Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Daily Coping 26 Jan 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 focus on what’s good on a tough day.

    Most of my days are pretty good, but there are some difficult days. As I tell my kids, every job is a job some days, no matter how much you love it.

    Last week I had a hard day. I wasn’t feeling well, fighting a cold (or maybe breakthrough COVID, but I don’t think so). I needed to get a few things done, I wanted to work out, and I needed rest.

    I decided to focus on the fact that I felt well enough to do something, and cut back where I could. I postponed some work, did a very light yoga workout in my bedroom, and took care of the one critical thing that needed to be done.

    By the end of the day, I felt better. I shortened the day and went to bed early, but I did enough to appreciate that it turned out to be a good one.

  • Daily Coping 25 Jan 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 get back in touch with an old friend.

    Actually, I had an old friend get in touch with me. Someone I worked with years ago reached out and I responded. We actually scheduled lunch together and it was great. A very nice chance to catch up with each other’s lives and careers.

    Worth the time and effort.

  • A Quick Data Backup

    The other day I was driving in the Tesla and clicked and Spotify application and chose a playlist. In this case, it was the “This is Stevie Wonder” playlist, which my wife and I had listened to the night before. I got a “load error” on a song.

    I tried another and got the same thing. I tried a third in this playlist, thinking this was some network error, but nothing worked. I switched to a different playlist and got a song to play, but when I went back to the Stevie Wonder one, it showed all the songs, but wouldn’t play.

    I finally connected my phone and opened the playlist in Spotify only to see it was empty. Somehow the Spotify generated list was deleted and the app in the Tesla didn’t update to see the issue.

    That got me thinking. I don’t have a lot of playlists, but I do sometimes follow and set up system playlists that I like. In the modern world where I’m sharing this data with others, I’m dependent that someone else doesn’t break things.

    I looked around to see if I could export and import playlists, or copy them, but I didn’t see anything, so I decided to make my own backup. There are really only 5 or 6 of these I follow, so I created my own new playlist.

    2022-01-13 17_03_56-John Mayer - All We Ever Do Is Say Goodbye

    I renamed it to the band name, in this case, The Beatles. Next, I opened the Spotify list, selected the songs, and then dragged them over.

    2022-01-13 17_05_03-John Mayer - All We Ever Do Is Say Goodbye

    I did this for the 5 or 6 “This is xxx” lists and then removed those Spotify ones from my list. If those get updated, I won’t know, but that’s not critical here. If I find something missing, or want to add something, I can. In fact, my “John Mayer” list now has “83”, which was missing from the Spotify list.

    Another case where a quick manual task works well and likely is better than a lot of code work. Here, that would probably be a lot of research to find something that might not even exist.

  • Knowing When to Respond

    I ran into this quote on the Microsoft Learn site, which I thought was a great way to think about how to administer a system: “Without a baseline, every issue encountered could be considered normal and therefore not require any additional intervention.”

    When I’ve had users file tickets or complain about things not working well, I’ve found more often than not their perception has changed more than the actual performance. I’ve been called for “slow applications” only to find out that “slow” was 30 seconds and the complainer wasn’t sure how long it used to take, but today being end of the quarter, it is slow. Digging into monitoring history has shown that the query always took at least 20s and could take over 30s. My main takeaway was a little stress for users sometimes culminates in unnecessary work for operations staff.

    There certainly are times when a database query takes longer than expected but is it because the system is overloaded or there’s a lot more data? When was the last time this ran and what changed? Are there more queries against the same objects than in the past? Even when there are real problems, without knowing how a system typically looks at this time, we may struggle to quickly determine where the problem lies. We may not even know how to craft a good solution without some baseline.

    Maybe the best reason for me to know a baseline is for triaging and prioritizing issues. Seeing a server at 100% CPU is one thing, but if this is a daily occurrence, I might decide another issue is more important. Especially at 2 am.

    Having a baseline for your systems is important. Build a system if you must, buy one if you can, but get monitoring set up for your systems. It will help you focus development efforts when changed code doesn’t work as expected. It also helps your operations staff to help them respond more efficiently to future issues.

    Steve Jones