Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • 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. 😉

  • Check the .NET Framework Version Installed

    I haven’t ever worried about this, but I had the need recently to check. I was looking a SQL Sentry’s Plan Explorer and the instructions mentioned that you need the .NET Framework v4.0 installed.

    So I decided to check my machine. First I hit Control Panel

    NetFramework1

    However that doesn’t say .NET 4.0 install. Instead it has a “client profile” listed. What does that mean?

    I wasn’t confident of this, so I Google’d for the question. I found this blog on How to Check. It lists a Javascript call that you can paste into IE or Firefox.

    javascript:alert(navigator.userAgent)

    I get this from Firefox:

    NetFramework3

    and this from IE:

    NetFramework4

    Again, .NET4 is listed, but not with a CLR component. So I’m not sure what I have.

    Then I went over to Stack Overflow to check. I would this answer, and it lists registry keys. I checked mine and I see this:

     NetFramework2

    So do I have .NET 4.0 or not? At this point I’m still not since it’s hard to determine if I really have the CLR needed. So I decide to just install Plan Explorer and look for error messages.

    NetFramework5

    Pow! Apparently the client profile isn’t enough. So I downloaded the .NET 4 Framework from the link at SQLSentry and then saw this:

    NetFramework7

    .NET Framework extended, which matches the result from IE:

    NetFramework6

    Now I can go play with SQL Sentry’s Plan Explorer. It certainly look cool!

  • Automated Driving

    In the book Red Thunder (highly recommended), the highways are under the control of some computer system. You approach a highway, get into some merge lane, and then a freeway computer takes control of your car, disconnecting the steering and foot controls and drives you along. When you want to get off, you signal, the computer moves you to an off ramp, and then releases control. It’s efficient, with the computer putting cars bumper to bumper, with a few inches between them since everything is under control.

    It sounds great to me, but I’m not sure we’ll ever want to completely put our transport under so much computer control. However people are trying, with automated subways and trains, but many of these still have an operator. There are quite a few projects looking at bringing this type of control to cars, though I’m not sure if we’ll ever get approval for something like this without some type of closed track that only allows automated cars.

    Think about all the issues you see in computer software, even supposedly well-written software. There are always bugs and unexpected code paths or even demands being made of the software. There’s also not enough testing to convince many people that we can really write extremely high quality, complex software that can handle something like traffic maneuvers.

    Then there’s the security. Whether it’s a central system that controls flow on a road or a distributed system in each vehicle, can you imagine the possible consequences if there were some security breach? What if someone finds a way to do some sort of SQL-Injection like attack, such as the one I show above?

    As much as I’d like to be able to ride in my own car, but have it handle the driving chores sometimes, I’m not sure our technology is anywhere close to the level it would need to be for me to trust it.