SelecTViews
with Stephen Wynkoop
Security policy gotchas, social media and data ownership questions, working with unstructured data…also on the show today, Couchbase with information about the merger plus the SQL Server tip of the day.
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Scheduled Processing in Windows – Multiple Machines
When you have a single server handling all of your scheduled tasks it is easier to manage what is running, and when. As your systems mature the schedules begins to sprawl so that a global picture is more difficult to manage.
I have seen systems where scheduled jobs are occurring from both SQL Agent and0 Windows NT Scheduler often operating on multiple machines. Synchronization of the different tasks is difficult to manage. To keep a view of when everything executes you may see somthing like a spreadsheet tracking the start times of the jobs throughout the system.
Because the schedulers are independent of each other they can only be synchronized (easily) by their start time. Without some kind of semaphore it is difficult to keep heavy load processes from overlapping if they are initiated by multiple schedulers.
There are some great third party tools addressing this problem, and I hope to have comments to share from them as a follow-up.
There are also some less elegant techniques for creating and waiting for semaphores allowing jobs to delay rather than overlapping. Perhaps you have some techniques you would like to share as well. I’ll share some of those tomorrow.
Reader Comments
Re: Oracle Drops Future Releases on Itanium Chip
Christo Writes:
I have experience on running MS SQL Server on a Itanium cluster and it was singing like a cannery. Not sure why MS isn’t pushing SQL Server 2008 R2 to run under Windows Server 2008 R2 Core Server. MS can even buy out the license from HP and also get into the hardware business! It is a solid processor with very good performance, yes over priced … do the same as with the XBOX, sell it for less than production cost and make up the lost revenue through software sales and associated license cost of same.
Ronald Writes (conversion tool Recommendation):
Microsoft SQL Server Migration Assistant for Oracle v4.2 http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2005/en/us/migration-oracle.aspx
Jeff Writes:
In reference to a comment in your newsletter recently, I thought your readers might be interested in this tool from Google…
http://browsersize.googlelabs.com
The nice thing is that it works with local intranet sites too. 😀
Quote from David E – Newsletter title: Javascript With Multiple Browsers in Mind (Mar. 22, 2011) (836268)
One issue that comes to mind in testing is screen resolution. Automated tests can’t really help us find those issues since it doesn’t "see" like a human. And most of the development team works on not one, but two, high-resolution monitors. We have a minimum resolution of 1024×768, which one of our developers claimed to have tested, but recently I watched a user in action and found that our minimum is not high enough as it was causing triple scrollbars and, shamefully, a horizontal scroll bar hiding out of the vision of the user. Unfortunately, with the economy and our organization dependent upon benevolence for most of our operating funds, the capital budget prevents many of the researchers from getting new monitors anytime soon. This leads us to have to go back and redesign to "create" more screen real estate for the users on a smaller monitor.
My personal experience with IE9 and IE8 with regards to having to use compatibility mode for a lot of sites in order to get their “download” button or other critical features to show up has caused me to use Chrome and Firefox more frequently than I used to and to hit the compatibility mode button as my first debugging technique when looking at a site in IE.
Note from editor: I showed this google tool to one of my web developers and he thought it was great.
If you have feedback, be sure to drop me a note on Facebook, Twitter, or e-mail at btaylor@SSWUG.org.
Cheers,
Ben
$$SWYNK$$
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