Dr. David DeWitt "I'm not a doctor." This is going to be good. "From 1 to 1000 MIPS" He's doing great. He was a fantastic last year and I knew this was going to be good. 32 years in academia and only in MS for 1.5 years. He's the blue sky guy, and beleive me when I tell you, you get smarter from being in the room with him. And a huge ovation because he told us that he's going technical and not covering a marketing pitch. Right. This one is going to be hard to blog. He's going through information quick. It's all good. He's giving an academic talk about the 30 years of technology trends in databases. He's going over how the trends have affected OLTP and why…
Wow, the bloggers table is empty today! Nice intro! Good photo's. I love the Summit! Bill Graziano is introducing Day 3. He acknowledged Twitter and the bloggers. We rock! Outgoing board members are Greg Low and Pat Wright. These are great guys who've busted their butts for the community. Kevin Kline is completely off the board now, finishing his time as the immediate past-president. I'm pretty sure that's the first time he won't be on the board. Yep, I'm right, he's never been off the board since PASS was a organization. He really has done a lot for the organization. Thanks for your time Kevin. A review of all the other board members including the new president Rushabh Mehta and Wayne Snyder as the immediate past president. April 21-23,2010 the…
Nice phot montage, included so many friends. I love PASS. Rushab Mehta launching the Wednesday key note. Unfortunately, this is the DULL, but important, stuff about finances. PASS is a non-profit, volunteer run organization. I'm not going to track this stuff. You can find the full financials on the PASS web site. Celebrating volunteers. You do need to thank the people that make this thing run. I'm especially amazed by the work done by the Program Committee. The outstanding volunteers for the year are: Tim Ford - Program Committe, Quizbowl Me - SQL Server Standard, Editorial Committee Amy Lewis - Co-leader & Volunteer Coordinator for BI Virtual Jacob Sebastian - Chapter Regional Mentor The PASSion Award is going to two people this year: Charley Hanania - International Recipient Allen Kinsel…
It's alive! It's alive! That's enough from Colin Clive. It'll be out for the Summit. SQL Server Standard lives again! Although, not quite in the same shape as it used to be. But hey, stitching stuff together out of dead tissue is messy work. I want to thank our first author who had to suffer through quite a few growing pains and help us blaze a trail through the woods, Thomas LaRock. I want to thank my boss at PASS for all the support especially the time I started whining, Andy Warren. And there's this other guy, who has helped just a ton in this effort in every way, and lead the technical edit team, Brad McGehee. We have a photo credit to Pat Write for the front. Craig Ellis has done…
A little cheap thrill for me. I passed 50,000 views on the blog yesterday. Thanks to everyone who has stopped by to read my fumbling attempts to understand SQL Server better. I hope some of the posts have proved useful to you. I learn a lot from putting them together.
I presented last night at the Cape Cod .NET User's Group. What a great bunch of people. About 20 people showed up at the nice facility they're using, Venture Think Together. A little pizza and a little chat and the meeting got started. Marcia McLean, their president, gave me a nice little introduction and I went through my slides. As I did them, I kept thinking about some of the advice offered up by Brent Ozar yesterday. Suddenly my slides seemed so wordy. It started to throw me off, but I just ignored it & plowed on. Overall, I think the presentation went well. I hit a couple of snags on some of the examples that I'm going to tweak before I present this at the PASS Summit in just…
This was a pretty cool event. The advertising leading up to it seemed to really cover the community very well. There was even a link to 24 Hours of PASS in my team's local web site. Unfortunately, I'm not an iron man like Tom LaRock, watching all 24 hours. I only hit a few sessions. The first session I hit was Allen White's PowerShell for SQL Server. I have attended a couple of his presentations at the PASS Summit. I think he's done a great job of gleaning better and better examples out of his presentations. This one was good. I loved the way he put together the backup processes for automating backups. It looked good, took into account common issues, it just worked. I was really happy I got…
My turn to answer Chris Shaw's questions "Do I feel I have a reliable SAN solution?" and "Describe Database Mirroring for the layman?" Thanks Tim. I've a feeling you're going to be disappointed. SAN: Hell, how should I know? Want to talk about a black box? Our SAN, as far as I'm aware, is run by a group of crack-shot ninja assassins and powered by pureed virgin unicorn. This strange mix of esoteric skill, magic and blood is evidently able to provide us with just about perfect up time. Once, one of the ninja's must have gone rogue (speculation) and had to be put down by his brother ninjas because we had a drive disappear on the cluster server. It took us a couple of hours, but it recovered as if it…
I thought I had captured statement start times within the DMV sys.dm_exec_sessions. I was absolutely wrong. However, this has sparked a bit of discussion, as you can see in the link to my correction. John Vanda (I couldn't find a blog by him, but I think this is his LinkedIn profile), suggested possibly joining between the sys.dm_exec_requests and sys.dm_tran_active_transactions through the transaction_id available in the requests DMV. He ran a series of tests that showed it to be promising. I re-ran my original test, a few long-running statements within a batch; BACKUP, CHECKDB, etc.. This time I captured the transaction information along with the other DMV's. The results were interesting. Rather than pull together any particular set of data as I was testing, I just collected all three DMV's once…
PASS just published a new Top 10 list of mine over at the their web site. This one is the Top 10 Articles on the web if you're trying to learn about spatial data. I'm not trying to say that I know what I'm doing with spatial data. I'm still feeling my way forward. These articles have proved to be the most useful in the learning I've done so far. I wanted to publish a little more information than we put into our Top 10 lists over at PASS. Having the list is good, but I thought it needed a bit of commentary to be complete. All these articles are good and all the web sites hosting the articles have good stuff on them. A few of the web sites stand out. Paul Randal's…