Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Republish: Artist or Scientist?

    Still on vacation, so Artist or Scientist? today.

  • Republish: Bronze Age Development

    On vacation today, celebrating with my wife in the mountains. You get Bronze Age Development.

  • The Database Server Upgrade for Let’s Encrypt

    Let’s Encrypt is a service the provides free SSL certificates for web servers. They have grown from a small project to a critical service on the web that serves over 235mm clients each year, and often issues over 1.5mm certificates each day. They depend on a MariaDB database to support this, and recently, they released a post on the database server upgrade they made. They run physical hardware on a managed services provider (Datto), rather than using a cloud platform service, which is fine. While cloud services are great, they aren’t always the best choice. I’d like to see them talk about any evaluation as to what Datto is better than, say, AWS.

    In any case, I like seeing how people upgrade hardware, as well as the impact of changes. I haven’t always done this when I’ve upgraded my home systems, though I do notice the new one always runs faster. Good for me, but for production systems, we should have better metrics, if for no other reason than to better learn how to size the next upgrade.

    In this case, Let’s Encrypt has a great post that shows how the hardware changed. They moved from Intel to AMD, 48 threads to 128 threads, doubled RAM, and went from mid 500MB/s read/writes to 3200MB/s. Their response metrics also improved, with API requests going from 90ms to 9ms. CPU dropped from 90% to 25% and latency is a third of previous values. Quite an impressive change.

    I like seeing the details of their change, and I think this is a nice pattern for others to think about. Whether you spec out machines, VMs in AWS, or DTUs in Azure. You ought to have some metrics that matter for your customers, and then compare the before and after. Prove your upgrade worked, or maybe prove that you need to alter your specs after the upgrade. One advantage with a cloud provider is that you can often scale up or down as needed. With an MSP, it might be harder, but I bet you can still change hardware fairly quickly if you suspect a problem.

    While we all want to test a new configuration before we turn it on, simulating a workload can be challenging. Clients somehow always seem to find ways to stress systems we hadn’t anticipated. When spec’ing out a new system, make sure you have room to grow if you’ve underestimated how the new system performs. You also might set specific targets that aim to improve your metrics to some level. Even if you don’t hit the estimate, you will learn something about your methodology that can help you improve your guess for the future.

    Above all, publish something like Let’s Encrypt. Share some data and help our industry move forward. We’ve love to have you write something for SQLServerCentral.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Remembering the Past

    Just a short time ago, the SQL Family lost Gareth Swanepoel. It was fairly sudden and sad to have someone I knew fairly well pass away. He was the first person that I directly knew that was lost to the COVID-19 pandemic.

    I’m getting older. I seem to hear about a person I’ve known passing away almost every year now. I know I’ve got more life behind me than in front of me, and I cherish the moments I do have and the memories of others.

    A few years ago Andy Warren and I were talking about this subject. This was after we lost a common friend, and we wanted to have some way to remember them. We kicked around a few ideas, but other than adding an “Obituaries” category to Database Weekly, I didn’t do much.

    I decided to change that after I heard about Gareth. While processing my grief, I bought sqlmemorial.org and started to put something together. I’ve been hearing about Jekyll and I spent a little time messing around with it. I ended up deciding to put this up and start ensuring that we have a way to remember the people that have taught and touched us. I’ll also share some articles on how I put this together.

    I set this up as a GitHub repo, and I am taking pull requests for people that want to add a memory, a link, a picture, or something else. I’m also hoping that people will let me know as others pass, a sad fact of life that we will continue to experience in the years to come.

    I’m hoping this helps me, and many of you, fondly remember the people in our SQL Family.

    Steve Jones