Categories
SQLServerPedia Syndication

SQL DBA: Starting Fresh, What do you do?

If you start at a new place, as a SQL Server Database Administrator (DBA), what is one of the first things you should do? In my opinion, after figuring out the key servers and instances running you need to support… is setting up alerts.

By setting up alerts you can start to get an idea of what is not working and start focusing on things that are failing, etc first. All the while you can still check on backups and getting everything else set up and working, but if you don’t have alerts, well, you are blind.

Alerts should tell you..

1) When a physical server is down (network)
2) When backups fail
3) When jobs fail
4) When logins fail
5) I/O issues
6) the “critical” 14, 15, 16, 17
7) crazy cpu and memory issues
8) services going up and down
9) if your SAN is up/down
10) Hard drive getting close to 100%

and that is just the beginning. What other alerts should DBA’s set up *right away* to make sure they are on top of things?


Categories
Product Reviews

BuddyFuse integrates Google Talk and Twitter into Windows Live Messenger

Ran across this today. Setting up a laptop, and one team we use Windows Live Messenger, the other Google Talk. I know there is Trillian, Digsby, etc, but I just wanted to use Windows Live Messenger, but still IM Google Talk contacts

BuddyFuse integrates Google Talk and Twitter into Windows Live Messenger

BuddyFuse to the rescue! Seems to be working well. Why just Windows Live Messenger? I like the presence it brings with Outlook 2010 and TFS, etc. More tightly coupled with the OS. Like using iChat on a Mac.

Categories
Ramblings

Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite… Check.In Fatigue

Location based services. They aren’t new. Back 5-6 years ago I was at Sprint PCS (Northern PCS) and dorking around with LBS from MIcrosoft and Cell phones. The stuff has just matured.

So, ok. You use the LBS apps. Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite, Yelp, Loopt… whatever. Personally there is so much fragmentation it is ridiculous. No single “places” db. Some venues have mayorship deals, some don’t care about anything but one app, etc.

The best thing I have seen so far is Check.In (web app) on my iPhone, which will do all 3 major services (more coming) at once. The thing is, you have to be on network. Problem is, most places I go to , there is no wifi, or cell coverage. So you just can’t even check in.

The other thing that comes up often is “check in fatigue”. Which is what you get after you go to a ton of different places and you spend more time checking in or trying to check in rather than enjoying the venue.

In the little town I am living in, there is once place with deals for mayorship – a coffee shop. And guess who is mayor? An employee. Forget it. Why even have any deals?

I am seriously thinking of just jumping out of the LBS app game, when you get down to it, just not enough time in the day to worry about “checking in” and really not getting much out of it. I would rather see it that if i am walking by a place, they txt me with a deal or do something to catch my attention, then me fight for some check in deal that I would never get.

Mobile/LBS apps will grow and mature and it is exciting to see where the space will go. Mainstream? not for a while, if ever. Trying to keep with my “appless” mode, I haven’t installed any LBS apps on my phone yet this week. (I have installed 4 other apps, but it is minimal :))

Mayorship really gets you nothing but bragging rights (and who really cares?) and not much else. I would rather spend my time reading or learning or hanging out with my babby 🙂

Categories
Geeky/Programming Product Reviews

PC vs Mac

Microsoft has published a site, PC vs Mac

There is only one thing you have to know, everything else is fluff.

You will never get a blue screen of death on a Mac. Oh, I got one last night on a Windows machine. With an xlsx half way open and not done yet. Lovely.

done. game over. Mac wins.

And I love Windows, for Development and Business Intelligence. It is the hardware and software that have problems working together. Should Microsoft try to build a PC? Hardware? (ala Xbox?) Would it perform better? Maybe. Would they have more control? Of course, the hardware and software could integrate nicely. I would buy a mythical Microsoft computer before buying a regular PC. Just like I would buy a Mac rather than a Hackintosh 🙂

Categories
Business Intelligence

SSRS Report Creation Checklist

You can whip out reports in SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) very quickly with the report builders (2.0 and 3.0 are money).

But what should you remember to do each time, or information to get?

  1. Where does the data come from (GL, Sales, etc) – we could use a cube or datawarehouse, or staging, or Other system, etc.
  2. Report Name (on Report Manager)
  3. Short description of the purpose – to appear under report name on report manager
  4. Should it go into an existing folder, or a new folder, or the user’s folder?
  5. Who should have access?
  6. How should it be consumed? Email (and what, excel, pdf, web archive, etc), To a file share, User Ran?
  7. What parameters should be available? a. What are the defaults?
  8. Can we get a rough mockup of how it should look? a. Can we get an existing report (if avail, crystal, or excel, etc)
  9. Does it need to print on a 8×11 page?
  10. How often are you going to run it? (Hourly,Daily, Weekly, Monthly, ad-hoc)
  11. Is it going to be informational, or used to export data and manipulate? (if export – is there something else we can do?)
  12. If tabular data, does it need to be sortable?
  13. Do snapshots need to be taken? a. How many do we save? b. How often to take them? c. Do you need ability to delete them?

you get the idea, the list could go on and on. So creating that report is simple, but actually getting and doing all the things necessary to get it done “correctly” is more time consuming.

What other things can you think of for the list?

Categories
Product Reviews

Flipboard for iPad, Personal Techmeme

Last week Flipboard informed me that their iPad app was ready for me to use (I have had it since day one, but their servers were overwhelmed).

The premise is that it takes your Twitter and Facebook feeds and creates personal “magazines”. It has other aggregated/curated content from around the web as well. I don’t know what the exact algorithm for figuring out what to show me is, but it seems to do ok. Right now I see it as another quick way to scan through things.

What I think would be an awesome edition, if it could handle it, is syncing my Google Reader. I want a personal “cloud” or personal “techmeme” – filter and find and combine like items. I thought maybe “The Early Edition” for iPad would do that, but it croaked on my 300 some feeds.

Some day there will be an app that does it 🙂


Categories
Business Intelligence

App Store Pivot Viewer – ZoomAppy

Good ideas are hard to stop from happening. After dorking around with Pivot Viewer, I was thinking of things I could “pivot”, and the iTunes App Store was one of them. No real API though, there are some out there that have created APIs, or you could scrape the web, etc but nothing solid.

Looks like someone took that idea and ran with it, called ZoomAppy (http://zoomappy.com/). RIght now it looks like it is just the app store, but they have more in store.

I agree that Pivot Viewer is “Business Intelligence”, but it is a different way of thinking. Where in traditional BI, you think of looking at metric/measures like sales/inventory, etc. With PivotViewer, you are looking at “objects” and filtering them based on properties. Teams, Bikes, Apps, Cars, People. Also PivotViewer doesn’t give you any type of aggregations besides counts, so it is limited in that regard.

What else would be a good candidate for Pivot Viewer?


Categories
Geeky/Programming

The New Hipster: Going Appless

Love the iPhone, really do. But I am pretty hardcode when it comes to apps and loading things and making it “work” hard. Every once in a while some rogue app goes off the wall and starts draining battery like crazy. Usually the only thing to do is restore phone. I have had to do this, and a few other people I know have see it as well. I don’t blame the iPhone, I blame the apps. Just like windows mobile, the apps were the problem 🙂

Anyways, this time, instead of restoring my phone from backup, I just let it stay “clean”. I decided to not install any apps for as long as I can. It has been 24 hours, so that says something 🙂

But what I am doing is going back to the iPhone roots, back to 2007. Web apps. Steve Jobs himself says it is their “other”, open, unrestricted platform they support, so let’s see what it can offer.

Facebook? touch.facebook.com
Twitter? m.twitter.com
Flickr? m.flickr.com
YouTube (the HTML5 version is better than the native app!) m.youtube.com
FourSquare/Gowalla? check.in
Reeder/Google Reader? google’s mobile formatted reader site works.
Other apps? openappmkt.com
IM? meebo has a pretty good web app.

Just like regular hipsters, that drink PBR, and lose the flavor and other added benefits of drinking a less “hip” beer, you have to give some things up.. such as..

Push Notifications – not sure yet if this is a good or bad thing to give up. The current implementation just seems to annoy anyways

Background/Streaming music (Pandora/Last.fm, etc) – I did find dance.fm has a HTML5 version or something that streams directly from a web page, so I could almost say others might follow suit. I also have iPod on the device so not to worried, I don’t listen to a helluva lot of music anyways.

