Downtime

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Downtime

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Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Posted Thursday, February 19, 2009 11:51 PM

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Comments posted to this topic are about the item Downtime

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Post #661067

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Posted Friday, February 20, 2009 10:33 AM

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A broken URL has no answers today Sad

However here's one I got in email:

For the record, the main reason to remove SPs that are surplus to requirements is to ensure that nobody uses them. Imagine an old and unmaintained stored procedure is used by someone and it has a bug or causes a performance issue... think of the amount of time and effort that would be required in troubleshooting and correcting the mess this might cause!

Far better to force a user to specifier their requirements or think through their own stored procedure, I think.

Code maintenance and software development is hard, and extraneous and unmanaged code is awful. I should know, I work for a vendor (EMC Infra) and code that our clients customize that isn't being used or is badly spec'ed is often the code that causes us the most amount of problems

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Post #661505

Alan Vogan

Posted Friday, February 20, 2009 11:14 AM

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Whew! I thought I was going crazy or the network was! Thank goodness it was just you and these crazy links!

Downtime: No. Didn't have any last year. Had a power outage but the back-ups and generators all worked. A few people lost/locked their terminal sessions because they didn't plug into the proper side of the UPS strip, but no data loss or downtime.

Pruning: Not a regular exercise. Once a year, or so. And I let things linger for 2 1/2 years, not just 6 months. I find when I get assigned a 'new' project, I'm usually rehashing through an older project that I did, or someone here did, about 2 years ago.

Post #661546

GSquared

Posted Friday, February 20, 2009 11:49 AM

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The company I currently work for had a heat-related massive downtime issue a month or so before I started here. From what I understand, the AC failed, and alerts that should have gone out, didn't.

I caused some downtime once by making a mistake with the default login used by a linked server, but that's not the kind of downtime you're asking about here.

I think most of the downtime I've seen has been because of poorly set up and maintained hardware. But that was years ago with a sysop who really shouldn't have been in that business. Downtime was hours per month at that place.

The best "the whole network is down" I've been through was when a salesperson ended up with Slammer on a copy of SQL Express he had on his laptop, and plugged that into the LAN and brought the whole place to its knees. He wasn't even sure why he had SQL on the laptop, much less how he got Slammer in there. Took all morning for the admin to figure out what was going on.

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Post #661586

OCTom

Posted Friday, February 20, 2009 2:21 PM

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We have very little downtime.

Pruning is something that occurs once a year. On our system i, I can use a command to tell the last time an object was used. I've written queries to tell me if the last usage was more than two years. We can then analyze it to determine if anybody really needs it.

I'm still pretty new to SQL Server and haven't looked into how this would be done. It would be handy to do it though.

Post #661774

P Jones

Posted Monday, February 23, 2009 1:13 AM

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Purging of stored procedures is usually because there are so many it is difficult to see the wood for the trees! If they could be divided into sub-directories in the same way as integration services packages can in msdb then life would be a lot easier.

Post #662402

ALZDBA

Posted Monday, February 23, 2009 2:08 AM

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knock on wood

the unplanned downtimes we had were:
- during fire detection system tests, the backup power unit was shut down because of a little shot circuit by one of the electricians.
All non-critical servers were still working w00t

- SAN servers lost SAN connection during online activation of SAN-switch duplexing, which shoudn't be a problem according the the SAN manufacturer.

- One of the non-sysadmins thought he should reboot a server, wasn't able to do it using RDB, so he entered the server room and pulled the power cables ... out of the wrong server.

- extreme temperature exposure caused some servers to stop working.
(we had some very hot days last year) That server cabinet has been modified with an airco unit.

- data upgrade because of new application rollout destructed data because of some last minute changes by the dev team.
The restore operation took more than the planned downtime window.

- in one occasion a non dba added a non-sysadmin sqlaccount to the
sysadmin group of sqlserver, and applications got messages
"object does not exists.." ....
That was finally thé issue that got us the approval to restrict sysadmin membership.

- we also has a downtime caused by yours truly, because even tough
the logon trigger had been tested for some time,
not every actual situation had occurred and an instance got unresponsive.
DAC saved my but.

Yes, we did have some hard disk failures, and because of it were raid volumns, all the sysadmins had to do was replace the disk and monitor the rebuilt process. No downtime, only slow down.

Redundancy and protection are to be considered like an insurance and cannot protect you physically against what human inventiveness ;) .

Johan

     Jul 13

Don't drive faster than your guardian angel can fly ...
but keeping both feet on the ground won't get you anywhere w00t

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Post #662419

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Posted Monday, February 23, 2009 10:16 AM

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If you're interested, there's a discussion on this in our LinkedIn group as well

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Post #662759

edq

Posted Tuesday, February 24, 2009 10:24 AM

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I know it makes the DBA look bad, but yeah we have a lot of unplanned downtimes of production systems. Bear in mind that we have over 1600 databases on ~140 different servers and 2 DBAs, so statistically we do ok with uptime.

Number one cause. Too many people with admin rights and not enough communication. It is a cultural thing here I inherited, and I can't change. As a result we do a lot of fire fighting.

Number two cause, budget constraints. Customers want High Availability for everything, but can't pay for it. Good example here is SAN failures, I won't name specific brand, but hey they were cheap for a reason.

Other unplanned downtimes included:
- Network switch failures
- Antivirus software mis-configured killed clusters
- Autopatch turned on accidently
- AD management failures (helpdesk had power to reset service account passwords and used said power)
- Rarely, the occasional CPU, Mainboard, memory, or other physical hardware failures.

Post #663694

Dave Schutz

Posted Friday, March 13, 2009 6:09 AM

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When I came in Monday morning my main production SQL server was down due to a hardware error. After talking to tech support it was decided the box required a new motherboard. We're a small non-profit so we don't have fail-over, replication or any such thing. Fortunately I have good backups! I had just started building a replacement server so I used the new server, installed SQL, restored databases from backup and was up in two hours. Everybody was happy after that.
One thing I've learned as a DBA: backup databases, practice restoring databases. It may be boring but can save your job and your companies data!

Post #675075

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