Voice of the DBA

Tag: sql server

  • The DBA is Dead

    I love seeing articles like this one: The Database Administrator is Dead. They make me laugh and look back at previous incarnations of the same thought. I think I should save the text of this article, stick it in an appointment with a reminder for 2 years from now, and then read it again.

    The first time I heard this was back in 2000. I was working in a small company and SQL Server 7.0 came out with a marketing push that a DBA wouldn’t be needed. The developers I worked with crowded around and asked if I was worried about my job. I’ll admit I was a little worried, even as I denied any concerns to my co-workers, but as I read about the changes and thought about my job, I realized it was all for naught.

    While much of our jobs can be automated, the specific details and implementation of any automation at any particular job will vary widely at different companies. Even at different times. The work that DBAs do is not going away, and someone needs to continue to provide some administration and management of databases.

    I will admit that I think there is less of a need for DBAs at many companies, at least if the DBAs are strictly managing security and backups. The amount of time these tasks take now has been dramatically reduced with new tools for managing systems, both within SQL Server and from third party vendors. If you have a job that just deals with basic administration, good for you, but I wouldn’t stop learning. Those talents might not be enough to get you a new job if you need one.

    I also think that today’s DBAs need to be able to handle the limited administration that might be needed on other platforms, including the cloud. We need to understand how we can work with, and speed up development, with SQL Server databases while helping to improve the quality of any database code that’s written. We need to learn about how we can get the most from the platform while integrating with a variety of technologies.

    The DBA isn’t dead, and I’ve created that appointment for 2 years down the road. It will be interesting to see how things have changed in that time.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.9MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Mevio . feed

    The Voice of the DBA podast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

  • Servicing SQL Server in the Future

    Service Packs have become the way that many of us patch the various Microsoft products we use. Many administrators find patching to be time consuming and difficult to justify, even for security patches, and as a result, often wait for a Service Pack before they inform clients and schedule testing. Most people used to always wait for Service Pack 1 before installing a new version of a server product, but I don’t think that’s necessary anymore. The quality of Microsoft server products has gone up quite a bit in the last 5 years.

    However, I don’t like the way that the servicing, or patching, of products has evolved. For SQL Server, we get patches every other month, known as Cumulative Updates. Exchange Server has also moved to this format, though it seems many of the other server products (Windows Server, Sharepoint, System Center, etc) still release Service Packs. A few years ago it was rumored that Microsoft would not release Service Pack 3 for SQL Server 2005. A number of us voted on this patch and it was eventually released.

    The strategy announced at that time was that SQL Server would receive a service pack 6 months after the RTM release and thereafter annual service packs until support expired for the product. In between, Cumulative Updates would be released. That seemed to be the case for a few years, but once again Microsoft seems to have quietly decided not to move forward with Service Packs. We’ve been getting cumulative updates, but no service packs in over a year and a half. The last SPs we have are SP1 for 2012 (Nov 2012), SP2 for 2008 R2 (July 2012), and SP3 for 2008 (Oct 2011).

    If you’re like to express your opinion, take a moment and vote for these items:

    It just takes a moment to click on them, and I’d also ask that you pass along the URL (or this editorial) to friends that work with SQL Server.

    Personally I’d also like to see a solid strategy moving forward that includes annual service packs, especially with a 2 year release cycle. I know some of my fellow MVPs and writers like the CU strategy and wish more people would adopt it, but I don’t agree. It’s time consuming to test and prepare for updates, and as long as this paragraph appears on CU pages, I do not think we should recommend CUs to DBAs.

    “This cumulative package is intended to correct only the problems that are described in this article. Apply it only to systems that are experiencing these specific problems. The updates in this package may receive additional testing. Therefore, if you are not severely affected by any of these problems, we recommend that you wait for the next SQL Server 2012 service pack that contains the hotfixes in this package.”

    To me that shows even Microsoft doesn’t completely want to stand behind their cumulative updates.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.7MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Mevio . feed

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

  • Common Checks

    One of the things that I recommend to DBAs is that as they write code to solve problems, they write some sort of check to catch future potential occurrences of the issue. For example, I worked with a product years ago that had an identity column as an int, but this product scanned thousands of our systems every 5 minutes, logging each scan. We found that after 8-12 months, we’d run out of identity ranges.

    While we considered changing to a bigint, this was a third party product and they did not want to allow us to alter the schema. Since there were only a few million rows in the table at any one time, we decided to write a check that would alert us when the table came close to running out of integer values. A DBA could then easily reseed the identity property to prevent issues.

    Across my career I’ve found many other instances where we could write checks to find issues before users were impacted. At SQLServerCentral we have checks looking for discrepancies in points awarded, in incorrect status values, and more. These often don’t impact the users of the site, but they are alerts that let administrators know about potential problems before they become issues.

    This week I’m wondering:

    What types of common issues have you found that could be valuable as checks for other DBAs?

    Perhaps looking for delays in replication or Service Broker? Jobs that never stop or never execute for some reason? Memory or space alerts? Do you look for localsystem as a service account? Let us know what checks you’ve written, or which ones you wish were available for you to download and use on your systems.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.4MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Mevio . feed

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

  • Looking to 2014

    It’s amazing to think that 2014 is already here. We’re 13 years past the fictional 2001 and now 4 years after the 2010 movie sequel. I’d still guess that those movies should have been set another 100 years into the future, given where we are today with technology. We start a new year today and I wanted to look forward to guess where the data world might go in the next year.

    As I think about SQL Server in 2014, there’s one big item that will change; we’ll have a new version. SQL Server 2014 will be released, and while I don’t think there are a lot of changes coming, there are a few noteworthy items. The two biggest items that I see coming with SQL Server 2014 are the In-Memory-OLTP Tables and writeable columnstore indexes. There are many other improvements to Resource Governor, Azure integration, incremental statistics, Power View, and a few more. However overall, it seems as though this isn’t worthy of a full release to me. There are two big features, but most of the rest of the changes feel small and incremental.

    In the rest of the data world, I see 2014 as a ho-hum, continue along the path evolution. We will see lots of people realize the Hadoop is more of a solution in search of a problem than vice versa. Hadoop works well, but it isn’t necessary for most problem domains and might be more work and cost than is needed. I suspect we’ll find that many people are also trying to use the various NoSQL platforms as a magic bullet to solve some problem they have and will realize that they really haven’t attacked the problem properly. Most of the time it’s not the platform, it’s their approach and changing platforms won’t fix that.

    I do hope that people continue to experiment with, use, and write about NoSQL platforms. We need to learn more about where and when these platforms are useful. I saw 5 database predictions from Michael Stonebraker recently and overall I agree with them. We will see more options for solving data problems, and more often than we expect, we will find that multiple solutions can, and perhaps should be, used. However we shouldn’t use platforms to use platforms, and we certainly need more expertise.

    I do think we will start to see more interesting hardware being released in 2014 and beyond. Tablets are maturing and I suspect by the end of 2014 we’ll have many, many choices from manufacturers of different sizes, form factors, and types of convertability for laptop devices. I suspect we’ll the line between phone, tablet, and laptop will continue to blur, and while I’m not sure we’ll get more types of new devices than watches or eyeglasses, I am hoping that we see more creative attempts. Personally I’d like to see new monitors that can project onto glass or semi-transparent surfaces and still handle touch (ala Minority Report).

    Finally, I think that Microsoft will truly abandon the RT experiment and move to a dual desktop Windows and Windows Phone platforms. They’ve talked about a unifying platform, but I don’t see that working, and certainly not in 2014. However I am hopeful the restructuring at Microsoft will have Windows Phone moving to take over phones, some tablets, and perhaps even some laptop-style devices while Windows on the desktop and server will scale from hundred-core multi-terabytes of RAM servers to tablet style devices. Perhaps even with the option to turn off all touch-screen like items. At least, that’s what I’d do.

    I look forward to 2014 as the start of a new year and with the optimism that I’ll be surprised and amazed at some point by technology.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Mevio . feed

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

    Follow Steve Jones on Twitter to find links and database related items and announcements.