I was installing SQL Server 2008 on a Windows 2008 cluster the other day and I received and error: ‘The current SKU is Invalid’. So I went looking for the resolution. I came across a blog post by Vittorio Pavesi that pointed me to the answer. I did not take the course of copying the install files to the local server. I was installing from a network share, so I simply moved the file DefaultSetup.ini to a new location and started the ‘Add node to a SQL Server failover cluster’ again and entered the key included on the DefaultSetup.ini manually. The rest of the install went without issue.
Author Archive
SKU is Invalid when installing 2nd node in SQL 2008
Thursday, July 16th, 2009
Today’s PSA
Saturday, July 11th, 2009According to the American Red Cross here are 10 facts about the need for blood donation.
| 1. | Every two seconds someone in the U.S. needs blood |
| 2. | More than 38,000 blood donations are needed every day |
| 3. | One out of every 10 people admitted in a hospital needs blood |
| 4. | Total blood transfusions in a given year: 14 million (2001) |
| 5. | The average red blood cell transfusion is approximately 3 pints |
| 6. | The blood type most often requested by hospitals is Type O |
| 7. | The blood used in an emergency is already on the shelves before the event occurs |
| 8. | Sickle cell disease affects more than 80,000 people in the U.S., 98% of whom are African American. Sickle cell patients can require frequent blood transfusions throughout their lives |
| 9. | More than 1 million new people are diagnosed with cancer each year. Many of them will need blood, sometimes daily, during their chemotherapy treatment. |
| 10. | A single car accident victim can require as many as 100 units of blood. |
Please consider donating. Whole blood can be donated every 56 days.
Stored Procedure with Execute as
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009We have a database that holds information that is fairly personal, so much that the application team that supports it may only have read access to the database. There came a need to occasionally lock all the administrators out of the system for updates. These updates will occur every few months. So I created a SQL user and gave that user select and update rights to the necessary table. Then I created a couple of stored procs, one to disable the logins and one to enable the logins.
CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[LockOutAdministrators]
WITH EXECUTE AS ‘EXECUTIONER’
AS
BEGIN
BLAH, BLAH, BLAH
END
I then granted execute to the stored procedures to the application group. So the application team can only update the table via the stored procedure that does only what it needs to do. They are happy they have an easy way to do this without me becoming the bottle neck. If this was a more sensitive system, I’d probably add some auditing, but it is not necessary at this time.
Pay a Compliment
Monday, May 4th, 2009This weekend I was volunteering at the One America Mini-Marathon Expo to help raise awareness of The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s Team in Training and I reconnected with a team mate from Team Indiana’s cycle team for the Honolulu Century ride. When he introduced me to his friend that came to the expo with him, the stated I was a “biking machine.” Yep, my head swelled. Now Scott is an athlete. Less then a month before the century ride he competed in an Olympic length triathlon. This summer in addition to running the mini, he is completing in an Olympic length, half, and full ironman triathlons. He even acknowledging that I ride is made me feel so good. So I’d like to challenge all to read this to be liberal with your compliments. There is so much in the world that tries to beat us down, that an honestly complementing someone based on your perception of their abilities is refreshing. Throughout the rest of the weekend, I began to watch how others greeted each other. I was surprised how much sarcasm and insults were in the greetings. Now I recognize that this is how we greet each other and no one takes these greeting as insulting. But I wonder if complementing rather than insulting could change attitudes and turn back the wave of negativism that is so prevalent in our society. So I am going to look for opportunities to complement and build up, and squelch the urge to break down, even in jest. Since I am rather sarcastic to begin with, I find this a challenging decision. Hopefully this will be a step in making this a better world.
Are All Test Environments Created Equal?
Tuesday, April 28th, 2009I don’t know about your environment, but at mine we have two classes of systems: Prod and Test. So as you can guess, anything that is not Prod is Test. That’s a pretty simple definition. Further defined anything that has a DR priority of 6 or less is PROD and anything 7 or greater (or not graded) is test. This makes live very simple, or so it would seem. So that brings me back to my question: Are All test environments created equal? On the one hand an answer of “yes” lets everyone know what to expect.
- Will the Test system be backed up?
- If it is backed up, what is the retention?
