Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • Daily Coping 2 Feb 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 choose one of your strengths and find a way to use it.

    One of my strengths is that I can grind away at tasks and get things done. I’m careful not to overcommit (most times) and being able to focus helps me work through the items I do agree to work on.

    For me, I’ve been using this personally for the last month. I started a diet with my wife, limiting food intake and avoiding alcohol. I haven’t had a drink from Jan 1 through Feb 1. I dropped my calorie intake to about 1500 cal/day.

    This hasn’t been too bad, but I think a couple of things from my strength help here. First, I know I’m paying a bit of penance for using food and alcohol to cope during the pandemic, at least a bit too much. Second, I have a routine of 3-4 days that I rotate through, and a fairly limited set of choices that I don’t dislike too much. I’ve been able to just keep pushing through hard days and looking forward to a new meal the next day.

    Overall it’s worked well. I went from about 236-226 in a month and while I’m rarely satisfied and often a little hungry, it’s not as bad as some attempts in the past.

    I think the penance thing has played to my strength.

  • Daily Coping 1 Feb 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 take a small step towards an important goal.

    One of the goals I have personally, and from work, is to take a few Azure tests. I’ve been studying here and there, but not with enough pressure. I decided to schedule the exam, and put some pressure on myself.

    It’s a small step, but an important goal and a positive step.

  • T-SQL Tuesday #147 Invitation – Upgrade Strategies

    tsqltuesdayIt is time for T-SQL Tuesday #147 and this month I get to be the host. Since I’m in charge, I usually try to ensure I remember what this is like and host every year or two. This will be my sixth time hosting. The others I’ve hosted are: 013, 027, 106, 117, 137.

    For this month, I was thinking about SQL Server 2022. The next version of the platform was announced in the fall, and I’ve spent a little time working with it, getting familiar with some of the changes. I don’t plan on upgrading SQL Server Central anytime soon, but you never know.

    Planning for Upgrades

    In my career, most of the time we don’t upgrade production databases very often. In most of my jobs, we’d change versions for new databases, but existing ones often lived on their original version. It’s how I got into a job where I was managing 4 different versions of SQL Server. These days I expect it’s common for many DBAs to have to deal with that many, or more, versions.

    I do have customers these days that try to upgrade often, and limit the number of versions they work with. I have customers now that are on a mix of 2016-2019 only, some that might be working on 2014-2016 only, and I’ve run into a customer that only has SQL Server 2017. Of course, they have few databases and look to upgrade about every 5 years when mainstream support is running out for their edition.

    This month I want you to write about how you look at SQL Server upgrades. A few things you might think about:

    • Why we wait to upgrade?
    • Strategies for testing an upgrade
    • Smoke tests or other ways to verify the upgrade worked
    • Moving to the cloud to avoid upgrades
    • Using compatibility levels to upgrade an instance by not a database.
    • Checklists of things to use in planning
    • The time it takes to upgrade your environment
    • What you evaluate in making a decision to upgrade or not?
    • Anything else

    I don’t know when SQL Server 2022 will release, but certainly many of us will need to consider in 2023 whether we want to upgrade systems or not. Think about it and write about something that matters to you.

    The Rules

    Write your own post in response to the invitation. If you want to be in the wrap-up, follow these rules. If you read this after Feb 8, 2022, just write your response on your blog.

    • Write your post and publish it on Feb 8 ,2022, UTC time
    • Include the T-SQL Tuesday logo and link to this post.
      (logo in this post)

    • Ensure you leave a comment on this post with the URL of your post (or a trackback/pingback)
    • Publicize your  post on Twitter/LinkedIn with the #tsql2sday hashtag

  • Daily Coping 31 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 say hello to a neighbor and get to know them better.

    Tough to say hello to neighbors where I am. The nearest one is over 1/4 mile away, and they have long driveways.

    I do, however, sometimes see me neighbors walking along the road. I slowed down and stopped to chat with one recently. I wasn’t pressed for time, so I took a few minutes to say hi, ask how life was going, and caught up with someone I hadn’t talked to in over a year.

    It was a good use of my time.