I decided that I really like the WordPress platform, and more importantly, that I need to consolidate all the work I do on my career.
With that in mind, http://www.voiceofthedba.com should now point here to this blog, where I’ll keep the editorials, and my blog going, as well as presentations and downloads.
Lots of work still to be done, but this is a good start.
I toyed with the idea of using the SSD for my main drive, but I’d really like to get the VMs running quicker and in the end decided to use that as my secondary, as the location for the VHD and VDI files.
As a result, my Windows Experience Index is only 5.9, as shown below:
The reason? The disk transfer rate from my primary drive is the lowest score. If I had used the SSD, I’m sure I’d have a 6.4 score or better. I’m not 100% positive I have the best driver for video on my machine, but since I don’t game, and primarily write here, I won’t worry about it. The CPU and memory scores are pretty good.
I downloaded Geekbench as well, and ran that.
As a note, this is a Lenovo W510 that is about a year old. I upgraded to 16GB of RAM recently, but here are the specs I note:
Not done yet, but I have been slowly patching and installing software over the last few evenings, stuck at my desk most days. It’s amazing how little software I have on DVD, and how little I need. Once I got Win 7 installed, I needed to grab the wireless driver from Lenovo, and since then I have been installing from the HDD.
I mentioned on Twitter the other day that I didn’t like Office 2010, and was going to go with 2007 again, but I then realized that I should install SQL 2008 R2 since I’ll demo stuff. Then I realized that I need Office 2010 for Powerpivot.
@##@$%$%$@#@
It’s mostly Outlook, and I should blog about that separately.
In any case, most of the software I need is back on the machine. I did decide to try Chrome (haven’t installed FF at all). However I have my Edit Plus, Password Safe, and Live Mesh working.
Once SQL finishes installing, I should be good to go.
I was watching Kimberly Tripp of SQL Skills talk recently about VLDB disasters and how to recover from them. One of the first things she said in the session was getting a damaged database back online, even without all of the data, was important. Often her clients need to keep working, and it is important that they get the system back online, even without all the data. This allows business applications and business people to get back to work.
That is interesting. I had always thought of my production OLTP databases as needing to be online, but also needing all the critical data. After Mrs. Tripp’s talk, I had to rethink that a bit and consider that a little data loss might be acceptable.
To me this is a topic that is worth understanding. At the very least, it will help you make decisions in the event of some disaster for how you will proceed. So for this Friday’s poll:
So what is more important to you: downtime or data loss?
My feeling is that most of the people would really rather have the database online, even without all the data so they can continue to work. I realized that most of the time, getting the site back up, having lookup and other types of ancillary data (like products, prices, etc), was the most important thing. Recovering other data such as older orders, was secondary.
Once the database is up, you can then work on getting other data back and merging it into the production system.
Let us know what you think this Friday and what’s more important to your business (and why).
Steve Jones
Originally Published at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Editorial/72117/
Voice of the DBA 