Don’t forget that free DVDs of our virtual conferences featuring me, along with Buck Woody (blog | twitter) and Brent Ozar (blog | twitter) will be mailed anywhere in North America free of charge, now available at this link.
I first wrote about useful database maintenance scripts on my SQLBlog account way back in 2008. Hmmm – now that I think about it, I first wrote about my own useful database maintenance scripts in a journal called SQL Server Professional back in the mid-1990′s on SQL Server v6.5 or some such. But I digress…
No, not that kind of script!
Anyway, I pointed out a couple useful sites where you could get some good scripts that would take care of preventative maintenance on your SQL Server, such as index defragmentation, updating statistics, and so forth. One of the script kits came directly from Microsoft’s internal database management team. But, alas, they haven’t published any updates in quite a while. On the other hand, the other set of scripts came from Ola Hallengren, who has done a great job keeping his scripts up to date.
Recently, Ola added support for updating column statistics, both in a generalized update and also updates for only those columns whose statistics have been modified. He’s added some other goodies to the latest release, which you can read about here, http://ola.hallengren.com/Versions.html for all details.
In addition, I’d like to remind you of the white paper I wrote a while back called Automating DBA Processes, which covers many aspects of database automation and cherry picks some of the best practices from many different thought leaders, such as Ola, Michelle Ufford (blog | @sqlfool) who will be speaking at the 24HOP soon, and Allen White (blog | twitter).
Quest Software’s latest community initiative, Windows Azure-based Project Lucy, has debuted! Project Lucy is part infrastructure analytics, part social media experiment, and part performance data warehouse.
The best things about Project Lucy include:
It’s Free – just like our SQLServerPedia website, Project Lucy is free to anyone who wants to upload a trace file
It’s 1oo% web-based – you don’t have to download or maintain anything and updates roll out seamlessly, all the time
It really helps – just generate a SQL Trace on a SQL Server 2000, 2005 or 2008 instance, upload it on www.projectlucy.com, and see for yourself
This initiative empowers DBAs and IT professionals to gain a better understanding of their database performance through automated analyses and collaboration with their peers. Our goal is to allow users to go beyond the benefits of installing and using a commercial product, and tap into an online community to share and compare experiences and results.
Our goal is to test the best ways we can help users learn and understand what their performance data really means, and how they should act upon that data – if at all – in a collaborative, meaningful way. For this debut, Project Lucy will accept SQL Trace files, or zip files containing multiple traces, and will provide a summary of the content and areas where performance can be improved. As y’all use the service, information will become available to help you compare your performance and engage in meaningful discussions with others about the issues you are facing.
Your feedback, your feedback, and participation will drive how Project Lucy evolves. Get involved by participating in the pilot program! And let me know what you think.
Sometimes I’m timely in getting the news out on useful resources. And, other times, I’m a bit slower on the draw. As I told friends back at New Year’s Day, “As an official member of the Procrastinators Club, welcome to 2008!” On the other hand, it’s always good to remind folks of great resources that are still available and on the shelf. Why? Well, the Internet hits us with such a deluge of constantly new material, that we often forget about the old(ish) stuff that’s still really useful.
Darth Doofus, Emporer Palpatine, and Darth Goofus
Quest vConference for SQL Server
One of the most popular teaching sessions I ever engaged in was the Quest vConferences for SQL Server in 2010, with my good friends Buck Woody (blog | twitter) and Brent Ozar (blog | twitter).
These are evergreen favorites for their strong technical content and, perhaps, an outpouring of Brent’s faux chest hair in the latter part of the training events. Go to this URL for the code samples, download the slides, and to rate the presentation: http://questkb.com/live and or http://www.vconferenceonline.com/shows/spring10/quest/conference/ondemand.asp. You can also get the full events shipped for free anywhere in North America on a single DVD.
24 Hours of PASS Celebrates Women in Technology
Kalen Delaney, author and expert, and one of the initiators of WiT within PASS
It’s always a big thrill for me when a successful initiative launched by PASS goes viral. One such example is the 24Hours of PASS. (See last year’s webcasts at http://www.sqlpass.org/24hours/2010/). I now see other industry trade groups and technology user groups launching their own 24 Hours type webcast marathons. Kudos – PASS folks thought of it first! (I’d give proper credit, if I could only remember who thought of it. Rick Heiges (blog | twitter), I think).
This year, 24 Hours of PASS is gearing up for an exceptional lineup of SQL Server and BI experts in 24 one-hour technical webcasts. This free training event takes place over two 12-hour days March 15-16, with each day beginning at 12:00 GMT (UTC). Click here to get registered: http://www.sqlpass.org/24hours/Spring2011/. And in celebration of Women in Technology, PASS is hosting an all female line-up of speakers.
