When I was a MVP many moons ago I was fortunate it enough to attend the MVP Summit in Seattle this is an annual gathering of all the MVP’s that get together and help MS improve their products and give feedback about the way they are doing things.  When I was there we were discussing SQL Server 2005 and what should be in each SKU/Product level (Standard, Workgroup, and Enterprise Editions).  We knew some of the new features that were coming out as Mvp’s and they wanted to get our take about where they should fall.  As MS read the different features it was unanimous most of the killer features we really wanted in the standard edition of the product since we knew lots of companies could benefit from that.  Not surprisingly when 2005 was released most of the features discussed ended up in enterprise edition.  What I would like to give everyone for Christmas is for the next release to balance this out a little better.  Every cycle Microsoft talks about the greatest features that are ready to come out during presentations and never mentions what edition they will be in until someone asks the question.  Go to most presentations from MS about new features and you tell me if they mention what versions they will be in until someone asks the question.

Now please don’t get me wrong, MS is a business and the job of the business is to make money.  I’m not saying they are not allowed to make money.  What I would like for everyone on Christmas from MS is for them to stop the smoke and mirror show and give it to us truthfully!  Tell us the HA features of 2012 will only be available in enterprise edition at the beginning of the presentation.  Why do I want this?   So I can go back to my desk and figure out ways to make my system work without these features since I only have Standard edition to use.  So I don’t have to spend an hour in a presentation with a technology I’m not going to be able to use.  Yes you will see me researching these new features and even presenting on them in the future but I will tell you the edition it applies to.  So you know whether this will be useful or not given your current situation.  Just a simple request to be clearer when you’re telling us that you made a new function that can give us Rainbows and Unicorns out of the DB.

I think it’s a simple Christmas wish.

Hope everyone finds this under their tree this year.

I noticed that many of the Databases were set to grow in 1mb increments.   That’s fine and dandy to make a fast Auto Grow time but my VLF files are off the charts on this server. I know the real solution is managing the space and growing when I want to in size/chunks when I want to.  For right now though with the 50 other tasks I have on my plate I wanted to knock this one out quickly.

Adding the policy was easy this post does a great job of showing you how to do this.    The problem I ran into was finding the proper Facet.   In this case you can find @growth in the Data File Facet.   The second mistake I made is I tried to say in the check condition I wanted to find everything that’s not equal to 512.  I figured that would give me a list of all my Databases out there.  But that’s not what PBM wants.  PBM wants you to tell it what the number should be and it will tell you who doesn’t match.  When I said not equal it wouldn’t let me apply that after I got my list.  Once I changed the rule to = 512 it found me all the databases I was looking for and allowed me to apply the change to set them to grow at 512 instead of 1.

Make sure when you are creating a PBM policy make your items equal to what you are looking for instead of not equal.

Thank you to @sacSqlDude and @johnsterrett on twitter for helping me out today and telling me what I needed to do!

The family extends so much further than a discussion forum or a specific website.  It’s there when your son/family member is in the hospital and you need some positive reinforcement.  It’s there to wish you congratulations when a new baby is born or you celebrating sending your kids off to college.  It’s people taking care of each other and looking out for one another.

To answer Thom’s original question.  #sqlfamily means people helping people.  Something I think all families should strive to do more often.

1.  Get a list of Servers I’ll be managing/owning: I’ve got the list, can’t say I have access to all of them but working through that.
2. Run the SP_Blitz: I’ve got this done on several servers and honestly haven’t done a ton of analysis on it yet.  Still high on the list.
3.  Get a DBA database created on each server: Done for known servers.
4. Create the server side trace: Done for the primary prod servers.
5. Create perfmon counters: Done for the primary prod servers.
6.  Install SSMS tools pack: Done (and it’s already saved me),
7. Check the backups/backup schedule: Taken care of by a managed host provider, many changes in store for this one.
8. Check the security model and who has access to the DB: Figured out most of this and some changes are in plan for the future as well.

Things to Add after your first week.

