Which would you rather do, wade through the nuances of SQL Server licensing or a typical tax form?  Some days, I think the latter would be a welcome respite. Let’s just put it this way, I bet Brent Ozar (BrentO on twitter) is happy that licensing wasn’t the biggest part of the MCM grade. (I don’t know this, I just presume it because people actually pass the MCM every once in a while).

Common SQL Server Licensing Myths

The people in this maze might be better off than us.

I am going to talk about some of the more common myths I’ve encountered with licensing throughout my career and consulting. Microsoft has some decent SQL Server licensing resources including some PDFs (some short and some nearing legislation size with flowcharts abound). This quick guide is a good start to look at. Which brings me to a disclaimer:

This blog post does not replace your own research and understanding of licensing guidelines from Microsoft.  The thoughts presented here are my own and represent my views of Microsoft licensing guidelines and my interpretations thereof. My perspective has the potential to be wrong (I’m a husband, so I’m likely wrong, come to think of it ) and could become outdated with future changes. Check with Microsoft and your licensing representative to make any final decisions.

On to the myths I encounter…

You Need Enterprise

Look at the edition feature matrix for your version (2008, 2008 R2, 2005) and see what you need and anticipate needing – it can save you around $15k + per CPU to go with Standard over Enterprise. I have commonly bumped into people believing that they need enterprise licenses when they don’t when it comes to things like:

• Log Shipping (Standard is fine)
• Clustering (You can have a single instance two node cluster on Standard)
• Mirroring (Some types are allowed in Standard)

In fact, this post was inspired recently when I was able to see a project at a company to roll out Enterprise Edition simply because of Log Shipping. No other enterprise features needed. This company had great pricing on Standard and I was able to save them almost $60,000 in Enterprise licenses they didn’t need. Wait. There’s more! Act now and you can save even more because another myth sounds like this:

You Need To License Your Mirrored Copy Also

In most situations (yours may be different, double check), a DR standby (For mirroring or log shipping) doesn’t need to be licensed by default. Now there are certain triggers (pardon me) that will hit you with a license cost (Being failed over to it for more than 30 days or reporting off of a snapshot of the mirror, for a couple examples) but by default, many simple options don’t. This same company had an Enterprise License purchase (single CPU) for the fail over site. Another $19,000 saved with no standard license even needed because that instance can sit there “unlicensed”.

I Can Put SSAS, SSRS and the DB Engine anywhere…

You can. And, as a best practice in busier environments I’d say you should. But you can’t do it for nothing. You can put them all on the same box and they will be licensed as though you just had one (under most circumstances). The moment you split them out (again, generally a best practice for performance) you must license each component separately. While I’ve saved some companies money, here I’ve cost some money… Sorry. I don’t like it either but it is what it is.

Multiple Instances Still Means Multiple Licenses

I hate typing this because just as soon as I do, I am sure some pointy headed boss someplace will say, let’s consolidate every instance onto one machine! Don’t do that. But this myth isn’t true – you pay by the CPU by the machine. If you have two instances on one machine each using 2 CPUs, you only need one 2 CPU license. Add another instance to it? Same thing, no new license, you pay by the machine not the instance. This is great and can really help save some license expenses at smaller shops but just do so carefully as I wrote when I first drafted this SQLServerPedia wiki article on multiple instance decision making.

SQL Server Licenses Are By Core, Like Oracle

Or at least like Oracle was last time I checked… SQL Server (today.. I don’t know of anything changing, but you never know) licenses by the socket. By the actual die that goes into the socket. Not by the core or thread. So you can have a Quad core proc with hyperthreading that looks like 8 CPUs in perfmon but you are paying for a single CPU license. This is good to know. Might make that hardware upgrade more worthwhile. Who knows how long this will last and, for all I know, maybe it is gone by the time you read this, so double check yourself.

Virtual Server Licensing Works Just Like Physical

I’m not going to say anything except to say this isn’t necessarily true. There are all sorts of scenarios and differences depending on if you are using standard or enterprise. The IRS has a hotline (800-829-1040). So does Microsoft, if you aren’t sure it may be worth a call or e-mail.

Developer Edition Works for All Developers

Well that may be true most of the time. Your developers could probably use developer edition but keep a few things in mind: 1.) Did you pay for it? Or is it just a download everyone shares? If you are covered by MSDN (For each developer who touches the instance) or some sort of enterprise agreement then you may be fine. If you paid for the product and a proper license you are fine for the intended use in the agreement. If not, you aren’t. But also – consider this: What is production going to be? If your production environment is standard, do you necessarily want the product developed and tested on developer edition, which is Enterprise Edition by features, Developer edition only be price tag and EULA?? There may be a reason (especially if you have MSDN licenses for each developer, a good investment typically) to make sure an app is developed and tested in something other than Enterprise. Consider the end goal and end edition. It would stink to see Dev and QA using Developer and relying on some enterprise feature that never failed a test only to find a deploy gone wild.

Licensing, Just Like SQL Server, Is Set-It-And-Forget-It

No. No to both. Depending on your agreement with Microsoft the day may come when they come to do a true up of your environment. They will discover your SQL instances with you and verify you are using what you purchased. If you haven’t you’ll be buying more licenses and you are in violation of laws and software agreements. You could face fines as a company or a individual, potentially. An answer? Do your own True Ups. Awhile ago I blogged about using the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAP) to discover your SQL instances. The report it spits out shows you all sorts of great details (server name, edition, version, CPU count, etc). Do your own true up, no reason you can’t. Are you in line? If not fix it by adding licenses or consolidating and saving the company hard earned cash (“Hey, boss, I just want 1%…”)

Summing It Up

A simple look at a few of the more common myths I bump into around licensing. They can all be summed up with the same advice, do your homework, understand the license agreements with factual information (not someones recollection or interpretation) and always double check. Even if the information comes from a trusted vendor (you know how I feel about that), you could be breaking the law or throwing away company money. Neither are great career advancement moves.

What about you? Do you have a licensing horror story? A tip for someone else out here. Leave it in the comments or blog about it and let us know when your post goes up, I’ll be more than happy to link to any tips to help folks avoid making a mistake up front.

[This is the 4th and final in a series of posts about "Getting Organized" using a better system and the Evernote tool-set for paperless notes (though you could do this with any such software).]

Getting Organized Series Outline

• Introduction and License Giveaway
• A Task’s Life
• The Death of a Task, Man
• 451 Degrees – Good For Notebooks

Welcome to the final post of the series. There will be a post the following week announcing the winner of the premium license from the license giveaway in the comments of the first post (contest entries close Friday 7/23).  We’ve talked about why I came to this software (and more importantly, a renewed desire to manage tasks); how I setup tasks in my system; and some ways I am attempting to add discipline.

We’ll finish this series by talking about some other features I use in this tool,my attempt to go paperless, what I plan on doing in the future and a few frustrations/concerns.

Before Starting – thanks to one of my readers, Chris who left an excellent comment in Part 3. (There are other great tips as well in the threads of these posts, worth checking out.) He gave us some good tips, a different program to try and I really liked his ideas for task priorities. If you recall, in part 2 I had priority titles like “Due Today, Due Soon, Due Someday, etc”. His are simpler and yet fully explain the priority, “Now!, Gotta, Outta, Wanna”. I like them and am thinking about trying them out for a while as replacements.

Burn The Notebooks

In part 1, I showed a picture of a typical notebook of mine. In a word: disheveled. Since installing Evernote a few weeks ago, I haven’t used a notebook once. I miss the uniball roller pens I love to write with but not that much; typing on the Macbook is also nice

I had several notebooks and I used them frequently. A good friend and a great resource on all things social media and blogging, Jon DiPietro who blogs about DomesticatingIT gave a great tip about blogging: “Always Be Collecting“. He suggests using a moleskin notebook and camera.  That is great, but.. I can’t read my notes and don’t always have the blog notebook (or the same one) with me. Now when an idea comes to me (even if in the middle of the night feeding the newborn), I reach over to wherever my smartphone is and I type a new note in the blog fodder category (If I am really tired or in a hurry, I won’t categorize.. it will be there in the inbox for me tomorrow). I have saved or created numerous ideas for work, blog topics, honey-do items, etc and that stimulates me to keep using the tool.

Several times now I have wanted to recall what we discussed in a meeting or a piece of tribal knowledge as I am still new to my company. Under my old system. I guarantee you I would have a 60% at best chance of finding the exact information in a notebook or single sheet of paper. I would then have an 80% chance of reading my scribbles, Now? I just search and find it. I can type fairly fast and I’m developing some short hand to consistently express the same thoughts the same way when typing the notes. I’ve even used the notes in a meeting to help someone else remember a point from a meeting.

I plan on banging away notes while at the PASS Summit sessions this year. Tasks will be things to research or look into in my own environment. Everything else will be blog topics or reference data for later on the gobs of knowledge gleaned. (Or the clever ways to insult people learned from Buck Woody).

To me, this is the biggest feature. The note taking is simple and works great. Adding the task management categories, notebooks and priorities made it even easier.

Burn The Business Cards

From any device with a camera, I can take a quick picture or iSight note (on the mac client) of a business card. Save it with the “persona” tag about which Mike the relationship is for and dump it into the contacts notebook. I don’t need your business card, just a picture. I have it on every device that I use Evernote with and I can search it (with OCR so not perfectly but fairly well). I can’t copy and paste the found text though (See wishlist). On the mac the process is a simple as:

1. Take a Picture of the card through EverNote’s iSight note

The back of my card says "Practice Your Restores!"

2. Save The Image To Evernote. Give it a title of the contact name, assign a tag. Add any other notes about the contact you wish to add

3. Search for the contact later in the contacts folder, or by contacts folder and which persona you know the contact through

My wife already told me - that is a big picture on the card...

I can do that with any picture, not just business cards. With the premium edition, I can also import just about any file format I wish to import and I can search through PDF files, I believe.

Burn A Tweet (Or E-Mail)

Ok, well I actually don’t mean with fire this time. I mean, burn a copy. With twitter interaction, I can send a tweet to @myen and it comes into my evernote account. The other day Karen Lopez (better known as @DataChick to the twitterers out there), who blogs at InfoAdvisors, sent out a tweet to a flickr picture with the message “this could be useful”. I agree, could use it in a post or a blog (but then I saw the Creative Commons license, no I can’t). But yeah, I can send myself a note through twitter. Same thing with e-mail, I can forward an e-mail to my evernote account and keep it there for a record or for an action item.

The Trunk

They recently launched an “app store” like feature called “The Trunk” where I can download apps that are designed to integrate with Evernote. There are some promsing applications out there and some neat ideas like scanning receipts/etc. into Evernote. One idea I had was to put all of my junk drawer (alright we have two junk drawers and a junk closet) paperwork into one of two places: Evernote and then the trash, or straight to the trash. I may still do this but not with as many items as I had wanted, as I don’t know how secure my PII would be on their servers. I may still scan them onto some app within my home network though. Using this tool has put me on a declutter kick and I think I’m liking the clean desk (STILL!) at work.

Blow Up These Problems!

Since I am talking a lot about a product (that, again, I am not receiving compensation from… In fact I approached them about giving away the premium license and they never got back to me…) I might as well talk about some of the frustrations/concerns:

• The Interwebs – One of the greatest features is one of the potential faults. What happens if World Cup fans all around the world want to take notes about tactics used in the games the next time? Services go down, in fact Evernote had some down time (not horribly long but they experienced it) just this week, after the first 3 posts were scheduled to go live and I had to make sure to add this. I will still have my notes but I can’t sync and can’t get all features (like the OCR on the mac. has to sync to server then back – seconds – to be searchable)
• Security - There is SSL for the data to go to the server. I can even encrypt selected text and receive my own pass phrase for decrypt. It is still all managed at the server and they don’t tell you a whole lot about the security. To get SSL encryption I had to upgrade to premium. I won’t be putting passwords and sensitive client/employer data in here that could cause issues if stolen. I also don’t know about their corporate security. What are their policies at their data center? Within their databases? It is a cloud based service that I don’t know a whole lot about.
• Backup - I perform exports on occasion of my notes to HTML for a local backup. The devices all receive all notebooks so I actually have copies in 3 places plus a backup. Plus whatever they do on their servers. Maybe it’s overkill, but I’m a DBA.
• Private Clouds – They don’t. What if I wanted to host my own evernote service for myself behind a firewall on my own equipment. I can’t. I don’t need their servers for this (save for the OCR perhaps)
• No great way to “Draw” on the mac. I can use a third party app like Skitch to do so but I wish I could easily and quickly drag shapes in when at a whiteboard session. I can take a picture but with the drawing, I can draw the “motion” of the whiteboard.

Series Summary

That’s it. I’ll answer questions you have about more specifics. Basically the important takeaway from this series, in my mind is, you can get organized. You can manage tasks. Even if you are borderline ADD. You need discipline and a system that works for you. The important system here for me is what I described in part 2 about collecting, organizing and prioritizing and then what I described in part 3 about getting the tasks done and enforcing discipline upon yourself. The tool you use matters not. Actually it does matter but only so far as you can answer this question with a yes, “Does the tool you use to manage your tasks appeal to you? Is it easy for you to use and do you stick with it?” If so, then great. If not, maybe it’s time to revisit it and get out of the “Oh crud! I forgot to do something, I’ll be home late tonight!!!” rut that I sometimes have been in.

As always, I welcome comments and discussion points. If it isn’t 7/24/10 (EDT) yet, go ahead and check out the first post and add a comment if you want to win the free premium license.

[This is part three in a series of posts about "Getting Organized" using a better system and the Evernote tool-set for paperless notes (though you could do this with any such software, I'd imagine).]

Getting Organized Series Outline

• Introduction and License Giveaway
• A Task’s Life
• The Death of a Task, Man
• 451 Degrees – Good For Notebooks

A Confession

The last post in this series didn’t help you, did it? I mean, sure, I gave you some priority ideas. I suggested you think about your multiple personas and assign stuff to them to do. All that is great but did it really help you? Here comes the confession – they didn’t help me. Those ideas don’t work for me…

Does your Task Management software include this? If so, let me know!

At least not alone. I can have all the features in a task management tool that I want or think I want and unless one feature is there – a killer robot that will be unleashed should I fail to do a task or get distracted – it just isn’t enough alone. Alas, even then after not being killed a few times it would lose its impact. So I have to create a system I want to follow.

Let’s get started and talk about some of the “soft skills” I am trying to employ to stay on track and kill tasks. And fix a problem that you could accuse me of:

You Lack Discipline

So I’m trying to gain some. I work for a company that really values thrift, productivity and getting it done while at work, more so than many places I’ve worked. I want to honor that and these ideas or mindsets seem to be working or at least seem promising.

Two Kinds Of Tasks = Two Types of Times for Tasks

I’m setting up “Focus Times” – I am blocking off time on my calendar, shutting down communication methods (save for phone – I’m a DBA) and putting my headphones on (actually helps me) and I work on the “Due Today” tasks in the Work notebook that require focus. I have even added (“FOCUS”) after some tasks in Evernote to help sort them out ahead of time. If a task is simple and requires less detail, I just do it when I can and e-mail interruptions are fine.

Send Me An E-Mail

If I get an action item packed e-mail that I need to be tickled about later, I forward it to the e-mail address Evernote sets up for my account. Poof. I have a new note in my inbox notebook to categorize, classify and prioritize as we discussed yesterday. I can also e-mail myself and I am going to give that e-mail address to my wife (for some reason the “World’s are colliding, Jerry!” episode of Seinfeld comes to mind) for those times when I “yes, dear” her but fail to remember to do it or if she wants to send a quick shopping list for me on my commute home.

Just Say No!

It isn’t an evil word. Not when said nicely anyway. If you don’t have the time required to perform a task with the right degree of focus, why say yes? You’ll stress yourself out trying to do it, perhaps end up rushing or at least end up sacrificing sleep to do it. It isn’t worth it. Just say no. Unless it is not a request or extra and then you might want to say yes or “I understand you wish me to work on x, but I also have y and z on my plate with tight due dates. Can you help me prioritize these tasks, dear leader?”

Check Yo’self!

Your tasks, that is. Setup times throughout the day to do this. If you use the system I described in part 2, it’s easy. I select my work notebook and then just click on each priority to see what is “Due Today”, “Ongoing”, “Due Soon” or “Due Someday” for my “employee persona” Things I’m looking for?

• Due Today Tasks are being planned and worked on. If not, do I intend to? If not? Why is it due today? Fix it!
• Due Soon Tasks are known and can I squeeze one in today? Any real quick ones that can be done in the next 5 minutes and give myself one less thing to do tomorrow? (If you read my post of lessons from planting garlic, you’ll remember that I believe in paying now where possible)
• Due Someday Tasks really are still tasks and can I do them or move them up? I’m liberal with waht I do with these as far as the circular file goes. (I’ll normally just do this in the AM)

Make It Feel Good

This is a bit cheesy, sure Admit it, though, it feels good to mark something as done.  If I want to stick with my approach to better task management I have to keep it motivating and receive a sense of accomplishment. Some ways I do this:

Not enough focus time that day, I guess.

Check Mark!

One of the things I missed about the paper lists was the ability to check off or scribble out a task. In Evernote, I can create a check mark widget and I use these for two purposes. One, while in a meeting if I am getting a task in the meeting note, I insert a check mark to remind me and create an action item later at the end of the meeting, or just tag the meeting note with the proper priority. More importantly, though, I can see what I’ve done and the more check marks I see, the happier I am.

Delete Notes

I miss that feeling of scrunching up the paper but it works. If I had a one off task that I don’t think I’ll need to show an accomplishment or reference notes from doing it. I enjoy putting a note into the trash can.

Sweat The Small Stuff

Now I know I said earlier in this series that if a task takes more time to manage, just do it and don’t mess with the system. I have another confession for you. Sometimes I’ll create a task and checkbox for a smaller task. Why? See Check! above. I like checking a task as complete.

Daily Task Note – Multiple Tasks

I have found that one way of tracking work for the day and planning the next task is to create one note and put the planned tasks due today in it. Sometimes I’ll even be inefficient and spend a minute or two grabbing tasks off of other notes that I want due today and putting them on that one note for the day. I’ll remove the “Due Today” tags from those notes I steal from. Now I can just keep checking that one task note as I work. I’ll also add notes about the tasks as I do them if there are things I want to reference later since my notebooks are fully searchable.

If you want to win the free premium upgrade for Evernote, don’t forget to leave a comment on the first post, by the way. We need at least 10 people to comment and it has to be done before midnight on Friday 7/23.

Upcoming Posts in the Getting Organized Series, subscribe to my feed to receive the next posts as they publish.

451 Degrees – Good For Notebooks – I talked about the main reason I came to a tool like Evernote is to replace my horrible notebooks that I can’t read or search. I’ll go into a little more details here, talk about some apps I’ve found useful alongside it and then I’ll talk about a few features I wish existed and some concerns about backing up notes, etc.

As Always – I look forward to hearing from you about what I’m missing or what makes sense (more of the former though, I like learning new ways)

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is being hosted by Robert Davis (@SQLSoldier on twitter) and he asked us about learning and teaching. More on the Captain Quote at the bottom.

How Do you Learn? How Do you Teach? YES

Robert asked those two questions (along with some others) to help inspire ideas for the topic. If you combine the question as one, I think yes is the perfect answer. There is a, sort of, continuum of education. First you learn. Then you do. Then you teach. And each one of those steps is still a learning exercise. I think if you ask anyone at any level who blogs about SQL Server or presents about SQL Server (yes, even a Paul, Kimberly or Kalen) you’ll find that they are constantly learning a ton through teaching.

Get Your Teach On

I mean it. After this run on sentence, stop reading for a few moments and really think about what you know – wherever your current skill set is – contemplate the knowledge you have and what you’ve learned in however long your career has been……. Ok, back? Great. So perhaps you just had a Janice Lee moment and realized you’ve been further than you thought you have. Maybe you haven’t but either way, you know something about SQL Server (or whatever skillset you are involved in, this is a SQL blog post primarily, work with me here!). Can you think of anyone who maybe doesn’t know it?  Well there you go. Get your teach on. Find a medium (Blogging – I wrote a series with an interview with Brent Ozar and tips for starting a blog -, speaking, answering forum questions with an eye to help teach or just instructing someone on your team) and prepare to teach.

How Is That Learning?

If you are like most people, you are going to want to know angles about whatever lesson it is you are preparing that you aren’t familiar with. You are going to want to be prepared for some  questions (you can’t prepare for them all but if you answer honestly with an “I’m not sure, let me get back to you” you just gave yourself a learning homework assignment) and you will soon know more about your topic. Then, when you are writing out that blog post or giving that presentation you’ll be further cementing your knowledge. You’ll be showing other people how to do it, you’ll see the questions they come up with and think about the topic in ways you haven’t before.

If I ever go on a cruise – I want this captain.

Teaching not only helps you learn but it is a leadership trait. It means you are swallowing pride and desiring to bring others up to your level. You can look at that in two ways -

1. If I share the knowledge and bring them up to speed, then I won’t be the know it all in that area. They’ll get to take some of the glory and do parts of my job, oh no!
2. Hey, cool. This person wants to learn about the role. I can mentor them and develop their technical skills while developing my mentoring skills. We’ll grow better as a team and I won’t have to worry when I’m on vacation, cool!

Raise your hands if you’ve ever had an inkling of position number 1 – I won’t look. Alright, I didn’t look but if you didn’t raise your hand you are either lying or you started out better than I did Once I started growing a bit in my early career my first inkling was to take road number 1. It was working with an HR person as part of an interview team that the scales were mostly removed. She talked about a tendency for folks to not go after A players because of pride, a fear of being shown up, etc. It was a good talk and her point was – Surround yourself with A players and you will always be learning, working well as a team and growing. If you are striving to grow, “getting it” and improving there will always be people further ahead of you and behind you. So what. Worry about you and hire the A player. The same goes with teaching someone else to get to where you are.

I blogged about the great learning experience I got from Andy Kelly, an early manager. I truly believe that if it weren’t for his desire to learn through teaching, I wouldn’t have the passion for SQL Server that I have today. Andy learned through teaching me and he was able to help me grow in the process. I never threatened his standing at the company. Instead, they recognized what a great leader and mentor he was. Traits that made him valuable to the company.

Back to the captain and the quote -

Being a geek, I enjoy gadgets and I stumbled across a link to wired magazine with some neat cockpit displays while deciding on a blog topic. The linked image caught my eye. What I really liked, though, was the quote from the skipper. Check it out yourself – he is talking about where the “steering” joysticks are. They aren’t on his seat but on the seats of other officers. His thoughts on this?

The port and starboard command chairs have built-in joysticks for controlling the ship,” Wright says. But those are typically operated by other officers. “Captains should be mentoring and teaching.”

It’s worth repeating – Captains should be mentoring and teaching. That’s good stuff.

In fact, Captain Wright could probably write a book about leadership and call it, “Captains Should Be Mentoring and Teaching.”. He isn’t worried about a mutiny if those junior officers grow. He knows there are a lot of ships in the sea (some may even hold celebrities like Brent Ozar or Tim Ford) and they need excellent Captains. He knows that comes through experience and training.

So  – What are you going to do?

Are you going to start teaching more? Great. Do you currently blog? I’d love to read your thoughts on your blog, pretty easy to start doing it. All you have to do to teach is remember what you know, find opportunities to bring someone up to that point and improve your own knowledge in the periphery of the topic while teaching. That’s it. You can’t go wrong because you and your student are growing, even if you stink at it.

(ps. Apparently Dead Poet’s society was brought out by my memory banks from typing captain so many times. I hadn’t read Walt Whitman’s poem before the movie and I am happy that I was able to type the entire post, the few “Captains” and all without saying “O Captain my Captain!” But I felt daring, so I had to work it in here someplace. I also changed the title of this blog post because I really like Captain Wright’s simple quote.

