Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Fast Migrations

    No matter if Hyper-V or VMWare are faster, competition will spur innovation.

    Virtualization is becoming more and more popular all the time, and if you don’t know much about this technology, I would highly recommend you begin learning. In fact, if you are a technology worker, you ought to have some sort of virtualization software installed on your computer right now. Testing, practicing, learning, all of these are made easier with a virtual machine that allows you to try out ideas without affecting your daily work.

    One of the advantages of virtualized servers is that they can be moved from one set of physical hardware to another. If you find that your virtual machine (VM) is not receiving enough resources from the host, you can move it to another less busy host, and improve performance. What’s even more amazing is that you can move this VM while it is in use. In fact, your clients may not even notice that the VM has migrated to another host, even while connected. To me, that’s absolutely amazing.

    The way it works isn’t important, but how quickly and smoothly it moves is important. VMWare and Hyper-V both support this live movement, and this might be the place we find the next race to speed up performance from software vendors. According to this article, the latest version of VMWare can move hosts five times faster than Hyper-V. Whether that’s true or not, I think it’s good that there is competition in this area, spurring innovation and research into ways that we can improve hypervisor performance.

    Improving that performance will lead to more applications for virtualized machines, including databases. I know plenty of people that are running SQL Server on a virtual host, and doing so quite successfully. It can be done, just be sure you do a little planning and think about how you virtualize your server. Also be aware of the limitations that exist in the hypervisors and don’t assume every SQL Server instance makes a good candidate.

    As always, test before you make the move, and be prepared for issues to come up, but don’t be afraid of making the move to virtualized database servers.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • A Refreshing Break

    Taking a break on the Winter Park slopes

    Thanksgiving is always the biggest break from work for me each year. My family goes away for a almost a week of skiing to take a break away from our busy lives. Last week I was gone, taking 6 whole days away from work and I came back this week, with a lot of emails, articles, and various other work here at SQLServerCentral.

    This time, however, I tried something completely new. I didn’t check my email from SQLServerCentral, visit the site, or do anything else work related during the time away. That’s a first for me, as the last few years I’ve been pruning emails on my phone during vacation, handling minor items as I had time. It was hard, since my email client would show an ever increasing count of unread messages, but I made a point of not working during the time away.

    I was very refreshed when I came back this week, enjoying a couple days over the weekend of catching up on chores around the house. For the first time in a long time I wasn’t anxious to get back to work, and I completely enjoyed the time away. It never felt like checking a few emails was that distracting, but it was, and it made quite a difference for me.

    It’s the holiday season, work usually slows down, and many people take some time off around the Christmas and New Years holidays. I’d urge you to avoid email and work completely, even on your smartphone when you have a few minutes. Keep a book around, start a few Words with Friends games, or use some other leisure distraction to give you a complete break from work and see if you come back refreshed.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Thinking Time

    My Thinking Time

    I have a friend that is responsible for working with clients, helping them to design solutions for their businesses, write statements of work, and develop proof of concepts. This friend also finds 4-5 meetings a day on their calendar, usually lasting from thirty to sixty minutes. That’s not an uncommon workday for many people in technology, which always amazes me.

    There was a time when I managed multiple DBAs and worked to remove them from meetings whenever possible. It was hard, with the workers always feeling like they wanted to know what was going on, and managers always wanting staff available for detailed updates if needed. Too often I felt that staff time in meetings, and performing updates, was wasted. Managers should take quick updates to meetings, and handle the coordination as much as possible.

    Andy Warren (LinkedIn | Blog | @sqlandy) always talks about how important thinking time is, and over the years I’ve learned that’s important. The work that we do is knowledge based. By definition that requires thought, creativity, and most importantly, time. We need to have concentrated time to think, and to work out how we want to attack the problems we face, without the pressure of producing some specific solution.

    I know it’s easy to view thinking time as an opportunity to waste time, and some people surely will waste the time. However for those of you that work hard, and that are trying to solve issues, it’s important to get some thinking time, time when you’re not actually writing code and step back to view the problem from another angle. I’d encourage you to take some time to just think over the holiday season, when there usually is less work going on, and see if it can help you produce higher quality results.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Snack Attack

    One of my favorite snacks

    This editorial was originally published on Jan 11, 2007 and is being re-run as Steve is on vacation.

    OK, I’ve done a bunch of editorials on security this week. It’s been in the news, it’s a new year, everyone’s making resolutions to implement better security, some bugs were found, so security has been a topic. Actually it was last week when I found these links and started sketching topics, but that’s another story.

    So today I wanted to take a break from the serious stuff. I found this link awhile back, Snacksby, which is an interesting idea. It’s an idea that a friend actually pitched something similar to me years ago, but she never got it going. So with that idea, this week’s poll is:

    What’s Your Favorite Snack while working?

    I know, I know, not a great poll question for the IT crowd, but maybe something will strike your fancy. Maybe you’ll discover a new snack from a response from someone else. Maybe I’ll get to be a spokesman.

    The only thing that I’ve usually craved when I’m working, and it’s pretty rare, is a Dairy Queen Blizzard, preferable something with peanut butter in it. There used to be one a block over when I worked in Virginia as a developer. The team would walk over a few times a week when the weather was warm for a break.

    Since then I usually have water and diet coke at my side, but that’s about it. Still once in awhile I swing by for an afternoon snack and quick sugar rush.