Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Work Isn’t the Most Important Thing

    brokenpipe_cI had quite an adventure today, away from work. We had a pipe freeze in the house, a sick kid, and then a plumber call when the pipe broke. All in all, with school closed and kids home, I haven’t gotten much work done. My wife ended up also missing a bunch of work at a busy time. I leave for Cleveland Friday morning, so it’s already a short week and that adds to the stress.

    But that happens. Life gets in the way of work, and there are times you need to let things go. I know there are friends that have gotten off of work this week because of the weather, and I’ve had companies close. When I lived in Virginia, we closed the office sometimes with hurricanes or strong storms, helping employees to manage their lives outside of work. I’ve helped hang plywood and even get boats out of the water in preparation for the storm.

    I think that a part of what business has to include is social responsibility. It can come with benefits like goodwill that come from donating back to schools, but I think that the highest level of profit you can make is not the way business should be run. You should consider what helps your employees, what helps your community, and what is the best way to integrate your company into the world outside of your profit.

    Hopefully your employer understands that.

  • What’s a Passive Server?

    Licensing software is often a more complicated process than I think it should be. Licensing database software seems to be even more difficult to understand, especially when you start to talk about the various high availability (HA) scenarios, virtualized  servers, separate machines to process SSIS packages and who knows what other configurations, not to mention the licensing changes with each new version of SQL Server.

    I was following a licensing debate  about how you license passive servers in an HA situation. I have always understood from the SQL Server licensing documents that if you have a passive server, it does not require a license for the SQL Server software. However it’s not that simple, or at least, it doesn’t appear that way to me.

    Suppose you have an primary instance that mirrors its database to another server. The mirror instance doesn’t need a license for that database, but what about if you also log ship your primary database to a third server? Does the third server need a license if it’s also “passive”? I assume that if you had second database on the mirror instance being used for another application, you’d need a license for that instance, but what if you only have a “DBA database” that gathers performance monitoring information for that mirror database? Is that “passive”?

    Suppose I have a 6 node cluster, and I have 4 active nodes and two passive ones, do I still have 2 other “passive” licenses for log shipped servers? Or can I log ship to 4 separate servers? That doesn’t even bring this clause into play:  “The passive server can take the duties of the active server for 30 days. Afterwards, it must be licensed accordingly” (from 2005 licensing). It almost feels like I am studying some type of Microsoft Internal Licensing Framework in preparation for some type of certification.

    To me, the simple way to handle this is to say that passive servers, those not doing any work for the business that owns them, don’t require a license. The exception would be for internal monitoring or maintenance on the passive server (backup restores, DBCC checks, DBA sysadmin monitoring). I doubt we’ll get something that simple, but that’s what I think would be fair.

    Steve Jones

    (originally published at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Editorial/72338/)

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • SQL Server Recovery–MCM Prep

    I always have to think about what happens during the recovery process in SQL Server after a restore. I’ve always known the process as roll forward and roll back, which is how the items are noted in the SQL Serve error log. Transactions are rolled forward or rolled back.

    But which comes first?

    If you think about it, you want to roll forward the committed transactions, which were not written to the data files. Then you roll back the changes made to the data files which were not committed. How you get transactions in these states is for another day.

    However I found an easier way to remember. While studying for the MCM, I heard these processes referred to as redo and undo, which apply to roll forward and roll back, respectively. If you use these terms and place them in alphabetical order, you get redo, undo.

    Or redo before undo.

  • It’s Almost Always the Humans

    Today we have an editorial reprinted from Sept 19, 2005 as Steve is on vacation.

    Most breaches of security, stolen data, etc. are almost always the result of some breakdown in the human factor of the equation. By that I mean some interaction between the human “bad guys” and some human in the company. It could be stealing a laptop, sorting through trash or even paying for it. Or perhaps this method.

    I saw this article about bank fraud, but not the kind I expected. After all, I got called last year by my cell phone provider in a similar situation. You are late on your bill, make a telephone payment, presumably because you’re short of time. In my case I didn’t even call them back, which I should have. In this case, the individual writing just called and made a payment over the phone.

    A short time later a suspicious charge appeared. The person tracked it down to customer service that had been outsourced and someone at the outsourcing company was selling or passing along information to criminals that would use it in some type of identity theft crime. No word on what is happening with the investigation or even which company it is.

    To me, this the worst method of saving money, and if this results in security breaches, the name of the company should be publicized. Most of these corporations are not losing money. They are racing to make more, increase the stock price, whatever, and in doing so, they are sending out a piece of their core business. Customer service should be a cornerstone of any company. That is how you show that you are the place someone wants to do business. I’m not sure I even agree with outsourcing IT since that data is critical and vital to your company as well, but there is no way customer service is not a core part of your business.

    If you’re missing that point, you’re missing the function of a business in the world.