Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • ConFab Conference Scheduling – SQL Saturday Advice

    One of the things that’s hard to manage for all events is scheduling. Larger events print a brochure, and smaller ones tend to post schedules outside of rooms. Most SQL Saturdays also seem to give a printed schedule out in the bags in the morning when people check in. However a few events have found a better, way, at least for some users.

    Confab is an app for iPhone/iTouch/iPad that allows you to have a conference schedule online. I got a note that it was available for SQL Saturday #45 in Louisville, but couldn’t attend, so I didn’t try it. However I did use it for SQL Saturday #60 in Cleveland, allowing me to quickly and easily see what sessions were available at each time slot. I haven’t found an app for Android or Blackberry, or WP7, but if anyone knows of one, please let me know.

    I know the printed schedules are nice, but those can be out of date, especially for last minute cancellations. Also, they’re not as convenient to me, someone that always has my phone, but hates digging around in my laptop bag. The SQL Saturday site is slow for the schedule, and hard to read on a small device.

    I’d consider using an app for scheduling, and hopefully we’ll get some for other platforms as well.

  • Rolling to SQL Saturday #60

    I’m still stunned as I see numbers above 50 in the hash tags for SQL Saturdays. Yet here we are, #60 in Cleveland this weekend and I’m on the road this morning. Or in the air, catching a flight to Cleveland from Denver.

    I’ve never really been to Ohio, only having driven through the state on my way to someplace else. Stopping for gas and coffee doesn’t count as a visit, so I’m looking forward to this. Allen White, a friend I’ve known for years, will be my host, along with a number of other SQL people I’m looking forward to seeing again, or meeting for the first time.

    The event is sold out, which is a good thing. It shows interest in the free training and I hope this means that a few of you will help out and get another SQL Saturday in Cleveland sometime in the fall.

    I don’t have any great plans of things to see, other than run with Allen on Sunday morning. If any SQL runners are out there, feel free to join us, and follow the #sqlsat60 tag on Twitter. I’ll post some info about where/when as I get it.

  • SQL Saturday Advice–Upload Decks Early

    One of the neat features for the SQL Saturday site is that it allows the speakers to upload a deck that is attached to their session. If you go to the schedule after the event, and pick a session you attended, you can get the Powerpoint deck, the code, anything the speaker has uploaded. That’s handy, and too often I’ve been at events where speakers point you to some location they use and it’s easy to forget where this is, or where the information is stored.

    However the organizers have to send this note to speakers, and in most events, this has come after the event. I’ll admit that sometimes I’ve been busy and have forgotten to upload the deck, or I’ve been slow to do so. However Saturday night, Sunday, or early the next week is when the attendees are thinking about the event, and if the deck isn’t there, they might not go back.

    This week I got the link early for SQL Saturday #60 in Cleveland. I was changing a couple slides in the presentation, based on feedback from previous events, and was a day late in uploading, but I have finished, and my deck is uploaded. Now I don’t have to worry about it, and the link is live, people can get the deck for themselves.

    I know some speakers are working on their decks at the last minute. I don’t think that’s a great idea, but I understand people have busy lives and they might be trying to add something on Friday that they learned recently. Or they remember to correct something from the last session as they’re reviewing the night before. That’s OK, and the organizers can always replace the code with a new download.

    I do think, however, that most attendees would appreciate having the downloads available right away, and by sending the upload link to speakers before the event, you can improve the chances you’ll have all the downloads uploaded and ready.

  • A Full Backup can Impact a Log Backup–MCM Prep

    In the early days of SQL Server you could not run a log backup while a full backup was running. In fact,you tried to schedule them apart from each other early in my career to prevent collisions. Nothing bad happens, but it does cause failures in your monitoring and those are annoying.

    In modern versions of SQL Server, you can run log backups and simultaneous full backups. They don’t collide or block each other, but there is a way that the full backup impacts a log backup.

    If you start a full backup, once all data pages are written to the backup device, the log records that were created since the start of the full backup are added to the full backup file. This allows the redo/undo process to complete and this gives you a full backup set that is intact as of the point in time in which the data pages finish writing.

    If you run a log backup, typically the log records are written out, and then the VLFs in the log file that were written to disk are marked as inactive.

    However since those log records are needed for the full backup to be complete, the log backup cannot clear those VLFs when the log backup finishes. That process still occurs, and technically this is part of the log backup, but it is deferred until the full backup completes.