Devops

DevOps has quickly become a core part of how many organizations deliver IT, and in particular, how they deliver applications. But just as quickly as it has become popular, a whole series of XXXOps names have appeared. One of the latest is AIOps. So is it just yet another almost meaningless acronym?

Well as Betteridges Law of Headlines suggests, the answer is no.

When I first saw the term, I was presuming this would be about how to deploy AI based systems, and I wondered why on earth that would need a special name. But that’s not what it is.

2019-05-03

I’m presenting a session on Azure DevOps for SQL Server DBAs that’s designed as an intro for data people who haven’t really worked with it before, at Red-Gate’s SQL in the City events in Brisbane (May 31), Christchurch (June 7), and Melbourne (June 14).

Looks like a fun lineup for the day, and it’d be great to catch up with you at one of those events. You can find more info here:

2019-04-12

I spend a lot of time on client sites and time and again, one of the mistakes that I see people making, is trying to start with large projects. I think one of my all time favorite quotes about IT is:

Any successful large IT system used to be a successful small IT system.

The next time you’re thinking about creating a project that’s going to have a big bang outcome, please remember this. The history of the industry is that it really is likely to be a big bang, and not in terms of being a big success like you’d hoped for.

2019-01-18

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. Or every now and then, I find the order of what I’ve entered just gets changed. Again, no error, but the order was changed.

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. A while back, we had Application Insights that could collect details of what was happening within an app. The data for that was stored in a tool called Log Analytics, and it could also collect operating system logs and more. Agents were provided for on-premises systems.

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. In every one now, there is a person heading up a “Cloud Transformation” project, but none of these companies mean the same thing when they talk about these types of projects.

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. It takes the following parameters and also returns a rowset that’s easy to consume programmatically (or by just looking at it):

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. The first step of their plan was to buy everything they needed. The second step was to carry out a proof of concept to see how it would all work (presuming it would work suitably at all).

2018-09-04