Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Why Should You Network?

    This editorial was originally published on August 17, 2009. It is being re-run for the President’s Day holiday.

    Why should you network? I’m speaking about interpersonal networking, not the bits and bytes in the ether kind 🙂

    It’s an interesting question and one I’ve been thinking about a lot since reading Andy Warren’s posts on the subject. He thought it was interesting enough to engage Don Gabor for his business and spend a little money to learn how to do it better. After having a few sessions, Andy thought it was helpful enough to get a pre-conference session at PASS on this topic. It’s a short pre-con, 2 hours, and won’t interfere with anything else you’ve booked. It’s an additional $60, but I’ve paid my fee (it’s a business expense) and will be there.

    Whether or not you attend the session (it’s limited in size), I think there is value in learning to network better. Andy has reviewed a few books, and I’m sure I’ll have some quick techniques to give you after PASS, or even during it. If you see me during the conference, please don’t hesitate to come up and say hello to me. It’s always great to meet new people.

    Back to me question: why network? I’ll give you a few examples in my life. I involuntarily networked myself into this field. When I was in graduate school searching for a job, I saw an internship at the power company. There were a few positions, but one of them was in the EE department, slightly out of my field. The guy in charge, however, was an alum of the University of Virginia, and I applied, and he gave me the job because we were fellow graduates. I had asked him a few months later and he said I got preference for that reason.

    In 4 other cases later in my career, I’ve heard about consulting jobs in various places in the US. I haven’t been interested in any of them, but I have passed them along to friends that I’ve gotten to know over the years from SQLServerCentral. These were people that had taken the time to say hi to me at some event and then correspond with me a little. Many of them were authors, and as I got to know their skills, I became comfortable with recommending them for work. It didn’t benefit me other than a little goodwill and the feeling of helping others.

    I have heard about similar situations all the time, where people have built a friendship, or some other bond, and then referred work or helped someone get a job. As much as it may upset technical people, it’s still often who you know that matters much more than your technical skills. Networking is a great way to grow your career by knowing more people.

    Steve Jones

    PS, I don’t get anything from recommending Don’s session at PASS,  but I’ve already paid my fee to go, and since Andy Warren recommended it, I’ll do the same. I trust his advice. And if you don’t go, feel free to ask me anytime during the week about it.

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    Everyday Jones

    The podcast feeds are available at sqlservercentral.mevio.com. Comments are definitely appreciated and wanted, and you can get feeds from there.

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    Today’s 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.

    I really appreciate and value feedback on the podcasts. Let us know what you like, don’t like, or even send in ideas for the show. If you’d like to comment, post something here. The boss will be sure to read it.

  • VMs for Development

    Here’s the scenario: you have gotten a few consulting jobs and have a couple clients. This could be your full time employment, or a side job that you perform away from another employer. You want to watch your budget, ensure you can work efficiently, and handle whatever requirements your clients may send your way. This week’s question is:

    How do you set up your virtual environment at home?

    I think the idea of using Virtual Machines (VM) is a given these days, but do you have one VM with all your tools in it? Do you use separate VMs for each client? What about licensing? Those can be complex questions for many people, especially if your employer does not provide you with multiple license keys.

    I hope that you are using VMs as having multiple computers isn’t practical these days, especially as the cost of power rises. A relatively small, inexpensive desktop computer can run 5, or even 10, VMs to simulate a variety of environments. I’ve seen some creative uses of hypervisors and other software to simulate clusters, SANs, and even multiple domains on one host.

    Let us know this week if you have some good tricks that can help someone get started with virtual machines, building a lab, choosing hardware, or easily configuring networking for their own learning efforts. Tell us what software you use, and if you don’t mind sharing cost data, I’m sure others would appreciate the information.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 1.9MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Mevio . 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.

  • What is Continuous Integration for Databases?

    I have a talk that I give on Automated Build and Test for databases. This was put together by one of the engineers at Red Gate Software, and I’ve presented it at a number of events. I enjoy it, and it’s one of those presentations that really gets people thinking. I enjoy getting people to think about software, and there are always good questions that come out of the session.

    The talk is essentially about how to set up continuous integration for databases. Continuous Integration is an extension of the daily build, which companies have been using for years to try and ensure some discipline in their software development practices. They want to limit the amount of code that can potentially break software.  The whole idea is to test changes developers commit to version control as quickly as possible and give feedback developers immediately so developers can fix issues while the issue is fresh in their minds.

    For databases, this can be a challenge. We have this stuff called data that has to be maintained between, during, and after builds. We can’t drop our structures and reload them as a developer does with an executable or DLL. As we work in a CI environment, we need to handle new objects, as well as alterations to existing structures. That means our scripts and code need to handle creation as well as upgrade scripts.

    This means that a CI process for databases must not only check out the DDL code from a Version Control System (VCS), but it must also handle the CREATE or ALTER code based on the state of the database. You can always build a database from scratch in your CI process, or you can restore a known version (usually the last version) and apply upgrade scripts. The way this happens depends on how you version your DDL code in a VCS and how your build process is structured.

    At Red Gate, we’ve built a number of scripts to help with this process for various CI servers. We have articles that discuss CI for Team City, Jenkins, Bamboo, and probably more by the time this piece appears. We’ve learned a lot about CI over the last few years and we are trying to share both our knowledge and code with you, as well as incorporate those ideas into our products.

    Whether you use our products or not, we do believe that you will build better software if you implement CI. We just know that we can make the process a lot smoother with our tools for developers and DBAs.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

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

  • How Often Do I Backup my Log?

    Do you know how often to back up your transaction log in SQL Server? Most of us have stock answers, hopefully answers that have time intervals like every hour. I worry that most people have a time interval of “never” because their answer is “I make full backups and don’t need to backup logs” or “What’s a transaction log?” That’s a different discussion and if those are your answers, I have an article for you to read.

    Managing a transaction log is a bit tricky and not straightforward. I think far too many people manage their logs based on the space they are trying to maintain on disk. However that’s not the way you decide when to back up logs. The way you decide how to back up a log has nothing to do with space. It’s best stated in this quote from Gail Shaw: “the log backup interval should be less than the allowable data loss for the system.”

    Simply put, decide how much data you can afford to lose. Or how much loss will exceed your tolerance for being yelled at. That’s your log backup interval. Make a log backup after that much time passes. Schedule that interval into your maintenance operations and observe how big the log backups are. That will determine your log size, not the other way around.

    As with most guidance and advice, this is based on a time and place in the platform’s lifecycle. This is the advice I’ve used from SQL Server 7 to 2012, but it’s subject to change, so make sure it’s still valid if you’re reading this in 2020.

    And, of course, make sure that you also understand how to restore these backups in case you do have an issue. That’s probably the most important thing to know.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.5MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Mevio . 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.