactly great disaster recovery planning.

    These days my part of the infrastructure, SQLServerCentral, lives on virtual servers. While I don’t have the responsibility for these servers, we do have images of them, as well as regular backups, and I suspect we could recover them fairly quickly. Maybe I should ask for a test someday soon….

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • The Khan Academy

    It’s completely unrelated to work, though there is a computer science section at The Kahn Academy.

    I can’t take credit for this, that goes to Andy Warren (LinkedIn | Blog | @sqlandy) for turning me onto the Khan Academy. It’s similar to what we built at SQL Share, but much broader in scope, and much more successful. Hopefully we’ll rectify that at some point.

    It’s almost an online learning site with a series of videos on a variety of topics. It was built with the idea that we can provide a free, high quality education to anyone that can view the videos. Students can sign up and pace themselves through the classes. Parents, coaches, teachers, can watch students and build a course with a series of steps.

    Or you can do what I did, just watch a few videos. I saw some algebra ones that I might show my kids when they need math help, and I started going through the calculus ones, as a brush up on my skills. I loved math in school and thought I’d play around with some of the topics and exercises.

    Check it out and see what you think.