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This evening I'll be presenting a brand new session on installing and managing SQL Server 2012 with PowerShell. Here's the abstract:
Windows Server 2008 introduced Server Core, the operating system without the Graphical User Interface. SQL Server 2012 is the first version of SQL Server to support Server Core. To gain the maximum efficiency from your servers you want to make use of Server Core and with PowerShell you can effectively manage SQL Server in that environment. This session will demonstrate how to manage SQL Server 2012 on Windows Server Core and provide scripts to help you perform the common tasks you need to perform on that platform.
Please join us at the Triangle SQL Server User Group meeting in Raleigh, NC for this first look at making your servers more efficient.
I look forward to seeing you there.
Allen
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 T-SQL Tuesday #25 fell on the same day I brought my mother home from a 3-day emergency trip to the hospital. She's much better, now, but it was a bit crazy there for a little bit. Thanks for everyone's best wishes.
Rob Farley kicked off the official start of the event with a post titled A T-SQL Tip: Working calculations. He showed us how to use the CROSS APPLY join operator to facilitate date calculations.
Greg M Lucas followed up with a list of Management Studio shortcuts (not exactly T-SQL, but useful nonetheless) here.
Pinal Dave (aka the SQL Authority) contributed a few scripts to help you manage your SQL Server configuration with his post SQL SERVER - A Quick Look at Performance - A Quick Look at Configuration.
We love comic books and super heroes, and Tracy McKibben (RealSQLGuy) fed that love with a couple of links to his performance capture scripts and to Adam Machanic's WhoIsActive script here.
In her first ever T-SQL Tuesday post, Mala Mahadevan shared with us a number of scripts that provide useful information and automate some processes here.
Sam Vanga's Tips and Tricks shared with us a way to clear the windows clutter of Management Studio and focus on the T-SQL here.
On Chris Shaw’s Weblog we learn how to read the SQL Server error logs via T-SQL and manage them across many servers here.
Using a method called "selective aggregates", Kent Chenery shows us how to efficiently summarize multi-year aggregate data here.
Ricardo Leca shared a script to create mirrored databases in T-SQL and making use of SQLCMD here.
A former Clevelander living in Washington, DC, Matt Velic shares a trick to make building referential integrity in databases easier in Easy Integrity.
Jason Strate showed us a script that you can use to show the various execution plans using a specific index here. In some performance work I'm doing for a client right now this script will really come in handy.
One of my favorite new people on the SQL Server scene, Jes Schultz Borland published a script to show how much transaction log space is used here.
Bob Pusateri demonstrates how to concatenate the returned rows from a query into a single string without using a cursor here.
My good friend John Sterrett has a nifty script to show us what queries are currently running right now in this post.
John Pertell keeps track of table growth with the scripts in this post.
Dev Nambi takes advantage of the INTERSECT operator to show how to ensure that query changes made for performance return the same result set here. I'm adding this one to my toolkit right away!
Some folks, like Richard Lewis (@gogorichie) posted links to earlier posts with their favorite tricks here.
David Howard points out some of the tricks in using the TOP keyword here.
One of my friends from the Cleveland group, Colleen Morrow, talked about organizing Registered Servers and how to run queries against multiple servers simultaneously using the groups in the Registered Servers tab in Management Studio here.
Aside from saying some very nice things about my presentations, Matt Nelson supplied a nifty script to return date range values via a view here.
Sebastian Meine talks about transaction log reuse waits, and how to determine why the log keeps growing here.
Nic Cain provides us a script that you can use to find out what Reporting Services reports have failed here.
Steve Wales also provided links to earlier posts here.
Jason Brimhall talked about some of the built-in property features in T-SQL here.
Aaron Bertrand also showed us how to be more productive in Management Studio with his tips here.
Rob Volk shares ways we can more easily use constraints in T-SQL here.
Mark Broadbent introduces us to The Best Tool You’ve Never Used. (Not exactly a T-SQL tip, but cool nonetheless.)
Another fellow Clevelander, Steve Smith, shares a grab bag full of cool tricks here.
Per the standard rules of T-SQL Tuesday, this ends the event, but there were a few stragglers that came in late:
Nigel Sammy: here.