Captains should be mentoring and teaching…

Some Related Posts

• Planning To Fail (part 2) –> Helping others learn from their mistakes is a way to teach.
• Made to Stick –> A great book I read that gives some usable tips for making your lessons last.
• Everyone Grows or Everyone Fails –> My contribution to the professional development week at SQL University, reminder to share knowledge (AKA – Teach)
• One Man’s Trash… –> I learned a lesson at the dump. It helps to have the right attitude when trying to teach something lasting.

Is your SQL Server Linked Server Query running slow? Check your permissions. Maybe this is old news to you but it wasn’t for me –>

It was a good day. We had finally migrated onto brand new hardware (and saw a 250% improvement in run times of most warehouse jobs). I had finally cleaned up the “interesting” security I had inherited (Linked Servers using SQL authenticated accounts with every Fixed Server Role and DB role granted, including SA overriding all the other attempts at access). Initial testing looked great. I couldn’t axe the Linked Servers but I fixed the permission to give them read on just the necessary objects, Least Privilege, Baby!

But then again… This is my blog and I don’t post too much about success stories now, do I? It hit, the next day I got the call -

“Hey Mike, the new SQL Server is really slow”

No way. Everything was running so much faster it was pathetic that it ever ran so slow. I debated in my head and even briefly on the phone but said I’ll take a look. Sure Enough! The plan was odd for their linked server query. On the older server the estimates were dead on. On the newer server (Same version of SQL, same everything, just older hardware and wide open permissions) the estimates were off and a sub optimal plan was selected. Really Suboptimal. Scans where I expected seeks, a seek where I expected a scan (on a large, for that database, table), an “interesting” join order chosen. I was banging my head on my desk contemplating what else could have changed when I gave the wide open permissions a quick shot to test. Sure enough, quick query, good plan. Did I mention I hate Linked Servers?

So I knew something was off with statistics somehow and I had realized that I was incorrect in assuming (I forgot to follow my own advice there) that statistics wouldn’t even come into play since it is a linked server query. Nope.. It was a Linked Server query between two SQL Servers and statistics do come into play. Distribution Statistics. Apparently, they can come into play with any OLE DB provider that takes advantage of them.

Alright. So Statistics Were At Play – But Why?

Well. Apparently, the (did I mention that I hate Linked Servers?) database engine will only provide those statistics if the calling user has the same permissions as required to run a DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS…. Ok, that sounds easy enough, I just have to look for that granular permission. Yeah. Right. Check out this excellent blog post by Linchi Shea to see what I found out when researching this issue. His post goes through the reason behind the issue and the permissions required to be able to see those statistics. Since his post helped me, I won’t give the final tidbit myself. Suffice it to say, however, that I had to grant more permissions that I wanted to fix the immediate issue.

Silver Linings – Because I try to be an optimist every so often, the good news from this is it at least gave me more ammo to try and convince folks to move away from Linked Servers. Only time and they will know how that pans out, though.

Psst. Hey Vendor – DBAs are secretly plotting against you! We hate what your products do to our environments. Sometimes we even work to get you replaced by someone else who makes a product in the same space but is “DBA-Approved”….

What’s that? You want the DBA stamp of approval?

I write this blog to help folks so I’ll pretend I’m not at work in a meeting railing on about how your product has no indexes or has way too permissive security or doesn’t think to recommend index maintenance. That’s right… I’ll help you. Why? Because I want you to succeed. I want to like working with you. I want you to be “DBA-Approved”

A History

You don’t have to look to hard to find blog posts of DBAs annoyed with vendor gaffes. There are some great vendors who really understand their destination database environment. They go out of their way to make sure their client properly backs up and maintains the environment. They performance test and look at best practices. There are a lot who don’t.

I’ve worked as a consultant for a vendor who wanted to do a better job in helping their customers handle the SQL Server environment they ship their app on. I’ve worked full time for a vendor who didn’t. I can tell you that my experience with the latter was early on in my career as a tech support engineer and I got a lot of painful calls from customers up a creek. Customers who maybe would have been better off with some prescriptive guidance…

But We Don’t Own Their Environment!

I know. But you didn’t tell the client that they really needed a DBA to look over their SQL Server environment did you? You might have even marketed it as “so easy! A few clicks and our installation is complete!”. I’m not saying you should own their environment. I’m not saying you should coddle each customer and play the role of DBA. I am saying that you should….

Care Enough To Do It Right

That’s right. I’m appealing to your heart. Though, if you do a great job it becomes marketing and word of mouth advertising. You’ll also be able to receive less “basic” support calls or deal with upset customers who got in trouble because of database issues. What about the lost business because of clients talking to other potential clients? Or IT staff commiserating with IT staff at user group meetings? Now I’m appealing to your bottom line, I hope?

Some Thoughts on Doing It Right

I’m not asking for much. This list is a good start. We might revisit this post in the future with more but starting with some basics, you’ll be on your way to being a “DBA-Approved” software vendor:

• Cheat – If you are looking to have your software sold and installed at a company that I work at, consult for or have worked at. Be prepared to answer these questions. Maybe all don’t apply, maybe some look like gibberish. Learn about the terms and understand why a DBA would ask. Send me an e-mail or leave a comment if you are confused about why I ask a question
• Learn and Know SQL Server – What kind of SQL Server expertise do you have on staff? You probably have some great developers but do you have someone with a DBA interest and skill set? Do you have someone who stays involved in the SQL Server community? Check out sites like SQLSkills, SQLBlog, SQL Server Central, SQLServerPedia and the SQLPASS organization.
  
• Speaking of PASS – PASS is the Professional Association for SQL Server users. It is a great organization with a lot of resources for us in the SQL Server space. They have a huge annual Summit with a lot of great technical content. Send someone to the conference and have them sit in the sessions. Have them talk to DBAs (we aren’t shy…)
• Documentation? Do you provide anything to your clients (especially those smaller shops that may not have a dedicated DBA, even if I think they should) around recommended best practices for database maintenance, backups, troubleshooting, etc.? You should.
• Best Practice Review – From some of the communities/blogs mentioned above you can find a lot of intelligent and experienced DBAs who can help you review your application from a database performance and best practices point of view. I would hazard to say that even just 12-24 hours of billable time can gain you a lot of customer good will. I know I’ve helped folks out with this in the past and as a DBA on the receiving end, it makes a difference working with a vendor who has Database best practices in mind.
• Security! Please. Don’t. Ask. For. Sysadmin (SA). Rights!!! Please don’t even ask for DBO, if you can avoid it. You should be using role based security with least privilege. It would be nice if you used Active Directory security and integrated with our AD but I’ll even let you use SQL authenticated if you stop asking for SA rights! Let me review your deploys and see the scripts that get run. Do your deploys with the least privilege necessary or heck, let me do it for you… I’m not being a jerk, I’m trying to do my job as a DBA.
• Backup/Restore – It goes with the database maintenance documentation above. I wanted to call it out here separately. Work with your clients on best practices for backup and recovery. Learn about them yourselves first. Don’t just install someplace and expect it all to be fine. Ask your support teams if they’ve dealt with a client who lost more data than they were willing. Ask them how that call went.
• Don’t Go With Defaults – There have been lots of blog posts about this that you should read to get an idea of what I mean -My thoughts, Paul Randal, Aaron Bertrand and plenty of others linked from those  – Back? Alright, learn about how to install SQL Server and include that in the documentation. Talk about recovery models so you don’t end up with huge transaction logs and bad advice being given to your customer’s IT support team from Google and forums.

Was That So Horrible?

I don’t think anything on there is going to make you freeze your code, hire a lot of developers or Project Managers. Sure if you don’t have the expertise on staff, you might engage a consultant and spend $5,000 or less on reviewing your docs and plans but how much will it cost you in lost opportunity to not do that?

Thanks for listening and I really hope you think about some of the points above or some of the points mentioned in my DBA Questions for Vendors list referenced earlier. I want your product to be a success and I want to see us DBAs start writing positive vendor rants (well.. Asking a DBA, a pessimist by trade, to be positive is a bit much. Maybe we can at least stop with the negative rants if you take some steps with us).

