The SQL Saturday #71/New England Data Camp #3 call for speakers has been open for quite a while. But, we had not yet sent out an official request. That email has now gone out the door. Here it is for those who might be interested in presenting. Please consider this your personal email: Let me tell you a little bit about our event. Last year we had over 300 attendees. We plan on doing that well again this year. That’s a guaranteed audience for your presentation. We’re holding the conference in the Microsoft offices on Jones Road in Waltham. The venue is well appointed and set up for presentations. We’re already gathering sponsors from all over the country and the region. It’s going to be a great event. Please submit…
Sounds like a good action adventure movie. The theme this month on TSQL Tuesday, thanks to our host, Jen McCown (blog|twitter) of SQLawesomesauce, is Resolutions. In particular, Techie Resolutions. I have to do this because Jen just received her MVP award, in case you’ve been under a rock since last week. I’m not a resolutions kind of guy. I tend to make plans. The plans might start on January 1st, or they might start as soon as they lawyers are done making up the contract. I’m not hung up on schedules except as they relate to due dates. For example, when submissions are due for the PASS Summit or something along those lines, then I’m date driven. In other words, I don’t sit down New Year’s Day or New Year’s…
As I have done in previous years, I’m going to post the results from my sessions at the PASS Summit. Feedback is a gift. I received a great many gifts this year and I’m extremely happy about all of them. There are a set of questions with ratings, the higher the rating, the better you did. One exception to this rule is the question on time for the session. I think there, somewhat lower scores are better. There were 183 technical sessions rated during the Summit. I’m very honored to have been included in that list. Identifying and Fixing Performance Problems using Execution Plans: 286 Attendees, 172 Responses, Avg Score of 4.23, Placed 136th How would you rate the usefulness of the information presented in your day-to-day environment? 1 2…
I ended up with 131 posts (1 late hit, sorry), not counting any duplicates with Brent or Steve. It was clear that people really took this thing seriously and put thought and effort into the posts. I wish I had about 60 iPad's to give away instead of only 10. But, decisions had to be made. The point system is utterly meaningless, but, points were awarded for pithiness (I warned you), for a well-turned phrase, and as much as I'm loathe to admit it, for poetry (just because of the work involved). Originally, I planned on just randomly picking the winner. But, I only had 131 entries, and you all worked so hard, I decided to read them all and work hard for you in return. This really was a…
I got my FreeCon. What's more, I did it in public and didn't get in trouble. FreeCon is the brain child of Brent Ozar (blog|twitter). Basically Brent gathered together a few bloggers & writers from the SQL Server community, some extremely well known, like Tom LaRock (blog|twitter), some in the middle, like me, and others that are clearly up & coming like David Stein (blog|twitter). He jammed us all in a room and made us talk to one another. OK, that's a lie. He invited us out to this lovely little poetry space in Seattle the day before the PASS Summit was due to start, where we imbibed good food & coffee and had the opportunity to share a lot of great information with each other. The basic concept was…
Or, another way to put it, in most cases, shooting yourself in the foot. I was not aware that the cumulative update for SQL Server 2008 back in June included a switch that allows you to turn parameter sniffing off within SQL Server. Thanks to Kendra Little (blog|twitter) for letting me know about it (although she let me know by "stumping the chump" during my lightening talk at the Summit, thanks Kendra!). When I first saw the switch, I thought about the places where switching off parameter sniffing could be helpful. But, as I thought about it, the more I realized that this was an extremely dangerous switch. Why? Because, most people only ever hear about parameter sniffing when they run into a problem. Someone says "Parameter sniffing" and you see people cringe.…
After all the conversations at FreeCon last week (more on that later, when I've assimilated it better), I finally decided to make some changes. The list of things I'm hitting is extremely long, but I'm going to be going through them a few at a time. First, and easiest, was getting moved off the WordPress domain to my own, hosted, domain. You're seeing the results. This is the new ScaryDBA blog. I suspect the theme may change once or twice over the next week, but basically, all the functionality that has been added, better feeds, conversation tracking, other stuff, will remain. Thank you for visiting in the past. I intend to provide you with plent of reasons to visit in the future.
Today is Kilt Day at the PASS Summit. We're going to try to arrange a group photo at lunch time. The network connection is extremely slow. I suspect the tweeting about the kilts. Bill Graziano is leading the key note and he started off with having all the kilted stand. Only about 12-15 of us, but that's five times better than last year. Then it was time for the volunteers to stand up. It was excellent to see so many people. The Outstanding Volunteer of the Year was Lorie Edwards. The PASSion award went to Wendy Pastrick, who really earned it. Unfortunately the next segment was on governance... blech! But necessary. Everyone here is a member, so they should know how the money is spent. Luckily Bill is not digging…
 Quote: "Database stuff, all this programming stuff, is easy. Anyone can do it. That's why everyone in the company has sa privileges." For nine months, I worked in an environment where everyone, from developers to QA to the sales people to the receptionist, had SA privileges. You know what? DBA skills are necessary. I speak from the point of view of someone that has had to recover a server after a salse person helpfully "cleaned up the temporary stuff on the server" by dropping tempdb, causing a late deployment for a client. I speak from the point of view of the guy who kept a window open on his desk with the database restore script ready to run, all day long, because of "accidents" that stopped development until I could get the…
Adam Machanic (blog|twitter) has put on a SQL Saturday/Data camp event in New England for the last two years. I've helped him both years. It's been very successful. In January we had over 300 attendees, making it one of the larger SQL Saturday events. But, with a single exception (thank you Tim Ford (blog|twitter)), we've only had local speakers. Mind you, we're somewhat lucky with speakers here in New England and have several MVPs and others who are truly excellent when presenting. I'm taking over from Adam to lead the effort for this year, and due to my schedule we're moving the event to the spring sometime. We were thinking about maybe making it the the weekend before SQL Rally. But, I've got a question for all of you who present at SQL Saturday events.…