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!

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.

As we approach the end of 2009,  I want to give myself a review on where I have been, what I have done and where I can grow next year from a SQL Server consultant point of view.

Part Time – Enough Time For Fun

As I have posted before and explain on the about us or services page, StraightPath is a part time venture I started to give a venue to use my experience to help companies having challenges with SQL Server. This year I was able to help more organizations, offer some one off advice through e-mail and delivered a few onsite mentoring engagements. Not bad for “spare time” – I have enough vacation time to get to travel for a couple clients and spend time off with the family.

2009 Highlights

Prior to 2009, I had a couple core clients with small interactions. It was more advice over the phone and remote work checking server health and giving advice on performance problems. They were mostly Remote DBA/Remote “Performance isn’t what it should be, Help!” engagements.

In 2009, I had the opportunity to continue this same work with some core clients but also expand out to offer some training over conference calls and in person and work with a very large client subcontracting on a performance and DBA/Development best practices mentoring engagement.

Some of the highlights, I would use in my own “self review”:

• This Blog – I started this around Christmas of 2008 and the primary focus is not the business. In fact this is really the first post about that since this blog’s inception. This is a great way for me to share and give back to the SQL community. Readership has been increasing slowly but steadily (up to around 3,000 unique a month, not bad for me) and I have 50 more RSS subscribers than I thought I would (plus a lot of viewers from the syndicated blog on SQLServerPedia)
• Articles/Wiki Articles – I submitted an article on Troubleshooting to SQLServerCentral and either wrote from scratch or adapted from this blog several wiki articles on SQLServerPedia (Shrinking, SP_Configure, Multiple Instances are the ones that come to mind first). Some of the work was included in “Best Of” publications from each site.  Going from having never written for the community to writing two articles worthy of inclusion with great content in these print publications was humbling.
• Week Long Mentoring Engagement – I was able to travel to Mexico to work with a large manufacturing client for a week. They were experiencing performance issues that had significant price tags associated through the downtime. Through analysis, interviews and research I was able to find and repair (with them, teaching the staff the how and why) several pieces of low hanging fruit. I also ended the week with an impromptu course on Database Administration, Performance Minded Development and some best practices that were relevant to their environment and my findings. The questions were great, showed me that knowledge from the week was being accepted, stored and used.
• Custom Course on Database Administration – One of my longer term clients who have been engaging me as a remote DBA had a budget to bring me onsite this year. I was able to teach a 3 day course on Database Administration concepts in SQL Server, Performance monitoring and performance tuning for some of the development staff. The class was tailored to what I knew they needed and tips and tricks for their environment.
• Several production systems are running a bit faster – Through working with various clients and giving advice, quick courses to development staff and assisting with production configurations and rollouts there are systems at several organizations running either better than they were before or running for the first time with best practices kept in mind.

2010 Goals

No review is complete without talking about where you want to go next. This won’t necessarily be my complete list of blogging goals, etc. I am sure there will be a meme of resolutions floating around come new years eve and I will probably join in.

Where do I want StraightPath to go next, though? I don’t know what the long term plans are for StraightPath Solutions.  For now, I  have some great colleagues in the full time role and it is comfortable and convenient. So what are some shorter term goals for StraightPath?

• Build on the successes of 2009 – I want to continue helping the existing clients that have all been gained through referral. Along with them, I would like to work with at least 2-4 more clients in 2010. And for those clients?
• Focus more on mentoring – Yes, some clients just need help and answers and they would rather just rely on a consultant than a full time resource due to budget, timeline, or other concerns. I will still work well with them. That being said, I want to focus on engagements where I can share knowledge and become a mentor and then a trusted advisor allowing the client to use those skills I shared.

The rest of the goals are all around community, blogging, personal goals and those will find a home in a later post this week.

Hello and welcome to Mike’s blog. If you are here visiting from the Quest Connect Presentation, please be sure to check out my blog post that contains resources based on the topic, links to the twitter handles of all those on the round table as well as some links to a white paper on I/O best practices and some resources here on this blog that may be of interest, especially to a DBA just starting out.

“Free SQL Training Online – Wednesday 10/21/09″

Where?

Quest Connect is an online series of webcasts on various topics. Some are pre-recorded (like the session that I did.. more on that later…). They have web casts on a variety of topics, not just SQL. You can look at the on demand topic listing here to see all the chats that will be available on demand. There will also be several live web casts with Q&A, etc. You can see those here.

What?

Live SQL Webcast Monday 10/@10:00AM EDT

There is one Live Webcast with Q&A on SQL Server (“A Sysadmins guide to SQL Server“) at 10:00AM EDT. The hosts will be such experts as Brent Ozar (Blog/Twitter), Thomas LaRock (Blog/Twitter) and Tim Ford (Blog/Twitter). This will be great for those reluctant DBAs (you know, you’re a server admin or windows admin, you help out on the SAN, you have to manage SQL.. you do it all but you are scared every second).

Pre-recorded sessions (including one with me)

These will be available from 4AM on 10/21 –> 4AM on 10/22 (times are in EDT)

You can see the full catalog of sessions for all subject areas here. The ones specific to SQL Server are:

• “Top 10 SQL Server Administration Mistakes” – I’ll talk in more depth about this one below.
• “Understanding Execution Plans” – With Grant Frtichey (Blog/Twitter) They aren’t that scary. Watch a scary DBA walk you through how easy they can be if you just know what to look for!
• “The top 5 things you can do with Litespeed for SQL Server to be a backup and recovery hero” – A title after my own heart: it’s long…  Quest puts these things on for us for free so it’s only natural to have some talks about how their products can help. Litespeed is a great tool (not paid to say it, don’t use it currently but have in other environments). Learn about this great backup tool and I am sure that Brent will give some good backup/recovery advice at the same time. Brent Ozar and Jason Hall will present this one.

