Voice of the DBA

Tag: administration

  • Production Subsets

    Continuous delivery recommends developers never use production data. It’s too big, too cumbersome, and slows the process too much. Developers should have enough data to determine if their solutions work as they build them. Testing should have enough to do some tuning, but unless you plan on full performance/load tests (which you should), then you don’t need the full set of production data.

    It’s an interesting idea, and overall I agree. A subset of data, hundreds of rows, can usually tell you if you’re writing code that works if you profile the code and look for inefficiencies. Note that profiling code doesn’t mean use Profiler. It means examining the resource used by your code in terms of CPU, I/O, memory, etc. There are tools to help you, and at some point in your development process, you should be using them.

    However it can be time consuming and cumbersome to build small development data sets. There are lots of choices in how you might do this, and I thought this would make an interesting poll. For those of you that deal with development, whether that’s T-SQL, .NET, or something else, what do you think?

    Should we have a subset of production data, a custom data set, or perhaps deal with complete production data?

    Some of this depends on the size of your production data, and I hope, it’s contents. I would not want any PII, PCI, medical, etc. in any development area. However if that’s not the case, then what do you prefer?

    Whether you have  custom data set or a subset of production, it can be cumbersome to keep this up to date. Your data may evolve over time and there’s overhead in maintaining some scripts that would produce the data you need. Perhaps that’s the cost of writing good software, but I’m curious how many of you feel.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.2MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. feed

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

  • Artist or Scientist

    Which are you, an artist or a scientist? If you automate, you’re the latter. If you are a scientist, you can go on vacation. You can be more productive. People can count on you. You get things done quickly, consistently, and reliably. Everyone knows what to expect when you’re done with a task. They can expect things to be completed a certain way.

    If you manually run installation programs, click GUIs to configure options from memory, and customize each system you work on, you’re an artist. Artists build works of art, each of them unique. I know some incredibly talented artists working in technology, people who duplicate their work over and over extremely consistently. However at some point they’ll make a mistake, and then I’ll never know what state the system or code is in.

    While we need artists to push boundaries and experiment with new techniques, we don’t want them managing production systems or writing production code.  I want production code to use well known and proven techniques, best practices, good error handling, application of standards, logging and more. I want production systems to be stable, not with a lack of change, but with a lack of issues. I need scientists that produce work that can be counted on.

    Don’t build works of art. In development you must be an artist at times, but when you solve problems, ensure that the code contains best practices (secure coding and error handling among them), and make sure that your team understands and can reproduce the code later. In production, ensure you learn automation (PoSh, scripting, templates) and can build, or rebuild, your systems quickly and consistently. Deploy your builds to QA and development so that all the environments are the same.

    Become more of a scientist and not only will people depend on you, they’ll be less worried when you go on vacation because there will be fewer surprises for the person covering your work.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.5MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. feed

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

  • Disconnecting Auditing

    We know security is becoming more and more of a topic for IT professionals. As we realy more heavily on our computer systems, we have to be sure that the information contained in them is secure. We know that we can’t necessarily anticipate and protect the applications from every attack, but we can usually detect and respond to incidents. To do that, we need good auditing of all the events that occur.

    The problem, in my mind, is that our auditing efforts and implementations are too tightly tied to the administration of our systems. The auditing features must be configured by administrators, who are also often tasked with the review of the auditing data and logs. This is a fundamental problem as it’s entirely possible that an administrator or privileged user might be just the person that will violate security practices. With their rights inside of the computer system, it’s likely that the same person perpetrating the malicious activity would be able to easily cover up or remove any evidence of the incident.

    I think that auditing is fundamentally implemented poorly. Auditing features in software, including SQL Server, should be separated out from administration, perhaps even configured and enabled by a separate user or account than the person who administers the system. I would anticipate that a person in the finance or accounting departments at most companies might be responsible for managing the audit data. Even if they were unsure of the meaning of the data, having control over the information would prevent problems with the auditing data being compromised. I could even see auditing services being offered by third parties that interpret or review the data for companies without a dedicated security department.

    I doubt we’ll see a disconnect anytime soon, but I do think that the value of auditing is drastically reduced when we don’t have a strong separation of rights, responsibility, and capabilities between auditing and administration.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.5MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. feed

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

  • Monitoring for Non Existent Events

    I was catching up on work recently, reading the third installment of The 5 Worst Days in a DBA’s life, starring The DBA Team. Someone had asked me if I enjoyed having Paul Randal (b | t) of SQLskills join them team. The piece had been edited and published while I was gone, and I hadn’t had a chance to immerse myself in the adventure. I was anxious too read how Paul helped save the day.

    It was a fun read, but one quote in the piece struck me. “A job that runs long or doesn’t run at all can sting just as bad as one that fails.” That’s a quote from my character showcasing a situation that few people actually think about. However jobs that don’t run or don’t finish are situations that DBAs should be monitoring for.

    So many of us adopt a set-it-and-forget-it mentality with our jobs. We assume that things will work, or fail, as we set them up. However it’s easy to forget that there are other states we might find ourselves or our systems in that can cause issues.

    Monitoring is critical to any well run system, but monitoring needs to be set up well. If we require that certain jobs run, we need to not only check for success or failure, but if the job has actually run and completed. It’s easy to accidentally disable the wrong job and not notice. It’s also entirely possible that a job gets stuck and doesn’t complete.

    If you’re not watching for those other states, you might find yourself in a situation where you don’t have backups and your job is on the line. However you probably won’t have The DBA Team to call on.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.2MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. feed

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.