Live in or near the Seacoast region of New Hampshire? The Seacoast SQL Server User group meets every second Tuesday of the month at 6:15 and so far we have had a great time at the meetings. I blogged about our inaugural meeting here and am excited to watch the membership grow and to see the attendance remain steady even through this awesome summer we have been having. The SQL Server user community in this region is huge and a large percentage care enough to come out and keep their skills sharp.

For the July meeting…

I’ll Be Speaking

I know. I booked myself, is that wrong? It made it easier than finding a speaker during July and with the new baby in the house, etc. So I am excited to be speaking on a topic I enjoy speaking about. I’m giving a presentation I have given a few times now (SQL Saturday Boston, SQL Saturday in Charlotte and to the Southern New England SQL Server Users Group). This is a fun one to give and it brings it back to basics a little.

It is my “As a DBA, Where Do I Start?!?” presentation, you can read a bit about it and see an earlier slide deck from it on my blog here. The main point is still the same but I am ever tweaking the delivery and slides to make them work a bit better.

So, if you are interested in the thought process around being a DBA, interested in where to prioritize the tasks as a DBA or just want to throw rotten fruit at me, check out the Seacoast SQL site and send an RSVP e-mail.

Special thanks to SQL Sentry for sponsoring this month’s meeting. I make it no secret that I enjoy working with their products so I’m excited to have them be the sponsor the same month I’m speaking!

Back in April, I invited Grant Fritchey to be our inaugural speaker to the Seacoast SQL Server User Group. My guess is he was frustrated with the traffic and time to drive from his office in Rhode Island up to New Hampshire in rush hour traffic. Why? Because shortly after his time speaking with us, I received an invite from his group, Southern New England SQL Server Users Group to come down and speak in May or June. I accepted not wanting to say no and wanting some experience in giving the presentation I plan on submitting as an abstract to the PASS Summit this year.

What?

I will be sharing the presentation I have given to a couple SQL Saturdays, “As a DBA, Where Do I start?” This talk is given to cover some of the basics of our role as Database Administrators. Cover the priorities of the role and has a goal of making people think about if their own environment is covered. It is meant to be interactive, there are some lighter moments when I’ve given it in the past and we poke a little healthy fun at developers and vendors along the way.

If you’ll be near RI on Wednesday, stop on by!

When?

Wednesday 5/12/2010 @6:00 PM

Where?

New England Institute of Technology
Hall of Fame Room
2480 Post Road
Warwick, RI 02886

I’m hoping to get some more feedback and input directly or on the Speaker Rate site so I can make course corrections along the way for future presentations.

This week is SQL University’s “Professional Development” week. Andy Leonard is a pro when it comes to this topic (check out this post and the links on it to see what I mean) and I asked if I could sneak a post in along side his this week since it is a topic I tend to gravitate towards (primarily as a means of teaching myself lessons I need to learn). I was going to write about some hallmarks of a good DBA or any IT Professional (Things I’ve blogged about before like when talking about owning mistakes or a post recapping lessons I learned at the dump). A recent post by Jason Hall, however, gave me a different thought process -

Everyone Grows… Or Everyone Fails

A hyperbole? I don’t know but I think it holds true. Jason’s post talked about his experience at a conference working at a vendor booth. He had a lot of conversations with developers and many sounded the same, apparently. They wish their DBAs shared reports and info about the system with them. My first instinct was to write a comment and say “yeah.. right.. I’d like to find some developers like that!” poking fun and adding fuel to the stereotype of DBA-Developer, umm, relationships. It started my thought process, though. Do we do enough as DBAs to share? Do I? Sure, I teach some classes for performance minded development wherever I am working. Sure I’ll answer some questions but is that enough? Do you share enough? Does your company? Or do you subscribe to the notion that…

Knowledge Is A Weapon?

I’ve worked with folks who believe this. I’ve worked at organizations where that notion is deeply set. Do you know what I mean? Getting information is like pulling teeth, people keep you guessing. Perhaps they are afraid of being less important. Perhaps they are afraid of their team losing an edge. Whatever the reason the end result isn’t great for anyone involved. Share. We learned that in Kindergarten. Heck we learned it in preschool and our parents enforced that rule often, especially if we had siblings. It works today in the corporate world, it works on technology teams.

Some Ways A DBA Can Share?

There area a lot of areas we can share better but some thoughts (and before you get uncomfortable, my standard professional development disclaimer applies – I am talking to myself as much as I am to you)

• Teaching/Mentoring – I really enjoy this one. Setup some brown bag lunches and teach a topic. Take a presentation you’ve received and regurgitate it to the rest of the DBA team, to some Developers or to the system administrator team.
• Show Them The Reports! – Like Jason said in the blog post that inspired this one. What’s the harm in letting others see the state of things. Developers might see the impact (positive or negative) from a development decision. Architects can see the effects of a design decision. Your peers and management will see, gasp!, the state of the environments you manage. Sure… I know this might air some dirty laundry but are you doing the best job you can do? Are you working your tail off on proactive tasks when you aren’t interrupted by reactive ones? If you are barely keeping your head above water because of too much reactive work for one DBA perhaps a couple black marks could even work in your favor.
• Documentation – Yeah.. I don’t like doing it either but Documentation is to be embraced.  It lets you go on uninterrupted vacation, it lets other staff back you up or do rote tasks and it just makes life easier for all involved.
• Participate In Meetings – Meetings!?! I know. I hear you. You have to go to them anyway, so instead of just playing Dr. No (Actually, I sign on to corporate web meetings as “Dr. No” but that’s another story.) explain things, offer suggestions and let people know what is going on in your head (related to the topic at hand, please)
• Check Your Motives – I wish I could say that this advice could never have anything to do with me. I can say it usually doesn’t but I catch myself letting that evil pride get in the way sometimes. As I get “older”, I find it occurring less and less. In the past few years, I’ve started to embrace offers for help. It means I have one less thing to do. I’ve started to jump for joy when a colleague wants me to teach them how to do a part of the job that I used to think was “mine, all mine!” It means I can focus on something else that needs to get done. It means I might have a week that is close to 40 hours because of the help. Some Tips for checking the motives?
  • Help is Help - Remember that. Help isn’t someone showing you up. Help isn’t someone trying to steal your job or “be better” than you. In fact, what does that even mean? Why do we go to our jobs? Is it to be better than people? I go to provide for my family first and foremost (though I think I’d sadly still enjoy doing something with technology and SQL Server even if I didn’t have to… maybe not as many hours). That means I am there to do the best job I can do for my company. I am there to make sure we have a more successful day each day. That doesn’t mean I have a more successful day but that the company does. That means my team should do the best we can do. If someone wants to help me on that quest, I should jump at the chance – there are enough people to deal with that seem to not have that same goal in mind (alright, I’m half joking)
  • All Boats Rise Together – If a colleague does a better job, the team is doing a better job. Maybe the analogy sees failures in some sports, but I think a team of team oriented players looking to succeed as a group does better in the long run. If you are the A player in a subject your goal should be to bring the B/C/D players up to A level. it shouldn’t be to keep them down so you have some sort of an edge.  Like I said above, everyone grows, or everyone fails.
• Honey, Not Vinegar – Sure we will always see people who aren’t like minded. We will always deal with less than optimal (and that is being nice) code, time lines, architectures, hardware, storage subsystem, etc.  You can write off the people or teams who create these situations or you can help them out. The former will give you a chance to use some new “witty” sarcastic comment. The latter will help prevent problems in the future without alienating people. I’ll be honest here, I have found myself tempted to go with bitter approach at times. I’ve even given in and it did nothing good. Technical accomplishments were forgotten and the attitude was remembered. Projects weren’t improved and issues were resolved angrily, if at all.

