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lauramayer
Posting Yak Master

152 Posts

Posted - 2005-07-06 : 09:52:16
Morning,

I have a developer who has created an application, well its a peice of crap. Poorly written, no database design, no primary keys, I could go on but it's just to painful. To add isult to injury he's now deploying this POS across the company. His program does deletes and wild inserts all day long. I ended up shrinking the databases and the log files today just to make it run. I know that it's not a good idea to do this, but I've done all I can, even explaining to him, with pictures, why tables with no primary keys and no relationships to anything else is a bad idea.

Knowing all this if I created a job to shrink all of his databases and logs every night would that make it even worse? It was up to 12gb until I shrank it which dropped it to 5gb.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks

Laura

Seventhnight
Master Smack Fu Yak Hacker

2878 Posts

Posted - 2005-07-06 : 10:21:58
fire em!


as far as realistic suggestions... I'd probably do what you're doin

Corey

Co-worker on The Wizard of Oz "...those three midgets that came out and danced, the freaked me out when I was little. But they are ok now."
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eyechart
Master Smack Fu Yak Hacker

3575 Posts

Posted - 2005-07-06 : 10:26:44
why did shrinking the database make it run? were you out of space?



-ec
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Thrasymachus
Constraint Violating Yak Guru

483 Posts

Posted - 2005-07-06 : 10:55:47
I would take it to the boss, the IT manager, the CIO, CTO or whatever you have there. The longer that POS (and I am not just talking about the application) is in place the harder it will be to correct the wrongs of yesteryear.

Sean Roussy

Please backup all of your databases including master, msdb and model on a regular basis. I am tired of telling people they are screwed. The job you save may be your own.

I am available for consulting work. Just email me though the forum.
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paulrandal
Yak with Vast SQL Skills

899 Posts

Posted - 2005-07-06 : 16:51:29
quote:
Originally posted by lauramayer

Knowing all this if I created a job to shrink all of his databases and logs every night would that make it even worse? It was up to 12gb until I shrank it which dropped it to 5gb.



Don't shrink the database every night unless you really, really need to. The odds are that it will just grow again the next day (dbs usually need some amount of free space for regular operations) and shrinking a database nicely fragments indexes, which will slow down any range scans on them tremendously.

Thanks

Paul Randal
Dev Lead, Microsoft SQL Server Storage Engine
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X002548
Not Just a Number

15586 Posts

Posted - 2005-07-06 : 17:03:02
What kind of production release environment do you have there?

Was the application developed on a test box?

Was it QA'ed Doesn't sound like it was stressed.

Don't you do code review?

I wouldn't have installed the application...

Does he know what a data model is?

You should go over and post it on WTF...



Brett

8-)

Hint: Want your questions answered fast? Follow the direction in this link
http://weblogs.sqlteam.com/brettk/archive/2005/05/25/5276.aspx
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Michael Valentine Jones
Yak DBA Kernel (pronounced Colonel)

7020 Posts

Posted - 2005-07-06 : 17:42:56
Just let the system alone. It sounds like it will die quickly on it's own. If it impacts other systems, explain to the users of the other systems the Mr. POS is the cause of all their problems, and suggest they talk to his boss.







CODO ERGO SUM
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Bustaz Kool
Master Smack Fu Yak Hacker

1834 Posts

Posted - 2005-07-06 : 20:30:04
You could add a clustered index to the tables. This would probably result in a performance increase and would not impact any of the existing logic.

Or you could take Michael's approach and allow it to choke the system and let the chips fall where they should...

HTH

=================================================================
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. -Johann Wolfgang van Goethe, poet, dramatist, novelist, and philosopher (1749-1832)
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