When I'm doing performance tuning on an application in the early stages of its lifecycle (or any app that's never had DBA attention before), I end up with a ton of recommendations within the first day of performance tuning. The resulting to-do list can seem overwhelming to project managers and developers, so I include one of the following two sentences as a part of each recommendation:
I've been backing up SQL Servers for almost a decade now, and it's time to share the lessons I've learned. All of this is my own opinion - your mileage may vary - but I'll try to explain the reasoning behind the choices I make. I won't address log shipping or snapshots this time around.…
The past month has been a real challenge, filled with 70-80 hour weeks and clawing back from one disaster after another.
In late June, IBM recommended that we upgrade the firmware on our DS4800 SAN controllers to fix some problems. We obliged, and two days later, our Exchange cluster rebooted without warning. We'd been having some other problems with those servers anyway, so we didn't connect the dots. A few days later, the reboot happened again, and then again.
Database administrators need to know each SQL Server's weakest link so we know where to focus their hardware budgets and time. On any given server, we need to know what the slowest component is, and where it'll pay off to invest hours and dollars. This is performance tuning, and the first place to start is by using Performance Monitor.
DBAs need an in-office computer to run overnight and weekend performance logs, traces, and long-running queries. For example, let's say you need to run a long series of maintenance queries to rebuild indexes over the weekend. You shouldn't be remote-desktopping into your production servers to run this query: instead, you just need a simple workstation that you can leave logged-in, with the desktop locked, that runs the query.
It's that beautiful time of year when everybody watches the colors. No, not the changing browns and reds of the foliage, but the red and black numbers on P&L statements. That's right - it's budget time.
In order to build a good database budget, we have to ask our managers a few key questions:
YES! YES! YES!
Or as they say in the World Cup, GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL!
For the past few days, I've complained a couple of times about the lack of testing on my new Cingular 8125. My troubles continue with the MMS integration. The device has a great digital camera, and it has great email support, but do the two work together? Not so much. STEPS TO REPRODUCE: 1. Take…
I had to do some developer training last week and I wrote up a paper on the basics of primary keys and indexes. Sure, there's tons of similar stuff around the net, but this is MINE, baby.
Our Table: Phone Numbers
For our evil training purposes, let's say we work for the phone company, and we need a database table with phone numbers. We need to track:
Last week I wrote a series of postings for employers, and this week I'll touch base on things candidates should know. Candidates: you are a product, and your web site is your brochure. Managers: read the brochure just as you would a new product. These days, we buy everything online. We read the product's web…
When hiring a new IT worker, take a few minutes to give them a tour of the group's work environment. You don't have to go so far as to point out, "Here's the cube where you'd be sitting," but try to give them a general idea of what the typical work area looks like. At…
Ebay just announced they're buying Skype for $2.6 billion dollars. Here's the press release.
For those of you who don't know what Skype is...exactly. That's the point.
The first thing administrators want to monitor is their resources: file servers, database servers, app servers, etc. That's understandable, since they're system administrators. In order to be really successful with monitoring, though, we need to think like customer administrators - for both our internal and external customers. Forget the hardware, and think about the people. How do our customers interact with our systems?
Here's a photo of the decorations. The place looks like a New Year's celebration. You can't help but smile in this office.
I came into the office last night to check up on my fantasy football scores (thank you, Priest Holmes, you record-setting devil you) and found that my office had been TP'ed for my upcoming birthday. They did a masterful job, down to hanging TP from the ceiling as streamers. I couldn't stop laughing for several minutes.
When I went downstairs this morning to make my second pot of coffee, I opened the kitchen blinds and saw a little creature in distress. This fella got his legs caught in the boards of my back fence overnight, probably while walking along the top, and was stuck. He was still alive, thank goodness, and…
I had a really crummy day yesterday. Things just weren't going my way, and I had all kinds of stupid small programming problems at work. Just one unrelated thing after another. Sometime in the afternoon, I stumbled downstairs for yet another pot of coffee and some ibuprofen, but I wasn't really paying attention. I was…
A few days ago, the RIAA announced that they were suing another 477 people who shared MP3's. I had a fake Yahoo press release rigged up so that people could put in a friend's name, and it would generate an official-looking link that they could send to their unwitting friend. The friend would read the…
JinWicked drew me a set of icons to use in online forums, and I'm really tickled with the way they turned out. The one shown here is my favorite, because it captures the way my eyes close when I smile. I gotta rescan them at a higher quality and chop 'em up in Photoshop this week. Having these makes me want to start leaving more comments on web forums so that I can show off my icons. Muhahaha.
I bought my first pantyhose yesterday. I've been trying to figure out why nobody sells the right filter refills for my Fluval 404 aquarium filter, which has been doing a bang-up job of removing turtle poop. Yesterday, a nice Petco staffer told me why: everybody buys women's pantyhose, cuts it up into bags, and uses…
