Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Are You Still Using Portable Drives?

    It’s the holiday season and that means lots of promotions for various items to give as gifts. Black Friday took place recently and I had no shortage of advertisements that I saw for all sorts of things. From computers to televisions to headphones to any sort of tech gadget you can think of. Plenty of other types of gifts as well.

    One item that kept cropping up for me was SSD drives. I saw an article in Tom’s Hardware about prices crashing to all time lows. That dovetailed with my part of the Data Community Summit keynote where I remembered Jim Gray saying 1TB would soon be US$10,000 in 1999 at the first PASS conference. I looked back at a few orders I’d made and saw I paid $150 for 512GB in 2017 and $125 for 1TB in 2020. Now I could get quality portable, SATA, or even NVMe drives for under $100/1TB. Incredible.

    I thought about this recently as I packed for a trip. I used to carry 2 1TB drives in my bag, along with a couple of thumb drives. At a recent event, I realized I only had 1 thumb drive in my bag, which I hadn’t used for years. Packing for the next trip, I realized that my portable drives had been pulled out sometime during the pandemic and never returned. Despite almost 10 work trips in 2021 and almost 20 in 2022, I haven’t needed a plug in a drive.

    In fact, I’m not sure the last time I used a drive with a wire. I’m used to getting everything through a network, even if it’s not a fast one. I wonder how many of you just live only on networks and never worry about using physical storage to transfer data. It seems that the idea of not really needing to use some physical medium to transfer information is becoming the norm rather than the exception.

    I know there are still uses for physical drives. The Azure Data Box and AWS Snowball are used when large transfers will overwhelm a network. There are likely still some people who flip tape drives or mount and dismount disks as more storage is needed, but that seems to be a specialist role rather than something that many of us worry about. Especially with the cloud, it’s more likely that many of us may never need to touch physical storage again in our lives.

    I don’t know if this is a good thing for the world, but I do think it is convenient. Knowing there is almost always a network around, and that we can make transfers between devices with wi-fi or Bluetooth without needing a physical cable is somewhat amazing. It’s a far cry from using multiple floppy disks or CDs to move data around. In fact, I had to search around for an optical drive as I realized I still have backups of pictures on DVD and none of the last few machines I’ve owned have a DVD drive.

    The changing nature of storage still amazes me, someone that first dealt with tape storage as the medium for saving work. The world has come a long way, and I’m looking forward to what comes next.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Daily Coping 16 Dec 2022

    Today’s coping tip is to send a gift to someone new.

    I have been sending gifts to my daughter at college every month or so, but I decided I ought to do this for others. I am sending out two packages. One to a family member, who I’m not naming here as they might not get it before this publishes.

    Second, I picked a friend that has had some ups and downs. I’m both cheering them on and sending empathy, but I wanted to reach out and send a small care package to them as well.

    Just a random gift. My family has moved away from everyone buying for everyone else, so I’m expanding that by picking a few people randomly to send things to throughout the year.

    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 15 Dec 2022

    Today’s coping tip is to support a charity or cause you care about.

    My big causes are food, housing, and education for those that are struggling.  I like to support these causes where I can. I had hoped to give time this year to Habitat to support their mission of shelter, health and time conflicted with my goal. I’m disappointed in myself here, and let life get away from me.

    However, I can donate money, so I’m giving to them and the local food bank to help support their causes.

    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.

  • Upgrading SQL Server Central

    The decision to upgrade database servers can be a complicated one that involves features, costs, and support requirements. While I think many people would love to run database systems for ten years, often there are concerns about support, which effectively ends after five years for SQL Server. While you can purchase extended support, is that worth the cost? A hard question to answer, but one I’ve had to confront lately. When do you upgrade a database instance?

    I’ve discussed this with a few customers, but it also came up in the context of SQL Server Central. We run a SQL Server 2016 database on Windows Server 2016. Someone recently sent a note that since 2016 is out of support, they’d like to upgrade the systems. They were thinking SQL Server 2019 on Windows Server 2022, but with the release of SQL Server 2022 that doesn’t make sense.

    I want to defer this process as long as possible. To me that means always aiming for the latest and greatest version. SQL Server releases roughly every 2-3 years, so this is the best time to upgrade for us. If we can upgrade before 12 months, we get 4+ years before we revisit this topic. If we were to upgrade to SQL Server 2019, then we’re already down to 2 years of support before we need to consider the topic again.

    I think many DBAs would feel the same way, looking to test and certify SQL Server 2022 for their internal apps. This is one reason why getting the RC0 and RC1 releases of new versions for some initial testing make sense. The sooner you can upgrade in version’s lifecycle, the longer before you do it again. Of course, if you have more than 50 servers, you might just be upgrading every year anyway, as some system is always falling out of support.

    Upgrades take time. There’s the time considering the decision, the testing a new system, the actual upgrade time, whether in place or migration, all of which eat up labor and time. Doing this for more than a few servers can become a full time job in some cases. That makes me start to really see the wisdom of using a PaaS service that’s evergreen.

    For organizations where support matters, then upgrades are a fact of life and a regular occurrence. However, if formal support isn’t an issue, you might feel differently. The more mainstream you keep your feature usage, the more likely that you can go far past 5, or even 10 years, with your database system. I know there are still companies running 2008, 2005, and even a few 2000 servers. I don’t know that the SQL Server Central code would run on SQL Server 2000, but it might. Project Nami is using fairly generic SQL. If we were more concerned about database licensing, likely we’d have not upgraded the site from ASP.NET to WordPress.

    For now, I think we’ll likely upgrade sometime in early 2023. I am not worried if things are delayed, but I do know that we also want to upgrade both WordPress and PHP. There is an order to getting all these steps completed with OS and database upgrades. Because of this, I want to ensure that we proceed soon and get things moving while my schedule is fairly light so that I can test and deal with any issues that arise. Hopefully there won’t be any, but I’ve learned to hope for the best and prepare for the worst, especially with software upgrades.

    Steve Jones

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