Upcoming Events

I have the good fortune to be presenting at upcoming events in Philadelphia, Boston, and Orlando.

This weekend at SQL Saturday #69 I will be presenting the following:

10:00 AM Building your first SQL Cluster

12:30 PM (Along with Mark Kromer from Microsoft) Migrate SQL Server Apps to SQL Azure Cloud DB

3:45 PM Deploying SQL Data Tier Applications using SQL 2008R2 and Visual Studio 2010

In Boston at SQL Saturday #71, on April 2, I will be presenting on Building your first SQL Cluster, again..

More details to come later on my presentation at SQL Rally Orlando!

SQL Server Clustering — Why you should use mount points

I’m in the process of developing a presentation entitled “Building Your First SQL Server Cluster” for some upcoming SQL Saturdays, and some inspiration for a few blog posts have come out of it. This one is short and fairly simple.

Windows, as we all know and love, has us use drive letters as the root of file systems. As there are only 26 letters in our alphabet, combined with the fact that A, B, and C generally aren’t available, leaves us with only 23 or 22 available for a given cluster. While this may seem like a lot, if you are splitting out tempdb, transaction logs and backups, you can chew up a lot of letters in a hurry.  If you are using multiple instances in your cluster, the problem is compounded. And remember–the cluster can only see drives that are attached to it–you can’t restore a backup from a UNC path.

So what is the solution to this conundrum? Mount points–mount points allow you to mount multiple physical devices under one drive letters, where they look similar to directories.  This does prevent a bit of a monitoring challenge, but that’s best left for another post.

I’ve posted before on how to add a disk to a SQL Server cluster here. Using mount points is really straightforward–assuming you have 3 “disks” (could be SAN luns or Windows volumes (well not in a cluster), designate one of the drives to be the root (the drive letter S:\ in this case).

*Note–it doesn’t really matter which disk you choose to be the root–in my case I select the backup lun, but I discussed this with a couple of others, and no one knows of  any impact to system performance.

When you are assigning a drive letter to the next device, stop–select the option to “add to empty NTFS folder”, make sure you have the root drive highlighted (Windows likes to default to C:\) and name your folder (you can easily rename through explorer later).

One note–when you go to add the disks to your cluster (if newly creating), you will only see the root disk as available, the other drives won’t be selectable. This is expected behavior and fine. Good luck and happy clustering.

A recruiter story, Part II

When I left you last week, we were discussing a recruiter horror story, passed along from a friend in a past job. She had a really awful phone screen with HR, but the hiring manager still wanted to speak with her. The story continues…

The hiring manager schedules a phone screen with me, and we have a really nice conversation, discussing the technologies they are utilizing and how my skill set could fit in there. The company sounded interesting, my skills fit really nicely into their gaps and we decide to take the process further along. A moderate annoyance that happened in between, was the recruiter wanting to do a call with me to discuss interview strategy. That would have been fine, if he had given me any actual intelligence about the interview or people I was interviewing. Instead, he gave me standard boilerplate about how to answer interview questions, and wasted 30 minutes of my time.

A couple of days later, I did another phone screen, this time with another DBA there. That went well, and they decided to bring me in for an actual interview.

This is where the already odd process, got really weird. The company scheduled an interview with me, through the recruiter, and when I asked to see an agenda for the interview, the recruiter said the company doesn’t usually give us that information?? What the hell? How long am I going to be there? The recruiter said just plan to take the afternoon off.

This should have been a giant red flag, but I decided to follow through with it. The other question I had was about the benefits package at the new company–I currently work for a solid company, with an outstanding benefits package, so the benefits package is something I really need to account for when negotiating a final salary.

The recruiter said this company doesn’t give us that information, but you should ask HR when you interview. That was extremely odd, as every time I’ve interviewed with a firm their benefits package is either on their website, or is provided before an interview. Nonetheless, I persevered onward.

At the interview, I met the HR person, whom I asked about benefits—her response was basically that “we have some benefits”. I received no documentation, or anything official—this was starting to get scary. Even after meeting with her, I had no official agenda, she mentioned a couple of people I would be interviewing with, but I didn’t have their names on paper, so I had to try to remember them which was confusing.

Once again, the actual technical part of the interview was interesting, and the managers were nice, and technical. If the company halfway had their stuff together, I’d be all about this job. HR wise this was a total train wreck. At this point, I’m thinking they would have to offer me X+30, a G6, and a Porsche 911, and then I’d consider it.

I talk to the recruiter, express my concerns, and go on have a cocktail with a friend who lived nearby. About three days later, I get an email from recruiter saying he thinks they’re going to make an offer. This was immediately followed by an email from the company’s HR rep, with the top secret benefits document.

Well frankly, their benefits package sucked—I would have been paying like $100/month more than I was currently paying, for inferior benefits. The 401k match was lower, in general it sucked. Another email came shortly thereafter, with the actual offer, which was 10k lower than expected. I called the recruiter and said “no way in hell”.  I suggested for 15k more I’d think about it.

The recruiter made a huge deal about this, but I was still within my expected salary range and they wanted me to work for them. Finally, after talking to his manager (am I buying a car, or trying to get a job??) said he wanted me to sleep on it, and think about if I was still ok with that. These recruiter guys saw a nice commission for themselves slowly disappearing.

I called back the next morning and gave them the same number. At this point, I was having real concerns about the company’s general lack of professionalism—if they are treating me as a prospective employee this way, how are they treating their customers? Since the company wasn’t publically traded, there is limited financial information available about them. However, there is a firm called Dun and Bradstreet who for the small price of $100 will supply you with as much information they have on a firm.

Well, 30 seconds later, I got an email that looked like this:

The company appeared to have some pretty major debt issues. Not quite the growing firm they had described. At this point, I forwarded the Dun and Bradstreet report to the recruiter, and resigned myself from consideration for the job. I said I’d gladly do some contract design and tuning work for them, but there was no way I’d work full time.

This is where the recruiters get really sleazy—they knew they were really close to a payday. They start calling my cell phone repeatedly—then I get an email, saying “we (the recruiting firm) talked to their HR, and that D&B report isn’t really accurate, and the company is very stable”. I didn’t even bother to write back at this point, but if I had, my response would have been—

“Do you honestly expect me to trust their HR department, who couldn’t even get me an agenda for an interview, to promise the financial viability of the firm? If you can get me three years of independently audited financial statements, and get them to raise the salary another 10k, then we might be able to talk. Until then, stop calling me”

The end. Be careful out there folks!!

A Recruiter Story, Part I

This conversation came up on Twitter a few weeks ago. There is a perception in the IT community that recruiters are nothing better than bottom feeding, used car salesman. As a point of reference, I’m trying to hire a DBA right now, and I’ve posted to Linked In and Twitter about it, and have had to be hassled by several sleaze bags types. A really good, professional recruiter is hard to find, and if you find one keep their name in your Rolodex forever.

I’ll echo what Brent says in one of his posts—recruiters don’t work for you, and they aren’t the employees of the company you’re trying to work for, they are contracted middle men, who only get paid if you get the job, and typically work there for six months. So remember—you don’t have the same best interests as a recruiter. Also, please note, most of these blogs are written with the perspective that your are currently employed, and looking for a more interesting role, if you’re currently unemployed, all bets are off, you need to try to talk with everyone you can (just don’t work with anyone who asks you for money!!! Major no, no)

The names in this post have been omitted to protect the innocent and the guilty.  This was a story told to me by a fellow DBA who worked with me in past job.

I get a call from a recruiter about a Senior DBA position with a healthcare software company in the area, and the salary range is X-X+25. I told the recruiter that I would really need to be at the very top of the range for this to work. Of course, the recruiter says no problem. This position was interesting to me, because I would be involved a lot more in development, and I could continue to carry my healthcare experience along.

