Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Congrats Summit 2015 Speakers

    I'm Speaking Graphic_SmallThe PASS Summit 2015 Speaker list has been released and I wanted to congratulate everyone that was accepted. It’s a great honor and I’m proud to be on the list once again.

    I also apologize to everyone that submitted and wasn’t accepted. I hadn’t planned on submitted, but part of my job is speaking to the community. I was asked to submit sessions, which I did. Of the three I submitted, one was accepted.

    I saw a post from Mark Broadbent (@retracement) today that talks about his submission experience this year. He’s spoken at the Summit before the Rally, and numerous SQL Saturdays. He’s got experience and success as a speaker. It’s hard to call a single session selection a failure, and I hope Mark doesn’t feel that way.

    It’s Not You

    One of the things I’d like to say is that if you submitted a session and weren’t picked, it’s not necessarily you. This is certainly true for the Summit, but the same thing can apply at SQL Saturdays or other events.

    I’m sure you doubt I know what I’m talking about, and that might be true, but I certainly understand how you feel. I’ve received two rejections this year from events that didn’t like my submissions. It’s tough, and it can be a blow to your self-confidence, but it’s not necessarily you.

    Don’t get me wrong. It could be. Please solicit feedback from the organizers and friends about your submissions. There might be things that you are doing poorly, and if so, you should learn to do a better job at writing abstracts, and a better job of speaking. I regularly ask people what they thought of my talks, and I’m happy to go watch and give feedback to others as well.

    I’m sure some of you have heard of, or seen spoofs, of medical school grading where professors start a test letting students know that there will be x As, y Bs, z Cs, i Ds, and j Fs. In other words, a forced ranking where you must compete in order to succeed. That’s the PASS Summit submissions, but in a more complex scenario.

    You might submit a great abstract, on an outstanding topic. Maybe you’re a SQL Server memory guru and you want to put in a 400 level internals talk on memory pressure. Great. But if Adam Machanic submits on a similar topic, I bet you don’t get picked.

    In the various areas, sessions are ranked, and no matter how good a job you do, it’s possible you’ll get beat out by someone else. That’s not to say it’s hopeless. I believe that some slots are reserved for first time speakers (to the Summit, not in general), but it does mean that your abstract needs to be good AND not have great competition in your topic area.

    Submitting to the Summit and getting picked is a bit of a lottery. It helps to speak at multiple other events (user groups, SQL Saturdays, etc), and get some reputation, but it’s also important to pick topics that will be both interesting and don’t have lots of competition. It also becomes important to write a great abstract, and if you need help, read Adam Machanic’s post on this topic.

    Above all, don’t get discouraged. Get help in putting your submission together. Ask friends, ask colleagues, ask your family and read what others have done. Pick a topic area you’re comfortable with and try to find a niche that minimizes competition. Above all, make sure you get feedback from PASS and try to use that to tailor the next submission.

    You can do it. We see more and more new speakers every year, and you have a better chance if you think about how to best present yourself to the world.

  • The First SQL Saturday in South Dakota

    There have been so many SQL Saturday events in many places, and in most of the US states, but there are a few that have never had an event. One more state gets its first event this July, with SQL Saturday #427 in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

    I’m proud to be speaking at the event, and I just finished booking my travel. I’ve never been to South Dakota, so I’m looking forward to wandering around a bit on Friday before we kick off the first SD SQL Saturday on July 18, 2015.

    I’m going to be talking about Continuous Integration in the afternoon, but there are some other great sessions. Learn about baselines, Service Broker, Auditing, SSAS, Stress testing, Reporting, and more.

    If you’re anywhere nearby, make some plans now to get to Sioux Falls in July for some SQL Server education.

  • #SQLNewBlogger

    In April, Ed Leighton-Dick set up a challenge to motivate new bloggers to begin writing about their knowledge of SQL Server. This is a passion of mine, and I believe this is one of the ways you can truly help interest potential employers in your work. It’s allows them to perform some due diligence, and I’ve had success in my career with employers being impressed with the knowledge I’ve shared through blogging.

    Ed made note of a new Twitter hashtag, #SQLNewBlogger, and there were a few people that participated in the challenge. However, there weren’t enough. I was really hoping to see more people join in, start blogging, and showcasing their knowledge. Therefore, I’m making an appeal here.

    Let’s extend the SQLNewBlogger. I’d like to change the rules a bit and see if I can motivate a few of you to start building your communication skills and showcasing your knowledge across the next year. Just like a class at a gym can motivate you to try harder and longer than you might otherwise, I’m hoping the #SQLNewBlogger tag can do that.

