Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Daily Coping 11 Jul 2022

    I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral 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.

    Today’s tip is to look back at the progress you’ve made at some goal or task.

    This was a surprise for me. It was something that just happened a few weeks ago.

    I’ve been practicing yoga for a decade or so. In that time, I’ve been listening to instructors call for knee-to-nose for years, never really thinking I could do it. I usually round my back and bring my knee in, but it’s never close to my nose.

    In fact, for years, I would squeeze my abs, but not really try or think I could touch my nose.

    Recently I made an effort and was surprised to feel my knee touch my nose. Just a light touch, but it was surprising.

    An amazing piece of progress that made me smile the rest of class and most of the day.

  • The Home Setup

    For many years, a home setup has been something us geeky people built to experiment, have fun, maybe play games, maybe for some career learning away from work. I’ve written about various workstations, as has Glenn Berry.

    Then the pandemic hit and many of us were sent home to work. I’ve seen people working on dining tables, coffee tables in living rooms, and even on a spare dresser in a bedroom. I see big and small offices, many of which were thrown together to just get by in the spring of 2020.

    It’s a few years later, and while I wrote about the ultimate home office in July 2020, I know that there are plenty of you still at home, at least part-time. While some companies want to get people back into the office, I don’t know how many people end up working full time in an office with the need for some setup at home.

    I saw recently that Andy Yun was building a home lab for himself and his wife, Deborah Melkin (send congrats to the newlyweds! Hopefully, Andy and Deborah have nice working spaces at home, and they don’t interfere with each other. My wife and shared an office for a few years, and we both had to learn to grab a laptop and leave if the other was on a call first.

    This week I wonder how you’ve changed your setup at home? Have you set up a dedicated space for work, a desk, a new chair, better lighting or larger monitors? What tips do you have for making a home office a real office?

    Let us know what has worked, and maybe what hasn’t. Or better yet, what do you wish you had known in the spring of 2020 when you first moved into your home instead of the office?

    Steve Jones

  • Flexibility in DR

    Disaster recovery is a topic that many people who work with databases find important. DBAs work to ensure their systems are highly available while practicing the skills needed to recover them in the event of a disaster. While we often practice the failure of a complete server or database, we sometimes forget there can be other issues for which we need to plan.

    I ran across a story about a data center outage in London, which was similar to an incident I experienced. In this case, a piece of power equipment failed and systems lost network access. While many of us aren’t responsible for the network, we certainly would still receive complaints if the database wasn’t available.

    In my situation, I was in a data center watching some workman service UPS systems. At the time I was a manager of database systems and thought they had things under control. I left the data center and went downstairs, only to audibly notice when the power dropped that all servers seemed to stop running. Similar to the London outage, a switch that was supposed to change power from one set of UPSes to the other failed. Our entire global infrastructure for 10,000+ people and who knows how many customers went down. This was in the pre-cloud era where we acted as our own cloud. And not very well.

    There are systems outside of our databases that we depend on. We might not be responsible for them, but we ought to ensure they are a part of our disaster recovery plans and account for various things going wrong. At the very least, we ought to question whether power, network, storage, and more are adequately prepared for major issues.

    We also need to think about minor issues. Atlassian had a major outage, at least for some customers, and they realized that they hadn’t planned to recover parts of their databases. A similar issue might occur for any of us, where we might have to restore parts of a database, whether that’s a table, partition, or a series of rows. Corruption or human error might result in a set of data that’s unreadable or even gone. I know I’ve accidentally caused data issues, and I’m careful. I learned to recover from my own mistakes and anticipate those of others. I practice not only full restores but how to copy over part of table from another location.

    A disaster is a major problem, but it might only affect a minor part of our systems. We need to ensure we are ready for any size or scale of problem and be ready to adapt our thinking and process to meet the disaster with the appropriate actions.

    Steve Jones

  • Daily Coping 8 Jul 2022

    I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral 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.

    Today’s tip is to be willing to ask for help when you need it.

    I struggle with this. I rarely ask for help, but when I added this tip to the list a month ago, I started to think about this on a more regular basis. I still don’t do this enough, but I got better.

    I was busy at work and asked someone else to handle something for me. In the past, I’d work longer hours and find a way to just handle the stress and workload. Thanks to my co-worker for helping out.

    I was putting in some fence recently and took a few minutes to ask a kid to help with the work. Again, I usually just work harder on my own.

    Same day, actually was tired (fencing in 90F/30C is hard) and asked another kid to cook dinner. They handled it.

    Asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness, but it’s also not my default action, even when I need it. I’m learning to be better.