Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • The Institute for Backup Trauma

    This is an editorial reprinted from April 27, 2005.

    It’s viral marketing, but it’s not bad. Livevault produced a short video starring John Cleese as the director for this institute that seeks to counsel those that have had problems with tape backups. “Such an unreliable medium”, this one is straight out there. An advertisement for Livevault, a little silly, satirical, but not that bad.

    It’s an interesting concept and one that I’ve debated with various colleagues over the years. Tape v disk. Which one is better for securing and ensuring the integrity of your data, which one is better for business continuity, which one works for your budget.

    When I started in this business, it was a no brainer. Disk was way more expensive than tape and there wasn’t even a choice. Nowhere I worked could afford to backup their data to disk. On top of that, the technology for managing disk backups wasn’t great. I remember working for a small company and we couldn’t afford a VCS system. At least, I couldn’t pry money out of my boss for one, despite the fact that the business lived and died based on the code that was written. So we setup 5 folders on the network: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and you guessed it, Friday. Under each one, the other developer and I each had our own folder and a batch job that would copy data off our desktops to the appropriate folder on the appropriate day. We erased everything older than 5 days, though we still had tapes if we needed them.

    Today, with disk being nearly as cheap and much, much faster than tape, and the need to go back more than one version in a business environment being fairly rare, it makes some sense to use disk. Microsoft released their own software, that helps with data recovery on disk, so there must be either some growth or a very high profit margin in this area 🙂

    Personally, I think that the idea is a good one, but like many new technologies that change the way a user works, this one will take some time to get used to. I’m all for users being able to recover their own data without calling an admin, especially when the admin is me, but I’m sure that there will be lots of calls on how to find the files, which version, I forgot to save it, but my machine crashed and I want to go back 3 versions, annoyed calls when the last version on disk rolls off, etc.

    But I wouldn’t give up my tape. At J.D. Edwards, we backed up the databases to disk, then to tape that night, with two copies of the tapes being made. One went offsite and one was in a rotation on site. The triple protection served me well and we never had issues getting data off disk or one of the two tapes.

    Of course, that was expensive, so it’d not an option I’ve had often. Still, one disk and one tape worked out well and these days having disk be so cheap, a second copy on disk is something I’d shoot for.

    Steve Jones

  • Hyper-V Guests

    Virtualization has really changed the way that we deal with software. It seems that more and more often I find people using virtualization for all sorts of systems, both production and non-production servers. The ability to run multiple operating systems on a single physical host means that systems are used more efficiently. It also means that more people have the ability to experiment with alternatives to the standard Windows OS that so many of us use.

    Hyper-V has gained a lot of attention over the last few years as Microsoft has tried to get people to run this hypervisor.  It seems that quite a few people have had success running Hyper-V, and it becomes more popular all the time. However, not everyone is happy, and I found a  post about Linux support in Hyper-V, or the lack thereof.

    Whether Microsoft is mis-representing their support is one thing, but this did have me thinking about a wider issue. As we build more and more systems that are virtualized, or even composed of services offered by other vendors, to what extent should the vendor provide support? Is it reasonable to say that your platform works with software x, y, and z, even if you don’t have engineers trained to support the software?

    This could become a large pain point in the future for other types of platforms, as I am sure it will continue to be an issue with hypervisors.  I’m not sure I would expect a hypervisor vendor to offer full  support for various guest operating systems, but I certainly would expect that they would work with engineers at other companies to solve issues, especially if I have a support contract.

    Steve Jones

  • We Are Not a Meritocracy

    I’ve heard a few times over the last month that the technology business ought to be a meritocracy, where people are hired, promoted, and fired based on their skills and talents. It’s usually accompanied by a mandate that everyone should  “hire the best person for the job.”

    Information Technology may be the closest we get to a meritocracy, but it certainly isn’t one. Your skills matter, your talent matters, but it’s still a who you know and who-you-get-along-with that overrides everything else. More often than not, skills alone will not carry you far. You need to have a bond with the people that hire you.

    If we were a meritocracy, we could just give everyone a test that applied for a job and hire the person with the highest score. Or just use a lottery to pick everyone that achieved a certain score. That doesn’t sound like the kind of place that I’d like to work since I place a lot of value on the interpersonal relationships with other people.

    It seems that most people really want their employees, or co-workers, to meet some minimum level of competency, continue to improve their skills, and do their share of the work. That’s reasonable and I can appreciate those qualities in people, but the thing that’s most important to me is that we get along.

    I can work with you to improve your technical skills, but I can’t usually do anything about your personality.

    Steve Jones

  • The Low End

    Are products like Access and VB bad? A long time ago it seemed that if you could spell VB, you could get a job. That was good in some ways as it helped the explosion of growth in technology employment. It was bad because we had many people building applications without understanding software development and we ended up with many buggy, crash-prone applications.

    Someone posted recently  that these “low-end” products had helped them get a job and get started in this business. This person thought my comment was a complaint against these software products, but that’s not the case. I know quite a few people have built or supported applications on Access, VB, or Excel and then gone on to a career with SQL Server. In fact, the first business application I built was on Lotus 1-2-3, using a large combination of macros to help someone with estimating.

    Are “easy-to-use” products like Access or Excel good for business? Should they be used to build applications? Like most things in technology, the answer is “it depends.” Often these are not the basis for a robust system on which you run your business, but they can be. Often there is a need  or desire for something to be built quickly, and cheaply, in order to accommodate some aspect of business. These tools are a way for some type of automation to be assembled quickly and used by business people.

    However you can outgrow these applications and find that something stronger is needed. That’s the time when an IT project makes sense, and arguably, that’s the appropriate time to spend the money.

    I like prototyping useful tools, and Microsoft provides ways to easily accomplish this.  To me, software like Powerpivot seems likely to spur on more projects, not fewer.

    Steve Jones