Happy New Year!
From everyone here at SSWUG.ORG – welcome back! We hope you all had a safe and excellent holiday and New Years and are ready to get back at it.
Interested in Learning PowerPivot?
Come to the January SSWUG.ORG Expo for SQL Server and PowerPivot! Donald Farmer will be presenting at this free event and will be providing in-depth information on what PowerPivot is all about, how you can use it, what it could mean for your company and a lot more. Make sure you get registered for the January Expo right away – and pass the word to others that will be interested as well – it will be a great event!
Webcast: Panic! SQL Disaster Strikes: 5 Best Practices to Recovery
No matter how much we prepare, when disaster strikes we all feel a moment of panic. For some that panic quickly passes as we get down to work to fix the problem. For others the panic continues to grow as we search for a solution. Of course back up is crucial, but in this session Sarah will provide useful real world best practices that will show how to recover from disaster and more importantly how to prepare for the inevitable. Specifically how to recover from common disaster scenarios. For example, what to do when the master database is corrupt, a drive array with half your database files fails, a hardware failure, a SQL injection attacks wipes out whole tables and many more.
Presented by: Sarah Barela.
> Register Now
> Live date: 1/13/2010 at 12:00 Pacific
Application DBAs, Mixing Up Roles and Optimizing Database Support
Richard wrote in with first-hand feedback on the process, or approach of splitting true-blue database and application support… "I am one of those witnessing the split first hand. In my position working on the CODIS database (federal dna database) I am asked to work more on the application side of things than on the physical layer side. And while I agree that there will at one point be a literal split on the jobs, I also believe that there will be important knowledge lost when this happens. Performance tuning is something that can either be application centric, or overall performance (health) driven. Who carries that water? The sysDBA won’t know the application well enough to deal with special configurations in the substructure that would enhance the experience of the application. Similarly, the AppDBA will not have the understanding of the substructure, even if he knows what will affect performance in a beneficial way.
The sad part of our business is the territorial ism that already exists in the IT world, and the DBA has for years kind of skated by (dodged the bullet) by being a quasi-infrastructure member. They work hand in hand with the Server Teams as part of that collective. When I was actually assigned in a previous job to work as an application-centric SQL Server DBA (as the SME) for the Accounting Department (in this case Microsoft Dynamics for a firm that had 12 subsidiary companies all being managed), I was not seen as "part of the team" anymore, my permissions were stripped and I had not only no way to access infrastructure (OS Level) workings, but the Server Team would not provide critical substructure data to help me understand latency and other issues affecting the application. The result was a political nightmare, and the end result is that the critical issues affecting performance could not truly be nailed down as half of my "view" was gone. In effect it woudl be like trying to describe Germany of the Cold War from one side of the wall or the other; you have no ideas what is happening "over the wall".
The second thing that I am seeing in that trend is the adoption of the appDBA into business units, and therefore removed from the daily "chatter" within the IT department. Traditionally in an IT department, when a subsystem is having troubles, somehow most in the IT group become aware of it, either directly or through the grapevine within the department. The appDBA is no differnt that a "power user" and will keep trying to attack a degradation in performance assuming there is no problem with the substructure (and in fact may never be told). Once an appDBA is assigned to a business unit, they frequently don’t even roll up to the CTO or CIO. This adds another unnecessary layer of complexity that will compound in larger organizations."
Featured Article(s)
Import and Export Data between SQL Server and Microsoft Excel – the Assistance
Two of the most popular tools are without a doubt MS Excel and SQL server. If you are old school and use MS Excel for every data analysis task, you might be aware of the best practices for Import – Export between applications. In fact, MS Excel is able to work with any database manager able to generate simple delimited data, however, this article will analyze MS Excel in relation with SQL Server.