This is another area in which PASS has prompted many emulators. My memory of the details grow dim, since this was almost ten years ago, but I believe it was then PASS director Kalen Delaney (blog | twitter) and Microsoft liaison to the board Jacqueline Borges who put forward the idea of hosting a special Women in Technology luncheon. Since that time, WiT has gone on to be one of the best parts about the big PASS Summit and something widely emulated by other professional and trade associations.
Microsoft Thrive – Career Planning Insights
I was honored to be a featured speaker on the Microsoft Thrive website about this time last year. What’s Thrive? It’s a website put together by Microsoft that helps you plan out your career. It has certification and learning resources, career paths, and traditional learning patterns and practices. In other words, it tells you what you need to know to qualify for various kinds of it jobs and then gives you links to dive deeper. Check it out!
Cloud computing is more than just the latest buzz word in the IT trade papers. It is a remarkable paradigm shift with as much potential to “turn over the apple cart” of IT computing as client-server had for the world of mainframe and minicomputers. If you’re not spending time to learn about cloud computing, in general, and SQL Azure, in particular, then you’re missing the boat in a big way. (Ha! Two big metaphors in one afternoon. My high-school English teacher would be proud.)
There are mountains, literally MOUNTAINS, of free and high-quality content to be had. For example:
Fire Side Chats are invitation only Live Meetings. They are an hour in length, repeated at different times of day so you don’t need to attend at 3:00am because of time zone issues. Each Fire Side Chat has a key Microsoft individual talking about their area of expertise and answering questions from the audience. The Fireside Chats are aimed at technical experts, MVPs, user group leaders and the like. But they have content of interest for everyone. When looking at the archives, I noticed that there didn’t seem to be many recent chats. But some of the older ones still looked interested. You can register to see one at http://ug.gitca.org/sites/FireSideChats.
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Microsoft Team Blogs of Interest
Do you ever wish that Microsoft consolidated all of their blogs in one easy to find central clearinghouse? Well, your wish was answered, actually quite a long time ago. BlogMS consolidates almost 250 Microsoft team blogs across a variety of Microsoft product and online services portfolio, with usually about 70 – 80 blog posts per week. Yes, children, that’s two to three HUNDRED blog posts per month.
You’ll find important announcements and details of Microsoft news, product releases, service packs and important support issues. On top of that, I really like all of the great links to Microsoft web resources on the right hand side of the website. If you’re like me (and let’s be honest, most rational or just sane people would not want anything of the sort), you’ll probably bookmark quite a few of those links.
The following BlogMS Resource Guides may also be of use:
You might be familiar with the term “Most Valuable Player”, but haven’t heard that MVPs exist in the professional world too. Microsoft has nearly 3,000 designated “Most Valuable Professionals”. These folks are designated experts who know their subject matter at an expert level and, as an added bonus, they don’t smell like a basketball locker room (SQLRockstar, Thomas LaRock, being a notable exception to this rule).
Late last year a cool new tool was launched called Microsoft Desktop Player. The player aggregates contextual technical content (webcasts, podcasts, white papers) from across all sorts of Microsoft websites having an IT Pro adoption lifecycle. In addition, it also provides links to local resources and news for the Developers and IT Pros based on their local settings, helping to drive the local engagement/relationship. You’ll need Microsoft Silverlight to run the website, but it’s oh-so-cool looking. Check out the details here: http://www.microsoft.com/click/desktopplayer.
Kevin discusses resources online that he uses and considers to be excellent destinations for SQL Server professionals. Kevin will discuss each site he uses in detail – check it out!
Kevin Kline will offer insight into best practices for SQL Server 2005 set up, configuration and queries. He will also discuss tuning for both the server and hardware to help an application perform better after it is deployed. This presentation will offer a better understanding of several SQL Server performance related areas including:
* Hardware design
* SQL Server configuration settings
* Database configuration settings
* Application design
* SQL Tuning
I always enjoy getting the chance to catch up with author, consultant, and Microsoft Clustering MVP Allan Hirt. Allan and I recently presented two sessions covering an overview of high availability in Microsoft SQL Server and, the following week, a demo of how to implement several different kinds of high availability techniques including database mirroring, transactional replication, and Windows clustering services.
We’re joined by my new cohort in crime, Iain Kick, also renowned for his role as the editor-in-chief at SQLServerPedia.
Allan is the author of these and other books:
During the Q&A, we always get a lot of questions. Here are the collected Q’s and A’s.
