Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • VMs are not VMs

    I was at VMWare recently. One of the main things that all of the SQL Server professionals that were there tried to emphasize is that SQL Server workloads are not like other workloads. The impact on the various host resources, the stress on the storage systems, these are fundamentally different in a database server. The loads tend to be higher, but not always, however the tolerance for delays tends to be lower than for many other types of applications.

    This becomes an issue if you work in an organization that doesn’t understand the challenges of database systems. It’s entirely possible that your virtualization administators, or your storage administrators don’t recognize that the SQL Server might need more resources. Or they don’t believe the impact is greater for the organization. To be fair, that might be true, but someone other than the DBA or system administrator should decide if the database is more important than the file server and should be treated differently from an infrastructure perspective.

    No matter what level of resources your database server need, it’s not going to run like other systems. Typically this means that the density of VMs has to change when a database server is involved. As an example, I know of a system that typically has a 10:1 guest:host ratio for most of their server systems. However for SQL Servers it’s 4:1 or lower. The same is true for storage. Aggregate bandwidth doesn’t always reflect the ability of a storage system to keep up with database requests. It becomes important that both you and your storage administrators learn to speak the same language and understand what requirements exist for SQL Server VMs.

    Virtualization really starts to highlight the advantages of a DevOps environment. DBAs and developers should work closely with the virtualization and storage administrators to learn what each others’ requirements are and how each of us can help the other perform their particular job at a higher level. Infrastructure staff can help prepare standard environments and ensure production looks like staging. Developers and DBAs can help a vSphere admin learn a little PowerCLI and programming. That might get them to be more cognizant of the particular requirements of your SQL Server and be more willing to work with you.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.8MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

     

  • Boring or Scripting

    Do you want to continue to perform boring, repetitive, mundane tasks as a part of your job? Many of you might not be challenged at work, or you might be burdened with a series of requests that repeat themselves over and over. They’re easy tasks, many of them probably take minutes. I’m sure there’s also a level of mindlessness that you find comforting at times with just working through a familiar task.

    However many of you also get busy. You have no shortage of new tasks that get assigned to you on a regular basis. You probably also get stressed from your heavy workload at times. What do you do when you’re too busy to work through the mundane tasks, but they still need to be done? It can be a challenge to manage that burst in a workload if you haven’t prepared for it.

    There is a way to remove some of the mundane administrative work from your job. It’s not simple, and it’s not going to solve all your issues right away, but over time, you can certainly reduce the burden of working on dull tasks over and over again, across multiple machines.

    Learning PowerShell (PoSh) or some other scripting language. VBScript works fine, as does Perl, and there are others, but if you’re a Microsoft person, especially a SQL Server person, learn PoSh. It’s used in all the products, it’s becoming a standard for all Microsoft products, it works in the cloud, and it works with SQL Server. It takes some getting used to, and it certainly can help with repetitive tasks. It can also run all your SQL scripts for you, just in a more automated fashion.

    You can grow your career, add a new skill, reduce your workload, and become more efficient at your job.

    Or continue to be boring.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.3MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

     

  • Awareness

    How often have you been caught off guard by some issue with one of your databases? I would guess most people have received a phone call, email, or trouble ticket that alerts them to the fact that something has gone wrong. A few of you might have even had an irate customer or manager wander over to your desk and loudly inform you of an issue. Those are not great times, and most of us would prefer to find out about problems before others bring them to our attention.

    This past week was the 66th T-SQL Tuesday blog party. If you haven’t heard of it, I would encourage you to look each month for the announcement on Twitter and participate. It’s a great chance to share some knowledge, and showcase your own experiences or viewpoint on a particular topic. I’d actually encourage all of you to go back and write posts about the past topics at some point. It’s a great way to challenge yourself to document your own experiences in a concrete way.

    The theme this month was monitoring (thanks to Catherine Wilhelmsen b | t), and this is exactly the way that you build awareness in your environment. Monitoring allows you to ensure that you, as the DBA, learn about issues, or potential issues, first. Monitoring doesn’t solve your problems; that’s up to you to do, but it can help you proactively detect issues early and perhaps mitigage them before users notice them.

    The blog entries this month cover all sorts of issues that you might think about watching for. The 825 errors in your log, metadata about your backups, jobs, and more. There’s a variety of posts that cover all sorts of home grown systems, as well as noting that third party products work well. You have a huge variety of choices, from building your own tools and processes or purchasing something like SQL Monitor from Red Gate. However no matter what your budget, resources, time, desire, and more, I’d highly recommend that you really think about ensuring that you are monitoring your systems in a way that lets you know how things are working.

    What to do when they’re working poorly, that’s up to you. Hopefully the information we publish at SQLServerCentral, and the links we send out every week from Database Weekly, can help you learn to be better at your job.

  • Documenting with Tests

    Documenting code isn’t a task that many people enjoy. Those of you that have been through a computer science curriculum probably added lots of verbose, and obvious, comments to code. It’s probably unlikely that you ever found much value in the comments in a paying job.

    There are all sorts of ideas on how to document your software, writing good comments, and even refactoring code to remove unnecessary comments. I’m sure that if we put five developers in a room, we’d end up with eight different ways to comment code that would be debated, with no agreement on how to proceed.

    I ran across an interesting approach from Ed Elliot on documenting your code with unit tests. I hadn’t thought about the tests providing some documentation, but it’s an interesting idea. I’d have to work with the concept a bit, but I’m skeptical I’d get enough information from unit tests to ensure I understood what a stored procedure was doing, especially if I had 10 tests for a long procedure.

    I do think unit tests are important, and perhaps in conjunction with some type of code header that gives the requirements the procedure fulfills, I’ll get enough information to understand the code.

    I don’t have a universal solution that I think will work in most situations, but I do think that having a tool like intellisense or SQL Prompt helps you self document code with expressive names for columns, variables, and aliases. If nothing else, those phrases for variables can clue the next programmer in to what is happening better than single letter names.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.2MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.