[Video] Office Hours 2016/12/14 (With Transcriptions)

This week, Brent, Erik, and Richie discuss their craziest SQL server troubleshooting issues, common causes of SSPI handshake errors, setting deadlock priority “high” on a query, vmotion high availability, best practices on windows Server 2012 page files, and whether a career as a Database Administrator will be good for the next 40 years.

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Office Hours Webcast 2016-12-14

Brent Ozar: Let’s see, I suppose we should get into questions. It is 15 minutes after the hour. We’ll start off with the first one, it says, “I have a replication question. Just kidding.” I guess this person sees that we don’t have Tara here, so we’re fresh out of replication.

Brent Ozar: Fellow human says, “I have a nephew who is very interested in what I do. Is database administrator still a good career choice for someone who’s in high school now? Is this career going to be good for the next 40 years?”

Erik Darling: In some form, but maybe not in like a traditional DBA sense. I think data is always going to need a steward. I think it’s always going to need someone to take care of it and to protect it in some way and to watch to make sure that certain things are happening that safeguard it. I don’t think that it’s always going to be the same backup and restore and corruption checks and, you know, query and index tuning that it is now. But I think in some way data is always going to need someone to make sure that the right processes are happening with it. It’s good to learn what’s happening now and maybe get into it now and get your feet wet so 40 years from now you can say, “Back when I started, I used to do backups myself. I used Ola Hallengren―the senior, not the junior.” So it’s good to get your feet in and start doing stuff now but whether this job, in this role, and the way it is now is going to last for forty years, I doubt it. Think about cab drivers five years ago.

Richie Rump: Look at me. I am the future of your data. This is it. My role.

Brent Ozar: That’s terrifying.

Richie Rump: It’s the future.

Brent Ozar: So what do you think, Richie?

Richie Rump: I think it’s going to be the person that understands the development side as well as the data side, that is going to be your steward. That is going to be the person that in the future with the cloud and all this other stuff that is going down, I think that’s going to be the person that is going to understand the data, how it works. It’s not going to be this low-level “Oh, I do the backups,” because those are all going to be automated in SQL Server 2030, whatever that is.

Erik Darling: But who runs the cloud?

Richie Rump: Someone who understands the code, someone who understands the data, that is going to be the future of the DBA.

Erik Darling: Who clouds the cloud, Richie? Who clouds the cloud?

Brent Ozar: I think if you step back generally,too, if you say, is any career going to be good for 40 years? That answer is probably no. With our parents, or grandparents, like my grandpa held the same job for I want to say 40 years at the same factory, he was a union’s rep or a union relations rep. Retired, he knew everybody in the community. My dad has held―I want to say four different careers. I’ve held a bunch of different jobs even, just every two or three years switching out. The things that you have to learn so much quicker is just very different.

Erik Darling: My dad has been doing the same kind of thing forever and ever doing sort of like technical sales writing and marketing but the companies and the stuff he’s been doing it for have been all over the place over the years. He’s at Oracle now but he started a little company called Data General in Massachusetts that was doing, at the time, tiddlywink hardware where like NT clusters were like holy crap.

Brent Ozar: Yeah.

Richie Rump: So now you don’t have to go anywhere else, Erik. You’re in your last job.

Erik Darling: That’s true. Ever.

Brent Ozar: We think he’s going to die with the rate that we eat and drink. So you can have one career, it’s just a really short lifespan now.

Erik Darling: I basically have the lifespan of a fly.

Brent Ozar: Watch him age in front of our eyes.

Brent Ozar: Next question, we’ve got some interesting soft skills questions here today. “What is the craziest thing you’ve heard someone wanting to do with SQL Server? Or the craziest troubleshooting issue that you’ve had?” Well, Richie went second last time, we’ll make him go first this time. Richie, what’s the craziest thing you ever heard someone wanting to do with a database server, or just in general?

Richie Rump: With a database server? Oh, geez, I’d have to think about that one.

Brent Ozar: Then Erik goes first.

Erik Darling: Well, a couple things that pop out in memory since I’ve been here was one person who basically, it was using CDC, change data capture, but it wasn’t working the way they wanted so they rewrote a layer over change data capture with Dynamic SQL. It was like CDC broke for us so we had to rewrite it. So they basically had this layer over CDC that did stuff for them. Another one that came to mind was people who are partitioning data by day but when they receive data it could update prior day’s stuff, so all these merge statements that they wrote were just going kablooey. Like they were just not getting the kind of partitioning magic that they were hoping for with things. There was sparse little partition elimination happening in that scenario.

Brent Ozar: How about you, Richie?

Richie Rump: The craziest thing, and actually it didn’t turn out to be so crazy, but I was working with a QSR company, fairly large. They had decided to write their own NoSQL database.

Brent Ozar: Oh, okay, which is common now these days.

Erik Darling: Everyone is doing that.

Richie Rump: Yeah, so it’s all this payment processing that’s coming in and they decided to write their own SQL database to store all this information. Where I came in is that they had no way to report off of that. So they started dumping it into SQL Server and that’s how I came into the project. It ended up working out for them. They put a ton of effort into building their own NoSQL stuff, but it worked out. So again, maybe crazy like a fox, maybe a bit. So I can’t wait to hear them upgrade to Cassandra. That would be fun.

Brent Ozar: I’d say the weirdest thing―there are a couple, two co