Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • The Cloud in Large IT Shops

    Toyota is focusing on software the enhance its business.
    Toyota is focusing on software the enhance its business.

    I’ve seen many presentations and talks from companies that are using cloud services to replace traditional IT infrastructures and lower their costs. Often these presentations are from smaller companies that don’t want to hire an IT administrator, or buy server or learn how to host and manage that hardware. Plenty of small companies would prefer that each employee manage their own laptop and nothing more.

    However many of those strategies don’t match the situation for large companies. Once you’ve hired an IT staff and made an investment in hardware and facilities, can the cloud really help you? I had my doubts, but this article about Toyota makes me rethink those doubts, or at least many of them.

    The lesson from the article, for me, is that Toyota’s IT group is learning to be a lean part of the business; they are building applications and tools that internal employees and customers can use to work better. They’re not acting as a separate business that needs to build software and also manage and administer the platforms that run those applications. By building software for Toyota and its customers, and outsourcing other functions, the Toyota IT group is more focused.

    Will this work in the long term? Will there be security issues from hosting email and other applications? Possibly, but I’m not sure if the problems and issues they encounter will be any worse than those problems that might come from managing all the hardware themselves.

    I still think the idea of container data centers, running cloud platform software, makes sense for large companies, but I suspect that even if they host an application like Salesforce.com, the administration of the software will come from Salesforce and not internal IT server administrators.

    Steve Jones

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    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

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

  • Dealing with Supervision

    Micro-managers can be hard to deal with.
    Micro-managers can be hard to deal with. You need a few techniques handy if you want to enjoy your employment.

    I’ve been working at home for a decade, first for my own company and now for Red Gate Software. In that time, I’ve learned to manage myself, motivate myself, find work to do, and meet deadlines, all of which I’ve done without having anyone manage me. Over the last five years I’ve worked at Red Gate, I’d like to think that I was one of the easier people to manage since I work well on my own. I’m not sure if my various managers would agree, since I know that I can be particular about how I work and not necessarily work closely with others, but at least I haven’t required much of their time.

    A short while back I was talking with a friend that was under pressure to complete a deployment that was proceeding poorly and their manager stood next to their desk, watching, commenting, and asking how long each process would take. I’ve had to deal with that situation in the past, and it was  maddening to me. It’s hard enough to focus and work on a task when there are problems with the technology. Having someone that can’t contribute but is in a supervisory role nearby usually makes things worse.

    Ultimately I think micro-management says more about the manager than the employee. There are trust issues or control issues, or perhaps pressure from the manager’s boss. It can be hard to deal with micro-management, but if you plan to continue your employment, you need to find some way to deal with it.

    There is no shortage of ideas. You can search for “dealing with micro-management” and you will get a wide variety of advice. I’ve tried different techniques in the past and some have worked, some haven’t. The best way to handle micro-management seems to vary with the situation, but it’s good to have a few things to try.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

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

  • Baselines

    You come into work one day and as you sit down, your phone rings. It’s one of the business groups complaining that the database is running slow. You check the server and find CPU at 80%, 800 pages/sec, disk IOps of 230 and 124 transactions/sec. Is the database the problem?

    Baselines are important to understand how your system is performing.
    Baselines are important to understand how your system is performing.
    Good DBAs know that baselines are essential. If you don’t know what values to expect from your server, it’s often hard to determine if the system is running slower than normal. Normal is something you need to define for each system, preferably in an automated way that updates your baseline over time.

    When building a baseline, however, how do you average out the information?

    That’s the poll this Friday. Let’s assume that you are examining the CPU percentage for a SQL Server and you have data points from every 5 minutes across the last month. What’s the average? Do you take the straight average? Do you break this down to hourly segments and then create further analysis that looks at different business periods?

    It can become problematic very quickly. Many of us have slow and busy periods. Do we want an average that’s perhaps lowered by the slow periods in our workload? Do we want to break out the averages for maintenance periods separately from normal operations? If you are looking to compare today’s values, do you look at yesterday’s for the same time period? Last week? An average of all points across the last week?

    Let us know what methodology you use and if you’d like to describe it in more than a paragraph or two, we’d love to have some articles published here on the site.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

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

  • A New Type of Colocation Facility

    Having a data center like this would certainly make it easy to grow your computing capacity quickly.
    Having a data center like this would certainly make it easy to grow your computing capacity quickly.

    Many of us in the technology industry have worked with a data center of some sort. It might be a closet in our employer’s building, a dedicated room with separate power and cooling, or perhaps rented space at a data center facility. In my career, I’ve worked with a variety of data centers over the years, and it’s been interesting to watch them evolve as new knowledge and technology becomes available.

    I remember having a dedicated room so cold that I kept a coat in by cube, even during the 95F summers. These days I have space in a Denver center that has hot and cold aisles. The latter still requires me to carry a coat, but any significant amount of time in the former means I’m down to just a t-shirt.

    As cloud computing grows, capacity becomes important (along with bandwidth and reliability), but the ability to scale your computing capacity up or down may be more important as your customer base grows. Microsoft is taking on this challenge and looking to build”generation 4″ data centers, which may be empty buildings that have power. In some places, these data centers might just be parking lots with power feeds and a fence.

    The cost of construction can be extremely high for new facilities, but imagine a section of a parking garage, or even a secured lot next to your building. A container of servers is dropped off and you connect power, network, and maybe cooling lines (or maybe no cooling). We could potentially even have containers of computing machines and containers of storage. If we ever get cloud computing software inside of companies, this might be the way in which we handle our future data center needs.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

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