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T-SQL Tuesday 120: What Were You Thinking?

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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 Wayne Sheffield (b|t) who has asked us to write about “What Were You Thinking?” – things we have seen that left us scratching our collective noggins.

The list is long, so I’ll just go with something I saw yesterday.  And in September. Both created by a full-time DBA at a client.

BACKUP LOG MyDatabase
TO DISK = 'E:\SQLBackups\MyDatabase.trn'
WITH INIT

Yep.  It runs hourly.  And initializes the .trn file each time. Goodbye Point in Time recovery.

Ick.

Bonus points: Duplicate indexes, which I will cover in a future post.

Thanks for reading!

Kevin3NF

Your Customers Are Ridiculous!

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They may also be wonderful.

Or profitable (we hope).

But they are ridiculous.

They expect you to have ZERO downtime and ZERO data loss. That’s like 100%. Seven 9’s is cheaper…

How do I know this about your customers when I don’t even know them?

I know you.

When you log into Twitter, or Facebook, or LinkedIn…you expect all of your posts, tweets, and likes to be there. I’ve seen you freak out when the like count on the last brilliant thing you said went down instead of up.

I do it too ?

You don’t mind a missing post on Facebook? Its not the end of the world? True.

How about a missing paycheck from your bank? One electronic transaction missing vs. a different electronic transaction. Totally different level of freak-out.

Facebook…you go post on Twitter about it. 1st National Bank of YourTown – you’re in the bank president’s office ripping them to shreds and threatening to sue. Because your mortgage payment was missed.

See…you expected no data loss and no downtime from your bank….ever. And you didn’t know that is a crazy expectation.

The 100% expectation is inherent in humans, and its our job as businesses to get as close to it as we can. The more “9s” you need to guarantee, the more expensive it is.

In the tech world we have fancy acronyms for this: RPO and RTO. Recovery Point Objective (data-loss tolerance) and Recovery Time Objective (downtime tolerance). You need to set these numbers for each critical system and put the processes in place to make them happen.

Databases, Web Servers, Firewalls…all of it. They all work together to help keep your customers happy, rather than having them come unglued because you lost their data.

Once you have all that in place…test it.

Comments welcomed and encouraged

Thanks for reading!

Kevin3NF

T-SQL Tuesday: Cookies…we love cookies!

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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 The Shane (b|t) who has challenged us to Dip Into the Cookie Jar of Goodness we use in order to think back about our accomplishments and take some sustenance from them.  When things suck, it helps to remember that there are White Chocolate Macadamia nut times as well

I have a number of accomplishments (and failures) in my career, pre-IT and as a SQL DBA.  Short list:

  • I learned a few decades ago (when we first got email) to keep an “Ego” folder and put any customer, co-worker and management kudos emails into it.  Even on a good day, go in there and read things.   Also, they help on Performance Reviews.
  • When I first successfully troubleshat a SQL Server replication issue for a customer (during my first Microsoft contract…)
    • That one was a CritSit call from a Premier customer and I knew the answer before they were actually on the phone
  • When I migrated a customer from full-blown Access 97 to SQL 2000 backend/Access .adp front-end and everything was so fast they thought it was broken
  • When a projector failed during my first SQL Saturday presentation (about DR) and I played it off like it was no big deal.   NOBODY knew that was my first talk 🙂
  • The first time someone paid my sticker price consulting rate and thanked me for it
  • When I trained some front-line engineers on Log Shipping nothing more than a white board and 2 different colored markers
  • That day I discovered Starbucks, signed a contract, then discovered Starbucks again.   I’m writing this from a Starbucks….just FYI.
  • …and so many more, because I’m old.

Thanks for reading!

Kevin3NF

Relax…

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(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

PASS Summit 2018 Game Night

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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

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