January and February are peak times for my company's business; now I can start to focus on new things, here is what I learned during peak and where 2010 will focus:
- Capacity management is the 2nd most important thing dba's do.
- Performance tuning and monitoring is the most important thing (during peak)
- Locking and Blocking is the biggest scale issue i regularly see.
- Mirroring on SQL Server standard edition sucks (especially for geographically disperse sites).
- Mirroring on SQL Server enterprise edition rocks (though the cost factor is prohibitive).
- Informatica is no better an ETL Tool than SSIS
- Oracle and SQL Server are a pain in the ass to make work together (Oracle DBAs are'nt much help either)
- 1 terrabyte of disk space is almost enough !
- Re-indexing and defragging is analogous to politics and religion and DBA's should be barred from discussing the topic
- Encryption is a pain in the ass.
- Surprise - Merge replication actually works and is not near the PIA I thought
- 6gb of RAM is never enough
- Polyserve is not worth the effort
- VM Ware with VMotion is awesome
- VM Ware is a good alternative to Polyserve
- Hyper-V is not there yet
- SQL 2008 R2 licensing sucks
- SQL 2000 is finally no longer meeting the business requirements and we may finally get funding to upgrade the remaining instances !