SQL Quiz Part 2

The first SQL Quiz that I did, had some results that I could not anticipate. I hope that we created a chain where people can learn from the mistakes that DBA’s have made in the past. There has been a number of great results and a number of great stories. I would like to start another Tag Quiz Game. I hope that this one has the same results as the first one. This way we can continue to get great information from Many DBA’s.

Sp here are the rules, please answer the question with at least two answers, once you have completed the answer please tag 2 people that you know to answer the questions as well. If you get tagged by this Quiz please let me know I would like to add all the results to the bottom of this blog so all the answers are in one place.

The Questions for this quiz…

What are the largest challenges that you have faced in your career and how did you overcome those?

Here are my Answers…

The first may sounds sort of simple for most DBA’s but it was a big challenge that I was facing when I first started working with SQL Server. I worked at a company where the database was in 100% stored procedures. We were supporting a web page that was answering 10,000+ requests a day on SQL Server 6.5. There was a business need to know what people were searching for on the database the most often, however since or traffic was very sporadic we put 3 SQL Servers behind the web servers to take the load. This was easy because we could create transactional replication and push from one publisher to two subscribers. The only time the database was written to by people internal to the company.

The thing that I found myself to be most proud of was the fact that I needed to be able to gather all the stored procedures execution parameters. So I need to know what City was being searched in the most. Or what category was being searched in the most often. The way that I tackled this problem: I modified the Stored Procedures to do a quick dump of the parameters into a single table. Then I replicated tables from Server 1 and Server 2 to Server 3. I then had Server 3 combine all the results into one database and created a query to group the searches. I then used SQL Mail to send the results to myself and the CEO. This way we knew what was being searched on most often and we were able to use that in our Marketing.

My Second Answer…

Again this is a little old school but I was working at a resale company. This company had no way to see the enterprise in a fashion where the health of all the SQL Servers were being monitored. This was pre SQL Server 2008. I installed on all 60 plus of the server SQL H2 and was able to start working on some custom reports. It was very satisfying that I could tell the CTO that a server that was 2000 miles away was going to run out of disk space in about 60 days if we did not make a change. Now that SQL H2 has gone the way of the Dodo bird, Data Collector looks to be a great replacement.

Now that they are down on paper they do not have the same feeling as they did when I completed the actions. I would love to see what Jason Massie and Brent Ozar Have to say about this.

Here are the others that have taken the Quiz that I know of…

• Brent Ozar
• Denny Cherry AKA MrDenny
• Tim Ford AKA SQLAgent Man
• Denis Gobo
• SQLBatMan
• facility9
• Jonathan Kehayias
• tjaybelt
• Home of the Scary DBA
• SQL Fool (Michelle Ufford)
• Less the Dot
• Ani Babaian
• Tim Mitchell
• dbo.Brain (Aaron Lowe)
• SQL In The Wild
• Kendal Van Dyke
• dkRanch (Steve Jones)

If you have noticed that I missed one please let me know.  I don’t always get a ping back on the ones that have been answered.