Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Closing Out Replies

    This editorial was originally published on Oct 17, 2006. It is being republished as Steve is at SQLBits 9 today.

    I’ve been posting on the Internet for nearly 17 years, from back in the days of Usenet, GOPHER, ARCHIE and FTP when everything was text. I’ve asked questions and answered them on various topics and as the World Wide Web grew, I grew with it, moving to BrainBench and various other sites where I could gett and provide answers. Recently some one sent me this definition for Warnock’s Dilemma, which was timely considering the today’s article on posting manners, which I received about the same time. I thought it was interesting wanted to bring it to people’s attention.

    Early on when I’d post a question, I got an answer, but then I wondered if it was good information. I could usually test it myself, but since I wasn’t sure of how to solve it on my own (hence the post), I wondered if there was a better way to solve it. Ideally I’d get 2-3 responses, maybe even some improving or commenting on others, to help me sort things out.

    If I didn’t get a response, then I wondered if I hadn’t phrased things correctly, or no one else knew, or even that no one bothered to read my post. All of these are valid interpretations and the new definition from Wikipedia pointing out that a lack of response doesn’t necessarily mean anything. There are 5 possible interpretations of this.

    When we started SQLServerCentral.com, our goal was to answer every single post. The three of us (and three others at the time) would research questions and make it a point to answer in some way, some type of post. As we grew, we encountered areas, such as MDX, where none of us had any expertise and couldn’t even understand the research sometimes, much less the question. To facilitate getting responses, you have probably noticed that we add an automatic post to some threads if they haven’t seen a response in a day or two. This is to bring them back to the top of the list and hopefully someone else’s attention.

    The other thing we debated on with answered posts was whether one answer was sufficient. Often one of us would come on a thread that someone else had answered and we liked the solution, but there was no closing “thanks” or “that worked”. So we decided that adding another post that agrees with the solution, a “me too” post, was a good idea. That way we hoped that we’d build some confidence in the solutions we believed in and give the newbies out there a reason to follow the advice.

    I’m really not sure what the best way to handle posts on the Internet. We’ve been asked to allow people to “rate” solutions as well as “close” threads. We’ve resisted because we see various issues with all of those solutions, just as with the thread within a thread capabilities of many forums. We’ve opted for a simpler solution that we think works well and we hope you agree.

  • Bits Bound

    I'm excited about my first trip to SQLBits

    I can’t believe I’m driving to the airport again today for a trip out of the country. Given the troubles that I’ve typically had crossing the Atlantic, it seems crazy to me that I’m going to go for the second time this year. In my life, I’ve flown to Europe 9 times and each trip has always been a one-stop each way, yet I’ve never had less than 5 planes and had as many as seven. A few years ago I thought that would end as I flew to the UK and made it back to Chicago with three planes. I then proceeded to get on, and off, three more planes before the fourth managed to get me to Denver.

    This time I’m trying a new route, actually flying through Calgary. My one Canadian trip was smooth, so maybe I’ll have an easy trip over the SQL Bits 9: Query Across the Mersey. Simon Sabin and the rest of the organizers have invited me to come quite a few times and I finally committed this year. I’ve been wanting to attend the event, which many friends have greatly enjoyed. I’m looking forward to getting to the home of the Beatles, Liverpool and seeing Chris Testa-O’Neill’s band along with the Fab Beatles, entertaining everyone on Thursday night. Assuming I can get there in time.

    SQL Bits has a great format that I’d love to see duplicated in the US. They have a day of pre-cons called “Training Day“, which is packed this year withAndy Leonard (blog |@AndyLeonard) and Allen White (blog | @SQLRunr) from the US along with Maciej Pilecki, Mark S. Rasmussen, and more. It’s a great way to get a pre-con at a great price. That occurs on Thursday, with a paid training day on Friday where I and many other speakers will be presenting on various topics. Saturday is like the US SQL Saturday model, with a free day of training for anyone that can register and come.

