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Performance Approaches – Continued
Jason writes: "Great thoughts by Mark!
I’m one of those accidental DBAs that are coming from the server administration side. I have been struggling for years in not only trying to find out what all a DBA should do, but also being able to educate management. I started a little over 5 years ago by management electing me to do SQL administration. Of course at that point this was limited on the amount of time they wanted to give me to do what need to be done. I feel that my organization has been lucky not to have nightmares that we all hear about. We have had our shares of issues, but nothing major. (knock on wood)
Mark’s thoughts were great in that it points out that you can get by with doing just the basics as a DBA and throw more hardware at the problem. But there’s so much greater detail that may be overlook or not known by the general DBA. Sometimes it can be better if we do have the staff to where people can have specialized skills in areas that can be used for database optimization tuning. We all know that in most cases this is not possible. So instead we have to settle for being the one and only. We do our best with the skill sets that we have, and work towards building on them when we have the opportunity. I personally spend an average of at least 8 hours of my personal time a week in trying to build my skill sets to be able to work smarter and not harder at my job. This involves being active in blogs, list servers, articles from different sites, reading books, local SQL group, conferences, and of course the SSWUG site.
We have been one of those IT teams that have thrown more hardware at a problem because it was easy and a quick fix. We have also thrown a different version of SQL into the mix as well. In that we moved a database that was performing badly with browser timeouts to SQL 2005 because it would run there. This was a quick and easy fix to the problem for now. What started out as an Access database that has grown into a SQL VLDB. I’m in the process of recommending a long solution to fix the underlying issue so that we do not let issue sneak up on us again.
One of the areas of tuning that I’m struggling with management with is that the DBA needs to be involved in the projects a lot sooner and not just when it’s time to implement what the developers have designed. There are more considerations to implementing a good solid database and the start of that is the foundation of the design both logical and physical. So if the developers have completed their logical design and coded the application, or web application, then it’s too late for me to make any suggestions. At this point it would require the developers having to go back and make application changes that would take lots of hours. I have to deal with 9 different developers and all are a “Jack of all Trades”. I know, I know you don’t have to get out your worlds smallest violin, I know I not the only one in this position in the world.
So my view it all depends on your organization what you have to work with and the skill sets of your IT team. The short term and easy solution would be to throw more hardware at the problem. But at some point the problem will become to big even for that, “You can only throw so much hardware a problem”. So don’t just ignore the underlining issue and plan on fixing the real problem with a good plan, solid design, and optimize tuning."
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