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Meeting Questions and Answers:
Subject: Pain of the Week We – October 14, 2010
Start Time: 14 October 2010 16:00:00 GMT+1:0
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Paul T Asked: General comment….. copying files is where I love the SAN replication. Don’t trust it at all for real database stuff though!
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Sherbaz M C P Changes Question To: Please suggest the best back/restore techique for huge databases. Should we go for SAN level backup technologies or snapshots that uses SQL Writer? Storage admins claims that they can restore a 28 TB database in 30 minutes. They are saying that they can even take transaction log backups and restores.
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Ameena L Asked: When we talk to our management about SLA, Recovery object and uptime etc. They say just do your best. They expect no downtime but will not define any of this so how we determine what we are shooting for if target is not identified?
Kevin Kline Answered: That’s why actually working through a recovery is so important. I strongly recommend that you perform a full recovery, perhaps to a dev or QA server, and then using that benchmark as the general rules for your SLA.
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Stuart A Asked: What do RTO & RPO stand for?
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Fadel Asked: at 2 part questions: part1- what is the advantage of having a sql clustering over Oracle RAC where in the first case, we have at least 1 node sitting there doing nothing waiting on the other node(s) to fail, comparing to the second case where Oracle RAC offers both, HA and scalability – part2: what is the new features on sql 2008 clustering compared to sql 2005 clustering – thanks!
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Mohammed Changes Question To: Shouldnt clustering considered as a local HA instead of DR since the other nodes are local?
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Alan Xu Changes Question To: Is cluster 2008 support sql 2005 instance and sql 2008 instance in the same cluster?
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sjohn Asked: What is the maximum recomended distance for a synced mirroring with a reasonable size of pipe
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Anita Asked: You mentioned about multi – instance cluster( active-active)? I will be interested in learning more about this. we have active-active in our environment. Is it scheduled for next week?
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robert l Asked: Will mirroring work with a large number of “Smaller” databases? 500 2gb databases vs 2 1tb database
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Alvinator Asked: When log shipping if you have a large tlog will it ship it in chunks or the entire log file?:
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James M Asked: What are the advantages of Database Mirroring over transaction replication? or vice versa
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Martin Asked: IDEA – Maybe Quest should provide a Database Invenotry/Request to gather all the information for a HA environment
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Martin Asked: I am very interested in finding a holistic view to HA and DR to handle SQL Server. Oracle and even DB2 – are you aware of such a product/s?
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Alan Xu Changes Question To: How to handle SSIS in multiple instance?
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Nadim Y Asked: I was coming from a consolidation angle – looking to install muliple instances on each node within the cluster. Is there an upper limit or just based on the resources available on the nodes
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Mohammed Asked: IS clusteting possible in std edition sql 2008?
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Anita Asked: You mentioned about multi – instance cluster( active-active)? I will be interested in learning more about this. we have active-active in our environment. Is it scheduled for next week?
Kevin Kline Answered: Next week is mostly demos of how to set up these techniques. However, there are some resource slides at the end that point you to more websites and whitepapers about each of these specific technologies.
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robert l Asked: Will mirroring work with a large number of “Smaller” databases? 500 2gb databases vs 2 1tb database
Kevin Kline Answered: absolutely! however, there is some management overhead in that mirroring is configured on a per database level
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Alvinator Asked: When log shipping if you have a large tlog will it ship it in chunks or the entire log file?:
Kevin Kline Answered: It doesn’t ship the transaction log, it shipps the backups/dumps of the t-logs. That’s an especially good use for backup compression. We have a lot of features specifically for this in our LiteSpeed backup tool.
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James M Asked: What are the advantages of Database Mirroring over transaction replication? or vice versa
Kevin Kline Answered: We’re on those slides now. =^)
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Martin Asked: IDEA – Maybe Quest should provide a Database Invenotry/Request to gather all the information for a HA environment
Kevin Kline Answered: I like it, Martin. I’ll put that in my notebook. Btw, have you seen our “Discovery Wizard for SQL Server”? It does inventorying for SQL Servers.
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@SQLRich Asked: I’ve heard that not all of the SQL components are cluster aware, is this true?
Kevin Kline Answered: Yes, afaik, SSIS is one of the biggest offenders in this area. But I think there are others.
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Desi Asked: Can you mirror a database to more than one locaton?
Kevin Kline Answered: I don’t recall the exact steps to do this, but yes. Also available with replication and log shipping.
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Mohammed Asked: IS clusteting possible in std edition sql 2008?
Kevin Kline Answered: Discussed on slide 11, Mohammed.