    If you’re thinking of asking for a raise, or looking for a new job next year, in 2016, do these things now:

    1. Set yourself a weekly reminder, and appointment, at a time when you can spare 15-30 minutes. Use this time to work on communicating, through writing.
    2. Get yourself a note taking system. You can use OneNote, Evernote, Remember the Milk, or Notepad. As you write queries, set up a system, or solve a problem, make a note of what you did. Pull out that list each week when the reminder you set in #1. Completely ignore anything anyone else has written on your subject and write your own thoughts.
    3. Make it a goal to get a 1-2 page post done each month. I’d like to think that in 1-2 weeks you can get one done, but find your pace.
    4. Use the #SQLNewBlogger tag to ask for help reviewing your post (you want good quality) and then finish one post a month. If you’d rather do this privately, have a friend review your work.
    5. You can get a free blog at WordPress, TypePad, Blogger, etc. You can choose to write and safe drafts forever, or publish posts for potential recruiters and employers to learn about your skills.
    6. Let us know what you wrote about. Either a link if you’ve published it for us to see, or a title if you keep the content private.

    That’s it. If it sounds like a lot, I’d remind you this is asking for 1-2 hours a month. 12-24 a week, to showcase your knowledge, grow your career, and maybe most importantly, improve your ability to write a sentence. We communicate constantly in this business, despite all the code we write, so learn to do it better.

    Next year, whether you publish publicly or not, you’ll have 12 things that show you have some knowledge about SQL Server. I’ve got a few references on setting up a blog, choosing topics, and writing better.

    I’d also like my fellow bloggers to encourage and cheer on the people making an effort to share some knowledge and grow their careers.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 4.6MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

  • Adding Extended Properties to a Table

    Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.

    I had the need recently to get put an extended property on a table in a database. I could easily have done this in SSMS, and have used the GUI before, but since I wanted to make a number of changes for testing, I wanted this done programmatically.

    I knew there had to be an easy way to do this, and was hoping for an ALTER TABLE statement, but that’s not the way it works right now. There’s an sp_addextendedproperty procedure that you can use.

    This procedure is somewhat of a generic procedure that takes a number of parameters, which are used to specify where the extended property applies. There is a name and value of the property, essentially a key-value pair, and then there are 3 levels of properties you can specify.

    Each of the levels has a name and type as well, so this is almost like a hierarchical EAV table. It’s a bit of a mess, IMHO, but that’s OK. It’s nice to have the ability to use Extended Properties for objects, though I wish this were better implemented at different levels and embedded as a core part of your database. The levels are

    • Level0 – Should be used for database scope items. For our purposes, we will use SCHEMA as the type here.
    • Level1 – The next level and should be the type of object getting the property (table, view, procedure, etc.)
    • Level2 – The level that gives the part of the Level1 object, i.e. COLUMN, TRIGGER, etc.

    These will change, and there are some notes on BOL, so be careful and read this before you do much.

    This post looks only at adding a property to a table, so let’s do that.

    I want to add a property to note that a particular table doesn’t need a Primary Key (PK). To do that, I’m going to call my type [PKException] and use a value of 1 to indicate that no PK is expected on this table.

    My call for the procedure will be:

    EXEC sp_updateextendedproperty 
@name = N'PKException', 
@value = '1',
@level0type = N'Schema', @level0name = 'dbo',
@level1type = N'Table',  @level1name = 'SalesTax3'
;

    In this case, I have a table called “SalesTax3” and it’s in the dbo schema. Those are my values for the Level0 and Level1 parameters. I can ignore the Level2 parameter since I am specifying this as a table level property.

    When I do this, I can then see the property in a few ways, but the easiest for most people is in the table properties, the Extended Properties tab,

    2015-05-26 09_55_09-Table Properties - SalesTax3

    That’s about it. If I want more properties, I can add them by changing the name and value of the property in the code above. I can also change the schema and table if I want this property added to other tables.

    SQLNewBlogger

    This was another side post from a separate post I was writing. I was working on solving a problem and needed an extended property. As I looked up the data to solve my issue and wrote code, I copied the Extended Property code and took a screenshot, leading to this side post.

    Once I had that, this was about 15 minutes to write. I’ll publish this one first, and refer to it in the post that solved my original problem.

    References

    sp_addextendedproperty – https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms180047.aspx

    sys.extendedproperties – https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms177541(v=sql.90).aspx