Voice of the DBA

Tag: speaking

  • Thirty Hours at Home

    This is a busy travel week for me, and one of those times that stresses out everyone in the household. I attended SQL Saturday #197 – Omaha over the weekend, arriving home Sunday morning from my trip. I had a good time at the event, my first time to Omaha, and would like to go back again sometime.

    However it’s a quick turnaround for me. Fortunately I have packing down to a science since I’m leaving today at 2:00 for Las Vegas and the first SQL Intersection conference. I have two talks to deliver on Tuesday and a few sessions I’d like to see Wednesday before I head home again.

    Back in time to cook a couple meals (and extra leftovers) for the family and spend a day with everyone before heading back out of town. These are tough times, and it’s a lot of support from the family that allows me to do this.

    I’ll have the same type of turnaround at the end of the month between SQL Saturday #175 – Fargo and SQL Bits.

    I may have to limit some trips later in the year after this month, so please don’t be offended if I decline any offers to speak.

  • Reminders and Rehearsal

    I’ve spoken at quite a few SQL Saturday events. I won’t hit 50 this year, like Kevin Boles, but by my count, I’ve been to 21, with 4 or 5 more coming this year.  I have no idea when I’ll get to 50, but I hope I do.

    Capture_028

    That’s in addition to other events, which will likely bring my 2013 total to close to 15 events, similar to what I’ve done the last few years. That doesn’t seem like a lot, maybe 1 every six weeks, but I end up doing multiple talks, on multiple subjects sometimes. There was a stretch late last year where I did 12 talks in 7 different areas in about 3 weeks. It was slightly confusing for me.

    Yesterday I received an email from SQL Saturday #197 – Omaha, which had the schedule in it. I’d glanced at it before, and had seen I was giving my Encryption Primer talk, but this time as I scrolled down, I saw my name at the end.

    sqlsat197

    Hmmm, that didn’t say “The Encryption Primer”. I’m glad I looked and double checked the schedule because I’m giving two talks. In addition to encryption, I’m talking FTS with Searching Binary Data in SQL Server.

    I’ve given the talk before, and I’m not too worried about it, but I do want to refresh my memory of the flow, and practice the demos again. I have given the Encryption talk a few times this year already, but I was planning on double checking demos again before the event. Especially as I changed the talk around and added some material for a variation I’m giving next week at SQL Intersection.

    I find it’s always good to rehearse my talks. I’m comfortable in front of people, and I know I can get through the talk, but I want things to flow and to make sense to attendees, The more practice I do, the better things go. The less “ums”, “errs” and other placeholders I use as well.

    Plus this will be good practice for SQL Bits, where I’ll deliver this talk again in May.

  • The DBA Team #1–Code and Slides

    Our first DBA Team event, in Richmond, VA just before SQL Saturday #187 went well. Overall I think our experiment was a success and we’re already talking about where and when we might do this again.

    In the meantime, we didn’t make a separate site for this series of events, being an experiment and all. I’m adding this post as a placeholder for the various slide decks and code.

    Core Monitoring for SQL Server (Steve Jones)

    Good DBAs ensure that they are always aware of the state of their instances. All systems should have monitoring in place, not just so you know when things go wrong, but so you understand what a normal workload looks like and can plan for the future. This session will cover the basics of monitoring a SQL Server system and the various metrics you should be tracking.

    Getting Started with SQL Server Backup (Grant Fritchey)

    Backups are fundamental to protecting the investment your business has in its data and they’re the foundation of disaster recovery planning. We’ll go over best practices for database backups, to ensure you’re establishing that foundation correctly within your systems. This introductory level session covers full, log, and differential backups, as well as restores and restores to a point in time. Come along to be sure you’ve got the right protection in place for your systems.

    Understanding Database Corruption (Grant Fritchey)

    A DBA’s primary purpose is to ensure that the information in their charge is accessible by the correct people within their organization. Despite everything you do to make sure you’ve got your servers configured, monitored, and tuned, with well-tested backups in place, you can still lose data through corruption. But what is corruption in a database? This session lays out exactly where database corruption can come from, how to find out exactly where the corruption is within a database, and  the methods you have available to recover from database corruption.

    Indexing for SQL Server (Steve Jones)

    Indexes are important for improving the performance of your queries, but they add overhead to your server and require maintenance. This session examines how indexes work and the basic maintenance that you should perform to ensure your system is running at its peak level.

  • What Do You Want to Know About I/O?

    Hope to see you at the conference.
    Hope to see you at the conference.

    There’s lots I want to know. What affect does an SSD have if I use it for a log file? One of my filegroups with indexes? What about tempdb? How do you dig in and prove latency to the storage groups from within SQL Server? Will the query optimizer take advantage of information about drive performance? There are lots of questions I have, and I’m hoping to get answers. I’m hoping to attend the “Ask Anything I/O” panel at SQL Intersection in a few weeks. I’m leaving the event Wed night, so unless there’s someone I’m trying to catch in a last minute meeting, I’ll be sitting in the audience.

    I am guessing that Brent Ozar, Kevin Farlee, and Mat Young will have lots of answers for me and others. I’m also guessing most of the questions will be met with references that are already out there, and I hope that the presenters will publish a list of questions and answers for attendees. That’s fine, as there are lots of times when I’m looking for information that has been published, but I can’t find in the ocean of Google results. Attending a session given by experts can be a way to shortcut some research and searching to find where the answers are located.

    That’s one of the reasons to attend a conference. Getting quick answers from experts, or learning how to better target your research. All the speakers at SQL Intersection are well known, longtime, expert SQL Server users who are friendly. They’re more than willing to answer questions, or help guide you to solve a problem or learn something new.

    The other great thing about conferences? You get to hear some great questions from other attendees. We all attack problems differently, and work in very diverse environments. There are many times I’ve heard how another person has implemented SQL Server and it’s intrigued, or even inspired, me to try something similar with my instances.

    If you can find the funding, SQL Intersection is a great event to attend, with an impressive list of speakers, each hand picked by Kimberly Tripp and Paul Randal of SQLskills. They provide amazing training in their Immersion events, and are trying to bring even more options to you with SQL Intersection. You can even walk away with something tangible in addition to all the knowledge you’ll gain: a Surface Tablet.

    Steve Jones

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