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| | | Mitigate Issues Early This is a great postmortem from Basecamp with a detailed explanation of a problem and how they are hoping to avoid issues with their service. Basecamp is a Software as a Service tool from 37 Signals that had an outage recently. Actually, the service was up and could be read, but new items couldn't be added and existing items couldn't be changed. That somewhat defeats the purpose of the tool. 37 Signals recognizes this and notes that they're calling this downtime and not trying to get pedantic about the state of the service. I have sympathy here because I've gotten the same error in SQL Sever. I've reached the point where I had 2,147,483,647 items in a table. Any additional items caused an error, which some of you might guess. This is the largest positive INT value and if you've started at 0 and incremented all new rows, when you reach this mark, you can't add more data. There are a few fixes for this, including moving to negative numbers or changing to a bigint type. The staff at 37 Signals knew this was an issue and had actually set a new default for Basecamp that used a bigint in MySQL and PostgreSQL. What they didn't do is actually make the changes in their hosted Basecamp database because they thought they had more time. I've seen that before, often when an application runs at a higher workload than expected for a few years and DBAs aren't paying attention. When staff least expects it, the INT will reach the max value an clients start complaining. I've had to respond to an urgent phone call about this in a few companies. If you use INT values that are being incremented in some standard way, I'd likely set some alert process that triggers when the value gets to 2 billion or so, depending on how fast you use the numbers. SQL Monitor can do this with a custom metric, and I'm sure other software can as well, including SQL Agent. Having some monitoring in place will help you plan and be prepared to address issues before they cause problems. Steve Jones from SQLServerCentral.comJoin the debate, and respond to today's editorial on the forums |
| The Voice of the DBA Podcast Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.5MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.  The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. |
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| | |  | Erin Stellato from SQLServerCentral.com In this level, we're going to dig a little deeper into the Extended Events engine, its architecture, and fundamental components. It will give you a deeper understanding of why, in general, an Extended Events session is inherently lower in overhead than an equivalent SQL Trace. We'll also investigate how to design our event sessions to minimize any unnecessary overhead during event data collection, even when we need to create relatively complex event sessions to investigate difficult performance problems. More » |
 | Press Release from Redgate When a SQL Server database is operating smoothly and performing well, there is no need to be particularly aware of the transaction log, beyond ensuring that every database has an appropriate backup regime and restore plan in place. When things go wrong, however, a DBA's reputation depends on a deeper understanding of the transaction log, both what it does, and how it works. More » |
 | Data privacy and protection is a large concern across all organizations and knowing how to best approach it can be daunting. Grant Fritchey unpicks US legislations HIPAA and SOX to uncover exactly what is required of you and your team to ensure compliance. Download your free copy. More » |
 | Additional Articles from Database Journal Relational Database Service (RDS) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) are two different approaches, with their own advantages and limitations, for making Microsoft SQL Server (MS SQL Server) available and maintaining MS SQL Server databases on Amazon Web Services (AWS). More » |
 | Igor Micev from SQLServerCentral Blogs Here are some basic guidelines that are good to consider when writing T-SQL (Transact SQL). These tips and hints are... More » |
| | Mala Mahadevan from SQLServerCentral Blogs I am the proud host of TSQL Tuesday for the month of November 2018. My call to post entries is here .... More » |
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| | | Today's Question (by Steve Jones): I have this code in Python: ctr = range(2, 5) for i in ctr: print(i) What does this return? |
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| | Yesterday's Question of the Day |
| Yesterday's Question (by Steve Jones): I have to store a series of negative numbers, all of which are between 0 and -100. What data type should I use in my table?
Answer: smallint Explanation: We want to use the smallest data storage possible to ensure good performance. In SQL Server, we would use a smallint as tinyints do not allow negative numbers. Ref: int, bigint, smallint, and tinyint - click here
» Discuss this question and answer on the forums |
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| Database Pros Who Need Your Help |
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