Steve Jones: here.
Jason Grobe: here.
Thanks to everyone who participated. I definitely learned some great new ways to work with SQL Server.
Allen
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I'll be presenting at the South East Michigan SQL Server User Group (SEMSSUG) tonight. The session will be Gather SQL Server Performance Data with PowerShell.
We all know how important it is to keep a baseline of performance metrics that allow us to know when something is wrong and help us to track it down and fix the problem. We don't always know how to do this easily and consistently. This session will walk you through a series of PowerShell scripts you can schedule which will capture the most important data and a set of reports to show you how to use that data to keep your server running smoothly.
You can register for the meeting via this link: http://semssug20111208.eventbrite.com/
The meeting will be at the Raymond James Southfield Offices, 25900 Telegraph Rd, Southfield, MI 48033. (Actual entrance is on Civic Center Drive, just 100 meters east of Telegraph Rd.) Directions found by clicking here.
The meeting starts at 6pm and runs until 8pm, and DBSophic is the sponsor, providing the pizza.
I hope to see you there.
Allen
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It doesn't seem that long ago that having cool little tidbits of information about SQL Server made a huge difference in how effective you could be. Well, that's still true, but let me give you an example.
SELECT name FROM sysobjects WHERE sysstat & 4 > 0
In the early days of SQL Server, this was the way to pull a list of the names of all the stored procedures in your database. The 4 bit in the sysstat column represented stored procedures. (1 represented user tables and 2 represented view, as I recall, so changing the WHERE clause to read WHERE sysstat & 7 > 0 returned all tables, views and stored procedures.)
As SQL Server has evolved, Microsoft has made it easier to query the metadata to determine what objects existed, adding columns that helped (like 'Type' in this case), catalog views, Dynamic Management Objects, etc.
So, the challenge for this month's T-SQL Tuesday is: What T-SQL tricks do you use today to make your job easier? (Notice I didn't say PowerShell - I have a bunch of those now, but this is T-SQL Tuesday, not PowerShell Tuesday.)
Here are the rules:
- Your post must go live between 00:00:00 GMT on Tuesday December 13 and 00:00:00 GMT on Wednesday December 14.
- Your post must link back to this post, and the link must be anchored from the logo (found above) which must also appear at the top of your post.
- Leave a comment or a trackback here on this blog regarding your post.
- 'T-SQL Tuesday #025' should be included in the title of the post.
- If you're on Twitter, tweet about your post using the hash tag #TSQL2sDay
I'm looking forward to reading what goodies you're all going to share. After the event closes I'll post a summary of all your contributions.
Allen
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On Monday, Tom LaRock (b/@sqlrockstar) presented his #MemeMonday topic as What #SQLFamily Means To Me. The #sqlfamily hash tag is a relatively new one, but is amazingly appropriate. I've been working with relational databases for almost 20 years, and for most of that time I've been the lone DBA. The only one to set things up, explain how things work, fix the problems, make it go faster, etc., etc., yadda, yadda, yadda. I enjoy being 'the guy', but at the same time it gets hard. What if I'm wrong? Is everything I've told people now taken with suspicion? Sometimes that's happened, and it sucks. Since I started attending the PASS Summit I've gotten to know a lot more people who do the same thing I do. That's been wonderful, as I have people I can contact if I'm unsure of something. When I was awarded the MVP Award in July, 2007 I became a part of a smaller community, and really got to know many of the people whose work was instrumental in my development. I met Tom at the PASS Summit in 2008, when I was moderating a panel discussion on automating databases. While the discussion was taking place, in front of a full audience, he and Brent Ozar (b/@BrentO) were typing into their laptops furiously, using this thing called Twitter. I was taken aback, and a bit put off. I've always known that when you're 'on stage', the audience comes first, and these guys were, in my mind, distracted and distracting. What I didn't realize until later was that they were communicating with the audience directly. Twitter has changed the way we interact with each other. We still work mostly alone, but we have hundreds, even thousands, of people following whatever we choose to share. I can honestly say that I've actually become closer to the SQL community because of it. And yes, Tom, it's become a second family to me. We share our successes and our failures, we ask questions, we answer questions. Not just SQL stuff, though. On my recent trip to the PASS Summit I drove first to Chicago (from Cleveland, where I live) and caught the train to Portland, my first stop on that amazing trip. I love taking the train, but it arrives in Cleveland, in both directions, at about 3am, and there's no public transportation here at that time. It's actually quicker to drive to Chicago than to take the train. The problem was always 'where do I leave my car'. I asked Wendy Pastrick (b|@wendy_dance) and she was kind enough to provide me driveway space for the 2 weeks I was out west. The return train was 5 hours late getting into Chicago, and Wendy went so far as to drive downtown to pick me up! That's family. At the end of the week of the PASS Summit, I stayed in Washington to run the Poulsbo Marathon. Kalen Delaney (b/@sqlqueen) lives in Poulsbo and invited me to spend the weekend with her family. She took pictures of me running during the race and crossing the finish line. It was a wonderful weekend, and I truly felt part of her family. Are there people in that family I don't get along with? Certainly. We all have family members who we don't care for, but they're still family, and this SQL family is no different. But I'll bend over backwards to help out any of them because I know they'll do the same for me, and that's what family is about. (I won't go into details about Tech Ed 2010 in New Orleans, guys. You were there, you know.) So, what does #SQLFamily mean to me? A lot. I've got this wonderful, world-wide group of people who all understand what I'm talking about when I talk tech, and who care about me, as I care about them. What more could we ask for? Allen
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When I first learned to program, back in the fall of 1968, the first 'word' the computer I connected to said to me was 'READY'. That summed it up neatly. The computer was ready to do work, it was just waiting for me to give it instruction. As I progressed through my knowledge of programming and my focus on providing businesses useful applications for making decisions, whether my interface to the computer was via typewritten prompts on a scroll of paper, green text glowing from a black CRT, on through the current era of graphical user interfaces the fact remains that the computer is still waiting for me to give it instruction. It is READY. Along that path I moved from developer (we called ourselves 'programmers' then) through network and communications specialist, to Unix and Windows admin, to database administrator, the focus was always on keeping the computer busy at all times, to keep it from waiting for instructions from us. Somewhere along the line, server operating systems were given a graphical user interface (GUI). Why? Don't know, I wasn't the guy making that decision. It goes against the need to keep it busy. GUIs offer choices. Choices take away from keeping that system busy. A lot of server admins who only learned their craft on Windows Servers seem to only understand how to manage the system via the GUI, and to me that's a shame. They've missed the point. In 2006, Microsoft introduced PowerShell, a true shell environment for Windows. HOORAY! I've got the command line environment again (without resorting to the brain-dead cmd.exe) with the great shell features I grew to love when working as a Unix admin, like the pipeline. In 2009, Microsoft released PowerShell v2, with it's built-in Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE). PowerShell v2 made great strides over the original v1, and I applauded their efforts. In v2 they added a cmdlet called Out-GridView. What? Why are you putting a GUI output in my scripting language? Windows Server 2008 introduced Server Core, a version of the operating system that doesn't include the GUI. Awesome! We can now focus on getting lots of work done again! An added bonus for me is that SQL Server 2012 will support Server Core, so we don't have to slow down the servers with all that graphical rendering (and it does take considerable resources to accomplish this.)
Now, PowerShell has great use on the desktop as well as on the servers, and from that aspect, having GUI output does make sense. The ISE is also useful for writing code, though I've spent a lot of years writing a lot of code without using a GUI to do so. I don't use it because, for the most part, I don't need it. I'd rather have the full command window to see my results than slice my workspace into three parts and work within one of them. But that's me. What's my point? There are a wealth of tools, and they're designed to make you or your computer more efficient. Use the ones you find most convenient, that works the way you want to work, and use it. What works for you may not work for me, and vice versa. The tools I use to get the work done don't define the value of my work, the work I produce does. The important thing is to get the most work done, and for me that means working from the command line, also known as PowerShell.exe.
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Today's the last day of the Summit, and Rick Heiges introduced Rob Farley and Buck Woody, who sang Rob's "Query Sucks" song. As is everything done by these two, it was way too much fun. Rick also did a retrospective of Wayne Snyder, PASS Immediate Past President. Wayne recognized Rick, who's rolling off the board this fall as well. Wayne ended with the wish that "as you slide down the banister of life, may the splinters of success stick in your career." SQL Rally Nordic is now sold out! SQL Rally Dallas will take place May 10 and 11. Many SQL Saturdays are already on the schedule, and more are coming. PASS Summit 2012 will take place November 6-9, 2012, with two precon days on November 5 & 6. All PASS attendees are getting an ebook copy with four chapters from the SQL Server MVP Deep Dives (Volume I) as a thank you for attending. Rick then introduced Dr. David Dewitt, to talk about Big Data. Dr. Dewitt first introduced Rimma Nehme, who's part of his team at the Jim Gray Systems Lab in Madison, Wisconsin. Big Data breaks down to massive volumes of records, whether recorded in relational databases or not. By 2020, we'll be managing data in the range of zettabytes, averaging around 35 ZB. Data is being generated by automated sources, generating the incredible quantities we're anticipating. The dramatic drop in the cost of hardware is the reason behind the increase in the amount of data we keep. eBay uses a Parallel data system, averaging about 10 PB on 256 nodes, while Facebook and Bing use NoSQL systems, managing 20PB and 150PB, respectively. He told us that NoSQL doesn't mean that SQL is dead, it means Not Only SQL - other systems will manage data as well as relational systems. It incorporates more data model flexibility, relaxed consistency models such as eventual consistency, low upfront costs, etc. The NoSQL model implements a model where data is just stored on arrival, without data cleansing or staging, and the data is evaluated as it arrives. It can use a Key/Value Store method, as in MongoDB, CouchBase, etc, where the data model is very flexible and supports single record retrievals through a key, and other systems like Hadoop, which Microsoft is now supporting. In relational systems there is a structure, where NoSQL uses an "unstructured" model. Relational systems provide maturity and reliability, and NoSQL systems provide flexibility. This is NOT a paradigm shift. SQL is NOT going away. (Codasyl to relational in the 70s was a paradigm shift.) Businesses will end up with data in both systems. Big Data started at Google, because they had massive amounts of click stream data that had to be stored and analyzed. It had to scale to petabytes and thousands of nodes. It had to be fault tolerant and simple to program against. They built a distributed file system called GFS and a programming system called MapReduce. Hadoop = HDFS + MapReduce. Hadoop & MapReduce makes it easy to scale to high amounts of data, with fault tolerance and low software and software costs. HDFS is the underpinnings of the entire ecosystem. It's scalable to 1000s of nodes, and assumes that failures are common. It's a write once, read multiple times, uses a traditional file system and is highly portable. The large file is broken up into 64MB blocks and stored separately on the native file system. The blocks are replicated so that hardware failures are handled, so that block 1 after being written on its original node, will also be stored on two additional nodes (2 and 4). This allows a high level of fault tolerance. Inside Hadoop there's a name node, which has one instance per cluster. There's also there's a backup node in case the name node has a failure, and there are data nodes. In HDFS the name node is always checking the state of the data nodes and ensuring that the data nodes are alive and balanced. The application has to send a message to the name node to find out where to put the data it needs to write. The name node will report where to place the data, but then gets out of the way and lets the application manage the data writes. Data retrieval is similar in that it asks the name node where the data lives, then gets it from the nodes where it's written. Failures are handled as an intrinsic part of HDFS. The multiple writes always ensure that the data is stored on nodes on multiple devices so that even rack or switch failures allow access to the data on another device that's still available. When additional hardware is added, the data nodes are rebalanced to make use of it. HDFS is highly scalable, doesn't make use of mirroring or RAID but you have no clue where your data really is. MapReduce is a programming framework to analyze the data sets stored in HDFS. Map pulls in the data from the smaller chunks, then Reduce analyzes the data against each of the smaller chunks until the work is done. There's a JobTracker function which manages the workload, then TaskTracker functions which manage the data analysis against all the blocks. The JobTracker task lives on top of the Name Node, and the TaskTracker tasks live on the systems with the Data Nodes. The actual number of map tasks is larger than the number of nodes existing. This allows map tasks to handle work for tasks that fail. Failures are detected by master pings. MapReduce is highly fault tolerant, relatively easy to write and removes the burden of dealing with failures from the programmer. The downside is that the schema is embedded in the application code. There is no shared schema, and there's no declarative query language. Both Facebook's HIVE language and Yahoo's PIG language use Hadoop's MapReduce methodology in their implementations. Hive introduces a richer environment that pure MapReduce and approaches standard SQL in functionality. Facebook runs 150K jobs daily, and maybe 500 of those are pure MapReduce applications, the rest are HiveQL. In a side-by-side comparison, a couple of standard queries ran about 4 times longer than the same queries using Microsoft's PDW (next release, not yet available.) Sqoop provides a bridge between the world where unstructured data exists and the structured data warehouse world. Sqoop is a command line utility to move data between those two worlds. Some analyses are hard to do in a query language and are more appropriate for a procedural language, so moving data between them makes sense. The problem with sqoop is that it's fairly slow. The answer is logically to build a data management system that understands both worlds. Dr. Dewitt terms this kind of system an Enterprise Data Manager. Relational systems and Hadoop are designed to solve different problems. The technology complements each other and is best used where appropriate. It's so wonderful that PASS brings Dr. Dewitt to help us get back to the fundamental basics behind what we do every day. I love the technical keynotes and really wish Microsoft would learn that marketing presentations aren't why we're here. It's time to get on to the next session, but this has been a great PASS Summit. Allen
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The second full day at the Summit is the day we recognize Women in Technology, and (merely by coincidence) the day we wear kilts to the event. This latter tradition started two years ago when Grant Fritchey, Steve Jones and Bill Fellows wore their kilts to the conference. Last year close to forty of us wore them, and it's grown beyond that this year. I'm sitting in the ballroom watching people walk in for the keynote, many in kilts, and it's awesome.
Bill Graziano came out to start the keynote wearing a kilt. Before the keynote started Bradley Ball took this picture of Bill, Grant Fritchey and me.
He went on to acknowledge the volunteers that make PASS possible. This year's PASSion award went to Lori Edwards, who managed the Program Committee, and I worked with her on the Election Review Committee, and got to see first hand how hard she works for PASS.
Bill then shared some basic information on the financial progress PASS has been making, and the growth of PASS through both the Summit and through other avenues such as SQL Saturday and Virtual Chapters.
The keynote speaker this morning is Quentin Clark from Microsoft. He first revisited Ted's goals from yesterday's keynote. He identified the "Fantastic 12 of SQL Server 2012", including - Required 9s & Protection
- Blazing Fast Performance
- Rapid Data Exploration
- Managed Self-Service BI
- Credible, Consistent Data
- Organizational Compliance
- Peace of Mind
- Scalable Data Warehousing
- Fast Time to Solution
- Extend Any Data, Anywhere
- Optimized Productivity
- Scale on Demand
Bob Erickson, Executive Vice President for Mediterranean Shipping Company, came out to talk about how the Always On Technology keeps his mission-critical processing going. Note - when you're doing demos the audience has to be able to see the details on the screen. (Zoom-it is your friend.) Quentin talked about Vertipaq and using the ColumnStore index to dramatically improve performance for BI applications. He mentioned Power View & Power Pivot, and the improvements in accessibility of data through those tools. Lara Rubbelke came out to show SharePoint and data warehouse reporting performance. She showed the creation and use of the ColumnStore index and how the Data Quality Services enhancements dramatically improved the quality and performance of queries behind critical reports. They also showed the Parallel Data Warehouse appliance offerings from both Dell and from HP. (Most of my experience has been in fairly small shops, so I've never seen a good business case for these offerings, but large companies appear to be excited about it.) They've announced ODBC drivers for Linux, and Change Data Capture for both SSIS and Oracle. They've also added objects to the Beyond Relational space, including FileTable, 2D Spatial and Semantic Search. Michael Rys came out to show the Statistical Semantic Search (and he'd tweeted that he was not going to use any Excel in his demos!) His demo was interesting and I'm looking forward to seeing business use cases for Semantic Search. It really looked like an interesting tool to use. Nicholas Dritsas came out to show a good integration between SQL Server and SQL Azure. Yesterday I attended a session with Buck Woody and Kevin Kline on using Azure to scale corporate applications, and it's making more and more sense. It appears they've made significant progress in adding the capabilities to SQL Azure to match the technical capabilities already existing in the standard relational platform. He was followed by Cihan Biyikoglu to show the elastic scaling capabilities of SQL Azure federations. OK, the dependency walker (and the new execution plan view) in the management console looks really interesting.
