DBA’s have egos.
We like to say “Look what I created,” “Check out this huge database I fixed,” or “I McGyver-ed a solution at 3am in a War-Room hyped up on my 8th cup of coffee.”
Then the bragging really begins. “I fixed a 1.2 T Data Warehouse!” Which receives a quick response of “Oh yeah? Well my OLTP database suddenly sped up and does bazillion transactions a second!”
Not me though. The bane of my existence was a small 35G transaction processing database centered on a small 5000 row table that was purged nightly because the data just wasn’t that important. Oh, and did I mention that I had over 1,700 locations and 12,000 users depending on this database? If a transaction started to creep over a few milliseconds it started a train of dominos that crippled the application and ground the business to a halt.
So in the midst of my troubleshooting and research, I caught myself saying “Huh, a blob. I haven’t really worked with those before. Could that be affecting the speed of my database?” Boy, I had no idea what was in store for me after that.
Weeks later my database is stabilized – but not without a lot of research, analysis, and a small crowd-sourcing effort from my DB2 peers. When you call in people like Ember Crooks, Scott Hayes, and a small army you know it is serious.
Next week, on Friday the 26th, I will be giving a webcast on the DB2 Night Show with Scott Hayes. I will be discussing how the use of blobs affected transactions within my database, how I learned to analyze their use, and how I tamed the beast. Following my webcast, I will be publishing an article on DB2Commerce.com summarizing my experience.
So tune in Friday. You can register for the webcast now. Go here: DB2 Night Show Registration .
Oh! For those that will be there – I will be at IDUG this year. I will be hanging around other shady folk such as Ember Crooks, Rebecca Bond, and Scott Hayes. I will also be at the Dine Around at Vito’s Chop house with Kelly Schlamb and Scott Hayes. You will know me by a small sticker of a Blob on my nametag. Trust me – that will make sense after the webcast.
Michael Krafick is an occasional contributor to db2commerce.com. He has been a production support DBA for over 12 years in data warehousing and highly transactional OLTP environments. He was acknowledged as a top ten session speaker for “10 Minute Triage” at the 2012 IDUG Technical Conference. Michael also has extensive experience in setting up monitoring configurations for DB2 Databases as well as preparing for high availability failover, backup, and recovery. He can be reached at “Michael.Krafick (at) icloud (dot) com”. Linked-in Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelkrafick. Twitter: mkrafick
Mike’s blog posts include:
10 Minute Triage: Assessing Problems Quickly (Part I)
10 Minute Triage: Assessing Problems Quickly (Part II)
Now, now you two play nice … DB2 and HACMP failover
Technical Conference – It’s a skill builder, not a trip to Vegas.
Why won’t you just die?! (Cleaning DB2 Process in Memory)
Attack of the Blob: Blobs in a Transaction Processing Environment
