Voice of the DBA

Tag: sql server

  • Shrinking Databases

    Every time you shrink a database, an angel gets its wings torn off. Or Paul Randal feels a disturbance in The Force. In other words, don’t do it.

    But people continually do shrink databases. Despite the constant advice and guidance from Microsoft, MVPs, and more, the fact that shrink is available easily in maintenance plans and with a DBCC command, people do it. I understand it since it’s natural to not waste space and so many other tools, like Access and Outlook, have files that only use the spaced needed.  Why not SQL Server?

    It’s Friday, and I thought I might see if there might be a oslution tht makes sense. For this poll, I want to ask you about shrink:

    Should shrink be removed or fixed?

    By removed, I don’t mean completely take it out of SQL Server, but make it harder. Maybe require a trace flag, maybe something else that might reduce the regularity with which it’s run. I’d certainly recommend it be completely removed from maintenance plans, both the wizard and the designer.

    Is there a better solution, however? Should perhaps shrink be fixed to be a more intelligent operation that doesn’t cause lots of fragmentation? Even if it’s slower, or maybe an operation that requires more resources to complete, would it be better to actually “fix” shrink?

    Put your answers in the discussion and let us know what you think

    Steve Jones

  • Certified Private Clouds

    Cloud computing is becoming more and more popular, or at least, more and more talked about in the tech press. Like many of you, I am not sure that I want to run my database servers from the cloud, but that might change. I ran across a note that said Microsoft is looking to certify private cloud stacks with a number of vendors, similar to the Fast Track program that they implemented for data warehousing.

    For some time now I’ve felt that to really get large scale adoption of the Azure cloud framework, Microsoft really needed to have a way for corporate IT departments to build and deploy to private, internal “cloud services.” Clouds they could build, expand, and most importantly, secure, according to their own requirements, on their own premises. The idea of trusting a central provider seems foreign to many companies, especially when governments could subpoena your information or the cloud provider could shut down your business. To what extent you are more protected on premises is unclear, but many companies do no want to trust a third party to safeguard their rights.

    The idea of a service that you can deploy to, connect to, and use to abstract your applications away from specific machines is one that makes sense. We constantly build abstraction layers to simplify the interconnections of our systems. The “cloud”, whether public or private, is another extension of this. I know I’d like to be able to manage one large SQL Server cloud, rather than individual machines.

    Actually, it seems like  a lot of the work I’ve done over the years is to try and make all my instances appear as one single group that I can manage together. Kind of my own type of “cloud.”

    Steve Jones

  • Consolidation

    I’m about to go down one laptop, which is good. I have had too many for some time. Right now I’ve got:

    • Dell 17” Inspiron which is in need of retirement. This is about 8 years old, the wireless radio is whacked, and my son has filled the 30GB HDD.
    • HP Netbook – Essentially my wife’s now as she uses it to blog. Too slow for me.
    • Toshiba Qosmio F45 – Been dead for awhile with a CMOS issue. However after 6 months perhaps it’s dead enough I can restart it and give it to a kid
    • Lenovo W510 – My primary machine, about to lose the DVD drive and get an SSD as a second drive.
    • Acer 1420P – PDC laptop, which I just sold and need to clean up.
    • iPad – Testing/demo’ing SQL Monitor from Red Gate. My second travel machine when my little girl doesn’t have ahold of it.

    That’s a lot of hardware, in addition to a quad core, 8GB desktop. So I’ll go down a machine, and maybe two if I can get the Toshiba working and send it to my son. Someone else can make do with the Dell.

  • Speed

    We are always improving our computer hardware. It used to be that our CPUs increased their clock speed regularly. Then we started to add additional cores. Along with large increases of memory and disk technology, there has been this quest to lower the response time of our systems. However many of our computers don’t seem to actually be moving quicker.

    Are our database systems responding quicker? We have better search and join algorithms, hardware that transfers data quicker, and more knowledge about how to index our tables. I know all that information might not always be used in many systems, but we can strive to use the DMVs and DMFs to learn more about our databases and tune them better.

    But do they respond quicker? In many cases they don’t, and part of this is the continual growth of data. It seems we accumulate more and more data, at faster rates each year. There is also the ever-increasing level of overhead we seem to add to each piece of software we use. The bloat of software, often with frameworks designed to make the developer’s job easier, result in systems that aren’t any more responsive than they have been in the past.

    I do wish software responded quicker, but I also love the richness of so many applications and web sites that I see. I think overall we’ve improved the experience of working with software by adding new features and capabilities over the years, especially in SQL Server.

    Steve Jones