I send my resume along to the recruiter, and their HR likes it and schedules quick phone screen (with HR).  When HR calls me the first question, after pleasantries were exchanged, was “What is your salary range?”, no questions about my experience or details about the role. Of course, I try to back away from the question; by saying., you know I need to hear more about the responsibilities of the position, etc. The HR rep won’t back down, so I say I need to at least be at X+25, she responds with “Oh, we were only looking to pay X, and no more” . So that call ended quickly—I called the recruiter back and told him the story, and he didn’t quite know what to say.

The next day the recruiter calls back, and says the hiring manager would like to talk to you, and that they would be willing to pay X+25 for an extremely qualified candidate such as yourself…

Come back next week for the conclusion to this exciting story!

A recruiter story, Part II

How to Transfer an IT Project Effectively

A couple of weeks ago I got some really good news—I was transferring into a new role at my current company. Since this is an internal transfer, the standard two-week notice stretched to four and I had time to properly transfer my existing projects.

It is important to be as effective as possible in doing this, so you aren’t dealing with your existing projects in your new role.

The first thing I recommend doing is introducing the project contact person (In this case a business user) to the DBA you are handing off to. Ideally, you can do this in person, but since we are at multiple sites, I had to do it over email. Make it clear you will be transitioning all responsibilities over to the other DBA, and are trying to be successful in a new role, so can no longer support this project (be really nice about it—kill ‘em with kindness).

Secondly, if you have an email folder for the project, share it with the rest of your DBA team. If you don’t have one—create one and copy as much mail as you can into it. The search function in Outlook 2010 works really well, and sharing the mail may save you a phone call or two down the road.

Finally, and most importantly, you need to build out a project document. Put as much detail in as possible. I used the below sections for mine:

• Project Contacts—Who you work with, and what is their business function • Vendor Contact Info—Who you work with directly (If a small vendor) or contact/support info for a larger vendor

• Business Purpose—What does this application do, and what does it support? What are the uptime requirements?

• Authentication—How is authentication handled? Are there SQL logins to worry about? • Security Groups—This ties back to authentication, but are there domain groups controlling access to the application? Which groups control which rights?

• SQL Jobs—If the application has agent jobs—what are they? What do they do? How do you handle job failure? Who is the point of contact on the jobs?

• General Narrative—Describe anything else about the application. In our case there are some subprocesses that were failing, so I included that information. I also discussed the application patching process, along with some persistent issues we were trying to resolve with the vendor

. • HA/DR—This was touched on earlier, but how is specifically implemented? Where is the database mirrored/replicated to?

• Architecture—A very detailed Visio showing the whole landscape for the application—client connections, database connections, application servers, any external connections.

This list is in no way complete—feel free to add anything in the comments, I’d love to improve my process.

This is important stuff—in order to be as successful as you can  in a new role, you need to be able to transition projects effectively, but this same process can be used to transfer support of an application to an operations team, or outsourcing overnight support.

SQL Rally — Vote for Me!!

For those of you who don’t know, PASS has a new event this year, in addition to the annual PASS Summit in Seattle. SQL Rally will be May 11-13 in Orlando, Florida, and will be a lower cost, slightly more community focussed event.  In addition to the lower cost, sessions will be voted on by the PASS community. You can register to vote here.

I’ve been presenting on SQL Server for a couple of years now, and am heavily involved with the Philadelphia SQL Server Users Group, as well as our SQL Saturday coming on March 5.

So, that brings me here–to shill for your vote. The session I’m presenting is entitled Deploying Data Tier Applications to the Cloud. This will be similar to sessions I presented at Philly .net Code Camp, and the SQL Saturdays in New York and Washington, but with a twist. This will be a start to finish demo of building a database application, using Data Tier Applications, and deploying it to SQL Azure.

