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July 2008 - Posts
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This morning I sat my first Microsoft Exam for about six months and I have to admit that it got me thinking about the whole exam process. Often, I come across DBAs and developers who have an extensive list of Microsoft certifications; however, their skills do not match the number of letters that they put in their e-mail signature and on their business cards. I am not trying to discount the Microsoft exams; I just don't think that exams necessarily correlate to real world experience. I think Microsoft exams have a place, but like any qualification, it does not equate to experience.
I have a few friends who are network engineers and some of them have sat the premium CISCO certifications. In these certifications there is an exam component as well as a practical component. Meaning that someone has to not only demonstrate his or her understating of theory but also be able to apply this theory in a practical "real world" scenario. Imagine the scenario where an exam candidate was provided a SQL Server database where a corruption had occurred and they needed to restore the database. There is a big difference between someone who can diagnose and the resolve the issue versus someone who can answer restore backup and roll forward transaction logs. Do you think that the current Microsoft certification process accurately measures the skills of a DBA?
- Peter Ward
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One of the reasons that I have been a little overwhelmed by the lack time at the moment is that I am trying to tie up any loose ends before the end of this week. From next Tuesday I will be working out of the office for two weeks. Next Tuesday I head to the Australian Microsoft Partner conference in Port Douglas and from there I head home to Brisbane for one night before heading to St. Paul Minnesota for a week to work on the SQL Server 2008 exams.
One of the things about working on the road is ensuring that you have all of the necessary equipment to work as if you were in the office. Much of the work that I perform is done remotely; however, while I am close to home I know if I need something I can just drive to the office or back home to get it. While on the road this is normally not an option. As a result often my Tom Bihn backpack appears to have more in it then my luggage, as it contains everything from a cell charger to a Skype headset. What is the one device that you make sure you always pack in your "Geek Bag" when you are travelling?
- Peter Ward
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I am sure many of us have had that feeling of "If only I had more"—fill in the blank here. That something might be more money or it might simply be more RAM for a server. At the moment, my current wish is for more time. I am sure we have all had that experience where we feel on top of everything and all of a sudden something comes from left field, or maybe a deadline changes and we no longer feel in control. The feeling is as if the rug has been pulled out from beneath us. The problem I find is that despite all of my efforts I think I will find that elusive money tree before I find the key to more time. So what strategies do you use when time becomes a valuable commodity?—I think my strategy at the moment involves a large amount of caffeine.
- Peter Ward
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As SQL Server 2000 is no longer in Mainstream Support, a lot of companies are starting to question the value of extended support. Sure, if they find a new bug or if they need to log a case with Microsoft then extended support provides peace of mind, but honestly when was the last time you came across a problem with SQL Server 2000 that you could not resolve?
The long lead time between SQL Server 2000 and 2005 meant that many people who bought Software Assurance (SA) still have a bad taste in their mouth, as they were potentially in a position that paying for SA to take advantage of the upgrade rights could actually have cost them money rather than save them money. Although SA provides other benefits such as training and support, are these really worth the additional cost? I think that maintenance in the software industry is one area were organizations are looking to cut costs. Historically companies would buy a software product and then continue to pay the standard 20-40% maintenance and support invoice each year when it arrived. However, with the current economic conditions, I am finding that maintenance and support contracts are now another area where costs are being reduced as companies are using older versions of products for longer and are prepared to pay per incident if they require support. Does your organization purchase extended maintenance and support when they buy software, or are they prepared to discover what it is like?
- Peter Ward
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Another week goes by and another acquisition occurs that will directly impact future releases of SQL Server. Hot on the heels of purchasing the database semantics company Zoomix, Microsoft has announced the acquisition of DATAllegro. DATAllegro is a company that specialises in providing Data Warehouse appliances. I am sure that Microsoft is not preparing to enter the Data Warehouse appliance market; however, the technology behind DATAllegro will provide the ability for SQL Server to deliver high performance Data Warehouses without the need to use expensive servers.
One area where other vendors have excelled in the Data Warehouse market is the ability to use and exploit shared-nothing, massively parallel processing architecture. Doug Henderson had an interesting comment on what this acquisition will mean for the SQL Server Data Warehouse market. His comment was that with the help of hardware and distribution partners, Microsoft intends to leapfrog Oracle and step up to high-scale data warehouse deployments. How do you think this technology will be utilised in future versions or SQL Server?
- Peter Ward
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Lately I have been talking in the daily editorial about communication. One thing I come across on a regular basis is that people do not like to communicate bad news. However, this is probably the most important time when communication is required. For example, on a project when people identify that they will not hit a deadline, often they do not flag the issue as they feel that if don't say anything they won't get into trouble for missing the milestone.
For the monthly SQL Server User Group we have pizzas delivered at 5:30 p.m. for a 6 o'clock meeting start. Tonight there was torrential rain in Brisbane, which meant that the traffic was a lot heavier than usual, and as a result the pizza delivery driver was delayed. However, instead of contacting me to let me know that the delivery was delayed I needed to call the pizza company to see what was going on. If I had been notified of what was going on, I would have understood the reason for being late and it would have meant that we had the opportunity to start the User Group a bit earlier and then break at an appropriate time. So next time you don't think you will hit a deadline make sure you let the appropriate person know, as it provides them an opportunity to minimise the impact.
- Peter Ward
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One of the challenges in any team is to ensure that there is effective communication between all team members. The problem is that a team is made up of the sum of the knowledge of all members, but how do you ensure that knowledge is disseminated to all team members? Often there is one person in the team that has specific skills such as the 'Clustering Guy' or the 'Replication Expert'. The problem is that when this person goes on holidays or leaves the organisation the specific skills are lost.
Documentation is often a process that is faced with a lot of resistance; however, most people enjoy pizza, especially when it is free. I was reading an article about a consulting company that had a unique way of dealing with sharing knowledge between their consultants that spent much of the time in the field. Instead of having a ridged structure for sharing knowledge, each team member was expected to perform a 15-minute session each week on something he or she had learnt throughout the week. In return the company would supply a free lunch to all of the consultants. I thought that this was a unique yet effective way to solve the problem of knowledge sharing. Is your team using any unique strategies such as this one to ensure effective communication?
- Peter Ward
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It does not matter what you do in life, there are always comprises that need to be made. At the moment I am looking to purchase a new house and it is a perfect example of compromise. If money were no object then I am sure that it would be possible to buy the newly renovated waterfront property with all of the mod-cons. However, I need to decide, do I want a waterfront property that needs to be renovated? or do I buy a property several streets back from the water that is already renovated?
When you configure a new server you are often faced with the same dilemma; however, instead of having to choose a location you need to choose between disk, memory, and CPU performance. In an ideal world, each server would have 64GB of RAM, 32 processors, and the fastest storage possible. However, for most organizations budget constraints force a compromise to be made that might reduce the overall performance of the server. For example, rather than purchasing 15K RPM drives you may need to use 10K RPM drives. So do you have any Golden Rules that you use to ensure that the compromises that you make in server configurations ensure the maximum performance?
- Peter Ward
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A word that I frequently hear when talking to customers is 'consolidation'. When people are talking about consolidation, often they are talking about virtualisation using their virtualisation platform of choice. However, consolidation means to combine multiple source systems into a centralized system. In other words, consolidation is only achieved when the number of systems is reduced and not just the number of physical servers that are being used.
The big issue I currently see with the approach to focus only on the reduction of physical servers is that although hardware and the associated costs such as rack space and power consumption are reduced, the overall management costs in regards to the number of SQL Server instances to manage is not. Real cost savings are achieved when not only the number of physical servers are reduced but also the number of SQL Server instances. What are your thoughts on the current buzz about consolidation?
- Peter Ward
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Since putting a computer on the desktop of almost everyone in the workforce, there has been a proliferation in the amount of unstructured data that is being generated. From a DBA's perspective unstructured data is any data that does not have a data structure, in other words the data is not stored in a database. A typical example of unstructured data is image and movie files or e-mails and spreadsheets. A recent study by Merrill Lynch found that more than 85 percent of all business information is stored in unstructured data.
The management of unstructured data is one of the biggest problems facing the IT industry. As despite being able to generate the data, it is extremely difficult to provide a mechanism to access this data and derive business value from it. According to Gartner, knowledge workers spend up to 30% of a working week managing unstructured data. Several approaches are currently available to try and assist with this challenge; however, each approach has its own drawbacks. For example, storing unstructured data in a file server or BLOB store adds complexity when developing applications. The complexity is introduced as the application needs to manage the link between the records stored in the database and the system that stores the BLOBs.
Over the last few days I have been exploring the FILESTREAM attribute in SQL Server 2008 and this feature looks like it has finally solved the problem of unstructured data. The FILESTREAM attribute can be applied to a varbinary column allowing SQL Server to store unstructured data for a column on the local NTFS file system. A great article for understating the features in SQL Server 2008 for unstructured data can be found here; however, I would love to hear about how you are currently dealing with this challenge.
- Peter Ward
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Earlier this week, Microsoft announced that it had acquired the Israeli company Zoomix. Zoomix is a database semantics company that specialises in data cleansing and linguistics and how these can be used to ensure data quality. Although acquisitions are nothing new for Microsoft, this one will directly affect future versions of SQL Server. In the press release, it was announced that Zoomix would become part of the SQL Server data platform to provide customers with a manageable and scalable enterprise-class data quality solution.
One of the current areas of weakness in SQL Server is around data quality. Although there are tools available in SSIS such as Fuzzy Grouping and Fuzzy Lookups, these tools do not compare with the tools available with other DBMS platforms and those supplied by third parties. It will be interesting to see when and how Zoomix will be integrated into SQL Server. I think this acquisition further communicates the fact that Microsoft is serious about ensuring that SQL Server is a complete data platform for all data management needs.
- Peter Ward
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