Author: way0utwest

Congratulations to John Magnabosco for being awarded as a Microsoft MVP. I met John last year at the Indy Tech Fest, and I’m looking forward to going back next year. We’ve corresponded regularly, and John was one of the people I picked to do some guest editorials here at SQLServerCentral, so look for his thoughts here soon.

We’ve been doing video conference calls for work through LiveMeeting for a few months. After two years of audio only calls, I have to say that the video was helpful. It adds to the meeting and it keeps me more focused. It’s not great, and it’s not like being there, but it was better.

However we had some technical issues. Video and audio dropping out, and we were ready to go with the audio call and video through Livemeeting. I think it’s the bandwidth to the company office in Cambridge, which seems spotty for video.

I’ve been also doing weekly calls with the editor of Simple Talk across Skype, and that seemed to work well for us. There have been times when one of us has dropped off, but the quality of the video and audio seemed much better than Livemeeting. So last week we actually tried Skype. It worked OK, except for the need to keep flipping a laptop around to see who was talking in the UK.

The problem with Skype is that it only does 2 way video calls. Brad, the other member of our team, lives in Hawaii, but was out of town last week. Adding him in wasn’t possible through Skype, so it appeared we might be heading back to Livemeeting. That wasn’t very exciting since we’ll get dropouts of 1-3 minutes at times and it’s not apparent that things are down. During my call to the office last week, my video kept freezing in Skype, despite my Multi-cam driver showing me it was still working locally.

Then I remembered a friend telling me about Oovoo. It’s another service like Skype, but they have some business features not the least of which is up to a 6 way video call. It’s not cheap al la carte, but they have some good plans, and it seems if they get some people using the service, it’s a sustainable model and company.

I downloaded the client, and we set up a 3 way call today. They show each person in a little window, and it seems much more stable and easy to use than Skype. The client was a little unintuitive for me at first, but I got it working, and we had a 3 way video call that was the best quality we’ve had yet.

The one downside to video conferencing is the audio. During our Oovoo call we had echoing from one person’s computer,and I assume it came from mine as well when the speakers outputted something and the mic picked it up. I put on headphones, which I think helped on my end, but we need to get some for the other people.

The conference room as well needs better mics. I think they probably need 4 or 5 directional mics that face each person since once they’re around a square table that’s 6 or 8 ft across, sounds echo in the room. The staccato British accent doesn’t help as well.

Video conferencing has come a long way since I first tried to get it working for my boss in ’94, and it’s at the point where I think it works fairly well for short meetings.

One of the things that I’ve asked DBAs, and I see asked often, is how much does your data change? That affects the transaction log sizes (and backups), the load on your server, possibly the tuning and specs you want to implement, etc. But most DBAs don’t have any clue what the change rate on their data is. Most probably can’t even tell you quickly what their data growth rate is.

The good ones can, and many of them either track it, or they do what I used to do: they monitor backup sizes and calculate an acceleration and velocity that assists them in proactively managing servers.

That accounts for growth, but what about changes? Very few DBAs know this, and it seems like it’s an advanced topic. I’ve never had a great, homegrown way to track this, and haven’t worried about it. Most of my systems could have weekly downtime, and I’d rebuild indexes, and statistics, during that time, so it wasn’t an issue.

The other day I was reading Kim Tripp’s blog because, well, it’s a good idea. She doesn’t post a lot, but when she does, it’s good stuff to know. In this post she talked about filtered indexes and statistics going stale quicker than expected. I’ll let you read it if you’re interested (you should be), but the interesting thing to me was her mentioning a way to know how many rows have changed.

In SQL Server 2000, there’s a value in sysindexes.rcmodctr that keeps track of how many rows have changed. This is used to note when to refresh statistics (it’s when 20% of the rows have changed).

In SQL Server 2005 and 2008, this is tracker per column, which may or may not be better. Read Kim’s explanation of that. However the values are in sysrowsetcolumns.rcmodified for SS2K5 and sysrscols.rcmodified for SS2K8.

That’s a handy piece of information for me to know. I can now easily track the number of rows that change daily, and then get some averages that might clue me in to the activity of the database. It’s not that this average means anything by itself, but if I know it, and then compare the last day’s change against the average, I’ll have some idea of the load on my server. Might help me diagnose issues, or let me know if the server if coming under more load.

I posted a note awhile back that it might be nice to be able to mark an object as deprecated. Then have the system remove it after some time, to allow us to prune out old data, objects, etc that clutter the system and make upgrades more difficult.

Someone suggested I create a Connect item, so I did. I submitted Allow User objects to be deprecated and went on my way. I posted a note and got a few votes.

The other day I got a note back from the system that someone had responded at MS:

This is indeed an interesting idea, and it dovetails nicely with some thoughts we’ve been having around managing the surface area of database apps. No promises for this release, but it is definitely something we will consider.

It’s always nice to get some feedback and feel that someone is looking at our suggestions. I do hope this isn’t a standard message, but from what I’ve seen on the few dozen items I’ve voted on or submitted, I get a personal message from an individual.