Voice of the DBA

Tag: Redgate

Monday Monitor Tips: Knowing Your RPO

A customer was asking recently about the RPO for their estate, and I showed them a few things from the Estate tab in Redgate Monitor. This post covers a few highlights.

This is part of a series of posts on Redgate Monitor. Click to see the other posts

Knowing Your RPO

It’s not often I have been asked by a business user about the Recovery Point Objective, though I’ve seen plenty of DBAs ask business people what they want as an RPO. If you don’t know what an RPO is, read this, and then think of this as the amount of data I could potentially lose.

Not that I will, but it’s possible.

In Redgate Monitor, the Estate tab shows you the RPO for all databases, as a graph. I’m showing this one from the demo site at monitor.red-gate.com. As you can see, I have most of my databases with an RPO of 1 hour or less. The vast majority are under 12 hours.

Note: This graph doesn’t include databases that have never been backed up.

This is based on backups, not on clustering or AGs or anything else, but this does let me determine if I think my estate is healthy. I wish I could alert or easily monitor this, but I can see if there are problems.

If I scroll down, I can sort the table of all databases by the worst RPO. I see this, which shows the SSC server at the top.

I’m not worried, as this is an AG setup and the one database is backed up regularly. Obviously we had a hiccup as 3 days is crazy, but I’m confident someone fixed this as I see a lower RPO with the current backups that have been completed.

If I filter by these servers, things look better.

At an estate level, there may be systems with a large RPO. Data warehouses, or reporting systems aren’t backed up as they can be reloaded in an emergency.

This is a good way for you to keep a high level view of your estate. In general, you will get a feel for what the estate looks like and you can drill into individual systems or databases if you’re wondering. I wish I could filter by RPO, but maybe that’s coming one day.

Summary

This section of the Estate tab gives you a high level view of backups and how you’ve configured them. Ultimately your backup schedule is less important than the RPO it produces and this let’s you keep an eye on what the RPO is for everything.

Redgate Monitor is a world class monitoring solution for your database estate. Download a trial today and see how it can help you manage your estate more efficiently.

October 14, 2024
Webinar tomorrow: The Role of Databases in the Era of AI

I’m hosting a webinar tomorrow with Rie Merritt from Microsoft. We’ll be talking about some of the sessions that Microsoft has planned for the PASS Data Community Summit as well as a discussion of how AI is changing our world.

Register and I’ll see you tomorrow.

October 14, 2024
Friday Flyway Tips: Searching a Migration

This was actually a cool tip I saw internally from one of the product managers, when trying to find specific text in a migration.

I’ve been working with Flyway Desktop for work more and more as we transition from older SSMS plugins to the standalone tool. This series looks at some tips I’ve gotten along the way.

A Large Project

I’ve got a project in Flyway Desktop that I add to regularly. It doesn’t do anything amazing, but I keep slowly adding objects, with the idea that I want to build up a large project for showcasing different things to customers. You can look at the project here if you are interested.

In my list of migrations, I’ve got a number of migrations, 21 to this point. It is a little hard to read names here, but I’ve named each script to make searching easier. I’ve included a create or alter, a type, and an object name. This helps me use the search box at the top of FWD, which searches migration names.

Most of these are relatively small scripts, one or two objects. A few are a little larger. If I select a particular one (21 as shown below), the code scrolls off the screen. Even if I expand the code listing to take up the entire screen, I can’t see all the code.

More importantly, it can be hard to visually find something in the code. If you’ve ever edited a stored procedure of 100 or more lines, you know what I mean.

One of our PMs pointed out recently that you can use the standard browser CTRL+F if you’ve clicked into the script. I’ve done this below and the search widget pops up at the top of the code. I’ve entered part of an object name here, prod, and you can see this shows 6 matches.

The first one is highlighted in a pale yellow color in the code.

If I click the down (or up) arrows in the search widget, the code jumps around, as it would in a browser. You can see below I’ve jumped down to the 4th occurrence, with the 2nd and 3rd highlighted in an orange(ish) color, while the 4th also has the yellow background bar.

Many of us would perform work on this code in an IDE (SSMS, ADS, etc.), but while managing a project or perhaps evaluating something else, we might want to quickly find something in code in FWD. Perhaps reviewing a change I’m about to commit. USing CTRL+F might be a handy feature.

I do wish the search was more comprehensive at the top, and could dig through all the files in the project, but at least I can search within a file here. Having a good naming convention for migrations also helps me to find the high level purpose for a migration in the list.

Flyway Enterprise

Try Flyway Enterprise out today. If you haven’t worked with Flyway Desktop, download it today. There is a free version that organizes migrations and paid versions with many more features.

If you use Flyway Community, download Flyway Desktop and get a GUI for your migration scripts.

Video Walkthrough

I made a quick video showing this as well. You can watch it below, or check out all the Flyway videos I’ve added:

October 11, 2024
Monday Monitor Tip: Compliance Checking for Old Versions

A customer recently wanted to know if any of their instances were too old and out of support. This was for a compliance purpose, and they had the need to show a report to management of when instances were out of compliance with policies.

This post shows how you can do this in Redgate Monitor.

This is part of a series of posts on Redgate Monitor. Click to see the other posts

Compliance Templates

This is an Enterprise feature, but it allows the administrators of Redgate Monitor to define templates for how the various servers and databases ought to be configured. Deviance from standards, or compliance with standards is often something auditors care about you documenting.

This is very easy with Redgate Monitor. Let’s see how this works.

Under the Security tab (appears in Enterprise edition), you can see there is a Configuration Compliance item. Click this.

This brings up the Configuration Compliance screen. This starts with Servers (highlighted with a bar to denote this tab, but there are also databases and Compliance templates. We want to choose compliance templates.

This tab shows the various templates that exist already in the system. I’m looking at monitor.red-gate.com, which has three templates configured already.

If you scroll to the right, we can see that two of these are server (instance) templates and one is a database template. We can add a new one, or edit existing ones. For this post, I’ll edit the Workload Server template.

After we click Edit, we get another set of tabs for the template itself. The default is for security, but there are also performance and environment options. Pic the Environment tab.

This brings up a list of settings. Scroll down to the bottom and you will see what settings below for Product Level, Product Version, Product version number, and Edition.

In this case, the template is checking that every server has at least SQL Server 2019 Enterprise installed. If any other version were installed, this would show as non compliant. This is useful for grouping your servers by versions.

The values entered here are the ones you would get back from the ServerProperty() function.

Summary

This post shows how you can configure a compliance template to check that the versions of SQL Server you have installed meet your requirements for a version.

Redgate Monitor is a world class monitoring solution for your database estate. Download a trial today and see how it can help you manage your estate more efficiently.

September 30, 2024