    I love the SQL Saturdays, but I think this model would work in the US as well. I’m looking forward to seeing the event and then with Karla Landrum’s (@karlakay22) help, hopefully seeing an event like this in the US.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Know when to hold ’em

    The SQLServerCentral party is always a great time

    It’s time for the annual SQLServerCental party at the PASS conference in Seattle again. It’s become an event that’s a lot of fun, and a great way for the SQL Server community to have some fun and get to know each other in a relaxed atmosphere. This year we’ve once again combined the party with the Exceptional DBA awards, and I’m honored to be there to celebrate noted SQLServerCentral author Jeff Moden as the winner.

    We have once again contracted for a casino themed party with various game tables around. We’ll call them the card game where you try to get twenty one, the competitive card game with a flop, river and turn, the roll-the-ball-around-the-circle-and-guess-the-number game, and probably that dice game as well. Have to be careful with the spam filters these days. 😉

    This year we’re selling tickets in advance for $20, or you can bring $30 to the door. We’ll have lots of prizes again, with me going through Best Buy and Think Geek to get a large variety of things to give away. I am happy to take suggestions for those items that you think would be fun gifts to take home.

    No skill is needed at the games as we’ll give prizes away randomly to people playing at the tables. Even if you have no idea what you’re doing, stick a few chips down,  introduce yourself to the player next to you and get some advice. You might learn something, and more importantly, you might make a friend.

    Come join us on Tuesday night for a great time. More details are in the party announcement.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Probabilities and Disaster Recovery

    The risk of an event is sometimes inversely proportional to its impact.

    When I talk about disaster recovery, one of the key things that I try to stress is the idea that the amount of effort and resources you devote to the problem is often scaled to the risk of loss. It doesn’t help the company if you decide to spend $1mm to ensure extremely high availability and zero data loss for a system that generates $20k in revenue a year. It might not be worth spending $100k to protect a system from more than a day of downtime if your daily revenue is less than $5,000, but it might be. You have to decide this in your environment.

    However when we talk about disaster recovery is seems that the vast majority of people plan for a data center failure, or a hurricane, or a major disaster. Those are possibilities, but the risk of them happening is low. It’s rare that a major disaster will hit any particular part of the world and therefore the risk is often very low. With a low risk, it might not be worth spending a lot of money on extra hardware to handle a situation that may never occur. I know that most of the time the management I’ve worked for haven’t felt it was worth spending a lot of money to prepare for a major disaster. There are systems that are worth duplicating to ensure high availability, and in many cases it does seem that management is willing to pay for spare systems when downtime is an issue.

    The most common disaster that I seem to hear about is the “whoops” disaster. A disaster that’s human error, a situation where someone makes a mistake in data entry. The most common “whoops” for DBAs seems to be the UPDATE or DELETE without a WHERE clause, but it seems these days there’s no shortage of issues occurring from applications that allow users to manipulate large batches of information.Yet it seems that too often I don’t see management making the preparation for this type of disaster a priority.

    There are numerous ways to handle these types of disasters. You can set up log shipping on a delay, even to a secure workstation (remember to secure production data), to give you time to respond to a situation and recover data. There are numerous tools, such as Red Gate’s Virtual Restore and SQL Backup Pro, that allow you to mount a backup file or recovery a single object from a backup file without impacting the full database. There are log reader tools that allow you to recover data or undo transactions from the transaction log whenever issues arise. Many of these tools have a price, but the cost of downtime is usually higher. Even the cost of losing other work when highly paid professionals are spending time recovering data across hours instead of minutes would justify the cost of purchasing one of these tools instead of the cost of time spent building a data recovery solution.

    Whether you build or buy a tool to help you deal with a “whoops” disaster, you ought to ensure that you make some preparations here. The risk of you losing revenue from this type of disaster is much higher than spending weeks building a plan that provides for recovery in the event of a catastrophic disaster.

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts