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…
Today is Dr. Dewitt. The ballroom, where the keynotes are held, is filled with extra chairs. The Summit organizers expect extra attendance today, and well they should. Dr. Dewitt was amazing last year. I suspect this year will be more of the same. Rick Heiges is introducing the day (waiting for Dr. Dewitt). Lynda Rab is leaving the board. Sad. I started volunteering for the PASS organization working for Lynda. She's great. The new board members are Douglas McDowell, Andy Warren and Allen Kinsel. The spring SQL Rally event was announced. I'll be presenting a full day session on query performance, Query Performance Tuning, Start to Finish. Look for (a lot) more blog posts on this. The Summit next year has been moved to mid-October. WHOOP! This is great because…
Ted Kummert is still talking. For the cloud, of course, they're talking about SQL Azure. Microsoft really is throwing themselves into the cloud, completely. The emphasis is that they offer both a cloud and an on-premises solution. I don't mind saying, I'm still trying to get the full business proposition for an old school, fat, business like the one I work for. What should we be doing with the cloud. I just haven't seen the magic. I see where smaller businesses, or start-ups, or temporary surge capacity for businesses that may have that type of thing can use the cloud, but... traditional work, it just doesn't seem to jive yet. We're going to see some made-up scenarios for how Azure can manage Contoso Bikes. He shows how the report can…
 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…
Blogging has been a bit quiet of late. That's because I've been spending a lot my spare time getting ready for presentations that I have to give. Two of them are in about two weeks. First, and this one is going to be a big deal, is 24 Hours of Pass: Summit Preview. At the PASS Summit this year I have two spotlight sessions, both on tricks and tools for tuning queries, one on using execution plans and the other on using DMVs. Since the 24HOP presentation is supposed to be a lead-in to the PASS presentations, I decided that before you started tuning queries, you need to know which queries to tune. The presentation is titled: Identifying Costly Queries. I understand there are already nearly 2000 people registered. Let's…
Tom Casey of Microsoft on BI. 20% of people that are decision makers within organizations have the tools and information they need. That means that 80% don't have it. I believe those numbers. Microsoft is very focused on getting BI built into the information platform. You can tell from the stuff released in SQL Server 2008. Part of the proof he's putting out is the PASS Summit itself. There's 2 dedicated BI trackes, 50+ sessions, and 30% of attendees said they were interested in that track. For some information Ron Vanzanten. He's sporting identical clothing to Tom Casey. 4 million card holders and 3200 employees. They'll be working through 600,000 credit card applications in a month. Woof. 24tb of customer data in a SQL Server BI environment. Woof X2. Unfortunately,…
Bob Muglia opened with January 13, 1988, when the Microsoft Sybase Ashton-Tate SQL Server program was launched. Apparently Bill Gates was very nervous about the speech at the time, but Steve Ballmer jumped up and down like a chear-leader. WOW. He's holding a box with 51/4 and 31/2 inch floppy disks (yeah, I'm old enough to know what he's talking about, kids, ask your grand-dad). Mr. Muglia just said that there were limitations to the product. That's an odd thing to hear from a software company. Nice to hear it though. He's showing how 128 differnt machines can be added to the system. They've got some kind of load generator that is maxing out 128 processors. Then they jumped it up to 192 processors. You'd be surprised how little space…
I keep seeing these concepts that have long been disproven, posted again and again on newsgroups as if they were valid information. The latest? Table variables are better because they're only in memory where as temporary tables write to the disk through tempdb. This one is abjectly wrong. I'm not even going to hedge with "it depends." From a macro point of view, there are only a few differences between temporary tables and table variables, statistics being the biggest. Temporary tables have 'em and table variables don't. Other than that, both will reside completely in memory or will swap out to the disk through tempdb, depending on their size. Some of the minor differences, and why you might want to use table variables over temporary tables, table variables won't cause a statement recompile while temporary tables will, table…
Or, as you should tell your boss, 24 hours of free training by many of the leaders of the industry presenting original sessions that will teach you about topics from SSIS to Spatial Data to Index Selection to CLR performance to... well, you get the idea. This shouldn't be a hard sell for anyone to their boss. "Hey, remember that problem we had the other day with the database that was in simple recovery mode? Yeah, well, Kalen Delaney is presenting for an hour on just that topic." Your follow-up question to the boss, should then be, not, can I, but "Do you want me to get a meeting room and project this for everyone?" Developers, designers, architects, administrators, and managers are going to be able to find something interesting…
I'm a bit of an old school geek, I prefer stone knives & bear skins... “So You’re On A Deserted Island With WiFi and you’re still on the clock at work. Okay, so not a very good situational exercise here, but let’s roll with it; we’ll call it a virtual deserted island. Perhaps what I should simply ask is if you had a month without any walk-up work, no projects due, no performance issues that require you to devote time from anything other than a wishlist of items you’ve been wanting to get accomplished at work but keep getting pulled away from I ask this question: what would be the top items that would get your attention?† Brent Ozar has passed me this interesting little question, and called me a noob…