My offer stands – shoot me an e-mail or leave a comment below and I’ll help you out with a quick question as time allows, I might be busy consulting for a client of yours having headaches with their SQL Server environment

Why on earth would anyone hire a Database Administrator? Your Windows Admin can install SQL Server with just a few clicks – It only takes a few more clicks to put a database there and grant permissions. Most of your vendors have simple setup scripts including database deploys… Why spend all that money on a DBA’s salary?

I’m glad you asked, I can think of a few reasons…

DBAs Are Mean Care About Your Data

Your developers hopefully care about the data. Your vendors care about their bottom line may even care about your

I'm sure they are great at their intended process but do you hire your developers from them? You might need a DBA

data as well.  Your system administrators like things to run smoothly also; no one likes a failure.  Your database administrators, however, have a vested interest in keeping your data clean and healthy. A good DBA will say “no” quite often (or, more accurately, “not yet”; “not deployed like that” or “no until security is cleaned up”) if something is being done without concern for security or performance best practices in mind.

Sure we can come across as tough sometimes but when you stop and ask why, it is usually because we care about the data. Maybe it’s not so altruistic and we just don’t like being woken up after hours. Either way, we are going to do all we can to fight silliness at every stage of a database’s life.

Sometimes it is appreciated and understood. A development manager at one point in my career sent me a note around review time that included this statement, “Our developers are very appreciative that, while you can be one tough and principled SOB, you are usually right in the end!!” That isn’t to gloat, it’s to say that a DBA who cares to do the job right and wants things right the first time can make a difference in the long run.

So Reason 1: A DBA cares about the database. It’s a myopic concern. Yes we care about the other facets of an application but it all stems from our desire to make the databases be all they can be. The other roles? They have their primary focus on something else (as they should!)

DBAs Like Best Practices

I’m talking about experienced and effective DBAs here. What I mean by the heading is that a database administrator knows what is beneath the set-it-and-forget-it installation options and deployment steps. We read books like Professional SQL Server 2008: Internals And Troubleshooting (some of us even read them on personal time!). We study up on the database engine we support. We want to first understand why a best practice exists and then implement the ones that make sense for our organization. We aren’t going to accept defaults, we aren’t going to ignore empirical evidence and try the first thing that a search engine shows us in production (hopefully). We may not just accept a hand me down server for that huge production ERP deployment. We might discuss SAN optimization with the storage team. When we look at a backup solution for the enterprise we will ask questions that are relevant to SQL Server and the recovery needs we support. We won’t let a vendor do something dumb without a lot of whining and attempts to correct.

Reason 2: A DBA cares to do the right job the first time. Again, you can even let it boil down to the self serving desire to not let the database be the cause for blame of a production outage. I don’t care, I’m still going to make sure that the database environment I support is running as well as it should and that we aren’t sacrificing best practices and performance (at least not always!) for the sake of “We’ll fix it later…”

DBAs Can Make Users Happy

How well are your systems running? Performance complaints? Do you have a DBA? If you don’t and the systems have a database back end it is incredibly likely that you are suffering from a lack of database TLC. I don’t know how many times I have been asked to consult on an engagement to “just make it faster!” or inherited horrible performing environments that were easily fixed with DBA 101 stuff (updating statistics, rebuilding indexes, the right settings, etc.). I know that because I do some consulting on the side, I might be eating into some billable time here but that’s fine, I have a busy life with the family, church and full time work. As a DBA, I usually know where to start looking for database performance problems. As a DBA, I usually know what planned maintenance to do on the database server and databases to keep things running smoothly. If you had a DBA, you would have less performance related fires; you wouldn’t have to pay an invoice to a consultant to come in and save the day. Your Sys Admin could help figure out an issue but, if they don’t have a lot of hands on – and academic – knowledge of database performance tuning and troubleshooting, it is going to take longer and could potentially include painful results if guesses/blind stabs are made. They specialize in a different skill set.

Reason 3: Database Administrators can prevent (or more easily resolve) performance issues or troubleshooting situations.

Oh No!!! Everything is down!

Picture a disaster scenario. System is belly up, drives are burned, whatever. How quickly do you want to be up? Your director, VP or CIO wants it yesterday and they want to know why your people are running around in panic mode looking stuff up on search engines.

A good Database Administrator (again, hopefully) is practicing restores or devising clever ways to sample for restore failure possibilities. They are thinking about disaster scenarios and possible responses to them. They have done restores before and have likely dealt with strange errors, corruption or common failure scenarios. Hopefully they are familiar with forums and know where to help find (and test) information. They can think on their feet about the ramifications of various recovery options or settings changes in a time of crisis.

Reason 4: Even if you stuffed your DBA in a closet on moth balls and only opened the door when danger strikes the time saved in that disaster and the possible data saved during that disaster justifies a DBA role in a lot of companies.

Your Data Is Your Business

How much do you rely on your data? Analysis of trends. Sales Forecasts. Payroll data. Sales data. Customer lists. Partner lists. Inventory. Shipping and Tracking information. You name the piece of your business, it is highly likely that you can’t name 2 or 3 that don’t have data stored in a database. What happens if you lose that? What happens if you can’t get to it fast enough? What happens if you can’t trust it to be accurate?

Reason 5: Your data is pretty important. You might have hired a Microsoft Exchange experienced system administrator because you realize how important e-mail is to your company. How useful is that e-mail system without your core systems described above? How much does your organization spend on various forms of insurance?

How Can I Get a DBA?

I could go on with more reasons. I could give you horror stories. I could tell you about the strange things vendors have requested (and the responses I’ve gotten when questioning those requests… Things like “look.. no one ever complained about that before”). I could go out and find statistics that talk about companies closing their doors because of data loss. I think you get the point though.

If you have database instances and applications running,  the simple truth is that you probably have enough work to keep a DBA busy. Maybe you could start smaller and get someone on retainer. I do that with some companies as an advisor/mentor. There are plenty of other people offering the same types of services, some larger companies dedicated to providing remote DBA or DBA Advisory services. Maybe you can hire someone with a good DBA background who has other interests and could wear a second hat for you.

I would say that in the New England job market, this must be a known fact – It seems like database roles are always being advertised or actively recruited, even in the down economy. So I would say get your DBA search on and fill that role already! Do it quick before the most experienced DBAs are gobbled up.

What do you think? Why do you (or don’t you) have a DBA? Any horror stories from when you’ve been burned by not having that role filled?

Let me share a little secret with you – You are going to fail. You’ll have multiple failures in diverse areas in life. It’s what you do with them that predicts if you’ll be an overall success.

In the first post of this two part series, we talked about including failure in our plans and embracing failure as an important individual learning tool. Today we’ll talk about failure as a teaching and corporate learning tool.

Angle #3 – Everybody Fails! (Plan to help others)

Can you think about the last time you made a mistake? I think if you are honest you won’t have to think back too far, I didn’t anyway. Remember when you were learning something? Remember when you were new at the job and you made that mistake. What about the time you got that response when you made an honest and simple mistake? Didn’t feel great, did it?

I’ll give my standard disclaimer here, I’m preaching to myself with this angle (well really all angles but this one especially)… We all make mistakes. If I had to take a stitch of cube fabric down for every mistake I’ve made in life, I’d have a real open concept cubicle.

Keep that in mind when dealing with other people’s mistakes. I think it is perfectly acceptable to expect people to own their mistakes and be honest and up front about them. As long as they are doing that and there wasn’t malicious intent or careless behavior involved why box someone’s ears? The sting of knowing you screwed up is often a powerful motivator and teacher all by itself. Come to that persons side, offer them some help, tell them a story about how you brought down the production cluster once. Sure there may be a teachable moment in there but teaching doesn’t always have to look like tearing into someone skull and popping their eyeballs out… Teach but don’t lecture. Help but don’t strut.

Angle #4 – Cleanup, Aisle 4 (Plan to not be doomed to repeat failures)

We either learn from our mistakes because we embraced our failure like we discussed in Angle #3 and change our course or we make the same failure again and again. I can’t speak for you, but I vote for the former.

As we discussed in part 1, we can learn from our own mistakes. That is a great tool for personal learning but how does your team or company do? I’ve worked at companies that do a great job at this and I’ve worked at companies that don’t.

