Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • The London Redgate Summit

    In a week I’m heading to London for the Redgate Summit. I enjoyed these last year and had some very interesting conversations with customers, prospects, and a few Redgate fans.

    This year the event is on Mar 11 at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, which should be fun given that I’ve been re-watching Ted Lasso (I still need to make a pilgrimage to Richmond…).

    The schedule has a variety of tracks for leadership and tech people. There are even some breakfast sessions if you want to learn more about Oracle or PostgreSQL. I’ve got the keynote session and a panel for leadership on my agenda.

    Check out the video from last year, and register to come this year. I’ll see you in London next week.

  • T-SQL Tuesday #183: Improving Permission Management

    This is my (late) answer to my own invitation for T-SQL Tuesday #183. I was very busy a few weeks ago when the invite when out (glad it was scheduled) and I never got this done. This post looks at how I managed permissions in the past.

    Large Enterprises

    Many of us would like to think that large enterprises have standards and they’ve learned about best practices. My experiences in 3 of them were that so often large enterprises were small ones that grew, often with lots of tech debt and busy staff. Even when there are limitations to ensuring good security, often we can’t just fix things because we might break something.

    In one large company (5000+ employees) I found that many of the database servers I managed had permissions set in a variety of manners. Often this included lots of individual permissions granted to logins and users, which was a mess.

    Even when AD groups were in place for departments, they weren’t used as logins in SQL Server since not everyone in a department needed to access the database.

    Cleaning Up

    I hated managing permissions by user. When I started and got a ticket to add a new person to a database for access, I watched someone train me by looking up another similar user in the database, scripting out their permissions, and then search/replace to change the user or login name.

    Not a bad solution, but one that doesn’t scale well over time. What I started to implement was to create an AD group (for Windows users) or a database role (for SQL Users) and then add the login/user to this group or role and assign the permissions from my “other” user to the role. I’d also often move the user to the new role and revoke their specific permissions.

    While this seemed like more work at first, this quickly started to scale well as we had a way to add new users to roles that matched the access they needed.

    Slowly over time we moved a lot of access to AD, which allowed us to remove the burden of disabling users in SQL Server. Plus, we could easily see which access a variety of users had by looking at a role rather than checking multiple accounts. Auditors liked that and it helped us pass various audit checks over time.

    Use roles and groups. They’re not hard and they make things cleaner and easier over time.

  • Monday Monitor Tips: VLF Alerts

    A recent change made to Redgate Monitor to add a new alert for VLF count. This post looks at the change.

    This is part of a series of posts on Redgate Monitor. Click to see the other posts

    Tracking Virtual Log Files

    Virtual Log Files (VLF) are sections inside of your physical log file (.ldf). These have no fixed size or number per file, but there can be many. The architecture of the log is explained in this doc and it varies according to a number of factors.

    That doc also explains there are issues with too many VLFs inside of a log file. There are plenty of other posts about this (Brent Ozar, Kimberly Trip) and it is somethin you want to keep track of.

    Redgate Monitor changes and grows every week with new releases and one of the resent releases (14.0.41) included a new alert for VLFs.

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    To configure this, select the gear icon in the upper right of Redgate Monitor.

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    On the configuration page, select the Alert settings. This will bring you to the details for your alerts.

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    There are a number of items on the Alert Settings page, but scroll down to the bottom of the SQL Server Alerts section. The Virtual log file count is the last alert.

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    The default setting is to raise multiple alerts here. The settings are:

    • low: 100
    • medium: 300
    • high: 1000

    These may or may not be appropriate  for your system, and for me, I don’t know I’ve ever had time to worry about this and I might disable a low level alert and only have two, but you can decide what’s important to you.

    The important thing is that if you worry about VLFs in your environment, you can get alerted and track this over time.

    Redgate Monitor is a world class monitoring solution for your database estate. Download a trial today and see how it can help you manage your estate more efficiently.

  • Watch Technology Has Advanced

    Today I wrote an editorial about my watch failing and getting a new one. I likened this to the changes in tools, which many of us deal with in technology. Certainly Visual Studio has changed a lot if you’re a developer, and you might even be using VS Code. For database people in the SQL Server world, we’ve gone from isql to Enterprise Manager to Management Studio to ADS to no-ADS.

