Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

PASS 2011 Recap

Last week was the PASS Summit in Seattle (again, but only for 1 more year) and I was up there for a long week of shaking hands and talking SQL. It was a good time, and I’m sorry I didn’t do a bit more while I was there, but I’m a bit worn out with traveling this year. It’s been hectic, and if I didn’t meet you, my apologies. I needed a bit of downtime during the week.

The week started with me arriving on Monday, early afternoon and going on my annual Best Buy shopping trip for the SQLServerCentral party. I joked about the trip on Twitter:

I have a good time grabbing prizes, trying to balance some quantity with quality, and ensure that lots of people have the chance to win something during the night. We have a casino night and give things away randomly for the most part. In case you’re wondering, here’s the picture from that tweet:

I dragged everything back to the hotel and then got ready for our Monday night networking event. Last year Andy Warren (LinkedIn | Blog | @sqlandy) and I rented out Lowell’s in the Pikes Place market for a one night event and it was busy, with over 100 people coming down on Sunday night.

This time we did it again, and it exploded. I arrived around 6:10 and there was a line out the door as the restaurant took orders as you walked in. It was supposed to be a pay-your-own-way, but there was confusion at first. Andy and I greeted people, and the staff put everything on one tab. We straightened it out, and my apologies for any confusion. Some people got a free meal, some didn’t, and that’s OK. Andy and I planned on a little cost, so we covered the early birds.

It turned out over 180 people came down, and we had a line for a few hours as people waited to get in, but it worked out. People had the chance to talk to each other and network, which was the idea. After 8 I had a chance to chat with Andy Leonard (blog | @AndyLeonard) and Jason Horner (website | @jasonhorner) , and a few others.

Credit to Pat Wright (http://www.flickr.com/photos/asylumphoto/) for the photos.

A long night, made longer when I stopped by an MVP event for an hour or so to say hi to a few of my friends that were attending, including the very funny Rob Farley who I haven’t seen for a few years.

Tuesday was pre-con day for me. I heard from a few people in other pre-conference sessions that they were great, and the one I attended was outstanding as well. Adam Machanic (Blog|Twitter) gave an all day session on No More Guessing! An Enlightened Approach to Performance Troubleshooting that talked about how he benchmarks, baselines, and troubleshoots performance. I need to write up detailed notes, but it was a great walkthrough with lots of demos and details on how you can find out what’s wrong with your system. Fixing it is up to you, but this talk shows how to find what’s wrong, and it’s worth paying for if he comes to an event near you.

One amazing thing was his use of spatial data to build graphs of performance data, compared with baselines, in SSMS. Very cool, and quicker to do if you know how than putting the data into Excel. Easier to update as well

The one funny event was right before lunch. I left about 15 minutes early to return my rental car to the airport and as soon as I walked out of the room, Adam made a SQLServerCentral plug that I heard about on Twitter. My timing isn’t that great

Tuesday night was the SQLServerCentral / Exceptional DBA party. I missed the opening quiz bowl party as I was getting ready for my party. You can see I had a lot to pack up:

The total prize count was 98 and it exceeded my pre-party-ticket-sales-party by quite a bit. The Best Buy total was $2500, in case you were wondering, which was a couple hundred $$ above the ticket sales. However we had quite a few people pay at the door and ended up on a slightly positive. I don’t need to ask my boss to approve any expenses, and I bought some coffees and drinks the rest of the week for people to even things out.

A long night, and I was tired at the end. Some good conversations with people throughout the night and a lot of fun. Hopefully we’ll do it again next year.

Wednesday

Wednesday started with some excitement about #sqlrun. Jes Borland had organized it and I was expecting 10-15 people to come. I walked up to the Sheraton a little early and saw one person getting their GPS synced. Nice, I thought.

I walked in to find about 25 people, which soon swelled to 40-45 people for a run along the water. It was fun, not too fast, and I had the chance to talk with Greg Gonzalez of SQL Sentry, Allen Kinsel, Tim Radney, and a few others while we jogged for a couple miles.

A ton of fun, and many thanks to Jes for getting it organized.

Already tired, but excited about the big Red Gate announcement. After the keynote, I went to the expo hall where Red Gate had decorated their booth with a space theme. If you haven’t heard, Red Gate is sending a DBA into space!

It’s a cool contest, accompanied by some B-movie clips to have fun with. I’m even in one. Enter today and get the chance to fly into space on a rocket, which is amazing.

At lunch time I left and headed out to do my Grey’s Anatomy impression by riding the ferry over to Bainbridge island for a little break. It’s been a long year, and two hectic days wore me out. I needed the chance to sit and write a bit, so I headed over on the ferry.

My wife asked me if I was McDreamy or McSteamy on the ride, and I think I was McDreamy. At least as best I could with headphones, a laptop, and a geeky backpack on. A nice break for me and a beautiful little town. My kind of place after the crowds and bustle of Seattle.

I returned in time to run over my Thur session in the hotel and then hit a few parties. It seems that every year there are more parties and this was no exception. I hit two on Wed night, skipping two others for which I had invites.

Thursday

Marginally better keynote, but not much better. I’m not sure why Microsoft insists on marketing to us in the keynotes. We’re already excited about SQL Server. Give us a technical fellow that can talk about what happens behind the scenes and we’ll be much more excited.

I had the first session, giving my Branding Yourself for a New Job talk on the Modern Resume. Well attended with 50-60 people, some good questions, and one that I really enjoy giving. I’d switched to doing a few technical talks this year instead of this one, but I like this one. I’ll do this one a few times next year in different places.

I walked around to a few other sessions, including a lightening talk with the Scary DBA. A short clip below:

Lots of people walking around, and more people outside of sessions than in years past. The talks are good, but the DVD is relatively cheap, especially compared with the chance to sit and talk with other SQL Server people. Networking is important, and not just for your career. You can make contacts and get ideas to help with your current job.

I took a couple hours to go over my Friday talk. I didn’t change anything, other than correct a typo I found. I’m not fond of changing talks the week I’m giving them, preferring to just practice. Then it was back out to parties. 3 parties this night, including a Friend of Red Gate dinner at Farestart. Afterwards our waiter, who is a volunteer and works for Boeing, talked about the program. It’s amazing, and if you are in Seattle, I recommend going there for dinner. The food is great and it’s a wonderful program.

Friday

Evidently I had too much fun and stayed out too long, despite walking back to the hotel just after 11. I was exhausted and struggled to get up and run, but I had a busy day planned.

First was another amazing keynote from Dr David DeWitt. Worth watching, and in fact I was watching it again today. The other keynotes had nothing of note in them worth watching, but this one does. Take an hour when you can and you’ll enjoy it.

Then it was most of Adam Machanic’s amazing 500 level memory session. He packed a 500-700 room audience and it was great. I stepped out early to check on my laptop and get my presentation ready. My VMs have flaked before, so I took 20 minutes to double check they were really ready to go for the talk.

After lunch I was worried. I had the same room as Adam, and was right before Kimberly Tripp. With 15 minutes to go, the 500 seats had about 15 people in there, but they filed in and when I started there were about 200 people in there. For a 100 level basic session, I was amazed. Mostly first timers as well, which was cool. Lots of good questions, and glad I had 75 minutes.

I answered a couple questions (I’m very thoughtful here ), but I had to run to the airport for a 5:00 flight.

Credit to Pat Wright (http://www.flickr.com/photos/asylumphoto/) for the photos.

An easy trip on the light rail to the airport (highly recommended) and then an easy flight back to Denver, though I didn’t get home until 11. A long day, and a long week, but lots of fun.

Overall the conference felt like three days of SQL Saturday’s, which is a testament to how those events have grown. The networking is wonderful at the larger conference if you can go, but if not, get to a SQL Saturday, or Tech Fest or some other event. It’s truly recharging and exciting to go see so many people in your profession excited about their careers.

October 18, 2011
Guest Appearance in DBA in Space

Win a trip into space!

The DBA in Space competition continues today with the third question. This time I get to ask it, a sci-fi film question. No hints, but do a little research and don’t make a mistake. You only get one chance at each question to get through them. New questions are coming every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, so keep an eye out for the new ones.

I had fun filming it, and I’ve got a few outtakes below from my efforts. It was surprisingly hard for me to remember two or three lines in between all the other things I normally do and the podcasts I record.

Enjoy and good luck with the competition

October 17, 2011
Password Help

Ensure you keep shared passwords safe when people leave.

