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What's the Cost of an Hour?

In 2017, we had a number of high profile downtime outages from companies. The British Airways fiasco, United airlines being grounded, Starbucks, Amazon, and more. There was a survey that noted 98% of respondents said an hour of downtime cost their organization over US$100,000. A third put that figure over $1mm.

This week, I'm wondering if you have any idea what downtime costs your company. If you do, and can let us know, drop a figure in the comments. Maybe you can give us a range, or maybe you can say it's a large amount. If you don't know, maybe let us know if it's not important to your business.

I haven't often calculated this, but when most companies look at lost revenue from customers, lost ability to conduct business, and potential losses from employees sitting around, it's probably a large number. Then again, many companies might just force employees to work extra to make up the work, so perhaps some companies don't care.

This certainly isn't a simple answer. Modern systems are often distributed, with many moving parts, and complex network connections. With modern software development using caching, micro-services, and feature flags, it's entirely that an application is down for some clients and not for others. Or perhaps, a portion of the application is broken while other parts work.

Downtime can be disruptive and expensive, and it is something most system administrators plan for and work to avoid. If you know what it cost for either the loss of a system or in your preparations, it would be interesting to know today.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Join the debate, and respond to today's editorial on the forums
 
  Featured Contents

Approaches to Import JSON in SSIS (SQL Server 2016+) Part 2

Nikolai Basov from SQLServerCentral.com

In this article, 2nd of 2-part series, we will look at the 3rd approach to import JSON, recap both parts of the series and form a conclusion.

Free Fundamentals of Index Tuning Week: Part 3, Indexing for Joins

Additional Articles from Brent Ozar Unlimited Blog

Previously we covered Part 1: Indexing for the WHERE Clause, and then we covered ORDER BY. Today, let’s tackle joins.

What’s New in SQL Monitor 10?

Tony Davis from SimpleTalk

SQL Monitor 10 packs a lot more under the hood in terms of connectivity, establishing cause-and-effect, and alerting. This article provides the high-level tour of the features we've introduced or improved, and why.

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Window Shopping the Query Store with XEvents

SQLRNNR from SQL RNNR

This article has just shared multiple tools to help you become more acquainted with the Query Store! This acquaintance is coming via an extremely powerful tool called Extended Events....

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Cross-Post: Learning From Technology’s Past

K. Brian Kelley from Databases – Infrastructure – Security

Cross-posted from the ISACA Now Blog: “This is the song that doesn’t end. Yes it goes on and on, my friends.” – Lewis, S., “The Song That Never Ends,” Lamb-chop’s...

 

  Question of the Day

Today's question (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor):
 

Using SQLCMD Variables
I am writing a SQLCMD script in SSMS with SQLCMD mode. I set a variable with this script (ignore the double backslashes for now): 
:setvar DirectoryRootPath "Log.txt"
Now I want to use this variable in another part of the script. What would I put in the place of XXX in this code to use the variable value here: 
SELECT XXX, myid, myname, mychar FROM dbo.MyTable;

Think you know the answer? Click here, and find out if you are right.
 

 

  Yesterday's Question of the Day (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor)

More Memory Optimized Table Limitations

In SQL Server 2017, which of these database options is not supported when you use Memory-optimized tables?

Answer: Auto Close

Explanation: The Auto Close option is not supported with MOT tables in a database. Ref:

Discuss this question and answer on the forums

 

 

 

Database Pros Who Need Your Help

Here's a few of the new posts today on the forums. To see more, visit the forums.
SQL Server 2017 - Administration
msdb.dbo.sysmanagement_shared_registered_servers_internal is empty - Good morning all , Who has an idea how I can feed the two system tables select * from msdb.dbo.sysmanagement_shared_registered_servers_internal msdb.dbo.sysmanagement_shared_server_groups_internal I tried to work with the ssms component registered server but the table is still empty normally on Central Management Servers, right click and I choose Register Central Management Server and I create one. […]
SQL Server 2016 - Administration
TempDB Sudden growth in ldf file - Hi Experts, Need your help for handling the unexpected error, Called "The transaction log for database 'tempdb' is full due to 'ACTIVE_TRANSACTION'." and  i am not able to work on SQL Server , unless i have to Re-Start the Services or Server. Once i have restarted the Server/Services My tempDB Log file is 1 MB […]
SQL Server 2016 - Development and T-SQL
WITH Query definition not working - SELECT * FROM OPENQUERY ( [LinkedServer], ' WITH Disk_Size (Servername,DiskMountPoint,fileSystemType,LogicalDrive,ToTalSizeGB,AvilableSizeGB,SpaceFree) AS ( SELECT DISTINCT @@Servername Servername, volume_mount_point [Disk Mount Point], file_system_type [File System Type], logical_volume_name as [Logical Drive Name], CONVERT(DECIMAL(18,2),total_bytes/1073741824.0) AS [Total Size in GB], ---1GB = 1073741824 bytes CONVERT(DECIMAL(18,2),available_bytes/1073741824.0) AS [Available Size in GB], CAST(CAST(available_bytes AS FLOAT)/ CAST(total_bytes AS FLOAT) AS DECIMAL(18,2)) * 100 […]
Scalar function too slow - Calculated field in column based on another columns - I have a big query, (really big, 800+columns - can't really make it smaller) that I'm trying to build in the most efficient way. I have some fields like this:   SELECT distinct(td.EVENT_ID), td.MENU_HINT, td.EVENT_NAME, td.EVENT_DT AS Expr1003, COUNT(td.EVENT_NAME) AS [Total Runners], -- AS [WinnerPrice], -- COUNT(td.ID) AS [WinnerCount], SUM(CASE WHEN td.BSP >= 1 AND […]
DMS Error DFT Flow task - Could any one let me know why i am getting this error?  on what basis these kind of occur errors? it fails some times not all the times? we were running this job since from last 2 years. we are seeing this error form last 2 weeks? is something changed on the source side ? […]
Need to replace this CASE statement in Where clause - Need to replace this CASE statement in Where clause with something else (not CASE...), AND/OR (?). Anyway, the task is to get rid of Case statement in Where clause but I am not seeing how. Does anyone have an idea? SELECT…. FROM  CA_Leaves CL WHERE  CL.C_Status     = 'New' AND 1 = CASE WHEN @i_PARAM1_field […]
Administration - SQL Server 2014
TDE related questions - Hi All, I have some questions related to SQL 2008 EE feature Transparent Data encryption (TDE). While implementing TDE we create a certificate in master database as follows and immediately take the backup of it. use master go CREATE CERTIFICATE TDECert WITH SUBJECT = 'Test TDE Certificate' go Question 1) By default expiry date of […]
SQL 2012 - General
SQL 2012 - Need to migrate the symmetric Key to Enterprise Edition from Standard - Hi, I have a database in SQL 2012 Standard Edition with few columns encrypted with Symmetric Key. I have a requirement to migrate the database to Enterprise Edition. I tried it in Testing environment to restore the DB and Keys. When I query the columns, it showing nulls. Can anybody suggest me, how to migrate […]
SQL Server 2019 - Administration
shrinking files in an availability group - Hi guys this is just a test database, so no urgency I have a database that has about 8Mb (yes a tiny database)  but the log was allowed to grow to 74GB (with 99% free space) - there are no open transactions , it got restored to our new 2019 server and put into an […]
R Services (In-Database) - Are the any free or trial versions of sql server that includes the R Services (In-Database) feature? https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/advanced-analytics/install/sql-r-services-windows-install?view=sql-server-2016&viewFallbackFrom=sql-server-ver15
SQL Server 2019 - Development
string of data into columns - I have a txt file that has about 5 columns when i import it.  1 of the column imports the data incorrectly and puts 15 columns into 1.  It is all separated by tabs in that one column.  How can i copy the values into their own columns.  I created empty varchar(50) columns with generic […]
SQL timeboxing by full hour - Hi, I am looking for a solution to this problem: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60606793/sql-timeboxing-by-full-hour/60606966?noredirect=1#comment107226910_60606966 Anyone has a good idea of how to solve it?
SQL Server Newbies
export stored images to disk - My movie collection has all dvd covers of every film stored inside the sql server database . Worked ok until the database grew over thousands of films and the retrieval of the data became a nightmare. So I decided to get them out of there to a separate folder where I would store them as […]
General
Full Outer Join with all rows - Hi Everyone, I have the following Table A and Table B. I tried doing a full outer join in Tableau software but was not successful. Could i please check if my desired output below is possible? I did not include my code because i uses Tableau to do a auto full outer join with my […]
Certification
Window Server 2016 Certification will be Retired on June 30, 2020 - Required exams of Windows Server 2016 certification are 70-740, 70-741 and 70-742 exams. The three exams will be retired on June 30, 2020. If you are planning to earn Windows Server 2016 certification, please take these exams before the retired date.
 

 

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