Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • Slide Decks for PASS, SQL in the City, and SQL Server Connections

    I’ve sent my slide decks to the organizers, but I know they don’t always get posted. So I’m putting a few links up here for my talks.

    If you check the page for my Preparation for Disaster talk, you’ll find I have links for the two recent events to the decks. I often version the decks after talks, and so I’ve decided to keep all versions live.

    I’ve also uploaded the decks from PASS if you’re interested.

    PASS Summit 2011

    SQL in the City – LA 2011

    SQL Server Connections

  • Get Inspired – SQL Inspire 2011 New York

    Coming up next week is the SQL Inspire 2011 event in New York City. It’s an event with a number of SQL Server community speakers that are here to inspire you in your career, your life, and with SQL Server. The talks cover a variety of topics, and they look interesting. I am very excited to attend the event, and give my talk as well.

    The event is from SQL People, the brainchild of Andy Leonard and Brian Moran, designed to build a stronger community by having us inspire each other. This event is based on the TED events, which are inspirational and informative talks that look to explore new ideas in a variety of topic areas. I have loved watching many of the talks, and while I’m not sure I’m up to the same level of presenting as many of these people, I’m going to try.

    Please come if you are in New York on the 12th of November. It will be a lot of fun, and hopefully a very motivational event.

  • Document Your Day

    You should be documenting your day, your week, your month, on a regular basis. Take a few minutes when you accomplish something and make a blog entry. This is a great way for you to keep track of what you’ve accomplished during the year, and be ready to talk about it in an interview, or in a performance review.

    You don’t have to publically blog this. You can use Word, emacs, Live Writer, text files, whatever works, but, keep track of it. Read through it when you need it and summarize your accomplishments for the quarter or year. This is also something you consult every quarter when you touch your resume.

    And when you get ready for that review, read Kendra Little’s post on asking for a raise.

  • Buckets for Disaster Recovery

    Disaster recovery can be a huge project at any company. Considering the ways in which you build a plan that covers all the infrastructure, and it can quickly become a full time job for someone. The details, and the scope of the project can be overwhelming when you try to address your environment.

    There’s a way to make this easier: buckets. If you can group your systems into a few gross buckets that define those systems that have similar needs, you can make life simpler.

    In the past, I have typically built four buckets of systems for DR purposes, though I think you could go with three. These are the buckets I’ve had:

    • Critical Systems – high priority systems that typically must be running the majority of the business day. Note that you may have a 24 hour business day in which case downtime must be minimized to minutes.
    • Low priority – systems that we can function without for a day or two if we need to. Often development systems fall into this area.
    • Everything else – Medium levels of priority.
    • Not recovered – This is an optional level, but it’s almost always been a set of test systems, maybe some development systems that aren’t important enough to worry about.

    The fourth bucket, the “Not Recovered” bucket doesn’t mean you abandon those systems. In the event of an issue, you would make an attempt to recover them, but you might not spend time or resources practicing or preparing for the recovery effort.

    Bucketing your systems is the best way to easily manage your preparations for disaster, and also set some gross priorities. You might end up recovering systems within the bucket in different orders, depending on what happened, but this gives you an easy way to allocate resources, both in a disaster, and in preparation.