Voice of the DBA

Tag: hardware

  • Nothing on My Laptop

    I heard this quote at the recent Redgate Summit: “If I drop my laptop in water, I can get everything back.” The context of the quote is that all your work, your IP, your code, etc. is saved in some common or duplicate location. Everything essentially has a backup.

    I learned the lesson early in my career that keeping one copy around of things was bad. On an old Apple II, I formatted the wrong disk numerous times, necessitating me recreating homework multiple times on a very tight schedule. Over the years, I often made sure I had some backup service, but things really changed for me about ten years ago.

    I had a laptop die on me while on the road. I had copies of things in different places, and a backup service, but I had to buy a new machine and get things set up quickly. It was a pain, but I started to adopt the DevOps idea of improving my system and learning what worked. Today’s cloud services, as well as package managers (Chocolatey) helped me. A few years ago my laptop blue screened and I had to reformat the drive and rebuild everything for a presentation the next day.

    It took my about 3 hours, thanks to code, documents, and more stored and available in different services. These days, I think I was up and running on a new laptop in tens of minutes, and had most of my bits available in Explorer or inside an application in a little over an hour.

    These are great habits to ensure I can continue to work, and good for home where I don’t want to lose photos or other digital assets.  These are also good ideas for shared work inside an organization, whether on workstations or servers. Don’t operate without a way to rebuild systems, including configuration and data, if something fails. Cultivate cattle, not pets, as the DevOps people say.

    Steve Jones

  • Hardware: Check the Drivers First

    This isn’t a database post, instead, I’m going to talk about my laptop.

    I got an HP Spectre x360 a couple years ago and was using it for work and presentations while traveling. Everything was fine, and then the COVID-19 pandemic shut down travel. I rarely used it across the last year, mostly working on my desktop, or using another laptop I have around. I didn’t sit idle for a year, but I might have used it every 2-3 months for a few hours.

    I know I have updated some software, including Windows in the last year, but a  few weeks ago I picked up the laptop and took it with me on a trip to work. I opened it to get something done and the screen kept flickering, sometimes going dark. I rebooted, and it seemed to do better.

    I used it a few more times across the last few weeks and each time the flicking got worse. It was essentially unusable, and I assumed that the hardware hinge between the keyboard and screen was damaged somehow and causing flickering. I started to go down the support process for repair, but then stopped.

    I’m not sure why, but I searched for “hp spectre screen flickering”. Google auto completed the last word, so I suspected that this was a known issue. I still assumed hardware, but I clicked and read a few posts, like this one.

    The medium answer (we’re past short here) is that the driver for this laptop from HP causes flickering. It acted like a poor connection, but when I downloaded the drivers from Intel and installed them, the flickering stopped.

    Crazy.

    It always pays to do a little research and ask some questions before assuming you know what’s wrong. In this case, I found a solution I never would have thought of: using the generic chip drivers instead of the manufacturer.

  • The Database Server Upgrade for Let’s Encrypt

    Let’s Encrypt is a service the provides free SSL certificates for web servers. They have grown from a small project to a critical service on the web that serves over 235mm clients each year, and often issues over 1.5mm certificates each day. They depend on a MariaDB database to support this, and recently, they released a post on the database server upgrade they made. They run physical hardware on a managed services provider (Datto), rather than using a cloud platform service, which is fine. While cloud services are great, they aren’t always the best choice. I’d like to see them talk about any evaluation as to what Datto is better than, say, AWS.

    In any case, I like seeing how people upgrade hardware, as well as the impact of changes. I haven’t always done this when I’ve upgraded my home systems, though I do notice the new one always runs faster. Good for me, but for production systems, we should have better metrics, if for no other reason than to better learn how to size the next upgrade.

    In this case, Let’s Encrypt has a great post that shows how the hardware changed. They moved from Intel to AMD, 48 threads to 128 threads, doubled RAM, and went from mid 500MB/s read/writes to 3200MB/s. Their response metrics also improved, with API requests going from 90ms to 9ms. CPU dropped from 90% to 25% and latency is a third of previous values. Quite an impressive change.

    I like seeing the details of their change, and I think this is a nice pattern for others to think about. Whether you spec out machines, VMs in AWS, or DTUs in Azure. You ought to have some metrics that matter for your customers, and then compare the before and after. Prove your upgrade worked, or maybe prove that you need to alter your specs after the upgrade. One advantage with a cloud provider is that you can often scale up or down as needed. With an MSP, it might be harder, but I bet you can still change hardware fairly quickly if you suspect a problem.

    While we all want to test a new configuration before we turn it on, simulating a workload can be challenging. Clients somehow always seem to find ways to stress systems we hadn’t anticipated. When spec’ing out a new system, make sure you have room to grow if you’ve underestimated how the new system performs. You also might set specific targets that aim to improve your metrics to some level. Even if you don’t hit the estimate, you will learn something about your methodology that can help you improve your guess for the future.

    Above all, publish something like Let’s Encrypt. Share some data and help our industry move forward. We’ve love to have you write something for SQLServerCentral.

    Steve Jones

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

  • The Challenge of Audio Data

    I’ve worked remote from my co-workers for nearly 20 years. In that time, I’ve spent a lot of time on the phone, as well as in audio and video calls. Quality has often been an issue, both with seeing others and hearing them. Add in accents, speech patterns, and equipment quality, and I’ve often found myself frustrated and upset with calls. Over the years things have improved, and I have to say that the modern Zoom/Teams/Slack style of everyone working separately and being in their own environment has made it easier to communicate.

    However, it’s still not great. I was on a call a few hours before I wrote this, where someone was talking on a laptop microphone, and as they moved their head, the audio quality changed dramatically. They also raised and lowered their voice, depending on their interest in that part of the update, which had me constantly raising and lowering the volume on my side.

    There was an article recently that noted employees can struggle with bad audio as they try to work remotely with others. Stress, frustration, embarrassment, and more can affect employees. For a once a week hour-long meeting, this might not be an issue. For daily stand-ups or multiple meetings a day, this is likely going to be a long term problem.

    When I’m on a call, I don’t know how I sound, unless someone tells me that there is an issue. I sometimes use a headset and mic, but I also take meetings with my PC speakers and external mic. To b fair, I haven’t often reviewed my audio sounds on a recording, but I know that there are times I get annoyed by heavy breathing by others, typing on keyboards, or even echos from someone else’s laptop speaker.

    It’s not often, but it does happen regularly. I haven’t even mentioned the issues at the beginning of calls of getting people connected to audio on calls, which are frustrating and often waste five or more minutes at the start of the meeting. We’ve tolerated and dealt with a lot of issues across the last few months of this pandemic, and I’m glad that most organizations, in most situations, have done so.

    That doesn’t mean that continued issues will be as easy to handle over the long term. We will see stress and struggles go up if we can’t ensure that audio data has a high quality, as we expect from email, chat, and other written data. I’m going to try and ensure that I listen to some recordings of myself in meetings, and ensure my audio setup is good, not just for me, but for everyone. I hope others do the same.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.