Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

Engineers Making the World Better for Diabetics

At Music City Tech today, I had the chance to watch Scott Hanselman deliver an opening keynote called Solving Diabetes with an Open Source Pancreas. It was an engaging and humorous talk that I enjoyed. Scott is a great speaker, and you can watch a previous recording from Webstock if you like.

I met Scott years ago, and he talked about his sensor at that time that got his blood sugar on his phone. At the time I thought that was cool, but in an abstract way. I’m blessed with good health as is my family. My eyes are bad and one of my ears is fairly broken, but those are really minor issues.

This is really my life, a shot from Scott’s talk.

I mostly do what I want and my blood sugar works well. In fact, my morning was wake up, a little hungry, but I hit the elliptical for a bit before eating breakfast. As a contrast, here’s another shot of what Scott does.

This past year, while coaching volleyball, one of my players was diagnosed with Type I diabetes. For a time I wasn’t sure if the player would return, and when she did, we had to be sure that she took time to prick her finger and check the reading during practice and tournaments. At some point she got a continuous glucose monitor, which Scott talked about, that sent readings to a small cell phone sized device. Over the season, all the girls learned to check the device periodically and warn the young lady or her mother if the numbers went too high or low.

I was quite impressed with the way this 14 year old managed her health, but more I realized just how lucky I am. As Scott delivered his talk, he also mentioned that he was lucky in that he’s in a first world country with the resources to manage his condition, something that many people struggle with.

Scott is working with the NightScout Foundation to use technology to try and automatically manage his diabetes. He has his real time blood sugar uploaded to the cloud so that he and his wife can track it, he gets data on his phone, and he has his pump low dosing him throughout the day. It’s an amazing system, and he even has his blood sugar appear in his git command prompt.

On one hand I’m amazed and thrilled that technology has really found a way to help people improve their lives. On the other, it’s a maddening situation where proprietary systems limit the access and ability of most people to manage their health. My heart angers over corporate greed and feels anguish for the struggles that should be much more manageable.

If you feel this is your cause, check out NighScout and maybe get involved.

June 1, 2018
Getting SQL Agent going for SQL Server on Linux–#SQLNewBlogger

Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.

It’s actually a simple procedure, but I thought I’d write a short note to help me remember. The procedure is documented in Books Online.

When I first started playing with this version, I noticed that SQL Agent was disabled. That’s not great, since SQL Agent is a great tool for various tasks in SQL Server. I can’t start the agent from here, as the underlying implementation is different, and I’m not really a host OS admin when connecting in SSMS.

After checking which patch level I was at (CU6), I changed to my Linux console, and ran the configuration utility. For Linux, this is mssql-conf.

The next step is to run the command listed to restart the system. I actually just ran

sudo sysmctl restart mssql-server

Once this was done, I refreshed SSMS.

This appears to work, but let’s test it. I’ll create a new job that does a backup of a database. This should be simple, and I’ll use defaults, just a filename for a full backup. I’ll use this command:

backup database dbaadmin to disk = ‘dbaadmin.bak’ with init

I save the job and run it. Sure enough, I have a backup.

Tada, now I can move forward with work.

SQLNewBlogger

This is a fairly simple thing to do, but the writing helps me remember, but more importantly, I can document that I’ve done some learning here and experimenting.

The next person thinking about interviewing you wants to know that you can learn and solve problems.

May 31, 2018
Learning Goals–May Update

It’s 5 months in, and this is hard. I find that the time I’ve picked each week sometimes gets bumped by other items, which do have a higher priority. More on this later.

Extended Events

An epic fail here for May. I started with one week and managed to get an hour watching part of a PASS session and building a few questions. However, the second week I got busy with some family stuff that impacted my work week. With deadlines and travel the third week, I skipped this.

The third week I was gone, and the fourth, well, only a little focus, though I did start to write a short piece on using Jon Kehayias’ script to convert a trace to an XE session. We’ll see if I get this done.

Fifth week, not sure. That Tuesday will be in the June update.

Python

Not a lot better than the XE stuff. Week one I had some family issues get in the way of my Friday learning and ended up skipping this as I was away from home. With a busy weekend, I didn’t make this up.

Week 2 I was prepping for week 3. Week 3 I was gone.

This brings me to week 4. While I like to try and do something, I really didn’t get much done during the week. I am looking to add Python questions to the mix on SSC, so I have taken a little time during the week to build a couple questions. Going through basics like lists and dictionaries helps me come up with things that I think people might not know and can get inspired to learn a little with a question. That helped me get a few things done this month.

I did take time to go through part of a Pluralsight course in week 4, about 90 minutes of total time, some of that pausing the course so I could generate a question and practice some Python skills.

I keep a few browser tabs open with Python links to try some problem solving, but I keep not making time.

Moving Forward

I didn’t travel much until mid May, but I had a very busy life outside of work and didn’t make much time to learn away from work. Fortunately my work is related to these topics, so I can take a little time for learning.

As I close out the first half of the year, I’m somewhat disappointed with progress. I definitely continue to learn, as my job requires it, but I’m not getting the focused time in these areas. Looking forward to next year, I want to aim for topics that are more tightly integrated with work so that I get more practice. Here, even though I’m doing something, I’m not as focused.

For June and further, I’m going to shift my times around and pick what I think are quieter times for me to get something done. Since I can ride a bike at home and watch Pluralsight, I’ll pick those times for at least passive learning. Then I’ll set aside a shorter time period, 30 minutes, for practice at other points in the week when I have found myself with time.

May 30, 2018
How Far Back?

At the Redgate SQL Privacy Summit recently, there was panel I hosted that I thought was really interesting. At one point someone asked a question and there was a bit of a discussion about the right to forget in the EU. One of the fascinating things wasn’t about the rights, but about backups. One of our panelists noted that we often keep too many backups, most of which are really useless.

This portion of the discussion started by asking how many backups people keep. Many of those in the audience kept many backups, sometimes dozens. Many of them had some rotation scheme that determined how many files were kept over time. I know I’ve worked in places where we kept over a week or two worth of backup files, often along with a monthly or quarterly backup for a year and then multiple year end backups in perpetuity. I guess since we didn’t really know how long those backups were valid as we just marked some tape as the end-of-year one and left it in a vault somewhere.

What was also interesting is the panelist asked if many people had restored a backup more than a month old. Almost no one had, but a few had restored a year old backup. I think that’s common, and I find I’ve only restored one backup more than a month old. That one was actually for a legal case, and it was six or seven years old. I actually had to find someone at Microsoft that could provide us with an old version of an SP to restore the database.

I’m wondering today about the rest of you. Not if you have done it, but would you do it today? How far back would you go for a backup of an important database? Assume this isn’t any requirement to find the data at a point in time, but for recovery purposes in a disaster.

For me, I’d expect that most of the systems I’ve managed really would have struggled to go back a week. After that point in time, so many transactions are missing that there are serious repercussions. This is why I’ve often ensured I had automated restores happening all the time, since I need to be sure that we can restore from yesterday or two days ago. If I went back more than a week, it would be because we had corrupt backups. While the business would probably survive, I’m not sure my job would. If I hadn’t been able to produce a workable backup for the last week, I think most organizations would be justified in terminating me.

Whether they would or not is another debate.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 4.4MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

May 30, 2018