Monthly Archives: June 2012
We Survived SQL Saturday #132, Pensacola
Relaxing in a Tallahassee Spring Hill Suites, I am reflecting on this weekend’s trip to Pensacola. Why Tallahassee? This SQL Learning trip was turned into a long weekend with my wife. We decided to split our long ride home in half and enjoy an extra day unwinding, relaxing in the pool in sunny Tallahassee especially since we did not get to enjoy the beautiful beaches of the Gulf Coast. We are already planning to return to Pensacola for next year’s SQL Saturday.
After yesterday’s flooding with the declaration of the state of emergency and driving around a flash flood only to find myself in an intersection that was about 18 inches deep, I can easily say that we survived SQL Saturday #132. However, I wouldn’t trade the experience as I arrived back at the venue in time to give my first ever presentation (I left because I was soaked from head to toe in order to put some fresh dry clothes on). I also got to spend some time with a couple of great MCMs and meet a handful of new people to add to my #SQLFamily.
Next week, after I return home from this trip, I will blog some of the things I learned in some of the sessions and the pre-con. Until, then relax and enjoy the rest of your weekend!
SQL Saturday #132 Pensacola, My First Presentation!
Welcome to Pensacola: home of the flash floods, torrential downpours, and wonderful people! Blogging live from SQL Saturday #132 after giving my world premier first presentation and my adrenaline is through the roof right now. I won the “Funniest Presentation Award” and received the Zombie Survival Guide. What a rush! But it almost didn’t happen!
After the first couple of sessions this morning, I went back to the hotel room to change into dry clothing and change my socks and shoes, yes I was serious about the flooding. I put some bags on my dry shoes and headed back to make it back in time for my session. Enter the flash flood around the Pensacola State College, so much so that people were stranded in the middle of the road outside of the building that we were located in. I drove around the perimeter of the college and almost got stuck in an intersection, that was very scary. I have never been stuck in a flood before and it was my wife’s fairly new SUV, that would not have been good for the vehicle or me.
Flood waters were not going to keep me from my first presentation as I put a fair amount of work into it. The audience laughed at all the right places, these people get me. I love #SQLFamily, what a great community! I will post the slide deck when I get back to the hotel and will blog more as the week goes on. Enjoy!
SQL Saturday 132, Pre-Con
Today I am spending the day at Pensacola State College attending the pre-conference training for SQL Saturday #132 titled “Demystifying Database Administration Best Practices” presented by Microsoft Certified Masters Robert Davis (twitter|blog) and Argenis Fernandez (twitter|blog).
This is my first pre-con and I was excited to meet both Masters as I have talked with them many times on twitter. This was definitely money well spent with the rapid fire style spouting out best practice after best practice answering questions along the way was refreshing.
Typically, I get bored pretty easily if the speaker can’t hold my attention. No problems here. When I get back home I will blog about some of the new things I learned. This has been a great day of learning, SQL awesomeness at its best!
Leaving Today for SQL Saturday #132, Pensacola
The day has finally arrived: travel day! I am leaving today after work for the six-hour drive to Pensacola for SQL Saturday #132. We have a new John Grisham audiobook, Calico Joe, ready for the ride. This one sounds like a great book: “A surprising and moving novel of fathers and sons, forgiveness and redemption, set in the world of Major League Baseball…”
Having experienced heavy rains all week in central Florida, I am a little concerned that we may not have a beautifully sunny weekend at the beach. However, the hotel does have an indoor pool so my wife is not too worried because we do live in Florida after all and this is a common summer time event.
Last night I was invited to the speaker’s dinner, thanks to the coordinator Mark Holmes (twitter|blog) for including me. In the past I have attended these speaker dinners as a volunteer, so I am moving up in the world. Thanks again Mark, I really do appreciate it and the event sounds amazing. I also want to thank Karla Kay (twitter|blog) for convincing me to take the leap and present as well as everything she does for the SQL community. She really is wonder woman as represented in her avatar.
Tomorrow is also my first pre-con training: “Demystifying Database Administration Best Practices” presented by Microsoft Certified Masters Robert Davis (twitter|blog) and Argenis Fernandez (twitter|blog). Some of my coworkers think that I am crazy for paying for this training and attending SQL Saturday’s out of my own pocket. They have obviously never been and met the #SQLFamily. Do yourself a favor and attend one of these event, you will not regret it. Enjoy!
SQL Saturday #132, Pensacola
Wow, another SQL Saturday is coming up and I am über excited! For this one I will travel up the panhandle to beautiful Pensacola with my lovely bride who will enjoy the sun and fun with me as we turn this into a four-day getaway. After our daughter’s graduation a couple of weeks ago, we could use a break.