Keynotes are by design marketing oriented, and it's impractical to get into any real detail in a forum like this. Reports and graphs seem to be the tools they use to excite people but I'd like better examples. OK, time to head to my session room and prepare for my session. Allen
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PASS selected me this year for a seat at the blogger's table for the keynote address each day. This is a singular honor, to be able to share with you my thoughts almost in real time. (How close to real remains to be seen - I'm having a bit of trouble with the overloaded network.) The level of excitement in the room is amazing. Dr. DeWitt came over to our table with Mark Souza to greet us all. (I really can't wait for his keynote on Friday.) The event starts with videos of people as they came and registered, and their thoughts on PASS, including PASS regulars and first timers as well. Nice start of the event.
Rushabh Mehta starts the event with a thank you to the entire community, including everyone watching from around the world via live feed. He reminds us of the various programs PASS offers, including SQL Saturdays, SQL Rally, 24 Hours of PASS and other events, and the PASS board members responsible for them. PASS goals are lofty, but the organization is making significant headway towards them.
Over the next three days, live streaming keynotes are available on sqlpass.org/livestream, and they'll stream the Women in Technology luncheon as well. On Twitter, follow the #sqlpass hashtag, and people will be sharing their pictures on Flickr using the sqlpass tag.
In 2003 I attended my first PASS Summit. I have one particular friend, Johan Bijnens (@alzdba on Twitter) whom I met at the conference in 2003 and we've been close friends ever since. Rushabh mentioned that this is a place to meet new people and make new friends, and I've had that experience myself. I'll also share that because of PASS and specifically the Summit, my life has changed dramatically for the better in the last eight years. I hope you have the opportunity to have as much success as I have because of this organization.
Ted Kummert, Senior Vice President from Microsoft is the senior exec over SQL Server. He comes on stage to talk about 'The New World of Data', and points out that Microsoft has been promoting the Cloud via Azure for eighteen months now, not just since last week. 400K Technical Hours, 79000+ Members, 300 Microsoft MVPs, 233 Chapters - Microsoft thanks us all for the support.
"We believe the cloud world is a hybrid world." You'll have data in your data center and in the cloud, not just one place or the other. Reporting will be added next year, as will Analysis Services. The data sync service will facilitate this. Servicing is the first priority with SQL Server. Looking forward they believe it will the most significant release in history. With Always On SQL Server will provide the highest uptime and best recovery story of any platform. "We're thinking about the cloud in everything we do."
Denali is now officially titled SQL Server 2012, and will be released in the first half of next year. (No surprise, but it's nice to have an official word.)
They have a three part vision. 1) Any data, any size, anywhere. They've decided they're going to support Hadoop as a platform. Coming will be Hadoop-based distribution for Windows Server and Windows Azure, an ODBC driver and add-in for Excel and for Apache Hive and a JavaScript framework for Hadoop. Right now there are SQL Server and Parallel Data Warehouse connectors for Apache Hadoop. Microsoft is partnering with hortonworks to facilitate this integration. Eric Baldeschwieler, CEO of hortonworks joined Ted on stage to discuss their history with Hadoop and the plans to integrate the product with Microsoft tools.
Next, Denny Lee, Principal Program Manager for Microsoft came on stage to demo working with big data. Using the new Hive ODBC driver, Denny connected directly to a multi-node Hadoop cluster via PowerPivot and presented a quick analysis of language use by country against Amazon profile data.
2) Connecting to the world's data. They want to enrich your data with the world's data, allowing you to build new services and applications and create a vibrant marketplace for the world's data. Tim Mallalieu, Principal Group Manager, and Nino Bice, Senior Program Manager Lead with Microsoft came on stage to show us how to "Empower Your Data". By adding databases (including publicly available data sources) and Excel spreadsheets, their new tool will match up the data within each source to allow business users to maximize disparate data into reports that are useful to decision-makers. (I hope this isn't another case of Microsoft making easy things easy.) Its code name is "Data Explorer".
