March 27, 2014 at 8:14 pm
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Perfect Environment
March 28, 2014 at 3:32 am
Often when I have seen someone develop the repeatable "perfect environment", be it as a set of scripts or a machine image or base VM etc., the mistake is to think that the job is done.
The hardest job is to keep going and create other "perfect environment"s moving forward to cover different versions of OS, servers and apps. This then shows that the difficulty is that there is likely to be a reasonably large number of variants. That really complicates matters.
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
March 28, 2014 at 7:37 am
An environment that lowers the risk to the customer and our internal organization is the one that we strive for. Setting expectations and having a good baseline are critical parts to that.
March 28, 2014 at 8:03 am
Robert.Sterbal (3/28/2014)
An environment that lowers the risk to the customer and our internal organization is the one that we strive for. Setting expectations and having a good baseline are critical parts to that.
There is no such thing as a perfect environment for everyone. Just like their is nor perfect food for everyone. My last company the emphasis was recoverablity and uptime. That included clustering and data replication to an offsite location.
My current company the emphasis is data protection and hosting. So I went from 5 SQL instances on two clusters to 80+ SQL instances on individual servers. And then later on it was making groups of five instances ready for dev, QA and eventually production servers all that were relatively consistent.
Some things are needed in any environment such as backups and reporting. But if you can't adapt to different needs as a DBA you need to get learn to identify the needs of your employer and go from there.
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Jim P.
A little bit of this and a little byte of that can cause bloatware.
March 28, 2014 at 9:06 am
In our environment, we install dozens of SQL Server installations on many different servers and operating systems. Each vendor gives us their requirements, although the majority of them are absolutely clueless about what is required. Few of them have any clue what collation sequence means. I have had vendors argue with me about how to install SQL Server 2008 when they provided instructions for 2005. One of them uninstalled everything I did, wasting hours of configuration time, only to later tell me "oh, you were right." I have even had to explain why putting 32GB of memory in a server running Windows Server 2000 standard and SQL Server 2000 standard isn't going to improve the database performance.
Perfect? I will never have every vendor on the current version. I am lucky if a vendor is one version behind, normally they are at least two versions behind. Most don't approve service packs, telling us we can only install SQL Server 2005 SP1 or something equally ridiculous. Most have no clue that SQL Server 2008 R2 SP2 is available, and tell me that SP2 is only for the non-R2 version.
How about having DBAs at development companies who actually have 10% of a clue about how to install, configure and run a database? Would that be OK?
For those of you reading this, obviously most of you are far, far better than the inept people I deal with. It isn't even fair to talk about SQL Server Central users and my vendor's DBAs in the same paragraph, but I want to make sure nobody reading this thinks I am referring to them. Clearly most of my vendor's DBAs frequently can't spell Google, as if they could, there is no way to be as bad as they are.
Dave
March 28, 2014 at 9:30 am
djackson 22568 (3/28/2014)
For those of you reading this, obviously most of you are far, far better than the inept people I deal with. It isn't even fair to talk about SQL Server Central users and my vendor's DBAs in the same paragraph, but I want to make sure nobody reading this thinks I am referring to them. Clearly most of my vendor's DBAs frequently can't spell Google, as if they could, there is no way to be as bad as they are.
I've been a production DBA for years. When my company was still doing development I can't count the number of days that I was glad our dev team and dev DBA were in Washington state and I was working in Ohio. Otherwise I would probably be in jail for assault or worse at this point. 😀
But I still thank you for the compliment about SQL Server Central users.
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Jim P.
A little bit of this and a little byte of that can cause bloatware.
March 31, 2014 at 1:34 am
I agree with djackson - it often seems that third party vendors allocate their budgets as follows - 75% sales 20% developemnt and (if you are lucky) 5% support - I could fill a book with the horror stories you can get from some of their "experts"
March 31, 2014 at 6:21 am
geoffrey.sturdy (3/31/2014)
I agree with djackson - it often seems that third party vendors allocate their budgets as follows - 75% sales 20% developemnt and (if you are lucky) 5% support - I could fill a book with the horror stories you can get from some of their "experts"
Which reminds me, bug fixes do NOT sell product. Sales and Marketing run companies, because sales income is what pays the bills. Therefore, sales and marketing have huge impacts on what goes into software. See point above about it not being bug fixes, and consider the newest buzz words that do. Throw in something Android or IOS, regardless of how true it is, maybe refer to the "cloud" or other non-existent benefit, add in something you saw in your competitor's product, and you have your new release!
It is so bad that there is at least one medical software vendor on the market that has multiple products which must be shut down for DST changes each year, some of them going both ways! Their developers are (redacted in an attempt to not be overly negative). It is an easy fix, requiring maybe 5 lines of code, yet repeated requests to fix it over the last 10 or more years have been ignored as they are working on more important items - like IOS and Android support for products that will NEVER be used on those platforms. Most of their products just started supporting Windows 7 in the last year, database support is always two versions back on average. I expect that to get worse.
To be fair, some of their products are top notch, and some truly have outstanding support teams. Some aren't.
Dave
March 31, 2014 at 10:13 am
To be honest, a "perfect environment" has nothing to do with the hardware, software, revisions, or infrastructure for me. For me, a "perfect environment" is having good, knowledgeable people all working towards the same goals and when they don't know about something, they fire a flare, yell "Hey Rube!", and we all come running.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
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