We’ve all been there. We all know that sending one more email is NOT going to solve the issue, and that a phone call is needed.

And yet, we never seem to choose the option on the right until the bridge is already on fire.

The post Ignore and Add Strife appeared first on Thomas LaRock.

Here is your assignment for next week:

SQLCLR: Good? Or Evil?

Give an example of how you have used CLR, or seen CLR used well, or not so well. Tell us why you may have decided to not use CLR at all.

The issue I had with CLR is that when a developer would build a CLR object (say, a stored procedure) and then complain about lousy performance on the database side, we couldn’t see the code that was in the assembly. And we didn’t have access to the source code (because we weren’t developers), so we would have to walk over to the developers cube to look at the .NET code in order to try to decipher what was being done. This made performance tuning and troubleshooting rather difficult, if not impossible.

I still remember being at the MTC in Waltham and the Microsoft folks many years ago telling me about how wonderful CLR was going to be and my asking the simple question “yeah, so how do I help tune code and queries I can’t see?” The look on their faces was priceless. “You could get a refactoring tool…I guess….we don’t know…why would you need to see it? It will execute just fine.”

Yeah. Just fine. Until it doesn’t run just fine. And then you need to fix it like a mechanic performing a tune-up in the dark with both hands behind their back.

Despite all of that I find CLR to be “mostly good”. I try to tell developers to use CLR any time they would be thinking of creating a .DLL for something. If whatever you are doing doesn’t need a .DLL, or an extended stored procedure, then you don’t need to be thinking about creating a CLR.

The post Meme Monday for April appeared first on Thomas LaRock.

The answer to the scenario last week is this: Someone ran a SELECT statement, and that statement needed to read pages from disk into memory, which flushed all the existing pages out.

There was no issue with hardware, there was no magic knob to turn to make performance better, or to have prevented any end user from running such a statement. The answer wasn’t complex, either. Just one user, running a valid query that needed to pull in a lot of data.

Sometimes, as a DBA, all you can do is educate. You are not always able to press a button to make problems go away completely.

Here is another one for you today. Can anyone explain what is happening here, and what actions a DBA would take when presented with these details…or if any action should be taken?

Leave your thoughts and answers in the comments, I would love to hear what you believe is happening to my server.

The post What Happened Here? appeared first on Thomas LaRock.

I simply had no idea. I am shocked to hear this.

On the other hand, the article reinforces a theory I have had for years: developers hate everyone, apparently.

Digging deeper into this I believe I have found the following facts to be true:

Developers Don’t Want Perfection

As a DBA or a data architect it is our role to lay out the ideals to be followed. As a result of seeing these ideals laid out before them, many people (developers, project managers, pointy hair bosses) see those ideals as too time consuming to be followed.

You want two or three testing phases? Impossible, we have deadlines to meet.

You want to use specific datatypes? Impossible, it would take us months to classify everything properly, and we have deadlines to meet.

You want to know how much data we are expecting? We have no idea, we have deadlines to meet and we need to get started coding now, why are you wasting our time with all these questions?

[Besides, we all know that the business requirements are going to change anyway, so we might as well start building something and worry about the requirements later, right?]

To me the first issue is the nature of how IT projects are almost always under the gun due to a time constraint. It’s always “by the end of the year”, or quarter, or month that a project needs to be completed. There is little to no time to worry about making it perfect, it simply needs to be considered “delivered” in order for people to be considered to have met their objectives for the year when it comes time for their annual review.

Developers Don’t Want To Waste Time

So now that the developers have started building something the last thing they would want to hear three months later is that they need to start over. Who wants to be told that they have wasted their time? Nobody, that’s who.

This is where I break out the term “structural integrity”. [Yeah, it *is* something I heard many times in many Star Trek episodes, so what?] Anyway, whatever it is that gets built is only going to be able to go so far, or so fast (i.e., scale). Three or six months down the road, as all the requirements are changing and performance isn’t being met, the last thing the developer wants to hear is that they should have listened to the DBA or data architect in the first place.

It’s like having to hear someone say “I told you so”, except you can’t punch them in the face after they say it without having HR get involved.

So how do we avoid this? With better project management, a better setting of expectations, and an understanding of what is needed versus what is wanted.

We all want perfection, but perfection is not always needed. Sometimes you just gotta get started on building/fixing something.

You’ve got to look past all those trees and just see the forest, you know?

The post DBAs and Data Architects: Equally Despised? appeared first on Thomas LaRock.

Of all the things I learned today, one of the neatest things was the fact that you could simply rename an Office 2007 document as a ZIP file and open the file with WinZip to examine the contents. Adam mentioned how he was having trouble understanding why a particular PowerPivot report was fairly large. When he renamed it is a .zip file he was able to quickly isolate the issue. Go ahead and try it with a .docx or .xlsx file, just rename to a .zip file, open, and explore.

I had not heard about this previously. A quick Google Bing for the topic came back with a few hits that had to do with IE and Office downloads but that was about it. Not sure if this will ever be useful for anyone or not, but I certainly found it interesting enough and felt it was worth mentioning here.

The post Office 2007 files and WinZip appeared first on Thomas LaRock.

“I’ve started, so I’ll finish!”

That’s how Sonny would react when anyone tried to interrupt him while he was telling a story. And he said it with the same tone and inflection as the time he corrected his better half by saying “I’m the man, and what I say stands!” And it was our clue that he had no idea what he was talking about. This was certainly true at this time, as Sonny had started to tell a story about the time he was working as an extra on the set of Revenge of the Sith, which we knew meant little more than working for the caterer.

Sonny continued on with his story, “…but as soon as he looks down he’s going to be very sad about the pony”.

“Why would George Lucas be sad about the pony?” I asked, waiting for an insult to be sent my way.

“I don’t know, and it’s not like I can just ask George “Let’s Have Padme Die Of A Broken Heart Instead Of Anakin Crushing Her To Death” Lucas why the hell he cares so much about a damn pony,” Sonny responded. “The guy was busy trying to bury the whole Star Wars franchise by simply using some magical tool, library, or bong. It’s not like I can tell you what the hell he was thinking.”

“OK then,” I replied, “so what was the point of your story again?”

Sonny was clearly annoyed at the interruptions, so he got right to the point. “I was trying to tell you about the time I got drunk with some of the guys at ILM and we inserted some signage into one of the city scenes. If you look close enough you can see a marquee that says “Live Nude Cats”, we knew George wouldn’t be able to spot that because there was too much going on in the scene already.”

“Wow,” was all I could say. And now I need to go watch the movie again. Sonny may be crazy, but so is George Lucas.

The post Whose Crazy Is It Anyway? appeared first on Thomas LaRock.

Here is the splash screen you will see to help you get started:

The link to “Enroll instances…” does not seem to be working. The other five are working just fine. Since I am not able to play the videos directly from my server, so I had to save the files to a network share and then play them from my desktop.

Here are the actual links:

Create a Utility Control Point (UCP)

Connect to an existing UCP

Create a data-tier application

Set Resource Health Policies

Modify UCP Users

Now, maybe it is just me, but I think there is some inconsistencies with the use of capitalization. But this is only a CTP, so I will refrain from filing a Connect item for now. But I may file one for the broken link.

The videos are hosted by Buck Woody (blog | @buckwoody), who is all business. I kept hoping to start making a list of people or things but he was professional throughout. In other words, the videos have little entertainment value, but are a wonderful resource to help you get started using UCP.

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