Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • SSD Lifetimes

    Samsung 840 SSD
    This looks like a nice SSD upgrade that’s reliable.

    One of the things that has concerned many DBAs looking at SSD drives is the possible limited life of these drives. In the past, many consumer drives have had issues, and can fail without warning. However there are plenty of people that still love them for the fact that they are crazy fast and can dramatically speed up your system. Just make sure you keep good backups of your data since it may not be recoverable.

    For servers, a number of manufacturers have been working hard to build more reliability and longer lifetimes into their drives. FusionIO has listed 2 million hours and 6 years write endurance for their cards, which is a quite a long time. Other manufacturers are working hard as well and I suspect we’ll see more and more SSDs architected into SQL Server instances over the next few years. Microsoft has a white paper on using FusionIO cards in tempdb, and I know a few SQL Server installations have been quite pleased with their results of using these cards in production systems.

    This week I saw an analysis of the Samsung SSD 840 over at AnandTech. They examined the wear of this drive and came to the conclusions that writing over 10GiB a day, you’re still get many years of service from this drive. That gives me a lot of confidence in the drive, and with Amazon listing the 250GB version for $180, it’s an upgrade you might consider for your laptop.

  • The Cost of Storage

    SAN disks
    The cost of storage per GB drops, but the cost to companies seems to keep going up.

    One thing that we can be sure of as data professionals: we will need more storage over time. We gather more data in our organizations and more data is sent to us by partners or automated systems. At the same time we must ensure all our existing data is always available for users. I don’t know how we solve any of these problems, but I do know that any solution will require likely more storage in the future.

    As DBAs, we aren’t too often involved in the cost of storage. These days as many companies move to SAN-based storage, there are separate administrators are involved in the specification and purchasing of the actual hardware. That means that as DBAs we are removed from the impact of our requests for more storage. We don’t necessarily know what the cost to the organization is when we request another 400GB LUN. However this week I’m curious if you know the answer to this.

    What’s the cost of storage in your organization?

    I’m wondering if you know the actual cost in dollars or the impact to limited IT resources of enterprise level storage in your company. Does this impact the way you do business as a DBA? We often don’t have control over the growth of our data, but we seem to regularly be pulled into the discussions on how to best manage the amount of data and even archive data or reduce its impact on the organization’s storage.

    Let us know this week if you are impacted by the cost of storage in your organization.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

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

  • Failure Lessons

    orca
    Orca was a high profile software failure this year.

    I really wish that we would see detailed analysis of failed systems, if for no other reasons than to avoid repeating the same mistakes in the future. I’d hope that technical people that were engaged in building systems that didn’t work well would share their experiences, whether from development, deployment, administration, or even operations. I ran across a piece on the lessons of Orca, the web application that Mitt Romney’s campaign used, or tried to use, to manage their operations.

    It seems that there were a number of problems with this system, which is almost stunning. I’d think this is a well known process that includes a number of pieces of technology that are built into so many systems these days. Integration is never smooth, and the short time frame of an election campaigns doesn’t leave a lot of time for testing, much of which apparently didn’t get completed. The article talks about many of the same things that I’ve seen mentioned in the past when applications don’t work as expected. A lack of training, a dearth of hardware, tooling that doesn’t work, all of these have been reported for years in many software engineering journals and articles.

    Perhaps more analysis won’t help. I doubt that even a high profile failure would convince the manager of any internal software development project to spend more resources or lengthen their time line to prevent a problem with an application. Like most developers, managers are eternal optimists when it comes to software being completed, regardless of their past experience. They never seem to learn that pushing for faster releases, cutting features, and limiting testing will showcase the end product poorly for the customer.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

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

  • The Future of DBAs

    truck data center
    Is this the future of many data centers?

    At SQL Saturday #169 in Denver I sat in on a panel that talked about cloud computing. There was a consultant, a customer, and a Microsoft representative that give different perspectives on what their experiences were with Windows Azure. It was an interesting talk and the more I learn about the cloud, the more potential situations where I think it applies. It’s not for everyone, but there are a lot of places where it can work, and I would encourage you to learn more about cloud services and cloud computing.

    One really interesting question was asked. Do you know the skills needed for modern Microsoft data centers? Truck driver. A truck driver can drop off a shipping container with servers pre-configured inside and just plug it in to power and network, often with no cooling needed. A fenced in parking lot, open to the atmosphere, makes a nice, inexpensive, low maintenance data center.

    That’s simplified, but it has interesting implications for networking, hardware, and system administrators, but what does that mean for DBAs? How will our jobs change if these shipping containers run SQL Server services on Azure or AWS? It’s a good question, and one that I know worries many people that manage SQL Servers.

    On one hand our jobs don’t change. We still need to manage the data, enforce quality, design tables and manage indexes. We must ensure the data is available, intact, accessible by clients. We import, export, and even recover it at times. These are all the core skills of a DBA. On the other hand, we have new challenges to manage. Our recovery process will change. We will need to learn how to scale out our data and applications. We will need to better set expectations for performance, and perhaps more closely expand and contract the resources we use to match the demand we receive. In order to do that, we’ll also have to better understand the financial costing models that vendors provide, along with gathering more knowledge on the actual value our organization receives from more, or fewer, resources.

    The idea of remote computing, whether as hosted VMs or a platform that provides database services, is going to be a part of many of our careers. We might as well embrace it, understand it, and find a way to fit in.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

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