August 31, 2009 at 6:20 am
In general as a dba how can we decide the down time for doing the activities in sql ?
August 31, 2009 at 6:48 am
It depends on your environment. You have to work with the clients of the database to decide when a good time for them is.
August 31, 2009 at 6:51 am
I agree with Steve. When you go in to have the conversation, one of the easiest ways to inform them of activity lulls is to capture user connections for a 24 hour period using the performance monitor counter. Better still would be to gather that data for a week or even a month to determine, for sure, when the fewest number of users are on your system. Then, armed with that info, you go & talk to the business.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt
Author of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning
September 1, 2009 at 6:12 am
Another factor can be other systems in the network may already have existing Service Level Agreements. It may not make sense to try and promise up time in the same window that other systems are usually down for maintenance.
Greg E
September 1, 2009 at 6:30 am
Agree you need to take into account Business rules and other systems that may have dependencies on one another, as well as capturing the performance counters.
At my last job we had a couple applications, the biggest by far was an internal app that was exposed on the intranet and internet, but had a dedicated amount of users. We had another application that was an internet application that was open to the general public.
The powers that be always felt that the maintinance window of the Main app would be the perfect window for everything which was during the weekend. After tracking performance counters for a Month i was able to go into a meeting and show that the lowest amount of usage was between 2 am and 4 am on weekdays and the second lowest window was between 9 am to 11 am. and the weekends were much busier than the week days, which is when management had assumed the application was most in use.
The counters are also good because they can help you reverse size a server so you can see how your hardware is meeting your needs.
Twitter: @SQLBalls
Blog: http://www.SQLBalls.com
Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Tales-from-the-Field
Viewing 5 posts - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply