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The Vast Expansions of Hardware

Voice of the DBA

Release Date: 10/17/2024

Distributed Monoliths show art Distributed Monoliths

Voice of the DBA

I was watching a video called . In it, the person being interviewed said that a lot of people really have a distributed monolith. That caught my eye since I've worked with a number of customers who are trying to adopt microservice architectures for their applications. I think this is less a performance/scaling choice than a reworking of their software development teams, and I'm not sure they will end up with a better system. What is ? I am not an expert, but this appears to be a place where all the services still depend on each other. For example, I might have a service getting user profile...

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Reducing the Cycle Time show art Reducing the Cycle Time

Voice of the DBA

There are lots of software development methodologies. lists a few, among them waterfall, agile, iterative, rapid, and more. What's been interesting to me is that the process of deciding what to code and then whether it works doesn't change much between different ways of building software. Instead, the cycle time between when we ask a client what to do and when we deliver it changes. The more agile/lean we are, the lower the cycle time. The more waterfall-ish, the larger the cycle time. I guess that analysis and breakdown of problems into work also changes, as the scope in modern DevOps styles...

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Doing a Little Research show art Doing a Little Research

Voice of the DBA

I've been very pleased with the direction of SSMS the last few years. As it's been separated from SQL Server releases and gets updated more often, I think the changes from v17 though v20 have been improvements. There are still issues, but it's been better. Now we finally have SSMS moving to a modern shell with and I'm excited to see how this changes the future of our tooling. However, the PM for SSMS, Erin Stellato, recently asking why people don't read documentation. She also asks what you want to see in 21, so respond if you think there are holes in the SSMS docs. I think this post came...

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Have Grace show art Have Grace

Voice of the DBA

Thanksgiving is tomorrow in the US and it is supposed to be a holiday when we give thanks for our blessings in life. My wife usually has everyone in our family tell what they are thankful for this year. I also see many people posting things they are grateful for during the month of December. Last month I was lucky enough to have dinner with Bob Ward and we were talking about some of the things we'd seen in travels, often some stressful times for ourselves or others. We've seen many people get upset or angry or have some other reaction. Both of us have some empathy for others, recognizing that...

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Computer Algebra show art Computer Algebra

Voice of the DBA

I was a bit of a math nerd in high school and college. Some of you might have been as well, but I took advanced math all through high school, culminating with AP Calculus as a senior with 11 other kids (of about 320). In college, I started with Calculus III freshman year and went on to take 7 more semesters of various high level maths. One of those classes included analyzing data with linear regression, which we did with hand calculators and formulae. At , I watched a talk from on linear regression. It was a trip down memory lane, with Jeff explaining how the process worked, the flaws, and...

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New SQL Server 2022 Functions show art New SQL Server 2022 Functions

Voice of the DBA

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How Do You Patch 100 Database Servers? show art How Do You Patch 100 Database Servers?

Voice of the DBA

In most of the organizations I've worked for or consulted with, patching was always a challenge. Patching hasn't usually been given a priority and is often skipped when operations staff is busy. This has resulted in lots of un-patched, or slowly patched systems. I assume this is one reason Microsoft continues to release RTM-GDR patches because some people won't patch at all unless there are critical fixes. I also know that much of IT management sees patching systems like patching parking lots. Needs to be done, but tomorrow, after we do other important work today. Read the rest of

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Do You Want a Microsoft Solution? show art Do You Want a Microsoft Solution?

Voice of the DBA

Microsoft constantly releases new features and products in the data platform space. Many of us have seen the SQL Server product grow in new ways, some of which are very useful to us. As an example the changes from log shipping to clustering to Availability Groups has improved our HA/DR options as well as the capabilities available to us in different situations. With that in mind, I saw someone recently that wanted to deploy SQL Server on Kubernetes, which is something that could be a very interesting way of managing your different systems. However, this individual wanted to know when Microsoft...

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Separate Reads show art Separate Reads

Voice of the DBA

Recently I was watching a presentation on how to scale performance in your SQL Server environment and one of the suggestions was setting up Availability Groups (AGs) and having read-intent connections that would query the secondary and not the primary. It's not a bad idea, and and make it easy to implement. The pattern of using multiple connections in an application, one for reads and one for writes, has been suggested often. However, in practice, I've rarely seen this work. Apparently having a connection variable, named dbConn, for writes and a second one, named dbConnReadOnly, for reads is...

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Time to Change Your Team show art Time to Change Your Team

Voice of the DBA

I assume most of you work with others in a team. Even if you are the data specialist and others work on different technologies, you still have a team. How long has your current team been together in this form? Have you had a stable team that might have grown, but the rest of the individuals and roles/responsibilities stay the same? Or has your team changed makeup, roles, responsibilities, or something else? I don't see a lot of organizations that change their team structures often. There may be people who come and go from a team, but the core structure remains the same. Even when your company...

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More Episodes

At the Small Data conference recently, one of the talks looked at hardware advances. It was interesting to see a data perspective on hardware changes, as many of us only worry about the results of hardware: can I get my data quickly? In or out, most of us are more often worried about performance than specs. However, today I thought it might be fun to look at a few changes and numbers to get an idea of how our hardware has changed, in the march towards dealing with more and more data. Big data anyone?

In thinking about disks, I saw a chart that looked at the changes from HDD (hard disk drives) to SDD (solid state drives) to NVMe (Nonvolatile Memory Express). These show read speeds going through the list from 80MB/S to 200MB/s to 5000+MB/s. That's a dramatic change, and not one only in high-end arrays. There are off-the-shelf drives you can put in a desktop that read this fast. If you think about some of the early IBM drives, which read at 8800b/s. Growth in disk speed, inside the timeline of our careers, has grown by a few orders of magnitude in read speed.

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