Ian Kirk - SQL DBA

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind of activity, both professional and personal.  In that whirlwind, I completely left the blog behind, languishing in inactivity.

So in the final days of 2008, we had plenty of scrambling within the company to meet deadlines before the big production freeze.  This lead to plenty of late night, last minute code reviews and releases.  Beyond that, we had several long-running critical incidents crop up - one associated with the MS CRM app we’re using, so not exactly a great place to see slowdowns.

Things kept quiet, though, on the final day of the year and I was able to finish my on-call cycle with a quiet night on the couch.

As 2009 starts, pretty official today, what with it being the first Monday, I’ve got plenty of things to stare down.

Biggest on the plate is a SQL 2008 cluster - 5 nodes using Veritas Clustering technology.  The business wants to see data from all over the enterprise in several different places as quickly as they can get it.  As such, we’re going to stand up a very sizable set of replication distributors so we can stop worrying about it.  Right now a lot of the work is done through self-distributors, but that’s only because one of the remote distributors is a Pentium III server.  Let’s just say that isn’t exactly speed demon these days.

While I’m waiting for all the infrastructure to get in place, I’ll be testing VCS with SQL 2008 in the lab.  I don’t expect much to happen there - the VCS SQL Agent doesn’t seem to be the most complex piece of work, but maybe I’m overlooking something.

I’m just polishing off a little C# applet to dig through the enterprise and collect physical configuration data about our servers.  Things like physical memory, vendor, etc.  This way we can identify the servers that aren’t meeting our standard and work toward bringing them in line.  We realized the other day that one of our clusters is operating with a lot less RAM than we thought… oops!

We’ve got a big datacenter move coming along, so I’ll play a role in all that planning.  We’ve got a server exhibiting CPU pressure issues, but I’ve deferred a lot of that to my teammates, since I think I’ve got plenty of things hanging around and I can’t dedicate myself appropriately.  Of course we still need to sort out this database mirroring problem - that hasn’t gone anywhere for weeks and we’ve just been running with log shipping as the alternative.

The boss is in town this week, too, so we’ll all get a little time to get the feel of things from him, which is nice.

I’m not really one for resolutions, but I do know that I’m going to re-dedicate myself to the blog, keeping it updated better.

Finally, for a bit of fun, I’ll share a photo from my other new thing for 2009 - the Flickr 365 project, a photo a day gig.  This was taken with the theme of “What I do at work when no one is looking” but I figured, since its from work, then it makes some sense to be here!