"Prepare yourselves!": a letter to my team members...

Hi folks!
This is an e-mail that I sent today to my team in the IT&T department after a very interesting day and the cummulative experience I get here this 9 months in Tirana, Albania. I thought to share it with you just for the fun of it.


"

My dear team mates!

Please spend 5 minutes of your time to read this through.

As you know we are something less than a week from the
going-live of NAV. Based on what I’ve experienced so far in my time being here
I came up with an idea to “arm” ourselves with something coming from the
American army, which is very trendy at all times, even in Hollywood!

I decided to base our operations on a DEFCON level! J

Let me explain some things about DEFCON and its meaning:

DEFCON stands for DEFense Readiness CONdition, and it has the following levels:





(Source: Wikipedia)

Normally and depending on the DEFCON level, soldiers (that’s our role) have different weapons to tackle each one.

“Our weapons”, you might ask? Not many but are enough most of the times to get through the difficulties:

1)     Us – Team spirit: we should be focused and work closely with the same target: “win the battle; defeat the ‘enemy’” You know that a war has many battles, some you win some you lose, if we are to lose any, we need to lose the ones that are of small significance. 

2)     Patience: Patience is a virtue and way of living. I’m not telling you to let the others step over you, but learn to listen, assess and then proceed with caution. 

3)     Knowledge: knowledge is a key that unlocks many “doors” but sometimes you have to constrain yourself from your reactions and what is hidden behind each door. Remember, knowledge you gain over year of experience and experience is based on mistakes of the past. Learn from your mistakes and get wiser. Don’t pick on the ones that have lack of it. 

4)     Time, is a two face monster! Sometimes it runs on our side and sometimes it seems there is no time to do anything in the IT world. Like a time-warp of Star Trek, everything happens so fast that you don’t see it coming. This brings me to the next weapon in our “arsenal”… 

5)     Always anticipate the worst! If all goes well no one will say how good you did. If all goes wrong, everyone has an opinion on how this “disaster” could be avoided. Before-hand the silence of the lambs is the law.

6)     Vitamins, you’ll need them because exhaustion comes in due time. 

7)     I, whenever you feel threatened by something or someone do not hesitate to point to my direction. I’ll thing of something to by-pass it for the moment and then work on it for a solution always with you on my side.

This mail was a spontaneous thing that came to me a couple of hours ago and I wanted to share with you. You might read it, keep it, delete it, forward it, laugh with/on it but I like it and I think it’s good to share among us peers.

I would really enjoy any comments you have of any type as this is an off-the-record communication and you can feel free to cast a stone...

So, without further delay we put our team in DEFCON 3!
Be prepared!

Your Captain,

VI 

"

Hope you enjoyed the post.

SQL Server και θέματα διαχείρισης μνήμης

Πάντα είχα για κάποιο λόγο την εντύπωση ότι αν ο counter SQL Server:Memory Manager και ειδκότερα τα Total Server Memory & Target Server Memory, πρέπει να είναι τα ίδια.

Πρέπει;
Μάλλον όχι... :)


Σήμερα κοιτώντας ένα νέο server όπου εγκαταστήσαμε το SQL που κάνει host την βάση του Microsoft Dynamics NAV (aka. Navision), παρατήρησα ότι τό Total Server Memory είναι κατά 20% λιγότερο από το Target Server Memory. Ψάχνοντας βρήκα στο MSDN ένα white paper όπου λέει ούτε λίγο-ούτε πολύ ότι αυτό δείχνει ότι ο server δεν είναι σε κατάσταση "stress" όπου χρειάζεται μνήμη για να αποδώσει καλύτερα.
Σε συνδιασμό πάντα με τον δείκτη Buffer Cache Hit Ratio, που πρέπει να είναι όσο κόντά στο 100%, είστε σε καλό δρόμο για να λύσετε αυτό το μυστήριο.... αν ήταν ποτέ για εσάς!

Το εν λόγω μπορείτε να το βρείτε στο SQL Performance Tuning Waits and Queues

Καλή χρονιά να έχουμε όλοι με υγεία!

V

SQL Server 2008 R2: the new UCP component notes

I was going through a textbook and found some things surrounding the new component of SQL Server 2008 R2 named UCP that I think is at least worth making a note about.

First of all, UCP stands for Utility Control Point. Secondly, what it does is the interface between SQL Server Utility and the SQL instances we install, to centrally monitor and manage database and instances from a single point of management. After the data is collected using the Utility Explorer and the SQL Server Dashboard and the wonderful viewpoints in SSMS you can monitor the health of the SQL Systems you manage.

As you can see in the above illustration, the data collected and configuration are saved both in msdb and in the new UMDW databases. Now, what is this UMDW? When you create for the first time the UCP this relational type of database is created. The reason? It is used to store the data collected from the managed instances, of course. The data is sent to this db every 15 minutes and retention is set to 1 year.

SQL Server Utility is used to set thresolds and resource utilization policies in the organization. Along with the UCP, the data collected are compared and provide feedback and bottlenecks in the installation with the use of Utility Explorer, dashboard and list views.

Prerequisites:

 - SQL Server 2008 R2 Datacenter, Enterprise, Developer

 - The host running UCP must be a member of an Active Directory domain

 - Operating system Windows 2003 Server and above

 - Recommended, the collation settings affiliated with the Database Engine instance that hosts the UCP to be case-sensitive.

One thing I don't get is this case-sensitive thing. I tried to look this up but failed. If you know please specify :)

Also, it would be useful to monitor Analysis Services instance too and Reporting Services not only SQL Database Engine.

But let us not be ungrateful :)

UCP can manage 100 hosts and monitor 200 SQL database instances. Around 1000 user databases in total and approximately 2GB per database for a year of data.

A couple of things for the installation:

 1) Administration privileges needed

 2) SQL Server Agent service set to auto start and with set with a valid windows domain account

That's all folks.

tnt,

VI