Rob Farley : sql, community

“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!

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

SQLRally Nordic gets underway

Rob Farley — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 10:56:01 GMT

PASS is becoming more international, which is great.

The SQL Community has always been international – it’s not as if data is only generated in North America. And while it’s easy for organisations to have a North American focus, PASS is taking steps to become international. Regular readers will be aware that I’m one of three advisors to the PASS Board of Directors, with a focus on developing PASS as a more global organisation.

With this in mind, it’s great that today is Day 1 of SQLRally Nordic, being hosted in in Sweden – not only a non-American country, but one that doesn’t have English as its major language.

The event has been hosted by the amazing Johan Åhlén and Raoul Illyés, two guys who I met earlier this year, but the thing that amazes me is the incredible support that this event has from the SQL Community.

It’s been sold out for a long time, and when you see the list of speakers, it’s not surprising.

Some of the industry’s biggest names from Microsoft have turned up, including Mark Souza (who is also a PASS Director), Thomas Kejser and Tobias Thernström. Business Intelligence experts such as Jen Stirrup, Chris Webb, Peter Myers, Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari are there, as are some of the most awarded SQL MVPs such as Itzik Ben-Gan, Aaron Bertrand and Kevin Kline. The sponsor list is also brilliant, with names such as HP, FusionIO, SQL Sentry, Quest and SolidQ complimented by Swedish companies like Cornerstone, Informator, B3IT and Addskills.

As someone who is interested in PASS becoming global, I’m really excited to see this event happening, and I hope it’s a launch-pad into many other international events hosted by the SQL community.

If you have the opportunity, thank Johan and Raoul for putting this event on, and the speakers and sponsors for helping support it. The noise from Twitter is that everything is going fantastically well, and everyone involved should be thoroughly congratulated!

@rob_farley

Highlights and Lowlights of PASS Summit 2011

Rob Farley — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 13:23:07 GMT

This was a proper big week.

The PASS Summit ran from Tuesday night to Friday, but I’d arrived in America the Friday before. So by the time it actually started, I had that strange feeling that things were wrapping up. My calendar was ridiculously full. The stuff that I was aware of ahead of time looked like this:

Friday 7th: Arrive in America. Travel to Portland. Speaker Dinner.

Saturday 8th: SQL Saturday #92 (two sessions to give, plus a song performance with Buck during the morning break). Charity dinner for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (whom LobsterPot sponsor).

Sunday 9th: Walk the Portland Half Marathon. Travel to Seattle. Collect my kilt. Register for the Summit.

Monday 10th: Early morning prayer meeting. Deliver a pre-conference seminar. Insiders Dinner in evening.

Tuesday 11th: Early morning prayer meeting. Meeting about SQL Saturday. PASS Board Meeting. Insiders Day at the Microsoft Campus. Opening Night Party, including being a Quiz Bowl contestant. Speaker/Volunteer Dinner.

Wednesday 12th: Early morning prayer meeting. Chapter leaders’ meeting. Chapter lunch. Book signing. Lightning Talk to deliver (my song). Global Growth meeting. Exhibitors’ party. Parties for SQL People, SQL Sentry, SolidQ and SQLKaraoke.

Thursday 13th: Early morning prayer meeting. WIT Lunch. Spotlight session to deliver. Redgate Dinner. Party at Gameworks.

Friday 14th: Early morning prayer meeting. More book signing. Board Q&A session. Board photos.

Saturday 15th: Sleep in and fly home.

That’s the short version. Really. There were a lot of other things that were squeezed in – in particular, the fact that I had promised Audrey Hammonds about six months ago that I would run through her presentation with her, and one other thing that became somewhat significant: THE FACT THAT ALLEN KINSEL ARRANGED FOR ME TO PERFORM MY SONG DURING THE FRIDAY KEYNOTE.

Readers of my blog (and plenty of other blogs) will know by now that I played my guitar and sang at the start of the Friday Keynote. Buck Woody accompanying me with his guitar and backing vocals. What you might not know is that this only got arranged late on Wednesday night. Allen had seen me perform it (again with Buck) during the Lightning Talks on Wednesday afternoon, and by the time the night was over, Buck and I were booked in to perform it in front of the three and a half thousand delegates at the biggest keynote of the week. I’ve played and sang before a couple of hundred before, but never even close to that many. To say I had mixed emotions would’ve been an understatement. I didn’t hesitate to say yes, and was excited, but was also phenomenally nervous.

As a late entry to a tight schedule, we got two minutes only and had to cut the song short. We didn’t sing the bridge section, so stopped after just Verse Chorus Verse Chorus. It was tremendous fun, and I loved seeing faint glows of phones being waved around in the crowd. I desperately wanted to look into the crowd as I was walking off stage, but my nerves and the fear of tripping on the guitar lead froze me completely and I didn’t turn my head at all. I was told later that there was a standing ovation – but I was just full of emotion, and so tired. So tired. It was my own fault – I’d gone out with Microsoft people after the various parties, and when they’d all gone to bed for a couple of hours around 5:30am, I’d got myself ready to lead a quick song at the 6am prayer meeting head off to my 6:15am sound check, prior to the 7:15am book signing. I got through the day (although I fell asleep for a few minutes during Audrey’s session, which I will need to watch to see how she did). I eventually got to bed around 10:30pm Friday night, and about twelve hours later managed to get up with just enough time to pack and check out of the hotel for noon.

But this wasn’t the highlight for me.

Nor was the highlight the fact that my level of involvement was so much greater, now that I’m a Board Member. I have to admit that I always get so much more out of events like this if I’m involved. I appreciate that I can get to more sessions if I’m not already laden with other entries on my calendar, but I would rather serve others wherever possible. I’m still new on the board, but as an advisor, I’m hoping to be able to influence things like the Summit more and more next year, and maybe there will be a few areas in which we can find opportunity to improve it still.

Serving is great – but wasn’t the highlight.

The highlight was the people. It always is, and it always will be. Right from the moment I arrived in America and tracked down John & Yanni Robel and Jes Borland. Arriving in Portland and seeing Jeremiah & Kendra, Buck Woody, Tim Ford, Erin Stellato and many more at the SQLSaturday events. Participating in the Portland Half Marathon with Erin, Jes, Yanni, Brent Ozar, Karen Lopez, Doug Lane (who did 10km) and Allen White (who did the full marathon), and a lots of people wearing the LobsterPot logo on their shirts. And despite not being able to run (I physically can’t run because of an old back injury, so I just walked it), I didn’t even finish last of the half marathoners! For all the extra pain I felt because my back isn’t really up to walking 21km in 3 hours, it was worth it. I’m especially proud of Yanni, who has achieved amazing things despite having a nasty blood cancer.

Despite Sunday being a ridiculously early start and a very long day, each day started with 6am prayer meetings. But this gave the opportunity to start each day on a good note, meet even more people (like Matt “Mrs” Slocum), and to figure out some of why I always click so well with friends like Stacia Misner.

Even the time I spent moving from one spot to another was a chance to see people and grow friendships deeper. I think of the night I was heading back to my hotel after the walk back from one of the parties had gone past the other hotels, and I bumped into the “Damn Strates” (Jason & Sarah), only to spend an hour talking with them about a number of different things. Or the time spent talking with one of the industry’s newest and brightest lights Jes Borland, who thinks she can out-talk me. Or the time with fellow board members JRJ, MarkS & Lara, which is time I can’t help but enjoy as the conversations switch over and over from flippant to serious and back again.

Oh, and the lowlight was losing my prescription sunglasses. That’s a real pain.

The SQL community has something very special, that other communities should be jealous of. These people genuinely love each other, and it’s really good to see and to be part of it. I’ve seen the same at SQLBits, but not in many other contexts.

@rob_farley

PS: Apologies to everyone for not having links on your names. I wrote this on a plane without connectivity.

I should've looked the other way

Rob Farley — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 18:08:00 GMT

The words for that song I did at the PASS Summit 2011 are as follows. On the Friday, I stopped where the bridge starts. Various recordings of it are making it to YouTube, such as here, where the song starts around 2:20 in.

I should've looked the other way

Verse 1:
My query sucks - it takes too long
So long I wrote this song
The plan's not big - it ain't a giant
And yet I have an angry client
Performance now has made her weary
So I've come in to fix her query
I promise I won't ever fail her
Say "Trust me, love, I'm from Australia!"

Chorus:
I need to find you
But I don't want to search every row
My predicate's residual
My seek just runs too slow
I thought I'd caught a glimpse of you
Been searching for all day
But all along, I'd done it wrong
I should've looked the other way

Verse 2:
A trace is on, I know the reads
That fetch the bytes the query needs
There's spooling from a CTE
They've got recursion needlessly
I need to dig a little further
I worry there might be a cursor
The DBA has the plan_handle
He says it's not corrupt, he knows Paul Randal!

Repeat chorus

Bridge:
There is an index covering predicates with keys
But my developer has used inequalities
There is a range scan
Hiding truth
Hiding cost
Hiding you...

Repeat chorus x2

I should've looked the other way

@rob_farley

Data, Information and Knowledge

Rob Farley — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 16:50:43 GMT

Hopefully my connection is slightly better during today’s keynote than it was during yesterday’s, when “Live Blogging” didn’t really cut it. The PASS staff saw the problem and have resolved it (thanks guys!).

Quentin Clark has jumped on stage to talk some more about SQL Server 2012, and he started with the expression “Data, Information and Knowledge”. I love this – I see Business Intelligence about extracting information from data, and it’s good to have Microsoft see this priority across the whole SQL platform.

He’s also talking about the 12 biggest features of SQL Server 2012, which he says has more new features than any release of SQL Server yet.

1. Required 9s

Integration Services as a Server
HA for StreamInsight
SQL Server AlwaysOn.

SQL Server has seen uptime as a key component for a long time, but to provide High Availability for StreamInsight is particularly significant. StreamInsight involves being able to consume data at significant rates, being able to run queries against that data while it’s still on the move – before it’s even reached the relational database. High Availability for StreamInsight should be able to better provide strategies to ensure that streaming data need not be lost. Businesses suffer badly when they lose data. SQL Server 2012 should be able to reduce this problem almost completely.

2. Blazing-Fast Performance

Performance Enhancements – RDBMS, SSAS, SSIS
ColumnStore Index

3. Rapid Data Exploration
4. Managed Self-Service BI

Power View + PowerPivot
Administration from SharePoint
Reporting Alerts

Yes, “Power View” has a space in it. It’s the new name for Crescent, which is about self-service reporting using a Silverlight experience. I’m all for allowing users to interact with the data in powerful ways, but I’m also concerned about how to manage this. SharePoint seems to continue as the main platform for this, and although I’d love to see the administration of these reports be done inside SQL itself (instead of SharePoint), I get that SharePoint is currently the platform of choice.

5. Credible, Consistent Data

BI Semantic Model
Data Quality Services
Master Data Services

I’m not going to comment on this stuff right now – it’s been talked about plenty already, but the enhancements definitely look good. The new stuff around DQS lets you fix up data at a number of extra points and have it pushed back into the underlying warehouse.

6. Organisational Compliance

Expanded Audit – User-defined, Filtering
User-defined Server Roles

This is useful. Audit is one of the massive things, and yet an administrator has always been able to turn it off. With the ability to have user-defined server roles, auditing turns into a much more real option.

7. Peace of Mind

Production-simulated Application Testing
System Center Advisor & Management Packs
Expanded Support – Premier Mission Critical

The Replay tools have become Distributed Replay, which is introduces a ton of really good options.

8. Scalable Data Warehousing
9. Fast Time to Solution

SQL Server Appliances – Optimised and Pre-tuned
HW + SW + Support – Just Add Power
Choice of Hardware

Appliances are stepping up. Buying an appliance, adding the network connection and electricity, and it’s ready to accept data in twenty minutes. The number of new options available suggests that the future of hardware buying will be even more focused on the appliance concept.

10. Extend Any Data, Anywhere

Greater Interoperability – new drivers for PHP, Java & Hadoop
ODBC Drivers for Linux & Change Data Capture for SSIS & Oracle
Beyond Relational: FileTable, 2D Spatial, Semantic Search

I really like the idea of CDC for Oracle, although I doubt there will be any

11. Optimised Productivity

SQL Server Data Tools (formerly “Juneau”)
Unified Across Database & BI
Deployment & Targeting Freedom

12. Scale on Demand

AlwaysOn
Deployment Across Public & Private
Elastic Scale

And of course, many of these items contribute to make a much more cloud-ready platform. Cloud isn’t for everyone, but Microsoft are certainly making steps to make it a more feasible option.

And we’re over – hitting publish now.

@rob_farley

SQL + Hadoop news

Rob Farley — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 16:07:38 GMT

I’m at the PASS Summit, and announcements are coming out nice and fast. One of the big ones that has just been made is that SQL Server will work much more closely with Apache Hadoop. Amazing stuff, that I think helps people realise that Microsoft is very much about providing platforms, and isn’t trying to stop you from using your other platforms either.

So in the “coming soon”, there were:

Apache Hadoop-based distribution for Windows Server and Windows Azure
ODBC Driver and Add-in for Excel, both for Apache Hive
JavaScript Framework for Hadoop

I’m not doing anything with Hadoop myself, but I know plenty of people do, and this is really good news!

PASS Summit 2011 – Day 1 Keynote

Rob Farley — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 15:54:27 GMT

I’m a guest blogger again!

This trip is already several days old for me. I arrived in America on Friday, delivered two sessions at Portland SQL Saturday event, walked (on Sunday) the Portland Half Marathon as a sponsor of Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s Team in Training program, delivered a full-day summit precon seminar on Monday, and was in PASS Board meetings yesterday. Finally we’ve reached Day 1, and I could use a weekend!

But it’s now that things really kick off properly.

As I write this, Rushabh Mehta is on stage, talking about some of the numbers that apply to this summit. There are over attendees at the Summit this year, demonstrating the amazing reach that the PASS Summit has. And they also just talked about my involvement as an advisor in reaching the rest of the world better too. Every year, the Summit gets bigger, and PASS runs more events in more places. It’s an exciting time to be part of this community.

Microsoft’s Ted Kummert (Senior VP, Business Platform Division) is on stage now, and has announced that SQL Server Denali will officially be named SQL Server 2012.

SQL Server MVP Deep Dives Vol 2 – get my chapter free

Rob Farley — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 04:55:50 GMT

Yes, the SQL book I was involved in two years ago has a sequel.

In the first book, I wrote chapters 7 and 40, and was one of 53 MVPs that contributed. And the proceeds went to War Child. Yes, none of the MVPs who wrote, edited, etc, got any royalties – that all went to charity.

This time, I wrote just one chapter (chapter 2), but there have been at least seventy MVPs involved. Sixty chapters all by different MVPs, with more MVPs involved as section editors, technical editors and more. And the money this time goes to Operation Smile, another international children’s charity.

It’s being published in time for the PASS Summit (which is now less than two weeks away), and there will be a book signing for people who have their copies already. You can pre-order through the Manning website at http://www.manning.com/delaney/, but if you do this, you might not have it for the signing. With most of the authors present, you might prefer to try your luck at picking up a copy at the Summit if you can make it.

If you’re not going to be at the Summit, then notice that you can pre-order the book and that this gets you an Early Access Edition – an electronic copy of some of the chapters as they become available.

But my chapter is different again – you can download it for FREE. No strings attached. You’ll see a link on the page to my chapter, and can enjoy it straight away, without having to pay anything at all.

I’m sure I will have missed someone in this list, but I have to provide it because it’s just so extraordinary. The list of MVPs I know were involved includes:

Johan Ahlen, Gogula Aryalingam, Glenn Berry, Aaron Bertrand, Kevin Boles, Robert Cain, Tim Chapman, Denny Cherry, Michael Coles, Rod Colledge, John Paul Cook, Louis Davidson, Kalen Delaney, Dave Dustin, Rob Farley, Grant Fritchey, Denis Gobo, Darren Gosbell, Sergio Govoni, Allan Hirt, Victor Isakov, Satya Shyam K Jayanty, Tibor Karaszi, Jungsun Kim, Tobiasz Koprowski, Hugo Kornelis, Ted Krueger, Matija Lah, Rodney Landrum, Greg Larsen, Peter Larsson, Andy Leonard, Ami Levin, Greg Low, John Magnabosco, Jennifer McCown, Brad McGehee, Siddharth Mehta, Ben Miller, Allan Mitchell, Tim Mitchell, Luciano Moreira, Jessica Moss, Aaron Nelson, Paul Nielsen, Shahriar Nikkhah, Robert Pearl, Boyan Penev, Pedro Perfeito, Pawel Potasinski, Mladen Prajdic, Abolfazl Radgoudarzi, Paul Randal, Denis Reznik, Rafael Salas, Edwin Sarmiento, Chris Shaw, Gail Shaw, Linchi Shea, Jen Stirrup, Jason Strate, Kimberly Tripp, Paul Turley, Bill Vaughn, Mike Walsh, Peter Ward, Joe Webb, John Welch, Allen White and Thiago Zavaschi.