I’ll give the negative example first… So a mistake happened, production downtime and money spent/lost because of a failure. Meetings are convened to discuss the failure but they start something like this – “Yesterday we had a failure in our system, it wasn’t my fault but I think it was the delivery team’s fault.” Ahhh the blame game, played in countless board rooms and e-mail trails across the world. In fact even as you read this post, somewhere some “team” is playing a round. Blame is assigned, the issue and causative factors are lost in the noise and someday, someway that issue is going to pop up again. Don’t do that. Don’t fall victim to that.

We already said it – We are going to fail, we all make mistakes. So how does an organization deal with that mistake’s aftermath? You may groan when you hear the terms “lessons learned meeting” or “root cause analysis” but those are really great tools. Don’t you want to know why the failure happened and how to prevent it? Put the egos, pointer fingers and pride aside and get together and figure out what happened. Ask why a few times like Thomas LaRock describes in his post on Root Cause Analysis. Thoroughly research and understand the issues before moving on from a serious production outage. Maybe you didn’t follow the first angle and you didn’t account for that failure scenario?

Wrap It Up, Walsh

We all mess up. Either understand, plan, prepare and learn from the times that you do and remember that when others do and end up succeeding in the end or let your failures be your (or your project’s, team’s, or even your company’s) failure. I really think it is that simple.  Before I leave you to go out and better practice what I preach, I’ll leave you with..

A Few Quotes

• “Failure is success if we learn from it.” – Malcolm S. Forbes
  
• “Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.” – C.S. Lewis
  
• “There are no failures – just experiences and your reactions to them.” Tom Krause
  
• “The greatest barrier to success is the fear of failure.” – Sven Goran Eriksson
  
• “Fear of failure must never be a reason not to try something.” – Frederick Smith

Don’t forget to check out the first part of this two part series. Looking forward to reading your thoughts in the comments below.

Let me share a little secret with you – You are going to fail. You’ll have multiple failures in diverse areas in life. It’s what you do with them that predicts if you’ll be an overall success.

If you are not planning for failure, you aren’t planning for success. My point may sound like a Yogiism but I mean it. Let’s dissect it a little bit. 

This post is a two part series. Today we’ll introduce the post and talk about the first two angles. Tomorrow or the next day, I’ll post the follow up with the final two angles and some quotes that serve as good reminders.  Subscribe to my feed to be notified when that posts.

Inspiration

I was leaving the office yesterday for lunch and I wish I had followed Jon DiPietro‘s great blogger advice and brought my camera phone. One of the landscapers working across the street had himself stuck on a precarious ledge on his lawnmower. His partner came to the rescue as I was getting ready to head over and offer a push. When the partner got there on his own tractor he pulled out a rope from his cart of tools. He handed the rope off and pulled him up with ease. Now maybe that was actually the plan all along and it wasn’t really a potential #fail in action but at the time, I thought it was and remarked in my head, “they were ready for that.”

I know I’ve blogged a bit about this before when first starting out in posts talking about using checklists, recipes and algorithms; embracing empirical evidence; or even harnessing paranoia as a DBA but I want to zero in on failure from four angles here.

Angle #1 – Include Failing In Your Planning

An obvious example - Had they planned for failure on the Titanic would more have survived?

It doesn’t matter what you are doing. Think about the failure scenarios for that task or project. Talk about them with the team; write them out on a project plan even.  The amount of time, energy and paper you spend on this should change based on the complexity and scope of the project but even just a quick run down in your head of a few, “what if” scenarios will really help.

If you include failure in your plans you have three potential outcomes that I can see, can anyone see any others?

• You Wasted Some Time – No good came of it. Those scenarios didn’t happen. You wasted the time thinking about and discussing the potential failures. (or did you?)
• You Averted Failure – Through talking out potential failure points and poking theoretical holes in your approach, you actually realized a mistake and changed the plans.
• You Knew What To Do When You Failed – Because you had discussed some failure paths ahead of time when presented with one that mirrored or was similar to a discussed fail path you already knew how to handle it. Even if presented with a very different failure path, you still knew what you would do in the event of a failure.

As I survey those outcomes, the benefit of the second two far outweigh the cost of the first. It wasn’t that much time wasted and even if we didn’t need the plan who is to say a future project won’t benefit from that discussion?

Angle #2 – Embrace Your Failures (Plan to learn from failure)

On the same day as the lawnmower “rescue mission”, I was listening to a radio show and heard the host talking about a time he tried starting a business -he failed. He received a call from an executive recruiter shortly after the failure. Someone wanted him to be CEO of a business in a very similar space. He was confused and asked the recruiter, “doesn’t the company know I just failed doing this same business?” I am paraphrasing the answer but believe it’s worth bolding, “That is why they want to hire you. They know you have the maturity from the failure and know you have that experience.” He decided to not go with the job for various reasons but that sounds like a really smart team looking to hire the position. They saw the wisdom gained through failure.

I’ll always remember when I was thrown into the pit with clustering for the first time. It was a new company, they liked my SQL Server DBA experience and felt I would be able to pick up clustering working with a consultant and be able to introduce the concept to their very young but quickly growing SQL Server environment. The consultant wasn’t actually a clustering expert so we muddled through together. I read the best practices, documentation, etc. but I got most of my knowledge about clustering where the rubber meets the road. Those first few months were interesting. I learned a lot of things the hard way (pay closer attention to the dialog boxes, don’t remove a dependent resource before clearing the dependency, etc) I had brought the production cluster down a couple times while fumbling. I don’t suggest this approach and wouldn’t normally take it but the timing left us little choice. I had a couple red faced moments but you know what? I learned a ton. I could have got discouraged and said forget this, I could have let the failures distract me but I documented where I messed up and gained knowledge (both of clustering and dealing with failures) that helped me on my journey to where I am today.

I want to repeat the secret from my introduction – You are going to fail. You’ll have multiple failures in diverse areas in life. It’s what you do with them that predicts if you’ll be an overall success. If you embrace the failure, learn from it and move on, then was it really a fail? If you flounder and flop after each failure and get gun shy then it most definitely was.

What Do You Think?

How do you plan for failure? Do you think I’m being too paranoid? Have a story of a time you learned through mistakes/failures? Share your thoughts below in the comments, I am sure others would love to see how not alone they are.

Part Two

Check out the follow up post, it continues the theme with a couple more angles:

• Angle #3 – Everybody Fails!
• Angle #4 – Cleanup, Aisle 4

When I picture Paul Randal, I picture a guy who likes to run up to a bees nest at a crowded picnic and give it a good couple whacks. You know what I mean, it’s that laughing picture in his twitter profile. Or maybe it’s the devil’s advocate style he has. Maybe it’s his controversial facebook thoughts? Either way, he likes to call things out and make people think. That’s a great trait, all kidding aside. He started a blog meme asking what 5 “features” you’d like to see retired in SQL Server. His responses were great and he tagged some folks. I’ve looked at Brent Ozar’s response and was then tagged by Aaron Bertrand.

After reading those three responses so far, I have to say I am not going to be that original so most of these will be a hearty “Amen!” to earlier sentiments.

Auto Shrink

I made my entrance into SQL Blogging with a series of rants about shrinking databases. I still get hits to articles like “Don’t Touch That Shrink Button!” from web searches or forums. The simple fact of the matter is.. Well to put it simply, “raise your hand if you think regular shrinking of production databases is a good idea.” Okay. Look around. Any hands raised? Not many. So why, on earth, would Microsoft make that a stinking setting option?

I would like to see this retired, and doing it in a Service Pack would be alright with me. Or at least rename it to “I’m not dangerous enough by myself, please automatically add to performance frustrations and index fragmentation while keeping my database size tidy, even though it will grow again right after the shrink but then again I never liked right sizing databases that requires too much work – Yes/No” (Yeah, I know… Not the best grammar there, Jeremiah, but…) This was already suggested by Paul and Brent.

Full Recovery by Default (Or something…)

Again I’m stealing ideas (but I’m doing it to help people!) – Brent and Paul both also suggested this. This has been like this for a long time. It still trips countless people up each day. Another hand raising question – how many of you have experienced, helped someone with or laughed at someone experiencing uncontrolled transaction log growth caused by a lack of log backups in full recovery model? All of the hands that were down in the earlier question were just up. We’ve all seen it, hopefully we haven’t really laughed though. It happens All. The. Time.

