Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Saving Hard Dollars

    This week I ran across an analytics piece that talks about how Big Data and analysis can do more than help marketing, it can also create hard dollars for your company. Companies are using sensors and technology for mundane tasks, but tasks that can save the company substantial, hard dollars.

    You may have heard of UPS and FedEx optimizing their routes, and tracking the actions of drivers. Those companies (and others) have learned that a little programming work to analyze and create instructions for their workers can reduce wasted time and fuel, which ultimately means less wasted money. Other companies have reduced their heating or cooling costs with more data and small investments.

    I don’t know how many additional cost reductions can take place in most companies, but there are likely changes none of us have thought of that could be easily implemented with technology. It seems like a no-brainer that technology can build better routes, but early on, it wasn’t considered as an option because it didn’t replace a formal manual process. It wasn’t worth paying someone to design routes each day for a truck.

    As computer power increases, and more data becomes available, I predict that we’ll find many ways to analyze that data and change the way we run businesses. Many of the ideas will be unexpected, and some may be counter-intuitive, but those of us working with data will have a front-row seat to the ways in which data analysis can transform our world.

    Steve Jones

  • The Decline of SQL Server

    For many years in my career, SQL Server was the runner up. Both Oracle and DB2 were in much wider use and more popular among all sizes of companies. Serious applications used one of those platforms, according to many technologists, the DBAs on those platforms made more money, and most companies were willing to pay for the software. That changed, and over the years I’ve seen SQL Server grow close to Oracle, while DB2 has declined (and MySQL has grown). Here’s the 2014 chart from Gartner, on of all places, the MySQL site.

    I see other charts and reports, showing various percentages, so it’s hard to be sure where things stand. Many of them agree that for total market share, it’s still Oracle and DB2 (mostly on larger hardware), but SQL Server rounds out the big 3. However is that the case for jobs and opportunities? I read a piece from Thomas Kejser that pointed out that the popularity of SQL Server may be declining (there’s also an update).

    I see lots of jobs posted, and so many companies using SQL Server. SQL Saturdays continue to have great attendance, so I wanted to ask you this week:

    Is SQL Server being used less, or are other platforms being implemented, in your experience?

    Are you seeing a trend away from new, or additional, SQL Servers in your organization? I haven’t heard of any large trends, though I certainly do know that some organizations are considering other relational platforms. I think that’s healthy and expected. The technology for managing transactions is well known, and I think that all three major platforms, as well as MySQL and PostgreSQL are maturing to the point that any of them can handle the load for most applications out there.

    I think it’s only natural that other platforms will be used to solve problems that they are well suited for. However just as I don’t think SQL Server will grow to dominate the RDBMS space, I don’t think that NoSQL platforms will dominate over RDBMSes in many applications.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.9MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. 

  • The Final Service Packs

    There was an announcement recently that Service Pack 3 for SQL Server 2008 R2 was released. This is the final SP for that version and is mostly a rollup of all the previous cumulative updates (CU), though there are a couple additional items included.

    This is good news, and if you are running the “R2” version, I’d test this and install it. No more CUs will be released, though you’ll want this SP installed in case additional security patches are released during extended support. The last thing you’ll want is a crisis situation where you need to install a security patch based on SP3, and you haven’t tested this update.

    Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that we’d get one last SP for both SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2. That was good news as many people are running these versions, and they haven’t installed all the previous CUs. I can understand this situation, and it would be good to bundle all the changes together in one final patch for companies that find the platform suits their needs. It’s also a fair request for customers that paid Microsoft for  a platform and should receive all patches developed during its lifecycle. Including a final patch that closes out support.

    I’m still waiting for an SP4 for SQL Server 2008 and I hope we get one soon. I’m not sure what the plans are for SQL Server 2012, 2014 and future releases, but I’d like to continue to see the bi-monthly CUs, an annual SP, and a final SP when each version transitions from mainstream to extended support.

    Steve Jones

    UPDATE: SQL Server 2008 SP4 was released just after this was written. It is available here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=44278

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

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

  • Life Logging

    This editorial was orignally published on Dec 8, 2009. It is being re-run as Steve is on vacation.

    There’s a new book from Microsoft Research called Total Recall. It’s actually on my list to read soon. It’s from Gordon Bell of Microsoft Research, and it talks about the idea of life logging, of capturing things about what you do and what you’ve done, in audio, video, and text. These might be things that are private, available to you and not the public. Or things that you might want to share with some people, like your family, but not others. Dr. Bell actually carried around devices to record his life for a long time, with the idea of working through the technological hurdles of life logging.

    Whether you think you’d like this in your life or not, it’s an interesting knowledge idea for companies or individuals. Maybe it’s a good idea for programmers or DBAs. What if you could have all the code you’d ever written? What about tests of that code and the applications where it had been used? Would a walkthrough of tuning efforts you’d made for some types of SQL or even queries that solved particular challenges be useful? What about a walkthrough of the changes to your schema across time?

    There are some interesting possibilities here in terms of your career work. If you could add meta data, annotations, correlations between emails, requests for work, problems, your particular implementation, and then the later results,  you might learn from your mistakes quicker. You could perform some type of root-cause analysis of your efforts across time, or on a system and find out what you are doing wrong, or what you’re doing well.

    I don’t know how well you could analyze someone’s work and help them find out what they’re doing well or not well. I also have some serious concerns about the privacy and security of the details about someone’s efforts being shared without their consent, or even the ownership of this data. But I think there are some great possibilities here as we develop new, and cheaper, ways to collect and store all kinds of data.

    At the very least having a “life log” of a server might prove to be a very valuable troubleshooting tool.

    Steve Jones