1. Developer communication/training.  We have a developer training planned this week and I’m prepping a presentation based on performance tuning and some of the procedures I’ve worked on over the last week.   It’s a great time to start building relationships with the DEV team and working with them to improve the app and server even more.
2. Slow procedures/query tuning.  Now that you’ve had your trace and performance counters in place start researching what you can do to improve the performance of the server.   Perhaps hardware is needed or memory settings need to be changed.   We saw a big increase because of a server mis-configuration in the memory settings.
3. DMV’s,  I want to get these into the first week list but didn’t have a chance and don’t have an automated procedure but am researching some right now and plan to have them running in the next week.  Capturing query info and index info in DMV’s are key.
4. Optimizations, unfortunately there is still a lot of mis-informaiton out there about what needs to be re-indexed/rebuilt and checked.  I’ve found a very heavy optimization job running on the servers and need to re-factor this to really help the performance of the server.  This is top on my list as it’s running into prod time and needs to get fixed.  I’ve also found Shrink jobs running (never a good thing).
5. Last major suggestion for this week is be cautious.   You’ll find lots of things that you want to change and you may be tempted to start making wide sweeping changes but be careful.  If your systems haven’t been looked at by DBA eyes for a while then making large sweeping changes could have a huge impact on the system.   Make sure to document and test anything you put into place.  One method I use for this is getting a mailbox setup that I can email my changes to and store them that way I have a history.  If you have a Team of DBA’s with you this works well to inform all of them at once.

Hopefully I’ll get a chance to blog out mid next week with some of the scripts I’ve been talking about.   Let’s see how this week 2 goes for me.

1.  Get a list of Servers I’ll be managing/owning.  This can be done with a script or just by the company letting you know which ones.  It’s not a bad idea using the script to find some other servers that might be out there that the company was not aware of.  Pinal Dave has a good example of this on his blog.
2. Run the SP_Blitz script from Brent Ozar (blog | Twitter) this is full of all sorts of good tidbits on what you need to look at for a server.  Check out the blog post in the link above and it will fill you in on the many great things this script can do for you.
3. Get a DBA database created on each server.  I typically use this to house all sorts of maintenance type things and monitoring and alerting.  Every DBA should have a DB to call their own.
4. Create the server side trace.  Years ago back in SQL 2000 I wrote a server side profiler trace that would run all the time and store the contents down to a table that I could later review to watch performance of queries hitting the DB.  Over the year’s fellow DBA’s have made updates to the script and made it better and it’s one of those key things I still depend on now.  I should get a future blog post out on this one.
5. Create perfmon counters.  I store perfmon counters down to a db through an odbc connection in perfmon.  This way I can use a custom set of reports I’ve created to report trends on my server/db performance.  This also gets me started on my benchmark and knowing where things are when I started.  I should have some future blogs on this.
6.  Install SSMS tools pack.  No one should go without this tool.   Saved me more times than I can count I would suggest it to everyone.
7. Check the backups/backup schedule.  Blitz script is going to tell me some of this but I want to make a point to check with the business as to what the backups schedule is and make sure that matches what is really happening.
8. Check the security model and who has access to the DB.  Again Blitz script might tell me some of this but I’ll make it a point to make sure something like domain admins don’t have full rights to the db and there are 100 people in domain admins (yes I’ve seen this before).

This is all the primary things I could come up with on day 1.  There’s still more items I’m sure but these are key and all have to be in place so I can continue moving forward from here I should have a good base to work with.

If you have other suggestions  let me know!

On the Last day of the PASS Summit an important tribute was made.  They honored Wayne Snyder with an award for his contribution to the PASS Community.

Wayne at the Volunteer Party

Years ago I attended the PASS summit for the first time in Florida and heard Wayne speak about why you should volunteer for PASS.  Here is the quote they used from me on stage for Wayne.

Wayne showed me the definition of speaking with passion.  He inspired me through his presentations to keep volunteering and opening a whole new world of possibilities for me because of it.  Thanks to his dedication and passion many more have been inspired.  Thank you Wayne from all of us you inspired. 

Wayne not only inspired me at the beginning of my volunteer career but also helped me years later when I was a PASS Board member.  I’m very thankful for all the time he has put into this community.  Thank you Wayne for all that you have done for us.

Rick Heiges

The same keynote on Friday morning made another big announcement.  Rick Heiges (Blog |Twitter ) is also rolling off the PASS Board.  Rick has been on the board longer than anyone I’ve ever known.  Rick’s created some great programs for us here at PASS and has given thousands of hours to the community.  He’s been a good friend and always inspired me to keep innovating new ideas for the community.  I can’t thank him enough for the many late night chats over a Rum and Diet Coke.  Thank you Rick for all that you have done for us!

The community will continue to grow and our SQL Family will get bigger and bigger.  I’m very honored to  know some of the best people in the community. With every passing summit and every SQL Saturday I meet even more great people in the community.   Thank you to all of you.

