Rob Farley : professional development

Why I present

Rob Farley — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 00:09:13 GMT

Louis Davidson just asked me why I write, and now Bob Pusateri (@sqlbob) is asking me why I present, which is his question for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday.

If you didn’t follow the link to see his actual question, you’ll need to know that he actually posed the question “How did you come to love presenting?”

Well, sometimes I don’t, but on the whole, I have to admit that presenting is part of who I am, and I miss it if I’m not presenting. It’s why despite being a PASS board member (that link will only seem relevant if you’re reading this while I’m still one) and having plenty of reason to NOT present at the PASS Summit in 2013, I’ve submitted the maximum number of abstracts for consideration. It’s why I want to be teaching more, both online and in the classroom, and so on.

It’s not that I think I have anything important to say (although I do only ever teach / present on things that I think are important).

It’s not that I think I’m good at presenting (my feedback scores beg to differ).

It’s not that I’m comfortable presenting (I still get ridiculously nervous most of the time).

I’m just addicted to it.

It’s a drug – it really is.

I spend my time walking around the room, or around the stage, explaining things to people, watching for those moments when the audience gets it, and... well, I’m addicted to it.

If you watch http://www.sqlbits.com/Sessions/Event5/Designing_for_simplification, you’ll see a few things. I was in Wales, and had started with the few words in Welsh that I know (but that’s been edited out – hopefully when I thought I was saying ‘hello’ I wasn’t actually insulting anyone). I nearly fell off the stage. I broke the microphone. I typed some things wrong in my queries. People complained that I didn’t say anything significant…

But around 33:10 in, you hear the audience almost start clapping. IN THE UK (where people don’t clap for presentations). It’s a moment where people see something they weren’t expecting, and (hopefully) realise the potential in what they’ve heard.

Phil Nolan wrote nicely about me on his blog, and said “Those of you who know Rob Farley will know he’s a funny guy with an enormous armoury of shockingly bad jokes.” More importantly though, he wrote “His design tips challenged a number of our ideas and meant I took away many valuable techniques,” which helped me know why I present.

…because it’s not about me, it’s about you. I present because at least one of the people in the audience will benefit from it. And that’s addictive.

@rob_farley

Why should you bother with the PASS BA Conference this April?

Rob Farley — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 21:09:40 GMT

I mean really? Why should you spend some of your training budget to go to this thing?

Suppose you’re someone in the PASS Community who mainly looks after people’s data. That could involve database administration, performance tuning, helping developers write queries, that kind of thing. What part of “Advanced Analytics and Insights”, “Big Data Innovations and Integration”, “Data Analytics and Visualization”, “Information Delivery and Collaboration” or “Strategy and Architecture” is relevant to you? It sounds all well and good for the BI team, who’s thinking about cubes and models and report subscriptions and Power something, but that’s not you.

The problem is that as data professionals, we’re no longer just database administrators. The world has become more demanding than that. Maybe it’s because of the financial difficulties that the western world has been facing. Maybe it’s because we’ve out-grown our jobs as database administrators. Maybe we’re simply being asked for more than we were before.

Now more than ever before, if you’re a data professional, you need to be thinking about more than just transaction logs, corruption checking, and backups. You need to be thinking about the overall data story. You can tune your databases to cope with the large amount of data that’s pouring into them, as more and more systems produce consumable data. You can work with your developers to help them understand the significance of indexes to be able to get the data out faster. But is this really enough?

Today, we need to be strategic about the data. An increasing number of companies are moving their data to the cloud, where the need for database administrators is not quite the same as it has been in the past. There are a number of tools out there to allow you to manage hundreds, even thousands of database servers, putting pressure on you to be providing more from your role.

And then you get asked into meetings! People more senior than you asking about what can be done with the data. Can you offer more than just a comment about how much they can trust you to make sure their data is available?

This is why you need to be looking at things like the Business Analytics Conference. It’s because you need to know how to make the data that you look after more relevant to the organisation who entrusts you with it. You need to know how to get insight from that data. You need to know how to visualise it effectively. You need to know how to make it visible through portals such as SharePoint.

And you need to know WHY these things are important.

Either that, or you need to call in external consultants, who can provide these kind of services. You know how to get in touch. ;)

@rob_farley

PS: I should mention that I’m on the PASS board, so I see a lot of stuff about this conference. I’m not part of the organising committee at all though, and have been remarkably separate from the whole process. I do consider that this conference is about helping people achieve more within the data space, and that’s something I think more people should be taken advantage of.

MCM – I passed!

Rob Farley — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 23:40:00 GMT

I was wrong – I passed the MCM lab last month.

I know I thought I’d failed – I’m still surprised that I passed. Maybe I managed to satisfy enough of enough questions. Certainly none of the questions were beyond me, as I wrote just after I’d sat it. But I do know that I left more questions in an incomplete state than I would’ve liked.

The things I hadn’t finished were mostly those things which I’d simply been caught by from a time-perspective. I didn’t feel like I was out of my depth at all, just that some things hadn’t worked the way that I’d expected. In real life I would’ve been able to solve them, and given a little more time, I would’ve been able to get through them too.

It’s why I wrote that I was confident I’d pass it on a subsequent attempt, although I’m quite happy to not have to do that. I’m still happy I told everyone I was taking the exams, and would do the same again. The study aspect is still something I’m not sure about. As much as I’d like to advise people to NOT study, I get that most people don’t manage to pass first time (even with some study). Heck – it used to require three weeks of intensive training in Seattle, and I was never going to do that (at least, not unless I was on the other side of the desk).

So now I’m a Microsoft Certified Master in SQL Server, to go with the Microsoft Certified Trainer cert and Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award that I’ve had since 2006. I don’t know how many people around the world have both MCM and MCT in SQL Server, but there can’t be many. I need to deliver more training.

@rob_farley
LobsterPot Solutions

The MCM lab exam – two days later

Rob Farley — Sat, 22 Dec 2012 20:59:38 GMT

Readers of my blog, or followers on Twitter will know I took the MCM Lab exam a couple of days ago. I let people know I was doing the exam, rather than doing the ‘normal’ thing of doing it in secret and hoping no-one found out until a successful result had been published.

Oh, and this post has been approved by the MCM program’s boB Taylor (@sqlboBT) as not-breaking NDA. Nothing herein should be seen to imply that a particular topic is or isn’t in the exam.

So how did I go? Well... I made a bunch of mistakes, I wasted a lot of time, I even left some questions incomplete, and so I assume I’ve failed. It’s a horrible feeling, I can tell you. I went in not knowing what to expect. I knew that I’d worked with SQL Server for a lot of years, and felt like I had a good grounding in all the various aspects of SQL Server that I might have to know – but on the day, in the stress of having a laggy remote desktop session, a Lync connection which had dropped out just beforehand, being told that ‘everyone’ fails first time but that I was probably going to be one of the exceptions..., well, I didn’t feel like it was my day.

If I’d had that day at a client site, it would’ve been fine. With extra time, I have no doubt that I would’ve been able to get through things. I could’ve raised questions when I didn’t feel exactly sure about what was expected. I could’ve pointed out how much I’d done to help address a situation and found out if they wanted me to continue hunting for other potential issues. I could’ve asked for more information. I could’ve written a document describing what I had in mind to solve the particular problem to confirm that the client was happy with it. You don’t get any of that in exam situations.

I found myself doing things the ways that work in the real world, but not having somewhere to turn when it turned out that the information was clearly not quite there, turning a simple situation into a trickier one. In real life, I’d’ve turned to the face peering over my shoulder and said “I thought you said it was that thing.” Instead, I wasted time looking for what it actually was.

I found myself making changes to databases that I wouldn’t make in the real world without first running those changes past someone, or at least making sufficient disclaimers along the lines of “I would recommend making this change, but there’s always a chance that something else will see the impact of this…”

Now, I think I could go into the exam, and even faced with a different set of questions, have a better picture about the style of thing that would be asked, and be better able to identify the danger-items – those things which could lure me away from staying on track. It’s not the same with consulting, because you can always ask as soon as you consider there’s a potential problem. Just like the mechanic who says “So, there’s a rattle… do you want me to spend some time looking into this? If so, is half an hour okay?”, I can ask my clients if there’s something which doesn’t smell right. In the exam, you don’t get that luxury.

If you’re going to take the exam, I would recommend the following approach:

Start by going through the questions, making notes about what they’re asking you to do and how much time it’ll take. Move the list of questions to the side, because switching from one window to another will simply take too long.
Once you’ve identified ones that you know will be ‘quick’, do them. But if one stops being quick, leave it and come back. You’re not in danger of leaving it unfinished completely – there’s 5.5 hours that you’ll be remoted in, and you’ll be coming back in about 30 minutes. But you don’t want to find that you spend an hour on something which you anticipated would be a ten minute job.
Whenever you leave a question, put it back in the list at an appropriate spot. If you think it’s still quicker than the question on XYZ, then fine, put it above that. But be ruthless about how long you spend on each task. If something doesn’t work the way you expect, do some troubleshooting, but don’t treat it as if your client depends on it. Your exam result will suffer more because you wasted time, than if you left it incomplete. You could end up finding that the XYZ question actually turned out to be simpler than you thought.

I hope I passed, but I really don’t think I have done.

I’m confident I blitzed quite a lot of them. There were plenty on the list that I moved through quickly, and others that took me longer than I expected, but I still finished. It’s just that there were a certain number that I assume I didn’t finish satisfactorily – simply because if it were my database that I had got a consultant in to fix, I wouldn’t’ve considered it complete. I mean, hopefully I hit the key things on some of those, but I can’t tell.

I know I definitely got some just plain wrong. The things that weren’t working, and I didn’t have time to get back to. I was getting hungry by the end of it, and was feeling stressed about the amount of time I’d wasted on other questions.

Assuming I need to retake it, I have to wait until 90 days after this attempt. That’s March 20th.

So what will I do between now and then? Well, I might check through the various guides about the things that stop things from working the way I expect them to. I’m not saying what didn’t work, but imagine there’s some technology that you’re familiar enough with. To use Tom’s example, peer-to-peer replication. I know how to set that up – I’ve done it before. It’s actually very straight forward. But if you do what you always do and you get some error… well, that might be harder to troubleshoot. In the real world there are plenty of ways you can troubleshoot online, but in an exam, it’s just Books Online and what’s in your head.

In that regard, Tom’s guide on what he didn’t do is useful. His “Don’t try to get every answer” is very important. But I would also point out that you should start to try them, in case they turn out to be easier than you expected. Just because it’s on P2P (continuing Tom’s example) doesn’t mean you won’t get it. Tom described shouting at the screen saying “Seriously? Is that all you’ve got?” – this is why you should try the ones that you figured would be harder. Don’t start with them, but a few hours in, don’t just focus on the time-wasters.

Tom described ‘not studying alone’. I discussed various things with people leading up to the exam, more so than studying per se. There’s another person who I know is taking the exam soon, and we’ve talked a bit about the various technologies. Like “How are you at TDE? What’s your clustering like?” – that kind of thing. He has environments set up where he's practising a bunch of tasks. I didn’t. I did skim through some of the videos, but not many, and it was really only skimming. I found myself being slightly interested in the video where PaulR demonstrates how to set up replication with a mirrored subscriber. I watched it a couple of times because something wasn’t sitting right – I figured it out though… in the exam you don’t want to be using scripts for everything (the GUI would be much better – not that I practised at all), but also, the error that he gets at the end… it’s because his script tries to remove the subscriber from the wrong server. In the GUI, he wouldn’t’ve had that problem (reminds me – I should mention this particular mistake to him, although I’m sure he knows about it and just doesn’t have an easy way to change the video). I didn’t end up watching most of the videos – even the ones on Resource Governor. I looked at the titles, and figured it would be fine to skip them. I listened to one on Clustering Troubleshooting in the car as I drove home from town, but just kept thinking “Right – I get all that… but is that enough for the exam?” I can’t say whether it was or not, but I can tell you that I didn’t do any further study on it. I also watched the Waits demo, and the slides on Log File Internals (but mainly out of curiosity about a different problem I’d had a while back).

I didn’t read the books. I’ve read a couple of chapters of Kalen’s SQL Internals before, but didn’t finish it. I haven’t even read the book I wrote recently (well, obviously the chapters I wrote – I read them lots of times).

Of Tom’s advice on what he did to pass (doing the reading, watching the videos, writing things down and teaching others) I really didn’t do any of them. But I do spend time teaching others in general. I’m an MCT – I teach from time to time (not as often as I used to), and that sharing aspect is important to me. I explain to people about how to tune their queries. I explain why indexing strategies will work for general performance gain. I explain why security is important, and the keys to avoiding SQL Injection. Even today I spent time explaining the roles of Replication Agents to someone (who later told me that they’d heard that stuff before, but it just made more sense when I explained it). Teaching comes naturally to me, and I’ve always done it. But I didn’t do any of that with this MCM exam in mind.

My advice on how to pass this exam – use SQL Server for fifteen years. It’s what I did. Studying might work for you too, and if that’s what you’ve done, then you may well get to leave the lab exam feeling a whole lot more confident about your result than me.

I actually did leave feeling very confident about my result. I’m confident I failed. But I also know that I could pass it tomorrow with no extra study – by avoiding the time sinks that are in there – and I wish I didn’t have to wait until March to retake it.

I’ll post again when my result becomes public, to let you know how I actually did.

Of course, I hope I’m wrong.

@rob_farley

MCM Lab exam this week

Rob Farley — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 07:55:56 GMT

In two days I’ll’ve finished the MCM Lab exam, 88-971. If you do an internet search for 88-971, it’ll tell you the answer is –883. Obviously.

It’ll also give you a link to the actual exam page, which is useful too, once you’ve finished being distracted by the calculator instead of going to the thing you’re actually looking for. (Do people actually search the internet for the results of mathematical questions? Really?)

The list of Skills Measured for this exam is quite short, but can essentially be broken down into one word “Anything”.

The Preparation Materials section is even better. Classroom Training – none available. Microsoft E-Learning – none available. Microsoft Press Books – none available. Practice Tests – none available. But there are links to Readiness Videos and a page which has no resources listed, but tells you a list of people who have already qualified. Three in Australia who have MCM SQL Server 2008 so far. The list doesn’t include some of the latest batch, such as Jason Strate or Tom LaRock.

I’ve used SQL Server for almost 15 years. During that time I’ve been awarded SQL Server MVP seven times, but the MVP award doesn’t actually mean all that much when considering this particular certification. I know lots of MVPs who have tried this particular exam and failed – including Jason and Tom. Right now, I have no idea whether I’ll pass or not. People tell me I’ll pass no problem, but I honestly have no idea. There’s something about that “Anything” aspect that worries me.

I keep looking at the list of things in the Readiness Videos, and think to myself “I’m comfortable with Resource Governor (or whatever) – that should be fine.” Except that then I feel like I maybe don’t know all the different things that can go wrong with Resource Governor (or whatever), and I wonder what kind of situations I’ll be faced with. And then I find myself looking through the stuff that’s explained in the videos, and wondering what kinds of things I should know that I don’t, and then I get amazingly bored and frustrated (after all, I tell people that these exams aren’t supposed to be studied for – you’ve been studying for the last 15 years, right?), and I figure “What’s the worst that can happen? A fail?”

I’m told that the exam provides a list of scenarios (maybe 14 of them?) and you have 5.5 hours to complete them. When I say “complete”, I mean complete – you don’t get to leave them unfinished, that’ll get you ‘nil points’ for that scenario. Apparently no-one gets to complete all of them.

Now, I’m a consultant. I get called on to fix the problems that people have on their SQL boxes. Sometimes this involves fixing corruption. Sometimes it’s figuring out some performance problem. Sometimes it’s as straight forward as getting past a full transaction log; sometimes it’s as tricky as recovering a database that has lost its metadata, without backups. Most situations aren’t a problem, but I also have the confidence of being able to do internet searches to verify my maths (in case I forget it’s –883). In the exam, I’ll have maybe twenty minutes per scenario (but if I need longer, I’ll have to take longer – no point in stopping half way if it takes more than twenty minutes, unless I don’t see an end coming up), so I’ll have time constraints too. And of course, I won’t have any of my usual tools. I can’t take scripts in, I can’t take staff members. Hopefully I can use the coffee machine that will be in the room.

I figure it’s going to feel like one of those days when I’ve gone into a client site, and found that the problems are way worse than I expected, and that the site is down, with people standing over me needing me to get things right first time...

...so it should be fine, I’ve done that before. :)

If I do fail, it won’t make me any less of a consultant. It won’t make me any less able to help all of my clients (including you if you get in touch – hehe), it’ll just mean that the particular problem might’ve taken me more than the twenty minutes that the exam gave me.

@rob_farley

PS: Apparently the done thing is to NOT advertise that you’re sitting the exam at a particular time, only that you’re expecting to take it at some point in the future. I think it’s akin to the idea of not telling people you’re pregnant for the first few months – it’s just in case the worst happens. Personally, I’m happy to tell you all that I’m going to take this exam the day after tomorrow (which is the 19th in the US, the 20th here). If I end up failing, you can all commiserate and tell me that I’m not actually as unqualified as I feel.

An MCM exam, Rob? Really?

Rob Farley — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 00:28:40 GMT

I took the SQL 2008 MCM Knowledge exam while in Seattle for the PASS Summit ten days ago.

I wasn’t planning to do it, but I got persuaded to try. I was meaning to write this post to explain myself before the result came out, but it seems I didn’t get typing quickly enough.

Those of you who know me will know I’m a big fan of certification, to a point. I’ve been involved with Microsoft Learning to help create exams. I’ve kept my certifications current since I first took an exam back in 1998, sitting many in beta, across quite a variety of topics. I’ve probably become quite good at them – I know I’ve definitely passed some that I really should’ve failed.

I’ve also written that I don’t think exams are worth studying for.

(That’s probably not entirely true, but it depends on your motivation. If you’re doing learning, I would encourage you to focus on what you need to know to do your job better. That will help you pass an exam – but the two skills are very different. I can coach someone on how to pass an exam, but that’s a different kind of teaching when compared to coaching someone about how to do a job. For example, the real world includes a lot of “it depends”, where you develop a feel for what the influencing factors might be. In an exam, its better to be able to know some of the “Don’t use this technology if XYZ is true” concepts better.)

As for the Microsoft Certified Master certification… I’m not opposed to the idea of having the MCM (or in the future, MCSM) cert. But the barrier to entry feels quite high for me. When it was first introduced, the nearest testing centres to me were in Kuala Lumpur and Manila. Now there’s one in Perth, but that’s still a big effort. I know there are options in the US – such as one about an hour’s drive away from downtown Seattle, but it all just seems too hard. Plus, these exams are more expensive, and all up – I wasn’t sure I wanted to try them, particularly with the fact that I don’t like to study.

I used to study for exams. It would drive my wife crazy. I’d have some exam scheduled for some time in the future (like the time I had two booked for two consecutive days at TechEd Australia 2005), and I’d make sure I was ready. Every waking moment would be spent pouring over exam material, and it wasn’t healthy. I got shaken out of that, though, when I ended up taking four exams in those two days in 2005 and passed them all. I also worked out that if I had a Second Shot available, then failing wasn’t a bad thing at all. Even without Second Shot, I’m much more okay about failing. But even just trying an MCM exam is a big effort. I wouldn’t want to fail one of them.

Plus there’s the illusion to maintain. People have told me for a long time that I should just take the MCM exams – that I’d pass no problem. I’ve never been so sure. It was almost becoming a pride-point. Perhaps I should fail just to demonstrate that I can fail these things.

Anyway – boB Taylor (@sqlboBT) persuaded me to try the SQL 2008 MCM Knowledge exam at the PASS Summit. They set up a testing centre in one of the room there, so it wasn’t out of my way at all. I had to squeeze it in between other commitments, and I certainly didn’t have time to even see what was on the syllabus, let alone study. In fact, I was so exhausted from the week that I fell asleep at least once (just for a moment though) during the actual exam. Perhaps the questions need more jokes, I’m not sure.

I knew if I failed, then I might disappoint some people, but that I wouldn’t’ve spent a great deal of effort in trying to pass. On the other hand, if I did pass I’d then be under pressure to investigate the MCM Lab exam, which can be taken remotely (therefore, a much smaller amount of effort to make happen). In some ways, passing could end up just putting a bunch more pressure on me.

Oh, and I did.

Summit reflections

Rob Farley — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 06:05:07 GMT

So far, my three PASS Summit experiences have been notably different to each other.

My first, I wasn’t on the board and I gave two regular sessions and a Lightning Talk in which I told jokes.

My second, I was a board advisor, and I delivered a precon, a spotlight and a Lightning Talk in which I sang.

My third (last week), I was a full board director, and I didn’t present at all.

Let’s not talk about next year. I’m not sure there are many options left.

This year, I noticed that a lot more people recognised me and said hello. I guess that’s potentially because of the singing last year, but could also be because board elections can bring a fair bit of attention, and because of the effort I’ve put in through things like 24HOP... Yeah, ok. It’d be the singing.

My approach was very different though. I was watching things through different eyes. I looked for the things that seemed to be working and the things that didn’t. I had staff there again, and was curious to know how their things were working out. I knew a lot more about what was going on behind the scenes to make various things happen, and although very little about the Summit was actually my responsibility (based on not having that portfolio), my perspective had moved considerably.

Before the Summit started, Board Members had been given notebooks – an idea Tom (who heads up PASS’ marketing) had come up with after being inspired by seeing Bill walk around with a notebook. The plan was to take notes about feedback we got from people. It was a good thing, and the notebook forms a nice pair with the SQLBits one I got a couple of years ago when I last spoke there. I think one of the biggest impacts of this was that during the first keynote, Bill told everyone present about the notebooks. This set a tone of “we’re listening”, and a number of people were definitely keen to tell us things that would cause us to pull out our notebooks.

PASSTV was a new thing this year. Justin, the host, featured on the couch and talked a lot of people about a lot of things, including me (he talked to me about a lot of things, I don’t think he talked to a lot people about me). Reaching people through online methods is something which interests me a lot – it has huge potential, and I love the idea of being able to broadcast to people who are unable to attend in person. I’m keen to see how this medium can be developed over time.

People who know me will know that I’m a keen advocate of certification – I've been SQL certified since version 6.5, and have even been involved in creating exams. However, I don’t believe in studying for exams. I think training is worthwhile for learning new skills, but the goal should be on learning those skills, not on passing an exam. Exams should be for proving that the skills are there, not a goal in themselves. The PASS Summit is an excellent place to take exams though, and with an attitude of professional development throughout the event, why not?

So I did. I wasn’t expecting to take one, but I was persuaded and took the MCM Knowledge Exam. I hadn’t even looked at the syllabus, but tried it anyway. I was very tired, and even fell asleep at one point during it. I’ll find out my result at some point in the future – the Prometric site just says “Tested” at the moment. As I said, it wasn’t something I was expecting to do, but it was good to have something unexpected during the week.

Of course it was good to catch up with old friends and make new ones. I feel like every time I’m in the US I see things develop a bit more, with more and more people knowing who I am, who my staff are, and recognising the LobsterPot brand. I missed being a presenter, but I definitely enjoyed seeing many friends on the list of presenters. I won’t try to list them, because there are so many these days that people might feel sad if I don’t mention them. For those that I managed to see, I was pleased to see that the majority of them have lifted their presentation skills since I last saw them, and I happily told them as much. One person who I will mention was Paul White, who travelled from New Zealand to his first PASS Summit. He gave two sessions (a regular session and a half-day), packed large rooms of people, and had everyone buzzing with enthusiasm. I spoke to him after the event, and he told me that his expectations were blown away. Paul isn’t normally a fan of crowds, and the thought of 4000 people would have been scary. But he told me he had no idea that people would welcome him so well, be so friendly and so down to earth. He’s seen the significance of the SQL Server community, and says he’ll be back.

It’ll be good to see him there. Will you be there too?

“Fabulous”

Rob Farley — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 22:46:04 GMT

I don’t tend to find that anything about me gets described as “Fabulous”. It’s not a word I ever use myself, so I was slightly amused to see it here.

It’s going to be an interesting week (in May, Monday 14th to Saturday 19th), in which I have two stints in classrooms (the three day course in downtown Chicago and this pre-con), plus two presentations at the main SQLSaturday event. I’ll be in a room freshly vacated by Jes Borland (I suspect you'll probably be still able to smell the ‘squee’), and from the look of things, I’ll be delivering a solid 2.5 hours of material, with an intermission of 15 minutes. Mind you, with people in the other rooms like Argenis, Ted and Erin, I’m not sure I’ll have much of a crowd. It might be more like “An Intimate Afternoon with Rob Farley” with whoever’s left.

The course will be the highlight of my week. I love teaching this course – it’s a great time to be able to get people in a room for a few days and go through ways to make queries better. More effective. It has “Advanced T-SQL” in the title, but I really try to focus on the “Effectiveness” aspect. Yes, we’ll look at a bunch of advanced features, and your T-SQL arsenal will grow, but the idea is to arm you with the information you need to be able to have more effective T-SQL. Advanced is only better when it’s more effective. It’s going to be a really fun few days, as I stretch your thinking and make you look at T-SQL in a new way.

The pre-con is going to be very different. We’ll be going through the syllabus of the new 70-461 exam, teaching you about all the ins and outs of the various features, leaving you in a position to be able to confidently take the exam. I’ve sat this exam in beta, but of course I can’t use any inside knowledge I gained from that to teach this. There’s a lot of stuff to get through. Each of the four sections has four or five bullet points underneath, and even more sub-points under that. We’ll be pushing through a lot of things, and a lot of the more basic stuff will certainly be skimmed through – but we’ll be looking deeper into a lot of the new things, and making sure that you get all the concepts on the exam. I can’t offer a proper guarantee that you’ll pass – some people just take exams badly. But as we’ll also be looking at a bunch of exam technique aspects, I think you'll be fine.

The two sessions that I’m doing at the SQLSaturday #119 are two of my favourite talks.

One of them is on SARGability. I remember doing this talk with a bunch of MVPs in the room (and a certain cloudy Microsoft employee), and even they said “Ooh – I didn’t know that” afterwards. SARGability – the ability to use indexes effectively – is such a significant aspect of querying, and a pet topic of mine (as regular readers will realise). SQL Server even provides a bunch of methods you can use to improve the SARGability, even if you can’t tweak the queries themselves. Very cool stuff. And did I mention I won’t have slides?

The other is on Analytic Functions (a talk which I’m currently doing around Australia and New Zealand at SQLSaturday 135, 136, 138, 139 and 140). There are eight new Analytic Functions in SQL 2012, plus some new enhancements to the OVER clause. I’ll be running through these, and I’m sure you’ll leave the room with new ideas to try to enhance your reporting and data analysis.

See you there?

Adelaide's SQL Tuesday

Rob Farley — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 08:36:42 GMT

This coming Tuesday sees a midweek SQL Saturday hit Adelaide. LobsterPot’s a sponsor, as are a bunch of other companies.

An all day event, with two tracks featuring some of the best material you’ve ever seen presented. I’m presenting too.

The thing I really want to draw your attention to is that we have two sessions from Paul White. If you haven’t heard of Paul, click the link to have a look at his blog. When you’ve picked your jaw up and some of the mind-blowing information he likes to write about, imagine yourself sitting in sessions by him. I’ve just got back from Wellington where I heard him for an hour, and knew that giving him two sessions was completely the right choice. Everyone left the room wishing that he could’ve gone on longer, and I suspect Paul will be somewhat caught up for questions for the rest of the day, as people try to pick his brain about some of the Query Optimizer things he can teach. He’s been scheduled for the morning so that attendees can have plenty of opportunity to see him around for the rest of the day. It’s his first time ever to Australia, so it’s completely brilliant to have him come to Adelaide for this event.

I shouldn’t suggest that the other sessions won’t be excellent though. Peter Ward’s session about the $10000 question has been very well received at SQLSaturday events so far, as have the sessions by Roger Noble and Paul te Braak. Combining these with Microsoft’s Raja N presenting about the Database Consolidation Appliance, some excellent local speakers, a terrific sponsor-session from Fusion-io (and a couple of spots from me), and I’m sure you’ll agree that this event is definitely worth getting to.

Numbers are limited and being a free event it may well sell out. So get yourself registered (but I’d recommend joining PASS first, which gives you a bunch of extra benefits and there’s no extra effort involved), and I’ll see you there.

It’s in less than a week!

T-SQL in Chicago – the LobsterPot teams with DataEducation

Rob Farley — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 13:18:00 GMT

In May, I’ll be in the US. I have board meetings for PASS at the SQLRally event in Dallas, and then I’m going to be spending a bit of time in Chicago.

The big news is that while I’m in Chicago (May 14-16), I’m going to teach my “Advanced T-SQL Querying and Reporting: Building Effectiveness” course. This is a course that I’ve been teaching since the 2005 days, and have modified over time for 2008 and 2012. It’s very much my most popular course, and I love teaching it. Let me tell you why.

For years, I wrote queries and thought I was good at it. I was a developer. I’d written a lot of C (and other, more fun languages like Prolog and Lisp) at university, and then got into the ‘real world’ and coded in VB, PL/SQL, and so on through to C#, and saw SQL (whichever database system it was) as just a way of getting the data back. I could write a query to return just about whatever data I wanted, and that was good. I was better at it than the people around me, and that helped. (It didn’t help my progression into management, then it just became a frustration, but for the most part, it was good to know that I was good at this particular thing.)

But then I discovered the other side of querying – the execution plan. I started to learn about the translation from what I’d written into the plan, and this impacted my query-writing significantly. I look back at the queries I wrote before I understood this, and shudder. I wrote queries that were correct, but often a long way from effective. I’d done query tuning, but had largely done it without considering the plan, just inferring what indexes would help.

This is not a performance-tuning course. It’s focused on the T-SQL that you read and write. But performance is a significant and recurring theme. Effective T-SQL has to be about performance – it’s the biggest way that a query becomes effective. There are other aspects too though – such as using constructs better. For example – I can write code that modifies data nicely, but if I haven’t learned about the MERGE statement and the way that it can impact things, I’m missing a few tricks.

If you’re going to do this course, a good place to be is the situation I was in a few years before I wrote this course. You’re probably comfortable with writing T-SQL queries. You know how to make a SELECT statement do what you need it to, but feel there has to be a better way. You can write JOINs easily, and understand how to use LEFT JOIN to make sure you don’t filter out rows from the first table, but you’re coding blind.

The first module I cover is on Query Execution. Take a look at the Course Outline at Data Education’s website. The first part of the first module is on the components of a SELECT statement (where I make you think harder about GROUP BY than you probably have before), but then we jump straight into Execution Plans. Some stuff on indexes is in there too, as is simplification and SARGability. Some of this is stuff that you may have heard me present on at conferences, but here you have me for three days straight. I’m sure you can imagine that we revisit these topics throughout the rest of the course as well, and you’d be right. In the second and third modules we look at a bunch of other aspects, including some of the T-SQL constructs that lots of people don’t know, and various other things that can help your T-SQL be, well, more effective.

I’ve had quite a lot of people do this course and be itching to get back to work even on the first day. That’s not a comment about the jokes I tell, but because people want to look at the queries they run.

LobsterPot Solutions is thrilled to be partnering with Data Education to bring this training to Chicago. Visit their website to register for the course.

@rob_farley

24 Hours of PASS – first reflections

Rob Farley — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 02:03:21 GMT

A few days after the end of 24HOP, I find myself reflecting on it.

I’m still waiting on most of the information. I want to be able to discover things like where the countries represented on each of the sessions, and things like that. So far, I have the feedback scores and the numbers of attendees. The data was provided in a PDF, so while I wait for it to appear in a more flexible format, I’ve pushed the 24 attendee numbers into Excel.

This chart shows the numbers by time. Remember that we started at midnight GMT, which was 10:30am in my part of the world and 8pm in New York. It’s probably no surprise that numbers drooped a bit at the start, stayed comparatively low, and then grew as the larger populations of the English-speaking world woke up.

I remember last time 24HOP ran for 24 hours straight, there were quite a few sessions with less than 100 attendees. None this time though. We got close, but even when it was 4am in New York, 8am in London and 7pm in Sydney (which would have to be the worst slot for attracting people), we still had over 100 people tuning in.

As expected numbers grew as the UK woke up, and even more so as the US did, with numbers peaking at 755 for the “3pm in New York” session on SQL Server Data Tools. Kendra Little almost reached those numbers too, and certainly contributed the biggest ‘spike’ on the chart with her session five hours earlier. Of all the sessions, Kendra had the highest proportion of ‘Excellent’s for the “Overall Evaluation of the session” question, and those of you who saw her probably won’t be surprised by that. Kendra had one of the best ranked sessions from the 24HOP event this time last year (narrowly missing out on being top 3), and she has produced a lot of good video content since then.

The reports indicate that there were nearly 8.5 thousand attendees across the 24 sessions, averaging over 350 at each one. I’m looking forward to seeing how many different people that was, although I do know that Wil Sisney managed to attend every single one (if you did too, please let me know). Wil even moderated one of the sessions, which made his feat even greater. Thanks Wil.

I also want to send massive thanks to Dave Dustin. Dave probably would have attended all of the sessions, if it weren’t for a power outage that forced him to take a break. He was also a moderator, and it was during this session that he earned special praise. Part way into the session he was moderating, the speaker lost connectivity and couldn’t get back for about fifteen minutes. That’s an incredibly long time when you’re in a live presentation. There were over 200 people tuned in at the time, and I’m sure Dave was as stressed as I was to have a speaker disappear. I started chasing down a phone number for the speaker, while Dave spoke to the audience. And he did brilliantly. He started answering questions, and kept doing that until the speaker came back. Bear in mind that Dave hadn’t expected to give a presentation on that topic (or any other), and was simply drawing on his SQL expertise to get him through. Also consider that this was between midnight at 1am in Dave’s part of the world (Auckland, NZ). I would’ve been expecting just to welcome people, monitor questions, probably read some out, and in general, help make things run smoothly. He went far beyond the call of duty, and if I had a medal to give him, he’d definitely be getting one.

On the whole, I think this 24HOP was a success. We tried a different platform, and I think for the most part it was a popular move. We didn’t ask the question “Was this better than LiveMeeting?”, but we did get a number of people telling us that they thought the platform was very good.

Some people have told me I get a chance to put my feet up now that this is over. As I’m also co-ordinating a tour of SQLSaturday events across the Australia/New Zealand region, I don’t quite get to take that much of a break (plus, there’s the little thing of squeezing in seven SQL 2012 exams over the next 2.5 weeks). But I am pleased to be reflecting on this event rather than anticipating it. There were a number of factors that could have gone badly, but on the whole I’m pleased about how it went. A massive thanks to everyone involved.

If you’re reading this and thinking you wish you could’ve tuned in more, don’t worry – they were all recorded and you’ll be able to watch them on demand very soon. But as well as that, PASS has a stream of content produced by the Virtual Chapters, so you can keep learning from the comfort of your desk all year round. More info on them at sqlpass.org, of course.

24 hours to pass until 24 Hours of PASS

Rob Farley — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 00:03:18 GMT

There’s a bunch of stuff going on at the moment in the SQL world, so if you’ve missed this particular piece of news, let me tell you a bit about it.

Twice a year, the SQL community puts on its biggest virtual event – 24 Hours of PASS. And the next one is tomorrow – March 21^st, 2012. Twenty-four sessions, back-to-back, featuring a selection of some of the best presenters in the SQL world, speakers from all over the world, coming together in an online collaboration that so far has well over thirty thousand registrations across the presentations. Some people are signed up for all 24 sessions, some only one.

Traditionally, LiveMeeting has been used as the platform for this event, but this year we’re going with a new platform – IBTalk. It promises big, and we’re hoping it won’t let us down. LiveMeeting has been great, and we thank Microsoft for providing it as a platform for the past few years. However, as the event has grown, we’ve found that a new idea is necessary. Last year a search was done for a new platform, and IBTalk ticked the right boxes. The feedback from the presenters and moderators so far has been overwhelmingly positive, and we’re hoping that this is going to really enhance the user experience.

One of my favourite features of the platform is the language side. It provides a pretty good translation service. Users who join a session will see a flag on the left of the screen. If they click it, they can change the language to one of 15 on offer. Picking this changes all the labels on everything. It even translates the text in the Q&A window.

What this means is that someone from Brazil can ask their question in Portuguese, and the presenter will see it in English. Then if the answer is typed in English, the questioner will be able to see the answer, also in Portuguese. Or they can switch to English to see it as the answerer typed it. I know there’s always the risk of bad translations going on, but I’ve heard good things about this translation service.

But there’s more – IBTalk are providing staff to type up closed captioning live during the event. So if English isn’t your first language, don’t worry!

Picking your language will also let you see subtitles in your chosen language. I’m hoping that this event is the start of PASS being able to reach people from all corners of the world. Wouldn’t it be great to find that this event is successful, and that the next 24HOP (later in the year, our Summit Preview event) has just as many non-English speakers tuning in as English speakers?

If you haven’t been planning which sessions you’re going to attend, you really should get over to sqlpass.org/24hours and have a look through what’s on offer. There’s some amazing material from some of the industry’s brightest, covering a wide range of topics, from classic SQL areas to the brand new SQL 2012 features. There really should be something for every SQL professional. Check the time zones though – if you’re in the US you might be on Summer time, and an hour closer to GMT than normal.

Massive thanks must go to Microsoft, SQL Sentry and Idera for sponsoring this event. Without sponsors we wouldn’t be able to put any of this on. These companies are helping 24HOP continue to grow into an event for the whole world.

See you tomorrow!

@rob_farley | #24hop | #sqlpass

More free training from PASS

Rob Farley — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 13:26:52 GMT

Yeah, alright. I know PASS puts on heaps of free training all the time. There are meetings around the world all the time, as held by hundreds of chapters.

Seriously, there’s over 240 chapters in the world. If you figure that they typically have a 2 hour meeting once a month, that makes over 480 hours of training per month. That’s an average over 16 hours per day – leaving just enough time to sleep. Good thing most of these chapters provide food!

But next week, there’s a 24 hours of PASS event. This is the chance to get a huge amount of content into you, and seriously get you into the frame of mind for the PASS Summit. This is a Summit Preview event. Almost all the pre-conference seminar speakers (including me) are going to be represented, so if you haven’t decided which pre-con sessions to get to, this will help you decide (tip: mine! – actually, you could learn plenty from any of them).

Have a look through, and block out several hours next week to tune in. It’s worthwhile, even if only to evaluate how interested you are in some of the Summit material. You could even use it to persuade your boss to let you go.

My session is on in the second day. 8am in Chicago, 2pm in London, 10:30pm where I live in Adelaide. Sept 8th everywhere except New Zealand.

See you there.

@rob_farley

How failure can be useful

Rob Farley — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 02:32:15 GMT

First, an apology. I haven’t blogged for the last couple of months, except for T-SQL Tuesday events. I make myself blog for these, for two reasons. One is the simple fact that I like the concept – I like the idea of getting a blogging assignment, and the fact that it’s a monthly event. I’m not saying that I want to sign up for every blogging meme that goes around, but I’m convinced it’s a good thing to write (publicly) about something each month, particularly as a prompt to write about something that isn’t my own idea.

The other reason is that I haven’t missed one yet, and I feel that missing a month would be akin to failure.

But that’s not the kind of failure that this month’s theme is about. Nor is the kind of failure that you get when you try something (like one of the Microsoft exams) and don’t quite get the mark you wanted (like a “pass”). I don’t count this as failure, assuming you are allowed to sit the thing another time. I’m a firm believer that you should treat these kind of exams as a learning experience in themselves, and see how you go without study. Assuming you fail, you get a piece of paper explaining the areas where you should study, and you probably know what those areas are yourself, as you’ve had questions presented to you that gave you that feeling that we all know. The kind of feeling that tells you that you don’t actually know what you’re doing, and that you’re going to fail. We do all know that feeling. We’ve all had it plenty of times before, and will have it again. We feel it when we have a real failure, when we have that realisation that we’ve made a mistake, and we will all experience many times more. In an exam though, particularly one like a Microsoft exam where the impact of a ‘fail’ is remarkably small, the feeling is safe. Worst case, you can try the exam again in the future, at which point you’ll probably pass easily enough. And if I’m your boss, I seriously don’t mind at all.

Today, I’m a consultant who runs a successful company called LobsterPot Solutions. I hold myself to high standards, and failure is still something which causes stress. I tell myself that failure is something to learn from, but nevertheless, I find myself rehearsing prior events, practicing for next time I have to deal with that moment, as if I’ll one day have a second shot. I remember times I’ve accidentally hurt the people I love, and I beat myself up about it. I remember the times I’ve let down clients, and beat myself up about it. I remember the times I’ve let down God, and I really beat myself up about it.

Except that all these people understand that I’m human, and understand forgiveness. They also know that it’s never my intention to fail, and that from year to year, I fail less often (I hope – man, I really do hope).

Failure has to be part of growth. And we do get second shots. The better you are, the more second shots you get. If you fail to use the second shots, then that’s a much bigger problem. Whenever we fail, we need to put it behind us and move on. It’s not a sin to fail, but if you make a habit of failure, then that’s something you need to stop.

As for the T-SQL Tuesday theme – mentioning a time that I did something which I’d thought was going to be clever, and it really wasn’t…

I remember the time I accidentally deleted all the timesheets for the company I was working for. That was lousy. I felt all those feelings that I described earlier. I’d made a copy of a table and then deleted the data in the copy. The plan was to get the copy populated with a handful of items, and then use this as a basis for bulk entry – it seemed like a smart idea. Unfortunately it was a linked table, and the copy pointed at the same location as the original. Everything disappeared. The most recent backup available still meant that some timesheet data was lost, and everyone had to re-enter a lot of data. There were useful lessons to be learned that day, and my colleagues helped make sure I learned plenty.

I haven’t done that again.

LobsterPot submissions for SQLPASS

Rob Farley — Fri, 06 May 2011 04:05:32 GMT

My guys are great! When PASS started accepting abstract submissions for their Summit (in October this year), some of the LobsterPot employees immediately started looking into ideas for talks they could do. We rate communication as one of our key values at LobsterPot, and all my staff are keen presenters.

Roger Noble was at the PASS Summit with me last year, and has since spoken at both the Adelaide SQL Server User Group and Adelaide SharePoint User Group. Considering the work he’s done in data visualisation with PivotViewer over the past year, he was keen to be able to submit a session on that. This technology is seriously cool stuff – quite a few of our clients have been very interested in it and are now using PivotViewer to get at their data in new ways. You can see examples of Roger’s work at http://pivot.lobsterpot.com.au

Get even more from PivotViewer (Roger Noble)

With the release of the Silverlight PivotViewer control from Microsoft in June 2010 we saw the beginning of a new direction for data visualisation and interactivity, allowing data to be browsed and filtered in ways that highlighted information that could have easily been missed. This session will show you how to take the PivotViewer control and enhance it even further to provide even more ways to display your data, including placing information on maps, and showing extra information in the PivotViewer tiles according to the zoom level. From sourcing data from PowerPivot and SharePoint 2010, using Visual Studio 2010 to add new functionality and improvements in future versions this session will show the range of ways that PivotViewer can effectively be used in your organisation.

