Mike's How Not to be a Cranky DBA at SQL Saturday 121 in Philadelphia.

1. How Not to be a Cranky DBA
Mike’s Top Ten Rules for Managing a Production Environment

2. Mike Hillwig
— AKA The Cranky DBA
— SQL Server DBA
— Working with SQL Server since SQL 7

3. Mike Hillwig
— Senior DBA at hosting division of a financial software company
— Working as the lone SQL DBA in an army of Oracle DBAs
— Resume includes Acme Packet, Shawmut Design and
Construction, Equitable Resources

5. Photo Credit: Nedra Isenberg

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13. Obligatory Social Networking Slide
— crankydba.com
— sqlserverpedia.com
— twitter.com/mikehillwig

15. No Need for Notes
Blog post and slide deck will be available later today

16. Today’s Format

17. What Makes a DBA Cranky
— Fixing Unnecessary Mistakes
— Lack of Sleep
— Answering Redundant Questions
— Repeating Manual Processes
— Performance Problems
— Waiting
— Unnecessary Emergencies

18. Why Does This Make Us Cranky?

19. We Would Rather
— Spend time with our
families
— Read
— Sleep
— Play Angry Birds
— Eat Bacon
— Anything other than work

20. The Tips

21. Beware of the Blogs
— There is some amazing
advice out there. But…
— Anybody can put bad advice
on the internet
— Trust people you know
— I don’t trust people who say
“ALWAYS” or “NEVER”
— Test everything in your own
test environment first.

22. Don’t enable Auto Shrink. Ever.
— This is my only exception
to “NEVER” advice
— You can’t control when it
runs
— What you shrink will just
grow again
— Fragments your indexes
— Instead: Use DBCC
Shrinkfile and then
rebuild your indexes

23. Triggers don’t’ send mail
— Does it need to be now, now, right this very moment,
now?
— Connecting to an outside application is costly for
performance
— If the mail server is down, users get ugly results.
— What happens if mail XPs get disabled?
— Instead, write to a queue table and have a SQL Agent
job process the queue.

24. Developers Don’t Touch Production
— Developers like to “fix”
problems.
— Changes must be tested
before moving into
production.
— Every environment needs
a gatekeeper/traffic cop
— You ARE using source
control, right?

25. Ask questions like an auditor
— “What would Sandra say?”
— What is our risk exposure?
— Are there any security concerns?
— Will this pose any compliance problems?
— Does this touch anything financial?
— Don’t be afraid to ask your auditor

26. Consistency is Key
— Versions — Easier to Troubleshoot
— Configurations — Easier to Remember What’s
Where
— Maintenance Processes
— Leverage the SQL Agent
MSX Server

27. Master the SQL Agent
— Easily automate manual tasks
— Run scripts regularly and have them alert you to
conditions
— Severity alerts are your friend
— Use Multi-Server Administration

28. Use Instant File Initialization
— Prevents waiting for a file to grow
— Makes RESTOREs run faster
— Creating new databases is much faster

29. Plan for when things go bump in the
night
— And they do go bump in the night
— Have a regular troubleshooting script for databases and
applications for your first-level support
— Give common errors and how to resolve them
— Tailor your alerts to indicate which items require
immediate attention and which should be flagged for
next-day resolution

30. Set Min and Max RAM
— Extremely important in virtual environments
— MIN allows you to be greedy
— MAX gives the OS breathing room

31. Your server is not a workstation
— Avoid Remote
Desktop
— Don’t run SSMS
directly from your
server
— Instead: Run from
a workstation
— RUNAS is your
friend

32. Set your file growth increments
— Defy the defaults!
— Growth is an ALTER, which is a database lock, which is a
performance issue
— More growths = fragmentation
— Log growths = high VLFs
— Better yet, monitor regularly and grow files manually

33. Test restores. Frequently.
— Easily automated
— The worst time to test a restore is when your
production server fails
— It’s good practice for when something does fail
— Don’t forget to test recovering from long-term storage
— Test recovering to a specific point in time as well as key
business processes

34. Reserved words are just that,
reserved
— Reserved words as column names make writing queries
harder
— [avoid this]
— If it turns blue in SSMS, try something else
— Common offenses:
— SECURITY
— STATUS
— IDENTITY

35. Limit access to SA and service
account passwords
— Not everyone needs to connect as SA
— Why? Why? Why must anyone have it?
— More hands = less control
— Does the application really need to connect as SA?
— Don’t be afraid to fight with the vendor
— Avoid Mixed Authentication Mode where possible
— Embrace AD authentication

36. Database servers are that and that
alone.
— Databases are the foundation of most critical business
applications
— If the database server is slow, everything else is slow
— Web servers, SSRS, SSAS, and SSIS go on a different box
— Keeps server optimized for running databases
— It’s okay to be greedy with system resources

37. Questions

38. More
Blog Post at crankydba.com/go/sqlsat121