My session is in the Azure track of the Database and Application Development track at SQL Rally.

Mark Kromer of Microsoft and I have submitted a similar presentation to TechEd, but this one is unique to SQL Rally. I’d love your vote so I can share it with the community.

Adding a new disk to a SQL Server Cluster Instance

In order to do anything involving a SQL Server clustered instance (restore, backup, store/read data) storage must be accessible to the clustered instance. Here we will discuss the process of how to add a new LUN to a SQL cluster.

First off, have your storage admin add the disk, and make it accessible to all of the nodes of the cluster. Most SANs are different, so I’m not going to discuss that syntax here.

The next step is a little painful, you need to go to each of your cluster nodes and do a rescan of storage. In order to do this, go to Server Manager and right click on Disk Management > Rescan Disks

Next, go the server where the cluster service you would like to add the disk to is running (you can accomplish this by entering the virtual cluster name into Terminal Services) and online the disk (From Disk Management)

After the disk is brought online, it must be initialized. This is done from the same disk management dialogue. Configure this with either a MBR or GUID partition table (preferable for very large LUNS).

Next create the volume, in order to this, right click in the disk area, and select “New Simple Volume”

To create this drive under an existing drive letter (which I like to do for clustering) select “Mount in the following empty NTFS folder”

Create a new folder under the drive letter associated with your cluster resource group. I typically name the folder $RESOURCE_GROUP_$PURPOSE. Where resource group would RG1_ and purpose would be backup/data/logs.

Lastly, you need to label your volume and format. Once again for clarity, I usually for $RESOURCE_GROUP_Identifier_$PURPOSE_$LUN#.

Next, launch failover cluster manager (this can run either on your server or desktop). Select manage a cluster, and the enter the name of the cluster you are managing (if it doesn’t auto-populate)

Right click on the Storage folder on the right and select add a disk. If the disk is presented and configured properly, the cluster should see it, and add it to available disks.

Expand the left hand window and select “Services and Applications”

Right click on the instance you would like to add the storage to, and select “Add Storage”. A dialogue box will pop up with the available disks to add.

This is where you select the appropriate disk and add it into your cluster. You should be able to identify by its disk number and volume information.

Go into SSMS and using the Attach  Database dialogue (or any dialogue that interacts with the files system–backup/restore, etc), and verify that SQL Server can see the disk.

Server Virtualization–the bottom end of the spectrum

Brent Ozar posted an excellent blog yesterday, on the upper limits of server virtualization. In his post, he discussed the limitations of the upper limits of using VMWare for database servers. I mentioned to Brent on twitter that, I had just been talking about the other side of this–what’s too small to virtualize.

I was in a meeting yesterday, discussing a recent acquisition for our company, and one of our remote manufacturing sites, and the costs involved of converting them to a virtual infrastructure. Each of these sites currently have around 10 physical servers, and no shared storage platform (currently). The leading management argument was that it’s cheaper to replace the servers of a regular cycle, than to make the investment into a virtual infrastructure.

The hardware costs for the project are as low as about $50-60k–using HP 360s and MSA iSCSI storage. That’s 3 servers and 3-4Tb of storage. The real killer is the VMWare licensing–we’re looking at close to $40k a host, which brings the total cost of the project to well over $100k. We’re in an odd spot, because we’re in a large company, but supporting smaller sites, that need some enterprise management features. A smaller shop could get away with VMWare Essentials plus, which is a much more affordable $3k a server (all prices are non-discounted).

However, that brings the total cost of the project to about $70k–which would replace all of the standalone servers on site at least once.

This obviously doesn’t account for reduced management and backup costs, nor does it account for the higher availability of the VMWare environment. High Availability can still be a hard sell in small shops–believe it or not. But that’s where the value in virtualizing their hardware is–outstanding uptime and ease of management. With a little bit higher cost.

I’m a big fan of virtualization, but some times it can be a hard sell to the pointy haired boss.