Voice of the DBA

Tag: T-SQL Tuesday

  • T-SQL Tuesday #147 Invitation – Upgrade Strategies

    tsqltuesdayIt is time for T-SQL Tuesday #147 and this month I get to be the host. Since I’m in charge, I usually try to ensure I remember what this is like and host every year or two. This will be my sixth time hosting. The others I’ve hosted are: 013, 027, 106, 117, 137.

    For this month, I was thinking about SQL Server 2022. The next version of the platform was announced in the fall, and I’ve spent a little time working with it, getting familiar with some of the changes. I don’t plan on upgrading SQL Server Central anytime soon, but you never know.

    Planning for Upgrades

    In my career, most of the time we don’t upgrade production databases very often. In most of my jobs, we’d change versions for new databases, but existing ones often lived on their original version. It’s how I got into a job where I was managing 4 different versions of SQL Server. These days I expect it’s common for many DBAs to have to deal with that many, or more, versions.

    I do have customers these days that try to upgrade often, and limit the number of versions they work with. I have customers now that are on a mix of 2016-2019 only, some that might be working on 2014-2016 only, and I’ve run into a customer that only has SQL Server 2017. Of course, they have few databases and look to upgrade about every 5 years when mainstream support is running out for their edition.

    This month I want you to write about how you look at SQL Server upgrades. A few things you might think about:

    • Why we wait to upgrade?
    • Strategies for testing an upgrade
    • Smoke tests or other ways to verify the upgrade worked
    • Moving to the cloud to avoid upgrades
    • Using compatibility levels to upgrade an instance by not a database.
    • Checklists of things to use in planning
    • The time it takes to upgrade your environment
    • What you evaluate in making a decision to upgrade or not?
    • Anything else

    I don’t know when SQL Server 2022 will release, but certainly many of us will need to consider in 2023 whether we want to upgrade systems or not. Think about it and write about something that matters to you.

    The Rules

    Write your own post in response to the invitation. If you want to be in the wrap-up, follow these rules. If you read this after Feb 8, 2022, just write your response on your blog.

    • Write your post and publish it on Feb 8 ,2022, UTC time
    • Include the T-SQL Tuesday logo and link to this post.
      (logo in this post)

    • Ensure you leave a comment on this post with the URL of your post (or a trackback/pingback)
    • Publicize your  post on Twitter/LinkedIn with the #tsql2sday hashtag

  • T-SQL Tuesday #146–Changing Preconceptions

    tsqltuesdayIt’s the start of a new year, and the first T-SQL Tuesday is from Andy Yun. I’ve known Andy a long time and this is his third time hosting with a creative prompt for us all to consider.

    I really like this one as it could be taken as a technical or a non-technical prompt. What did you think was one way and you learned it was another way. Always good to stop and double check that your view is actually representing what you think.

    We all do this in our views of life as well as work, and it can be hard to change what or how we think. This is especially true for many of my customers, as I find them wanting to adopt DevOps, but not really wanting to change.

    I’ll tackle this one in a couple ways, one technical and one non-technical.

    Separate Accounts for Each Instance

    For a long time, I always used separate domain accounts for each SQL Server service. Even in a large environment, with hundreds of instances, I did the work (or have junior DBAs do it) to ensure that each service was account separated. This was important because I’ve had change passwords and other issues break services in the past. None of the incidents seemed worth saving a bit of time to set up separate accounts.

    Over time, and as SQL Server evolved, Group Managed Service Accounts came into being. I resisted using these at first, but over time I’ve realized that these are valuable and provide security as well as ease of administration. If I went back to managing servers, even single ones, I’d likely look to ensure that gMSA was the standard.

    Take Feedback as An Opportunity

    I’ve struggled with having someone criticize me for my work. I’ve even struggled when they suggest something else, bristling at the idea that I wasn’t doing something well. Often I was successful and doing something well, but there might be a better way.

    Across time, and age, I’ve learned to appreciate other points of view and not become defensive to feedback. Instead, I’ve started to look at other views as a chance to learn or grow, or even just try something. I can still reject the advice or suggestion, but I ought to consider it.

    I’ve started to adopt the “strong opinions, loosely held” philosophy at work.

    Note, I’m trying to do this in my personal life, but I still very much suck at this.

  • The Next Event: T-SQL Tuesday #145

    tsqltuesdayIt’s time for T-SQL Tuesday again, and this month the host is Xavier Morera. He’s been part of the push I had to get a host with every letter of the alphabet. Silly, but fun for me. Now I just need I, O, Q, U, Y, and Z.

    The invite this month is about conferences, and specifically what is your favorite event, venue, presenter, and where you want for your next event. A topic near and dear to my heart as a speaker and organizer, so I’m looking forward to what people write.

    Favorites

    I’ve been blessed to go to many events. My Speaking CV shows most, but I’ve been to quite a few others as an attendee. My favorite conference is SQL Bits. They event is always slightly different, the themed party is fun, and they are family friendly. I see people from all over the world, and I’m excited just thinking about going in 2022.

    My favorite venue is harder. Lots of venues are just spaces, just conference centers. That being said, I think that there are a couple that stand out. Bangalore had a beautiful conference center. SQL Saturday #66 in Colorado Springs was in a games/go-kart center. The elementary school at the Jewish Center in Portland. All memorable locations.

    I think my favorite place I’ve been was the Royal Society of Medicine in London. Redgate rented this out for a few events, and it’s nice, lots of comfortable seats, plenty of bathrooms, tables for lunch. It was quite a nice venue.

    My favorite speaker is tough. I’ve seen many, and I’ve enjoyed most. I’ll give a nod to Amir Netz, from Microsoft, who I’ve seen quite a few times over the years. He’s entertaining, funny, and smart. Half the time I don’t quite understand what he’s talking about, but I’m enjoying it just the same.

    The Next Event

    I’m blessed in that I’m actually just returning from my “next event”. I was in Las Vegas last week for the SQL Server and Azure SQL Conference at DevIntersection.  I’ve been lucky that I was able to attend a few live events this year (2021) and am looking forward to more in 2022.

    Costa Rica would be an amazing next event. I have never been there and would love to go. I’d speak, volunteer, and help organize if someone is interested.

    It’s a tough time in the world, and I know that holding a live event might not be possible, or safe, in some locations. I would love to return to New Zealand, I’m looking forward to Jacksonville in the spring, as I’ve never been able to make that SQL Saturday.

    If I had to choose, I’d want to get a SQL event in Tokyo and go there. I have never been to Japan, and it’s on my list of places to go at some point, so I hope I hear 日本へようこそ one day.

  • T-SQL Tuesday #144–Data Governance

    tsqltuesdayThis month’s topic is something I wouldn’t have considered a decade ago. Especially in the US, this isn’t something that I’d actually have cared about for most of my career. Even when companies talked about governance, it was more a checkbox exercise.

    Dr. Victoria Holt brings us this invitation from the UK, and I think it’s a great one. This is a data topic that will impact more and more of us in the future. Not all of us, but certainly plenty of us.

    If you haven’t thought about this topic, I’d urge you to write something, even if it’s a view that this isn’t necessary. Share your thoughts, this month or in the future.

    Data Governance Effort

    My employer, Redgate Software, has been interested in this for a number of years. We are a UK company, and when the GDPR passed, we knew this would be a concern for us and our customers.

    We built a product to help customers classify and understand their exposure in databases. I hope this expands out to other sources, because I feel this is a constant challenge. While lots of data is in database, we are constantly pulling it out and sharing it in files, reports, and more.

    Security is hard, and I don’t know that we’ll end up completely controlling the access and data, but I do think that we need to understand where our risk and exposure are as we share data.

    This is a hard job, and a boring one. I can’t see many people enjoying the process of dealing with data governance. We need to make this easy to do, in a distributed fashion by many people as they notice something is not being managed. At the same time, I think that we need to be regularly reviewing and examining security against policies. We have far too many public access points being used to share information when things should be secured.

    I don’t know how we reconcile those things, and decide on the value of doing them. Some products may work well, some I think are too targeted, and some too expensive.

    I believe data governance matters, but not sure how we actually get to a place that it’s well done in many organizations. Especially in the US.

    I hope I’m wrong.