Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • CPU Upgrades

    I expected this to be an article from Glenn Berry. He often tries to convince me to upgrade. I think so he can justify buying his own new hardware.

    In this case, however, this is a note from Tom’s Hardware that it’s a great time to upgrade your CPU. The article is a few weeks old, referencing Cyber Monday deals, and it notes that CPU sales are at a 30-year low. This means there’s a lot of supply and retailers are trying to clear out stock.

    I don’t know how many of you find your CPU slow, or if you have access to change the CPU (often you can’t in a laptop). If you have a desktop, then you might not have a motherboard that supports the latest CPUs. Glenn would say upgrade your motherboard, but as I’ve seen in the past, this sometimes means memory upgrades as well.

    Many of us work with server machines, but we aren’t responsible for the hardware. We often can’t even request different hardware. Glenn has written about which CPUs work for SQL Server, though not for a few years. Maybe this piece will get him to update that article.

    SQL Server 2022 is the latest version, and the price as increased. The performance per core is more important than ever, so choosing the best CPU could have a big impact on the ROI of your database server. Even if you use the cloud, often there are choices in hardware, and expressing your reasoning for one over the other to the groups responsible for infrastructure can help ensure your organization gets the most performance for their billing.

    And if you’re the person specifying hardware, you definitely ought to understand the differences between the CPU choices and make the best choice for your budget.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.

  • Daily Coping 21 Dec 2022

    Today’s coping tip is to listen wholeheartedly to someone else, without judging them.

    I get the chance to talk with lots of people. I make it a point when I go to events or travel to get time with friends, or make time for people that come up to me and introduce themselves, and give them some undivided attention.

    Sometimes these conversations go sideways, but most of the time people are very interesting in how they view the world. This tip made me think of the PASS Data Community Summit and an individual I met there. I was glad that I stopped and spent 10 minutes chatting with them.

    After a session, someone came up to me and wanted to talk about DevOps and culture. This was a person who had studied psychology and culture in organizations and was now working with DevOps. They wanted to explain to me how they viewed the process, and where I was right, and where I was deficient.

    I didn’t always agree with their conclusions, but I didn’t judge them. Their view and experiences were not mine, and perhaps they were right. In any case, I was happy to listen to their view and help broaden my perspective on something that is a regular part of my job.

    I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQL Server Central newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.

  • Daily Coping 20 Dec 2022

    Today’s coping tip is to do something helpful for a friend or family member.

    Easy one for me. My daughter came home from University yesterday, and I took time to go out and pick her up from the airport. And I brought a treat Winking smile

    I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQL Server Central newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.

  • The SPU

    Ever since I heard about the SQLOS and all the work that went into producing an operating system for SQL Server inside of the host OS, I’ve thought that perhaps there might be value in specializing the environment for a database platform. Given the importance of databases, especially relational ones, and the need to get every bit of performance out of hardware, I wondered if we wouldn’t see a version of SQL Server that is installed directly on the hardware, without a host OS.

    In some sense, I guess that’s what a PaaS database is in Azure, but I thought we might see that for the download-and-install version. I doubt that will ever happen now with the growth of the cloud.

    Instead, maybe there’s a better way to improve performance without requiring SQL Server (or Oracle, PostgreSQL, etc.) to implement some of the OS features they’d need. Perhaps we could change the hardware around and use a SQL Processing Unit (SPU). The SPU is another specialized chip. Like a GPU for graphics, or even some of the other chips that are made specifically for mobiles, storage, or networking, this one would be focused on database needs. Apparently, there are a few companies that are researching how they might build chips that focus specifically on the types of computations that data analysis requires.

    I don’t know how practical this is, or whether we’d see any major database vendor attempt to port to a new chip. Perhaps they’d add instructions that could use one of these chips inside a regular system, similar to how a GPU can offload work. That might seriously improve performance, something that a lot of our customers would appreciate. Especially if this happens without spending a lot of developer time rewriting old code.

    That’s not to say that developers shouldn’t learn to write better code. They ought to, mostly so that their initial attempt at producing reports or batches of data handles a wide variety of data values and workloads without stressing the hardware. More efficient code is always the best way to attack any problem. Even if you had a very efficient SPU, chances are that your workload will still grow to overwhelm the hardware at some point, especially as the number of users grows.

    Monitoring helps find problem queries, but it’s up to developers to change their habits, grow their knowledge, and produce better code sooner. Then we can use hardware to deal with the large numbers of users that need to access the system.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.