Off the radar

So I’ve not written anything on the blog in….well a long time, so I thought it was time to start up again.

It’s certainly been a chaotic time, a lot has changed, new practices, training and alike, some of the interesting stuff I’ve picked up is ITIL and Agile development and process control, I’ll hopefully blog on these things soon.

On a more technical note, I’ve been battling away with our production indexes and I’ll definitely blog soon about the importance of setting up your indexes correctly, and how to maintain them.

See you again soon,

Nic

Lack of sleep…..

Couldnt sleep this evening so I thought it was about time I posted a blog entry, it’s been a while since I have, and I had kind of promised myself I would try and do one every few days.

Well, it’s been a tough week, both in the office at home.  Spent the last few days sorting out a release we have pending, it’s due to hit our production servers in early next week, and its a fairly major release.  The lucky thing is I’ve been involved from the start, however it made me thing about how is the best way to handle something that just drops on your desk.

In my view the key is preperation, in short, analyse what there, be it a release, a request for some data, or something else.  Take a moment to digest what is required, how best you can acheive your objective, and then how you can go about delivering above and beyoned it. 

In my case, I have a release, so I’ve analysed the risk factors and the potential issues I may encounter.  I’ve looked at what it is that being delivered, and how I can best deliver it (sadly this means a bit of overtime for me).  When it comes to a release, rollback scripts are a given, the number of business that operate releases without a rollback strategy amazes me. 

What is essential for a release to me is the knowledge that should the unforseen happen, I can revert back to a safe point that wont affect the business.  This really is paramount.  I like to take a snapshot of the db on my local machine (obviously having put the release through dev, test and UAT), then apply the release, I then properly test it, and  run my rollback, there is in my view, no excuse for not having a rollback, be it procedural changes, or data manipulation.  A rollback of some variety should always exist.

I then test my rollback, ensuring everything works correctly,  I personally use RedGate SQL Compare to compare the snapshot of the db to the ones I applied and rolled back the release too.  Ensuring the two are identical after the rollback.  This gives me the peice of mind that I can acheived the objective of not impacting the business should I need to revert my release.

As I said, the key really is preperation, be prepared for anything, cause it can happen.  Trust me.

Anyway, it’s late and I’ve ranted on enough, as I said it’s late so you’ve have to forgive the no doubt numerous spelling mistakes.

I’m off to bed.  Good night all, hope the above is of some use.

End of an era

Well, it’s finally gone.

Today I sent off my iPhone knowing that I will never see it again. 

If you dont know the story, I’ll quickly fill you, on New Years day I dropped and managed to crack the top of the screen.  The crack was that bad that you could actually see the board underneath it.  So I logged my claim with the insurance company, however it took nearly 4 weeks to get the forms, fill them in and finally send them back, during this time, the iPhone served me well, not once did it break, even with a giant crack in it.

So my claims has been accepted, and I’ve sent the phone in.  However the insurance company informed me, I wont be getting a new iPhone, instead I’ll get the cash equivelent.  Which leaves me with the dilema of deciding which one to get next?  A windows phone perhaps…….?

SQL Bits VI

Its been officially announced that SQL Bits VI will be held on the 16th of April 2010, in London.

If you’ve not been to a SQL Bits before then I would strongly recommend that you go, you’ll not only attend some sessions which will make you SQL life easier, but you’ll also meet some of the best people in the SQL community.

Last year the event was in Wales and I got to see presentations by the likes of Brent Ozar and Simon Sabin.  I can’t recommend this event enough.  Tickets aren’t released yet, but check out http://sqlbits.com/ for more info.  You can also watch record sessions from last years event there!

Hopefully see you there in the spring!

Good day to you world

Well, I’ve finally got round to setting up a blog for myself!

So now, there will be no excuse but to listen to the rantings of a SQL Server obsessed mad man!

Watch this space.