Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • How I like to work

    This is a great sign. I see if every time I go to Brother’s BBQ in Denver and it never fails to make me smile.

    brothers

    I snapped a quick picture last week, and in case you can’t see it because of the sun, the sign says:

    OPEN EVERYDAY

    FROM AROUND 10AM

    TO AT LEAST 10PM

    Those are great hours, especially for restaurant. A little flexibility is good, especially if business is good. Why knock off if things are going well, but why commit to longer hours if there’s no business.

    It’s also fun, and fun should be a little more part of our lives.

  • More Triggers

    In the old days of T-SQL, back when we wrote “CREATE TRIGGER …. FOR INSERT” we could only have one insert/update/delete trigger for each table. Eventually SQL Server allowed us to have multiple triggers, and even have some control over in what order the triggers fired.

    Triggers are often hidden objects that confound DBAs who aren’t aware they exist. It’s not easy to tell when a table has a trigger on it, and since we don’t often use triggers, it’s not the first place people look when something strange happens.

    However triggers are useful, and it seems that there are many people using them. For this Friday, I wanted to ask how people implement triggers in their applications.

    Do you prefer one trigger for each table action or multiple triggers?

    I’m curious what’s the 80 in your 0/20 rule for triggers. Should all update actions be handled in one trigger? Or should there be one trigger for business logic  and a separate one for auditing? I’m not sure it matters a lot for performance, but I can see that it might be easier to manage and track fewer triggers. The flip side is that something like auditing can be handled with one trigger, and business logic with another: a clean separation.

    Triggers aren’t usually my first solution to a problem, but I do think there is value in using them. However I don’t see a lot of guidance about how to best implement them, so I’m hoping your answers today will help.

    Steve Jones

  • SQL Rally Pre-Cons

    The SQL Rally pre-conference sessions were announced today, and congratulations to the winners. They are:

    • Business Intelligence Workshop – Patrick LeBlanc, Devin Knight, Mike Davis, & Adam Jorgensen
    • Query Performance Tuning, Start to Finish – Grant Fritchey
    • Maximize Your SQL Server 2008 Coding Skills – Plamen Ratchev
    • Leadership and Team Management Skills for the Database Professional – Kevin Kline

    You can read more about each session here.

    These are all great sessions, and no matter who was selected, there wasn’t a chance you’d see a bad session. Of these, I’d be likely to attend Grant’s session or the BI ones since I think those have the best chance for me to learn something that I could start to use quickly.

    The voting was sent to all applicants and I was a little surprised by the results. I don’t know if I can disclose anything, so I won’t, but there was quite a disparity from first to second place in each category. I’m not sure if that’s due to much better marketing from the winners or if it reflects interest. I’d love to know more.

    I’m slightly disappointed that I wasn’t selected, but I wasn’t sure how many people would really want to invest in a half day seminar for about $100 that would  help them find a new job. I’m sure their bosses wouldn’t. However the PD session from Kevin Kline is a good one, and I think it’s a better topic for many companies, who desperately need some leadership in the IT space.

  • Live Monitoring

    My employer, Red Gate Software, recently released a new product called SQL Monitor. This is the 2.0 version of SQL Response, enhanced and renamed after a lot of feedback and input from various DBAs around the globe. It’s very cool and in preparation for the release, they asked if we could install the software on the SQLServerCentral servers. I was happy to have it on the servers for additional monitoring. Even though I don’t have to manage the databases, I wanted to make sure whoever is managing them has some tools.

    Then my boss asked if we could make the data public. He mentioned that the early look at the console showed a lot of alerts, potentially some less than optimal configurations, and more. I said we should definitely show the site, and at The Future of Monitoring, the try it online link shows the live SQLServerCentral database cluster.

    That’s live, as in a few seconds delay to process the data, but if you look at instance 1, the graphs are changing in real time. Keep in mind that it might appear slow with the huge SQLServerCentral community checking the servers, but you probably don’t have a million wannabe administrators checking out your servers.

    We haven’t changed much at all in the configuration since we made the data public, but over the next few months we are going to slowly tune and configure the server live, informing you of the changes, and showing the before/after data. If you’re following along, you can track the performance differences yourself as well. This is a real world performance because just like most of you, we have resource constraints while managing and tuning servers. We can’t optimally design, build, and manage our servers as that’s not our primary job, but we’re trying to get better by using SQL Monitor to help us keep better track of the servers and work more efficiently.

    One of the coolest things I’ve seen is that our IT staff actually has iPads to watch over servers, and they love it. There’s a slide show on the front page of the monitoring site showing lots of people running SQL Monitor with tablets. Maybe I should take on some DBA chores and see if they’ll get me one. Maybe you can convince your boss to get an iPad with a copy of SQL Monitor as well. 😉