John McCormack DBA

SQL Server Databases and Cloud

Balancing work and life – The COVID years – tsql2sday

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For this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, Tjay Belt (b|t) asks about balancing work and life. He lists some options and I decided to write about What rules have you implemented that made it easier to balance?

Balancing work and life

The initial shift to working from home didn’t phase me. I thought it was just a short term measure to keep people safe. I found that my team became more productive and there were high spirits initially. I was happy to work overtime and spend time on community work. (Looking back, I spent far too long at my desk)

The period up to July/August I was very productive with blogging and creating content for online presentations and YouTube videos. I then felt a little flat and my productivity dropped off a cliff. Similarly I had a small boost in February when I felt motivated. So I had to come up with some rules.

Striking the balance – The rules

I have adopted a few rules and try to stick to them but I don’t stress out about it. If I need to work on, or I don’t want to go outdoors, it’s not a big deal.

  1. Try to finish work at 5:30
  2. Spend 30 minutes outdoors every day
  3. Have some fun

Try to finish work at 5:30

Honestly: finish at finishing time. Don’t work for free. It’s my number one tip for balancing work and life. The work will always wait for you. Now I’m not saying this is possible 100% of the time but it should be your aim. For example, I’ve had to deal with production issues that can’t wait but on the whole, I’m referring to the ticket queue and requests from end users. I’ll also take time back if I’ve had to work on at a time that suits me and my company.

My employer also introduced a new perk called Summer Hours where all employees get every Friday afternoon off during July and August. It’s such a fantastic employee benefit which is worth 4 extra paid days off per year.

Spend 30 minutes outdoors

I attended an online seminar at my work (Monster.com) talking about mental health. I was inspired by one of the speakers who had set up a podcast and blog called humansoutside. She described that simply spending 30 minutes outdoors every day had had a profound effect on her’s and her husband’s mental health. You should give the podcast a listen.

So now I try to spend some time outside each day. Whether is working in the garden, going a walk or just taking refuge from the rain under my Gazebo to drink a coffee, it is a refreshing habit.

Have some fun

I mentioned on a previous post that I had got a pool table at home. I’m lucky to have the space and I really use it all the time. I aim to clear the balls once a day. If I can play more and get my kids involved, even better.

John playing pool to avoid burnout in IT
John playing pool

I’m also a bit of a telly addict. During lockdown, I re-watched the series Curb you enthusiasm. It’s cringe comedy but I love the pedantry. I also re-watched Mad Men which is one of the all time greatest box sets (imho).

I try to have a box set on the go with my wife as well that we only watch at the pace where we can both manage it. (No sneaking ahead, even although sometimes it is tempting)

I hope this helps. Do whatever works for you but do try to do something actively to ensure you strike a work/life balance that works for you.

Why I certified to become more than a SQL DBA

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For this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, Andy Leonard (b|t) asks How Do You Respond When Technology Changes Under You?

It’s a great topic and inspired me to write a T-SQL Tuesday post this month. I’ve missed the last couple due to a combination of just not feeling like it, and the previous topics weren’t best suited to me. Hopefully this can inspire me to get writing again.

Hey, I thought I was the SQL DBA!

When I got my start with SQL Server, I was just that –  A SQL DBA. I worked as a junior member of a big team, we had a large SQL Server estate and I just wanted to learn to become as experienced as the senior folk. I was able to learn and be mentored and was enjoying making progress. Then I heard we were going to start using “The Cloud”. Not only that but I was going to be responsible for the operation of our Kafka clusters, EMR and ElasticSearch.

A lot of these technologies were developer led, they knew why they wanted to use them and from an operations perspective, it was about making sure things didn’t fail, and errors were handled. I had no background in them, and didn’t really understand them well. Simply learning to use PuTTY to log into a linux VM was one of my early successes.

AWS Certifications FTW

The move to the cloud, in this case AWS was going ahead with or without me so I had to embrace it. Of course, I learned and collaborated with colleagues and got to an acceptable standard but it was only when I decided to do AWS certifications that things really took off. I found that by studying for the AWS Cloud Solutions Architect certification that I got an appreciation for all cloud services, not just the data ones like RDS. Studying for the AWS certifications improved my networking skills; I learned about object vs block storage and of course I learned all of the different data products (often managed services but not always).

I approached the certification process from a genuine perspective of learning the technology well, rather than just passing the exam. Simply passing the exam does not do much for you. Even if it gets you a job, you will likely be found out pretty quickly.

A further benefit to learning one cloud technology well is that when we started using Azure, I found the concepts were the same. I understood the networking, the security groups and PaaS vs IaaS. It made this transition much easier and meant that when I moved to a job that was predominantly based in Azure, I didn’t have the huge knowledge gap that I would have had, if I had not done my AWS certifications.

So for me, a structured learning approach is best. It’s not for everyone but I am certainly glad that my job is no longer just “SQL DBA”.

You don’t need to run CHECKDB on Azure SQL DB

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right or wrong sign for dbcc checkdb
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CHECKDB on Azure SQL DB?

This is a selfish post because I’ll probably forget and go googling for info on this topic, so I though I would link to an authoritative answer on the question, do you need to run DBCC CHECKDB on Azure SQL DB?

