Instead of working, I blog.

I've had to call a vendor for support and it's already not going well. I'm not going to say which vendor, but I'll tell you that I'm having problems with my SQL backups.
Anyway, I went online and filled out the form with all the info... OS, SQL version, etc... then I got the email from the support tech asking me for all this info.

I replied by saying I had already filled that stuff out when I created the ticket so why did I have to do it again? I don't mean to be a difficult customer, but come on. Why do I have to do everything twice?

Every morning when I leave the house I get in the car and the first thing I do is throw my jellied toast face down in the floor of my car. Why not, that's where it's going to end up anyway when the asshole in front of me slams on his breaks. Now at least it doens't piss me off when it happens. Then when I get to work the first thing I do is run some kind of wild query that fills up all the memory and CPU and locks everyone out of the system. Why not, that's what's going to happen as soon as my favorite report writer logs in.

Some days it just doesn't pay to get out of bed and go through the hassle. Then again, if you've done what you should as a DBA, it shouldn't be that bad. Hopefully you've setup things in your DB that keep things from getting too out of hand. Hopefully you've been able to teach your report writer some basic dos and don'ts (sp?).
But what if you're in a new place? Can you still be effective? Of course you can. Again, if you're a good DBA you've collected a nice gaggle of scripts that you take from place to place. Years ago when I was just getting started, I didn't get that. I always thought, why be lazy, just write the damn scripts when you need them. But that's the wrong attitude. It's not laziness, it's practicality. There's just no reason to work out that logic every time.

So if you follow some of your own best practices and set yourself up for success, maybe you can withstand the bad times. But there's nothing you can do about traffic, so I guess you'll have to keep throwing your toast on the floor. Life goes on.

For those of you who follow my blog, you know that I've used LiteSpeed for many years now. And one of the things that's always bugged me is the lousy way they run their upgrades. To upgrade LS typically consists of having to do some version of manually deleting the current repository tables and then running the install program. And this is after uninstalling your previous version manually as well. And if you want to save your data in your repo tables you have to create new ones and copy the data over, or just rename the old tables. And it still isn't that easy because of the relationships. If you just rename the tables you have to rename the relationships too or the new install will fail. And you have to do this for every box you own. What a pain in the ass!!

Well, I have a problem with LS not backing up one of my DBs even though it's been working just fine for almost 2yrs. So I just upgraded from v.4.7 to the latest 4.8 (yes, I know v.5 is coming out soon, but I can't wait). And let me tell you this... it looks like they finally got these upgrade problems fixed. My upgrade went smooth. I didn't have to manually uninstall the old version, I didn't have to play my usual shell game with the repo tables, and I didn't have to burp the service. Life is good.

Now, I'll have to see if it actually fixed my problem. But I'm happy to be able to report something good about LS for the first time in a long time. They've mostly been adding features, and very slowly at that, and haven't been really concerned with our actual problems. Maybe this is a turning point.

Anyway, good job LS guys.

One thing that's as varied as ways to code is how to manage the code itself. Or I guess I should say architect instead of manage, but it all comes down to management.

The 2 major ways are to componentize and to not. And by componentize, I mean taking all the individual components and turning them into small independent chunks that can be called from many sources. A good example is taking a date calculator routine in your SPs and turning it into a function so the SPs just call it instead.
So those are the 2 ways. You either put it inline with the code or you make it into a component and call it from all the modules you need.

Of course, I'm mainly talking about SQL code here, but it really applies to any kind of code I suppose.

It's easy to see the advantages of developing a component solution. This is the DB equivalent of COM, right? But what's not easy to see is what it does for you (or to you) support-wise. What this solution can do is put you in a new form of .dll hell from the old days.

Let's take a simple example...
Let's say that you have sn SP in prod that's giving you problems and you want to track down where the degraded performance is coming from. So you open up the SP and start looking at the code. You see that a major component of it is an external SP call. OK, so you open up that SP. Now you see that that SP calls 3 other SPs. And each one of them is calling more SPs. And so on and so on. This is the definition of spaghetti code isn't it?

I'm actually in the middle of doing this very thing right now. I wanted to stop and blog about it while I was still pissed off. I've been doing this for an hour now and I'm not any closer to a solution than I was when I started. So you can see that while going the COM route can be helpful, you can take it too far. And that's really what happens, isn't it? Devs take a good idea and drive it into the ground until it's so hard to manage it's not even worth having it anymore.

I've been trying to come up with some guidelines for this and it's tough. But roughly, I like to say that if several SPs use the same code, or are calculating the same thing, it's ok to pull out into COM. The same goes with code that gets changed a lot. If you've got code that changes often and is used in a lot of SPs, by all means put it into it's own SP so you only have one place to change it.

Anyway, I guess I'll get back to my plate of spaghetti now.

This post is dedicated to all those field DBAs who like to call up the prod DBAs and tell them how busy the server is based on the number of spids or short-term blocks returned by sp_who(2).

See this is the hidden cost of generic logins that have too many rights. Everyone on the planet can read BOL and try to interpret the results. And whatever they mark in their heads as being the sign of a server being too busy is what they're going to call you with. Our users have 2 criteria for a busy server. The number of spids (active or inactive), and how many short-term blocks they see.

Of course I used to try to explain to them that you could bring the server down with a single spid so the number doesn't matter... and that blocks are fine as long as they don't persist. Since I've been here for quite a while though, and none of them have gotten the hint yet, I usually just thank them for letting us know and that we'll get right on it.

One of my favorite analogies used to be that judging the server on the amount of spids is like loading your car up with people and declaring that traffic is really bad today. Somehow that still didn't get the point across.