Why did they ask me to help?

I guess I’ve blogged about a few worst practices (Shrinking anyone?, Shoot From the hip much anyone?) so I was asked to help participate in the “Top 10 SQL Server Administration Mistakes” chat. This was a fun recording and is a great conversation with a few folks much smarter than me – Kevin Kline (Blog/Twitter), Colin Stasiuk (Blog/Twitter) and Jason Strate (Blog/Twitter) and myself about mistakes we have done, seen and had to help fix in our careers.

We’ll walk through a PowerPoint of 10 mistakes that DBAs often make when working with SQL Server. They range from issues like considering disk options based on space needs only, shoddy troubleshooting, not embracing change control (maybe embrace is too strong a word ) to bad thinking with backup and recovery.

It was an informative talk, I learned a few things on the talk myself and you’ll even hear an epiphany moment where three of us picked up a great tip around change control/rollback steps. A real “Why didn’t I think of that…” moment.

I hope you register for Quest Connect and check out all of the videos and I hope you check out the conversation that Kevin, Colin, Jason and myself had around DBA “stuff”, might help you out, might start a conversation.

Resources for the presentation I was a part of:

First of all: Comments. If you have any questions on the parts of the conversation I was in, you can hit me up on twitter but I don’t get there much on most weekdays. Leave a comment on this post if it is a question that others might benefit from or add insight into. Send me an e-mail if you want to talk out of the comment thread instead.

I hope you check out the blogs of all of those who participated, I gave links above. You can also go to SQLServerPedia where all of our blogs are syndicated and search blogs and SQL wiki articles on a topic you want to know more on.

If I remember correctly, I mentioned the SQL Server 2000 I/O Best Practices document. It is not 100% applicable to 2005/2008 but the basic concepts largely remain true and this is a good resource.But instead of linking you there, check out this document from Microsoft which is more recent and it references that SQL 2000 document as a resource at the bottom.

I also suggest visiting the SQLCAT team website with their best practices, great resource. If you don’t own the Inside SQL Server 2005 series, you should. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Internals is also a great resource. These books go into a lot more depth on a lot of the areas we talked about.

There are also some blog topics on my blog that are related to what we talked about:

• Advice to beginning DBAs wondering, “Where do I start?!?!”
• Shrinking – several posts on the topic.
• Troubleshooting Methodology Woes (I also wrote an article for SQL Server Central on this topic)
• Empirical Evidence
• Documentation (or how I learned to stop procrastinating and love tolerate a chore necessary task)
• A little Paranoia and Control Freak attitude can help a DBA
• Checklists, Recipes and Algorithms – Learning about these great tools from other professions (Pilots, Chefs and Doctors) 
• How do I find all of my SQL Servers? – Maybe after listening to us you’ll want to spend more time with the instances at your network. Check this link out to learn about a tool that I use to find all the SQL Servers in my network.
• Questions to ask a software vendor – Working with a new vendor with their own database? Here are some questions I ask them.

Thanks for listening, thanks for stopping by to check out the blog. I hope you visit the other guy’s sites also. Lots of information and like I said, SQLServerPedia is a great place to find info. There are a lot of great bloggers there. I also have a lot of bloggers I read in my blogroll.

I was in a company offsite meeting yesterday so I missed the fanfare on twitter and the blogosphere about the opening of the call for speakers.

Brent Ozar blogged about it, Thomas LaRock blogged about it… Countless others on my blogroll also blogged about it. The bottom line is go to the PASS speaker resources site for more information on what you need to do to present.

I submitted a session to PASS for the first time. Not sure if it will be accepted but if not it’s a topic I have been hinting around about on this blog and hope to present a smaller version to local user groups.. Here is the abstract I submitted for the professional development track:

Iceberg, Dead Ahead!

What does a plane crash have to do with technical skills? You might be surprised…

There are many lessons to be learned from disasters and our response to them. Most accidents are caused not by a single factor, but by a series of seemingly-small missteps. It’s the same in our offices: carelessness or complacency can lead to a resume-altering disaster. Even if a freak accident occurs, training and preparation can make a difference in the outcome.

In this session we’ll dig deep into some real-life disasters and see what lessons we can take back to our day jobs. We’ll explore corollaries between the news stories and those heart-pumping times when our cubes are filled with VPs and CIOs.

Fasten your seatbelts as Mike Walsh takes us on a journey through the headlines in search of a healthy respect for the unexpected.

I hope to dissect a handful of disasters that fall into different categories, walk through what happened in the real world incidents (one of my favorite shows when we still had cable was seconds from disaster, combine that with the background of having been a volunteer firefighter/emt and now working at an insurance company: I enjoy studying disasters.) From there we will look at the correlation to our careers (and perhaps even our personal lives).

I will probably have it be mostly a presentation style but will also do some audience discussions where we can talk about lessons and “action items” to take back to our companies when we head home from the Summit.

(P.S. Full Disclosure: This year I am helping SQL PASS on the program Committee, working on abstract selection. I have recused myself from voting on my own abstract)

Adam Mechanic over on his blog has announced a code camp offered by Microsoft, and the New England and New Hampshire SQL Server User Groups. Looks like a great time of learning and the price is right