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T-SQL Tuesday: Brick walls

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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


Your DR Plan isn’t a Plan

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My apologies, but someone had to tell you.

You don’t have a Disaster Recovery Plan™. You have a Disaster Recovery Hope. (paraphrased from a source I’ve forgotten…)

If I’m wrong (and I hope I am), its because you are in the 10% (optimistically) of companies that actually test their DR plans and document the results.

In the 18 years I’ve been asking the following question, I’ve gotten one excellent and correct response, and one that was good, but I still poked holes in it.

“If your most important database server melted right now, how long until you are back online?”

I get a lot of responses on this question:

  • 2 days
  • 30 minutes
  • I don’t know
  • Blank Stares (its a response…just a scary one)

If you are not testing your DR plan, you may be betting your company’s existence on a flawed premise: “Our people know what to do. We have backups.”

If your DR plan is a digital “living document” that lives on your Sharepoint server, you are already in trouble.  Everyone involved needs a current, non-digital copy on their desk and at their home.

Disaster recovery is about far more than restoring databases.  But, for my mostly-SQL Server audience, let me ask you this:

Can you do an emergency test restore of your most mission critical database onto identical hardware, to a point 27.5 minutes ago and have everything work as expected?

If you don’t do test restores, you are HOPING your backups are valid. If you don’t have the ability to replace critical hardware or spin up an identical VM, you are HOPING that your server or SAN never fails.

If you are running through your DR Plan regularly, with everyone ready to go and knowing their place in the process…you are HOPING the next disaster happens when everyone is available, online and up to speed.   What if that disaster happens when your Sr. DBA is on vacation?  Who is her backup? A Jr. DBA?

If you don’t know the answer to the “How long…” question above, you really should go find out who in your organization does.  If nobody does, contact me.

If you think you have it 100% nailed…I challenge you to let me into your server room unattended.

Thanks for reading!

Kevin3NF

SQL 101: Extended Events – set up a basic session

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Setting up your first Extended Event session is much simpler than I thought it would be!

Extended Events (XE) in SQL Server showed up first in SQL 2008, but they got a GUI in SQL 2012, making them much easier to work with on the fly.  I’m one of those old DBAs that was reluctant to move away from SQL Trace via Profiler for simple needs.  Of course for more complex issues and long-term tracking I used server-side tracing for many years.

With the advent of XE, Microsoft stopped enhancing SQL Trace.  Many of the new features of SQL are not in SQL Trace at all (180 in Trace compared to 1000+ in XE now).  In addition to the video in this post, I strongly recommend you go through the 4 step Stairway to Extended Events by Erin Stellato (b|t).  I’m just now starting my journey with XE so I will be leaving out everything but the most basics steps I used…this is a 101 post after all 🙂

Please forgive the watermark…was testing Camtasia.  I’ll be buying a copy soon!

I also want to thank Dave Mason (b|t) for his post Hide and Seek with Extended Events, which helped me understand why I was not seeing my test data in “Watch Live Data” mode, and come up with the workaround you see in the video.  Dave has his own workaround that I did not test.  Lastly, thanks to my Apprentice DBA (t) for teaching me XE after I had him go learn from the Stairway and some testing on his own.   I used what he taught me the next day to capture a sample command on a production system so I could tune some code in the customer’s test environment.

Thanks for reading!

Kevin3NF


Your SQL Servers are misconfigured

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So are some of mine.

So are 90% of the servers I run across, especially in mid-size businesses ( <1000 employees, or 10-20 servers typically).

Its probably not your fault.

There are a bunch of instance level settings in SQL Server that need to be set that are specific to your environment and the workload you are going to run against it.  Most of the defaults that are in the SQL Server installer are set up to make sure the performance is acceptable on a very modest server.  Until version 2016, the installer had not changed much.

The problem is that in a large number of organizations, the person doing the installation of SQL Server is a Developer, or a SysAdmin running a script.   Both are great at their core jobs, but does either of them know what Cost Threshold for Parallelism is?  It is not in the installer…it has to be configured post install or left at a very old default number that most likely makes no sense for you.

Likewise, if you are running SQL Server installed from a script that came with a 3rd party software product, you very likely have the “safest” possible settings in place.

Some of the most common things I see everywhere:

  • Instant File Initialization not enabled
  • Cost Threshold for Parallelism not set correctly
  • MAXDOP set to 1 or ALL CPUs
  • MAX Memory left at default
  • MAX Memory left at default on a multi-instance server
  • Default file locations for system databases, or all
  • No maintenance processes

That is the short list.

Sales Pitch:  I will give you the first hour (one server) free to check on your configuration.  This involves me running a set of scripts, analyzing the results and sending back some recommendations.  Yes, I want to implement them for you as well.