What else? Not sure yet, we will see how long I last. One thing I can say, there are some games that are web apps that are pretty cool, but don’t come close to the native games … yet.

Of course I will probably start installing some apps eventually, and after a while I will be back to my old app going ways 🙂

Categories
Geeky/Programming Product Reviews

Tool of the Day: Sysinternals ProcMon

Funny how you might not EVER use a given tool, and some days you might end up using it twice. Sysinternals Procmon was that tool today.

It is the successor from old utils from Sysinternals – Filemon and Regmon.

What does it do? It monitors all processes and services and watches what they are doing on your system. File, Registry, etc, etc. Open/Close, Read/Write, what user, status, etc. You can filter and pause and find out pretty much anything going on in windows.

So early in the day, running into a website issue, not loading in IIS. No idea what is going on. Fire up Procmon and filter to the website directory on disk. Lo and behold, the site is trying to impersonate a user, and that user doesn’t have permissions. The site still didn’t work, and if I would have dug a bit more with Procmon, would have found that the user impersonating on the site also needed rights to the ASP.NET Temporary files, but after seeing the impersonation and the site still not working, I guessed it didn’t have rights to the temp folder.

Things like the scenario above I have seen people waste a support call with Microsoft with.

Second thing today. Trying to install a extension to SSRS. The installer isn’t even seeing that SSRS is installed, yet it clearly is and functioning correctly on the box. Some how the installer must be reading something or looking somewhere and not finding something. Procmon to the rescue. Fire it up, watch msiexec.exe. Seeing registry reads, it finds the SSRS instance names, then looks to a registry area with that instance name and tries to find more details. Was failing on finding the details because there was no reg keys in the second location (for whatever reason). But there was info in the first location, the same info it was looking for. I exported it out, changed the reg path of the keys, and imported. Re-ran setup and it found the instance this time and I could install the extension.

Without Procmon would have been flying blind or just guessing randomly on what to do. Could have been hours on tech support with a company, or again, a support call with Microsoft.

Procmon saved the day. Check it out and try to use where applicable in your day to day troubleshooting.

Categories
Business Intelligence

Blaming the Waitress

Most people have probably done this at least once in their lives.. You go to a restaurant and order a meal. The waitress is nice, comes over, gets your drinks, takes your order, checks up on you, refills, what not, brings out the meal, and woah, something is wrong, it is cold, bad, just something. But what do you end up doing? Getting mad and blaming the waitress. You might not give her any tip at the end of the meal, because you are mad about the mishap with the food.

But then you start to think about it, and you look back and realize that hey, it wasn’t the waitress who caused the issue, it was probably the cooks! But you are already driving home and don’t really do anything about it.

People like to cast blame, even that might not be the right phrase, but people like to *call out* the group on the front lines (note: in most cases. For instance in the military campaigns, when one side loses, people blame the generals and commanders, etc, not the privates on the front lines, and rightfully so).

In Business Intelligence, you are usually the “front line” to the business when it comes to reporting information and data. One of the roles of BI is to “deliver information to the business”. But then what happens when something is wrong with that information? People immediately blame the Business Intelligence group. It just seems to be human nature, just like blaming the waitress.

Now, don’t get me wrong, sometimes the problem might reside with the waitress, and then you would call her out on things, but you need to realize, your tip just doesn’t go to her. It gets split between her, the cook, the bus boys, the greeters, etc.

I hate playing any part of the “blame game”, but sometimes people should think through what they are actually “blaming” and make sure it just isn’t calling out the front lines because that is what is easiest.

I’m not sure that Business Intelligence will ever fully get around taking most of the up front hits when something goes wrong with data, or with a reporting server, or with anything that might be outside of its control, but what Business Intelligence groups should strive for is to be accountable for things within its control, such as finding problems before the business does, handling data integrity issues with ease, making ETL’s more fault tolerant, getting and handling server alerts for jobs and processes that it is in charge of, etc, etc.

Just try to remember the next time your food is cold at the restaurant, try not to blame the waitress 🙂