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sjohn Asked: What is the maximum recomended distance for a synced mirroring with a reasonable size of pipe
Kevin Kline Answered: That’s on slide 10,
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Nadim Y Asked: Is there a maximum number of instances you can have in a multinode cluster
Kevin Kline Answered: Not sure what you mean, Nadim. Usually, I don’t see more than 2 actives to 1 passive.
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Mohammed Asked: One question before we leave please..i asked this before also. Clustering is more Local HA and mirrroing/ls is DR…is this correct?
Kevin Kline Answered: Clustering across fibre can be miles, sometimes many miles distant, though it’s uncommon. Mirroring and log shipping can be long-distance. Latency varies per technology type and is also another issue as to whether the solution is considered HA or DR.
Peter Drucker, the Father of Modern Busines Management
November 2009 would have been the 100th birthday of famed management guru, Peter Drucker, were he alive today. Now for those of you who don’t know the name, Peter Drucker was no mere guru or simple pundit. He was in fact the father of management and universally acclaimed as the world’s greatest management thinker. Anyone who’s taken a business class, studied for an MBA, or had to deal with an IT project to build a management dashboard has been touched by Peter Drucker. If you have a spare moment, add Drucker’s Concept of the Corporation to your library.
Drucker came upon the scene at a time when management, as a discipline, was a career backwater treated like a red-headed stepchild compared to the other professions. The famed Boston Consulting Group hadn’t been founded yet and McKinsey was perhaps a decade old. A genuine intellectual who stood in the company of Keynes and Wittgenstein, he still managed to illustrate his thoughts in realistic examples taken from literature and history. And he spread his gospel in both the commercial and social sector (as an advisor to the Girl Scouts) from countries near, like USA and throughout Europe, to far, like Japan and China. Even today, his thoughts and ideas are still startlingly relevant.
One of Drucker’s most famous axioms, and I paraphrase, is If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it – what we now call metrics. In IT circles, we most often see metrics come to life as key performance indicators (KPI). KPIs are typically used to track an organizations success in reaching key strategic goals, especially towards hard-to-quantify goals. We used KPIs heavily during my presidency with PASS, and I encourage you to read more about them so that you can implement them in your organization. (Start at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_performance_indicator or http://management.about.com/cs/generalmanagement/a/keyperfindic.htm to find more information.)
Here’s a quick primer on KPIs, which might even be enough for you to get started. Remember, a KPI should always be derived from a strategic goal or vision of the organization. It’s a pointless exercise creating KPIs that are tied back to organizational strategy – hence the word key in the title. Rather, KPIs are intended to achieve a very specific result. But I digress. KPIs generally described by the S.M.A.R.T criteria:
SPECIFIC: The KPIs should be specific to the purposes of the organization and aligned with its corporate strategies and vision. They should balance and complement each other, not compete with or confound each other.
MEASUREABLE: A measurable KPI is one that is easy to understand, derived from sensible data points, not from complex indexes. KPIs measure the drivers of business value and are, thus, leading indicators of performance – that is, they’re good predictors of how well the organization is meeting its strategic goals. (As an example, lots of organizations have shifted from magazine based advertising, which is nearly impossible to measure its impact, to web advertising, where you can clearly tell exactly how successful the ad is based on the number of click-throughs).
ACHIEVABLE: KPIs must be owned by an individual or group who is held accountable for its outcomes, event to the point of tying compensation or incentives to their achievement. However, the KPI needs timely, actionable data so that its owner can intervene to improve performance before it’s too late to meet the target.
RELEVANT: You should have a relatively small number of high-value KPIs that focus attention, rather than many KPIs that scatter attention and energy. Your organization should also create their KPIs based on standardized rules and definitions, so that they’re intuitively understandable. KPIs can lose impact over time, they should be periodically reviewed, refreshed, and amended to remain relevant in light of the current business environment.
TIMED: KPIs also need to be context-driven according to the targets and thresholds pertinent to their managers within a specified time frame, usually with milestones at quarter-end and year-end. If, upon review, the KPI is not being met, there should be enough information to trigger a series of corrective actions or positive changes for the organization so they can meet the KPI goal.
If you can't measure it, you can't manage it.
KPIs, just by their very nature, are as much a process as anything else. Since you must constantly measure performance relative to the KPI and, upon occasion, take corrective action, the KPIs become an everyday component of your daily business processes. This strengthens your team and your entire organization. If you’re in a position to start applying KPIs or simply a set of published performance metrics in your organization, I strongly encourage you to do so. And remember, this recommendation comes not from me, but from Peter Drucker, the world’s greatest management thinker.
