It’s President’s Day in the US, and technically a holiday for me (I think). Hard to tell since my company is a UK company and the holidays get a little weird for me. However it’s a holiday for my wife and kids, so I’ll take part of the day off.
I do have some things to do, and a ton of messages piled up from vacation, so I need to go through things a bit and get some things done for tomorrow.
Strange to be back, after being gone for a week and mostly unwired. I took my laptop and checked some email, thinking I might work and write a bit, but didn’t. I did get some MCM studying done, so it wasn’t a complete sit-by-the-pool-and-drink-fest, but not as much as I might have liked. Some notes, and some good questions to run on SQLServerCentral as the Question of the day.
If you have a disaster, and you need to restore to some point in time prior to the last log backup you have, what’s the first thing you should do at this point in time?
Make a full backup, of course.
Actually anytime you complete a restore sequence, you want to do a full backup immediately before you turn users loose to do work. Why is that?
Think about what happens if you complete the restore and then have another issue? You would have to go through the entire restore sequence again from before the first disaster. If that were a full backup, a differential, and a dozen log backups, would you want to explain that delay to your boss again?
Would you even want to go through it?
I wouldn’t, and it’s easy to prevent. Once you get done with your restore, start a full backup right away. You might never need it, but then again, you probably said that about the full backup you just restored.
Today we have an editorial reprinted from Jan 3, 2006 as Steve is on vacation.
I saw this a piece on code quality recently, specifically mentioning Java development managers and their work on quality. They seem to strive for it and fall short, but I don’t think the results from .NET development managers would be much different.
The piece talked about most managers not measuring quality or if they do, not starting until the project is over half complete. That’s interesting because in the jobs that I’ve done software development, we were most concerned about timelines, and code was usually graded in one of three ways. Works, doesn’t work, or needs more work. And most things passed through all 3 of these phases during a development project.
But interestingly enough, I’ve never had quality measured as a DBA. All the T-SQL work either does what it is supposed to do or it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t, we work some more on it 🙂
There’s never been any measure of code quality for me, and I’m not sure how I’d go about doing it. It seems from the article that they looked at bugs reported v lines of code. I’m not sure that’s the best measurement since I could write some code that works, but is very slow to execute. Or that has hard-coded information that makes maintenance a nightmare.
I’m not a software expert, especially with regard to quality. To me it either works as I expect it to and well enough or it doesn’t. I kind of use that thumbnail estimation in that a particular item, stored procedure, function, etc. either returns the results it should or it doesn’t, and it works in an acceptable time frame, or it doesn’t. Comparing a method call to calculate interest on a line to a stored procedure that produces a sales by month result is hard, and I’m not sure I could setup concrete ways to do it.
But I know people are trying. Like the company that sponsored the survey. So I’m wondering, do any of you measure quality? Know of a good way to do it?
Today we have an editorial reprinted from Dec 13, 2005 as Steve is on vacation.
Geeks,
Have an extra beer tonight. Or your adult beverage of choice to relax and unwind after a long day. After all, it appears that caffeine helps your liver, so don’t worry about damaging it with a couple relaxing frosty mugs.
The study from the article linked above apparently says that coffee and tea can help reduce the risk of damage from alcohol. So maybe that coffee you drink trying to sober up does more good than just keep you awake?
As with any study, you should be careful of reading too much into this and don’t go out on some great 12 pint binge and expect a few extra cups of coffee in the morning will repair the damage. After all, in another year we’ll be reading that beer undoes the good that coffee does to your liver 🙂
But for the geeks in the house that enjoy a cold one, this is certainly welcome news.
Voice of the DBA 