Tag: administration

It’s the start of a new year, and while it might feel like COVID-19 has us stuck back in March 2020, I hope that will start to fade as we move into the new year. Certainly our employers want to move forward, and I suspect that there is some hope that organizations will start to thrive in 2021.

I saw a post from Kenneth Fisher recently that talked about an end of year, new year checklist. It’s a basic set of things that you might do as a type of review and cleanup of some of the instances and databases that you manage. Checking things like end of year processes and performing some review of potential items that might no longer be needed.

In the past, I didn’t do this type of work at the end of the year, or even that often, but when there were slow times, I did have a list of things to periodically review. We had canned queries and reports to help us evaluate resources. Many were automated to ensure the data about systems was available if I had time.

One area that I was check once or twice a year was the configuration, trying to determine if any hardware had changed, the workload had altered, or there were proactive configuration changes we could make. This might include removing unused security logins or turning off services that weren’t being used.

Certainly I was always cognizant of the load that managing lots of databases can have on a DBA. Every additional database is a potential customer that can call or file a ticket. I couldn’t often remove any, but I did find ways to remove unused objects and archive data at times. Reducing resource usage often pays itself back over time, especially when the need for more storage arises, which was more of a battle than it needed to be.

I might add one thing to Ken’s list. I would ensure that you should check on cloud resources that might not be used. One thing I see too often is that cloud resources are easy to spin up and leave up, even if they become unused. Finding a few of these might earn you some points with the people paying the bills.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.

One of the research areas at the Redgate Foundry is in estate management, trying to better understand how people manage an estate of servers. These could be physical servers you own, VMs in a hosted or cloud situation, or even a platform service like Azure SQL Database or AWS RDS. In today’s world with a myriad of choices, it’s easy to lose control of your estate of servers.

I saw a quote recently from someone that was struggling with their estate. They said: “The moment it goes red, if you don’t know what it should be, then you’re clutching at straws.”

This particular person was struggling with rebuilding systems after a failure. If one of your VMs dies or gets removed, something that is easy to do in the cloud, do you know all the settings to rebuild it? Not just the CPU and RAM, but all the SQL Server configuration settings you might have changed? These days there are lots of database settings, which ought to be in those backups, but there are plenty of other items that could be hard to recover.

Most of us don’t experience large disasters in our instances, but we do get regular calls, tickets, and complaints about performance. We might even find out that settings get changed in a team environment that we are not aware were made. Monitoring systems might catch this, but not necessarily every little setting that we care about. Building your own system is complex, and more importantly, I find that ensuring all new instances and databases that get deployed are in your system is hard.

I didn’t think much of this project when it started, but I realized this is more of a problem for people when I attended a session at SQL in the City London in 2019, where our Foundry presented on a few projects. I had assumed that most people would be thrilled with the Spawn project, but most were more interested in estate management. Lots of interest in having software to ensure you not only know what your settings are, but when they might change and how to get them back.

Part of building software, especially with DevOps, is ensuring you know how well it is, or isn’t, performing and if the things you change are useful and valuable. Certainly this is important for those DBAs and system administrators, but I think it’s also important to ensure you share those settings with developers. Having all your systems configured in the same way through the software process helps ensure more consistent performance.

Some sort of estate management is important, and no matter how you might monitor systems, ensure that you are including the various configuration settings as a part of that.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.