This post is the first in a series of 5 posts wrapping up the PASS Summit 2011 for me.

Welcome to the PASS Summit!

I knew I had no chance of writing summary blogs during the summit; way too much is going on and way to many late nights.  I figured there was no better way to keep the summit high going then writing a series of blog posts summarizing my days at the summit.  Of course I’ll help us all remember with some pictures as well.

My summit experience started early Sunday morning when I boarded a plane from SLC to Seattle.  I got into Seattle around 9:30 a.m. quickly got my rental car and headed out for a little town called Index, WA (where else would a DBA go?).

Index, WA

It was nice getting out of the city and seeing some of the great scenery in Washington.

Waterfall near Index, WA

On my way back into the city I stopped by Kerry Park.  The place where you get the cool postcard shots of the city, this is great at night time or day time.

Seattle Skyline

The rest of the day was spent checking in/registering and catching up with friends at the tap house.

Jason Strate Celebrating!

Monday was the big photowalk, for the first time ever we were rained out (surprising I know). So we decided to go inside and do some training on how to use your camera and playing with the lights I brought for another shoot later in the week.  The training might become a regular thing for photowalks I got a lot of compliments that said it helped and it was a lot of fun.

Jes and Tim

After the indoor photowalk we headed down to Pikes place market a favorite place to take photographs in Seattle.  The group got together for some Great Russian food at a café in pikes place.

Pikes Place Market

See a Summary of Sunday and Monday Pictures here.

I take a different approach to the summit than many other people.  Sure I’m going to network and see my great friends I’ve made in this community.  I’m also going to get the best training/content I can’t get anywhere else.  For me though there is a little more.  For many years I’ve approached the summit with a photographers view.

I really started getting into photography about 5 years ago and started enjoying it as a hobby as I got farther into it and as my skills possessed I learned I could finally make some of the pictures and ideas I had in my head.  I started to make photographs instead of just taking snapshots.  The PASS summit is hard for me since I want to use my knowledge to make the right photograph but I also find that the best photographs at the pass summit are the ones that just happen.

This year I’ll once again be carrying a camera and looking for the same thing I have every year.

Something that captures “PASS”, maybe that’s a first timer seeing the quiz bowl for the first time or someone meeting SQL Royalty Paul Randal and Kimberly Tripp for the first time.  Whatever it may be I’m going to do my best to try and find it.

That’s great Pat but what’s your point here?    My photos are always open to the community and for use by everyone.  My goal this year is to come back with photos that you can use in future presentations and future websites.  Not just talking about photos PASS can use but all the SQL community.  My challenge to you, as you fly/bike/ride/walk/travel to the PASS summit is what ideas do you have that you would like to see or use in a future presentation related to SQL?   I would love to see an email/comment or hit me up in the halls telling me what you would like to see in a photo that you could use.  I’ll work on making it happen.

As always my photos will be streaming through an Eye-fi card to this flick album (here) so even if you’re not at the summit you will be able to tune in and see what’s going on.  My final photos after editing will end up on my Smugmug site (here).  If you would like to use one of my pictures you need only to ask, safe travels to all my SQL family and looking forward to seeing you all soon.

See you in Seattle!

Pat

Recently I was approached by this wonderful gentleman that needed some help with some DB work and he offered a lunch to discuss the position.  I figured I would go to lunch and let him know about the great events we had coming up in the community that could not only help him find someone but could get his team exposed to lots of great content.   Unfortunately I’m a lousy sales person.   Adam (@AdamEdmunds) told me about the SSAS projects they had in the works and what they were looking to do and I was intrigued.  After a few more emails and discussions I was hooked on the idea.

In a few short weeks I’ll start with Allegiance.   I’m really stoked about getting started on the projects they are currently working on.  We collect Survey/Feedback for customers from multiple sources to present that data to the customer.   I’ll be working as a Dba/DW/Architect basically anything that is needed on the DB.  One of the unique aspects to the company is providing DW/BI as a service to our customers.  For anyone that knows and understands the DW/BI space it’s not a simple thing to use a SAAS (Software as a Service) model for DW/BI.  This should be an excellent challenge that I’ll share in the future though blogging.  Looking forward to the challenge the position will bring.  If you’re at the summit and you do a DW/BI in a SAAS model I would love to chat!

Tomorrow I’ll be back to my blogging about the PASS summit coming up next week!  See you all there!

We’ve had lots of great blog posts lately on what you need to do for your first time at the SQL PASS Summit.   I thought I would add some info as well.  Hopefully you will benefit from it.