3) Immersive experiences, wherever you are. Get business insight from any data, empower users from the tools you use every data, from on premises to cloud, on any device. Handheld and other devices provide business users a variety of ways to access their data. Amir Netz, Technical Fellow for Microsoft joined Ted on stage. Amir is bringing in data from Box Office Mojo, a subsidiary of IMDB, so he's demonstrating against real data. Using a new tool called PowerView, he looked at movie genre evolution over time. This demo blew me away, with how easy it was to find significance of segmented data. The analytical capabilities of this tool are pretty amazing and I look forward to seeing how I can make use of it with client data. The last thing he showed was to export the results to a handheld device, allowing drill-through on units like Windows Phone or iPad.
The ability to present data analysis across multiple source platforms and multiple destination platforms is the focus of the future from Microsoft's perspective, and it'll be interesting to see how this strategy plays out.
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After a week of data recovery (see my blog post here) and travel via train with no internet access, I've finally been able to get my presentation materials together from the Training Day and two regular sessions I did at SQL Bits #9 in Liverpool last week. I've uploaded the materials here for the training day. If you were in the room that day you know the password to the file. (If you weren't, please don't ask. My income is partly derived from producing training material, and I don't ask you to work for me for free.) You can download the material for my session on Gathering Performance Data with PowerShell here, and from my session on Service Broker here. Thank you to everyone who came out to my sessions, and I look forward to hearing how you've made use of what you've learned! Allen
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After spending last week in England, playing tourist in London, then presenting at SQLBits #9 in Liverpool, I'm now in Portland, Oregon, getting ready for SQL Saturday #92 tomorrow, and the Portland Marathon on Sunday morning. SQL Saturdays are always fun, and this one should be amazing, with all the speakers here before we all head up to Seattle for the 2011 PASS Summit. This afternoon I went to the expo for the marathon and the excitement there is just as high, as this is the 40th anniversary of that event. You may have seen a number of people chatting on Twitter using the #sqlrun hashtag - a good number of people are running the half marathon on Sunday morning, and I'm running the full 26.2 miles. I have a goal to run a full marathon in all 50 states in the US, and Sunday will give me State #26 towards that goal. My goal is partly to keep in shape and partly to really see the states that I visit. It's amazing over the course of a marathon how much of an area you really get to see - not just the touristy places, but the areas where real people live and work, and that's why I love doing the marathons. Well, that and the sense of accomplishment after completing a race of that distance. So, tomorrow we'll talk SQL all day, and Sunday I'll be running for 5-6 hours, seeing the real Portland. See you here, or at the Summit! Allen
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For those of you who weren't in my Saturday afternoon Service Broker session, the C: drive on my laptop crashed about 3 hours before that session and I was unable to boot my laptop from that point forward. Gert Drapers was kind enough to lend me one of his laptops, and even downloaded Virtual PC so I could run my demos for the attendees. I had my presentation and demo VPC on a USB drive "in case", and this time I needed it. For those of you who are waiting to download the decks and demo scripts, please be patient. I'm still trying to rebuild my machine - I'm on a temporary machine at the moment. I don't have a lot of time to get it all fixed, since I leave for SQL Saturday #92 and the PASS Summit on Wednesday morning. I hope to get it done today so I can do final trip preparation tomorrow. Thanks to everyone who came out to my sessions! Allen
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Other than changing planes once at Heathrow Airport, I've never been to England, so I'm getting really excited about traveling there next week for SQLBits 9 - Query across the Mersey!
My wife and I will be spending a couple of days in London first, and since I'm a descendant of the Howard family from the Tudor period, I'm most interested in seeing the sites relevant to that time. I also want to spend as much time as I can at the British Museum, home of the Rosetta Stone and the Elgin Marbles.
During the SQLBits conference I'll be presenting a full Training Day session entitled Automate and Manage SQL Server with Powershell. I'll spend time introducing you to basics of PowerShell, so you don't need to know anything about it to start. I will be covering how to manage SQL Server with PowerShell using SMO (Server Management Objects), as well as going through the SQL Server provider and the cmdlets included with SQL Server 2008.