This SQL Saturday is different for me in a few ways. First of all, I am going to the Pre-Con! This will be my first ever pre-con training as I never could get the schedule right in coordination with my work schedule. The stars aligned just right for this one, though. This pre-con will be “Demystifying Database Administration Best Practices” presented by Microsoft Certified Masters Robert Davis (twitter|blog) and Argenis Fernandez (twitter|blog). Being passionate about best practices, I am excited about this session as well as meeting two fellow tweeps.
The second difference is that I will be presenting for the first time ever! Going old school MTV style: This Saturday live at 1 pm come see the world-premiere video (er, I mean) presentation from SQLGator. It is a lightning talk presentation which will be great for my first time to help me get over my stage fright and conquer my goal of speaking. I am still considering submitting for SQL Saturday #151 Orlando and this will be a good test of whether or not I can do this. I am confident I can do this, but I am having some serious nervousness.
Hanging out with #SQLFamily will be amazing and I am looking forward to meeting some new people especially some of the bigger names in the SQL Server community. Come on out and enjoy the free learning. See you there!
Removing a Perfectly Good Cluster, Part Two
Yesterday I started a new project to downgrade our two new SQL Server 2008 R2 clusters down to SQL Server 2008 clusters. The uninstall went off without a hitch as we removed both nodes and then removed the support tools. I find it interesting that when we went to install the 2008 server, there was still tempDB data files which prevented the new install from moving forward until we deleted them. I am not sure if the other system databases were there as the installer did not complain about those. In hindsight, I probably should have removed all of the directories and files before installing as a general best practice but I did reboot the server prior to the new install and thought it would be fine.
Because I do not spin up new clusters everyday (that would be a great job), I took screen shots during the initial 2008 R2 install to serve as a guide because I knew that I had a total of three clusters to build by the end of the year. In this scenario, documentation is an amazing thing (well it is amazing in most areas but most DBAs become complacent about doing it myself included). Originally I built the first two clusters back in January and since they were the first clusters that I had ever built I wanted to document it as I am responsible for many systems and quite honestly I would not have remembered the settings chosen on each screen. Having worked with SQL Server for sometime, I could have configured a stand-alone server in my sleep, but I was not as confident with clusters. My confidence is building at this point.
Now, it appears that building 2008 SP3 servers is almost identical to 2008 R2 servers from slipstreaming through the configuration for best practices. In a future post, I will discuss some best practice troubleshooting I did for these reinstalls. Enjoy!
Removing a Perfectly Good Cluster, Step One
Today we embark on a somewhat sad journey. A couple of days ago, I told you a story about a vendor and the miscommunication of specifications. Today the chickens have come home to roost. We must replace the SQL Server 2008R2 clusters with 2008 clusters. These were perfectly good clusters, fine tuned and ready to burst out of the starting gate and win the triple crown, well you understand what I mean. I’ve grown attached to these clusters as they were the first ones that I have ever personally built from the purchase order to production.
Today, we will uninstall both of the SQL Server nodes and then begin the reinstallation of the previous version. We will run the installer on the passive node first. In the installer go to the maintenance section and choose “Remove node from a SQL Server failover cluster.” After this is complete then we will go to the active node and go through the same process. Tomorrow we will look at the reinstallation of SQL Server 2008 SP3. Enjoy!
Disaster Recovery, Hurricane Season
June 1st marks the beginning of hurricane season on the east coast of the United States (May15th for the West Coast in case your curious). Working in Florida, I call this the dreaded time of year for many reasons and none of them have to do with being afraid that a hurricane is going to wipe out my house.
First of all, it is the dreaded ‘Hey let’s dust off the old DR plan and update it!’ time, that really should be kept up to date year round, but I digress. Most people don’t realize this but very few storms actually hit the state as opposed to the coastal Carolinas. Now we tend to worry if a storm makes it to the Gulf because those are unpredictable but generally head to Texas or New Orleans. However if it stay in the Atlantic they generally head right up the continental shelf and hit the Carolinas or go right on out to sea. Generally. Yes we did get a couple about eight years ago and I do remember Andrew especially since I went to High School in Homestead. Please don’t take this the wrong way as those were devastating but generally and statistically we see very little action.
If you have lived here for any time you start to see a pattern every June 1st. The first being what I like to call local news panic. I live somewhat between Orlando and Tampa and for years we would receive both sets of local channels in our cable package and we were unique in that regard. That is how I formed this theory as well as living in Jacksonville and South Florida while growing up. Every television station in Florida like to set in the panic about three weeks before a storm is actually anywhere near the state. They lead broadcasts with Tropical Depression Ed is located 1 million miles from the lesser Antilles and is showing a direct path through your living room. Then during the 11pm broadcast they show the panic and hysteria at the Home Depot where all the transplants panic and try to buy up all of the generators and plywood, water and batteries from Wal-Mart, and any other supplies they think they will need. PANIC! Little does everyone know that Miami is showing a direct path to their city, Tampa shows it either veering into the Gulf and then to Tampa or cutting clear across the state to them.
I’ve learned one thing about transplants, they are scared to death of Hurricanes which makes me wonder why they moved to Florida in the first place. Generally every ten or twenty years we get a storm which helps perpetrate the hysteria because everyone remembers or knows someone who was in Charlie or Andrew. Do not misunderstand this post, Hurricanes are bad, very bad and we usually escape the major damage but we always get tons of rain which causes flooding, lots of lightning (as we are the capital), and boat lot of tornadoes. There is damage, but it is not the mass hysteria that the media generates.
There is also a different phenomenon in the workplace: complacency. After you have been here for a while and realize this media panic, it leads to complacency as you can probably tell by my tone in this post. Generally this leads to DR plans not being updated and data not being accounted for in a disaster. UPDATE YOUR DISASTER RECOVERY PLAN! SAVE YOUR DATA! Enjoy!
Vendor Rant, Starting Over
We interrupt this regularly scheduled blog series to bring you a rant. Now wait don’t click away just yet. There is a lesson here somewhere, I hope.
To give you some background, we have a vendor, henceforth known as XYZ, to whom we have worked with for several years on their financial package. The package is currently in Oracle and it was decided that we could reduce costs by upgrading to the newest version of their package but migrating it to SQL Server to reduce our Oracle licenses which makes sound financial sense. Being a predominantly Oracle shop, I have been masterminding the demise of Oracle for the year that I have been here quietly chipping away.
This project has been in the planning stages for several months. During which time we order four identical super servers to be clustered into a production and development/acceptance active-passive clusters. I cannot deny that I indeed was excited about this project whole heartedly because of the hardware as well as the chance to reduce the Oracle footprint and to champion SQL Server as the preferred database. Plus, I have never built clusters from the ground up.
We took our time setting this servers up with Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise making sure that everything was well tuned. Then we setup our SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise clusters on all four boxes even bringing in our Microsoft Premier Field Engineer to ensure a successful migration ensuring that best practices were in effect. Most would view bringing in help as an insult to their pride, but I welcomed the learning opportunity and it helped with the learning of our green junior DBA who has no server or SQL experience. In addition, whenever I can be around our PFE, I am the eager padawan and she is the jedi master especially since she has an extensive Oracle background as well.
Fast forward and these machines are ready to go and all of the specifications were discussed and communicated several times through planning meetings. I even spoke with their DBAs during the install process to ensure that our settings were commensurate with the project. Now on Thursday of this week, the day before we are to begin migrating some of the Oracle data to the development box, I discover on one of the documents that the only version supported is SQL Server 2008 SP3 running on Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise. Hold the phone!
Rewind, notice I said we communicated several times that we were going to install SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise clusters on our new boxes and the vendor was compliant offering assistance if we needed it. THEY NEVER MENTIONED THAT THEY DID NOT SUPPORT R2. Now we have to uninstall R2 and install plain jane 2008 in effect putting us two versions behind and this project does not go live for another year after extensive testing. We even offered to be a beta testing site so that they could certify and say that they supported R2 since we have a year of testing ahead of us. DENIED! They were not interested whatsoever since none of the third-party tools such as BOXI support R2, according to them. Now I have to uninstall my beautiful creations and go backwards, this is progress. 😦
The moral of the story is to get the vendor to verify and sign off that the version you are installing is indeed supported before you install it. My supervisor and I thought by telling the vendor in the meetings that this would be evident. Next time we will force the issue before proceeding.
SQL Nexus, Perf Stats Report
2005 Perf Stats Report for 2008 Data
Continuing our SQL Nexus journey, I noticed another item with the Perf Stats reports. As I mentioned in a previous post, I imported SQL Server 2008 R2 data into SQL Nexus. However when I choose the “SQL Server 2008 Perf Stats” report I get the “The database doesn’t have necessary data to run this report” dialog box and when I choose the 2005 report, it opens.
Here is where it gets interesting, if I right-click on the report I can select the report parameters. The only parameter is version and the value is 2005. That’s understandable, so I manually tried to change it to 2008. Voila! The report refreshes and now the report title reflects the new value. This report gives you three choices: Blocking and Wait Statistics and Bottleneck Analysis, which both have their own reports on the menu, and Spin Lock Stats. It appears that changing the parameter only changes the title of the report. I think next week I will crack open these two reports to see why the 2008 data loads in the 2005 report and not in the proper one and what the parameter really does. Until then, enjoy your weekend!
SQL Swampland 