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Category: Administration

DevOps And The DBA

Published 2017-08-11 by Kevin Feasel

Kellyn Pot’Vin-Gorman gives a bit of DevOps 101 to database administrators:

Monitoring changes a bit with DevOps. It’s less about a simple tier and moves to the entire infrastructure. A need to monitor application, host, database and availability between each is essential. As these different tiers rarely come from one vendor and many may even be proprietary, there are requirements to monitor using multiple tools, scripts and interfaces.

Two of the main products for monitoring, recognized in the DevOps community are New Relic and AppDynamics. Monitoring can be as simple as a suite of scripts that report the health and status of processes and orchestration, notifying if there is any failure. This choice normally has a scaling limit and at some point, a more robust solution is required or gaps are felt in the monitoring process or failure at certain tiers. More enterprise solutions, such as New Relic and AppDynamics and enhanced by logging suites like Splunk and Sumo Logic.

Read the whole thing.

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Cloudera Director And AWS Spot Instances

Published 2017-08-10 by Kevin Feasel

David Han shows off some new features in Cloudera Director 2.5 to help when building Hadoop clusters on AWS spot price instances:

You can configure Spot instances in Cloudera Director’s instance templates. These instance templates contain a flag indicating whether Spot instances should be used, as well as a field specifying the bid price for those instances.

Each instance group in the cluster template includes a field that indicates the minimum number of instances required in that group for the cluster to be considered successful. Cloudera Director will continue with bootstrapping or growing a cluster if the minimum count for each instance group is satisfied. Spot instances should not be used for instance groups that are required for the normal operation of the cluster, such as HDFS DataNodes. Instance groups configured to use Spot instances should set their minimum number to zero with the expectation that the instances may not be provisioned due to the Spot bid price being lower than the Spot price.

If you’re able to take advantage of spot instances, you can end up saving a pretty good amount of money.

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What’s New In Ambari 2.5

Published 2017-08-09 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Codding tells us what’s coming in the next version of Ambari:

Ambari Log Search (Tech Preview) has been one of our most popular features, and in this release has seen UI, and backend refreshes based on customer feedback.  Log Search is planned for GA with the next major Ambari release, Ambari 3.0 in which the UI will be simplified, and the backend will have more robust log retention and scaling capabilities.

There are some interesting changes, so read the whole thing.

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Breaking A Database Into Smaller Files

Published 2017-08-09 by Kevin Feasel

Jana Sattainathan shows how to break a SQL Server database into smaller files, as well as giving some reasons why you might want to do that:

You are probably reading this post because you have experienced the pain yourself and I dont want to waste anymore of your time and get right to the steps involved in breaking up a huge database or a datafile

  1. Check the space situation on your host

  2. Get the space usage by files for the big database/datafile in question

  3. Decide on number of files to add/location

  4. Add multiple secondary datafiles

  5. Distribute data from big datafile into the new datafiles using EMPTYFILE option

  6. Shrink the big datafile and set a maximum size

  7. Change the default filegroup

Read on for Jana’s step-by-step approach.

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Automating Installation Of SQL Server

Published 2017-08-08 by Kevin Feasel

Nate Johnson has a script he uses to automate installation of SQL Server on a new server:

We can then use this file in the ConfigurationFile argument of setup.exe from the SQL Server install media.  To put a little more color on that: the .ini file is really just a collection of command-line arguments to setup.exe​; you could also list them all out in-line, but that would be tedious and silly.  Here’s a couple major selling points of creating your own config file:

  1. Slipstream updates (SP’s, CU’s), instead of having it go out to MSFT update servers (or *aghast* sticking with the original RTM bits, you heathen you!)

  2. Specify drive letters / default file locations: sure, this may be considered old-hat if you’re running super slick storage, but I still find it makes management a bit easier if I know where my MDFs, LDFs, TempDB, & backups will always be.

  3. Take advantage of 2016’s better TempDB setup options (# files, size & growth)

Read the whole thing.

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More Annoying MSDTC Problems

Published 2017-08-07 by Kevin Feasel

Jeff Mlakar walks through some advanced MSDTC troubleshooting:

Sometimes when a VM is cloned from a template (VMware or Hyper-V) the CID can be duplicated between the two machines. Evidence of this can be seen in the Event Viewer (Event ID 4101). This means the two MSDTC services will not be able to communicate with each other.

A possible error message is:

The Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator (MS DTC) has cancelled the distributed transaction

The MSDTC feature of the Windows operating system requires unique CID values to ensure that MSDTC functionality between computers works correctly. Disk duplicate images of Windows installations must have unique CID values or MSDTC functionality may be impaired. This can occur when using virtual hard disks to deploy an operating system to a virtual machine.

This burned me in the past.  Jeff has several scenarios that he walks us through, so if you’re using the Distributed Transaction Coordinator, definitely check this out.

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Azure SQL Database Deployment Account Errors

Published 2017-08-03 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones troubleshoots an issue with Azure SQL Database:

 I’ve had most builds work really well. I tried a number of things, but kept getting a few items in the build. There were login errors or network errors, both of which bothered me since I could manually log in with SSMS from the same machine as my build agent.

I suspected a few things here, one of which was the use of named pipes for the Shadow database and TCP for Azure SQL Database.

Eventually, I decided to fall back with msbuild, ignoring VSTS, and make sure all my parameters were correct.

Read on for the rest of the story.

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Resizing A Linux Partition

Published 2017-08-02 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones shows how to add disk space to a Linux partition:

While working with some SQL Server 2017 tests, I ran out of disk space. I tend to size my VMs around 40GB, and that works for some things, but I’ll run out of space.

I needed to expand the VMWare disk. That doesn’t mean Linux sees the space directly, and I had to figure out how to make the partition bigger. I could have added another disk, but I wanted to work through this process. I learned I needed to have an inactive partition, so I download gparted on a live cd and booted to that.

Steve uses the GUI approach; in the comments, David Klee links to his CLI approach.

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Using Startup Stored Procedures

Published 2017-08-02 by Kevin Feasel

John Morehouse explains how to set up a startup stored procedure, as well as some of the risks involved:

Startup procedures automatically execute whenever SQL Server is started.  Where would you use this?  One example is if you had an application that required the use of a global temporary table, you could use a startup procedure to create it.  This would allow the table to be immediately accessible to any application that requires it.

Another possibility is that you could “warm up” the cache so that data is already cached when an application needs it.  This would help prevent that initial I/O hit the first time the query is called, thus potentially improving initial performance.

Click through for details.  I’ve created a couple of these, but they rarely come to mind and that’s one of the big problems:  if there is an issue, there’s probably quite a bit of investigative work that would take place before somebody remembers that hey, these things exist.

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Moving SQL Server Data Files

Published 2017-08-01 by Kevin Feasel

Jana Sattainathan walks us through the process of moving a SQL Server data file from one drive to another:

Space got tight on a drive and I knew that there was space on another drive. I had already set this particular database with multiple secondary file groups/files (.ndf files) instead of a huge and single .mdf file (which would have made the whole thing a lot harder).

The procedure to relocate data files is extremely simple

Click through for Jana’s seven salvos of administrator success.

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