Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • The Danger of Custom Software

    The Movie Vanishes
    My kids enjoyed this DR tale from Pixar.

    There’s been a great little movie short making the rounds of the Internet from Pixar. It’s called “The Movie Vanishes” and it’s worth a few minutes of your time. Toy Story 2 was almost lost because of a mistake and some bad luck at Pixar.  This was at a time when the company was successful, and certainly should have been able to better prepare for a disaster. If you want a touch more background, there’s a few other notes at Quora.

    A lot of the software that Pixar uses was written in house. That’s a double edged sword because there isn’t anyone that can stand behind the software, other than the people that wrote it. There might not be adequate testing and there are certainly bugs in the software that may lie dormant for years. I have no idea of any of the bugs inside Pixar’s software caused this disaster, and I’m not implying it did.

    The positive side of building your own software is that you know how it works. You have the source code, and if you have a developer that can understand it, you can fix problems, patch issues, and customize it to suit your needs. As long as you have the time and resources to do so.

    I saw someone write recently that building their own monitoring solution for a set of SQL Servers was easy, but that was the smallest part of the job. Maintaining and enhancing it over time were much larger jobs than setting up monitoring. This person said they’d rather buy a package in the future than build their own again.

    If you have a system set up, it probably makes sense to use it, but as you look to develop new software, whether for monitoring servers or handling sales, it might be worth spending a bit of time trying to determine if there is something out there you can buy, which might be well tested, vouched for by other customers, and be easier to integrate than your own system.

    Steve Jones

    SQL Monitor from Red Gate SoftwareIf you don’t have monitoring set up, you should. SQL Monitor from Red Gate software is an easy way to get notified when something in your environment needs to be looked at further.

    If you want to get monitoring setup without minimal effort and immediately, think about downloading a trialof SQL Monitor and testing it with your servers.

    If you’d like to see SQL Monitor working on the live SQLServerCentral database server, go over to monitor.red-gate.com.

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

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

  • 13 Disasters

    Hopefully you don’t have any server disasters because of coffee spilled on a machine.

    This editorial that was originally published on Aug 15, 2007. It is being rerun as Steve is traveling.

    This is an interesting list of disasters that can befall a production system. It comprises more than database servers, but certainly can happen to them as well.

    The list is pretty good and of these I’ve had more than a few of them happen to me. There were a few that I’ve never seen and it makes me worry a bit that this guy doesn’t have a good staff or set of vendors working with him. But one of these is very interesting.

    The second item on the list, a controller going bad and corrupting disks, is an interesting one in today’s world. What would you do if this happened on your SAN? Actually I know what you’d do. First you’d be in denial, and I don’t mean the river in Africa.

    Then you’d tell the SAN guys. They wouldn’t believe you. You’d argue and they’d check things, then they’d wonder how it could happen and why? You’d scream at them to fix it, probably using 4 letter, not 3 letter words. They’d start looking for ways to recover data and your hair would be slowly thinning as upper managers started calling down looking for answers.

    It shouldn’t happen, but it could. Some marketing VP is showing off that nice piece of SAN equipment with it’s high speed switches, dozens of drives, and lots of colored wires. He sloshes some coffee onto the system, freezes, but when the flashing red lights and siren from the Enterprise don’t go off (Red Alert!), he continues his tour while the controller scribbles on your disks.

    Restoring from backup might be easy. Of course if you have a system like some I’ve seen that shares physical disks among multiple LUNs, it might not.

    Disaster Recovery is rarely the hurricane Katrina type of issue. Usually it’s something like a disk drive, raid controller, cut wire, etc. that you have to deal with. So think about all of the minor disasters that you want to be sure you can handle and get some practice in on those. Make sure you have spare parts, you can rebuild a server (QA machines are handy for this), you know how to perform a restore.

    And most of all, be sure that you know where the backup files are stored. Preferably on different disks than the production data.

    Steve Jones

  • Interns

    Google Interns
    Being an intern at Google or Microsoft has to be very cool.

    Today we have an editorial from Aug 8, 2007 that is being republished as Steve is on holiday.

    You wouldn’t think that it would take much to woo interns to Silicon Valley, especially for Google. My guess is that Google and Microsoft get to fight over the top candidates, and neither of them is really a loser. It’s all the other companies out there that end up getting the less highly rated interns.

    Which is cool with me. It would have given me lots of other choices if I were graduating 🙂

    Still, how cool would it be to get to the Bill Gate summer BBQ while in college?

    I had the chance to intern at Virginia Power a long time ago and it turned out to be a great experience. I was an EE graduate student at the time and ended up in the maintenance group learning how to schedule maintenance and giving input for work that was actually being done. Done by someone else, of course. It was, after all, a nuclear power plant. You can’t have interns running around with wrenches tightening reactor bolts. It is rightie-tightie, right?

    However I ended up moving over to the IT group and writing a scheduling application that my old department actually used to manage their work. I stayed in IT, switched to computer engineering, and the rest is history.

    I think interning is a great idea and it gives you the chance to groom someone for your company. It’s a chance for students to learn, do real work, and you to find out who fits and doesn’t fit in your organization. And it brings a new perspective to your group, with the addition of someone that isn’t set in their ways. After the recent Revisit What You Know, maybe that’s a really good thing.

    I think there are less IT people to choose from overall, especially as salaries stagnate a little and the layoffs continue, but there is still a demand for people that’s hard to fill. If your company doesn’t look to hire people right out of college, maybe they should.

  • Learn in the Margins

    notesin the margin
    The margins can provide a little more time in your life if you learn to use them.

    Investing in yourself is key to growing in your career and enjoying the rest of your life. You should invest in your knowledge, and I’ve written about the need to constantly improve your skills over time. I know you need to think about your financial future as well and make sure you are looking forward to the day when you might not want to work full time in technology. I’ve also written that you need to make some personal investments in your health to be sure that you are around to enjoy a long life.

    I saw this post about finding exercise in life’s margins. Taking the stairs, or walking while on the phone. Small things that allow you to fit in some movement around the rest of your life. That’s a great way to improve your health without making drastic changes in your life. Consider a standing desk, something I’m experimenting with, but look to find ways to take care of yourself while balancing the most limited resource you have: time.

    The idea of finding ways to exercise in the margins of your life makes me think this might be a good way to improve your knowledge as well. Are there margins of time in your day when you can learn something? Perhaps you can take 5 less minutes at lunch a few times a week and browse through forums, looking to answer some question on your own and try to improve your T-SQL. Maybe you spend an hour on Sunday morning, browsing through Database Weekly and reading a few blog posts about topics that interest you. Maybe you take the last 10 minutes of the day and read a book on T-SQL. It might take you all year to get through the book, but that’s one more book you’d finish this year. If you have a commute, download the MCM videos from SQLskills and listen on the way.

    Life is busy, and life is hard, and life is often something that happens when you’re making all kinds of other plans. It’s hard to fit in big projects or concentrated efforts to improve your career, but maybe you can find a little time in the margins and find a way to improve your skills without taking too much time away from the rest of your life.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

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