A good tactical move would be to remove this as a default. Start folks out in Simple.  Or perhaps a strategic option would be a “Recovery Model Wizard” as a required step of installations? It would be nice to not need it but I think a lot of folks could benefit. As long as there was some way to override it with an advanced configuration, I wouldn’t mind a tutorial explaining pros/cons and costs of settings so people could make <gasp> informed decisions about their recovery models. Or maybe that is enabling companies to not hire experienced DBAs? I don’t know, what do you think?

No Simple Way to Truncate Backup History

Why make someone write a script or know to go look in a maintenance plan to find this option? Backup history isn’t critical to restores, sure it makes GUI based restores easier but how many GUI based restores are done going past 30 days? Why not make a default rolling window and let SQL cleanup that history. Provide a configuration option to change this window, even a configuration screen during setup asking other questions that should be asked but never get looked at by a lot of the SQL Server installations out there (backup history, recovery modes, heck even error log recycles)

Auditing – Enterprise Only?

Aaron talked about licensing models and I agree. One area is Auditing. Nowadays, even smaller companies with smaller budgets are being subject to increasing scrutiny and audit standards. In some ways, this can help a larger company that has a budget for Enterprise edition everything and an audit staff. What about the smaller company that is cash strapped? They can get most of the performance they need out of Standard and handle most questions/problems just fine, a $15k difference (or so) in per CPU licensing is a lot to ask for to better handle some of the auditing abilities in SQL Server.

Next, Next, Next, Finish

Aaron talked about the installation process in his response. He was talking about some of the bad defaults like I mentioned when talking about cleaning up backup history. This is perhaps more of a tongue-in-cheek response but it has some sort of a serious underpinning. I’ve always complained (raise your hand one last time if you’ve shared this complaint) that SQL Server is too easy to install. Accepting defaults and clicking next, next, finish gives folks a SQL Server instance that they put all of their most sensitive and important data. It also gives them:

• No backups
  

  Brings back memories of 386DX, "Boost Priority" is not a turbo button

• Full Recovery mode with no log backups
• No thought of DR
• No thought of right sizing a database
• Options that look tempting to select like “boost SQL priority”
• Data and Logs on the same drive (performance concern and recoverability concern)
• False confidence that everything is fine

That list could go on but the point is maybe SQL Server is a little too easy to install? I’ve heard it in a joking manner before like, “why do we need a SQL Server DBA? Any moron can install it!” I’ve seen the results of any old IT person (or business person) installing SQL. It inspired a series of posts on thinking about SQL installations.

I am going to take a cue from Brent and not tag anyone but welcome you to respond in your own post, leave a comment arguing with me (or agreeing) below or leave a comment on any of the blog posts that are sparked from the original post by Paul. I’d love to hear your thoughts, maybe I’ve gone too far? Maybe I missed something critical. I’d love to hear your thoughts. Also feel free to subscribe to the feed here for more posts like this.

Related Posts At StraightpathSQL.Com

• Why I think you focus too much on your backups – As discussed in the presentation, the focus should be on restores. May seem like semantics, but the focus on restore means you are thinking of more questions.
• How Do You Install SQL Server? – The first of a 3 part series where we discuss some tips for installing SQL Server and planning for a successful implementation.
• SQL Server Benchmarking Tips – I introduced the Performance Analysis For Logs tool in this presentation, this post talks about that tool.
• Find All SQL Server Instances On Your Network – I talk about using the Microsoft Assessment and Planning toolkit to locate all of your SQL Server instances. This post describes my discovery and use of this great (and free) tool.

Some neat (and free) tools to help you out with SQL Server. This is my second contribution to the SQL University “Tools of The Trade” week series.

In part one we had a quick chat about why to look at using various tools to help you out working with SQL Server. In this post, we’ll talk about some neat free tools I’ve encountered (or plan on encountering) in my career. This has a DBA bent to it since that is what I primarily am. Please do check out the post from DBA Coach, Tom LaRock, where he goes through all types of SQL Server tools. His post is great and covers a lot of information and he brings up a good point on rolling your own (I was originally going to say, “Don’t, plenty of tools already exist”. His post reminded me of what I learned through rolling my own tools early on and it reminded me that a lot of companies started out that way).

Enough introduction, on to some tools…

Performance Analysis Of Logs (PAL)

Great Tool! I was introduced to this tool from a SQL Server premiere field engineer working on a case at my full time position. I originally blogged about using PAL with SQL Server last year and have remained smitten with this tool. You can download it from codeplex here. Check it out, it is free and easy to install. In a nutshell this tool takes perfmon log files (even tells you what counters and objects to watch) and it creates pretty reports that show you potential issues. Great for troubleshooting general performance issues. Great for taking baselines.

Microsoft Assessment And Planning Toolkit (MAP)

Put down your pencil. Put down your notebook. Pop Quiz Time! Ready? How many instances do you support? How many instances of SQL Server are installed in your network? What version are they? How did you do? Put your shoes and socks back on please, it won’t help.

I don’t know a bout you but at most environments I walk into, that is not a readily answerable question. There are hidden SQL Server instances everywhere, it would seem. This is a tool that is also free and you can download it from Microsoft here. I blogged about this tool last year talking about how to find your SQL Server instances, but it really has other uses. Not only can it find your instances, it gives you a simple excel spreadsheet with good information (Server Name, Instance Name, Version and Edition of SQL Installed to name just a few) and you can use this spreadsheet as the start of a total environment documentation. Add columns for application owners, support people, etc. Import it into a database of database instances.

Enterprise Policy Management Framework

This great tool is another tool you can download from Codeplex. It is a neat framework that sits on top of Policy Based Management. It can take your existing policies and check them against all of your SQL Server 2000,2005 or 2008 instances that you discovered with the MAP tool above. It evaluates the policies and presents some excellent reports that can give you a good glance of how you are looking with compliance. This is a great tool to allow you to quickly find potential higher priority policy failures and drill into more details about what the failures are. If you are still doing homework from our meeting on knowledge sharing, this would be one great way to open up info about your environment. Publish the reports and let people see how compliant the environments are with the policies you setup.

SQL Nexus

SQL Nexus should be in your troubleshooting arsenal. It collects data from various sources and gives you some good diagnostics information and detailed reports outlining potential areas of concern. This is, yet another, free tool you can download from Codeplex (Sensing a pattern? Perhaps you can do some searching/playing on Codeplex and find some new tools in the process )

Three Books

There are plenty of other good free tools around. Checking out Tom’s post above or  following a blog syndication feed like SQLServerpedia will get you some tips for SQL Server tools as folks blog about tools they like. One of the books below actually goes into some details on tools like SQL Nexus. These books are three books I think should belong in every SQL Server person’s library. (There are others but these three are a good start).

In No specific order:

• Inside SQL Server T-SQL Querying. This book, by Itzik Ben-Gan, exists for SQL Server 2005 and for 2008. Perfect book for anyone who has to write SQL code or advise those that do. It covers the how and why behind how SQL processes a query. It covers set based theory and helps you think logically.
• SQL Server MVP Deep Dives – 53 MVPs got together to write this book. Tips and Tricks, advice and commentary on a huge range of topics. All easy reads, all written from the folks who give much to the SQL community. Proceeds of book sales help out a worthy cause as well.
• Professional SQL Server 2008 Internals and Troubleshooting – I just read 80% of this book ( have one more chapter to finish for an upcoming review). So far? This book is a great balance of academic knowledge going into the “how and why?” behind the topics and practical information (putting it together for the real world). The last few chapters of this book also talk about using a few free tools and reporting components to better tune and work with your environment.

I may make a part 3 to this in the future and add some more free tools that I missed in the interest of not over burdening you in this one post. If I do, I’ll link it here and it will be published to my feed.

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I don’t know about you, but I’m too busy to do it all. I use tools to help me do my job as a DBA. Let’s talk about some of the tools or types of tools that might help you do your job.

