Get a better name Define my personal goals for the course I won’t be sharing these with you. I may share them with my Inner Circle (defined below). I’m thinking this is a 2-3 year commitment I’m making. I need to have my own set of measurements to ensure that this will be worth the time and effort that I’m putting into it. Define a set of principles and goals for the course I want this course to have meaningful aim. It’s not, absolutely not, about management. Management and Leadership are two different things. This is about being a leader. It must have a purpose. The goals defined here, and like everything else, subject to change over time, will set the tone for each of the other choices. Here's another…
The one absolute promise I made about serving on the PASS Board is that I would let you know what I was doing there. Well, we're two weeks in and I figured now was a good time for a report. Next week is my first board meeting (and I will report back on how that goes). I'll be presenting the goals I've worked up for the Chapters and see how many of them we can get approved and then how many of them we can deliver. In the time I've had on the board so far, a big part of what I've been doing is learning about what has gone before. What kind of goals did we have for last year. Which of them were delivered. Which weren't. Why. What's…
For the first time ever at the PASS Summit, a competition was held to select a speaker for the 2015 Summit. This competition was organized and run by Denny Cherry. You can read all about what he thought of the event right here. I was asked to take part as a judge. I was on the panel for all the preliminaries and then sat in the room for the final. Here's what I thought of the event. First off, thank you to the PASS organization for taking a chance. This is a deviation from the way things have been done. Trying new things can be difficult, but the organization stepped right up and supported this addition to the rich pageant that is the Summit. Second, I want to thank Denny…
Since I'm starting on the board in January, I've stopped taking part in the bloggers table during keynotes. First time since they had a bloggers. But, I am going to blog through the Women in Technology (WIT) Luncheon because I just love getting to take part in this amazing event. For the luncheon this year, they have changed the format. Instead of a panel, they're just talking to some really interesting people who have been doing amazing stuff supporting growth of women within STEM types of work and education. First up is Kimberly Bryant, the founder of a non-profit organization called Black Girls Code. She started out trying to build a for-profit startup, but when she found that there just weren't that many women in technology. But when her daughter…
I have a pre-con coming up at the PASS Summit. You can read about it here. I named it "Query Performance Tuning in SQL Server 2014" because it seemed like a good idea to bring out the aspects of 2014, and we will. But, I need to tell you, this is primarily a session about query performance tuning in SQL Server, full stop. I'm going to cover information that's applicable all the way back to SQL Server 2000 and 2005. The majority of the information will be applicable to 2008 and up. I'm going to go over the things you can do with dynamic management views to pull information about queries to tune right out of the cache. That's applicable to more than 2014. We're also going to go over…
Some of the new functionality of 2014 is straight forward, non-controversial and easily welcomed by the community. Think, updateable column store indexes. Some of the new functionality is going to raise an eyebrow or three (most of the time, not on one person, but you know the #sqlfamily, we have some interesting mutations represented). Think... managed backups. Now, why on earth would a process that takes backups for you, including log backups, does it automatically per a schedule and/or when data has changed sufficiently, stores it offsite for protection and is easy to set up and maintain going to cause so much controversy? Hey, I'm wrong, it won't, move along... Or, maybe, I'm right, and this is going to raise more than eyebrows. We're talking about surrendering control over your…
Microsoft keeps sneaking little things under the door for Windows Azure SQL Database. This time it's a couple of new views, a system view and a Dynamic Management View (DMV); sys.resource_stats and sys.dm_operation_stats. But, I also learned another fun fact, not all this stuff rolls out at the same speed. For example, if I run sys.resource_stats on a database on a server located in the North Central US data center, the output looks like this: But, if I run the same query against the same view with a database in a data center in East Asia (I experiment with where I put things), it looks like this (click on it to expand it, probably want to do that into a second tab or window so you can refer to it…
Learning new things can be daunting. First, you have to come up with the spare time. Then you have track down resources. For computers, computing and programming, this is both extremely easy and extremely difficult. That difficulty is especially true when it comes to gathering resources for learning things that, while you learn, are potentially going to cost you money. It's a difficult decision to make to risk cash on exploring a new technology. Here's the good news, for several reasons, you don't need to sweat this to get going with Windows Azure SQL Database (WASD). A couple of years ago Jamie Thompson (b|t) set up an account on Azure, all on his own, that allowed people to connect up to it and play with a copy of the AdventureWorks…
Let's be honest. Database administration is not all that tough. Set up your backups. Test them. Get consistency checks on line. Some maintenance routines for statistics and maybe for fragmentation are also helpful. Set up security. In most of the important ways, you're done. Sit back, monitor the whole thing and collect your paycheck. BWA-HA-HA! Yeah, well, it's a nice dream. The reality is that you're dealing with constant change that throw this simple set of maintenance monitoring tasks into the garbage. No, you've got new databases under development. Sometimes by development teams that are absolute rocket scientists and you sit at their feet learning how they did some really cool piece of code. And sometimes by development teams that more resemble crazed monkeys throwing poo at the walls to…
Welcome to Teched 2013 We're starting off with some type of James Bond video. Chase scene with a really cool car. Not quite French Connection, but good. OK, that was, if a little ballsy, "you'll never crack it" Jeez, how to upset people. And the car from the video drives out on stage. And that is Brad Anderson arriving. Guy7 looks like he does crossfit. "We spend our time making other people great" He's laying out the path of the future and, shock of shocks, he said SQL. Out loud. On stage. Twice. That's pretty cool. SQL Server often feels like a red-headed step child. Iain McDonald, comes out to introduce information about Windows Core. The OS covers everything from the phone to tablets to xbox to your servers. The…