Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Daily Coping 2 Feb 2021

    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 decide to lift people up rather than put them down.

    I live in the US, and our culture and atmosphere has been challenging across the last decade with the political climate. I also find that more and more often that people tend to present a worse version of themselves online. It’s also easy to try to make a joke in response to some post, and not realize that the way it is received is far different from how you intended the words.

    I see this often in Twitter, and I’m certainly guilt of registering a complaint, an opinion, or some comment without thinking.

    I saw this tip and then started to think about how I interact with people. A few of us have been trying to find a way to continue events through Data Saturdays, after the SQL Saturday franchise folded. There are lots of opinions and feelings about this, and as these are expressed, strong emotions can follow.

    I’ve been making an effort, publicly and privately, to be positive and try to help others accomplish what they want, regardless of how I feel. In an effort to lift people, I have been working on being positive, and asking questions if there is something I might not like or agree with. I’ll let someone educate me before we debate.

    It feels better to approach things online this way.

  • Daily Coping 1 Feb 2021

    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 plan something fun and invite others to join you.

    My nephew turned 18 recently. He lives on the East Coast, but in talking with my brother, we decided to give him a ski trip for the occasion. I donated our place in the mountains, and his dad is sending him out in a few weeks.

    In planning this, I thought it would be fun for a day if I went skiing with him and I invited my wife and the one son here in CO to go. They’re thinking about it, and I’m not sure they’ll go, but it’s a good event to plan and enjoy.

  • Self-Care–Using Vacation

    I spent most of my work as a bit of a workaholic. Not that I worked too many crazy hours or spent all my time at work, because I didn’t. I had some rough stretches, but I’ve mostly worked 45-50 hours a week for the majority of my career, in all positions.

    However, I struggled to take vacation. In fact, I rarely took more than a few days. Even now, after about 4 days I’m usually ready to go back to work. I am trying to do better, but it’s hard. Or maybe it’s a sign I have a great job and love what I do.

    In any case, I’m trying to be better in a different way. My family enjoys winter, and while travel is restricted in a variety of ways, we do have season passes for the Colorado mountains and a place up there. We usually rent it out, but there haven’t been any since last year. That might start changing, but for the time being, we’ve tried to take advantage of the space.

    We took a couple trips up there in December, and one a couple weeks ago. We’re back up this week for a few more days, and I’ve even lent it out to my nephew in a few weeks (though I may come up for a day). No long trips, but I’m trying to take them regularly and get away.

    See you later this week.

  • The Database Server Upgrade for Let’s Encrypt

    Let’s Encrypt is a service the provides free SSL certificates for web servers. They have grown from a small project to a critical service on the web that serves over 235mm clients each year, and often issues over 1.5mm certificates each day. They depend on a MariaDB database to support this, and recently, they released a post on the database server upgrade they made. They run physical hardware on a managed services provider (Datto), rather than using a cloud platform service, which is fine. While cloud services are great, they aren’t always the best choice. I’d like to see them talk about any evaluation as to what Datto is better than, say, AWS.

    In any case, I like seeing how people upgrade hardware, as well as the impact of changes. I haven’t always done this when I’ve upgraded my home systems, though I do notice the new one always runs faster. Good for me, but for production systems, we should have better metrics, if for no other reason than to better learn how to size the next upgrade.

    In this case, Let’s Encrypt has a great post that shows how the hardware changed. They moved from Intel to AMD, 48 threads to 128 threads, doubled RAM, and went from mid 500MB/s read/writes to 3200MB/s. Their response metrics also improved, with API requests going from 90ms to 9ms. CPU dropped from 90% to 25% and latency is a third of previous values. Quite an impressive change.

    I like seeing the details of their change, and I think this is a nice pattern for others to think about. Whether you spec out machines, VMs in AWS, or DTUs in Azure. You ought to have some metrics that matter for your customers, and then compare the before and after. Prove your upgrade worked, or maybe prove that you need to alter your specs after the upgrade. One advantage with a cloud provider is that you can often scale up or down as needed. With an MSP, it might be harder, but I bet you can still change hardware fairly quickly if you suspect a problem.

    While we all want to test a new configuration before we turn it on, simulating a workload can be challenging. Clients somehow always seem to find ways to stress systems we hadn’t anticipated. When spec’ing out a new system, make sure you have room to grow if you’ve underestimated how the new system performs. You also might set specific targets that aim to improve your metrics to some level. Even if you don’t hit the estimate, you will learn something about your methodology that can help you improve your guess for the future.

    Above all, publish something like Let’s Encrypt. Share some data and help our industry move forward. We’ve love to have you write something for SQLServerCentral.

    Steve Jones

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