Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Efficiency

    There was a debate recently about older IT workers and the fact that there is some age discrimination going on in this industry. While that’s probably true, it happens in other fields as well. Especially blue collar fields where the amount of work done often relates to some physical activity. Older workers might make less, or be paid less, because they do the job differently.

    Without getting into the debate about age discrimination, I wanted to get a feel for how you feel about your career progressing. I’m sure those of you in your 20s can’t conceive of being 60 and programming any differently than you do now, but times will change for you.

    One of my feelings is that there is a lot of value in experience. The latest .NET changes aren’t harder to use or understand than the previous ones, and the changes to T-SQL bring about new things to learn, but they aren’t really any more complex than previous features, commands, and constructs. For this Friday, I wanted to ask this:

    Are you becoming more efficient as you progress in you career?

    Maybe you can answer how you are getting more efficient. Are you developing skills that allow you to produce higher quality code in less time?

    I hope that most of you are, and the explosion of blogs, books, and events like SQLSaturday mean that you have more chances than ever to learn how to become more efficient in whatever type of technology you work with in your career.

    Steve Jones

  • Plan for Capacity

    In many applications, it seems that performance often falls off a cliff at some point because no one is planning for capacity increases. Everyone talks about the potential load on the system when it’s first being built. However since we often over-buy hardware, we rarely monitor the load until something goes wrong.

    I was reminded up this with a write-up from Simon Sabin recently that examined a lesson on capacity planning from FourSquare. Apparently FourSquare had some capacity issues with their MongoDB server. Despite the realization that they were growing and the addition of a second node to their database, they didn’t learn the lesson and didn’t add a third or fourth node until they were over capacity.

    Most of us don’t experience this type of hyper-growth in our systems. The majority of applications I’ve seen have undergone a quick growth in load at some point, but then leveled off to a steady, or slowly growing load on the system. However that doesn’t necessarily change the planning needed for growth. It just means that you need to grow your system at different times than if you were doubling in size every few months.

    A solid monitoring plan, and buy-in from management that you will periodically need to upgrade your servers, is necessary. Typically you will add storage over time, perhaps RAM, and potentially new CPUs or servers. You might not be able to exactly predict when you will have performance issues, but you can plan for issues. You can proactively let management know that space is running low, or that you may run into issues if data sets continue to grow in size.

    Funding is often hard to get, but by preparing people in advance that your database will need improvements over time, you are more likely to be able to respond quickly when there are performance issues.

    Steve Jones

  • Living Moore’s Law

    I’m not much of a hardware geek these days. For the most part I just want my computers to work. Actually if I think about it, I really just want my services to work. I don’t care what specs they have, or the technology used.

    If I went back to managing databases, I would be looking for databases to work on, not individual machines. I think that’s one reason that the idea of cloud database services appeals to me. Not necessarily clouds on the Internet, but as a series of machines in my data center that I could just plug together and have SQL Server run various services across them.

    In reading a little about eBay and their new data center, I think it might be very cool to work there. The director of their data center talks about living Moore’s Law, with the new data center in Utah. While I’m sure many of the large internet companies like Microsoft, Google, Rackspace, etc. would also be interesting, I’m not sure how many of them are on a two year cycle, replacing all of their systems on a rotating basis.

    I live on a 35 acre ranch, and it’s a lot of work keeping it up. That can help me appreciate the scale of the new eBay data center, which is a 60 acre campus. Their phase one approach has 7.2MW of server load in the building with some racks generating over 30,000W of heat. That’s quite a hot aisle!

    At that pace of change, I have to think that it’s both exciting and a challenge to keep systems running on new hardware and also modifying code to take advantage of the new capabilities offered by hardware changes. It’s a challenge that I would love to tackle at some point in my life.

    Steve Jones

  • Software Assurance Cuts Back

    Did anyone ever use this benefit of Software Assurance (SA)? Apparently if your company had SA on Microsoft software, you could purchase that software for a discounted price for use in your own home.

    I wasn’t aware of it, and it’s never been a perk that any of my employers have offered me. I have had the chance to use Microsoft Office on my home computer if I was licensed for it at work, but I never knew I could “own” something like Visual Studio at a discount. I’m not even sure I would have taken advantage of it, but I’m sure there are lots of people that might have appreciated it. Plenty of my friends that wanted Microsoft Office at home, instead of Microsoft Works. I’m sure a few of them would have purchased a copy of Office at a discount from their company if they could have.

    However it doesn’t matter anymore since this perk is being removed from Software Assurance. I wonder how much money that Microsoft thinks they’re saving here, or maybe how much money they think they might earn. Those extra copies of software don’t cost Microsoft anything, though perhaps there is a significant administrative cost savings involved. More people probably use the Home Use Program instead, which allows people to use a copy of software at home.

    I don’t know that these programs add much to the value that a company gets from SA. Perhaps if they did include home software, or XBOX games, this might be a nice perk to attract employees, but I doubt it. I don’t know that these discounts would make a different in helping me choose where to work. To me they just help Microsoft continue to dominate in some areas of software as corporate workers look to use the same software at home that they have at work.

    If that’s the goal, Microsoft ought to sell the software at a nominal cost, like $25, just to get people to use it at home.

    Steve Jones