Voice of the DBA

Tag: Database Weekly

  • Which Problem Are You Solving?

    One of the problems I’ve seen for years in computing is people seeing the forest or the trees. Not that either is good or bad, but far too often I’ve run across people that only see one of these, meaning they examine problems from a high level perspective, or a very low level perspective. While either of those can help you solve your issues, there will be a problem or a time when you need to examine the situation from another perspective. Knowing when to look at a higher or lower level can be invaluable in troubleshooting.

    This past week I ran across a great post from Grant Fritchey called Understand the True Source of Problems. In this post, Grant talks about some strange DBA “best practices” that were implemented to solve problems, but aren’t necessarily the best of anything. It’s an interesting list, and you might read it for entertainment, though I hope none of you are following these ideals at your place of employment.

    However the thing I liked about this post is that in the beginning Grant begins with an old doctor joke, which is still funny to me, but it often is the approache taken by people trying to solve problems. They just avoid the issue, and never solve it. That can work in the short term, but I’ve seen this build up over time to the point where people are afraid to make any changes to a system or code because of the fear of causing some unknown issue.

    I don’t think that every issue needs to be solve to the root cause. There are plenty of times something goes sideways on one of my computers and a reboot fixes the issue. I’m fine with that, but if it occurs more than two or three times, I do need to solve the problem. I need to be able to dig deeper to diagnose what resources are failing, what performance issue exists, or maybe what line of code is broken. Perhaps I need to step back and examine if some other part of my system, like the disk or network, is causing an issue that appears to be isolated to code. In other words, I need to be able to look at the wider environment (the forest) or dive into the particulars of a process (the trees).

    Knowing how to strike this balance is a bit of an art, and it’s what really makes the best problem solvers experts. I can’t teach you that part of computing, but I can teach you this. When you don’t think you’ve completely solved the issue, stop for a minute and take a wider or narrower view. Or maybe both. Look for what you might not have thought of. If you’re like me, there are probably plenty of possibilities that come to mind when you stop and re-examine the issue. Then work your way through those items, discarding the ones that aren’t relevant. Sometimes opening your mind a bit is the best way to find the exact cause of an issue.

    Steve Jones

  • Data Lakes

    I heard a new phrase this week: the data lake. It comes from a Radar Podcast episode where Edd Dumbill talks about data as an asset that should be exposed everywhere in an organization. There’s a blog post on the subject as well.

    The idea is somewhat centered on Hadoop, but it could apply elsewhere. Data comes into an organization and then tends to seek and get stored with other data in a large lake. Applications are just a way of accessing the data in the lake, but all the data really lives in a large Hadoop lake of information. In some sense, this isn’t far away from the “single view of the truth” that I’ve seen plenty of organizations attempt. In a relational world this means all data moves from OLTP systems to a large data warehouse, and is then moved to smaller data marts (really warehouse subsets) and is accessed from there.

    It’s a good idea in theory, but in the practice of trying to move data around with any velocity between users, with all the copying, cleaning, transforming, and more going on doesn’t work. OLTP systems are needed because there are transactional actions that must be completed quickly and accurately. Moving this data to other systems becomes harder as data volumes and the sheer number of clients (whether users or other systems) increase. The idea that we can keep all of our processes working quickly enough that users won’t get frustrated is likely a dream. The more a value exists in a set of data, the more users will access it. The more accesses, the slower it often becomes, which starts a cycle of smaller subsets of data and applications that subsist on those small data puddles.

    Excel is probably the most common example of a data puddle that exists in your organization. A set of data, perhaps out of date, but useful enough to make decisions based on. Infinitely flexible and convenient enough that updates, changes, and more often spawn more and more puddles where the information never gets transferred back to the large lake of a database, whether that’s an RDBMS, Hadoop clusters, or something else.

    I think the idea of a large data lake is great, but in a practical sense, much of an organization’s data will never live in the lake. If it does, it will most likely be data that’s been superceeded by information in a puddle somewhere on an employee’s laptop, tablet, or personal cloud.

    Steve Jones

  • Normalizing Performance

    This week I ran across a post from Glenn Berry on hardware performance that I thought framed the concept of performance value well. In the post, Glenn talks about the latest TPC-E benchmark and the SQL Server performance values that vendors release. Glenn mentions that he always tries to divide out the numbers to provide better comparisons for the various hardware choices.

    That makes a lot of sense to me, as I think very few of us would be able to afford the top of the line systems on which vendors run the benchmarks. Most of us try to somehow compare the results in some way and then make our own decisions for our smaller systems. I don’t know many people that run 36 core machines, but I do know lots that need to decide which 4 or 8 core systems they should choose.

    The idea of normalizing performance to smaller loads is something we do often. We need to do this, because we often can’t get the same size, scale, or specifications in our test systems as we have in production. As much as we’d like to have them, resources are limited, and we do need to have some way of extrapolating the results in our development and test systems forward to production.

    Glenn has a way of doing this for CPUs, and while you might not agree with his method, at least he has an organized way of doing things, and then letting empirical results provide feedback on whether this works well. You should do the same thing, whether you’re trying to gauge disk or T-SQL speed. Develop a hypothesis (or read about how other do so)  for measuring your performance on a lesser, and then your primary system. Take time to run some test the same way, even if it’s single query performance on a production system while it’s live.

    You won’t get perfect results and scalability, but you’ll develop a few metrics that allow you to determine if your decisions in development will have severe negative impacts. There still might be problems, but you should eliminate more and more of these over time.

  • Saving Hard Dollars

    This week I ran across an analytics piece that talks about how Big Data and analysis can do more than help marketing, it can also create hard dollars for your company. Companies are using sensors and technology for mundane tasks, but tasks that can save the company substantial, hard dollars.

    You may have heard of UPS and FedEx optimizing their routes, and tracking the actions of drivers. Those companies (and others) have learned that a little programming work to analyze and create instructions for their workers can reduce wasted time and fuel, which ultimately means less wasted money. Other companies have reduced their heating or cooling costs with more data and small investments.

    I don’t know how many additional cost reductions can take place in most companies, but there are likely changes none of us have thought of that could be easily implemented with technology. It seems like a no-brainer that technology can build better routes, but early on, it wasn’t considered as an option because it didn’t replace a formal manual process. It wasn’t worth paying someone to design routes each day for a truck.

    As computer power increases, and more data becomes available, I predict that we’ll find many ways to analyze that data and change the way we run businesses. Many of the ideas will be unexpected, and some may be counter-intuitive, but those of us working with data will have a front-row seat to the ways in which data analysis can transform our world.

    Steve Jones