No Auditing

SQL University students are tough and determined. Someday there may be a Microsoft Certified Masters student who got their start reading posts here. Real students don’t audit. So… There is a homework assignment. It’s simple though: Try it. Publish a report from a monitoring tool or the SSMS reports. Show someone how to look at one of the tools you like to use to track your environment. Approach a code review as a time to partner with development in the same goal – meeting the requirements – exceeding them, even. Be sickly positive even when faced with some pretty frustrating situations and share knowledge, work with the goal of making the environment better. I’ll be doing the homework assignment myself and I’ll report back here in a week or two with the results. I just ask you to try it for a week and let us know in the comments what you ended up sharing. Enjoy the rest of the semester at SQL University and I’ll see you in a couple weeks when I am your official instructor during the week discussing SQL Server tools (instead of lecturing during Andy Leonard‘s class )

Other Professional Development Posts

Some other topics in the “Professional Development” vein.

• Checklists, Recipes and Algorithms – DBAs can learn a lot from Pilots, Chefs and Doctors. I blog about it here.
• One Man’s Trash – While at the dump, I picked up an important lesson about attitude.
• Bill Clinton Wasn’t Impeached For… – Own your mistakes, it is often the best solution in the long run.
• Day Job Lessons From The Garden – Sometimes some manual labor will give a few good reminders.

Update

I’ve done some of my homework. I took some reports from the monitoring tool I use and published them. I have a time setup to training folks on the reports and publish the URLs out. I’ve also been working on the security policy which allows developer support teams the ability to look at server information (view server state) and query (select only) from certain log tables. Giving them the information to help me. How about you?

I saved one of the signs. I know...

(Written the night of the meeting, edited and posted after)

Wow. I just got home from a really great night with a fun group of people. The first meeting (hopefully of many more) was a success (more on what that means from my point of view below) and we had an amazing turnout – By my count, we had at least 57 people there! A few ins and outs after counting but I was floored by the turnout. We originally had about 60 chairs, had to scramble to bring in another dozen or so from another room (not all seats were full, but folks don’t like moving up front when they come in late, apparently). We learned some lessons, had some successes and got some good data. A quick recap before I go to sleep and the excitement is drained away by a day in the office on Wednesday.

The Good

• They Got It! – The crowd was following along, I saw some light bulbs going off, I saw some good questions and a lot of people taking notes and contemplating what they were being told. This right here is what I consider success. A topic that jived with a lot, a lot of people seeming to grab usable information. I mentioned when I gave the intro that I subscribe to the “All boats rise together” mentality and that is the major reason this group exists. I think I witnessed that tonight. Thanks, Grant!
• Grant Fritchey – Anyone who has seen Grant speak needn’t read further. He was great, as usual. Had the crowd laughing and speaking out loud in unison reiterating earlier points he made. I was approached by people afterwards who were impressed by his style, knowledge and excitement. A sysadmin colleague of mine told me after, “that guy was really excited about the product. I didn’t know a lot of what he was talking about but you could tell he was excited and really likes working with SQL.” The audience picked up that excitement and were glued.
• Excitement – A lot of people wide awake and eager to be there and participate. I heard a lot of positive comments and asides.
  

  Vendor Discussion towards the beginning

• Crowd – We didn’t get out on a lot of lists ahead of time but the turnout was great! Friends and friends of friends and folks on Alexander Technology Goup’s mailing lists were there and in force!
• Survey Responses – We want to know who our membersare and what they want to hear about. I have a big stack of surveys to go through and will map it out and share some of the aggregated info in a future post.
• Attunity – We need to work on our sponsor arrangements and sign-ups but the folks at Attunity were flexible, gave a great presentation about their product and covered a good spread of food.
• Pizza - The local cafeteria at Great Bay College (our location) was the only option to use, they have right of first refusal. They are called The Green Bean and they make some great soups, breads and sandwiches. Never knew the did pizza and they did it really well. I don’t get a discount by saying so but they were great to work with and the food was fresh, hot and healthy. Grease free pizza
• No Competition – There is a really awesome user group about 1.5 hours away from ours. Adam Machanic does a LOT of work keeping New England SQL Server Users going strong and he deserves a huge round of applause. I was worried that I might step on his toes or overwhelm folks with “too many” meetings. I asked about where folks go and by show of hands, the vast majority of the audience are too far to head down there. This is an audience that is thirsty for knowledge but a longer drive is impractical. That is great news! That tells me we are a good distance to provide an option without “stealing” members and we are sharing knowledge where it might not have been otherwise shared.
• The Help - Like I said in the meeting, this is not “my” group. It is “our” group and a lot of folks helped put this together, especially the Vice Presidents of the group, Mike Kennie and Melissa Field. Thanks for putting up with me and helping out! We’ll all be busy keeping this going and it is good to know it doesn’t rest on one’s shoulders only. That’s good because with our new baby coming at the end of May, the June meeting will need some extra help
• Great Bay College – For now, our use of this space is complimentary. The service and help we got was as though we paid a lot of money. Jennifer from the university helped set everything up. Signage was all over the place. The room was setup for us and it will be rearranged for us. Everything worked the first time with the AV equipment. Awesome venue and a really great resource for the Seacoast with their educational offerings.
• Alexander Technology Group – The folks at Alexander Technology Group helped us make introductions to the college and got this group out to their lists. They were as excited about what this brings to the area as we were and they kept us excited through the process of getting things going.

What Can We Do Better?

• Space – The room got kind of tight kind of quickly, if we keep growing we may need to rearrange the space or move to a larger room. Good problem to have.
• Timings – It was the first meeting, lots of housekeeping discussions. We will work on this over time.
• Sponsors – We had a great first sponsor, now I need to get on the ball and reach out to more sponsors who want to reach an eager SQL Server community. Interested? E-mail me seacoastsql@straightpathsql.com!
• What Else? Were you there? Let me know how we can do better to make your next meeting more enjoyable. I’ll be compiling survey results later in the week but any additional feedback (positive is always good but negative is really accepted – I like challenges better than pats on the back.)
• There is a SQL Community? This isn’t bad at all. I don’t think life is all twitter, blogs and PASS Summit hangouts. But, when Grant asked about various names in the community not a lot of hands went out. I don’t care that folks aren’t reading blogs or know SQL Server authors by name. I do care, however, that some folks don’t know about some great resources. Yes twitter is a tool with the #sqlhelp hash tag. Blogs are some places to really learn about various topics (need to apply tests and empirical evidence to the data, obviously) and SQL PASS really offers a lot for folks. I hope to help everyone up on the Seacoast tap into these resources. Maybe I’ll do a presentation on the SQL Community sometime.

What Will Success Look Like?

I said this first meeting seemed successful. To me, the size of the crowd isn’t what is key. While we had an awesome turnout for a first meeting, I think success is bringing the right content to the right people. Watching people learn (learning myself in the process, hopefully) about topics relevant to their day jobs will be a great measure. We’ll see how this happens overtime but I think the group is off to a great start.

I am looking forward to a long run of the Seacoast SQL Server Users Group. Tonight’s meeting inspires me to keep working my tail off to make sure that happens – A lot of people to not want to let down now

Look for a post in the coming weeks about the survey results. You can subscribe to my feed to see that post.

One of the things that have been keeping me from regular posts has been working on setting up a new SQL Server User Group. Well, that is now starting to really come together! Our first meeting is scheduled for Tuesday April 13th, 2010. We have a basic site, a logo and some plans. Still some little kinks to work out but we have a start and that is really exciting.

Checkout The Seacoast SQL Server Users Group Website to learn more details.

You can also follow us on twitter at @SeacoastSQL or find our LinkedIn group.

Learning, Giveaways, Networking And Free Dinner

Hopefully the emphasis is on Learning but we will have other things for you there also Giveaways will look different (books, an Amazon gift card the first meeting, and other random toys and trinkets from vendors, Microsoft and others). They’ll be given away by drawing and that list will be populated by folks who RSVPd ahead of time. Free food each night as well (First meeting will be Pizza and Soft Drinks/Coffee).

The learning will typically look like a 45-75 minute presentation with some time for Questions and Answers. The first month we have Grant Fritchey who blogs as the Scary DBA who will be presenting on understanding Execution Plans. A topic he often blogs about and wrote a book about.

Future months will feature various speakers, national and local, well known or new and from our own local community. They’ll present on a variety of topics covering all parts of SQL Server (BI, Database Engine, Database Administration, Reporting, even Professional Development).

Seacoast? Isn’t That Kind Of Vague?

There is an area of Maine, Massachusetts and New Hampshire often know as the “Seacoast Region”. That is where we are. We are in Portsmouth, NH (45 minutes from Portland, Maine. 60 Minutes from Boston, MA and 45 Minutes from Manchester, NH). We have an excellent user group in the general region with the “New England SQL Server Users Group“. They meet in Waltham, which for those of us up this way is about a 1.75 hour drive.

Hopefully meeting up here will give a second option for folks who live north of Boston. I will still try and get to many of the New England SQL Server Users Group meetings, always good to be learning.

I Want To Go!

Well – check out the site. For now, send an RSVP e-mail to seacoastsql@straightpathsql.com so we can make sure we are ready for you and have you entered into any giveaway drawings. The first meeting is Tuesday April 13th at 6:00PM (Main presentation starts at 6:30 if you are a bit late, no worries)

I Want To Speak!

Great! Please contact me at that same address above or in the comments below. We are hoping to start off with speakers in the flesh but may also consider remote speakers with live meeting if we need to. As we gain sponsors we hope to be starting a budget to cover travel costs for speakers coming up, including hotel in Portsmouth, NH by fall (A really fun town with some great atmosphere and plenty to do no matter what you are interested in). We are looking for speakers across the spectrum of the SQL Server product line. Let us know and we’ll get you scheduled!

We & Us

This is the user group for the community of SQL Server users in the area described above. I happened to have the idea bouncing around for a few years as I posted last year. I enlisted the help of some great local SQL Server experts to help keep things honest and they and keep things moving along. We may be the folks who got this off the ground and have names in small print on the about us page but this is not our group. Well at least not only ours. This group is for you. We want to see the knowledge level rise all around the area and encourage the sharing of great knowledge and tips all around the local SQL Community.

Have an idea? Let us know. Have a complaint? Les us know. Want to speak for the first time? By all means! One of the things I would like to do (but only if folks think it is a good idea) is try a night where we have a lot of speakers speak for shorter stints to get used to it and get honest and constructive feedback.  Have some content you really want to hear? Please, let us know.

