Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

  • Interviewing for the PASS Board of Directors

    My nomination application made it through the committee. I got an email yesterday telling me that I needed to schedule an interview, and a list of available slots.

    I picked next Friday, August 6th, at 10am PST for my slot and it’s scheduled. It’s a phone interview, according to the process on the PASS Election site, and I’m guessing this will be an interesting conference call. I’ve had group interviews before, but never on the phone, so I’m wondering what this will be like.

    Time to prep, and thanks to Buck Woody (blog | Twitter), I have a list of tips to go over:

    • Try not vomiting on the table when you talk to them. Or at least more than once.
    • Also do not pause and look at one of them and say "did you just call me fat?"
    • Another tip: End each statement with "… in accordance with prophecy."
    • Tip #4: Grin really big the whole time and answer each question with "I’ve got new socks on!"
    • Tip #5: Say "Wanna hear the noise I can make with my finger and my nose?"
    • Tip #6: Wear skates.
    • Tip #7: For each answer, adopt a different accent.
    • Tip #8: Wrap your head in seran-wrap and cut little holes out to breathe.
    • Tip #9: Tell them you can hold your breath for over 7 minutes, then do it.
    • Bring several ferrets and allow them to run free during the interview. In the middle of the interview, add a monkey.
    • Tip #10: After each statement, say "Am I right, or what?" OK, that’s an even number, I can stop on that tip.

    I’m not sure exactly what to prep here, since I’ve never run for a position that had an interview. When I ran for the HOA board, they just had to have someone else second me. I understand this is a little different as the organization needs semi-qualified people, and it can be hard to sustain if people get on the board that won’t do work.

    There is a form that is used to rate people during the interview, so I’ll review that as well as my application.

    Hopefully this will go well.

  • Slack Traveler

    I realized over the weekend that I hadn’t booked a hotel for my SQL Saturday #28 trip to Baton Rouge. This was one I can’t miss since I’m doing 2 sessions and the keynote. I remembered today, and called the Cook Hotel, a beautiful place on the LSU campus where I stayed last year.

    Nothing available but suites. Tempting but at $299 I’m not sure my boss would like that. The reserved rate was $99, and the difference is probably the cost of my trip to Kansas City later this year. So I started to look around on Expedia and found a Marriot not too far away to book.

    I’m traveling a bit more these days, more like 10 times a year, and in doing so, I’ve gotten a bit slack. I went to New Orleans without knowing my hotel reservation, and I haven’t been traveling with printouts or directions. I’m relying on the iPhone, which is OK, but I probably should keep a backup somewhere since you never know if service will go out or batteries will die.

  • Do As I Say, Not as I Do

    Do I follow my own advice?
    I’ve been asked that at a few of my Modern Resume presentations if I do all the things that I mention, and to what extent. My answer is that I do and I don’t. I’ve done them all at some point in my career, but I don’t necessarily do them all now.
    For the most part I have my brand on my mind most of the time. I think about what I post, I consider the impact to my reputation, and try to self-moderate myself. I do, at times, also send things to others for comment before I post them.
    I have tried to follow my own advice about promotion, but it’s hard. I struggle to write my own kudos, but I do try to post announcements when I am speaking, or doing something out of the ordinary. I also have such a presence with my daily editorial and podcast that I think sometimes that a regular note somewhere like Twitter might overwhelm my followers or overexpose me.
    One area that someone asked me about was my resume. Do I touch mine every quarter like I ask other people to do?
    No. I don’t, but I have a good reason.
    I have an employment contract. So even if someone contacted me about a job that is almost as awesome as mine, I have to give months notice to leave. Months as in 3 or 4 (can’t remember), and while I could possibly get out of that, I wouldn’t. I signed a contract, I need to honor it.
    So unlike when I worked in the corporate world, and have gotten calls that say “send your resume today” I wouldn’t, or couldn’t, do that right now.
    I do try to give good advice, and incorporate new things into the presentation and this blog as I learn them. I have a set of notes that I regularly keep working on as I get feedback and learn new things from others. If you find a problem with what I’ve written, let me know. Otherwise, start working on your brand.

  • SQL University – Capacity Planning Week

    I am honored to be a guest lecturer this week for SQL University. There have been some amazing professors helping guide you through SQL Server this semester, and I hope that this week meets your expectations.

    The topic for this week is capacity planning. While not a critical task for DBAs on a regular basis, the failure to properly plan for the resources needed can easily become a critical problem at the worst possible time: when your systems are busiest.

    What is Capacity Planning?

