Art of the DBA Rotating Header Image

T-SQL Tuesday #32 – A Day in the Life (#tsql2sday)

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is brought to us by one of the more statistically important data professionals out there, Erin Stellato(b|t).  The assignment is simple enough: Record your day on either Wednesday 7-11 or Thursday 7-12.  Easy enough, but leave it to me to screw it up, right?  Anyway, I was travelling on Thursday (heading down to Albuquerque to present at the local 505 user group), so I cheated and recorded my activities for Tuesday, 7-10.  It was an average enough day, so a good cross section for the series.  So, without further adieu:

  • 6:55 AM – 7:10 AM Check on I/O trace – I can work remotely, so commonly when I get up I’ll check in on things just to make sure everything is ok.   This time, I had set a profiler trace to run overnight to give me some info on I/O issues we were having.  All I did here was log in and make sure it ran, I was going to drill in to the detail later.
  • 8:15 AM – 8:30 AM Review alerts from previous night – Still at home, but I did a quick glance over the alerts from last night just to make sure there weren’t any fires.  Everything was cool, so I hit the road to get in to the office.
  • 9:00 AM – 9:20 AM Arrive in the office, get my day started – This is administrative time, responding to emails and getting my tea (I hate coffee.  There.), settling in for the day.  This bleeds into the next part….
  • 9:20 AM – 9:40 AM General maintenance work – This was basically some file clean up and responding to some of the alerts I saw from over night.  Nothing major.
  • 9:40 AM – 10:40 AM I/O research – So we’re having an I/O issue in our lower environments.  We’ve got a LUN on one of our instances that is getting slammed.  This was what I was using my trace to research and discovered that a whole lot of work was going through tempdb.  I spent this time reviewing my data and then talking with the relevant developers and QA engineers.  Once I had my info collected, I reported out to the systems team, DBA team, and the dev guys.  Unfortunately, this is a situation where not much can be done.  There really wasn’t any alternatives for spreading out the I/O load (at least none worth pursuing for a lower environment system) and the proper way to fix it was to have the dev team file things away for code fixes.  Still, with the info I collected we could come back to that with a better strategy.
  • 10:40 AM – 11:00 AM TempDB cleanup – Got some additional space for one of our dev instances to allow us more tempdb space, so I cleaned that up and arranged the files.
  • 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM CLR Research – So I’ve never really done much CLR work.  We had a legacy sproc that we used that was reporting incorrectly, so I was doing some research as to why. Really didn’t have much luck, but since I was used to the WMI in Powershell, I figured I’d try and rewrite the CLR logic using that.
  • 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM Lunch – Every Tuesday we go to this awesome thai place down the road.  Basil chicken for the win!
  • 1:00 PM – 5:00 PM CLR Research – I basically spent the rest of my day fighting with CLR.  Keep in mind, I’m a DBA with a sys admin background.  I’ve dabbled in .Net code, but I’m very rusty and my code is less than elegant.  However, it was a good learning experience, and taught me several things:
    1. CLR only supports a limited set of libraries.
    2. The System.Management libraries apparently have a lot of dependencies on forms and drawing (I have no idea why).
    3. CLR is a real pain to debug, depending on local security policies.

Honestly, this was one of my lighter days.  Probably because we had just come out of a holiday week where we had locked systems down and allowed minimal change, meaning we also did have much breaking.  This is what makes the job enjoyable: not every day is a fire drill and the ones that aren’t afford me an opportunity to experiment and learn.  Because of this day, I’m a whole lot more comfortable with the concepts of CLR (even though I still haven’t built a successful CLR function) and it’s made me a stronger DBA.

Thanks to Erin for hosting T-SQL Tuesday #32!   Make sure you visit the master post for other great blogs!

2 Comments

  1. […] T-SQL Tuesday #32 – A Day in the Life (#tsql2sday) […]

  2. […] Mike Fal – Mike is a DBA and spends some of his day doing what I would call “typical” DBA work – verifying jobs have run, checking alerts, fixing issues with TempDB, etc. as well as research.  I consider research to be typical for DBA, and Mike has plenty of that as he’s learning more about CLR.  Mike, let me know how all the CLR stuff goes.  Still haven’t tackled that one yet! […]

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *