Back from hols – Projects!

At the weekend I got back from a weeks well-deserved (or at least I think so) holiday. Having spent much of the holiday lying on a sun lounger in the baking heat of the South of France, I have returned to boring, drab and wet England with renewed vigor and vitality.

Projects! My philosophy is that one should “Pay for services not products…” As such I don’t believe in developing products per se, but rather Projects that are free and available to everyone (without those little licence catches.) On the right is a new Projects page that will give you a little information about the projects I am currently working on in my spare time – renewed vigor remember. When complete, hopefully they will allow me to give something back…

SLAs in percentages; urgency in minutes!

If, like me, you get given figures like networks must be up for 95% of working days, and then told to report on that, you may find this post helpful. Recently, I spent some time trying to work out how to account for this in Service Desk Express and here is what I reckon:

Ok, so lets say that for a given service the percentage uptime required is 95.00%. That means that the percentage downtime allowed is 5.00%. We will also assume that the number of hours per week in your work schedule is 37.

Consequently, the number of minutes downtime allowed per week = (number of hours per week in work schedule * 60) * percentage downtime allowed = 111 minutes.

Now at this point you have to take a bit of a guess as you need to know roughly how many incidents you are likely to have per week for this service. For the sake of arguement we will assume 5.

Thus your downtime in minutes allowed per incident and consequently your duration for urgency = Downtime (minutes) allowed per week / Number of expected incidents per week = 22.2

This may have a few limitations but it allows you to bridge the gap between the people writing the SLAs and those implementing the Service Desk Tool!

SQL 2000 vs 2005

Just a short post regarding the use of SQL 2000 SP4 vs SQL 2005. I have installed and used production SDE installations on both databases and my experience is that, at least for the time being, installations on SQL 2000 SP4 are considerably more stable than those on SQL 2005. I should point out however, that I am not saying SQL 2005 is unstable – infact I much prefer it over SQL 2000 for developing my own applications.

One of the main issues I keep facing with SQL 2005 installations is with “Page cannot be displayed errors” when using DB Admin. It becomes very painful doing any kind of extensive configuration work! It doesn’t seem to matter how much RAM or how many processors the DB server has I always seem to get these type of issues.

 It would be interesting to hear of anyone else’s opinions on this matter.