Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Appliances – Just Add Data

    The first release of a large data appliance from Microsoft is the SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse Edition in which you buy a rack of pre-configured servers that you access with tools and perform limited management on. I was reminded of this as I read about Teradata’s new product strategy, it seemed that they have integrated an appliance in there as well.

    Appliances bring some value to customers by supposedly reducing some of the tuning, configuration, setup, etc. costs in setting up a system. Hopefully the also reduce some ongoing costs that might come from mis-configuration, things running slowly, etc. How many times has an inexperienced person setup a server in a way that causes issues for an application?

    However appliances tend to be expensive. They have to be if there is any level of support from the vendors in custom tuning. That limits how many places will purchase them, and there is also some level of distrust and fear from IT workers that worry about being displaced by a machine. Almost funny when you think about many of our systems displacing other jobs.

    Appliances haven’t had great success in the past, outside of network devices, but I wonder if we might be better off examining them more in the future. Rather than trying to have general database instances put together by IT groups, should we have small, modular appliances that handle various database services and then just write the code and supply the data. For this Friday, let me know what you think:

    Would you like to see small, modular data appliances that you connect to storage and then just add data?

    Steve Jones

  • Check Twice, Update Once

    I was reading through this blog from the SQL Server PSS team (a must-follow), and found this note about the SQL Server Best Practices Analyzer (BPA). This isa tool that can examine an installation of SQL Server and report on any deviations from best practices according to Microsoft, as well as warn you of potential issues with your configuration. I had used it with previous versions of SQL Server and it helped me quickly determine if I’d missed anything during setup.

    Now I haven’t much thought about running this regularly. I’d assume this is something I just run once after installation to be sure I’ve configured, but the blog gives me a good reason to run this regularly, and especially whenever I have an issue. In the entry, it talks about not only noting that an error being returned by SQL Server and noting it’s fixed in a CU, but that a trace flag is also needed. Running the BPA would inform the user that the trace flag needs to be enabled.

    I think it’s great that this type of feature is being designed into a tool like the BPA that can really help a DBA. Knowing that this trace flag needs to be enabled is the type of knowledge that someone might gain with experience, but it’s short lived. At least it should be as I would hope the issue is corrected in a Service Pack w/o the need for a trace flag.

    Tools like this don’t eliminate the need for DBAs. We still need people that can make the decision about whether to apply this, perform testing, and more. These tools just make it easier for us to do our jobs more efficiently.

    Steve Jones

    Update: as noted in the discussion, the MS Baseline Configuration Analyzer is required for the BPA tool. MS BCA v2.0

  • Where Are the Programmers?

    When I was growing up, I thought I wanted to be a computer programmer. I had my own Vic-20, and various other machines, and I wrote code that was used to solve problems. I programmed the computer to handle various calculations or manipulations for school or fun and thought that was very cool. I solved many chemistry labs with the help of my computer.

    The other day someone asked me what I did for a living and I said that I used to work with computers, but now wrote about them. They asked me if I was a computer programmer in the past. That was something I hadn’t heard in a long time.

    I’m not sure when we changed from programmers to developers. Fundamentally we do the same thing, though I’ll admit that developer sounds more important, or more talented. I’m sure at some point a programmer wanted to separate their job from everyone else, called themselves a developer, and the trend caught on.

    I haven’t worried about titles for a long time, but at one point in my career I did press to get the senior DBA title after working with SQL Server for about 6 or 7 years. At that time I felt I knew more about SQL Server than the majority of people that I met, and I deserved to be “senior.” I’m still not sure if I had earned it at that time, but it was a title I was proud of.

    It seems that us data professionals have tried to separate ourselves from the average DBA with database architects and database developers and any number of other database specialties that sound more important than just DBA or developer.

    It makes me wonder what’s coming next. Will we start to advertise ourselves as DSS (data security specialist) or DTS (data transformation specialist) or even BIDS (Business Intelligence developer specialist)? Who knows, those acronyms are already well known in the SQL Server world. They might just impress a manager who knows just a little about SQL Server.

    Steve Jones

  • The Cloud is Nothing Special

    In the news this week, there was a major announcement. Buck Woody (blog | @BuckWoody), longtime Microsoft employee and favorite speaker of many in the community, bought an iPad. That in and of itself, with Buck’s frequent touting of Microsoft products, is amazing, and Buck wrote about it on his blog, noting that Windows Azure is platform independent. He even has a picture of a NASA app, something built on Azure, running on his new toy.

    This week, SQL Azure finally gets its own web site, showcasing SQL Server in the cloud. I know lots of DBAs, and IT people in general might be down on computing in the cloud, but I’m not. I think that there are some problems, some applications, that will benefit from cloud computing. Not every instance of SQL Server should be moved to the cloud, but some will work better in the cloud. If nothing else, being able to use cloud services is another evolution of the hosted environments that so many small companies use today. You can get the services you need without the need to do as much administration or setup.

    For most of us, the services that we might use on the Internet are platform independent. We don’t care that Facebook uses Cassandra, or Google uses BigTable, or that TractorByNet uses whatever technology they use. We just want our particular service to work, and it doesn’t mattter what the underlying technology is.

    I think it’s the same with cloud computing. Ultimately it doesn’t matter if it’s Azure, EC2, or some other service. Just like Brent Ozar views virtualization, I would bet that some of the time a cloud service is “good enough” to use.