    Capacity planning involves making estimates of the resources that will be needed in some area or system and then ensuring that you can acquire those resources to meet demand. The resources can be time, money, hardware, people, or just about anything that is used in your environment.

    The traditional method of capacity planning deals with the resource requirements that your systems need. For SQL Server this has primarily been CPU, memory, and disk resources for each instance. While this seems to be a fairly benign and perhaps boring topic, it has enough moving parts that it quickly can overwhelm a DBA tasked with planning the resources needed and budgeting for them appropriately. There are other potential issues, and some of those will be discussed on Friday.

    As our systems become more complex, include more interconnections between them, and become more important, the ability to properly plan for, and meet, the demand for your services is an important part of the data professional’s job. Even if you have server administrators, SAN administrators and other professionals responsible for physical hardware, if your database is not available or does not scale, you will be blamed.

    Server Sizing

    People new to managing database servers constantly ask the question “how big a server should I buy?” as if there is a standard size server for a particular number of users or databases. There isn’t one, and these factors don’t really apply to proper server sizing:

    • number of users
    • number of databases
    • number of transactions
    • number of records in your largest table

    While these numbers do seem to increase as the load on your server increases, resulting in the need for more resources, these aren’t the way that you can size a particular server.

    Ultimately for new systems you can only take a guess at what level of CPU, memory, and I/O you will need. Likely it will be a bad guess, and so most DBAs and server administrators try to buy the largest server hardware just in case database use is far beyond what they expected. Or they economize and wind up with a severely underpowered server and a large percentage of unhappy clients.

    For existing systems, you should have some idea of the load being placed on your systems. From this load, you can extrapolate to make predictions about future loads and plan accordingly to meet the demand.

    Baselining

    The only really good way to properly size a system is to extrapolate future needs based on the past usage of the system. For existing databases, it helps to have a process set up that determines a baseline of not only the performance of your server, but also the capacity peaks and averages over time. These will help you extrapolate for future demand on the database.

    For a brand new database, you can only take a guess. As good as your guess might be, you will still likely be wrong, but having a baseline process set up at the beginning can help you quickly decide by how much your estimates are wrong and adjust the hardware accordingly.

    There are a number of articles written, and any number of product to help with the setting up of a baseline for your servers. The important thing to remember is that this is unique to each server, each company, and each database. The way that Microsoft Dynamics runs on your server instance will be different from mine, even if we have the same number of users. Don’t examine the scores from hardware manufacturers or software vendors as a way of determining what capacities you need to plan for. Those are useful for comparing systems in a theoretical way, but you need something more concrete for your instances.

    You need an affordable baseline system that you can deploy to all your server instances. I have had good luck with home grown systems at most of the places I have worked. I have also used commercial off the shelf packages (COTS) with as BMC’s Patrol and HP’s Openview to record data, but often had to extract that data to run my own extrapolation calculations. In SQL Server 2008, Microsoft introduced the Management Data Warehouse, which does a lot of this monitoring for you as well, if you have Enterprise Edition. Technet has a performance baseline white paper that gives some good basic guidance on what to monitor in order to measure the performance of your system.

    The specifics of how you gather and store this information are not that important. Use whatever method is convenient for you. The important thing is that you keep this data over time. You do not need extremely detailed information over time, but rather broad averages that allow you to determine if your resource requirements are increasing.

    I used to track the performance at 5 minute intervals for all server instances across a month, and average that down to hour increments for the past year. This easily allowed me to extrapolate for future planning by loading the data into Excel and performing a linear regression analysis. This will produce a line graph that best fits your data points.

    Third Party Tools

    As mentioned, there are a number of products that can help you with baselining and measuring the performance of your systems. Any tool that measures the various Performance Monitoring counters can be used if you can store those measurements over time. What’s Up Gold, Unicenter, even SQL Response (from my employer, Red Gate Software) can help you determine a baseline for your system.

    While it can be a relatively simple task to build a monitoring system on SQL Server, there are a lot of factors to consider, and building a new piece of software might not be the best use of your time. There are often other servers in your environment that also need capacity planning. File server, mail (Exchange) servers, and more. Ask your system administrators if they have a system in place, or software available that can measure the load of your servers over time. It might make sense to use a system already available or purchase one rather than building your own.

    Moving Forward

    That’s all we have for this lecture. Please feel free to chime in on the topic capacity planning and specifically any systems or software that you have preferred for tracking a baseline over time.

    In the next installment of SQL University, we will examine disk capacity specifically as this is an area that most often administrators struggle with managing.

    If you have other links, your own blog, or comments to add to this topic, please feel free to leave a note/link below.