Today we have an editorial that was originally published on Oct 9, 2006.

Yesterday I wrote about compliance tips and one of the things I mentioned was using encryption and passwords for your backups. It’s a good idea that you should use even with disk backups. You never know when someone might get socially-engineered and hand over one of your .bak files to the wrong folks.

But using encryption isn’t enough; you need strong key management that changes the passwords on a regular basis to prevent data losses from the passwords getting released over time. I’ve worked in a dozen companies and there are many cases where a password has been used for some shared function, some application, some particular feature, whatever. If this password has remained the same for over a year, it’s been almost common knowledge throughout the company what the password is. I’ve seen business people, executives, even secretaries that knew the password to the point where it was useless.

Shared passwords will be a fact of life in many cases. Administrative teams grow, help desk people may need access, consultants help out and learn them, and others overhear them. It’s going to happen, so you need to mitigate this risk.

I used to manage a nightclub and we had similar risks with the alcohol. Since turnover was a fact of life, we had a simple policy. When a manager left, for any reason, all alarm codes were changed. On the third occurrence of a manager leaving, we had all locks re-keyed. It was a simple policy to reduce risk.

The same thing needs to happen with your backups. Use one or even a few passwords to protect the various database backups. But then change those passwords every month or two and escrow or archive the old ones. You may not be able to prevent losses of the backup files, but by ensuring they are protected and the passwords changed regularly, you may just protect the data.

And your job.

October 17, 2011
Does It Help

This editorial was originally published on Oct 12, 2006, published today as Steve is out today at the PASS Summit.

Years ago I used to work for an import company and we dealt with all types of distributors and wholesalers for the products we brought in from overseas. One of our divisions dealt with metal products, mostly door hinges, from China and we had workers whose job it was to arrange for inventory from various warehouses to be shipped to fulfill orders.

At the time, circa 1996, we were pretty high tech. We mostly dealt with faxes and phone orders at the time, phone orders being the easiest because the workers would just enter an order and match it up with inventory from the closest warehouse. Faxes were more challenging, but we had a high tech fax server that caught every fax coming into our company and saved it to an imaging system.

When I got there, Windows had just been deployed, so workers would pull up an image on the screen, look at it, and then alt-tab to the order entry system and enter some information, alt-tab back to read, alt-tab back, etc. They could also make notations on the image, and would do so with an order number, ship date, etc. and save the image back to our high tech, SQL Server 4.2-based, image server.

We were looking to rewrite the order entry system when I got there and as we did so, we spent a lot of time with the workers trying to figure out how to speed the process up for them and make their job easier, and get them to process more orders per day.

Recently a study said that one 30inch monitor would increase productivity, though some people disagreed. The alternative presented was two 19″ inch monitors instead. The type of work you do probably has some impact on which is more productive, but I know that either of these is better than a single 17″ monitor.

This brings me back to my little tale because I actually tested this a decade ago. At the time most people had 14″ or 15″ monitors on their desks, each of which could cost $300 or so. I proposed moving to two monitors for the workers that needed to see two applications at the same time and got permission to buy an extra 15″ monitor and a fancy $500 video card with two VGA outputs. I also got permission to spend $800 on a single 20″ monitor and we spent a few months swapping the setups among all the workers and even a few others to see what they thought. The result?

Two monitors hands down.

As much as I’d like to have a monitor the size of my desk, like on The Island or Minority Report, I know it’s not as productive as multiple monitors. You just spend too much time moving things around, resizing, etc. to make them fit your current task. You might work with Outlook and Query Analyzer now, but then need Excel and Outlook, or Word and Query Analyzer, or Outlook and Word, and all the sizes and locations you set don’t always work.

You’ll still resize and move applications with multiple monitors, but there’s another key. You can full screen an app on multiple monitors and it will stick to just that screen. So even if you have to drag something from one to the other quickly, you can maximize it and cover everything else up. I use that a lot and it’s helpful.

If you’ve never tried it, get a $30 video card and borrow another monitor. You won’t go back. I have a 19″ LCD and a 20″ CRT on my desk and love it. Unless I was some type of artist, I’m not sure I’d go to one monitor, even a 42″ wide one.

So what do you think for the Friday poll? Do information workers, or more importantly, DBAs do better with a large monitor?

October 14, 2011