Voice of the DBA

Tag: Humor

  • How To Make Your Laptop 100x Faster

    Simon Sabin had his own take on increasing laptop speed. He had some good ideas, but he inspired me to try to top his suggestions. Here’s what I came up with:

    speed

    Anyone needing help, let me know. I can swing by.

  • What Don’t I Know?

    Apparently a lot, at least according to the blooper reel today Smile

     

  • Happy Easter 2011

    Happy Easter

    This weekend is the Easter holiday weekend around the world and with today being Good Friday, it’s a vacation day for me.

    The ski slopes are closing this weekend and if the weather is good, I’ll be heading up for one last day of sliding down Copper mountain today. Winter is when I tend to take a lot of vacation and this weekend is the end of that season for me.

    Hopefully everyone is having a quiet day if you are at work, with nothing broken and no deployments scheduled over the holiday. I know that holidays are often the best time for deployments to occur for the business as there are less people working on the systems. When I worked as a production DBA, especially in places where the systems were usually in use 24 hours a day by other employees, holidays were the only time we could schedule extended outages.

    As much as that can be frustrating to IT people that want to get a break on the holidays, I think that the IT business, like some other businesses, require you to trade some holiday work for time off at other parts of the year. My previous careers in the restaurant and hospitality business had me working many holidays, and I know that many people in retail positions also end up working holidays like Easter.

    My advice to find a balance in your life is to negotiate a rotation for IT covereage on holidays and perhaps even ask for two days off if you have to work this one holiday. There are lots of progressive companies that do recognize a hardship for holiday work, but plenty of others that don’t have an IT policy since most workers take the holiday off. People that work on an hourly basis usually get twice their rate for holiday work, why not salaried IT workers?

    Enjoy the weekend and enjoy the blooper reel today.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Improving SQLServerCentral

    A better database for SQLServerCentral: BigTable

    We have some big changes coming to SQLServerCentral over the next few months. In response to a large number of comments about the performance of the site, we are looking to implement some sweeping changes that will drastically improve performance, and make the site much more interesting.

    We send out nearly a million newsletters a day, which places a substantial load on our system. Our hardware upgrade last year improved the performance, but as we continue to grow, we are stressing the hardware. When we add in the global reach of our forums, we have once again begun to noticed a slowdown on the systems.

    Fortunately we have a solution. One of the distinguished engineers at Red Gate has a brother that works for Google and they have agreed to help us out. We received a license to implement the BigTable technology at SQLServerCentral and will be moving our primary database systems to this NoSQL storage. This will allow us to scale out effectively with a large number of small, single socket, dual core servers, each of which will handle a portion of our load.

    In addition we have decided to also scale out our articles using the cloud. With a combination of the BigTable technology and GoogleDocs, we will be moving all our publications to the cloud, enabling you to get access to our content with the power of the Google network. We will have analytics built in and the OpenID framework will authenticate you with a Google ID.

    Of course, this is all a big joke give that today is April Fools day in the US. We like Google’s technology, but we *love* SQL Server and have no desire to move off that platform for any other. Now if we could get Resource Governor in our Standard Edition, all would be great.

    Enjoy your day and hopefully you liked this editorial.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts