Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Killing IE

    Sort of. Apparently, Microsoft will kill off IE in Feb 2023 in Windows 10. The lifecycle page notes that IE will be permanently disabled with an Edge update. For earlier OSes, it isn’t quite clear what will happen. However, extended support ends this month, Jan 2023, for Windows 7 and 8.

    Does anyone use Windows 8?

    I have used IE many times in my career, but the last decade of so I’ve shuddered every time I need to run it on a server or remote machine. It’s ancient technology that feels cumbersome, much like trying to get something done on a Palm Pilot instead of a modern smartphone.

    I know there are lots of websites and apps that use technology that works in IE, and Microsoft is adding an IE Mode to Edge for those cases.  Microsoft has a “what you need to know” article you can read, but it seems more like an advertisement for Edge than an informative article.

    I could care less about IE, and I mostly don’t think I’ve needed it in years, but I do encounter that technology in a few places. Outlook is the main one where some sort of IE-based control is still being loaded for some authentication mechanisms. I think removing IE is one thing, but getting rid of embedded controls based on IE is going to be a much harder and longer-term issue.

    I know so many developers that used various versions of the browser control in their apps, and I suspect there is no shortage of places that IE tech will continue to be a problem. I’m sure it works most of the time, but probably not always.

    Hopefully, most of you out there use a modern browser for your work, and if you need one inside an application, you use something besides an embedded IE-era control. If you need an alternative, there’s an older Stack answer that might help. Please, use anything by an IE control. It’s time we let that technology retire gracefully in a museum somewhere.

    Steve Jones

  • Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays 2022

    This weekend is Christmas, and likely many of you are not working hard today and will enjoy a long weekend until Tuesday. There are many other holidays at this time of year as well, and I hope you are enjoying the season with loved ones. I want to take a moment to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy Holiday season.

    As we come to the end of this year, it’s a good time to take stock of life. Work slows down for many of us, and it’s a time we think about family and friends. My wish is that you find yourself in a better position than last year. You are hopefully finding ways to cope and enjoy this world.

    If not, then take stock of what isn’t working well and make a plan to change things. Life is short, sometimes much shorter than we realize, so move towards something that fulfills you, brings you happiness, and lets you enjoy the most of each day.

    Enjoy the weekend and I’ll see you next week.

    Steve Jones

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

  • CPU Upgrades

    I expected this to be an article from Glenn Berry. He often tries to convince me to upgrade. I think so he can justify buying his own new hardware.

    In this case, however, this is a note from Tom’s Hardware that it’s a great time to upgrade your CPU. The article is a few weeks old, referencing Cyber Monday deals, and it notes that CPU sales are at a 30-year low. This means there’s a lot of supply and retailers are trying to clear out stock.

    I don’t know how many of you find your CPU slow, or if you have access to change the CPU (often you can’t in a laptop). If you have a desktop, then you might not have a motherboard that supports the latest CPUs. Glenn would say upgrade your motherboard, but as I’ve seen in the past, this sometimes means memory upgrades as well.

    Many of us work with server machines, but we aren’t responsible for the hardware. We often can’t even request different hardware. Glenn has written about which CPUs work for SQL Server, though not for a few years. Maybe this piece will get him to update that article.

    SQL Server 2022 is the latest version, and the price as increased. The performance per core is more important than ever, so choosing the best CPU could have a big impact on the ROI of your database server. Even if you use the cloud, often there are choices in hardware, and expressing your reasoning for one over the other to the groups responsible for infrastructure can help ensure your organization gets the most performance for their billing.

    And if you’re the person specifying hardware, you definitely ought to understand the differences between the CPU choices and make the best choice for your budget.

    Steve Jones

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

  • The SPU

    Ever since I heard about the SQLOS and all the work that went into producing an operating system for SQL Server inside of the host OS, I’ve thought that perhaps there might be value in specializing the environment for a database platform. Given the importance of databases, especially relational ones, and the need to get every bit of performance out of hardware, I wondered if we wouldn’t see a version of SQL Server that is installed directly on the hardware, without a host OS.

    In some sense, I guess that’s what a PaaS database is in Azure, but I thought we might see that for the download-and-install version. I doubt that will ever happen now with the growth of the cloud.

    Instead, maybe there’s a better way to improve performance without requiring SQL Server (or Oracle, PostgreSQL, etc.) to implement some of the OS features they’d need. Perhaps we could change the hardware around and use a SQL Processing Unit (SPU). The SPU is another specialized chip. Like a GPU for graphics, or even some of the other chips that are made specifically for mobiles, storage, or networking, this one would be focused on database needs. Apparently, there are a few companies that are researching how they might build chips that focus specifically on the types of computations that data analysis requires.

    I don’t know how practical this is, or whether we’d see any major database vendor attempt to port to a new chip. Perhaps they’d add instructions that could use one of these chips inside a regular system, similar to how a GPU can offload work. That might seriously improve performance, something that a lot of our customers would appreciate. Especially if this happens without spending a lot of developer time rewriting old code.

    That’s not to say that developers shouldn’t learn to write better code. They ought to, mostly so that their initial attempt at producing reports or batches of data handles a wide variety of data values and workloads without stressing the hardware. More efficient code is always the best way to attack any problem. Even if you had a very efficient SPU, chances are that your workload will still grow to overwhelm the hardware at some point, especially as the number of users grows.

    Monitoring helps find problem queries, but it’s up to developers to change their habits, grow their knowledge, and produce better code sooner. Then we can use hardware to deal with the large numbers of users that need to access the system.

    Steve Jones

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