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Author: Kevin Feasel

Tales Of Terror

Published 2017-03-15 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Davis shares some of the wackier moments of his career:

From the day we started the merge until the day I left, there was a WTF moment almost every day. One of the biggest issues I had with my new manager (the whole list is too long for a single blog post) was that he treated his team like unskilled laborers. He did not support them or back them up. They were expected to do anything the dev teams asked them to do any time of day or night. Holidays, weekends, whenever. If they asked to have some code deployed, the DBAs were expected to do it within half an hour during the day or within an hour any other time. They would often get 2 or 3 deployment requests overnight. 1 AM, 2 AM, 4 AM, whatever. And the person on-call not only did it within an hour every time, but they were also expected to be in the office for their normal 40 hours that week.

There’s a lot of crazy in these stories.

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When To Store JSON In SQL Server

Published 2017-03-15 by Kevin Feasel

Bert Wagner thinks about which conditions should hold for it to make sense to store JSON in SQL Server:

Every once in a while I hear of some technologist say that relational databases are dead; instead, a non-table based NoSQL storage format is the way of the future. SQL Server 2016 introduced JSON functionality, making it possible for some “non-SQL” data storage to make its way into the traditionally tabled-based SQL Server.

Does this mean all data in SQL Server going forward should be stored in long JSON strings? No, that would be a terrible idea. There are instances when storing JSON in SQL Server is a good choice though. In this post I want to create recommendations for when data should be stored as JSON and when it shouldn’t.

Protip:  anyone who says relational databases are dead is already working with one strike against.  Bert has great use cases for JSON as well as a good understanding that there are plenty of anti-use cases, making his post well worth reading.

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Recovering From Failure

Published 2017-03-15 by Kevin Feasel

Edwin Sarmiento shares three stories of failure:

The year was 2010. A consultant was working on designing and deploying System Center Operations Manager (OpsMgr) and System Center Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr) for a customer. The goal was to operationalize the enterprise software deployment process and systems monitoring. The servers were prepared, SQL Server was installed, OpsMgr and ConfigMgr configured. The project was in the stabilization phase waiting for the go-live schedule.

Except…

People fail; how much they learn from failures makes the difference.

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Checking Server Specs

Published 2017-03-15 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck had an issue with server power:

Let me tell you the story of a small BI project I did a couple of years back. The project building a small data mart for the local branch of a very large multinational in consumer goods. The data was gathered by the retailers in the country, who send the details back to the company for analyses of the sales performance. The data was to be hosted internally at the company, not at the client. However, the server was commissioned but not yet delivered. In the meantime, I would simply start developing on my own machine – which was quite a powerful laptop with 8 cores and 32GB of RAM – and we would migrate the solution once the server arrived.

Read on for what happened.  I was half-expecting “And that’s when my laptop became the new server” to be the punch line.

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An Expensive String Length Calculator

Published 2017-03-15 by Kevin Feasel

Ewald Cress describes an Inner Platform Effect issue:

When you spend a reasonable amount of time churning out simple form-based UI workflows, you inevitably get bored. And you try and abstract away the drudgery of building forms into something the Common Folks can manage, by building a framework, because Lord knows you can’t buy this sort of thing off the shelf. Inevitably, the arcane knowledge of how to churn out expensive work without obviously doing expensive work can safely stay within an inner circle of senior developers who will be the only people ever allowed to try and configure a no-programming-needed workflow.

Never mind. Their hearts were in the right place.

Could be worse?  Maybe they could have run a WAITFOR for the number of seconds corresponding with the string’s length and then collected that information from a Windows event log entry.

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Violating Swart’s Law

Published 2017-03-15 by Kevin Feasel

Kenneth Fisher notes that maxima are not aspirations:

It could be databases on an instance, indexes on a table, columns in a table, etc. etc. And in case you were wondering, you can get the answers here.

You see this come up every once in a while. A forum question, a question on #sqlhelp, even in *shudder* your own systems. And the answer always comes back the same: Limits are not goals! Usually accompanied by a few jokes.

For more on this, Michael Swart coined Swart’s Ten Percent Rule.

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Everyone’s A Sysadmin

Published 2017-03-15 by Kevin Feasel

Raul Gonzalez has a script to see if you’re in a terrible security situation:

I’m not sure what it’d scare me more, if there are many [sysadmin] or just [sa] because the first one is scary, but the second involves to find out who knows the [sa] password and knowing who did what, can be a real pain in the neck.

One way or another, as I said, I want to know the different people and level of access to my server[s], so back in the day I created this stored procedure which now I want to share with you guys.

We can find all that info using DMV’s and in my case I use sys.server_principals, sys.server_role_members and sys.server_permissions and some stored procedure which I bet it’s not that well known, sys.xp_logininfo which help to get more granular picture from Windows AD Groups.

Click through for the script.

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Thinking About Parallelism

Published 2017-03-14 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey continues his thoughts on parallelism:

Microsoft set the default value for the Cost Threshold for Parallelism back in the 1990s. They were developing SQL Server 2000. That means this value was determined as a good starting point for query plan costs over 17 years ago. In case you’re not aware, technology, T-SQL, SQL Server, and all the databases and database objects within them shifted, just a little, in the intervening 17 years. We can argue whether or not this value made sense as a starting point (and remember, the default settings are meant to be starting points covering a majority of cases, not a final immutable value) for determining your Cost Threshold for Parallelism 17 years ago. I think we can agree that it’s no longer even a good starting point.

For more thoughts, check out a prior post on figuring out the cost threshold.

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Knox With Active Directory

Published 2017-03-14 by Kevin Feasel

Jon Morisi shows how to configure Knox to work with Active Directory:

I’ve recently been doing some work with Hadoop using the Hortonworks distribution.  Most recently I configured Knox to integrate with Active Directory.  The end goal was to be able to authenticate with Active Directory via Knox (a REST API Gateway) and then on to other services like Hive.  I also configured Knox to point to Zookeeper (HA service discovery) vs. Hive directly, but that’s really more detail than we need for integrating Knox with AD.

The Knox documentation is really good and very helpful:
https://knox.apache.org/books/knox-0-9-0/user-guide.html

Worth the read if you’re putting together a Hadoop cluster.

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Diplomacy In Action

Published 2017-03-14 by Kevin Feasel

Mala Mahadevan describes a bad backup situation:

I dug into the script – it was simple – it pulled an alphabetical list of databases from system metadata and proceeded to back them up. It didn’t do this one simple thing – leave TEMPDB off the list. So when the backups got down to TEMPDB, they promptly failed. Now as a smart person – I should have just communicated this to her and had it fixed quietly. But, I was young and rather hot headed at that time. It amazed me that a DBA with several years of experience did not know that TEMPDB cannot be backed up. So, I waited until the team meeting the next day. And when the said job failure came up again – I said that I knew the reason and stated why. I also added that this was a ‘very basic  thing’ that junior DBAs are supposed to know. I was stopped right there. It did not go down well. Her face was flaming red because a consultant showed her up in front of her boss in a bad light. She said she would talk to her boss and collegues the next day (several of whom were nodding their heads disapprovingly at me) and meeting was abruptly adjourned.

In this case, I don’t think there were any good actors.

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