Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

  • Quick Elevators

    I’m at the Renaissance in Seattle for a couple days, stuck on the 14th floor. That’s higher than I normally like to stay, preferring low floors. However there is something that makes a huge difference here.

    A fast elevator.

    Traveling is often an inconvenience for me. It’s a hassle, it disrupts my schedule, and I feel like I waste a lot of time getting places. Last week I had a 10 minute walk from the convention center to my hotel room, and they were in essentially the same building! But they drag you through the casino, and it’s designed to tempt you on the way, so it ended up being around 1/2 mile. And I had a slow elevator.

    Today I got up to run, and then fitness center is on the 28th floor, top of the building. My trip on the elevator, nonstop, was about 15 sec. That’s doors closing and all. Last week the doors would stay open for 10 sec or so, perhaps in expectation of people enjoying themselves a bit much in Vegas, but it was annoying. Here the doors open and almost immediately start to close if no one is there.

    I noticed it because on the way back up from breakfast we stopped at floors 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, and finally 14. I was starting to get annoyed, but it was almost as quick as my 1 to 4 to 5 trip last week because of the delays in the doors and the slower elevator.

    Little things make a difference, and surprisingly to me, the fast elevator here makes a difference.

  • The Tapestry

    270px-ST-TNG_Tapestry[1] When I run on the treadmill, I have a TV and DVD player down there and have been watching Star Trek: The Next Generation over the last few years on and off. I recently saw an episode called Tapestry and it really made me stop and think.

    In this episode, Picard is killed, or dying at the beginning, pulled into Sick Bay. As he fades, we cut to a scene with Q where Picard is told he’s dead. The story goes on to give Picard a chance to change his life, taking him back to the time when he’s newly graduated and just before he’s stabbed in the heart. Picard shows some regret that he started a fight then, and had to receive an artificial heart. You can guess that he relives the scene, but doesn’t get stabbed, resulting in a history he doesn’t like.

    As I watched this over a few days, I kept thinking about my life, and regrets. Would I want to go back, with different knowledge, and change anything? I know I have some regrets, some actions that I’m not proud of, but I wouldn’t change anything. The place that I am in today is because of all the choices I made in the past. The good ones, the bad ones, they’ve contributed to the person that I am today.

    I’m not a fatalist, but I have an acceptance of life as it is. I strive to do good, to be better, but I understand I’ll make mistakes and I’m frail. I do the best I can at each moment, knowing that sometimes that isn’t my best, and that I might change how I view the world as I grow and learn.

    The tapestry of my life is somewhat woven, with more being added each day, but I wouldn’t go back and change anything. If I died today, I would accept that I’ve lived a good life, without wishing for the chance to change my past.

  • Powershell and Performance Monitoring

    When I was doing performance monitoring of servers, I typically struggled with a good way to get the data. In years past it was cumbersome to keep track of server information and rarely was it done well. So often I found that many problems were the result of simple mis-configuration settings, or a lack of patches. Once a DBA or sysadmin can’t remember everything about every instance, it invites chaos.

    Allen White is showing how to better track a “server inventory” to learn all about the setup, configuration, and performance of SQL Server using Powershell. It’s easy to find this information in an ad hoc manner, but keeping track of it and catching exceptions requires something more formal. Powershell is a great way to do that in a repeatable way.

    Based on an article at Simple Talk, Allen shows how you can put your servers in an XML file and then read that in from Powershell and use it to drive a series of queries against a particular instance and machine.

    Most of this session gives you a good look at a script that will gather various information, including performance data, from your instances.  One of the more practical sessions that can really help you understand a large Powershell script in detail.

    However Powershell takes some practice. It’s a set of fairly concepts that are designed to be put together, but you need to take a little time to understand how the scripts work.

    If you get the chance to see Allen speak, it’s worth it. He does a good job of walking through code and helping you understand how it works.

  • Powershell and Policy Based Management

    If you haven’t looked at Policy Based Management (PBM), and you manage multiple instances, you ought to really look at it. Even if you manage just a few, having your systems automated just saves you a lot of time and effort.

    Allen White is the Powershell guy for me, and he’s showing how you can automate the PBM setup with Powershell. Powershell is another tool that every administrator probably should spend some time working with since it just allows you to repeat the work you need to do with minimal effort.

    This is a good session that shows the basics of what PBM is and how it is structured. What’s a policy, a facet, a condition. As an example, Allen shows how to make sure that your database (facet) has autoshrink = False (condition) with a policy that checks this. Loading these types of policies into all your instances can prevent any strange issues that might come about from having differing setups.

    A smart DBA will probably have whole sets of these policies, perhaps even different groups for development and production, that are applied to ensure that the knobs are tweaked to your particular environment.

    Powershell allows you to script actions. For things you do once, there’s no benefit, but I’ve learned in IT that if you do something once, likely you’ll have to do it again. So having the ability to script things that you might repeat is useful.

    Allen shows how to load assemblies in Powershell, connect to SQL Server, and then access objects properties and methods. Most of what I see done here is done in many Powershell sessions. It’s basic programming, but so often people don’t understand basic programming if they are sysadmins. Developers ought to pick this stuff up instantly since it’s the kind of thing they do often. It’s just interpreted, not compiled.

    One nice tip from Allen, if you use single quotes, then everything is literally. If you use double quotes, you can have variable substitution.

    Building policies with Powershell helps you understand the SMO objects, and it you have a fairly repeatable process. These scripts are something you can easily carry to the next environment, which isn’t as easy in the GUI.

    All kinds of things Allen shows, reading the registry, deploying to multiple instances consistently, and more, is easier in Powershell. It’s confusing when you see so many variables, but if you play with Powershell a bit, you’ll find that it’s a great way to manage your systems.