Voice of the DBA

Tag: administration

  • Scripting

    One of the directions in which Red Gate Software is to build more tools and utilities that all of you can use for working in cloud environments. We aren’t ignoring the desktop tools like SQL Compare and Prompt (v6, yeah!) that you’ve come to appreciate and depend on, but we are investing in expanding these tools to work with a remote, services style architecture since there are plenty of companies looking at AWS, Azure, or other providers for a portion of their applications.

    I’ve been learning a bit more about the way cloud services work and one of the things that becomes important in an IaaS environment is scripting. The environment you get is a base install and if you need more software or processes to run when a new VM starts up, you need to script the various installations or configurations.

    There are some great scripting features for SQL Server, like Finebuild for installs and Powershell for most everything else. Scripting is a great way to accomplish tasks, but like most skills, it needs to be used in order to be efficient and practical for most tasks. I’ve struggled with this, and I’m sure many others feel the same way.

    However I am starting to think that Powershell might be the best investment in my future skills. The quicker I can write it and build scripts to accomplish tasks, the more I’ll be able to do over time as I build a library of commandlets and scripts. That’s if I remember to document them well so I can easily search for what I need.

  • The Human Cost of Managing Data

    If you’ve ever worked in a large environment, where the numbers of nodes number in the thousands, or tens of thousands, then you know many software packages don’t scale to that size very well. I’ve seen quite a few pieces of software that were well written, and ran well with hundreds of items, but choked miserably when the count crept past a few thousand. Typically those are edge-case sized installations, and most applications aren’t designed for, or tested at, those scales. I haven’t registered 1,000 instances in SSMS, but I could guess that it would not necessarily run smoothly with that many instances being examined.

    Software designed at scale tends to take the “install another central node” and manage multiple central nodes individually. That quickly becomes a pain point for the humans that administer the systems as they must learn and remember where individual systems are being managed. It’s not much different for hardware as well. When a system exceeds the capacity of a single node, we often find that we are adding multiple modes and managing them individually. Many backup systems work this way, adding new units to handle the additional backup space requirements.

    However there’s a staffing cost as well, and it’s one that can be overlooked as a company grows. More systems mean more backups, more maintenance, and more failures. Even with automation and standardization, there’s a physical workload increase on your staff, and also a stress level increase from managing more systems. It can be easy to overwhelm your staff, assuming they can easily handle the additional load because they have plenty of tools to do so.

    Tools are required, and whether you build or buy them, you’ll make use of them if you want to minimize your salary costs. However you still need to make sure you grow your staff, train them, and give them time off. The last thing you want is to overload and burn out a small staff of one or two. I’d bet that the week your staff quits or takes ill, your systems will choose to fail.

    Steve Jones

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  • The Dangers of Detach

    I ran across a twitter conversation about a post recently. The post talks about detaching or attaching databases in bulk.

    I agree that detaching databases in some cases is bad, but it’s not necessarily something I’d avoid. Detach is a good way to prep for upgrades, movement, etc. It may or may not be faster than backup/restore, depending on your environment, but it’s something to consider.

    However.

    If you are going to detach, there are a couple things I’d recommend. First, make sure you have a good backup. A backup is just that, a backup plan, a backup file, a way to recover when things go wrong. It isn’t your data, it’s a copy. A detached mdf is your data. Make sure you have a backup before detaching and messing with files.

    Second, never move files. Never, ever, ever, ever, move database files. Detach/attach is a valid way to move databases, but always copy the files.

  • Job Worries over Automation

    There was a report recently where the NSA noted that they are reducing the number of system administrators by 90%. If the report is true, that would certainly worry many of the people in the technology industry. However I’m not sure that the quote given in the article means what it looks like at first.
    Much of the technology reports that we see aren’t completely true since many of the reporters aren’t that familiar with the details of how computer technology works. In this case, however, we have a quote: “What we’re in the process of doing – not fast enough – is reducing our system administrators by about 90 percent,” It might be hard to interpret this remark in any way other than the NSA is looking to reduce the number of people, but if you read further, the piece notes that the NSA is concerned about contractors, not necessarily FTEs. I suspect that any reduction in contractors employed by other companies will be made up by increased internal headcount.
    However even if the NSA can reduce the number of people needed to administer their systems, I’d suspect that means that they had too many people to begin with. The various reports of this story all talk about automation being used increasingly to handle the load of system work, but the idea that automation replaces people is a myth. Automation usually results in less growth of people, but rarely a reduction in staff.
    I’ve heard the concerns over automation replacing technology workers for decades (literally) and I’ve yet to see it happen. We have more technology workers than ever before, and no sign of there being less in the future. Your department might change, you might hire less, but there will be lots of jobs in technology for the foreseeable future. In other departments that might not be the case, but I bet you we’ll have system administrators, DBAs, and developers for a long, long time in most companies that have them today.
    Steve Jones

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    Today’s 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.

    Follow Steve Jones on Twitter to find links and database related items and announcements.
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