Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Learning from Exercise

    A long time ago I decided to run every day. I did for a bit, in fact, I had a neat milestone along the way and continued on for 1564 days. That was quite a memorable period in my life, and one that I look back upon fondly. I’ve aged a bit, and while I could do it again, I also have decided there are other things that matter more to me, so I have moved on in life.  I learned a lot from that time, lessons about myself and life that continue to help me today. Some of them even apply to work and my career, little nuggets of wisdom that help me find ways to find success in my life.

    Apart from some better fitness, one of the main benefits for me was the sense of accomplishment. I had no bad days where I would think I wished I had run. None. That seems obvious, but it also provided me some comfort that I had moved things forward in my life. I took that lesson back to work, where I sometimes have bad days. I have days where nothing goes right, or I have people that take over my day and schedule.

    I know there are also a number of things that I need to do at work, which aren’t that important, or even aren’t that critical, but they provide a measure of satisfaction that I’ve moved things forward. These days that is often getting things scheduled for the newsletter. In the past it might be doing a little space extrapolation (though I’d just look at this in SQL Monitor today). Low value items, but I get some accomplishment in the midst of otherwise stressful times when I get something small done that is on my list.

    The other thing that came from the running streak was the feeling of getting away from other parts of my life. Whether with family or work, I might be overwhelmed or stressed or otherwise out of sorts in my day. Taking 20-30 minutes for myself was a way of resetting my day, and it was a welcome break. While exercise is my thing, and even today it’s a priority around work, I’ve had other crutches that help me cope. I love to read, so taking 5 minutes to escape in a book every day is something that feels similar to exercise.

    I know other friends that might play a short game, play with a pet. Having some other consistent, distracting activity is a good release when things are tough. No matter how busy we are, or what’s broken, taking 5, 10, 15 minutes away can help refresh you and get you ready to go back into the trenches and deal with others.

    I’m sure jobs exist that can’t spare the time, but I’ve never had one. I haven’t always realized it until later, but I wish someone had told me to take 10 minutes away in a crisis to reset myself and then come back. I know I’ll remember that the next time I end up being stressed during an IT problem at work.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • True HA and DR

    For many years, SQL Server administrators have tried to ensure their systems run smoothly by executing DBCC commands against their production databases. As workloads have grown, this has become an issue with resource contention with production users. Backups have had the same issue, and the smart DBAs have offloaded this work to another server. With the more recent versions of SQL Server, we could move backups and DBCC checks to secondary systems.

    The problem with this has been licensing. Microsoft has required a secondary node (often referred to as passive, which Allan Hirt notes is incorrect) to be separately licensed if any activity is performed, which includes DBCC. We could have a secondary system receiving data as a part of Software Assurance licensing, but no activity on this system. A common misunderstanding, and a long and often raised complaint by customers.

    That has changed as of Nov 1, 2019. Microsoft posted a blog that now lets us use those secondary systems for a number of purposes. We can now run DBCC, log and full backups, and monitor resource usage data on a secondary system without requiring licensing. What’s more, we can now have multiple secondary systems that are not separately licensed for both HA and DR purposes.

    Perhaps best of all, this isn’t limited to SQL Server 2019. This is in effect for all supported SQL Server systems. With SQL Server 2012 in Extended Support, I would assume this would apply there. The caveat is that you need Software Assurance (SA) on the licensed systems. You don’t get this for free, but many organizations get SA to allow them to upgrade, and this will be a welcome addition to the value for SA.

    I think this should have been the way that licensing worked forever, as I’d argue DBCC isn’t a workload, but a verification that things are working appropriately. SQL Server should detect this stuff automatically to me, but since it doesn’t, this isn’t any active workload. Neither are backups. Finally, Microsoft agrees.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • The Network Bottleneck

    Most of us know that sending extra data back in a result set is a waste of resources. This can certainly cause delays and poor response in our apps, and across slow networks, this can even cause timeouts. Good developers try to limit the data transfer to just the data necessary, without pulling back extra fields. This is one reason a “SELECT *” is a bad idea.

