DallasDBAs.com

Explaining SQL Server in plain english

Header Right

Kevin3NF

SQL101: Import/Export wizard

by Leave a Comment

Do you need to quickly Import or Export data to/from SQL Server?  Do you want to avoid the hassle of creating and deploying an SSIS pacakge?

The SQL Server Import/Export wizard might be perfect for you!

The wizard steps you through the necessary pieces and is surprisingly flexible.  I cover the basics in this video (recorded in one shot, please excuse throat clears and “Ums”)

If you have comments, please leave them on the YouTube page (ideally) or down below.

Its very likely this is part 1 of at least two…trying to keep my videos to shorter lengths.

Thanks for reading!

Kevin3NF

Care and Feeding of your DBA

by 2 Comments

The care and feeding of a DBA

Everyone in your organization is important, of course. You should take good care of your humans, because…they are humans. Not desks, not slave labor, not assets, not even resources. Gold and Oil are resources. Your team is made up of real life people.

In your IT shop, you have a variety of types of people. Developers that write the products you sell, or the customer facing website. Project Managers that herd all the cats to get things done, etc.

An often overlooked group is the administration team. “Administrator” is not as cool of a title as say, “CIO”, or “Scrum Master” and quite often, many of the folks outside of the IT team have no idea what an admin does. Exchange admin, Systems admin, Database admin.

ADMINISTRATION – noun – the process or activity of running a business, organization.
“the day-to-day administration of the company”

Exciting! Yes?

Your IT admins are the ones keeping everything moving. If you get a “yes” email from a sales prospect, thank your mail admin. If you can log on to your machine each day, from Starbucks and IM with teammates around the world, thank your Systems Admins. If the data that runs the entire company is still there today just like it was yesterday, thank your Database Admins!

Admins keep the company alive and functioning properly.

A few tips on how to keep the database admins happy and eager to be a part of the team:

  • STOP BLAMING THE DATABASE!
    • Every time something goes wrong, please quit yelling at the DBAs to fix it. That’s like getting mad at the car engine for a flat tire without investigating why the car slowed down.
  • THANK THEM
    • DBAs are human. They appreciate being appreciated. Not just at the annual review.
  • TRAIN THEM
    • Allow your DBAs to continuously improve their skill set so they can continuously improve your systems. Conferences, paid online training, etc.
  • FEED THEM
    • Allow your DBAs to actually go to lunch on a lunch hour without calling them for non-emergencies
  • LISTEN TO THEM
    • When a DBA makes a recommendation, trust, test and implement. When you hire a consultant to come tell you the same thing, its insulting.
  • PAY THEM
    • Please stop offering to pay Junior level wages to a person with 20 years of experience. We know the market rates, just like you do. Be reasonable.
  • LET THEM TEST THINGS
    • Allow them to set up a test environment so they don’t have to test in Production when things go bad. Cloud VMs are super cheap to spin up for a day, test something and deallocate.
  • STAY CURRENT
    • No DBA wants to work on old, out-of-support versions of Oracle, SQL Server etc. We hear this from recruiters and already know what the day-to-day is going to be like. (Hint – its going to suck if you are still on SQL 2005)
  • TRUST THEM
    • You have given them SysAdmin rights to all of your company’s data. Trust them to use that access wisely. Let them do what they need to do to help you, without burying them under arbitrary InfoSec rules. If your DBA can be trusted to see everything in the HR database, surely she can be trusted to install appropriate things on her laptop, yes?
  • LET THEM HAVE A LIFE
    • A well rested, happy DBA is going to work their tail off for you. Demanding 60 hour weeks and 24x7x365 on call is going to burn them out. Some DBAs even have families they love and want to see. Limit the off-hours calls and texts to actual emergencies

Most of these are common sense (or should be) and apply very well to any number of positions in your organization. Many admins simply want to do their job and chill out in the background while being a part of the overall success of the firm.

Comments welcomed.

Thanks for reading!

Kevin3NF

Relax…

by Leave a Comment

(Originally posted on my old site but got lost in the move.  Still relevant)

Relax…its going to be ok!

Sometimes its good to sit back, listen, nod and hear what is being said before speaking.   Actually, that is almost always the best idea.

Case in point:
I am the team lead here (small team of 3…SQL, Windows and storage admins…we overlap.).
I came back from lunch yesterday and one of my guys very passionately launched into “We need to have a meeting!”, “The developers want too many deployments!”, “We need change management!”, etc.
All of his points were true.  This is a small team with very few procedures and practises, and our job is to get a handle on this.   We are also at the end of the development process for v1.0 of an internal application…which is being demonstrated today.   Not the best time to suddenly change things.
So I listened while he made his case, agreed with most of what he said and asked some questions when he was done:
1.  What problem are you trying to solve by forcing change windows today that don’t exist?
2.  How many “deployments” are we being asked to do each day?  (A deployment here could simply be ALTERing a stored proc, and the target is a Pre-Production database)
3. Should we be focusing on the other issues here we have already identified?  Where does this rank in the list? (Backups, security, perf, etc. all rank higher and are more actionable)
What it boiled down to is that we don’t really have a problem…he just got hit with three requests in a short time frame, due to the upcoming demo to the executive staff.
We get maybe 2 requests a day from the Devs, and have 3 people capable of deploying them.  At this time, on this project…all a forced window will do is alienate 10 of the 15 team members.   Yes, it is a good idea, but lets phase it in for better acceptance, when the team is not under the gun.  Production release is only a month away…
Sometimes its best to relax, look at the bigger picture and make the best decision for the team.
Imma buy this guy lunch, with fries 🙂
Kevin3NF

Getting Started with Index and Execution Plan Basics

by Leave a Comment

If you are a developer or new SQL Server DBA and have never really worked with query tuning, this post is for you.  If you are an experienced DBA/Tuner and want to nit-pick me saying field vs. column, feel free to leave a comment that I will delete or never publish, lol.  This is basics, yo…

I concentrate on how to measure the performance of a query, as well as the basics of “seeing” how SQL Server is executing the query to return the results.

