Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • 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

  • Big Gaps

    Emacs was my favorite editor in college

    I saw this piece on Learning Unix from Miguel  de Icaza that brought back memories. Michael is a well known developer that is working an open source implementation of .NET called Mono. He worked at Microsoft and continues to bring .NET to other platforms, but he primarily works on Unix based systems. The post laments the lack of basic Unix knowledge and tricks from many of the developers he meets. His recommendation is a few books and tutorials to learn shell commands, emacs, and more.

    Those bring back memories for me since I learned to use emacs early in college. I went through tutorial and enjoyed the editor much more than vi and learned to take advantage of shell commands for quick scripts or tools that would make my programming tasks easier. Those skills helped me when I moved to the DOS/Windows world and scripted many tasks, and even helped in SQL Server with the scripting tasks is SSIS and SQLCMD. As I look over PowerShell scripts these days, I find myself seeing the same constructs as I saw in Korn shell, but with different syntax.

    As I read the piece, I asked myself a question over and over, which I couldn’t answer completely. I did, however think it would make a good Friday poll and decided to ask the rest of you for your opinion:

    What basics do you find many data professionals lacking and what do you recommend to help them?

    I know people need to learn how to back up a database, and they should learn T-SQL to some extent, but what basic skills would you point people towards? What books or resources would you recommend?

    I know we have some great basic articles here at SQLServerCentral that everyone should read, like Managing Transaction Logs. I think we’ve tried to address the basics with the Stairway series on various topics. However I’m sure there are holes in our catalog as well as some very common things that many of you would like to recommend to every DBA or developer. You have your chance today to help compile a list.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts