Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • The DBA Financial Analyst

    The DBA job is somewhat nebulous, with a variety of skills being needed, and the mix of those skills varying from company to company. As companies look to save money, and look to perhaps go with cloud computing or other types of hosted environments, are DBAs going to need to also perform financial calculations?

    I was reading a post on SQL Azure recently that talked about the cost of indexes. Not performance, or space, but actual real dollars and cents cost since indexes take up space and you are charged by the space you use. Adding extra indexes, or adding columns to indexes, or adding covering columns, can cost you real money if you have any large scale of resources.

    So does that mean that in addition to trying to determine what changes you can make to code to improve performance, or what new features might make sense to your applications, you need to also run some financial ROI calculation on the choices? Maybe PowerPivot was released just in time for all those virtual systems that might charge by the byte or cycle.

    As a DBA, I’ve had to budget, and try to determine  how to spend funds for hardware, balancing out choices for RAM v disk v CPU, and even comparing secondary servers for read-only scale out against a larger single server. However I typically don’t have to compare the cost of features in my analysis.

    I’ve sometimes wished I could pay for just one feature, and it’s starting to look like that might be something that could happen in the cloud. While the possibility if mix and match features intrigues me, the extra work to add cost to my calculations along with performance makes me think the cloud might be more trouble than it’s worth.

    Steve Jones

  • When To Touch

    It seems that every product that has an underlying database has documentation that says not to modify the schema?  Do you always pay attention to that warning? The PSS blog at Microsoft says that for Reporting Services you ought to definitely keep your hands off, and gives some good reasons why you should.

    However what about those other products? Dynamics, SAP, JD Edwards, and other common types of software that many companies use. Can you modify them at all? Perhaps.

    We hear about the build vs. buy debate in software, but there’s also the modify vs. workaround argument. I was reminded of that from the PSS blog. There are times that you might be tempted to change things in a database built a software company, or add objects to that database. In many cases this can be seen as action that voids any support contract with the vendor, and more often than not they won’t want to give permission to make changes.

    I can understand that, as it can substantially increase the support costs for a software company. However I also think that a blanket policy prohibiting changes is a bad idea.

    I think there are plenty of things that you can do, especially with the latest versions of SQL Server, that could be useful “touches” that improve the use of a database. Adding indexes judiciously to improve performance of some queries is one very light touch that can add tremendous benefits. Adding reporting objects in another schema could help you extend functionality to get more value from the software.

    Touching a database that you didn’t build should be done carefully, lightly, and with a lot of testing, and it can be something that creates a much more valuable system.

    Steve Jones

  • Rating Bugs

    Is this a big deal? Michigan is the wrong shape, reported on Connect as a problem with the Report Builder 3.0. I guess is depends on whether or not you are showing Michigan in one of your reports. If you are, it’s probably a big deal, and no matter what data is on the report, plenty of people will never get beyond the incorrect shape.

    Is this a critical bug? Is it a must fix for SP1? Does it deserve a high level of priority?

    Triaging bugs like this and assigning a priority has to be extremely hard. On one hand this should be a simple fix, but after the maintenance plan fiasco in SQL Server 2005 SP2, I’ve heard a few SQL Server developers say there are no “simple fixes.” However this bug is not critical to most people; it won’t cause downtime or data loss. For those people that need it, however, it could be extremely critical. It also a little embarrassing for any report that has the wrong shape visible in a map control.

    Should this be fixed before bugs that cause downtime? What if this takes 2 days and those bugs take 2 weeks? Or two months? You could easily get into the situation where a low priority bug keeps getting pushed back because there are more important issues to deal with. I’m not specifically talking about this bug, but rather using it as an example of an annoying, but otherwise non-critical issue.

    As companies work on software, I’m sure there’s some developer on every team that finds items like this one to be very annoying bugs, and would probably just fix it if they had time. Or permission. To me, this is a great reason why you ought to give developers some free time to work on things that they find interesting. My guess is many little bugs like this that can be fixed quickly, would get worked into the schedule.

    Developers like fixing things, and they like easy wins. Give them a chance to work on them.

    Steve Jones

  • Personal Investments

    I’ve written a lot on various aspects of your career, and I mention training often. I try to encourage you to seek training dollars from your employer to go to things like the PASS Summit or SQL Connections.  I think that your boss out to invest in you and that it will pay him or her back over time with better quality work overall.

    I know there are plenty of managers that don’t have a budget for training, or they are resistant to just spend it on requests from employees without some sort of guarantee. There are no guarantees in life, and managers should get used to that, but you can help them gain some confidence that money spent on you is not money wasted.

    There are a couple ways to do this, one of which is to make your own investment. I think that you ought to be spending some time on building your skills on your own. Document those efforts, and then show your manager that you are trying to learn more when you ask for money. So for this Friday’s poll, I wanted to see who might be doing that. This week I’m asking:

    What are the investments that you are making in your career?

    Right now, what tangible things can you list that you have done in the last year that show you are making an effort to improve in your job. I realize that some of you might not want to post directly, or too specifically, but if you can write something, perhaps you can inspire others.

    For my own career, which is only somewhat technical, I’ve been making an effort to improve my skills by working more with the new aspects of SQL Server, blogging about them, and then building additional presentations that I can give at events. That is a way that I’m looking to improve my own skills, as well as gain additional exposure for my company. Hopefully that pays them back and it means it’s worth investing in me by sending me to more events, or even a few training classes.

    Hopefully you’ve done something in the last year that shows an investment in your own career. My own investment has been mostly limited to time, but I have purchased a few books to help me learn. Let us know this Friday what you’ve done on your own. And be sure to let your boss know as well.

    Steve Jones