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Day 30 as DBA
This follow-on to the Day 1 as DBA show will go into the things you can do now that you’re semi-established in your routines. Daily maintenance, auditing, security checks, best practices and more. There is a lot to consider and think about when you’re putting a good foundation in place for your systems, we’ll cover check point items here and keep you up to speed on "what’s next."
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> Live date: 8/14/2007 12:00pm Noon Pacific
Featured Article(s)
Are You A Real DBA?? – Development DBAs and Production DBAs
Recently an editorial "Are You A Real DBA?? – (07/31/2007)" appeared in response to a reader question arising from a survey. To shed some light on the underlying issues this article describes some characteristics of development and production DBAs.
Reporting Services Deployments Made Simple
Getting the reports built using Reporting Services is the first half of the battle. The second half is getting the right reports, in the right formats, to the right people at the right time. Sounds simple – create the report and make it available. Once you find out that users need it as a PDF, Excel sheet, Word document or other formats, and that they don’t necessarily all want the same reports at the same time, you see it can get messy quickly. It’s easy to manage though with SQL-RD. SQL-RD is a point and click manager for those routines to make sure your users get the information they need exactly as they need it. Build the reports, then deploy it with SQL-RD and you’ll be set. Get a free trial and see how easy it can be.
Feedback on Future Upgrade Plans for SQL Server
I asked about what people were planning to do with their upgrades, versions and so-on. Some great feedback came in, here are two of them I received that seemed to fall in line with what others were saying as well.
Shawn: "We have recently upgraded one of our products to SQL 2005 and then the annoucement came out about 2008. For this product, the growth precipated the need to go to 2005 as soon a possible, so we did. However, all of our other products are waiting until 2008 as it is only 6-8 months away. We have made sure they are on SQL 2000 SP4 and will be recoding their applications to take advantage of many of the newer datatypes and features of 2008. This 6-8 months should give them enough of a head start to come out with their next version.
As for the product that we just upgraded to 2005, we will wait and see how it goes. This product uses Polyserve and we need to see what they will support before we upgrade. Also, we had many issues with 2005 and trying to figure out how it goes. Our code ran fairly well on 2000 and we thought it was optimized, however in moving over to 2005, there are just enough changes in the engine to keep me really busy trying to figure some new things out, so much so that several of our databases still run in 80 compatability mode. Our first true 2005 back end will go live next week.
With all the trouble we had with converting our existing db and code to 2005, I am recommending that our other teams wait until 2008."
Bob: "We have 30+ SQL Servers. In some cases the applications running on them dictate whether we can upgrade to a particular SQL version. Our original plan was to upgrade all servers that we could from 2000 to 2005; and we have done all but a handful.
However, given the fact that 2008 is going to be on the scene in less than a year, and we have upgraded all the servers to 2005 where the need for the feature set dictated we do so, our plans have changed. We have decided to wait until 2008 comes out to upgrade any other servers unless new application releases dictate the upgrade. I will probably test the 2000 to 2008 jump with one of the future 2008 CTP’s to make sure there are no issues with making this leap."
This seems to be the general concensus at this point, that people are finishing upgrades in process now and holding off on entirely new projects to deploy under 2008. It’s going to be interesting to watch over time with Microsoft’s committment to getting new releases out more frequently, at some point, it just becomes a continuum and you upgrade to the "current" release as you start your process. It won’t be possible to hold off until the next release to get started – because it’ll be followed by the next one "soon" thereafter. It seems that the upgrade processes have smoothed, at least largely, and that helps. I do still wonder what the targeted "span" of versions is for active, production applications as Microsoft is doing their research. It could well be that we’d have 3-4 (or even more) very active releases at any given time in the market.
Featured White Paper(s)
The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Service Bus, Q2 2006
Cape Clear retains its leading position in Forrester’s latest review of the standalone ESB market. The vendor is one of the p… (read more)
SQL Injection Protection White Paper
This white paper demonstrates various techniques that can be used to evade SQL injection signatures, and explains why it is n… (read more)
Tuning SQL Statements
This paper covers the basic techniques used to tune SELECT statements on Microsoft`s SQL Server relational database managemen… (read more)