Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Geeky Books

    Goodreads
    Goodreads is a neat place to track your reading, and see what others think of books.

    I love to read. It’s one of my hobbies, and I usually go through 50-100 books a year, depending on the subject and the rest of my life. Usually I’m also keeping an eye on Paul Randal, who probably reads more pages than I do in a year, just less books. So far this year, I read 47 books through June 30, though 5 or 6 of those were re-reads from previous years. I have a page on GoodReads that notes a lot of what I read, but it’s not always completely up to date. I’m trying, but I read a lot.

    I recently saw a list of geeky books for the summer. It’s a mix of fiction and nonfiction, science and technology, but all geeky type stuff. As I look through the list of 23 books, I found:

    • Two I’ve read
    • Two on my list to read
    • Two I don’t want to read
    • Nine that I added to my ever growing list of books

    This year I’ll probably get to 100 books. With lots of travel planned, and lots of reading while I’m in the air, it shouldn’t be a problem. I highly encourage people to read, and constantly bug my kids to read more. It’s a good habit to get into, I think it improves your thinking and engagement with the world, it’s fun, and it’s a great habit to build. Both for your career and your life.

    If you’ve got your own geeky recommendations, let us know.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

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

  • Time Zones

    Visual Studio Lightswitch
    Designed to make developers’ lives easier. Shouldn’t we do that in T-SQL?

    I ran across this article on time zones, and was surprised that it was such a complex topic. It seemed to me that there should be an easy conversion function built into SQL Server that would do this:

    DECLARE @dt datetime
SELECT @dt = GETDATE()

SELECT CONVERT( DATETIMEOFFSET, @dt, 'CST')

    and I’d get my current time in Central Standard Time (CST).

    It’s 2012. We’ve learned that time zones are a part of applications. SQL Server is built for work with web applications, which usually span time zones. Developers can code around this, but don’t we want to give them tools to save time? Isn’t that the whole idea behind Lightswitch, ORMs, and most of the new languages in the world? To make developers more productive?

    CONVERT still has crazy numeric codes for conversion. Wouldn’t it make more sense to do this:

    DECLARE @dt datetime
SELECT @dt = GETDATE()

SELECT CONVERT( datetime, @dt, 'dd.mm.yy')

    than this?

    DECLARE @dt datetime
SELECT @dt = GETDATE()

SELECT CONVERT( datetime, @dt, 104)

    Time zone abbreviations are well known. Shouldn’t they be built into SQL Server?

    Sometimes I wonder if we are looking too much into things we can add to an application rather than the things that we can improve. Especially those things we use constantly.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

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

  • A Cool Job

    Unisys ES7000
    How would you like to play with this server every day?

    I saw recently that the newly approved TPC-E Benchmark, a test of OLTP systems, is having a test system submitted by Unisys. They’ll be the first ones to send a system, in this case the ES7000, through it’s paces with this benchmark.

    It’s got to be a cool process and I’ve got feelers out to Unisys to try and dig further into what goes on when you try to build a system to test the benchmark. I have the feeling this will be an interesting story, so be on the lookout for that.

    However I’ll speculate a little that this has to be a very interesting exercise. The application is static, after all, it’s a standard set of routines (I’m assuming) that you’ll run against your server. So the challenge is in sizing and tuning your system. Tweak a knob, hit the turbo switch, get advice from the MS guys, it’s got to be an interesting day’s work.

    And I’m sure it’s incredibly enlightening. What does file placement mean? How far can you push a system? At the very least you’d think that they’d build some sort of real-time, F1-like dashboard so they can watch the system go.

    Heck, that would be a cool job just to build some application to receive the telemetry of the system in real time and display it on some sort of dashboard. Maybe I’ll see if Unisys wants someone to work on that aspect of the test system.

    Now if we could just have some real-time knobs and sliders on the server to actually adjust various parameters…

  • Kill a SPID

    This editorial was originally published on Sept 5, 2007. It is being re-run as Steve is traveling.

    I know some people get a kick out of running the KILL command. Heck, I’m sure all of us enjoy stopping a runaway process from an annoying user at times. But not everyone seems to understand exactly how databases work. It’s not necessarily a knock on the original poster, after all, most of us had to learn about the ACID properties at some point. Perhaps even after someone dropped a database in our lap without warning.

    If you kill a spid, I saw some confusion about data loss in a recent thread. You won’t lose data, but you could still have a problem. It’s not a technical problem and the storage engine inside SQL Server ensures that the transaction conforms to the ACID properties to ensure data integrity.

    The users, however, might or might not realize that their “work” was not done. It depends on the error handling of your application, what message (if any) that is presented to the user, and if they’re even still around. I’ve seen people start processes they expected to run long and then leave their workstation. If there wasn’t a message on it later, they might assume the transaction had gone through.

    Even if you tell them you’re killing the process, they might still think that some amount of work is completed. There are all sorts of users, with all different kinds of expectations out there, so you should be sure that they understand exactly what is happening.

    And be sure that they know their “work” is lost. From the point of view of someone doing data entry, if the transaction rolls back and the application can’t handle it, they will have to enter information again. So their work is essentially lost.

    Those of us in technology sometimes forget the impact of our systems in the real world. Even when things work well or as designed, they may still be a problem for real people that have real tasks to get done.