This is going to be fun.

If I am counting right, it looks like 26 separate blog posts were sent in for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday “IO, IO, It’s Off To Disk We Go”

I am still in the process of digesting them all but wanted to at least start the roundup post and at least do a quick scan of each entry, if not read it all. So far it is looking like a lot of great posts that all are worth re-reading. I might even try printing with the option to print all linked articles (never used it before) and have a closer look at these posts on IO.

Thanks for participating! If I somehow missed a post, please leave a comment and I’ll update the roundup and tweet the update out. My late night double check looked like none were missed.

First Time Participants

In no particular order give a big welcome to the T-SQL Tuesday party to the following bloggers who (as near as I can tell) contributed to their first T-SQL Tuesday:

Paul Randal talked about the behind the scenes goings on of a DMV we should all, hopefully, be familiar with – sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats. He relives his “younger” days and talks about where the “WITH FAST” option came from in the older DBCC SHOWCONTIG (Guess who wrote it?)

Michael Zilberstein explores perfmon, io counters and RAID levels in capacity planning. A good read with a good reminder at the end.

Glenn Allen Berry shared some scripts from his impressive (and well known) arsenal of T-SQL scripts to help us detect our IO pressure in SQL Server 2008. Great queries to help see if you are suffering from IO issues or not.

Robert Davis showed us a way to tell if our temporary objects are being stored on disk or in memory. I haven’t had a chance to play with the scripts he shares but it is on my short list of things to play with this week .

Kendal Van Dyke blogged about a topic I was fortunate enough to watch him present on this past weekend at SQL Saturday #33 –> Solid State Drives. This is the start of a new series he is starting, so I suggest you subscribe to his blog in your favorite reader to keep up with his posts. Solid states are here, getting better and we’ll be using the more and more each year.

Jeremiah Peschka went someplace else Great forray into a different Io altogether. Check it out and you’ll see what I mean.

Brent Ozar graced T-SQL Tuesday with his presence through a post about his findings with some Fusion IO drives he got his hands on for testing. Neat stuff but be sure to read about his caveats at the end. The technology is still being ironed out and he discusses some of the risks I have heard from others when it comes to some of the SSD technologies. Still may very well apply to some of your workloads and environments.

Gethyn Ellis took a walk down recent memory lane and gave us some good reminders from his walk. Sometimes it takes an “oops” to learn some key lessons and it’s even better when those lessons are on a test server as Gethyn’s was. I’ll be adding his blog to my feed reader (which in turn means my large blog roll) and I’ll be checking out more posts from him.

Remus Rusanu fit a post about large Service Broker Queues into the theme. He talked about some of the issues affecting them and reminds us that good database maintenance must include queue maintenance in environments with Service Broker.

Brian Henderson works for EMC and likes to blog about storage topics. He posts a link to a document a colleague of his wrote about SQL Server consolidation options. Interesting perspective.

Nicholas Cain Reminded us about the benefit of splitting files and filegroups onto separate spindles. Shows a good way to see what the hogs are with the DMVs. I will be adding this blogger to my blogroll also.

Merrill Aldrich shares some great lessons he picked up while doing a really large storage implementation. He worked with a new EMC symmetrix SAN with some SSDs on board. He got some nice results and his lessons should serve as reminders to all of us.

Stefan Bauer Gave us a blog post as part of an ongoing series he had on Disk Performance. In this post he covers some concepts around some of the performance monitor counters one could look at when analyzing SQL Performance. He also created a poll asking about the type of IO folks use (SAN, Local Disk, iSCSI, etc).

Pinal Dave Joined the T-SQL Tuesday fray (yay!) with a post about Covering Indexes and talks about where and how they can be helpful. He includes a good reminder in his disclaimer – covering indexes are not a one stop shop for all problems. You need to consider all of your workload when looking at indexes.

Denny Cherry is one of the people (like Paul Randal and Kendal Van Dyke, among others) who would make this their first T-SQL Tuesday with this topic. I wasn’t let down. Denny is just as much into storage as he is SQL (maybe even more, Denny?). This post helps show us how to find out where our disk bottlenecks are and how to go about troubleshooting at each area (SQL, Windows, Array)

Experienced T-SQL Tuesday Contributors

Again, in no particular order (just the order I clicked on them in the browser tabs I opened to read all the posts), here are the contributions from the folks who have participated in prior T-SQL Tuesdays:

Brad Schulz – If you’ve read a T-SQL Tuesday roundup before, I don’t have to say anything else. So I lied, I said no particular order but I had to put this one first. It is a long winding read but worth every minute. He takes us on a recursive journey through some CTEs.

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Jason Brimhall reminds us that reducing the IO cost of a query is a worthwhile exercise. He uses a fun example to illustrate this to us. Check out his post and go hunt for the higher IO queries in your own environment. You can do it!

Sankar Reddy started off with a post about log blocks and log block checksums. Not to be outdone (by himself?) he posted a second post about a very important concept, Forwarded Records. Are you suffering from the ill effects of forwarded records? Check out his post and find out.

Aaron Nelson eeked in a bit past the deadline but I let him in with the couple hours of grace period. He was busy the past couple weeks preparing for his multiple sessions at SQL Saturday 33, I’m sure. He combined two themes and posted about an interesting troubleshooting journey and some lessons he learned along the way.

Kalen Delaney agrees with some of the other posters that looking at IO Statistics is a useful tool. Yet with one convincing and simple example, she shows us that they aren’t so useful in isolation these days. I use IO Statistics often when tuning but I also look at the big picture. If you tune to IO only, you can get caught up in trying to tune to lower reads at the cost of CPU or Duration – don’t

Michael Swart goes to the other side of the coin a bit. He talks about his own experiences and that tuning to IO is one of the best ways he has seen to improve query performance. I think if you take his advice, cross apply some of Kalen’s and Rob’s advice you’ll do just fine. I agree with Michael, in the majority of cases I come across, reducing the reads reduces the duration. Just be cautious like Kalen said and don’t go overboard like Rob said.