Start at the beginning.

Packing

Layers of clothing are best in the Pacific Northwest areas like Seattle.  You can expect 50-60’s during the day.  You can find more info here. I typically bring a light jacket that has fleece inside and blocks the wind.  I’ve yet to take an umbrella to PASS.  I’ve lucked out in either needing to not walk far in the rain or it just not raining that much to matter.  Typically the rain is light and since most activities are close to the convention center you can cab or walk easily.   Bring plenty of cables; Surge protectors can be very helpful since there are never enough outlets when you need them (in hotel or in the convention center).  Comfy shoes, these are very important you will do lots of walking while at the summit.  Bring an extra bag, or bring one that can be folded down so it packs easily on your way to the summit.  You typically get lots of Swag at the summit and you need a bag to ship back or bring it home in.  Consider shipping as an option since Airline fees for luggage can be horrible (there is a fedex center in the convention center).  Laptop/Netbook/ Ipad are all up to you on what to bring you will have Wi-Fi in the convention center and in most hotels there is some sort of Wi-Fi or internet in the rooms for a fee.

Planning

Lots of debates on this, some suggest planning all your sessions out and all the events you plan to intend.  I do my planning every morning at breakfast.  I sit down with others at a table and ask them what they plan to attend and what they like.  This gives me a chance to meet others and socialize, ultimately I still make the decision on what I want to attend but chatting with others gives me a perspective that I wouldn’t get sitting at home planning my schedule myself.  I’ve done this for just about every summit I’ve attended.

For after-hours events I do plan this time out so I know where the major vendor and PASS events are located and the times.  I also keep a close eye on twitter to find changes to events or where my friends will be at various times.  You can find the PASS after hour’s page here.  I would suggest putting these items on your calendar in your phone so you will have them all available to you.  Contact any vendors you do business with at work as well and find out if they will have parties during the summit.  Make sure to visit the expo hall and ask vendor’s about any parties they have planned they can get you an invite to the party during the evening.  Personally I would not miss SQL Karaoke always a good time try and make it out if you have the chance!

Take a problem that you have at work and make a list of questions for the problem so that when you meet a MS employee/MVP/MCM/Fellow DBA you will have questions to ask and conversation with them.  Remember what makes the PASS Summit a great event is the socializing aspect.  You can learn so many things just being out in the hall with experts asking them questions.  Don’t be afraid to approach someone and start a conversation, if you’re worried about meeting someone or coming out of your shell feel free to find me I’ll introduce you. 

The Big Week

Here are some general tips during the week that will help you out.

1. Have Fun!
2. Socialize!
3. Learn!
4. Register during an off time. If you come in Sunday afternoon register Sunday night it’s usually pretty dead.  If you are attending a pre-con it’s not a bad idea to get to registration early as it can be busy.  If you’re starting on Wednesday then try and register Tuesday night.  Registration is open pretty late most days so take advantage of it.
5. Get to your sessions early and don’t be afraid to sit up front.  I find it’s the best spot for me to stay focused on the presentation and I can see well up front.  On the opposite of this don’t be afraid to miss a session if you’re having a good conversation with others out in the hall.  Remember if you’re getting your questions answered/solved and you’re learning something you’re succeeding at the summit.
6. Talk to your neighbor/Socialize.  Before the session gets started is a great time to chat with the person next to you and find out if they have enjoyed the summit.  Perhaps they are someone who can help you with your problems at work.  I started a conversation with 2 people years ago during a pre-con and they are now lifelong friends (2 of the best Db professionals around as well).
7. Be courteous to your speakers put your cell phone on Vibrate.  We understand you have to take calls and help your company be courteous of others and excuse yourself and take the call.
8. Give honest feedback to the speakers good or bad.  PASS values the feedback we give as attendees and I know the speakers value it even more.  The only way to make a speaker better is to give them feedback.  If you see a speaker in the hall later don’t be shy to say thank you and that you enjoyed the session.  Speakers put a ton of time and effort into their presentations and hearing that feedback is great.
9. Handout business cards and when you get business cards from others write a quick statement on them what you talked about on it.  This will help you remember when you get back to the office who you spoke with and what topics you discussed.

For more resources on your first time check out the PASS Summit First timers page lots of good links in there about all sorts of information.  You can find it here.

The most important things to remember about the summit are to never eat alone, have fun and learn something.  If you do that you’ll have a great first time experience.