Author: way0utwest

The segment should go out in this week’s show, but I spent half a day down in Colorado Springs with the CSTechCast crew, doing an interview for their weekly podcast.

They hosts of the show, Eric, Eric, and Josh, are friends I’ve known for a few years in the local tech community. I did an interview a few years back for their audio only podcast, but this was my first video interview with them. I talked about free training and the SQL Saturday franchise, so check out the show this week.

I’d also recommend this as a decent summary of the tech world in general from the perspective of a few different technology areas. They cover Windows, Exchange, Development, along with SQL Server, and have a good rapport with each other. It’s a long show, 40 minutes, but running in the background it should provide you with a nice summary of the past week’s tech world, and perhaps broaden your view of technology.

I missed T-SQL Tuesday #1, but participated in T-SQL Tuesday #2. Now it’s time for #3, and I’m making my entry. I like this style of getting a series of posts from the community on a topic, and thanks to Rob Farley, we have an interesting and open-ended topic for T-SQL Tuesday #3: Relationships.

Making Friends
Some year ago I started a new job as a DBA with a large company. I was a production guy, working in the Operations group that was responsible for keeping our live systems running. That’s the kind of work I enjoy.

In the company there was also an Engineering group, that was a counter-part to my group. They helped architect, design, sometimes build solutions that we would then deploy. As you might expect, there were usually bugs or issues in systems, and since my group was on-call for issues, we had to support those systems at night, often without a lot of help from Engineering after hours. The relationship between the groups was somewhat contentious, and even outright hostile at times.

Enter Steve. New DBA, and taking the place of a senior DBA that had moved on. Without the baggage of previous relationships, I wasn’t aware of issues. However when I got a call one day asking if the DBA could come help Engineering on an issue, I headed over. More than a few of my co-workers told me that I should stand my ground and not let the Engineering group tell me what to do.

Walking over to the other side of the building, I couldn’t help but wonder what I was in for. All the talk from my group had put me in a slightly defensive mood, but when I got there, all I found was another IT guy asking for help discovering why something wasn’t working. A little SQL Server debugging and tracing, and I’d fixed his issue, gotten thanks, chatted for a few minutes, and then went back to work.

Over the next few months, I had a few more encounters with Engineering and Security people, usually being called to solve a problem. I made some friendships by helping people get their jobs done. I left my ego at the door, and just solved problems, even when they were self-inflicted by people that ought to know better.

Those relationships were handy later in my career at that company. There were times I needed to shortcut a rule to get something done, and would get the help I needed. My responsibility to comply with paperwork or regulations had to be completed, but having a good working relationship allowed me to get the work done first, and the documentation second. It also helped me to stop an Engineering deployment a few times and let them know that they had a system with issues and their group was responsible. Hearing that from someone with whom you have a good relationship is completely different than hearing that from someone you dislike. It allowed me to legitimately push-back and have someone listen to my reasons without being overly defensive from the start.

In short, the relationships helped me to get work done and problems solved in an efficient matter. Sometimes being a DBA means working on relationships outside of SQL Server in order to have those inside SQL Server work better.

I was watching Michelle Ufford’s (blog, Twitter) presentation from the 2009 PASS Summit recently on DVD. I had purchased them, and this was one session I had attended, but had to leave early because of another commitment.

However I thought the session was interesting, I like Michelle’s writing, and this was the first one I popped in when I got my Summit DVDs. It talks about the overload on their database servers from the first GoDaddy Super Bowl commercial, which referred people to their website. The week after the Super Bowl, they started redesigning their database and infrastructure to handle the extreme loads they experienced.

One of the things that Michelle mentioned is that data types matter. I know lots of designers don’t think about this, and perhaps it isn’t important for most databases. After all, worrying about squeezing things down takes time, and you could easily “guess” wrong when you’re building a database. If you have a small system, and you use a tinyint only to find out that you needed a smallint, it’s a lot of work to change things sometimes. And it isn’t necessarily worth it.

However in a large database, things might be different. This is an image that Michelle used in her presentation.

Two tables, partially represented here. If you calculate the differences here, you’ll see that if you use the smallest data type possible, as in Table B, you end up with

(449-323) / 323 * 100 = about 40% more rows. That could translate into significant IO savings for this table in an index scan, and lots of reports use Index scans.

Is it worth limiting yourself in all systems? No, but you ought to take a few seconds when you’re building a database and if there are obvious places where you don’t need a larger data type, pick a smaller one.