Voice of the DBA

Tag: sql server

  • Which Versions of SQL Server Do You Have?

    SQL Server v6.5 retail box
    This was my 5th SQL Server version upgrade.

    I have worked with every version of SQL Server since it was first available from Microsoft on OS/2. Each version has improved the features, the stability, and the scalability, and I’ve looked forward to each change. In many of the companies I worked at, we had a fairly homogenous environment, with one or two versions to support. I think some of that was the timing of my employment dates with the version release dates. If I’d stayed longer at a few jobs, I think I might have ended up supporting three versions of SQL Server in a few places.

    That seems to have changed, however with the long delay of SQL Server 2005, and then the very short delays for SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2. Now it seems many companies have two or three versions at a minimum and might have 4 versions, with SQL Server 2000 servers still available. The last year on Twitter I’ve seen a number of DBAs noting that they are retiring SQL Server 2000 instances at a good clip, with a few people eliminating the version from their environments, but there are plenty of instances still out there.

    This week I wanted to see what percentage of people are still supporting older versions. There seems to be less of a push to upgrade old servers, but we still install the latest version for newer servers. Supporting more versions may mean a higher cost of support for your infrastructure, so I decided to ask this question:

    What’s the oldest version of SQL Server you still support?

    It would be good to know how many versions you are supporting, and if you have older versions (v6.5, v7, v2000), are they used in limited systems, such as keycard systems only. My intention is to try and get an understanding of the shape of the SQL Server community, and the types of work they do each day.

    As SQL Server evolves from a core database engine and includes a wide variety of subsystems and features, I think there is less of a need to upgrade existing instances en masse. Instead targeting those applications that receive large benefits from the changes seems to make more sense. With a very stable engine and very few security problems, I think that companies will use each version longer and require their DBAs to support more versions at any one time. I am sure by the middle of 2010, we will have some DBAs supporting five versions of SQL Server in their companies, going back to SQL Server 2000.

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  • Give us all the features

    I'd rather by by scale than features

    When you look at the various editions of SQL Server available from Microsoft, there is a strange combination of restrictions at each level. Features, maximum amounts of hardware, database size, and even licensing change from edition to edition. A DBA making the decision on which edition to buy is faced with a choice that is more complex than it needs to be in order to solve a problem. The DBA not only considers the scale of their hardware, but also the mix of features present in that particular edition. It becomes even more complex for third party vendors, who may not be able to request that Enterprise or Data Center editions must be used for their product and must often choose to develop an application with a minimal amount of features.

    I would rather see all features in all editions and change the licensing model to charge by the scale of server I want. Charge me one price for a single socket, 2GB of RAM machine and more for a dual socket, 8GB machine. Let me pay by the scale, or the amount of performance I’m willing to pay for. I don’t know that Microsoft will change, but I think it would be a better way to license their software.

    As data professionals, we get paid to solve problems. We should learn to use the various tools that are available to us. For SQL Server professionals, that means choosing features like partitioning that prepare your system for archiving data. Using Resource Governor appropriately to manage disparate workloads and improve the performance for different groups of clients. Appropriately deploying online indexing operations to prevent downtime for your systems, or impacts to production processes. Better security with TDE isn’t available in Standard Edition, which is something that every company could use. Yet for many DBAs, the many customers that choose to deploy Standard Edition, these features aren’t accessible.

    Streaminsight is one of the features that follows a more logical license. It’s available in Standard Edition, but at a lower processing rate and higher latency. It scales higher if customers find the need to pay for it in Data Center, but customers are free to choose a lower level of performance, with all the same features, in other editions. This isn’t perfect since I think I’d like to see a third level of performance in Enterprise Edition, but it’s a start.

    I don’t think these choices actually convince many customers to purchase Enterprise Edition over Standard Edition. The features missing from Standard Edition aren’t necessarily hurting customers as much as they’re hurting Microsoft and the SQL Server platform. Adding those features in would improve the performance of all applications. They would allowed DBAs to perform better at their jobs, and build more robust systems that would ultimately make SQL Server a better choice for most customers than other RDBMSes. They would, IMHO, improve sales and revenue over time, not reduce them.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Password Help

    Ensure you keep shared passwords safe when people leave.

    Today we have an editorial that was originally published on Oct 9, 2006. 