Like most of the team, Ashley Sewell has been doing a bunch of work with clients implementing cubes and reports. The talk he’s put in reflects a very common emotion that he gets from clients when they first start talking about Business Intelligence. They want to know that they’re not just getting their data in a different format, but that they’re going to be able to reach into the data themselves and realise that ‘Analysis’ aspect of SSAS. Ashley used to be tertiary lecturer, and understands the importance of giving presentations that are useful as well as at an appropriate technical level. This talk will be excellent, and I really hope it gets picked.

So you've got a Cube. What's Next? (Ashley Sewell)

Did you ever get to the end of an Analysis Services session thinking "Cubes sound great but what can I show the analysts and execs back at work to woo them?". If your answer is yes then this session is for you. You will be taken through some of the Business Intelligence reporting and dashboarding available using a combination of PerformancePoint Services 2010 and Reporting Services 2008 R2 with particular emphasis on combining the best of each offering to maximise the impact of your dashboards. You can expect to leave this session with a deep enough understanding (and a list of gotchas) to enable you to create your own dashboards and data visualizations that bring the data within your cube to life on the web.

As expected, I’ve put a few submissions – a pre-conference seminar and two regular sessions.

The pre-con is an enhanced version of the one I did at SQLBits 7. In that, I go through a bunch of T-SQL queries that could have been fixed using T-SQL that most people aren’t aware of. For example – many people would shy away from something like ORDER BY MAX(OrderDate) DESC, but if you understand what’s going on there, when it’s good and when it’s bad, then it can be just fine. This pre-con got excellent feedback at SQLBits, and I think it will please PASS Summit delegates as well.

Fixing Queries With Advanced T-SQL Constructs (Rob Farley)

Have you inherited queries that are not your own, and are finding that performance isn’t so great? Removing cursors in favour of set-based queries is useful, but even set-based queries can perform poorly. Understanding the impact that various constructs can have on a query plan could be key to resolving many of these issues. In this seminar, irrepressible SQL MVP Rob Farley will take a look at some real-life queries and take the audience through examples of constructs that can have significant effects on tuning. This will include complex nested joins, join simplification, procedural functions, SARGability v residuality with predicates, better execution plan reading, start-up parameters, force hints, complex sorting, ORs, effective Dynamic SQL, GROUP BY v DISTINCT, unique indexes, temporary tables, APPLY considerations, and more. You'll discover profoundness in things you thought you knew, and you'll even see when a covering index that returns a single row can be a bad thing. This will be a day spent in Management Studio, not PowerPoint. If you want to know how to persuade the Query Optimizer to do a better job of running your query, this day is for you. The examples will apply to a variety of versions, with most of it being useful even in a SQL 2005 environment.

Another talk that I’ve done in the past is one called “Understanding SARGability (to make your queries run faster)”. In fact, last year this talk was a ‘stand-by’ for the PASS Summit. I also gave it at SQLBits 7, with Brent Ozar (@BrentO) and Buck Woody (@BuckWoody) heckling me from the back. Brent tweeted “Okay, wow, @robfarley is a seriously good presenter”, and although he got my Twitter handle wrong (it’s @rob_farley), I was very flattered. It’s one of my second-favourite tweets still.

Over recent times, I’ve found that people really don’t seem to understand the significance of having predicates fall into the category of “Residual”. I wrote about it recently, and was quite interested to see some of the reactions that people had when they talked about it with me. Jack Li wrote a post last week about a query which took longer than expected because a Hash Match was putting a lot of data into a single bucket. This is a common problem that gets missed, because of the impact of having the selective predicate treated as residual. I’m going to write more posts on that in the coming weeks, and a lot of that will be covered in one of the talks I’ve submitted this year. Residualiciousness isn’t a real word, but I figure that shouldn’t stop me.

Joins, SARGability and the Evils of Residualiciousness (Rob Farley)

You wouldn't believe how often people just aren't using their indexes effectively, whether it be searching for data, or joining tables. Quite often, this comes down to predicates becoming residual. Yes, residuality is a problem, and once a predicate has become residualicious, you may as well be scanning instead of seeking. There’s so much more to SARGability than people think, and people can often miss out on significant performance benefits by not appreciating this – particularly with new and improved query hints becoming available in SQL 2008 R2 SP1 and Denali. SARGable means Search ARGument Able and relates to the ability to search through an index for a value. Unfortunately many database professionals don’t really understand it – especially in regard to joins – leading to queries which don’t run as well as they should. In this talk, you'll learn how to tell whether a predicate is being used correctly, and to evaluate what's really going on in your Seek or Join. You'll even learn to use new features in SQL 2008 R2 SP1 and Denali to affect the residuality of your predicates. This is a talk involving lots of demos, showing plenty of queries and execution plans.

The other talk I’ve submitted was inspired by a conversation with my friend Jamie Thomson (@jamiet), who unfortunately won’t be at the PASS Summit this year (he does have an excellent reason though). I happened to mention something which I considered an important consideration about queries used for SSIS, and he told me I had to write a blog post about it. I eventually did, and it got me thinking about a bunch of things that SSIS Tuning Talks (like those that Jamie gives) which are very relevant to tuning T-SQL, but yet almost never get mentioned by standard talks. Some of them get covered in the pre-con seminar too, and I’m sure I’ll have to get blog posts written on some of these things over coming months.

Tuning T-SQL Using Lessons Learned From SSIS (Rob Farley)

We see presentations telling us how to tune T-SQL, looking at things like how a covering index can help avoid an expensive lookup, and the importance of set-based thinking. But there can be a lot more to finding bottlenecks in an execution plan, and there are significant parallels with the kind of concerns we have when tuning SSIS Data Flows. This session will look at some of the things that SSIS gurus explain when in looking at how to make SSIS run faster, and draw strong parallels to things that many query tuners don't realise. If only they paid attention to the SSIS world! There will be a lot of examples in this session, explaining what's happening in query plans and the ways that you can persuade your queries to run more like your SSIS packages, and vice-versa.

Looking at the long list of abstract submissions this year (and right now there’s about three hours for more to come in), I think it’s going to be a great event. With buzz around Denali and a stronger community than ever, I think it’s going to be huge.

There will be handful of LobsterPot employees there, and I hope you will be too!

@rob_farley