Rob Farley also weighed in on the whole query tuning to IO question. He showed an example involving string manipulation where more IOs did not equal less duration. In fact the opposite happened. Rob was also the host of T-SQL 003 on Relationships. Check out his roundup to see the posts for that one.

Michael Cole’s article should give you pause if you are presuming your use of Transparent Data Encryption is encrypting your Filestream data. Read his post and see why it isn’t, the picture makes it clear.

Aaron Bertrand has had a great post series on Bad Habits to kick. He added a smorgasbord of bad IO practices to avoid in this installment. He starts off with his thoughts on the points raised by Kalen, Michael and Rob above when he reminds us that Ignoring IO in queries is a bad habit to kick.

Oops! Apparently I missed a post from a twitter friend and SQL geek, Jorge Segarra! Now, technically speaking, it is up to the blogger to ensure that a comment appears on the invite post and post a manual comment if not but I’ll post it because it is a great read. So please, check out his post. He blogged about his experience with a NetApp SAN and he drew important conclusions to bring back to anything you do, really.

Phew!

That was a lot of summarizing. Some really great posts and ensuing discussions from this one. There are actually a few that I’ll be printing out for coworkers to peruse. Some made me laugh, none made me cry. Thanks again to Adam Machanic for thinking up and organizing this concept! It is a lot of fun and I am looking forward to finding out who is hosting next month’s! If you want to participate I suggest you look at the #tsql2sday twitter search stream. If the next organizer doesn’t tweet, I am sure others will when they find out about the topic and dates. You don’t even need twitter to search for the stream. Just click the link. Even better? Just subscribe to the RSS feed for that one search tag here. You will only see new tweets that mention #tsql2sday.

I didn’t get a chance to finish my draft and submit it but it was heading out along the same lines of tune to reads so it was done by some great folks already anyway

Thanks again for participating, feel free to leave any comments about any of the posts or my comments below or on the original posts (or both).

Updated – Removed a post which was potentially plagiarized. See Denny Cherry’s post about this here.

I am sitting in the terminal at Charlotte’s airport waiting for my flight back, it’s a bit delayed so I have time to reflect on a great SQL Saturday. This was my second SQLSaturday and it was a fantastic event. Boston was also great, as I blogged about but I was here a bit longer and had more time to interact with a lot of great speakers and attendees. I also had a great time hanging out wit the folks at SQL Sentry for their first Product Advisory Council meeting.

I am excited to be heading home to my family but it is actually a bit sad leaving some of the great people I got to hang out with. Once again, there were some great speakers (It is intimidating to be speaking at an event with the names who spoke today).

I’m going to take a walk through my weekend with a few lenses. If you are interested, come along for the journey…

Product Advisory Council Meeting

Wow. A great time. I felt a little odd being there with crowd of gurus and MVPs that they had assembled but I wasn’t lost in the conversations. I’ll blog about this a bit more in a separate non-syndicated post since it is related to a product. Suffice it to say, I learned a lot and was able to provide (hopefully meaningful) input. I had a great time hanging out with the team and hitting the speaker party on Friday. What a great time put on by the platinum sponsor of this SQL Saturday – SQL Sentry. Great food and some awesome conversations with some familiar faces from PASS and the blogosphere.

SQL Saturday Presenter

I am balding faster than I realized...

So last month was my first time speaking at a community event and I was a lot more nervous and a bit more rigid then than I was today. I had a really fun time presenting both sessions today. A bit more fun in the first talk (more on that in a second) but the audience was great, the atmosphere was relaxed, I had laughs where I was hoping to, had some good interaction back from all y’alls in the audience.

I know what I need to improve on and am hoping to get some feedback to know what I don’t know I need to improve on but I really want to speak some more, it is a great next step in the learning continuum (I learned preparing, learned through the questions during and after the talks,etc)

First Talk – “As a DBA, Where Do I start?”

If I had to rate myself, I’d say this was the better of the two. I was in a 20 capacity room and the chairs filled up with some folks standing around in the back and sitting on the floor/tables. I liked the smaller room, the fuller feeling room and being closer to the audience made it flow better, I think.

The questions from this talk told me that I was heading in the right direction. I think I might tweak it to include some more demos and perhaps better show a priority of steps. I want to keep doing this chat, there are a lot of accidental DBAs out there.

I need to work on my slide design. I like the minimalist approach and the images I use in this deck to provide some levity (the waterboarding of vendors seemed to be a universally well accepted practice down here) but I want to link back to more points (Like Buck Woody’s checklist for DBAs) and maybe spend some more time on practical aspects, perhaps as a follow on to that conversation. Maybe a screen cast to make.

Second Talk – “You Can Tune Your Own SQL Code”

I saw a fair number of familiar faces in this talk from my first talk. That was nice, made me feel that much better about the first talk and inspire some confidence. That and all the sweet tea cursing through my system (I discovered and fell in love with the stuff down here… Did I mention I don’t get out of New England a whole lot?) made me definitely energetic for this talk. This talk was really crowded, I was a bit late getting over there because of the previous session and I had to fight a crowd to get in. It was a 20 person room but the tables and aisles were well filled. Hoping folks found what they were expecting.

It started out well. I feel like I had some good audience interaction and some good laughter (where I was alright hearing laughter, mind you) and some fun with the crowd. I need to rework and re-rehearse this presentation more, though. My timing of the slides to demos was off, I was too rushed in the demo. I also need to better tweak what I talk about, I only have 60 minutes and I can’t get into every single detail (like the side track on the whiteboard of B-Trees, those kind of discussions can happen later). I think the Phone Book trick worked to help illustrate SARGable queries and I’ll keep that. I will, however, re-time everything and make a better flow. All in all, I don’t think I outright bombed (please leave a comment if I did! It can be anonymous, My speaker rate account is completely anonymous if you prefer- Mike Walsh speaker rate). I had some questions afterwards, requests for cards, etc. but I didn’t feel as good about this one as the first talk. I want to give a better experience for the next time I deliver this talk.

SQL Saturday Attendee

I went to the following sessions:

Kendal Van Dyke (@SQLDBA on twitter) – He gave a talk on an introduction to Blogging and Speaking. He asked me if I would help on the panel but it was all his presentation. It was a great presentation, really shows what our community is about – Community. We don’t want to exclude speakers or bloggers, we want more! I blogged about that in the post series on blogging. A few people in the audience said they would start blogging or speaking. I really hope they do. Great presentation!

Tim Ford (@SQLAgentMan on twitter) – He said he was off because he was sick but he gave a good presentation anyway. He talked about tips for harnessing the power of Lazy as a DBA. Some good tips (including using templates for a baseline server installation process. That is awesome and I have a huge need for that in my day job, I’ll be implementing his idea very soon)

Kendal Van Dyke (again) – He gave a great presentation on SSD storage options with pros/cons and honest feedback/caveats. I haven’t yet played with it and his talk gave me some great food for thought. I was very impressed by his cold reboot mid-presentation. I have never seen a Windows laptop reboot so quick. One thing I may do is change my laptop drive real soon

Jeffry Schwartz – I met Jeffry at the PAC meeting. He is a really thoughtful, intelligent and in tune with performance kind of guy. His talk was great. He didn’t talk a lot about SQL Server but he talked about “performance outside the box”. He got into counters I don’t play with much in perfmon (DPCs, Processor interrupts) and talked about a lot of really good, geeky hardware and OS information. I am used to SQL Server sessions devoted a lot more to performance counters within SQL and SQL performance. Jeffry reminded us of something that should be common sense (but not always is a first instinct for folks) –> sometimes performance problems have nothing to do with SQL. He showed us some tools and tips to help see when someone else on your SAN is the blame, or when the system is to blame or even a driver/NIC configuration. I really hope to see Jeffry speak at the PASS Summit for a longer session.

Going Home Mike

Well that’s it. Going home Mike is tired (the sugar rush from the sweet tea is wearing off), filled with knowledge and excited to speak again. I won’t be doing any SQL Saturday’s until at least fall with baby number 3 (Sam) coming sometime around the end of May. I pay my own way and have a family to support. Plus my time will be devoted to getting the Seacoast NH/ME/MA SQL chapter working with our first meeting coming in April.

I may even to submit a Professional Development chat to PASS or perhaps even a variation of my DBA talk from SQL Saturday.

Again, thanks to the sponsors, this was a memorable time! I stole my picture from this stream: http://sqlsentry.smugmug.com/Events/2010-03-SQLsaturday33/11432245_nDzgG I am hoping they don’t mind

Did you go? What did you go listen to? What did you take away? Let us know in the comments or a post of your own.

Yes, it is already time for T-SQL Tuesday again (well one week away, time for the invite). I have been thoroughly enjoying T-SQL Tuesday (especially the posts ones from Brad Schulz) but the fact that this is #004 means time is flying too fast lately.

You Don’t Know What T-SQL Tuesday Is Yet?

Adam Machanic (Also on twitter as @AdamMachanic) had a great idea 4 months back – Invite new and existing SQL Server bloggers to post about the same topic on the same day. The results have been excellent – diverse skill sets and data related job roles all posting from differing perspectives on the same issue.

Since this is still early in the game, a quick list of the post roundups from the first 3 topics:

• #001 Adam Machanic started this off with a topic of Date/Time tricks
• #002 Adam then wanted to hear about your Puzzling Situations
• #003 Rob Farley got romantic on us and asked about Relationships

IO, IO, It’s Off To Disk We Go!

IO is on my mind lately. It could be some recent “discussions” with a SAN administrator, clients with disk performance issues or helping developers with some queries that are doing lots and lots of needless reads. It could be that I just changed my son’s diaper and it was heavy on the Output side (time to start potty training, I think…)

Actually, as a DBA, IO is often on my mind. So that is what this month’s theme is: IO.

Like last month’s theme, you could treat this topic in a few different ways. Perhaps some best practices that you have implemented for disk allocation. A professional development topic on working better with your storage administrators? A case study with a vendor or type of storage system? A developer writing about better managing reads in your queries? You could brag about your latest experiment with SSDs? Maybe a walk down memory lane of storage performance even. How about writing a beginners guide to setting up optimal storage? Have some really busy SQL Servers running on a virtual? How is your IO configured?

Well, you get the idea, the post has to have something to do with IO but it doesn’t have to be about T-SQL necessarily.

There’s always rules…

Once again, please note the time is in UTC. I also echo earlier encouragements to feel free to write your post ahead of time and schedule it. The rules are around when the post publishes, not when it is written.These rules are the same as the previous couple of T-SQL Tuesday’s but I’ll recap:

1. The Post must go live between 00:00:00 UTC on Tuesday the 9th of March and 00:00:00 UTC on Wednesday the 10th. If it isn’t, it can’t be included in the round up post.
2. Your post must link back to this post here (Trackback or Comment)
3. It is your responsibility to verify the trackback or comment appears (My commenting system has a difficult time with trackbacks – If I can’t resolve it by next week I will disable it and use standard WP comments but please still verify and add your own comment with a link back to your T-SQL Tuesday post and it will be included in the roundup.

That’s it. Hopefully those aren’t too difficult to follow Remember

Twitter

Not a rule but a great idea. A lot of the folks who read and participate are on twitter. Follow the hashtag #TSQL2sDay and when your post goes live, tweet a link to it with that tag.

Want To Host?

All you have to do is participate in at least two events and let Adam Machanic know. You can tweet him or leave a comment on his blog, all described in his first T-SQL Tuesday Invitation.

If you need any more clarification, leave a comment. I will respond in the comments or update this post if necessary. Have fun thinking of a topic and I look forward to reading the posts!

It’s Tuesday somewhere when this post goes up. In fact when this goes live it will be sometime around Tuesday afternoon or evening in Adelaide Australia. Why there? This month’s “T-SQL Tuesday” is being hosted by Rob Farley over at his place. His topic is “relationships”. He talks about the history of T-SQL Tuesday over at his post and I encourage you to check it out.

In honor of Valentine’s day, he wanted us to all chat about relationships with no other specificity other than having some sort of a relationship to our day jobs with SQL Server.  A few directions came into mind, come along on a journey through the rambling thoughts in my mind. Let me know what you think in the comments, I’d love to hear your opinion.

Customer Relationships

This past weekend I experienced some customer service that made me think back to my own abilities in this area (and where I can improve). You might read about another such lesson I learned at my town dump a few months back when posting about the importance of attitude at work. Anyway, I ordered from a smaller pizza store in town. They don’t get a lot of business (new kid on the block) but I wanted a calzone. The former owner (and older Greek man) made a good one with Spinach, Feta, Mushrooms and Kalamata Olives with olive oil and garlic. Called and ordered that. No questions/complaints (Until I got there). To continue the point let me contrast how I came upon this idea of a calzone with the former owner…

A Positive Example

Now the former owner used to have to chop the non-pitted olives up but he offered to do that. In fact when I was first in there and ordered the calzone without the olives he got excited and said something like, “no one up this way ever wants something like that.. they want sauce and pizza cheese.. How about we put some olives in there too?” He made it up, we chatted while it cooked and he took an interest in me. Asked me questions about my family, about living in town, etc. Nothing annoying, nothing prying. He just seemed to care about me. I asked him about business, about Greece and we just chatted between customers picking up orders (Did I mention I live in a small town? Smaller shop, not a lot of business unfortunately.. The popular pizza place has been established by another Greek family for some time and they dominate the “market”). Great Calzone and I ordered it from time to time…

Under New Management

Flash forward to this past weekend. I called up, ordered this calzone for the first time with the new owners (I knew there was new ownership because we ordered a pizza a while back and the young owner was quick to ask “have you been here recently? we have new ownership… I just wanted to let you know our prices went up so you aren’t surprised”). No questions/comments over the phone, I even said “the old owner used to cut up the olives, if you guys can that’s great otherwise don’t worry about it”) When I went to pick it up the owner, his mother and a female employee were lazing about and I was greeted not with a hello but with, “Just so you know… Those olives are expensive, we normally use regular black olives on pizza. Plus there are pits, my mother had to cut them up with a knife.. If we do this for you next time we will have to charge you 1 dollar.” I had already paid and didn’t offer to pay the difference (price was already astronomical ) but I did say, “oh.. sorry I used to get them like that with the other guy”… The response? “Yeah.. That old guy used to always do special requests for customers, that’s one of the reasons he isn’t here anymore, you know?” I didn’t comment on the fact that the “old guy” was just one person working, here is 3 people with one customer.. I just nodded and left, likely for good until this guy goes out of business and new management comes in…

The Day Job Lesson?

Yeah, I know. Conciseness is key but the story above illustrates a few points to remember with the relationship to our “customers”, managers, vendors, etc. As a DBA, the developers are my customers. To a developer, perhaps a DBA can be seen as a consultant or vendor. No matter how you define it, a relationship exists. Customer satisfaction is a good goal. Some thoughts:

• Going the extra mile isn’t always bad – At the pizza place doing extra for each customer may not be wise but every once in awhile? Might make a repeat customer. As a DBA, always doing something extra for every customer may mean a week that never ends. But… There is a happy medium. Where you can do so safely, a little more is a good goal.
• Why are you telling someone the impact to you? I am not saying don’t tell them but ask why. If you are just whining to brag about how you went above and beyond and complain at how horrible it was for you, save it. Save your breath. Just quiet down and go and beat the expectations for the sake of doing a good job.
• Happy Customer – Happy Provider- At the pizza place a happy customer means I’ll go back. As a DBA? Maybe a developer will be more likely to listen to some advice or guidelines if you aren’t always whining, complaining and doing the bare minimum.

Relationships Work

I used a lot of my words in the above post. Just a reminder here that set based logic and normalized databases generally work out just fine. I still hear people come to job interviews and say things like “normalization is a great concept academically” or “I never normalize too far, then there are too many tables”. Blah. Blech, even. I am not saying every database needs to get to the highest level of normalization but go for it and try a higher bit of normalization than you are currently willing to. Performance and Integrity will thank you. Sure, in some cases the read performance might even take a slight, barely noticeable hint. But your maintainability, data integrity and update/insert cost may just improve at the same time for a couple ms here or there.

The rules of normalization still apply (40 years later! That is pretty neat… I work with in 2010 in IT with a technology that is by and large based on the same bedrock that was there before I was born.. not a lot of .net developers can say that and it isn’t “legacy”) and good database design eliminates many performance problems. In fact taking the time to properly design your database today will mean there is a much slimmer chance that you’ll ever need to hire the likes of me to come in on a tuning or “what the heck is happening to data quality!?” project. Louis Davidson (and others) wrote a good book on this subject, Pro SQL Server 2008 Relational Database Design and Implementation , is a great resource (so are his earlier versions). The first section of the MVP Deep Dives book which covers design decisions is worth the price of the book alone (then you get a bonus of a multitude of other, post-design concerns in the book)

Go and read some of the early papers in the life of the database as we mostly know it today, like this paper from E.F. Codd. Heck – spend some time clicking around in Wikipedia even, start in normalization and click on what you don’t know. Then apply some basic principles:

• Normalize your database. Go through the motions and understand normalization and ask the right questions of your data model (joins are not inherently evil, especially in 2010 with DBMS’ and hardware where they are…)
• Define your relationships explicitly at the database level if you care about integrity (sure there are some cases where you may be better served not to but in most databases I have worked with, they would have benefited from integrity and possibly join elimination for some outer joins to dimension tables)
• Model – No, wipe that zoolander face off please… Model your database, define your relationships before you start working. Some seem to have the, “real data professionals don’t do data models” mentality -  That’s bull. (though, I’ve had quiche from time to time, so your mileage may vary).

Check out the rest of the links that will go up on Rob Farley’s SQL Blog at the conclusion of this event. I am sure there will be some great posts (and then there will be some like this random relationship rambling but it will be worth it when you find the good ones)

What do you think? Should us DBAs send Valentines to our developer friends like our kids do at school?

Where does the time go?! January was an incredibly busy month with the day job, home, a battle with the flu and the wrap up of the holidays. It went felt like it took a week to go by but some good news came in January as well. This first week in February, I hope to catch up with a post about the goals for the year, perhaps respond to a meme I was tagged on and get some technical posts queued up for the coming weeks. Until then, a bit of an update:

SQL Saturday

I presented at my first even user community event! I am still here typing after doing so, so the fear, nervousness and anxiety didn’t kill me. I was given some good feedback by people I trust after each talk on some areas to improve but it didn’t seem like I bombed in either talk. Some people sought me out after each thanking me and even had some compliments. I can definitely be more interactive, project my voice better and try and keep the presentations a little bit more dynamic (I had positive feedback with a silly phonebook game I did in one of the talks when talking about SARGability and Indexes). I also have some thoughts on tweaking the DBA talk a bit to help drive the main point home. The slide decks and some other info on the talks are in the presentations area of this site:

• You Can Tune Your Own SQL Code – The beginner level talk aimed to help show that doing some level of tuning isn’t as scary as some make it out to be.
• As a DBA, Where Do I Start? – We setup a scenario at the beginning that puts you into the position of being the only SQL Server DBA at a company. Through that we talk about prioritizing our jobs as DBA as we go through the “itties” of database administration.

Seacoast SQL Server Users Group!

I got a great e-mail from Blythe Morrow at PASS HQ (BlytheMorrow on twitter) welcoming the Seacoast SQL Server Users group to PASS. I still have some finalization with a location and primary sponsor but it looks like our first meeting will be the first or second Tuesday of April on Pease Tradeport in Portsmouth, NH. More coming on this in the coming week or two as more details are finalized. Subscribe to the blog feed to keep up with updates.

An Ultrasound and A Name!

My family and I (Today that set includes a wife, a 4 year old daughter and an almost 2 year old son) got to watch an Ultrasound (I love watching the pictures, especially the 3D… Amazing) on my wife. The Insert statement (Lord Willing) is looking like this INSERT INTO WalshFamily (Name, GoesBy,Gender, DOB, LikesToSleepFlag, CuteFlag) VALUES (‘Samuel’,'Sam’,'M’,’0528ish’,1,1)… Happy news indeed There is talk about another INSERT statement but we have plenty of time to pray and discuss that one. It will be what it will be, though.

SAPpy Love Songs

Well.. Not a lot of love, but it looks like I am now getting my hands very dirty in the area of being a DBA for an SAP implementation. Getting to know the tables (and the big tables), the processes and maintenance on our new GL. We’ll be adding more functionality but for now, I am getting to know the environment closely. Also getting to know a lot of new ETL processes and a team of dedicated ETL developers. It was a busy month but things are stabilizing and we’ll see how it looks when we go through the future phases. I’ve worked with many ERP systems, just never SAP. Great that we are doing SAP on SQL, too bad they planned it before talking to me and missed the opportunity to go 2008 at go live but we can work on that later.

But No Blogging, Tweeting, Etc.

Didn’t really touch the blog this month. I exhausted a couple saved posts early on but didn’t do any updates. I was a bit of a recluse this month. In the coming days, I’ll get a goals post (late but better than never) online. I am expecting to be perhaps speaking at another SQL Saturday or two this year and I will be doing tweaked and (hopefully anyway) improved versions of the two talks I gave in Waltham. 2010 is shaping up to be a fun, busy year.

A Great Idea – #SQLHelp hashtag on Twitter

I was following a conversation today between Brent Ozar, who is @BrentO on twitter and Aaron Nelson, who is @SQLVariant on twitter.

A great idea was discussed: A twitter hashtag that, as Jorge Segarra (or @SQLChicken on twitter) describes it in his blog post, can act like a bat signal.

Brent blogs about using the #sqlhelp hashtag to get help to an immediate concern and lists other options for help that require more than 140 characters.

Check out both blogs. In fact, Brent describes in great detail how to ask for help and I won’t recreate that here. You can tweet me any questions you may have. I’m @Mike_Walsh on twitter.

So that’s reason 1 for writing – To tell you about it.

What’s reason 2?

An add-on idea, or a bad idea?

So there are lots of ways to get help. Serverfault, Stackoverflow, Twitter’s #sqlhelp tag, MSDN Forums, SQL Server Central, Newsgroups (I go there just to watch the Aaron Bertrand/Joe Celko show and answer the occasional question) and even sometime in LinkedIn answers.

Most of these all have something in common: RSS FEEDS.

Why not get them all together and tweet new questions?

So that’s the idea. I am too busy to take it on right now but maybe, if anyone thinks it’s a good idea, someone can take it and run with it. The dream in my head looks something like this:

• A Twitter Account “MSSQLHelp” or something
• That twitter account simply tweets out from an aggregated feed comprised of all of the above feeds new question posts (including the #sqlhelp hashtag)
• Want to get notified of question? Follow that twitter account and put it in it’s own list/group and watch the list/group.
• When a question comes in that someone happens to catch on twitter and knows something about – they can click the link and help the person in whichever forum they asked the question.

Short of the idea?

So if that idea is really bad because I missed all of the finer points and details (or it just falls on it’s face) that’s fine. You can at least sign up the RSS feeds of your favorite locations to get and give help and see the questions as they come in. I need to be a little better at this. I am not the highest degree SQL Server guru-belt out there but I do enjoy helping with questions when I can.
That’s it.. Like the idea? Steal it, claim it and do it. Don’t like it, well like Brent and I said in the first part of our video interview on blogging (on Brent’s site), even negative comments can be better than no comments

Welcome to the final post in my series on metablogging topics. We started with a post on my site called “Why Should I Blog?“, which went live the same time as the first part of the below video interview with Brent Ozar. That first video interview went live on Brent Ozar’s Blog.The text series finished up here with the second post, “How Should I Blog?” on my site.

Today – there isn’t much reading to do, just some watching and listening (well maybe you should just listen). This video is about 16 minutes long and it discusses some tips and tricks around blogging and Brent’s experiences with blogging. Some links related to what we discussed are below the video.

[See post to watch Flash video]