Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

  • Rating PASS Abstracts

    I was on a committee to help rate abstracts for the PASS Summit this year. It was an interesting and challenging experience. I learned some things, and I can better appreciate that this is a tough job. It’s hard to try and choose what people want, what will interest people, and what makes the Summit a better sell to potential attendees. Or at least their managers.

    I found some flaws in the process, at least things that I thought made it a difficult set of decisions for me. I wanted to list them out, not to blame anyone, but to give some insight into the process, and perhaps get some ideas on how to better serve the community in the future.

    Here’s the basic process:

    • People submit abstracts. This year they could see what else was submitted prior to their entry. I believe they could edit theirs, but not sure.
    • All abstracts were put in an XLS and sent to committee members.
    • We had a tool on the PASS site which allowed us to rate each abstract in four areas. Ratings were 1-10, and were in these areas: Abstract, topic, speaker, subjective.
    • Once all sessions in our area were rated, the committee scheduled a call to review the overall rating.
    • We picked a certain number of sessions in various tracks along with alternates.
    • People get notified.

    A quick list of the issues I saw, and I’ll give some more detailed thoughts on each one of these. However I’m curious about any feedback as well from other people that are interested.

    • My first issue was that I didn’t really have a set of guidelines for what each rating meant. What is abstract v topic v subjective? Speaker I could figure out, but what do you do if you don’t know the speaker or haven’t seen them talk? We actually had people rating this differently
    • I find it difficult to actually rate things on a 1-10 scale. What’s a 7 v 8 v 9? I found myself struggling and probably inconsistently rated things. I might give someone an 8 in one area, and then find a very similar item and give it a 7. This is a hard one
    • I didn’t have much feedback on how other people in the community felt about speakers.
    • I didn’t have much feedback on how other people in the community felt about topics, or these specific sessions.
    • It was hard to tell if we were covering all types of topics in SQL Server. I only saw one replication submission in the spotlight sessions. No idea if there were any in the regular sessions.
    • I had no insight into what other groups were doing for their tracks. For all I know we all picked SSIS ETL sessions and everyone left out fuzzy matching or data mining.
    • I have no idea what speakers submitted in other tracks or areas.

    Some of these worked themselves out, so they aren’t major complaints. As an example, we discussed our ratings, and didn’t necessarily pick the top xx in some area. We moved around, and sometimes picked sessions rated much lower.

    As I mentioned, I’ll post some notes on each of these areas in more detail, assuming I can disclose things. Please feel free to comment on what you think we should do to pick sessions of more value to everyone.

  • PASS, Don’t Waste My Time

    Update: Apparently I can’t write, or get a point across from the comments and a few emails, so I have edited this to hopefully make it clearer.

    The pre/post conference sessions came out today for the 2010 SQL PASS Summit. And to my surprise the list of sessions wasn’t quite what I expected.
    I know I complained last year about the selections, and a few people said that I should get involved if I didn’t like the way things were done. So I did. I volunteered and wound up on the Pre/Post Con and Spotlight committee. I spent quite a few hours of my time reviewing abstracts, emailing with the speakers to get more information, and then rating sessions. I got on a conference call, with all that prep work, and debated the choices with the others and think we had a great list of sessions. We, the three members of the committee, sent our decisions over to PASS over a week ago. Actually I think two weeks ago.
    Only the sessions I the committee I was on had picked aren’t the same ones as the ones PASS published.
    <insert four letter words here>
      ______-_______ _______ ________ ______ ______
    </four letter words rant>
    I understand that PASS needs to make money from these sessions, and there are marketing issues involved. However the instructions I had stated that my committee “Make decisions with regard to all Program aspects of PASS Community Summit.” (emphasis mine)
    Apparently that’s not the case. I’m not going to disclose which session I picked that didn’t make it, and which one  got picked instead. That’s not fair to either speaker, and not the point.
    If marketing, money, other issues are the important ones, that’s fine. If you ask others to pick sessions, and supposedly decide on what the community wants to see and what is good for PASS, then let the committee do that. I can’t speak for the rest of my committee, but we were caught off guard and not happy with this decision. I’m upset because I wanted to make a difference to this process, try to do a good job, defend the decisions of the committee and take the flack for those decisions. I was also trying to ensure that PASS wasn’t choosing people because they’re a part of some “old speakers network”. I feel I’ve failed there since I didn’t make a difference, and the old speaker’s club reigned.

    If that’s the way PASS wants to work, let some non-SQL, non-DBA, non-volunteer honk just rank everyone and pick the sessions they think are important. Publish the rules and guidelines and make it happen.
    Just don’t waste my time as a volunteer.

    To be clear: My committee sent selections to PASS some time ago. We were not informed, queried, or told of any changes. One of our pre-con sessions was demoted to an alternate. One we picked as an alternate, not sure it was one we wanted to see, was moved to a regular session. Nothing in the comments below seems to give a good reason for this.

  • Truncating the Log and Database Mirroring

    I saw someone post recently that they wanted to run this code on their principal server in database mirroring to clean out a large transaction log and shrink it.

    alter database <mydb> set recovery simple
    go
    checkpoint
    go
    alter database <mydb> set recovery full
    go
    backup database pubs to disk = 'c:\mydb.bak' with init
    go
    dbcc shrinkfile (N'mydb_log' , 1)
    go

    I responded, and a few others as well, that this will break your mirroring session. However I wanted to do some research, and I started googling around to see what I could find.

    While I haven’t found an explicit reference, I did note that Paul Randal has a note that you can switch to Bulk Logged mode without breaking the log chain, but I knew that.

    I don’t have a definitive reference, though I’m hoping one appears soon. The documentation for Books Online does say that full recovery mode is required.

    If you have a log file that’s too large, you can run shrinkfile on it, even if it is mirrored. That will work, but don’t set the database to Simple mode. Manage the log backups, and make sure you have them running regularly. And if you need help shrinking the log, try this script.

  • ‘Tis the Season for SQL Leaving

    With the announcement of Brent Ozar (Blog | Twitter ) leaving Quest for SQL Skills, Exceptional DBA finalist Jorge Segarra (blog | twitter) taking a new job far from the Novice Chef, Kathi Kellenberger getting a new job, and more, a few people pinged me to ask if I were next.

    No.

    I have the best job in the world (I need to blog that!) and I love it. It fits my life wonderfully, I have a good balance, I get to do things I enjoy, at my pace, I get to ski during the week, what more could I want?

    Actually I’m sure there are things I’d want, and I could do better, but overall I have a great job.

    And I have a contract. With Red Gate being a UK company, people have employment contracts, and even though I’m a US guy, I have one. It’s fairly binding and I have to give months notice to leave. However it’s fair in that Red Gate has to give me equal notice, so I have good job security in the short term as well.

    Provided I don’t do anything egregiously stupid, which I try not to do every day.