- What level of disk redundancy is available?
- Can Test servers be physical hardware or VM only?
- What is the recovery priority if needed?
This sounds like a pretty straight forward way to go. But on the other hand does one size fit all? We use many of our test systems for training. The current production system refreshed the test system, the upgrades are done to the test system and the end users are trained on the new system using the test environment. New employees are also trained on this system on an ongoing basis. So here’s the scenario. A medical system is going live in 2 days. 100 nurses need to be trained. Training takes 2 hours. The medical facility calls in PRN staff to cover the nurses during training. Let’s just assume all the nurses make the nation average that I googled a few minutes ago of $45,000 per year + benefits or $21.63 per hour + 39% benefit package. (yep, made that benefit number up makes it an easier $30.00 per hour labor cost) lets also say the training room can accommodate 10 students. Just for fun, lets also say the contract with the trainer is for two 12 hour days at $50.00 per hour including expenses. My calculations work out to about $660.00 per hour of training or sitting if the test system is not available.
- $30.00 per hour of the nurse in training
- $30.00 per hour of the nurse replacing the nurse in training
- $60.00 per instruction hour by the trainer ($600 per day/10 instruction hours)
- Ten nurses and replacements
I’d hate to image the cost if we were training doctors rather than nurses. Does that system have the same requirements as the “sandbox” I use to experiment and document the SQL 2005 SP3 upgrade?
So when does this discussion happen? Usually it involves the SAN/Backup team. They are charged with providing disk for servers and ensuring that what is on that disk is archived and recoverable within a reasonable time. I don’t envy their position at all. They also have to balance backup windows, and backing up test databases uses equipment and storage that the Prod system could be using. There are only so many data paths and hours in the day and purging old data seems to be a thing of the past. So I’m not sure a simplistic look at Prod/Test is appropriate. As we look at tiered storage, tiered version of SQL do we also need to look at tiered test environments or break the model completely and add a couple more tiers. Prod, Train, Test, Sandbox. Then place policies and expectations at each level. How about your environment? Do you ever struggle with getting other teams to understand the cost of data that is not “Production”? Of course that leads into the “we want to test this software and see if it solves the problem and now we have 100 users depending on it” issue, but that’s another day.
Home PC Backups
Wednesday, April 15th, 2009I have been noticing a scary trend over the last few years. Home computers have gone from a techno-toy (like a DVD player) to an important part of everyone’s life. I have also noticed that computers are becoming 5 year assets. People are replacing them every 5 years. Today they are inexpensive enough to do that. But the trend I am seeing is that the old PC is not being replaced, but a notebook is being added to the home computer. So I have a lot of family and friends with 4 to 5 year old desktop PCs, and hard drives are beginning to fail. Since most PCs came in as toys, disaster recovery is typically not considered by the home user. Does the thought of loosing all you digital pictures, your password database that you are allowing your web browser of choice manage for you, or any document you have created scare you? It should. A couple of people have asked me my strategy so here it is. I use a three pronged approach. I have a wireless network in my house. Every night at 2:00 am (wow, now that I think of that it is a really bad time to choose now that Indiana is on daylight saving time) *Note to self reschedule backups*. I copy my documents folder to another PC that is on different power circuit in a different part of the house. I also copy that data to a USB connected disk. Please note, this is not a backup plan. I cannot step back in time and get an old version of a changed file. But in most cases I don’t need that. Then once a month, I burn what I feel is most important (pictures, keepass password database, e-mail archive) to DVD and store it off-site. I point all my applications to store their data in that location. I am not saying this is the best strategy, but I would like you to at least think about your strategy. The day after a hard drive crash is not the time to consider this. Just remember, that e-mail and web surfing appliance is becoming a critical part of your life. Protect it.
