Hi kids.
Well it’s Friday and I made it. For the last 48 hours I’ve been either throwing up or feeling very sorry for myself in bed. Lovely eh?
So the other day I thought I’d spend some time with my dear chum Brad. You know, Brad McGehee international SQL Server professional book writing presenting super dude. Well ok, I didn’t sit down and have a cup of tea with him. To be fair I hardly know the guy. In fact, I only know of him due to my crazy Kiwi friend: Jono Kerr. He introduced me to Brad a while ago when I became his boss for a period of time (Jono not Brad), the introduction was the reading of his free eBooks. So… when I say hang out… I really mean surfing his website….Any who….Brad has the same values as myself – which I don’t think a lot of technical people do. It’s called: Professional people skills.
Now before you run off – I’m not insulting any one when I say, it’s an acquired skillset, in some people they’ll never have it. I once had a boss who insisted on marching you round the building whilst he gave you a piece of his mind, purely opinion based life advice, a bit like the over zealous fathers or grandfathers - I kid you not. This same guy liked to tell customers they were ‘stoopid’ … to their faces. Nice. I have also worked with people who liked to shout at customers down the phone by telling them they are wrong and that ‘As I’m the technical expert…’ for their reason in being a chauvinistic bully boy. Talk about killing your business.
Anyway – Brad has the same out look on the professional conduct of us DBAs, as I. This is interesting as many DBAs are from either the developer (recluses) background or the UNIX/Windows Administration background (recluses).
This means people skill = null;
Now I was from the developer background and I can be reserved when I want to be (yes dear friends, I really can…), but generally I talk the hind leg off my team mates (or donkeys, depending on the day of the week). I also can build excellent rapport with everyone – from the CEO to the guy who delivers mail. Let’s get this straight though, I’m no natural people pleaser – I have to work at it as much as the next guy – it’s just once I’m through the first 5 seconds of conversation, I can generally make clients feel comfortable with my ability and build up trust and so forth. Anyways… I’m rambling on about me – and this is not the point of this post.
As I was saying – Brad shares the same values as me in the professional context of delivering our skill sets as DBAs. Which is great.
So with this in mind, I occasionally frequent his community website (plug: www.bradmcgehee.com). And this week I found an interesting post by Brad about Windows Power Saving plans. Something which I had never really thought about (shameful really…. as I like to think beyond the black box aka ‘database’). Brad had done some clever testing (not that clever – but hey I hadn’t and I bet many others hadn’t thought of it)… which involved his Dell server (Brad’s sponsors… I swear haha) and Geekbench. What he discovered was the CPU throughput was directly affected by the power saving options utilised in Windows 2008.
So I commented on his post, and did a little digging of my own… and found the Microsoft white paper published in 2009 on Windows Server 2008 Power Saving features…. I was amazed to read (I really was… jaw dropped, mouth open, dribble pouring down my chin) to find out that modern day servers coupled with Advanced ACPI and Windows Server 2008 Power Management can actually affect the power going to the CPUs and their respected cores. The aim, according to the document, is to reduce carbon emissions, and gallantly goes onto suggest if EVERYONE in the world who uses Windows Server software upgraded to and utilised Windows Server 2008 it would reduce carbon emissions of servers by 18%. Nice.
The only issue is, if you have a 24/7 database server can your business afford to have reduced performance to cut it’s own carbon footprint by 18% (well, the power part anyway)? It’s a hard question, and as server farms reduced in size due to virtualisation anyway, I think we’ll see a bigger and better impact by this method rather than reducing our databases performances.
TIP: Check your server’s power plans right now. The default for Windows Server 2008 is ‘BALANCED’ which lops about 10% of your CPU right there on the spot. Get it on ‘HIGH PERFORMANCE’ also know as ‘ENVIRONMENTAL DEATH MODE’, but at least our databases will be running ok.
So there we go. Friday is here, I’m dressed down (and got ribbed for it… government workers eh?)… It’s not raining and I don’t feel sick.
Time for coffee. And before I get threats that I’m saying destroy the planet, I’m not. We need to look after it – but some ideas to look after it are pointless and counter-productive. That being said I’m going to go and eat a salad now and tend to my desk plant… with Geoffery the Giraffe… Maybe you’ll get to see him one day.
Now go!
