Voice of the DBA

Tag: Friday Poll

  • A Flock of SQL Servers

    Check out the #sqlhelp hashtag on Twitter

    Twitter is an amazing application. I still remember hearing about it in the spring of 2008 as some type of “let others know what you’re doing” service. It seemed a little silly to me and I couldn’t understand the value. My first tweet is lost for now, but I know that I struggled to find a use for the service at the beginning. Like many people, I ended up updating my status with inane things like “Getting a latte from Starbucks.”

    Since then I’ve found Twitter to be a very exciting way of keeping in touch with people around the world, learning new things, and even getting information at various events. It’s the ultimate water cooler that makes me smile, laugh, and share interesting information. There is a great SQL Server community on Twitter, and an amazing hashtag (#sqlhelp) that might help you solve some complex SQL issue. It’s happened before, and it’s amazing when it does, especially considering that responses are limited to 140 characters.

    It seems that there are any number of ways in which people use the service to spread information and interact with others. However there are security implications in using Twitter, and that leads me to this week’s poll:

    Do you want your SQL Servers tweeting?

    If you find some way in which it might be useful for your database server to send information out through a broadcast service, would you want to use Twitter? Are you worried about potential security implications, or maybe just the potential load from a large number of broadcasts. Would you ever consider letting your application or database server read twitter updates and respond to them?

    If you haven’t tried Twitter, I’d recommend you do so. It isn’t for everyone, but I’ve found a lot of value and inspiration from the service.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Geeky Distractions

    Captain America is recommended for geeks.

    I saw Captain America recently and enjoyed it. I’ve been following the Marvel comics as they move to the movie screen, having seen Iron Man and Thor as well, and looking forward to The Avengers next year. My kids have enjoyed the movies as well, and it’s likely to be a nice family night out when it releases.

    It’s the middle of summer, with many blockbuster movies released this year that fall into the science fiction, or even geeky, areas at my house. We have had a new Transformers and X-Men movies, Falling Skies on TV, along with a (scary) introduction to Dr. Who for my daughter, and I’ve enjoyed a few books like the Solar Clipper Seriesand the Spinward Fringe series.

    We have no shortage of amazing geeky media around here, and I’m wondering if you feel the same. With that in mind, on a middle-of-the-summer Friday, I have a fun, non-database poll for you:

    What’s your favorite geek media for 2011?

    It could be a book, a movie, or something else. What has excited you in the science fiction world this year? What would you recommend to your fellow geeks that are looking for a diversion from work and want to have some fun?

    I have a few listed above, but right now I’m also reading Temporary Duty, about the first trips in space by humans after meeting another race of traders. It’s from the perspective of a second class enlisted man, which is interesting. I’d also recommend The Burning Wire, with the mystery of Jeffrey Deaver meeting electricity in a scary way.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Self-aware Instances

    I like the idea of limited self-awareness in our systems.

    I’ve been seeing lots of monitoring solutions written up lately. I saw this blog from Phil Darmanin on SQLServerCentral and we have had numerous articles written over the years on building monitoring solutions. The build vs. buy debate is one that companies regularly have, and if time is an issue, my company, Red Gate, sells a great solution in SQL Monitor that’s worth checking out.

    However most of the solutions I see use a similar architecture. They have a central monitoring server that reaches out to all other servers and gathers information from them, which is rolled up into a database for reporting. That’s fine, but in many cases there isn’t a ton of testing or error handling built into home grown solutions, and when they fail, you lose data for the day. You also either go into fire-fighting mode to get things working, or you just drop data for a few days.

    However I’ve had a different approach in the past. I’ve typically had a set of monitoring scripts that I’ve deployed to each instance, having them run on a schedule that gathers all the data on settings, changes, backups, jobs, etc. for that instance. I then have a central server that just reads that data from each instance, so if I have an issue with my rollup process, I still have the data on each instance. For this Friday, I wanted to ask this question of you:

    Do you like the idea of architecting processes to be more self aware and distributed, or do you prefer some central process that reaches out to control everything?

    It’s an interesting debate, and one that reminds me of an MIT competition years ago. Early in the 90s, there was a competition where different professors were trying to build robots to navigate a space. One team used a central CPU with complex instructions that controlled the legs and eyes and made decisions. The other used smaller, less powerful controllers in each leg and eye and had them “learn” to work together. Both worked well in different ways, but the latter approach always struck me as a more interesting one.

    For your SQL Server, or application code, which approach to you prefer and why? Let us know this Friday.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Temporary Indexes

    Temporary placeholders can be valuable

    Recently I was studying for the MCM exam and one of the things that came up in my research was the idea of temporary indexes. I had never used them before and was intrigued by the idea. I have dropped indexes before a large load and then recreated them, but these are indexes I planned to keep on the table indefinitely.

    There are always processes that you run periodically on some schedule. These might be end of month, or end of year processes where you run a series of reports or queries that aren’t necessarily run at other times in your business cycle.

    Since this was a new concept for me, I wanted to ask and see how many others might actually be using this. Maybe you’ll get an idea for how to speed up some of the periodic, but very important, processes you run. For this Friday:

    Do you use temporary indexes?

    By temporary, I mean indexes that you create for a process and then discard at the end of a process. These could be indexes that you use to supplement some type of data load, perhaps indexes used in staging tables. Or they could be indexes that are added to some OLTP tables for the processing of certain reports in a short period of time.

    However you might implement them, let us know how you use them, and how they have improved performance for you.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts