Well last week was an exciting week, in the SSWUG conference we did a few things that we had never done before. Any time you try something new there is a bit of the nerves that set in but you keep your head down and continue to press through them. Here is a short list of the firsts:
- We did a SKYPE Video Call with one of the speakers. The video was shown live to the conference attendees.
- We did a SKYPE Audio Call with an attendee in London. It was awesome to talk to someone so far away about a conference we were doing live.
- We had a whole room that was dedicated to all live sessions all day. Speakers in this room were delivering sessions without the safety of a recording. This gave attendees from around the world the chance to ask questions in the middle of a session.
All of this along with a number of other sessions and activities really lead to an awesome event.
If you attended this event make sure you fill out your survey. We look for these to help us plan for the next conference from the dates to the event to the subject.
Speaking of awesome events there has been a number of Saturday events around the country over the last few years. One of these a friend of mine is a coordinator and is really excited to be involved with this.
They plan on having various tracks, such as development, architecture, administration, and end users with 4 hands on lab sessions for SharePoint 2010. All the breakout sessions will be a mix between 2007 and 2010 topics. Our registration page is located at http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/kc. This year we are lucky to have Joel Oleson, former MS SharePoint Product Team Member and SharePoint Evangelist for Quest Software, keynoting our event.
If you have any interest in Share Point and will be around KC Dec 12th, 2009 you may want to check out this Share Point Saturday. This is a free event and I know there will be a number of National Speakers there.
Day 1 for the conference is in the book. It was a great event with SQL Rockstar otherwise known as Thomas La Rock. We were getting a lot of questions and there was some great talk about if you as a DBA want to be Mr. Right or Mr. Right Now. I can’t go through and type his whole session, but here is the break down…
Mr. Right – This is the guy who is right all the time. He is known for being right and may not be known for the best customer service. You may have met this guy in the past. See the thing about Mr. Right is that he plans there may not be a lot of quick fixes. Mr. Right is confidant and does things the right way.
Mr. Right Now – Always has a phone to his ear and is spending most of his time working manual workaround issues. Mr. Right Now is very well like and is everyone’s best friend. He would be a big hit at all the parties, however he is working to make sure that everyone else’s mistakes have been corrected or should we say band-aided.
Maybe the descriptions are a bit drastic. But really is the mindset of proactive or reactive. Awesome discussion Mr. Rockstar, what a way to start our first all live all day all room confernce. It was a pleasure to meet you. I hope to work with you in the future.
In the morning we have Ted Malone, I am sure he is going to have some great information to pass along as well.
I have a lot going on this week. 3 big presentations that are keeping my attention plus knowing I will be in Tucson next week for the conference. If you haven’t had a chance to look at it yet you should check out the lineup. I hope that I have more time next week to post some more information.
Only a couple of days left to register!
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I have about 100 e-mail address like I am sure that everyone else does as well now a days. Many of them I never check, but today I got an e-mail from a friend that I use to work with. I met this friend about 10 years ago when we worked at the same company. I am sure that his first memory was of me taking all the admin access away from about 15 developers (Not a great day in my career). Back then I was very adamant that all code must be done in stored procedures, he wanted to know how I felt about it today. Today I know that I am not always going to be so lucky, however that does not mean that I cannot share my opinion on a professional level.
So I took 5 min to write down what first came to my mind on the Pro’s and Con’s of using stored procs:
Pro’s
- There is a lot of flexibility in using dynamic SQL statement.
- Developers have more control over how data is returned.
Con’s
- When code is embedded in web pages the risk of SQL Injection is very high. Over the last few years we have seen actual examples from clients who have not changed over to Proc’s What use to be a matter of just sanitizing your inputs is now a matter of being able to catch the hack at all. Many of the hack are coming across as Hex so there is no way to sanitize. I have actual code examples of this.
- There is always the fact that SQL Server has no idea what is coming at it, so it has to continue to compile the procs and look at Stats to see what is the best index to use.
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When the code is not in procs the performance tuning is left up to the developer of the application or it put a major load on the DBA trying to find the bad code using 3rd party procs and or trace files and performance monitors
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Security is a concern when direct table access is allowed. Even in a Select statement. There have been many times when I have seen a Select statements hurt the performance of a production server.
I am sure I missed a bunch of Pro’s and Con’s. If you make a note on here I would be more than happy to add them.
I was thinking today about the many things that you can do with SQL Server. Things that go beyond what database servers are really designed to do. As I was thinking about the subject it reminded me of a discussion I had one time with a boss of mine right after I got out of the Marine Corp. This boss of mine was named Bill and Bill played a huge role in getting me back into thinking like a civilian and understanding what you need to do to succeed. Anyhow, we had this employee that worked for me and whenever we had an idea on how we can make something better or a new benefit to being a client of ours this employee would always come up with reasons not to do it. This guy’s name was John and John was 100% sure that the product we offered at that time could not get any better.
If you think about John he may be bringing valid points to a subject. There may have been many finer more specific points of a suggestion that he would just fight us on. If Microsoft handled business this way we would not have many of the cool neat new features that we do. To take it one step beyond that, another company may have produced something that had been tabled causing us to lose that money.
OK, I am done rambling. I am just saying when new subjects come across your desk maybe we should take a look at how it can be done, not always why it cannot be done. There is always the question on if you should do something that needs to be addressed. In my opinion it’s all in the attitude.
I noticed today that I have not posted all the things that are moving forward this fall. I figured it was time we made a mention of it.
It appears that I may start doing a weekly guest editorial for SSWUG. I am really excited about this because of the size of the SSWUG community and the sharp people that are there. I have noticed time and time again when a question is sent to the group that they respond with a wide variety of answers. If you are not a member of SSWUG or do not get the daily newsletter now that is put out by Stephen Wynkoop you can sign up for that here.
Stephen Wynkoop and I just finished up DBA School. DBA School started as a 3 day class that covered 6 main topic area’s after running long a couple of nights and seeing that we could have had more discussions we have made an adjustment to the schedule. Now rather than 3 days it will extend to 5 days. We have removed the auditing session and are replacing it with a best practices session. The next DBA School will be in November as soon as we have a link for the signup we will be sending it out.
I have been working with the SSWUG community and with Paul Nielson to bring the SSWUG Community the Smart Database Design class that Paul authored. I have worked with Paul for a number of years and I know that this class is going to be something that you are not going to want to miss. You can find more information on that class here.
Over the course of the summer the SSWUG staff has been working hard to put together a Fall Conference that we will never forget. Names like Donald Farmer, Buck Woody and Kevin Kline will be presenting some great new sessions. There is also going to be a live room each and every day of the conference, so attendees can log on and during conference hours ask questions to speaker live on camera. If you have never been to a virtual conference this is a great way to keep up on the knowledge that you need without flying and paying for a hotel.
To top all that off I am working on two new presentations myself. The first one is for the business community to help them navigate the technology world and the second is a workshop on Data Clone’s. I could not think of a better name so if you have one I am open to it. The subject matter is all the different ways to move your data around from replication and transaction log shipping to data mirroring. This workshop should be on the web in the next week or so. Speaking of workshops there is one coming up on Oct 15th that will cover all you need to know about Backing up and Restoring your database. This workshop is about 4 hours long and has a lot of great information including a whole hour on how to restore data without restoring the database.
I am sure that I am missing a bunch of stuff, I will post it as I remember.
This week I am looking at compiling some information on database outages. I have been a firsthand witness to more than one outage some of those were to databases that I managed and some were to databases that belong to clients who requested my help in restoring data. All of the outages that come to mind where permanent data loss was involved could have been avoided. Last year I was working with a new client that needed some help with installing a service pack. When I checked his backups I found that he had one full that was run about 4 years prior and t-logs from that day. When I did the math a system restore would have taken over 1300 files. I am glad we caught that before it became a restore.
As I am looking at this data with some help from a developer at SSWUG, I found a number of statistics that that really perked my interest. By the way most of the information I am finding is from a survey done in 2001 called the “Cost of Downtime”. I think that I am going to see what I can do to get a more directed and recent survey done on SSWUG.
- 60% of companies that lose their data close down within 6 months of the disaster
- 40% of Small and Medium Sized Businesses don’t back up their data at all
- 72% of businesses that suffer major data loss disappear within 24 months
- 60% of all data is held on PC Desktops and laptops
- One-third of all computers sold are notebooks
Those are some heart stopping numbers is you really start to think about them. Just the first point on the list where 60% of companies that lose their data close doors within 6 months. I am not sure what the difference is between the first and third point and what is considered a major loss and what is not. I hope to find out. I know that a number of reports can mean different things based on the questions. But these figures should really get you thinking. I know it did me.
Last week we wrapped up the first ever DBA School. From this point I have to say that this went much better then what we anticipated. Not that we would go after something that we believed would not work or not be a benefit to all involved, but it was the first one. Just like version 1 of anything you never know what issues are going to come up and you don’t know what people will or will not like. One thing that it appeared that everyone liked was the ability that the DBA School attendees had to talk with other people in the industry.
- Many DBA’s are the only one in their shop. This can present a number of issues. Questions like:
- Is this the right design?
- Is this the right way to look at this?
- Are there other solutions?
- Am I the only one who has this issue?
Remember if you are a DBA that feels isolated, there are a number of things that you can do to really make sure that you are getting the help you need or the sounding board that could help you keep your sanity. There are a number of options that you have here is conferences, user groups the forums on SSWUG.
Even thought I was there as an instructor I had a chance to learn a number of items. It was even nice to see that I am not the only one that runs into empire building. There were attendees that had noticed this before as well. So as I head back home and we are getting ready to land at the airport I have to say I am excited about DBA School Version 2.
I am in the process of putting the finishing touches on the DBA School class that Stephen Wynkoop and I are going to be teaching next week. We have talked a number of times over the last couple weeks on exactly how we want to present the information so that not only are the facts covered but the class is relevant to each person who attends. Stephen had a great idea on the way we can accomplish this exact thing. I anticipate that this is going to help get many if not all the attendees involved in the class on a whole new level.
As I work on the class I have been thinking about how I learned different aspects to SQL Server. The one thought that keeps coming to mind is that each time I would learn something new I would consistently learn the same thing time and time again.
No matter how much I learn there is so much more there that I want to learn.
As I think about this, I can’t help but to think about how much the SQL Server product has expanded over the last 10 years. What started as a database engine has now morphed into so much more with the releases of SSIS, SSRS, and SSAS just to touch base on a few. I was thinking about replication in 6.5 when it was a complex process just to complete the Wizard. I believe the first time I set up replication it took me 3 days to complete the task.
With the release of new features of SQL Server, it requires DBA’s to look at where we want to focus our attention and our time. This may not always be a concise decision as much as it is a business need. I think today I am just thinking about all the new things there are to learn and where the product is going to go from here.
A few days ago Tom Roush sent this message into the SSWUG List server. I loved the idea so I thought I would post about it. What would I have answered…
Awhile back Chris Shaw made an interesting comment during a presentation about wanting anonymity in the company – with the idea that if people know who you are, it means they know because there are problems. I understand that – and ideally, you’re just part of the woodwork, keeping problems from happening before they happen. Which brings me to the question: How do you promote yourselves within the company? The cuts companies are making these days are often – well, some can be said to be ‘penny wise and pound foolish’ – so what are you out there doing to make sure the folks above you who control the purse strings know what you’re doing? I’m sure we’ve all got ways that work in different environments. Last year I did a “SQL State of the Union” presentation to the executive staff – which was high enough level to not glaze their eyes over, yet detailed enough (performance improvements and the like) to let them know they’d done a good thing when they hired me.
I think many DBA’s may already have to do a “State of the Union”, if not I think it is a great idea. What an opportunity to make your voice heard in an environment where many times if things are not broke you are not going to get any money to fix it. I work for years at a company that was more than happy to let you budget like you would get the resources that you needed. We would spend a month planning and researching what equipment that we would upgrade or replace. Sit around and look form training classes so that we could keep everyone’s skill set up to par. Work that was all done in vain, eventually every year they would come back and let us know that we needed to be at a certain amount. I can understand that we cannot run around hog wild and just purchase whatever we want however many of the times we would get budgets that would barely allow of payroll. In some years it would not.
So a “State of the Union” on your databases and database systems would give you a great opportunity to be upfront with all the risks that may be lurking. In my “State of the Union” I would address the following items:
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Disaster Recovery – What plans are in place to recover the servers if something were to go wrong? How long would it take to bring a server back up to replace the existing? What challenges are between a disaster and a quick recovery? What is the impact if these systems got down and you cannot bring them back up for an extended period of time?
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Security – Are you being asked to place the databases or the data at risk by allowing excessive permissions? Is there a chance that your company could be at risk for losing someone’s personal data? Is there the opportunity for improvement?
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Morale of the team – I think this is a point that gets looked over often many companies start to cut any sort of morale boosters when the economy gets tight. When you have a staff that is working on keeping the company’s data online many times working around the clock is it a good idea to have them with a poor morale?
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Goals Reached – Many times the DBA team is overlooked if you are doing your job right. I don’t think that is a bad thing, but you do need to make sure that the executive staff knows there is work being done. Let them know where and how you saved them money and or downtime. What has been done in the last year to increase the stability and performance of the systems?
What would you put in your “State of the Union”?