Most are authors, some (like Aaron Nelson and Jen Stirrup) were technical editors, and some (like Paul Randal and Kimberly Tripp) were section editors. And Kalen Delaney was the overall editor and responsible for everything.

So a big thanks to Manning to make this possible, and to Kalen Delaney for leading the effort.

To potential buyers, see it as a series of short stories, and an opportunity to see a little into the minds of many of the industry’s leading lights.

And buy a copy – it’s for charity!

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

New PASS Summit speakers that deserve votes

Rob Farley — Thu, 19 May 2011 03:35:25 GMT

I’m not going to ask you to vote for the abstracts that I submitted for the PASS Summit. I’m not even going to mention the abstracts that Roger and Ashley submitted. I figure if you’re reading this, you may have already read the post I wrote about them, back before SQLPASS had said that there’d be voting.

Instead, I’m going to pick a few people that I recommend you vote for.

The people I’m going to pick are Paul White, Chris Testa-O’Neill and Erin Stellato. Three very different people, even from different countries. But I don’t think any of them have spoken at the PASS Summit before, and it would be good if they got accepted.

Paul White (NZ) is a fellow blogger at sqlblog.com. If you haven’t read his stuff, you’re seriously missing out. He spends an inordinate amount of time researching the behaviour of SQL Server, and has discovered all kinds of amazing things. He recently gave a presentation at the Boston SQL Saturday, and there was a lot of good feedback about it.

Chris Testa-O’Neill (UK) is one of the organisers of the SQLBits conferences in the UK, and has also appeared on many of the eLearning training for Microsoft. He hails from Manchester but has family living in Adelaide. He visited over Christmas and did an excellent job of speaking at the Adelaide SQL Server User Group.

Erin Stellato (US) blogs at erinstellato.com (I guess that makes sense). I met her briefly at the last PASS Summit, but over recent months have had a few conversations with her about some of the things she writes about on her blog. She submitted an abstract for 24 Hours of PASS event, but didn’t manage to get enough votes to speak. Despite this, I know she knows her stuff, and would do an excellent job presenting.

So there’s three people that I recommend you vote for. You can easily see the abstracts they’ve submitted on the site, to help in your decision. There are plenty of other people you should vote for too, such as the Scottish Jen Stirrup, the Aussie Darren Gosbell, or Seattle’s own Kendra Little (I think they haven’t spoken at the PASS Summit before either) – but please have a look through the names and pick some that are not the usual suspects.

@rob_farley

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

A SQL story in 11 words or less

Rob Farley — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 01:29:41 GMT

Success Quietly Looms.

Not quite 11 words, I know. I’ll put more at the end. Definitely SQL related though, right? (And it’s even an acrostic!) Tom LaRock started this, and Stacia Misner tagged me. Monday is over now though (heck, it’s well into Tuesday here), so I’m not going to tag anyone else.

I’m not talking about our success (even though I’m in the process of hiring my sixth employee), I’m talking about the impact of having a system that you’ve implemented well, and finding that people actually want to use it. It’s the hope of every project. You don’t want to implement something only to find that people use the old system.

And yet when you implement a system which becomes successful, there are unexpected problems.

Look at Twitter. A few guys sit around and think how useful it would be to send SMS messages to a central location where everyone can read it. It becomes a worldwide phenomenon, and has very serious (and very public) problems scaling. Brilliant idea, but success quietly loomed.

Scalability needs to be a forethought, not a reaction. If you do your job well, you will have underestimated the required workload. It’s a fact of life. Luckily, SQL easily lets you plan things nicely. Systems can be tuned when small, allowing for growth that doesn’t cripple.

The principle also applies on a personal level. If you do well at things, you’ll be given more, and need to work out how to scale. Right now my business is growing, and that’s a good thing. I’ve had to hire extra people to allow for the growth, and I’m trying to find time to get into CRM Online and various other systems. I’m needing to adjust to the challenges of having a company of six (nearly seven) people, having to lean on God more than ever, and (like Aaron) making sure I prioritise the things that are important. I’m not leaving the community – I see that as an important part of running my business – but I do need to make sure that my family doesn’t suffer too much simply because there is more that needs doing than ever before.

As for the other eight words in my short story (and acrostic):

Did Anybody Think About Backups And Saving Everything?