T-Man's Work Report (3-11-05)
It's all about the database
Friday, March 11, 2005 by T-Man | Discussion: Developer Journals
Who's says I don't do much work anymore? Want to know what I accomplished this week. Well here it is!
- I moved our database from one server to another server
Woohoo! Now don't everyone get all excited at once. Ok it doesn't seem like much but it was a fairly large task. Everyone of our systems and websites communicates with this database so I had to do this in a way where downtime was minimal.
First the servers were in two entirely different locations. Matter of fact, they were in two different states just to make it more challenging. I chose to use SQL Server Replication to transfer the data since copying the files would take more than 2 hours. I didn't really want to do replication since I have had many headaches with it in the past but I figured this was my best option to keep data conistant between the two locations. For the most part replication this time went pretty smooth which was completely unusual from past experiences. I think most of it was probably because SQL Server 2000 replication works much better than SQL Server 7.0 which is what I had used in the past. Plus I have learned a bit more since the last time.
Ok, Data has been replicated and is in both locations, any changes being made to the old server are automatically being pushed to the new server. Excellent. Now all I need to do is make are dozen or so websites and applications point to the new database. After making many configuration changes on all the servers to facilitate the move I was finally able to make the switch with only having a couple of minutes of downtime.
We had a couple of snags with TotalGaming.net and GalCiv.com communicating with the new server but everything else went fairly smooth.
I did actually do some more work but that was mostly what I worked on this week. Here are a couple other modifcations that I made to WinCustomize this week.
- Turned on the filter to cap past customers at 500MB's of downloads
- Added some additional ads to the site on the main index and preview pages
- Updated the UserLevel code to pickup product registrations from your cross referenced account
- Spent a couple hours chasing down a bug that brought WinCustomize down. Must remember to use LONG instead of INT
- Take son to hockey practive
- pick up daughter from gymastics practice
ooops, sorry about that, getting my lists confused. Anyway, thats about it in a nutshell.
Reply #2 Friday, March 11, 2005 5:36 PM
And obviously I can't type or spell 
It's friday. I must go home now.
Reply #3 Friday, March 11, 2005 5:53 PM
Reply #4 Friday, March 11, 2005 6:06 PM
Reply #5 Friday, March 11, 2005 6:11 PM
Nice work, T-Man. Moving that database without any notable downtime for WC is a major feat in itself. There's a lot of data passing through here in a given day, and to keep several websites live while remotely moving the database to another state really is commendable. 
In retrospect, all I really managed to do this week was blow up a monitor. I love the smell of burning electronics on a Friday afternoon. 
Reply #6 Friday, March 11, 2005 6:42 PM
Reply #7 Friday, March 11, 2005 6:56 PM
Sounds like it went fairly smoothly, great job, T-Man.
Enjoy your weekend.
Reply #8 Friday, March 11, 2005 8:14 PM
Reply #13 Saturday, March 12, 2005 10:02 AM
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Reply #1 Friday, March 11, 2005 5:33 PM
...errrr, I believe it was Frogboy
Great job T-Man. I guess all the server error pages I've been getting is due to all this, but its really good to hear that you are not messing up much.... errr, I mean fixing up everything.
pick up daughter from gymastics practice
You mean, Frogboy actually lets you leave your desk??
Keep up the good work