I’ve noticed in my working life so far that you get (roughly) two kinds of contractor/consultant.  You get the one who likes money (and nothing else) and you get the one that likes money AND likes to do a super job.  I’d like to think I’m in the blue spandex suit and red cape camp.

With that in mind, here are some of the top 5 things I do when engaging with my clients:

1. Understand their business.
2. Understand the database system – like what versions and editions are they running, where do they sit in the stack, are all maintenance plans and scripts functioning (check them out, don’t just trust job schedules or cronjob lists). 
3. Document a state of play for their system.  Provide recommendations to improve things, either business cost reductions or technical improvements.
4. Promote the latest proven technical solutions from their database vendors (Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, etc).
5. ENGAGE with the technical operations team members (like the system admins, helpdesk guys, etc). I’m amazed at how many DBAs DON’T do this.  They sit in the corner, quietly humming along.  The communication is so important and it get’s people involved and interested in what your doing.

If you struggle with written or oral communication, I’d recommend either finding someone in your organisation who is good at either or both areas, and if they are approachable, get them to mentor you.  The other option is to attend some courses, but I find the mentor solution much more effective as it keeps you focused over a sustained period, a course will overload your brain and for about a week you’ll be the best communicator in the land…. and then you’ll turn back into a bowl of jelly and wobble in the corner again…..

Another good thing to do, is upon your colleagues arrivals, greet them, ask them about their evenings (and plans for the weekend if it’s Friday).  Engage with people.  You’ll be surprised at the response you’ll get and you may even make some solid friendships in the work place on the way.

So come on people.  Go the extra 1.6 km and make the world a better place.

Peace!

It’s so good, that I’ve already gone off my Windows laptop at home (sorry Bill and Steve).

It’s got all these features that sound all a bit artsy… like gestures, bonjour technology and so forth.  It’s like a whole new world.  And this new world ROCKS!

I started life with an Amiga 500 back when 286s were laughed at and considered electronic typewriters.  Then I bought into the Pentium series of PCs when they got popular (because 2-d gaming started to look dated as the new 3-d games started to arrive)… and up until recently, I used a Toshiba laptop.

So thanks to a good friend of mine: Fen Coull – the Scottish wizard of Programme Management (right now anyway), I got persuaded into looking at the Macbook Pro series.  And boy o boy, is Fen onto something. 

Just opening the box the laptop is stylishly presented, making you feel like you’ve bought a nouveau piece of art.  The aluminium case looks class and the other items are all nicely boxed or wrapped up in white or black packaging.  Beautiful.

Setting it up was a doodle.  Took all of ten minutes and the thing just zooms along.  No freezing, no complicated processes in using programmes.  It’s all so natural.

I even made a mini movie on iMovie with my son, his cars and car mat and my Nokia 5230′s camera.  It’s great fun!!

All I can say to people who pooh-pooh the whole idea of using anything other than Windows is:  give it a try.

It’s a great device and I will never ever go back to a Windows laptop now – it just feels too… slow and antiquated…

Steve Jobs: You are a clever chap and… keep the hamster, I like my Macbook Pro too much! (sorry Hammy).

Oh and to keep this kind of related to databases, you can run Oracle database on the OS X schweet.  So I’ll check that out and give ya’ll a run down.

Yeehaw!

Well… apologies for the delays in blogging recently… I’ve been busy pottering away on a solution for a client.  This involves running 64 bit Oracle Database 10Gr2 (10.2.0.4) on a x64 Windows 2k3 system…also utilising Oracle’s Fail Safe software, which allows you to run your DR database/application server for 10 individual calendar days (or part of) per year without any additional license costs.

This series will cover off some interesting facts and points (hopefully) and help my fellow DBAs in looking at this as a possible solution.

First things first… Why Windows?

Well in this instance, the client is 100% Windows based.  It makes no sense to use any other technology for them. They’d have to retrain staff (extra cost), buy specific hardware, software and vendor support (extra cost) and then there’s the whole hassle of keeping it supported (extra cost).

Next: Why 64 bit?

Well… 64 bit Oracle can perform much better than it’s 32 bit cousin (memory addressing/buffer wise), the 64 bit Windows can address more memory also, which allows for greater scalability options for the business.  This is important.  I’m in the business of helping business, not satisfing my technology ego.

To be honest, now 64 bit architecture has been around for some time, you’d be crazy not to be building systems using 64 bit Windows OS and database/application server software.

Finally… Large Pages

So to end this little monologue, the final bonus of using Windows 64 bit with Oracle 64 bit is the Large Pages, which means rather than using 4k page files to store elements in memory, by activating the Large Pages option in Windows 64 bit gives you 2mb page files to store elements in.  Making database buffer reading much faster and wider (if that makes sense).  There are a multitude of blogs and technical articles on enabling the feature… so when I get a second, I’ll dig the links out and place them here.

In the next part (Part 2 believe it or not!), I’ll go over the initial steps that will need to happen to build our foundation active/passive cluster with Oracle Fail Safe installed also.

If you want more detail anywhere, ask me (comment below).

Cheers

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!

So… What did I discover.  I discovered that a) The Database Mirroring Wizard does all the work that the document tells you to setup manually (and incorrectly) and b) NEVER set your administration account’s default database to anything other than master. 

Yep.  I did that.  What a FAIL.

Well come on it was Tuesday and I was already suffering after my household of four kids, a stomach bug and the traffic snarl in the morning had taken most of my brain power by 8am.  That, and I even think the wind was blowing from the South.

Besides the impending odds, I eventually got the process happening by following these simple steps (on a SQL Server 2008 Enterprise install):

Pre-reqs: You don’t need encryption and you sure as hell don’t want certificates to be used.  Also, you are creating a brand new mirror on an already installed instance of SQL Server 2008 Enterprise.  Now stop reading this bit and move on to the 1,2,3 steps. Go on. Move it. Now. Please?

1. Make sure the account being used to initiate the mirroring wizard has appropriate access to the database.
2. Backup and restore your principle to the mirror server (make sure to use the NORECOVERY option!) – use the same name and for goodness sake, make sure your mirror has the same drive sizes and directories as the principle.
3. DON’T pre-create the endpoints, you don’t need to as the wonderful wizard does it….
4. Just before you are going to run the mirror wizard, make sure you apply a transaction log backup from your principle server to the mirror (remember… NORECOVERY – otherwise you’ll have to start again).
5. Use the mirror wizard to create the mirror, follow your nose.  When prompted for the SERVICE accounts – DON’T put anything in (assuming you want your current logged in account to be the handler for this particular process).
6. The mirror wizard will create the endpoints, initialize the mirror and whoop de doo, you’ll have a fully working mirrored database.  If you don’t then I suggest you run for the hills with a couple of sandbags, a water canteen and pea shooter… Or you can ask someone to help you out (like me).  The cost is 3 unused tea bags and some hot water.

To conclude:
So there you have it… don’t believe everything you read, even from the Gods themselves (I’m not one, just a mere mortal). 

Any one else out there suffered at the hands of vendor instructions, only to find there are completely useless and following ones nose and experience actually got you through?

Comment away fellow Zealots.