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With the economy the way that it is today, I can understand why there are so many articles that are appearing with what to do and what not to do at an interview. Some of these suggestions are just ridiculous. I have hired a number of DBAs and I thought I would add my two cents.
SQL Server, Chargebacks, and Visibility
Staying in front of your users is key to keeping not only awareness of your very existence up, but also what you’re bringing to the table for your users, your management and so-on. These are very important – not only for the reasons of making sure people know the value you bring to the company, but also to keep you involved and "in the flow" of application development, support and information use. Staying engaged with the users of your systems is a huge piece of them understanding your role, your contributions.
Thoughts? Email them in here – James wrote in with the following experiences about chargebacks and the overall approach they can include:
"I have been involved in chargeback for about twenty years now in several companies. My experience has been mainframe related, but I can see the storm clouds brewing for it to get started on SQL Server as well. Not only for the
reasons Buck mentioned, but as a necessary requirement for virtualization.
What has "big iron" taught us? Basically to stay in the middle of the road.
You can chargeback for I/Os, but then you get mired down in the definition of "what is an I/O?" There are various types of buffered I/Os and physical I/Os.
To add to this complexity, one transaction can initiate a large amount of asynchronous I/Os because it was unfortunate enough to cross a quiet system threshold. Under a strict chargeback system, who pays for these I/Os? What seems to work well is chargeback only for CPU and the amount of disk and tape storage consumed. Is this perfect? Not by a long shot, but it usually is more than adequate as long as the identity of the resource consumer is accurate.
Windows 2003 has WSRM to report on CPU usage. I know of one shop that was looking into using this facility to chargeback for SQL Server. I don’t know the outcome but I can assure you of this: any company adopting chargeback will certainly look at IT differently. Typically in shops where chargeback doesn’t occur, the focus on performance tuning is to improve elapsed time. For those shops which have chargeback, the focus is to improve CPU time. You also begin to think of different chargeback scenarios such as peak time and non-peak time.
If you have to upgrade the processor because a particular application hogs the CPU only during peak time, other business units will resent IT for its lack of granularity. Lastly, in periods of business decline (like we are experiencing worldwide today), you will find goals and metrics assigned to IT groups to reduce CPU and disk consumption. Sometimes jobs are on the line to meet these budget goals. As a result, goals get met sometimes utilizing "fuzzy accounting" and the feeling of gamesmanship within IT."
The question that this brings to mind for me, too, is whether chargebacks help, or hurt the perceived value of IT? I ask because as I’m reading this, and cringing at the overhead that it imposes and red-tape that it generates, I have to wonder – is it worth it? I’m sure it’s "worth it" but I could easily see too where it becomes such a nightmare to both administer and answer to ("what do you mean it took twice as many cycles? I thought you had it figured out at the lower rate?!") that it could be a real … drag.
Current SQL Server Show
The show today features several tech-industry experts, here in-studio for the upcoming vConference. Eric Johnson and Josh Jones get together for a discussion, Craig Utley and Erik Veerman are also on the show.
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Last week:
SelectViews: Today on the show we have three interviews – Kevin Kline, Scott Golightly and Anthony D’Angelo. We talked about all sorts of things, from Business Intelligence tricks to upcoming tools.
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