March 22, 2012 at 10:35 pm
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Maintenance Poll
March 23, 2012 at 1:17 am
One or twice a year, there is a maintenance window for some of the applications that lasts for a couple of days. Otherwise, Tuesday or Thursday evenings are usually used.
Maintenance window on a Friday? That would never work in Sweden 😉
March 23, 2012 at 4:29 am
Happily enough our boss is a little bit workaholic and technical - so we often just convey requirements to him and he sorts it out late at night. Tuesday or other early week evenings are favoured just so we know there will be someone around the next day if there is fall out. I have done weekends occasionally - but that counts as juicy overtime.
March 23, 2012 at 4:46 am
when setting up the automation run by sql server agent, i was able to block off
22:20 to 23:40
as a daily maintenance window - no users online, no automation runs, typically
for our install, sunday morning is also a window- about 06:00 to 09:00
we are about to integrate a web-based application, so i can see going to formal windows at least the sunday
March 23, 2012 at 6:00 am
I support the databases behind web-based banking apps. We have a weekly maintenance window on Sunday morning from 00:00 to 06:00. But it's mainly for making changes to the non-database components. I have online maintenance set up for the databases so they don't need a maintenance window. We don't officially get comp time / time off for maintenance window work but the boss usually tells us to head out early on Friday if we have weekend tasks.
March 23, 2012 at 6:05 am
Being a small company, I have a little more flexibility in scheduling, as long as our primary web and mail servers are operational during our employees' work hours. Most of our employees are spread across the US - from Maine to Hawaii, so I'm "blocked" from 6:30am ET until 5pm HT (10pm ET) - although I can get in a quick reboot after 8pm ET if necessary. My focus, though, is on weekends during the second half of the month - accounting will scream if I try to do "normal" maintenance (outages more than 5 minutes) on their systems (the key systems in our company) during the first half (Month-end close, Invoicing and Accounts Receivable...).
Also, I'm the IT boss, so I can be flexible in my time (when you already work more hours than are "standard" in the pay period, you have some flexibility - that's the "joy" of being salaried...).
J
March 23, 2012 at 7:02 am
we outsource outrweekly maintenance to a company that performs it over night on weekends. This allows us to focus on the more the tasks we really want to get to. We can do our testing before pushing patches etc to production and then have the outsource company push it to production overnight.
March 23, 2012 at 7:26 am
Sunday mornings 0400 - 1200 for both our dbs and web servers.
We get comp time if it is more than an hour, but are "encouraged" to use it the following week so it doesn't accumulate.
Edited to add:
·Server patching is also Sunday morning but 0000-0800 (yes, there's overlap)
·SQL Server patching generally happens Friday evenings between 6 and 10
March 23, 2012 at 7:34 am
Operations team patches all servers on the 3rd Saturday night of every month (from mid night to Sunday 6am). So that's my maintenance window too for most of my database servers(except two servers that are patched and maintained quarterly). No official comp time but I guess I can take one if I want to 🙂
March 23, 2012 at 7:39 am
In an atmosphere where we support various customers the maintenance windows vary. Some allow for open maintenance any time on weekends while others require various levels of approval with very little time allowed annually for any true down time. We do a lot of our scheduled automated maintenance in the wee hours of the weekends. We often struggle with the concept of cost vs down time. Customers want no down time at all but also do not want to have the expense of Enterprise Edition for Online indexing and other benefits. We also have a hard time justifying Enterprise edition when it is only leveraged for online index operations in those environments so we have to get a bit more creative.
March 23, 2012 at 7:46 am
Do you have regular maintenance scheduled? No
When you patch systems or make changes, how does that impact your schedule during the week? It doesn't
Do you get any comp time or flexible scheduling to accommodate patches? No
March 23, 2012 at 9:27 am
For Windows updates, the application owners can either take the automated off-hours reboot when the update goes out or plan it themselves around the users schedule (which they do is picked when the server is set up). Outside of that we have different timeframes for different servers (business hours only vs 24-hour clinical apps). However, we have a two hour maintenance window Sunday morning once a month where we can declare a server (or servers) is going down for maintenance.
If the work is done while on pager there isn't any comp time (as far as I know, our DBA team was taken off pager when there was only one and haven't been put back on yet). If the we aren't on pager for the work we do get comp time to make up for it.
March 23, 2012 at 10:19 am
My previous job where I was responsible for such things...
Production servers were rebooted the last Thursday of every month at 4 am so Windows updates could be installed. So the stand alone servers were down for maybe 3-5 minutes. The clusters were down less as we could reboot the passive, fail over, then reboot what was the active. This had the added benefit of allowing us to alternate nodes each month and thus ensure the health of each node.
Other maintenance was on an as needed basis but generally took place between 2-5 am.
As for comp time, there was no stated policy, but my boss was really good about me either coming in late, going home early, working from home, whatever sounded fair that week...
March 23, 2012 at 11:10 am
For our systems that touch the stores we have a third Thursday of the month from 11PM till 5AM window. The Wednesday before we all meet to discuss what will be happening and the day before (provided those changes are approved by our Change Control group) finalize the list and put together a who is first, who is second who can do things without effecting the other.
March 23, 2012 at 11:49 am
... maintenance window every Friday night. It was annoying for the family, but it did build a nice bond among the production staff ...
I hope you didn't think "nice bonding" made up for annoying the family, but rather "making the best of a bad situation it created ...". 😉
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Livin' down on the cube farm. Left, left, then a right.
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