    Yesterday I wrote about compliance tips and one of the things I mentioned was using encryption and passwords for your backups. It’s a good idea that you should use even with disk backups. You never know when someone might get socially-engineered and hand over one of your .bak files to the wrong folks.

    But using encryption isn’t enough; you need strong key management that changes the passwords on a regular basis to prevent data losses from the passwords getting released over time. I’ve worked in a dozen companies and there are many cases where a password has been used for some shared function, some application, some particular feature, whatever. If this password has remained the same for over a year, it’s been almost common knowledge throughout the company what the password is. I’ve seen business people, executives, even secretaries that knew the password to the point where it was useless.

    Shared passwords will be a fact of life in many cases. Administrative teams grow, help desk people may need access, consultants help out and learn them, and others overhear them. It’s going to happen, so you need to mitigate this risk.

    I used to manage a nightclub and we had similar risks with the alcohol. Since turnover was a fact of life, we had a simple policy. When a manager left, for any reason, all alarm codes were changed. On the third occurrence of a manager leaving, we had all locks re-keyed. It was a simple policy to reduce risk.

    The same thing needs to happen with your backups. Use one or even a few passwords to protect the various database backups. But then change those passwords every month or two and escrow or archive the old ones. You may not be able to prevent losses of the backup files, but by ensuring they are protected and the passwords changed regularly, you may just protect the data.

    And your job.

  • PASS Summit – Day 1 Keynote

    How can you miss the audience so badly? I can completely understand me making a mistake. It’s just me, I  am distracted by other work, I get little feedback from people whose opinions I ask, and I’m just one person. But Microsoft? Surely they have a team of people to examine the message, think about the audience and try to pick a topic and demos that matter to the group getting the message.

    I arrived late at the keynote, after SQL Run and doing a bit of work. It felt like lots of marketing talk, but the interesting thing is that the next version of SQL Server will be released in the first half of 2012 and will be called SQL Server 2012. I was hoping for a return to realistic names that make sense, with SQL Server 11, but the marketing people are likely too scared to change anything.

    SQL Server v11 will be SQL Server 2012. That will be fun. And confusing. And an endless source of difficult discussions among professionals. I was hoping for a return to reasonable naming. We got Windows 7, why not SQL Server 11?

    Oh well, we’ll get used to it and I suppose we’ll have SQL2K12 on Win2K8 or Win2K12 as well. Maybe that won’t be so bad.

    Microsoft appears to recognize there’s more of a world out there than their own products. They’ve acknowledged things at times, but for the most part keynotes seem to ignore the fact that we want and need to use other products. That didn’t stop the keynote from saying that the “eye-apps” (iApps) aren’t the only thing out there, and the keynote noting that we want tablets AND slates (who wants slates?) and a few other subtle digs at the Apple and Android worlds. It’s a transition to the Hadoop connectors have been released for SQL Server and SQL Azure.

    Denny Lee of the CAT team comes out to talk about terabytes of data from web logs needing to be analyzed. A demo of analysis in Hadoop for Windows. 100% compatible with other platforms, which I hope is true. Adding any extensions or additions that aren’t in the *nix versions would be bad.

    The demo pulls Hadoop data into Powerpivot for analysis. I guess this makes sense, but there’s a bunch of scenarios and information being shared that makes this too complex a demo for me. It’s just as contrived as most of the simpler ones, but it’s hard to see if there is a lot of value here. I guess if you use Hadoop, getting the data into Powerpivot could be nice, but hard to see how this makes SQL Server better for this crowd.

    Next we go to showing some data explorer, more demos, but my attention wanes. I’m not sure why the keynotes are talking around SQL Server. I understand that self-service BI is important, but I’m not sure that pushing it so heavily is what this audience wants to see. I don’t know how many people outside of the SQL Server pros are that interested. This seems like a talk more for executives or business users, not the IT folk.

    It feels like a miss. I know Microsoft wants to get the message out to the wider world, and there will be press people reporting on this, but I’m still surprised. The technical people want to see something that relates to them, not just to their clients. Show us something that’s of interest to us, as the developers, architects, and administrators of database systems, not as the end users.

    The press won’t beat you up, they’ll ignore you. You can always give them another presentation, demo, or press release later, but the technical people, the ones that will advocate and push for upgrades should get some attention while they’re in the room, with some explanations and talks about topics that capture their interest, not showcase features that don’t require them to advance in their careers.