I could type all of this up, but watching the video is going to be a WHOLE lot better teacher, so here you go:

As always, feel free to reach out via the comments here or on the video.  Or, follow me on Twitter and ask away!

Thanks for reading!

Kevin3NF

PASS Summit 2018 Game Night

by Leave a Comment

Game Night 3.0 is happening at PASS Summit 2018!!

 

Game night is an annual gathering at PASS Summit aimed at those attendees that are not necessarily the bar hopping or karaoke sort (not that there is anything wrong with that…).  Or for those that just want to spend some non-technical time with like minded people in a somewhat quieter setting and make some new friends.

Steve Jones and Andy Warren hosted the first ever Summit Game Night in 2016  and it was a great success.  I was able to teach a few newbies how to play Spades, along with some other sharks 😉

They handed the reigns over to PASS in 2017 and let them do the promotion, coordination with the convention center, etc.  PASS also bought quite a few games, partially influenced by a poll I ran last year.  They also graciously let me be the loud-mouthed spammer of the event on Twitter, Slack and wherever else SQL folks hang out.

IT’S BACK!  2 nights this year!!!

If you want more info about Game Night, or want to give feedback on previous events, PLEASE put something in a comment below and I will make sure you are heard.

This is not a free event though…there will be a choice of alcoholic or non-alcoholic beverages.  $12 gets you in the door with drink tickets.  And of course the PASS Anti-Harassment Policy applies, so that everyone can have a good, safe time.  This includes the games.  You can bring your own, and are encouraged to bring a favorite…but it must be AHP appropriate.  Assume there will be random 8 year-olds watching and you should be fine.

Updated list of the games that PASS owns and will provide:

  • 7 Wonders
  • Apples to Apples *
  • Brain Games
  • Carcassone *
  • Catan
  • Chess *
  • Clue *
  • Codenames
  • Dominoes
  • Dominion
  • Exploding Kittens *
  • Fluxx *
  • Generic card decks *
  • Jenga *
  • Monopoly *
  • Munchkin *
  • Pandemic
  • Scrabble
  • Sequence
  • Stratego *
  • Ticket to Ride *
  • Uno *

* I’ve played this 🙂

Registration links are up:

Wednesday night, 8pm – 10:30pm

Thursday night, 7pm – 10:30pm

Thanks for reading!

Kevin3NF

T-SQL Tuesday: Brick walls

by 1 Comment

T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party for the SQL Server community. It is the brainchild of Adam Machanic (b|t). This month’s edition is hosted by Wayne Sheffield (b|t) who has asked us to tell a story about a time we ran into a Brick Wall.

So many walls, so few Bulldozers…

The largest brick walls I’ve ever run up against were not technical issues as you might expect…but people and processes.

Processes:

I was working for a company that bought a company that bought the company I had hired on with.  The newest owner was growing their managed hosting business by buying others out.   Not a bad approach when you have deep pockets.  BUT, they never integrated any of them.  Everything was still in its original silo.  So, anytime I got a call or a ticket, I had to search through 4-5 knowledge base/Sharepoints, 2-3 password repositories and 4 ticketing systems.  I could easily spend 2 hours to research and close a ticket that took 3 minutes to resolve on the technical side.

This place broke my flipper.  As in, I no longer gave a flip after it took a full year to get all the access I needed to every environment.  The Bulldozer here is that I got laid off.  They gave me a big bag of money to leave and go do cool things with modern SQL versions for other places.  YES!!

People:

I was asked to bill a crazy high rate for a full-time contract, to watch over a very small environment of 25 servers.  I was asked to put in best practices, be the unofficial team lead, make things go faster, secure them, etc.

BUT…JimBob the Manager (clearly not his real name) gave me the brick wall at every turn. It took 6 weeks to get rid of NetBackup in favor of SQL Server Maintenance Plans. (I know…lets not go there.).  Compressed backups?  Made me prove it.   Index maintenance?  OK, but he wouldn’t let me schedule it.  New indexes that actually made sense?  No chance, as that was a code change to the application our Very Big Vendor had written for us.  Within 3 months, I was down to 15 minutes of real work a day, and the rest spent blogging, Tweeting and answering questions on DBA.StackExchange.

The Bulldozer on this one was me walking out the door into cooler things.  33% pay cut was worth it, to save my sanity and go independent again!

Technology:

I don’t run into technical Brick Walls, because I know how to Tweet using #sqlhelp, as well as read blogs from people I trust in the #sqlCommunity, and Vendor docs.

Thanks for reading!

Kevin3NF