    In any case, I’m still not sure that I like the Garmin Venu2SQ. If you’ve never had a smartwatch, or a Garmin, this might not mean much to you, but I’ll write a little about things I noticed with tech changing. These are things that stood out to me, which aren’t necessarily good or bad, but just are.

    The Look

    There’s two things here: the shape and the display. The shape is square, and my wife noticed the difference right away. My old one was round and looked like a watch. It had an always on display, so during the daytime I could see it.

    It looked like a watch.

    This one is square, the display turns off, and it seems like a device. Similar to an Apple watch or Galaxy watch.

    I have to admit I hadn’t thought about it, but after years of various Timex’s and the old Garmin Forerunner, it does look different and I notice now that my wife pointed this out.

    The other thing is the display. On one hand, it’s colorful and bright. That’s new. On the other, I haven’t found a watch face that I like. The old one I had selected and used for 7+ years isn’t available anymore, or I can’t find it. The Garmin store is crowded with watch faces, and I’m a little overwhelmed. I’m trying a few, but so far nothing is amazing.

    Ergonomics

    One of the reasons I liked my old watch is that it had a number of physical buttons, which make it easy to pick things. At the same time, sometimes there were too many things to pick from (a long list or a circular display of options) and it was a lot of presses to pick something.

    This new watch has a touch screen and only two buttons. One button will show me my fitness activities (press) or various controls (long press). The other is a “back” button (press) or a settings button (long press). I thought that would be non-intuitive, but once I’ve learned this, it’s only slightly distracting.

    The screen is a touch screen, and scrolling through things works well, which I was surprised to see. There is often a virtual button at the top or bottom of a display that lets me easily open a menu of options. I was surprised how well this works, as well as how little I mess up the actions. I change alarms often as I travel and setting a new alarm on the watch works well.

    I thought I would miss more buttons, but I don’t.

    The one part of the touch screen I don’t like is at times I lift my wrist to check some notification, usually a text, and my coat sleeve catches the screen and dismisses the notification before I can read it. Or before I can press the menu to respond. That’s a minor issue, though one thing I don’t like about touch screens.

    Battery Life

    This is amazing to me. I loved my old Forerunner which lasted 4-5 days between charges, which was useful as I traveled. I had a lot of trips where I didn’t need to charge, though I carried a second charger as sometimes I’d forget to charge before I left.

    This new watch has been running for 6 days and I have 50% charge. To be fair, life now is a little busy and I’m doing less gym time and no GPS, but the battery is rated close to two weeks, with a color touch screen. That’s amazing.

    Features

    I picked the Forerunner as it had a NFC payment and music capabilities. At the time I thought I’d connect Bluetooth headphones at the gym and not need my phone. I’ve learned that I really don’t do that, especially as my phone is my car key, so I am rarely without it.

    This new watch doesn’t have music downloaded, but it does have a wallet, and a few of the apps I’ve used on the old watch. At 1/3 of the price. It’s somewhat amazing that this much tech is packed into a watch, with better battery life.

    The way I manage apps and watch faces has changed, depending less on the app and more on a link through my phone to the store, but I get that probably saves them some software engineering of the app.

    What I learned most of all is that I really just need to track my sleep, stress, heart rate, and exercise, all of which are available.

    Learning Curve

    As I wrote in the editorial, I’m not sure I’m using a lot of the watch, but I do slowly figure things out as I need them. This week I was looking to get music controls on the watch, so that when I’m doing chores and my phone is buried in a coat, I can change tracks. It took me about 5-10 minutes of searching to find out how, but once I enabled this, it worked great.

    Slowly I’m coming to accept this watch, and will just keep changing watch faces every week or so until I find one I like.

    Finding The Tech Fit

    I see people doing other things on their watches, but I don’t find myself jealous. My wife can answer a phone call on her watch and talk through it, but I don’t have that need. I’m rarely on a horse, and need hands free access. I don’t constantly look for information other than the time or my health.

    What’s amazing to me is how much cheaper the tech is and how long my battery life is, and how little I do on the watch. After making a snap decision, this has turned out to meet most of my needs across the last month.

    It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough and that’s OK with me.