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For the handover of SQLSaturday to PASS, Rushabh Metha, President of PASS, came to the Charlotte SQL Saturday, where Andy Warren and I handed over a symbolic key. It was at the end of the keynote, and fun for us, though I’m not sure that many of the attendees thought much of it.

I think this was the most impressive SQL Saturday from a speaker/content viewpoint. There were about 17 MVPs there by my count, and a few more people that could easily be awarded at any time. That alone made it a fantastic event, with so many excellent speakers giving training.

The event was held at the Charlotte Microsoft office, which is also one of the locations for the SQL Server support group at Microsoft. A number of their engineers held a Q&A session during the day, giving the high end DBAs a chance to ask questions without the cost of a CSS call.  The facility was nice, though a slightly high security pair of buildings that required security guards to let people in and out. It was nice of Microsoft to donate the space, and employees, to allow local professionals to get training. It was slightly confusing as to where the rooms were, but plenty of volunteers around to direct people.

The keynote was late in starting, with check in going a little slow. One thing I’d recommend to other SQL Saturday events is start check in early and perhaps schedule a couple birds-of-a-feather sessions early in the morning for people that check in first. Andy and I had talked about it, and shared the deck and I think it went over well.

I posted my section of the keynote over the weekend, and I have a video as well that Blythe Morrow from PASS HQ took as well.

I went to Kendal Van Dyke’s session on blogging/speaking, before giving my own take on the subject with my presentation on The Modern Resume. Both were well attended, drawing about 20-30 people in each. I noticed that there were a few tracks that had almost double sessions back to back. While that might seem strange to speakers, I think it’s great for attendees. If you miss one to see another session, you can get similar material in the next slot.

I’d like to see more SQL Saturdays consider that, and put out more tracks, but duplicate sessions so that people would not be torn between two topics. You will never get this perfect, but duplicating some sessions throughout the day would be good. I know I’d be happy to present twice on the same topic at an event.

The rest of the day seemed to run smoothly. There were snacks in the afternoon, people flowed between sessions, though I ended up chatting with a number of friends that were speaking at the event. It’s a good time to network and that works for me. I’d like to find some ways to help others network as well that attend the event and that’s one place that I think PASS can help.

People seemed to enjoy the training, and I heard good comments about sessions. I missed out on the after party, having to head back to Denver on Saturday night, but I thought this was a great event. There were a few vendors that attended as well, and they were all pleased with the turnout, which is great. Without vendor support, these events don’t happen.

I had a great time, and am looking forward to the next SQL Saturday that I can attend. I would love to come back to Charlotte as well.

The keynote is up on YouTube if you are interested.

• Part 1

Part 2

It’s time for the March T-SQL Tuesday and this month Mike Walsh picked the topic. It’s I/O and you can read about his idea on the Straight Path Solutions blog.

I am not really a hardware guy. I like it, and it can be interesting, and in the past I spent a lot of time learning about SCSI, PCI v EISA, RAID, etc. and it’s impact on SQL Server. However about the time that SANs became popular I found that I couldn’t keep up with all the technologies that were coming out and it wasn’t a part of my job. The companies for which I worked typically had someone assigned to deal with hardware, and often just storage.

So I let them figure out what hardware we needed, and what implementation. My only requirements were that I have xxx sized drives (or arrays/LUNs) for my SQL Server to separate out data from logs or backups. I would even let them know that we wanted to support yyy reads/sec of zzz size, or similar specs so that they could design the subsystem.

One day we got a new SAN.

I needed new storage for a SQL Server and soon the storage guy came to talk to me. He said that the vendor basically set up the entire SAN as one large array of disks and he would just carve out xx GBs for each of my drives. I wasn’t pleased with that and requested a meeting with the vendor. I got 2 sales guys and a sales engineer to talk to me, none of whom had ever really spent time using the product and were repeating what their engineers had (supposedly) said.

Needless to say I disagreed with them, but I let them do things their way and we ended up with performance problems at times on the SQL Servers connected to the SAN. Not all of them, but a few that were very busy at times had delays getting I/O satisfied if other servers also needed lots of I/O.

I left shortly thereafter, so I’m not sure what happened with those servers. However I think the lesson here is that a SAN doesn’t magically create better storage. A SAN can often handle higher I/O loads overall than DASD (Direct Attached Storage Devices), but it’s a balancing act for the SAN. Like an Ethernet network, often the SAN is counting on a distribution of I/O loads. Not all servers needing lots of I/O at the same time.

Or if they are, that the write cache can handle things, or the servers will retry their requests (or wait). For file server type operations this can work great. But for SQL Server it can be an issue. And write caching transactions that SQL Server expects to be on disk and permanent, or Durable in ACID terms, can lead to corruption.

Be careful of thinking a SAN can remove all I/O worries from your storage design. Good fundamental disk practices are still required.

I missed the 2010 MVP Summit, which is disappointing. There were a lot of SQL 11 talks and I was looking forward to those. I was also hoping to get together with a lot of MVP friends that I rarely see.
However this weekend in Charlotte, for SQL Saturday #33, it appears that it’s like a mini-summit, and thanks to Peter Shire and SQL Sentry for assembling an amazing lineup. I am sure I am forgetting someone, but look at this lineup:

• Andy Warren
• Andy Leonard
• Jessica Moss
• Kevin Kline
• Rushabh Mehta
• Wayne Snyder
• Allen White (the roommate I missed at the Summit)
• Andrew Kelley
• Aaron Bertrand
• Tim Ford
• Denny Cherry
• Geoff Hiten
• Ashton Hobbs
• Alejandro Mesa
• Mike Walsh
• Patrick LeBlanc
• Kendal van Dyke
• and more

Not all MVPs, but a few probably deserve it.
I think I’m the weakest link of this bunch. This was one of the best lineups I’ve seen at an event, and incredible for a free event. SQL Pros in Charlotte, you should consider yourselves lucky to have the chance to attend this amazing day of training for free.

I didn’t quite read this, but this was the written part of what I have as the opening keynote for SQL Saturday #33.

Welcome to SQL Saturday #33 here in Charlotte.

My business partner, Andy Warren, has had a ton of ideas over the years. He likes to remind me that they might not all be good ideas, but there’s no shortage of them. A few of them stand out, like his idea for the Best of SQLServerCentral books. I was driving home in a rare Denver rainstorm one night when he told me we should republish the best articles from the year in a book format. I had to pull over and debate it since I was sure no one would want a copy, but I was proved wrong. That series has been very popular over the years and we are on our eighth volume this year. SQL Saturday was another one of idea I didn’t believe in at first

When we started our training business, SQL Share, we were looking for ways to market the business. We tried some of the traditional methods of advertising, and had even considered purchasing a booth at the PASS Summit or TechEd. Those were expensive, and we were not sure they would be good investments. In our market research, which is really just a fancy term for us talking to regular people like all of you, we realized that the vast majority of IT professionals never attend conferences and other large events. Lots of people rarely go, usually once or twice in their careers, and a very lucky, select few go quite often.

When Andy approached me with the idea of running free events to get more training out to those that can’t go to conferences, I was skeptical. I wasn’t sure that it would even run, much less help us market our business, but Andy had proven me wrong before and both Brian Knight and I lent our support.

And money.

Over many phone calls, we worked on the idea and eventually SQL Saturday #1 in Orlando was held three years ago. Since then dozens of events have been held all over the country, and while they haven’t necessarily resulted in a lot of monetary profit, they have brought us a lot of satisfaction, and I’m proud to be associated with them. I’ve helped in a small way, but most of the credit has to go to Andy Warren.