Renaming a SQL server
Monday, April 13th, 2009Here’s a little simple one that I’ll probably need again, so I thought I’d just blog it:
How to rename a SQL server used mostly when the windows server it resides on changes names:
To change the name of a default instance of SQL, run the following procedures:
sp_dropserver <old_name>
GO
sp_addserver <new_name>, local
GO
To change the name of a named instance of SQL, run the following procedures:
sp_dropserver <old_name\instancename>
GO
sp_addserver <new_name\instancename>, local
GO
Cleaning up the disk
Monday, April 6th, 2009When I became our companies MSSQL DBA I inherited an smooth running machine. My predecessors were extremely talented and their scripts did everything we needed done. But I can’t just live off their hard work, I need to leave my mark on the environment. So I am tweaking some of their scripts to get rid of what annoys me. The current task is old backup files. The scripts they wrote do this awesome thing that archives a backup if the archive bit has not been cleared. This is so cool. If NetBackup has a problem, the old backup file that hasn’t gone to tape/disk is moved to an archive folder and then the new backup file is created. But what happens when after the file is backed up and the archive bit is cleared. It just sits on the disk and is backed up again with every full backup that occurs. That makes the backups bigger and take longer. So I added a job that deletes all *.bak files that have their archive bit cleared. That was so much easier than I expected it to be.
exec xp_cmdshell ‘del d:\mssql\backup\*.bak /A:-A /S /F’
I run this command 15 minutes before I do the nightly backup. It frees up space so I get less alerts of full volumes. It decreases the NetBackUp full backup time and more backups can happen within their windows. Unfortunately the DBAs before me decided that transaction log backups and database backups should have an extension of .bak. Since I want to treat transaction logs differently I have to go back and change the backup extension. So I’m slowly working through the databases to make that change. So once that is done, I can start cleaning up my backup volumes.
Blog Direction
Monday, April 6th, 2009I was looking over my blog and I noticed that it was heading in a direction I didn’t like. I had stared down the path of a whiney, ranting, complaining, negative blog that way too many blogs have gone. So I am stopping it now. I need to get more SQL and positive posts to offset some of the negative I am seeing in the blog world. So here is the positive for today. I am going to focus on the positive of the “special needs” part of my world. My eleven year old daughter was born with Down Syndrome and congenital heart defects. At eleven months she had open heart surgery to repair those holes. At seven years old she was diagnosed with leukemia and fought to beat that beast for two and a half years. To put it plainly, she is a fighter. That is the background for her newest endeavor. She recently began theraputic riding at a local stable, and her instructor was so impressed with her abilities that she promoted her to horse riding lessons and has now begun to ride full sized horses without side walker assitance. She also joined 4-H and is working on halter class for this years county fair. She will be competing against typically developing kids in this class, and that’s the way she like it. So her battle for inclusion continues as she continues to impress and break stereotypes. She may be “special needs” but if you are competing against her in anything, don’t take her lightly, or she will take you. Perhaps I’ll tell you about her Karate touranment last year some time. Inclusion does work, her life is proof.
Start the Meeting on Time
Wednesday, March 25th, 2009“What You Tolerate, You Encourage” I am getting really fed up with meetings, web conferences, teleconferences, board meetings, etc. that can’t seem to start on time. If you want to have a meeting at 10:30, start the meeting at 10:30. I have attended one to many web conferences that start 10 minutes late, then don’t have time for Q&A at the end because the presenter wants to “respect everyone’s time”. Hello! what about the 10 minutes you wasted waiting for those who don’t have enough respect for your time to show up on schedule? Why punish the punctual? If you start on time, those who are late and don’t want to miss anything might try harder next time. I once worked for a company where the VP would call a meeting. When the meeting time arrived, he locked the door. If you weren’t there you missed the meeting. I don’t know of anyone who was late more than once. That worked for me. Have we become such a wishy-washy society that we are afraid we will offend those who don’t have basic respect for the meeting organizer? I will not get onto me soap box about respect, just look out the car window as you drive down any road and you will see how much we “respect our planet and each other.” I’m tired of it. If you are putting together a meeting and you want to be respectful of the time of someone who may be exiting another meeting, schedule the meeting for 5 minutes ofter the hour, then everyone will know when you plan to start. The punctual will be there on time, as usual. Yes, I know things come up and occasionally you have to be late. But is that the fault of everyone else? Be late, if that works for you. But don’t expect me to wait on you. just remember – the world is run by those who show up. If you get there behind me who has a better chance of determining the direction? So take a stand. Start your meeting on time. It will catch a few people off guard, but maybe we can bring a little respect back into our world.
