Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

  • SQL Saturday Advice–Upload Decks Early

    One of the neat features for the SQL Saturday site is that it allows the speakers to upload a deck that is attached to their session. If you go to the schedule after the event, and pick a session you attended, you can get the Powerpoint deck, the code, anything the speaker has uploaded. That’s handy, and too often I’ve been at events where speakers point you to some location they use and it’s easy to forget where this is, or where the information is stored.

    However the organizers have to send this note to speakers, and in most events, this has come after the event. I’ll admit that sometimes I’ve been busy and have forgotten to upload the deck, or I’ve been slow to do so. However Saturday night, Sunday, or early the next week is when the attendees are thinking about the event, and if the deck isn’t there, they might not go back.

    This week I got the link early for SQL Saturday #60 in Cleveland. I was changing a couple slides in the presentation, based on feedback from previous events, and was a day late in uploading, but I have finished, and my deck is uploaded. Now I don’t have to worry about it, and the link is live, people can get the deck for themselves.

    I know some speakers are working on their decks at the last minute. I don’t think that’s a great idea, but I understand people have busy lives and they might be trying to add something on Friday that they learned recently. Or they remember to correct something from the last session as they’re reviewing the night before. That’s OK, and the organizers can always replace the code with a new download.

    I do think, however, that most attendees would appreciate having the downloads available right away, and by sending the upload link to speakers before the event, you can improve the chances you’ll have all the downloads uploaded and ready.

  • A Full Backup can Impact a Log Backup–MCM Prep

    In the early days of SQL Server you could not run a log backup while a full backup was running. In fact,you tried to schedule them apart from each other early in my career to prevent collisions. Nothing bad happens, but it does cause failures in your monitoring and those are annoying.

    In modern versions of SQL Server, you can run log backups and simultaneous full backups. They don’t collide or block each other, but there is a way that the full backup impacts a log backup.

    If you start a full backup, once all data pages are written to the backup device, the log records that were created since the start of the full backup are added to the full backup file. This allows the redo/undo process to complete and this gives you a full backup set that is intact as of the point in time in which the data pages finish writing.

    If you run a log backup, typically the log records are written out, and then the VLFs in the log file that were written to disk are marked as inactive.

    However since those log records are needed for the full backup to be complete, the log backup cannot clear those VLFs when the log backup finishes. That process still occurs, and technically this is part of the log backup, but it is deferred until the full backup completes.

  • Work Isn’t the Most Important Thing

    brokenpipe_cI had quite an adventure today, away from work. We had a pipe freeze in the house, a sick kid, and then a plumber call when the pipe broke. All in all, with school closed and kids home, I haven’t gotten much work done. My wife ended up also missing a bunch of work at a busy time. I leave for Cleveland Friday morning, so it’s already a short week and that adds to the stress.

    But that happens. Life gets in the way of work, and there are times you need to let things go. I know there are friends that have gotten off of work this week because of the weather, and I’ve had companies close. When I lived in Virginia, we closed the office sometimes with hurricanes or strong storms, helping employees to manage their lives outside of work. I’ve helped hang plywood and even get boats out of the water in preparation for the storm.

    I think that a part of what business has to include is social responsibility. It can come with benefits like goodwill that come from donating back to schools, but I think that the highest level of profit you can make is not the way business should be run. You should consider what helps your employees, what helps your community, and what is the best way to integrate your company into the world outside of your profit.

    Hopefully your employer understands that.

  • What’s a Passive Server?

    Licensing software is often a more complicated process than I think it should be. Licensing database software seems to be even more difficult to understand, especially when you start to talk about the various high availability (HA) scenarios, virtualized  servers, separate machines to process SSIS packages and who knows what other configurations, not to mention the licensing changes with each new version of SQL Server.

    I was following a licensing debate  about how you license passive servers in an HA situation. I have always understood from the SQL Server licensing documents that if you have a passive server, it does not require a license for the SQL Server software. However it’s not that simple, or at least, it doesn’t appear that way to me.

    Suppose you have an primary instance that mirrors its database to another server. The mirror instance doesn’t need a license for that database, but what about if you also log ship your primary database to a third server? Does the third server need a license if it’s also “passive”? I assume that if you had second database on the mirror instance being used for another application, you’d need a license for that instance, but what if you only have a “DBA database” that gathers performance monitoring information for that mirror database? Is that “passive”?

    Suppose I have a 6 node cluster, and I have 4 active nodes and two passive ones, do I still have 2 other “passive” licenses for log shipped servers? Or can I log ship to 4 separate servers? That doesn’t even bring this clause into play:  “The passive server can take the duties of the active server for 30 days. Afterwards, it must be licensed accordingly” (from 2005 licensing). It almost feels like I am studying some type of Microsoft Internal Licensing Framework in preparation for some type of certification.

    To me, the simple way to handle this is to say that passive servers, those not doing any work for the business that owns them, don’t require a license. The exception would be for internal monitoring or maintenance on the passive server (backup restores, DBCC checks, DBA sysadmin monitoring). I doubt we’ll get something that simple, but that’s what I think would be fair.

    Steve Jones

    (originally published at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Editorial/72338/)

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