I just received 35 speaker evaluations from SQL Saturday #60 in Cleveland. It was a great event (although I had a hard time getting there) and I really enjoyed giving my presentation on “Gathering and Interpreting Performance Metrics†(a warm-up presentation of part of my SQL Rally pre-con). Feedback is a wonderful gift. Thanks to everyone who filled out the eval and especially to those who commented. The evals have six questions and an area for comments. The questions are rated from Very Poor to Excellent. I’ve decided to assign them number values from 1-5. The overall average is 4.82. Here are the breakdowns per question: How would you rate the usefulness of the session information in your day-to-day environment: 4.79 How would you rate the Speaker’s presentation skills: 4.85…
Automation is the separation point for the professional DBA from the amateur. That makes this a very important topic. Thanks to Pat Wright (blog|twitter) for coming up with something great to write about and hosting the event. I recently wrote an article for the SQL Spackle series over on SQL Server Central on how to “Set Up and Schedule a Server Side Trace.†That covers well what to do to set up a trace on your system so that you can automate it. But I think I left out a few details that I think are worth pointing out here. The basics on creating the Server Side Trace using Profiler and scheduling it using SQL Agent are well covered in the article. The extra areas I want to address are…
First, let me thank Erin Stellato (blog|twitter) and all the volunteers for running such a great event. Nicely done. This event was to be my very first walk on to the public stage as a Red Gate employee, so I was excited about getting there. About 10 minutes before I left for the airport, I got a call from the airline. My flight had been cancelled, but no worries, they rescheduled everything for me. Instead of flying to LaGuardia and then on to Cleveland, I would fly past Cleveland to Chicago and then back to Cleveland, getting there at 7:30PM instead of 4:30PM. Ah well. What are you going to do. I’d prefer not to go to Chicago, but everything should be fine… The plane was supposed to leave Chicago…
Andy Warren has posted another one of his excellent summaries of what’s going on at the PASS Board. Andy, thanks for what you do. Those of us who care about what goes on at PASS really appreciate your posts. The discussion under consideration this time is the location of the PASS Summit. As you may be aware, it’s been held in Seattle for several years now and will be there for at least two more years going forward. It seems that the board is leaning, extremely heavily, towards making it a permanent fixture in Seattle. I can see why they might do this. First, and biggest, it’s next door to Microsoft. That means the Summit gets tons and tons of Microsoft Employees in attendance, which is a huge draw and…
The SQL Saturday #71/New England Data Camp #3 call for speakers has been open for quite a while. But, we had not yet sent out an official request. That email has now gone out the door. Here it is for those who might be interested in presenting. Please consider this your personal email: Let me tell you a little bit about our event. Last year we had over 300 attendees. We plan on doing that well again this year. That’s a guaranteed audience for your presentation. We’re holding the conference in the Microsoft offices on Jones Road in Waltham. The venue is well appointed and set up for presentations. We’re already gathering sponsors from all over the country and the region. It’s going to be a great event. Please submit…
Sounds like a good action adventure movie. The theme this month on TSQL Tuesday, thanks to our host, Jen McCown (blog|twitter) of SQLawesomesauce, is Resolutions. In particular, Techie Resolutions. I have to do this because Jen just received her MVP award, in case you’ve been under a rock since last week. I’m not a resolutions kind of guy. I tend to make plans. The plans might start on January 1st, or they might start as soon as they lawyers are done making up the contract. I’m not hung up on schedules except as they relate to due dates. For example, when submissions are due for the PASS Summit or something along those lines, then I’m date driven. In other words, I don’t sit down New Year’s Day or New Year’s…
I got my FreeCon. What's more, I did it in public and didn't get in trouble. FreeCon is the brain child of Brent Ozar (blog|twitter). Basically Brent gathered together a few bloggers & writers from the SQL Server community, some extremely well known, like Tom LaRock (blog|twitter), some in the middle, like me, and others that are clearly up & coming like David Stein (blog|twitter). He jammed us all in a room and made us talk to one another. OK, that's a lie. He invited us out to this lovely little poetry space in Seattle the day before the PASS Summit was due to start, where we imbibed good food & coffee and had the opportunity to share a lot of great information with each other. The basic concept was…
Or, another way to put it, in most cases, shooting yourself in the foot. I was not aware that the cumulative update for SQL Server 2008 back in June included a switch that allows you to turn parameter sniffing off within SQL Server. Thanks to Kendra Little (blog|twitter) for letting me know about it (although she let me know by "stumping the chump" during my lightening talk at the Summit, thanks Kendra!). When I first saw the switch, I thought about the places where switching off parameter sniffing could be helpful. But, as I thought about it, the more I realized that this was an extremely dangerous switch. Why? Because, most people only ever hear about parameter sniffing when they run into a problem. Someone says "Parameter sniffing" and you see people cringe.…
 Quote: "Database stuff, all this programming stuff, is easy. Anyone can do it. That's why everyone in the company has sa privileges." For nine months, I worked in an environment where everyone, from developers to QA to the sales people to the receptionist, had SA privileges. You know what? DBA skills are necessary. I speak from the point of view of someone that has had to recover a server after a salse person helpfully "cleaned up the temporary stuff on the server" by dropping tempdb, causing a late deployment for a client. I speak from the point of view of the guy who kept a window open on his desk with the database restore script ready to run, all day long, because of "accidents" that stopped development until I could get the…
I am not a Reporting Services guru and nor do I play one on TV. I am however forced to be all things Microsoft Data where I work. So I frequently find myself stretching way beyond my abilities. I just had to get a report running that feeds from a web service and has a recursive hiearchy with customized aggregation on multiple fields with drill down to a different set of details. Yeah, through the internet I can see the SSRS monsters rolling their eyes at the ease of this task. But for us mere mortals it was work. Since I spent so much time learning how to do it, I thought I'd share. XML as a Source First, because we have a very paranoid (and appropriately so) group of…