Alternatively, a lighter weight version of this is the Constant Care offering from Brent Ozar Unlimited.  I can take his results and explain what they mean so that we can make intelligent decisions together.  We are not affiliated with Brent Ozar Unlimited, other than as part of the SQL Community.

Let’s talk.  Click HERE to set a meeting on my Calendar.

Thanks for reading!

Kevin3NF


SQL Saturday Dallas, 2018

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Quacky rides bikes!

 

SQL Saturday Dallas #734 is a wrap!

I’m still tired, 2 weeks later!

This is my 7th or 8th SQL Saturday as an attendee.  3rd as a pre-con presenter.  5th delivering a Saturday session, 1st as a sponsor and 1st as a co-organizer.

And it was a blast.

Months of prep work went into getting things ready…venue change, sponsor chasing, speakers, goodies for speakers and attendees, pre-con stuff, after-part, speaker dinner…you name it, I at least read an email about it.  This was my first time around so I was following the lead of veterans on the NTSSUG board.  We had over 1000 people register…I don’t recall the final tally of actual attendees but the place was packed all day!

My pre-con (DBA Fundamentals) went really well, with a record number of attendees. By design this class is usually small and intimate.   The BI session next door had 65 or so!  I’ve done this pre-con 3 times now, and this was the first time I actually had a technical issue (fonts went wacky) and a brain cramp in the middle.  But, I recovered and people (hopefully) learned something they can take back with them to the office.

I also did my Disaster recovery session on Saturday, which I think went really well, and got a bonus of meeting someone I knew through a previous client and only by phone.  I always think you’ve done your session well when people line up to chat with you afterwards:

Either something was really funny, or my backpack has way too much stuff in it…

 

Our Dallas DBAs sponsor table went really well…except everyone seemed to think I was raffling off my personal racing bike.  Lots of folks came by for the raffle and the free t-shirts (100 only…gone in 90 minutes).  Some even stopped to ask what we do, giving me the chance to promote our Apprentice program.  Thanks to everyone that came by!  And also to Richardson Bike Mart for providing the $150 gift card for our raffle.

Not the raffle item….just clickbait apparently:

The entire staff of Dallas DBAs, in official uniform

 

A very special shout out to my good friend and graphics/web guy, Jeff Miller of Igniss Images for shooting this event as a free service to the SQL Server Community.  See the pics!

Thanks to all the attendees for coming, and to the Sponsors that make it possible!

Kevin3NF

 

T-SQL Tuesday: Giving Back

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T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party for the SQL Server community. It is the brainchild of Adam Machanic (b|t) and this month’s edition is hosted by Riley Major (b|t) who has challenged us to “Pick some way you can help our community“…but not just give a few sentences on how you want to help, but to actually put feet, brain cells and dates to it.

Community service is something I’ve been involved in for decades in many different ways.  Within the SQL Server specific community, I got serious about it a couple of years ago when I changed the nature of this blog from “weird stuff I saw at work today” to “here is some info you can use to make your life better today.”  I also started speaking at SQL Saturdays last June in Houston.

Last year, I decided to take this a step further and set up an unofficial “Apprentice” program to help young people get into tech careers that don’t (for whatever reason) have the same opportunities most of us do.   My barrier to entry was low…others not so much.

The 1st Apprentice is ready to become a part-time Junior DBA and I couldn’t be more proud of him for his hard work.  He entered the program as a bit of a test case.  His barrier to entry – zero desire to go to a 4-year school and chase a possibly useless (for him) degree.

I will soon be looking for the next Apprentice.  Will s/he be like the first?  Maybe from a low income area?   Possibly aging out of the Foster Care system?  On the Autism spectrum?  Who knows.

For now, I will be working with one at a time.  I would like to get to the point where I have 2 or 3 that can learn together by working out solutions as a team.   This will help them not only learn Database Administration, but teamwork, trust, communication skills, etc.  Some of them may decide they hate databases but think Security is really cool.  Or Python.  Or Networking.  And that is great!  If they can find a career that they enjoy and provides a stable lifestyle financially, then I’m thrilled to be a step along a glorious path for them.

HOW YOU CAN HELP!

As these young people get to the point that I run out of things to teach them, they need real-world practice. Eventually I will have an “Apprentice” rate/offering on my Services and Pricing page for them to do the grunt work on your servers.  Part-time, with oversight from me or another Sr. Level DBA.  There are caveats and conditions on this I have not sorted out yet, but its coming sometime in the next 6-12 months.  Please keep an eye out for my posts here, on Twitter and on the Dallas DBAs LinkedIn Page.

I want your thoughts on this…privately or in the comments as you see fit.

Thanks for reading,

Kevin3NF