Devops

I don’t know if it’s considered some sort of modern trend, but what is it with applications now that just swallow errors instead of dealing with them? Is there an edict within these companies that errors should get shown, so they can argue their app doesn’t have errors? I’m working with a SaaS app right now. It does editing. Sometimes when I save, it just doesn’t save. No error, just nothing saved.

2019-01-08

System configurations are becoming more complex all the time. Each and every server, container, and key application and service today has log files that tell you a wealth about what’s going on under the covers. But how accessible are those log files in your organization? If you aren’t using a log management tool, you probably should be. Here are a few easy ones to get started with: Azure Monitor One thing that I do find frustrating with Microsoft tooling at present is the constant churn of product names.

2018-12-20

I used to do a lot of work at the operating system and network level. I was always fascinated watching people use network trace tools when they were trying to debug a problem. The challenge was that they had no idea what was normal activity on the network, and what wasn’t. The end result of this is that they’d then spend huge amounts of time chasing down what were really just red herrings.

2018-12-11

Damon Edwards had a session recently where he said claimed that Without Self-Service Operations, the Cloud is Just Expensive Hosting 2.0. There is much in his session that I completely agree with, and have been concerned about for quite a while. I see it more in terms of the adoption of Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings. I spend most of my consulting/mentoring time in larger organizations, many are large financial organizations.

2018-11-23

In a recent post, I mentioned that I often need to do a quick check to see if the schema of two SQL Server databases is the same, and how our GetDBSchemaCoreComparison procedure can make that easy. On a similar vein, I often need to get a detailed comparison of two tables. In our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, there is another stored procedure called GetTableSchemaComparison to make that easy as well.

2018-09-12

I often need to do a quick check to see if the schema of two SQL Server databases is the same. In our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, there is a stored procedure called GetDBSchemaCoreComparison to make that easy. It takes the following parameters and returns a rowset that’s easy to consume programmatically (or by just looking at it): @Database1 sysname -> name of the first database to check @Database2 sysname -> name of the second database to compare @IgnoreColumnID bit -> set to 1 if tables with the same columns but in different order are considered equivalent, otherwise set to 0 @IgnoreFillFactor bit -> set to 1 if index fillfactors are to be ignored, otherwise set to 0

2018-09-05

Just a short post today to call out something that I’m seeing again and again. It’s where organizations purchase all their hardware and software platforms before they start to carry out a proof of concept. This is a very poor option. I was reading the data strategy for a global company that I was doing consulting work for. They were proudly introducing the new strategy yet I was sitting looking at it, trying to work out what they were thinking.

2018-09-04

Most companies have some sort of ongoing maintenance processes that perform periodic backups of databases. They also have log backups scheduled for any databases that are online and in full recovery model. However, when you first create a database, it might be in full recovery model yet never have had a full backup performed. If your scheduled jobs then try to create a log backup prior to the first full backup, the backup will fail, and that might make your job fail.

2018-09-03

I have many friends who would have checked the calendar when they first heard that Microsoft was buying Github. They would have guessed it was April 1st. I think it’s another pretty bold strategic move by Satya Nadella. It’s been interesting to see all the naysayers coming out of the woodwork to beat up on the idea of Microsoft owning Github, as though it was going to be the death of Github.

2018-06-15

We’ve been using SQL Server database projects ever since they were called “Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals”. That was back in 2005 and the name was quite a mouthful. Until the last year or so though, we’ve only seen fairly patchy adoption of them among our customers. Over the last year or so, this has really changed. We’re seeing so many customers starting to use them. Why? I’m guessing that it’s the increased interest in using DevOps.

2018-06-01