Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Geeky Distractions

    Captain America is recommended for geeks.

    I saw Captain America recently and enjoyed it. I’ve been following the Marvel comics as they move to the movie screen, having seen Iron Man and Thor as well, and looking forward to The Avengers next year. My kids have enjoyed the movies as well, and it’s likely to be a nice family night out when it releases.

    It’s the middle of summer, with many blockbuster movies released this year that fall into the science fiction, or even geeky, areas at my house. We have had a new Transformers and X-Men movies, Falling Skies on TV, along with a (scary) introduction to Dr. Who for my daughter, and I’ve enjoyed a few books like the Solar Clipper Seriesand the Spinward Fringe series.

    We have no shortage of amazing geeky media around here, and I’m wondering if you feel the same. With that in mind, on a middle-of-the-summer Friday, I have a fun, non-database poll for you:

    What’s your favorite geek media for 2011?

    It could be a book, a movie, or something else. What has excited you in the science fiction world this year? What would you recommend to your fellow geeks that are looking for a diversion from work and want to have some fun?

    I have a few listed above, but right now I’m also reading Temporary Duty, about the first trips in space by humans after meeting another race of traders. It’s from the perspective of a second class enlisted man, which is interesting. I’d also recommend The Burning Wire, with the mystery of Jeffrey Deaver meeting electricity in a scary way.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • You Can Telecommute

    Working in my own litlte world

    I’ve written a number of pieces about telecommuting over the years, and while some people have had success in getting permission to work from home, many of you tell me that your current manager, and likely every manager you’ve ever had wouldn’t allow it. There are a huge group of people that are convinced telecommuting is not in their future. I think you’re wrong, and let me tell you a story.

    Years ago I went to work for a small (50 people), old company. The CEO had worked their his whole life, his father had worked there most of his life, and they had very conservative values and ideals. They both wore suits to the office every day and I was expected to do the same, even as an IT guy. I went out and bought 4 or 5 suits the first year I worked there, along with slacks, shirts, and (shudder) ties.

    I argued, politely and regularly, with the CEO that the clothes didn’t really influence the quality of work. We rarely had clients in the office. My boss, the VP, agreed, and we found numerous studies and surveys that proved our point. Others felt the same way, but we two were the only one that regularly tried to debate the issue. I’d often return from a run or swim at lunch and “forget” to tighten up my tie. Usually by 2pm, however, my boss would come by to “remind” me.

    After a year, we managed to get “casual” Friday, where we could wear (non-logo) polo shirts and khakis. No faded jeans, no sneakers, and it’s almost what many companies would see as business casual today. Another year or two went by, with regular chastising of my afternoon dress, often followed by a short debate on the subject. Eventually my boss allowed us to pilot “casual” dress on all non-client days, and jeans on Friday. No faded jeans, but more comfortable wear. Work didn’t suffer, and while my boss still wore suits, he accepted that we didn’t need to. I think I even saw him wear a shirt without a tie one day before I left.

    You can do the same thing with telecommuting. Offer a pilot, show articles, blogs, and studies that talk about telecommuting, set up metrics to measure work, and get employees to agree that the privilege can be suspended. I am sure with some regular debates and discussions, perseverance and persistence, you can find a way to implement telecommuting if your job can be done remotely.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Time for a ROWID?

    Do we need a ROWID structure in all SQL Server tables?

    One of the things I’ve been doing lately is looking forward to future versions of SQL Server. Not SQL 11/Denali, which has CTP 3 out now, but more towards the future. SQL 12 and beyond, and wondering how the platform can advance and incorporate new ideas and knowledge from other areas such as NoSQL or NewSQL. I also have been trying to decide which parts of SQL Server could be improved to be more robust of scalable, or address some failings in the platform.

    Our systems seem to be growing larger, and storage seems to cost less all the time. While this doesn’t always result in cost savings, it does mean that we may be ready to increase the page size in SQL Server once again, perhaps growing to 16k or even 64k. If that follows as I/O transfer sizes grow, then is it time to add in a rowid marker of some sort that gives us a unique handle to every row on a page?

    I know this adds some overhead, and in reading about the internals of current pages, that overhead can be significant. However it seems that I find people that regularly have non-unique clustered indexes, or heaps, and could require SQL Server to differentiate the rows internally. With our busses increasing in size and larger sectors on disks, perhaps the overhead isn’t out of the question.

    This would allow for some interesting benefits for replication, with the possibility that any object could be replicated, no matter what the structure. It also might allow us to very efficiently eliminate duplicates and perhaps improve the efficiency of some T-SQL commands.

    What do you think? Is it time for a true ROWID? Time to increase the page size for SQL Server?

    Steve Jones

     

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • NewSQL Can Save the World

    Michael Stonebraker, a database pioneer and researcher, recently said that Facebook’s implementation of MySQL was “a fate worse than death,” and they ought to rewrite their entire infrastructure. I think that analogy is a bit extreme. That statement also shows me that relational databases can scale to some dramatic heights with creative engineering as Facebook as shown with MySQL. I suspect that Facebook could easily use SQL Server and complex sharding of data to power the site if they wanted to in place of MySQL.

    Mr. Stonebraker has another solution for the “oldSQL” problem of scaling to very high volumes of transactions while maintaining ACID principles. He has a company that makes VoltDB, a database that lives in memory, complies with ACID principles, and can scale to very high transaction volumes.

    Can VoltDB solve the RDBMS scaling issues?

    That’s part of a wave of products that are classified as “NewSQL”, or even ScalableSQL, solutions. These databases embrace the power of SQL and even relational databases, but build scalability and high availability directly into the products. It’s interesting to see SQL Azure on the list of NewSQL products, and it makes me think that Azure is much more than just a VM in the cloud running SQL Server. At least I hope it is and includes some scaling features beyond what a single VM can provide.

    Running in memory scares me, but perhaps if you expect failure of nodes, and you have some sort of replication of the data among many nodes, it can work. I do worry about the consistency across the nodes and the latency that can affect this, but perhaps these products do a good job of addressing these concerns. I still think a large scale power failure could be disastrous, so I assume these products do write to disk at some point.

    I do agree that the relational model can scale, and I’m sure that we will see SQL Server grow to encompass and accommodate the concerns of customers that need to run large scale databases in the future. I’m just not sure how they’ll do it.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts