Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • A Billion Transactions

    These are some of the sensors generating that half billion transactions/day.
    These are some of the sensors generating that half billion transactions/day.

    How long would it take your systems at work to process a billion transactions? You’d expect some, heavily used and highly visible systems to be involved. The stock market systems process billions of trades a day, but I’m sure most of the systems in single companies, even large companies, deal with fewer transactions on a daily basis. A billion transactions a day is 11,000+ transactions a second, sustained across the entire day. That’s a heavy load, but it might be the level of transactions that more and more of us will see over time as our systems gather more data.

    The Microsoft corporate headquarters in Redmond consists of over 100 buildings on 500 acres. It’s grown over the years from its original 88 acres, which is also the title of a story about Microsoft and the relatively unknown work in automating their infrastructure. Not the computer systems their software developers use, but rather their facilities and physical buildings. It’s a fascinating story that outlines the way in which Microsoft saves millions of dollars in maintenance and repairs by using software.

    Across those buildings, Microsoft collects a huge amount of data, from disparate systems, which is the presented to the facilities personnel. The sensors and systems don’t process a billion transactions day; they process half a billion. Still an amazing amount of data, just from physical buildings and the infrastructure that ensures Microsoft employees have a pleasant place to work every day. Using a combination of SQL Server, Office, and Azure, Microsoft has built a software system that corrects many faults itself within sixty seconds. Those that can’t be fixed remotely often end up generating one of the 30,000 work orders produced for personnel every quarter. The system is forecasted to save 6-10% of the energy that might otherwise be wasted with a less efficient system.

    It’s a great read, and perhaps is a good case study for an application that is well suited for cloud services. There are a few great quotes from the article as well that are particularly pleasing to a data professional. “Give me a little data and I’ll tell you a little,” he (Darrell Smith) says. “Give me a lot of data and I’ll save the world.” That ought to be the model for data analysts. As SQL Server professionals and developers, we should be helping others to do just that.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.

  • Upgrading to 2012

    I love this logo, and I love working with SQL Server.
    I love this logo, and I love working with SQL Server.

    It’s been a little over a year since SQL Server 2012 was released in its RTM version. In that time, I’ve been using it on most of my machines for testing and demos. I like working with the new features and enhancements, and I think this is the best version of SQL Server yet. However I also keep a version of SQL Server 2008 running in a virtual machine since this is the version that runsSQLServerCentral.

    In the last three years, we’ve continued to run the site on SQL Server 2008 because it works well. We don’t need the newer features, and since we have a clustered pair of instances, an upgrade would be a substantial cost. That cost is hard to justify when there isn’t a business benefit I can point to. I’m sure we could write more efficient code with the new T-SQL enhancements and improve performance, but since we’ve invested in beefy hardware, I’m not sure we would gain much with an upgrade. Quite a few of the people I’ve talked to in the last couple years feel the same way.

    This week I’m curious to see if any of you are looking to upgrade. I know for new systems it might make sense to just install the latest version of SQL Server, but what about existing systems? The question this week is:

    Are you upgrading any existing systems to SQL Server 2012 and why?

    I’m looking for those drivers that provide enough benefit for you to upgrade. There might be features you are taking advantage of that others can use, so share with us the exact reasons for your upgrade. As budgets shrink, especially for systems that are working well, it can be hard to justify upgrades across the board for all your servers, but there are sometimes reasons to upgrade individual instances.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.

  • Asking for Interview Questions

    Recently someone posted a question on SQLServerCentral asking for potential interview questions. A few people were annoyed by this and their annoyance showed in their replies. I completely understand that feeling, with fewer jobs than candidates, people looking for jobs do not want anyone with less knowledge to get any help.

    However there are other sides to this question, and I’m torn as to how I feel. If you haven’t interviewed in awhile, or if this is your first interview for a database job, wouldn’t you want to get an idea of what somoen might ask you? I wouldn’t want anyone to misrepresent their skills, but I’d also want them to be able to talk about the skills they have had. Perhaps realizing that they should think about their experience in T-SQL more than their experience with replication might be valuable information.

    There’s another side to this. Plenty of managers, developers, and even DBAs that are tasked with interviewing candidates for a position don’t necessarily realize what questions might help them evaluate a candidate’s skills. This is especially true when you have a staff of people trying to find a senior level person because their only talented person resigned. Hiring someone to interview for you, especially for the first or second interview, just isn’t cost effective.

    Many of us work in companies, and as much as we’d like to think we are gaining new knowledge and experience every year, it’s very, very easy to get caught up in our daily work and accumulate many years of similar experience. Without an effort to branch out, take on new responsibilities, and try new technologies, it’s easy to become very specialized in the skills needed for our job, even if those aren’t a broad range of skills.

    I am highly torn on how to handle requests and content on interview questions, but ultimately I think that putting more information out there is the best way to handle things and allow people looking for jobs, as well as those hiring, to educate themselves.

    Steve Jones

  • The Patch Wild, Wild West

    The wild, wild west, immortalized in so many movies, was very chaotic. Not what I want in a patching process.
    The wild, wild west, immortalized in so many movies, was very chaotic. Not what I want in a patching process.

    I’ve had various iOS devices over the last few years and one thing that’s annoyed me is the patching process. I have very little control over which patches I install, and I can’t roll back patches if I get a new version of an application that doesn’t seem to work well. As a result, I’m glad I have control over when I patch particular apps, and patch them rarely. This isn’t the best security process, but it provides stability, which is usually more important to me on my devices.

    It seems to have worked well for Apple, which has sold billions of applications across their devices. It works so well that Microsoft seems to have adopted a new process for the “Metro” style applications for devices and Windows 8. According to this article, the “Black Tuesday” for patches might be going away. All of the things I don’t like about the iOS patch system seem to be coming to Metro apps. I wouldn’t care, but since Windows Server 2012 has some of the Windows 8 characteristics, I’m a little concerned. Are we doomed to get more “Metro” style interfaces for Windows features and potentially third party applications that will send patches mixed in with enhancements? Will we get stuck “upgrading” systems with new features in order to get security patches?

    Consumers want things to work, and I can understand Microsoft’s desire to simplify the patch process, but removing the ability to roll back and not warning users of patches could backfire with companies that end up using these same devices. This most assuredly makes the process of publishing and distributing patches easier for Microsoft, but it’s a big step backward for companies, and it’s one that I’m sure will upset, anger, and frustrate both users and IT departments.

    The world continues to abstract away from particular platforms for any purpose. Those of us using SQL Server are stuck with Windows, but many of the applications we use are increasingly being released on multiple platforms. If Microsoft is having issues with Windows 8, Windows phone, and Windows RT adoption, this is a sure way to continue the problems. Other ecosystems might not be any better, but if that’s the case, then wouldn’t you consider iOS, Android or something else?

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.