This is Week 4 of the Spring 2010 semester of SQL University – Tools Of The Trade Week. Thanks, Jorge for setting this up! I’m your official instructor for this week but if you check out the SQL University site there may be some guest instructors adding their thoughts as well. We’ll divide this up into a couple posts. You are at the first post, a general discussion. In Part 2, I share some free SQL Server tools that have helped me.

Why Use Tools?

Do you have a full staff of production DBAs backing you up? Do all of your jobs and servers run as they are expected? Do you hate writing your own environment documentation from scratch? Get confused when there are performance issues?

Well, those are some great reasons to look at SQL Server help from some source. Be it reporting add-ons to Management Studio, a third party vendor’s product for monitoring your environment, some PowerShell scripts you wrote or even a SQL Script you found (and tested!) from a trusted resource, there are tons of tools out there to help you.

My goal in this post is to get you to think about looking beyond the tools that ship with SQL Server and consider your needs. Look at ways to get a force multiplier for your environment.

Isn’t SSMS Enough?

SQL Server Management Studio is a great tool. From it you can do just about every task that you would need to do to manage day to day DBA duties. Developers can bang out SQL code in it. Access can be granted or revoked. You can view built-in reports or add performance dashboard reports.

It isn’t enough, though. There are great tools out there from vendors. There are ways for you to fill your own specific needs with custom scripts or even your own applications. There are some great SQL Server vendors that come to mind who started because someone saw a need and developed a tool.

So What Do We Need?

Well I was going to go through a list of some types of tools in this first post but Tom LaRock actually beat me to the punch with his DBA coach contribution to the SQL University topic. Rather than do it here, go check out his blog and look at some of the tips and thoughts in his great post on SQL Server Tools.

We’ll come back inPart 2 and revisit some neat tools I’ve liked and used or liked and plan on using from codeplex (free).

SQL University Survey

If you would like to participate, SQL University is running a survey to seek feedback on all sessions provided this semester. If you have a few moments please check out the survey. The results will help us blog more relevant content and improve SQLU next semester!

It’s spring and in addition to our usual vegetable garden and some existing fruit crops, we are putting in a row of 15 blueberry bushes. Well the past two nights I’ve been outside for 3-4 hours digging a trench (about 40′ long by 2.5′ wide and 1′ deep. right, I said feet.) by hand and then started to refill it with better dirt basically. Plenty of time for the mind to wander about a host of topics, including this post.  As I worked a few lessons that apply to the day job came to mind.  Good lessons no matter what you do but I’ll spin the SQL side, obviously… Since it is still Professional Development week at SQL University, I figured I’d post this week. Maybe you’ll take something useful from it, or maybe this is all for me. The previous Professional Development post for SQL University was on sharing knowledge.

Lessons (In No Particular Order)

My hand - apparently it's built for keyboards, not shovels...

1.) It Isn’t Weak To Use Help – I don’t really own a good pair of work gloves. My wife has some flowery gardening gloves. The first night of shoveling in bouldery/rocky hard-pan clay, I figured “real men don’t wear work gloves!” I seem to recall re-learning this lesson every so often working outside.

Books Online is a friend – The day job corollary in my mind is – use the help that is available. Most of the time it is a sign of strength, not weakness to use a help source. The end results can mean happier customers and a better process (or less pain in the palm of your hand). Tonight, I used the  new work gloves I bought at Wal-Mart. Wow. What a difference. I was even more effective.  Ever try and solve anything through trial and error only to realize that a trusted source (such as books online) had the answer the whole time? Well that’s how I felt… Use The Resources available to you.

2.) It Helps To Be In Shape – I only took a picture of my hand. No videos of me panting while working or clothing drenched from sweat. I was in much better shape after ActiveAugust last year but I got to the worst shape of my life the past 6 months, let stress get the best of me and sort of gave up on the working out and then the eating healthy… Well I realize the error of my ways and will be working on that…

Back to the day job application – Stay Current With Your Skills - Alright, so some of these analogies will be stretches but it made sense to me when I was out there working and thinking of the lessons. If I were in better shape (lets just say that these past two nights have been the best workout I’ve had in many months) I would have done more and felt better. Don’t be your own enemy – Practice your skills, read blogs, try things out, always be learning and preparing.

3.) Prepare When You Can (File under practice what you preach) – Last fall, I did a lot of prep work for the vegetable garden. We planted a bunch of garlic for summer harvest. That inspired the above linked post reminding folks to plan ahead… Oops. We knew we had the bare root blueberry plants coming but I was busy with work and “busy” slacking off instead of doing this ins small chunks. Do what you can ahead of time, “we’ll take care of it later” usually has a cost.

Where have you been all my life??

4.) Use The Right Tool(s) For The Job – I’ve always hated digging on my property. Hard pan clay, boulders just under the grass/loam layer. I’ve always just muttered my way through with a garden shovel. Well, not for this project. 3/4 of the way through my first night of trench duty I remembered my wife’s grandmother had a pick axe (well actually a pick mattock, I think) so I drove down and borrowed it. WOW! If I had one when we first moved in and used it ever since, I would probably have 30 hours of my time back from planting apple trees, making garden beds, planting lilacs and establishing a lawn. It made short work of the rocks, popped big boulders up with a simple swing and a push forward with the mattock providing a fulcrum getting the boulder ready for my greedy hands. I almost am willing to say it made it fun. For the day job? Use the right tool for the job! Maintenance plans have their place for a DBA who isn’t comfortable enough to create database maintenance jobs by scratch, even if you are comfortable. Some may laugh, I won’t. It works. Use a tool for source control, windows explorer (at least by itself with no source control tool add-ons) is not that tool. Use “Helper” Tools - Be it a database monitoring software program, a data comparison tool, a database diagramming tool, etc. there are tools out there that are designed to make life easier for you. I am actually contemplating buying a pick mattock and just leaving it in my cube as a work related tool. Not to actually use, just for intimidation for drive-by’s…

5.) Focus On Your Own Task – It was a bit boring out there and I’ll be honest, I wanted to be done. Anytime I looked forward to what was left or back to how little I’ve gone, it was a bit of a kick in the seat. When I zeroed in on the window of what I was doing (dig, dump, dig, dump) I got a lot further than I realized  I was getting. Instead of focusing on what I had left to do I was focused on my task.. Now in the day job it looks a bit different because while zeroing in visually on where I was working my mind was still wandering, I was doing a mindless task and I don’t do Zen. At work I actually mean focus on your task. If it is a deploy, then focus on the step of the deploy script and pay excruciating attention to that one detail. Sounds like common sense but if I don’t work at focus, I can miss a small piece of a puzzle. Do whatever you have to do to maintain that focus.

6.) Remember How Easy You Have It – While digging it occurred to me that this project is nothing compared to what other folks have dug by hand over time. Foundations, Wells, even canals – or am I thinking of the Panama Canal in the basement from Arsenic and Old Lace? anyway… So I spent some time marveling at the kind of things done by hand over time. Ever use an older version of SQL Server? I have recollections of pains in growing a file in SQL Server 6.5 and working an application that often had fun data integrity issues on SQL 6.5 (wasn’t SQL’s fault, if I recall correctly). Things get easier with the new tools and versions that come out. You could always have it worse.

7.) Quality Now Means Quality Later – Kind of goes with that link about practicing what you preach above but the more quality I put in here, the better chance the blueberries have. Since they are 3 year old plants the plants that bear fruit early should do so in just a couple months. So a little hard work now gives me some fresh, tasty, organic blueberries around June. Keep the end result in mind. Building a new SQL Instance? The more attention you pay to thinking about how you install SQL Server means less time supporting issues later. Creating a new database or developing some code? Think about the code review now, not at the code review. Fix things now while you can and you’ll have more time later.

There you have it. Some random thoughts from a garden project. Time to take some ibuprofen and hit bed I’ll set this to schedule on Friday morning sometime. Did I miss any lessons? Any tips for the blueberries? (Besides rent a backhoe, that is). Comments are always open, no registration required.

SQL University Survey

If you would like to participate, SQL University is running a survey to seek feedback on all sessions provided this semester. If you have a few moments please check out the survey. The results will help us blog more relevant content and improve SQLU next semester!