Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

  • T-SQL Tuesday #13– The Business and Disaster Recovery

    I’m hosting this month’s T-SQL Tuesday blog party, but that doesn’t mean I can’t participate. I posted the invitation last week, and hopefully we’ll have a large number of people participating today.

    The Cost of HADR

    I’ve dealt with a lot of business people over the years, and for a variety of reasons. At one job, I worked for a small company, literally about 50 people, and we had a number of systems critical to our business. We had a large fax server, receiving hundreds of faxes a day from overseas. We had a large imaging server/platform in which we stored our faxes along with quite a bit of other business correspondence that we needed a record of, and we had an inventory management/sales system running on SQL Server that people used every day to run the business.

    These were all important systems, and if they were down, business would slow to a crawl. The owner of the company wanted to take advantage of all our technology and mandated “no downtime” and “zero data loss” to my boss, the VP of sales for the company. He was, of course, happy to push this down to me as a goal for the next year.

    This was in 1997, and as I investigated our possibilities for achieving this, I realized very quickly that it wasn’t a good move for the company. Clustering in SQL Server v6.5 was shaky and hard to install and maintain. Marathon Technologies had a machine that was basically a “cluster-in-box” that would do a lot of what we wanted, but it would have been around a $30k server. Since our two SQL Servers cost about $7k together, this didn’t seem like a great solution to me.

    Instead I investigated what downtime cost us. What would it cost in terms of work and salary if we had to re-enter data that might be lost. We had been down for various periods of time due to different events, and the business had survived, even one day when we were shut completely down for 2 days.

    It quickly came to light that we’d have to be down for over a week to really cost the business more than $30k, and that was debatable. We could still conduct lots of work on paper and over the phone, so it didn’t make sense to aim for zero data loss and zero downtime. I explained it to my boss, laid out a simple case for him with a few numbers highlighted, and the provided an alternative for investment in a little redundancy, designed to minimize losses, but not prevent them.

    In the end the big boss agreed. He hadn’t really meant zero loss, after all, anyone in business knows that there are always going to be some losses. What he wanted was his business to keep running, cost effectively. That’s what we gave him at a much more reasonable price.

  • iPads for Christmas

    There’s a contest going on, today through Friday, and you can win a copy of SQL Monitor from my employer Red Gate Software.

    Oh yeah, in order to use your new software like we do at SQLServerCentral, we’ll send you an iPad as well. A 16GB, 3G, iPad.

    You can read about the contest in today’s editorial.

  • SQL Server 2005 SP4

    Last year I submitted a Connect item for SQL Server 2005 SP4. Quite a few people supported this item and voted for it, and Microsoft decided to build this last, final Service Pack for SQL Server 2005.

    No timeline was given, but last week someone noticed that my Connect item had been changed to “closed” status, which to me is an indication that the Service Pack is getting close to being finished. I have no idea when this might be released, but I am guessing since we just passed the five year anniversary of the release of SQL Server 2005, it will be soon. I am sure Microsoft would like to get this finished, and move more people out of SQL Server 2005 support and into supporting newer products.

    There are lots of people that run SQL Server 2005 instances. Actually I think there are lots of people still running SQL Server 2000 instances as well. These are mature products, and I understand that need to stop bug fixes for these products as time marches on. However I also think that we ought to finalize the products with a final rollup of the CUs and patches that is tested and deployable.

    Not everyone can, or wants to upgrade, and the customers that did pay for those products deserve to have a full lifecycle of support. Which can be up to ten years after the original release of the product.

  • SQL Saturday #45 Cancelled

    I hate not living up to commitments. It really, really bothers me and I have tried hard in my career to under-promise and over-deliver. However I’m going to get a big fat #FAIL for SQL Saturday #45.

    I found out last night that my son has his black belt test scheduled for Jan 22, 2011. That’s the same day as SQL Saturday #45 in Louisville, KY, an event that I have been planning on attending for a few months. I tried to get the test moved, but our karate school only does black belt testing twice a year, and they bring in another teacher from out of town to help, so I was stuck. I had been thinking it would be Jan 29, since that’s usually when other tests occur, but that wasn’t the case this time.

    So I sent a note with apologies and regret to the organizers as well as Red Gate since I was supposed to represent them there. I did find a few people that were willing to speak and take my place, so I think the event will be fine, but I still feel bad about cancelling.

    I’m glad that I went to class since this was the first I’d heard of it and it gave me some notice. With only a week left before I go on holiday, I’d gate to have missed this news until Jan.