Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Hooks

    I read this sentence recently, and it really caught my eye, mostly because I’ve rarely seen hooks being built into the software systems that I’ve written, or that have been deployed to my production systems.

    “A quick chat with your Operations team should convince you of the necessity to log every error condition to a single wellknown location, with the appropriate severity, so that they [the Operations team] know exactly what the problem is.”

    It seems obvious, but so few people I know have taken advantage of this. Far too many software products build their own logs and display errors on screens rather than alerting operations departments. So few people have taken advantage of RAISERROR to write to Windows logs, or the custom SQL Server performance counters to disclose information to operations systems or personnel.

    That’s my experience, but I wanted to ask you this week how you’ve handled things. Do you have software installed that does this? Is it a part of your development process to include hooks?

    Do you hook your logging into operations systems to alert others?

    As I think about it, I can’t imagine not doing this now. After all, I like to sleep. I don’t need calls at 2am from Production operator trying to find a log and debug a problem. I’d rather ensure that I log information to well known places and ensure exceptions will catch the eye of operations people. I want to give them as much information as I can in order to help them solve the problem. I’d rather sleep and depend on the on-call staff then be woken up because they rely on me to solve problems.

    Personally I think that logging to the Event logs, or including configuration switches to send alerts to other software ought to be part of the best practice of developing software. It’s a maturity point where we recognize that we’re building interconnected systems, not individual bits of software that live like hermits.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.6MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. feed

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

  • Reverse Engineering Disasters

    If you are responsible for managing systems, you should have some sort of disaster recovery plan. Even if you are only managing the one system you carry with you on a regular basis, you should ask the question: What would it take to destroy this data?

    It’s a good question, and in the post I’ve linked above, a technologist talks about some of the failings of disaster recovery plans because they forward engineer plans to recover systems. People think of specific problems and try to prevent them. They don’t reverse engineer to find out what events would cause them to lose their system.

    That’s really the key to a lot of design and architecture in computer science. You can’t think about just what you expect to happen, or even what you want to happen. You have to consider the other ways in which events could occur or the issues that could cause an problem in your system. In development, the things you expect are considered to be the happy path. A good architect or engineer will think about everything else in addition to the happy path.

    I sometimes think that far too many decisions are made while considering the happy path, but ignoring or discounting the other paths available. These other paths may be unlikely to occur, but having worked with computer for over 25 years, I can tell you that I often find the least likely events occurring far too frequently.

    As the author says, you should never say “I never even thought of that happening.” Consider reverse engineering problematic situations and then make a judgment of how likely is it that any of the events will occur. That way you have at some idea of what could go wrong and what events you are willing to protect against.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.1MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. feed

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

  • Smooth Database Deployment at SQL in the City 2014

    One of the themes at Red Gate Software this year has been “ship often, ship safe”. Actually, that’s been a theme (and goal) for us the last few years as we’ve learned how to build software faster, maintain quality, and get features into the hands of our customers. We’ve been working hard on expanding our knowledge , both through tools and education, to help our customers deliver their database software in a better way.

    Grant and I have traveled around the US giving free seminars on database development, deployment, and delivery, with ideas on how you can more easily manage your software pipeline. This fall, we’ve revamped our talks and added a new one on testing, and we’ll be delivering these talks at our 2014 SQL in the City events. We’ll be in London on Oct 24, 2014 and Seattle on Mon, Nov 3, 2014 talking about software, along with a number of our Friends of Red Gate. These will be full day conferences with a variety of DBA related topics featuring a number of speakers that are experts working with SQL Server. Quite a few of our developers and managers will also be available to share our knowledge about the process of building, testing, and deploying software, particularly database driven software. We’d also love to hear about your challenges and issues you face on a regular basis. If you can come, we’d love to meet you.

    Our events are a casual, fun, educational way to learn more about SQL Server. You’ll get ideas and tips for becoming a better developer or DBA that you will want to experiment with and put into place every day to make your job more enjoyable. We hope you join us at one of these events, or at one of our seminars in the future.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

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

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

  • Testing is Your Best Investment

    I signed up for the FlowCon 2014 conference in San Francisco this September. It’s a two day event about software development and how we can do better. My job is starting to encompass more work in this area, and I’m excited to go see some of the ThoughtWorks developers talk about what they do well. Part of the reason I wanted to go came after watching a few videos from last year, including this one from Randy Shoup.

    There are some interesting things in the talk, but one thing really caught my eye at the 9:52 mark. Mr. Shoup made a statement that “tests help you go faster” and “the best investment you can make in your own code …[are] tests for your code.” Those statements are a short part of the talk, but they make a lot of sense to me.

    It’s easy to ignore testing, after all, it’s hard to test for everything that can possibly happen, and writing tests can be extremely tedious. However building tests JIT, when you find bugs or problems, can give you good code coverage, especially in the areas where you find developers are likely to make mistakes.

    And like with all other software development skills, the more you work on writing tests, the easier, and faster you become at building them.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 1.6MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. feed

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.