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/blog/data-integrity-in-azure-sql-database/

Microsoft distinguished engineer Peter Carlin says you don’t need to, it is monitored by Azure on your behalf. And if something was to go wrong, they will also work with you to put things right.

Although Peter says you can run them if you want, his post gives me enough peace of mind to stop running these on my Azure SQL DB instances. Let me know if you agree in the comments.

For more Azure content, check out my Azure tag.

How to find out Azure SQL DB Startup time

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Alarm clock and cup of tea
Wakey Wakey SQL DB

Azure SQL DB Startup time

The query

SELECT sqlserver_start_time FROM sys.dm_os_sys_info;

Why write a post about this?

The traditional methods used for to find the start up time for SQL Server don’t work in Azure SQL DB.

I searched high and low to find this and thought I’ve got to share, and hopefully make it search engine friendly. A traditional google or bing search wasn’t bringing up the best way to find this out. I saw a lot of complicated queries to pull data, convert it and estimate start up time using functions and all kinds of magic. Actually, it turns out that the start up time is provided for you in sys.dm_os_sys_info (which works in Azure SQL DB). It also work in SQL Server which is a bonus.

Permissions to check Azure SQL DB Startup time

The permissions you need to run this query vary depending on the pricing tier of your Azure SQL DB. I ran this successfully on a P2 and a basic tier database.

On SQL Server, requires VIEW SERVER STATE permission.
On SQL Database Basic, S0, and S1 service objectives, and for databases in elastic pools, the Server admin or an Azure Active Directory admin account is required. On all other SQL Database service objectives, the VIEW DATABASE STATE permission is required in the database.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/system-dynamic-management-views/sys-dm-os-sys-info-transact-sql?view=sql-server-ver15

I hope this one liner t-sql script was useful. Please let me know in the comments if you know a better way to get the start up time of Azure SQL DB, using T-SQL.

While you’re on my site, why not take a look to see if you can save money on your Azure SQL DBs, and other Azure resources by looking at my guide: 7 ways for data teams to save money in Azure.

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Free SQL Tools to make your life easier

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I’ve written and spoken about free SQL tools to make your life easier on a few occasions. It was the subject of my presentation at SQLBits 2020 so I was delighted to see Mikey Brownowski (b|t) choose tooling as the subject for February’s T-SQL Tuesday #135. #tsl2sday.

In this month’s t-SQL Tuesday, Mikey asks us to “Write a blog post about the most helpful and effective tools you use or know of.” I use quite a few free tools. I love the way the SQL Community embraces sharing and I know I wouldn’t have achieved a fraction of my career success without free tools. In my SQLBits talk, I discussed the following free tools:

  1. sp_whoisactive
  2. First Responder Kit
  3. Statistics Parser
  4. Ola Hallengren’s Maintenance Solution
  5. DBATools
  6. DLM Dashboard

For this post, I will focus on Statistics Parser, written by Richie Rump (b|t). My blog has info on some other free sql tools as well.

Statistics Parser

Legend

Legend has it that Richie Rump wrote it during a Brent Ozar conference session. I asked him about this and he told me:

Well, I started it in one of his training classes. It was in Atlanta. It was the last day and it was mentioned that there was an Excel spreadsheet that parsed out statistics io output. I found that as interesting but odd. So I started out writing out a web based parser right there in class. The core of it was finished on the plane ride home.

Richie Rump 2021

So what does Statistics Parser do?

If you run SET STATISTICS TIME,IO ON before you run a query in SSMS, you will get information back on how much data was accessed and how long it took. Things like logical reads, physical reads, CPU time and elapsed time etc.

If you are only querying one or two tables, it is easy enough to just read this in the messages window. But what about those complex stored procs or queries hitting multiple tables and views that return a very long list of outputs? The output can be long and intimidating and certainly hard to understand at a glance.

Statistics Parser is a web page which allows you to paste in the statistics time,io output from the SSMS messages tab, and it formats into neat tables showing how much IO happens for each table. It is immediately easier to read and you get a handy % column on the right hand side showing you which tables are being read the most. I find this really useful for query tuning because it lets me know where my biggest pain points are. For complex queries, which touch a lot of tables, it just makes it easy to see at a glance where you should initially focus your attention. It also shows worktable and workfile tables which serves as a handy hint that tempdb is in play.

A really handy feature is that you can open multiple browser tabs, but give each tab it’s own name. Then you can paste the output from the original query in to a tab you have named as “before” or “original”, then give a name to each tab as you try something new. e.g. “index_abc_added” or “fixed_cursors”. I like to do this when working through query tuning options against a restored copy of production. I use it for tuning CPU and reads. I quite often find that if I can make a big enough impact on the reads, the CPU will also come down.

via GIPHY

How to use Statistics Parser

  1. Run the following query in the same SSMS window as a query you are about to troubleshoot:
    1. SET STATISTICS TIME,IO ON
  2. Run your query
  3. Copy/paste the message from SSMS into statisticsparser.com
  4. Click Parse button
  5. Open more tabs as needed

Thanks Richie

Thanks for making a great tool, free and easy to use. And thanks for answering my questions.

FYI

Attendees of SQLBits 2020 can still login using their personal link and see all the recorded content so my talk is there. In it, I spend a few minutes demonstrating Statistics Parser. I’m not sure if they will make it free to everyone else in future, like they’ve done in previous years.

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