Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • The Push to Upgrade from SQL Server 2005

    It was interesting to see the results of my straw poll last week on SQL Server 2005. Quite a few people still run that version, and some aren’t looking to upgrade anytime soon. However when support ends, you should be aware that there is potentially an impact to your organization.

    If you work for a government, or you are bound by regulations such as PCI, HIPAA, or something else, you need to upgrade. I would hope that an audit sometime in the last 3-4 years would have alerted you to the issues of running unsupported software, but given the wide variability in auditors in the world, perhaps not. In any case, consider this a warning that you should be sure any databases that contain data regulated by law are upgraded by April 12, 2016. Otherwise your organization will likely be out of compliance with the regulations.

    If you haven’t upgraded, and want to avoid an upgrade for the next decade, this is a tough time. I’m not sure that SQL Server 2016 will RTM before support ends, which is the version you’d like to pick. This means that counting on this event is unwise. Even if you were sure SQL Server 2016 will release on April 1, is that really enough time to test your application?

    That’s really the bottom line for most of us. We need to test and be sure that an upgrade will, in fact, work for our particular environment. We need extensive testing, which probably means that those of us aiming to upgrade should be aiming for SQL Server 2014 (or SQL Azure Database). Microsoft would like you to choose one of these, as it benefits their bottom line, and they are pushing customers to upgrade. However, that’s somewhat the nature of software. We need to upgrade at times in order to maintain our systems, and vendors won’t support old software indefinitely.

    There are a couple months left, and I think you’ll need all that time to be sure your software still runs fine. I’d recommend you use new hardware, a completely separate instance (side by side upgrade) and use Distributed Replay to capture a workload on your existing instance and replay it on the upgraded server to check that your system performs well. To do this, you really need to be sure you are monitoring your current (and the upgraded) server to measure timings and performance.

    Monitoring isn’t simple, but it’s not that hard either. You should always be monitoring your system (we use SQL Monitor at SQLServerCentral), as well as keeping baselines, including wait statistics, that you can use to analyze the performance of your database. This is invaluable in determining if your new database will outperform the old (hint, it should).

    However you approach your upgrade from SQL Server 2005, be aware that you need to be on SP4. I recommend you use the Upgrade Advisor, perform a side by side upgrade, and don’t be afraid to use the compatibility level to allow the database to continue to behave as a 2005 instance. Above all, be sure you have good backups you’ve tested, just in case things fall apart.

    Lastly, SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2 are both out of mainstream support, so don’t forget about future planning for those versions as well. Best of luck with your upgrades, and please let us know if you find specific issues or problems in upgrading. Post a note in the forums to get help, or maybe help someone else complete their own upgrade.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 4.4MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

  • Reasonable Timeframes

    Many of us hear about problems with various systems on a regular basis. We report them in Database Weekly far too often, and I’m sure a few of you have been informed (or found) bugs, nagging issues, even vulnerabilities in your systems.

    What’s a reasonable time to fix a system after an audit?

    It’s a simple question, but it’s not very simple to answer. After all, most of us don’t have a lot of slack development time built in to fix issues. Unless the issue is a broken application that doesn’t work, the items disclosed in an audit need to scheduled in among other work. After all, most of the time the audit finds something that no one is aware of, or no one has wanted to fix. This is work that no one really planned on completing.

    I ran across an interesting piece about the Employment Department for the state of Oregon hasn’t fixed a number of issues after an audit last year. While some strides have been made, there are still outstanding issues, the sum total of which it is estimated will take a decade to complete. That’s a long time, but in large systems, especially ones where the entire application cannot be rewritten because of resources, it’s not unusual. I’ve worked in a few places where we had large scale systems that we knew had issues, but we couldn’t easily re-design and implement fixes in any reasonable length of time. Often this was because of downstream dependencies, but certainly culture and management hadn’t made change a priority.

    I sympathize with those people dependent on mainframe systems. The power and reach of those systems, the poor documentation, not to mention the complex training required to change clients’ habits is huge. I would hope that the government groups using these large scale systems would work together to jointly proceed on development, with politicians also involved to help standardize the requirements across state lines (or countries’ borders) and simplify the software needed.

    However, no one ever makes software simpler, especially when it’s being designed.

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.4MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

  • The Digital Woes of Public Records

    Researcher Chris Vickery, discovered that 191 million voter records are available to the public. The information was in a database on the Internet, which seemed to be a collection of voter records and information compiled from public sources in various US states. While no Social Security numbers were present, names and dates of birth, as well as address and voting scores were in the database.

    That’s scary, though potentially not a problem. A number of states publish voter data as public records. A few might have restrictions on the use of that data, but the fact that the data is available means it could be used maliciously, with overburdened authorities unlikely to prosecute anyone even if they’re caught.

    This is one of those areas where our understanding and control of data hasn’t caught up to the digital age. It is one thing when public data is available to those that must physically search for it, or even query for singleton records. However data can reveal much more information, or even be used in new ways when large volumes of it is available. Now the ability to access every voter’s name, address, and date of birth could potentially be a problem.

    I see so much data that we might have taken for granted in the past, thinking nothing of it’s visibility, being a problem in the future. When someone can gather large amounts of data, and store is cheaply, even accessible in something like a data lake, we may find that public data is problematic. When anyone can start to gather and combine lots of data from different sources, we might find that capability quite scary as potentially lots of information about individuals can be determined. We’ve seen anonymous data sets de-anonymized with the application merge of data from different sources.

    I truly hope that we find ways to better protect and ensure privacy in the future, as all the capabilities and power that computing brings to data analysis truly has a dark side.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.4MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

  • Culture and Performance

    Most people in management seem to believe that culture matters in a company. I know some don’t, and I’ve worked for a few of those people, whichi s never an enjoyable experience. As the world seems to change to more and more knowledge work for people in technology, it seems that businesses are starting to realize that the way their employees feel about the company can have a direct impact on the company’s bottom line.

    There’s an article about culture and motivation in the Harvard Business Review that I think does a good job of looking at how well people perform when they have various motivations. The authors talk about the six reasons why people work, each of which can drive motivation in a different way. Some are positive motivators, some are negative, and it’s good to be aware of the differences.

    This ties into culture in that the way your organization is built. The culture that pervades the company can really determine how employees are motivated. More negative motivators result in less performance, especially creative performance, from employees.

    I don’t think that building a great team and getting the most from people is necessarily this simple. Different people respond differently to a culture, and the same person might even respond differently at different times in their employment. However I do think that you can look to adjust the way you fit each employee in, with the work you assign, the support you give, and the demands that you make on them.

    The mark of a good manager is that they find ways to treat each employee differently, in a way that suits them best, while maintaining a core set of values and rules for the entire organization.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.0MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. feed