    What about when we are sending just the data we need, but that data is so voluminous that we can’t easily transmit it across a network. That’s one of the ideas that is noted in this piece, which asks for innovation in the way that we move data around, especially IoT data. This type of data is growing, and potentially growing across networks that are bandwidth constrained, such as satellite and cellular links.

    Do many of you find that your network links are constrained? I certainly do at times, though I live in a place where the broadband and cellular networks are not very robust. Even so, most of the time I never notice issues with moving data around. Even when using a real time application, such as streaming data.

    Perhaps there are tricks that buffer data and hide network issues, but even if that is the case, is there a problem? After all, that’s part of what our applications should do: isolate and protect us from the inherent unreliability of hardware.

    Relational databases continue to store and process larger amounts of data all the time. Size of data operations, which grow increasingly cumbersome as data volumes grow, are a place where many vendors are trying to improve their offerings. Microsoft is one of these, and some of the improvements in SQL Server 2019, with Big Data Clusters, Accelerated Database Recovery, and scale out architectures are designed to precisely help us cope with more data.

    I have confidence that we will continue to solve these problems, and that networks will keep growing to support the demands of our ever increasing database sizes. We just need to be sure we continue to evolve and grow our applications to take advantage of these improvements.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • How Did I Do?

    I made a number of predictions for the opening keynote at the PASS Summit. I wrote the predictions a week before the event, making my own guesses about what might be revealed. I was busy in pre-conference sessions on Monday and Tuesday, so I had to write something well in advance of the event. I was flying home yesterday, so I had no chance to watch the keynote until later, so this is a look back after catching up Wednesday evening at home.

    How did I do?

    With the Ignite conference taking place this week, I had guessed that SQL Server 2019 would release there and then be a part of the Summit keynote. I was right. On Monday, as I was taking a break during the SQL in the City Summit, I saw that SQL Server 2019 had been released. A milestone, and perhaps one that I think changes the data platform. It’s an inflection point, and I agree with this tweet from Distinguished Engineer, Slava Oks. Rohan Kumar did announce it at PASS as well, so maybe half credit here?

    I didn’t mention Hyperscale yesterday, as I wasn’t sure what I knew as NDA and what was possible. The demonstration of Azure Arc, and Hyperscale for PostgreSQL, is pretty cool. While I used to think Hyperscale was only for the largest of the large databases, I now think that many smaller, 2-4TB systems (I can’t believe I think of that as small), might consider moving to Hyperscale and preparing for future growth into the low single digits of TBs. BTW, Azure Arc is amazing. I knew about it previously, but didn’t expect it this year. I did mention Azure Stack deploying on premise, and I think the Azure Arc covers this, so 1 1/2 right.

    Azure Synapse was something I didn’t expect. I have been looking at Big Data Clusters as a game changer with the relational platform. Synapse combines the Azure SQL Data Warehouse and Data Lakes into a platform. Since these were both the places where we first got compute separated from storage, this makes sense. Both of these platforms seemed similar to me, so combining them and letting customers drop structured and unstructured data.

    The Edge is a bigger deal than I thought. This was mentioned as a private preview during Build, and I should have guessed this would move to public preview. This as one of those areas that I haven’t been as focused on and wasn’t sure about information I’ve gotten under NDA, so I didn’t include this. Certainly a miss here, but I do think the demo in the keynote with Zeiss and making decisions from sensor data is something more organizations will do. Sensors generate too much data and trying to move all that across a network to the cloud doesn’t make sense. Train models and let some low power SQL Server Edge engine make a few decisions without moving data.

    There was more in the keynote, and it’s worth watching. If nothing else, I think both the opening Ignite keynote and the opening Summit keynote are inspiring for us as data professionals. You can dream about possibilities and truly see that data is an important asset that Microsoft is empowering us to make better decisions about based on analytics.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.