On Friday, September 30, I'll be delivering my session on Gather SQL Server Performance Data with PowerShell. The methods and scripts I'll show in this sessions are what I use at client sites to gather performance information to monitor their baseline performance and look for any anomalies.
Saturday, October 1, I'll present my session on Let Service Broker Help You Scale Your Application. I love how Service Broker can get information quickly and reliably to other servers, other databases, or even other tables within your current database asynchronously, so you don't have lock contention on highly active tables to worry about (as much). I've used it successfully in client implementations and this session will give you the basics on how to get started with Service Broker.
The SQLBits team has put together a great conference and I hope to see you all there!
Allen
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In life as we develop personal relationships we build up what I'll call capital based on the value of that relationship to us and to the other person. Over time that capital builds up as that relationship grows, and it's this capital that helps you to decide whether or not to help a friend move for the twelfth time in the last three years, for example. (I hope none of your friends asks you to help them move that much - yuck!)
This past week a friend emailed me to ask if I could come read for a part he hadn't been able to cast from open auditions. Theatre has been my primary "hobby" for most of my life, and I hadn't performed on stage in a show in over six years. The show is one of my favorites - The Fantasticks! - and will run for three weekends in January. They'll start rehearsals in December, so it's in that 'dead' time between the various events in the SQL Server community. I decided to accept.
For those of you who've never been to Cleveland, there's a very strong dividing line down the center of the area, and people are defined as 'west siders' or 'east siders'. I had to drive to the far east side of town, and I live southwest of the city, so I had to drive about 45 minutes to go to the reading.
When I arrived I found he'd invited another friend to also read for the same part. It was a nice reunion, and he's one of the people I truly value in that community. We both read for the part (privately, we were never in the room together during the readings), and then I was told I was done and that I'd hear back in a few days.
Today I received the email telling me that my friend was chosen for the part. It's very similar to finding out your abstract wasn't selected for a conference at which you really want to present. You understand, but it hurts. I know my friend will do a great job in the part and I'm happy for him. At the same time, I made all these mental plans to put aside other things to make room for this.
And that's my point. We build this personal relationship capital over time by helping people out, and we spend it when we ask people to help us. The director built up capital with me by directing two of the shows that I treasure having been part of. He was also the catalyst for my having gone back to college in 2005 to finish my degree. He spent a great deal of that capital today. How much - well that'll take some time for me to know. I didn't audition for the show because I didn't feel I had the time. His request made me reconsider and adjust my plans, and his decision made all that effort moot.
In our professional lives we develop the same kind of personal relationship capital. It takes time to build up, and we can spend it wisely, or we can blow it by saying the wrong thing, or doing the wrong thing, or not doing the right thing. I've made these mistakes and deeply regret them. Each time I make mental notes to do it better next time.
The thing we don't want to do is waste people's time. That'll spend that capital faster than anything else. People want to know their time is valuable. Treat it as such, and appreciate what they're doing for you.
Allen
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Last weekend, as I was waiting for the start of the performance of the Cleveland Orchestra at its summer outdoor venue, Blossom Music Center, a client called with a problem. The databases on his principal production server had failed over to the mirror server, and now he couldn't connect to the principal server.
After trying a couple of things we were able to determine that the principal server was indeed up and running, and on the mirror (now principal) server, he could see that mirroring was still working properly, and the databases were synchronized. I walked him through the process of manually failing the main database back, and the scripts I'd implemented to automatically fail the rest of the associated databases over kicked in, and all the databases were back and functioning on the original server.
The reason he couldn't log into the principal server was that the administrative accounts had their default database setting set to the main application database. Because that database was in a restoring state the login attempt couldn't connect to that database, so the login failed.
This is why your administrative accounts should always be set so the default database is 'master'. If a user database fails the account can still connect to the server and assess the problem before bringing the databases back from your DR solution, whatever it may be.
Sometimes it's the little things that'll get ya!
Allen
P.S. The good news is that on the connect dialog in SSMS there's an Options button that allows you to specify the database to open when you connect, and this overrides the default database setting, so he was able to get in that way.
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