Limerick Contest 2012

My company is very creative. We have writers, designers, video, audio, artists, programmers, etc. There are often contests that let folks participate in cross culture from their day job. Cooking contests, video contests, etc. Its quite enjoyable. I myself have created several wood creations that are on display that have garnered compliments.

This month, and this week, being St. Patrick's Day, they are again holding a Limerick Contest. I started with one word. Reindexing. Mainly because its one of the words I have reused over and over to describe what I do. Always reindexing. Mainly as a joke, and as a bridge to those that may not actually know what I do on a day to day basis.

So the limerick started with that word. Actually it ended with that word. Which made it interesting to come up with rhymes. Many versions were attempted, and some of those were shared with individuals and the public, prior to the final draft. Here it is without further adieu.

What's a DBA? It's perplexing...

He sure seems busy, it's quite vexing!

He mumbles bizarre phrases.

Stuff like Server Side Traces,

Kill, Schema, Cursors, Reindexing!

Chili cook off

today is out annual chili cookoff. I did not participate last year. But have thrown my chili in to be judged this year.

here is my recipe.

Alabaster Chile con Pixie (Ambrosia)

4 Jar Alabaster Legumes harvested from North facing walls of Machu Pichu

3 small Bottles chopped Pungent Capsicum Fruits

2 medium vessels Alabaster Creamy Goodness

4 Shorn, Braised, Shredded Pixie Pith

Some Cayenne Pepper

3 Pinches of Pixie Dust

So you wanna attend our SQL Rally 2012 Precon?

Chris Shaw and myself will be putting on a Pre-Con for the upcoming SQLRally in Dallas in May 2012. We are excited. I am excited. Here is a link to our Pre-con, so that you can check it out yourself.

The content that we have put together comes from trial and error in our day jobs. As well as having been packaged and presented in other forums, including SSWUG vConferences, SQL Saturday events, User Groups, and so on. We are proud of the content, and the ideas we have realized, and we simply want to share these with others.

It is our hope that thru the presentation of this information we can help you alter your day to day practices, become better at your job, and help us along with others realize how to be better at what we do. You would be amazed at the things I learn from you as I stand in front of an audience to teach; I end up learning a lot about myself and what I do or worse, don't do.

Taken directly from the abstract, you can see some of the topics that we will be discussing.

• The “Why” or “How” questions that come up
• why should we upgrade our servers
• how much server power do we need
• what is the best process to follow
• how should we manage our releases
• a checklist that has proven to foster stable database servers
• database utilities to automate these checklist items
• learning about change management options
• disaster recovery options
• gain an understanding of these tasks
• leave the session with an ability to help improve systems back home
• be armed with

o examples

o ideas

o suggestions

o actual code

o samples

o documentation

o templates

o other tools

This we will do thru presenting what we are calling sub sessions of informational topics that we have put together. Like I mentioned, some of these have been presented many times before in different venues, while some content will be seen for the first time at this event.

To give you an idea of what lies ahead, if you attend, we will start the day with an introduction to all that we will discuss. We will even open up some of the time to vote on several possible sub sessions we will have prepared. This means that we will have enough content to speak and teach for 10 or more hours, but allow you, the audience, to choose some of that content yourselves, at the onset of the event. It will all tie together as we traverse the tapestry of what it means to Be a DBA, and you will leave with a larger toolbelt of utilities than when you entered.

Our core content will be discussing a Checklist of tasks to do daily, weekly and monthly. A Utility Database that will empower you, arming you with valuable information to direct you activities. We will dig deeper with a sub session that discusses Data File Sizes and the importance of properly sizing your databases, as well as collecting the data you need to arm you properly to make valid decisions. An interactive sub session dealing with Disaster Recovery will allow you to interact with us and the audience to learn about DR and provide the best solution in several case studies we will all do together. Helping you get a handle on Release Management and various tools as well as processes you can implement to ease this process will be discussed. The day will finish up with the task we never actually get to; Documentation. We will show you various methods for documenting what we do as DBAs and you will leave with examples, templates, and so on to help you on Monday morning back at work.

I would suggest that you bring several things to this session. A jump drive to collect our code, demos, samples, templates, and so on. Paper to take notes with, adding vital pieces of information you think of and learn to add to your utility belt. A remembrance of your problems and solutions to these various topics, so that you can enlighten us with how you solved it in your past. As well as an ability to learn from us and others in the audience.

The goal of all these topics, all these demos, templates, etc. is to get your brain thinking and interacting with us, so that we can all become better Data Professionals. Allowing us all to come away from this session better armed to go back to our day jobs and excel.

Please, if you feel so inclined, sign up for our Pre-Con. Come and learn from us as we learn from you.

http://www.sqlpass.org/sqlrally/2012/dallas/Register.aspx

SQL Rally 2012 - I'm hoping to present a Pre-Con

This is a Shameless Plug to get your VOTE. Read on for some back story, and information about my and Chris Shaw's pre-con we are hoping to present.

SQL Rally is coming soon. May 10-11, in Dallas Texas, to be exact.

A couple days before this event, you will find various souls attending Pre-Conference sessions. 6 have been selected already. You can see them here. There were a few Pre-Cons that were not selected initially and have been served up for Community Vote. You can vote for them here.

As you peruse the available sessions, you will see one called "How to be a DBA - A Utility Belt of tools". This session is one conceived by myself and Chris Shaw (blog | twitter). The idea for this session came about as I watched Chris present last year in Utah his Utility Database session. It was then that I realized that he and I had had very similar experiences as we have supported databases throughout our careers.

Back in 2004 I became involved with PASS when I attended my first summit. I had been attending a local User Group and had even spoken a couple times at the User Group meetings. This was a scary and exhilarating prospect to stand up in front of people and talk about stuff. Some stuff that others knew much more about than I did. But I did it nonetheless. And loved it.

I have found that as I speak to folks, sharing my knowledge, I always learn form them as well. Really. This isn't one of those things you say. I do enjoy the interaction and almost always learn from the experience. Often it is new ways to look at what I do. This is priceless to me.

I have spoken at various events, User Groups, Code Camps, SSWUG virtual events, PASS SIG meetings and SQL Saturdays. As I have spoken, I have stretched and grown. I am a better DBA now because of my past experiences, including speaking and presenting. As I have spoken, I have challenged myself into bigger an better. Thus my desire to perform a pre-con at SQLRally. At the other events I have presented at, I have always felt bad that my sessions were level 100, and not level 300. But I have a certain set of skills and ideas that I feel are appropriate for this level of session. I often think back to when I started in this career, and had wished that someone would have taught me the things that I am teaching.

This same session was presented in Colorado Springs SQL Saturday 104. I was pretty worried about it, and hoped that it would come across well. Speaking for an hour is one thing. Doing that for 4+ hours is bigger. Doing it for 8 straight... well, I'm not there yet. First things first.

This pre-con will discuss various topics. Some of these I have presented many times in other venues. Chris has presented his portions as well. We are fine tuning this information, and regurgitating this for your benefit.

For this session, we will talk about the following:

• Daily/Weekly/Monthly DBA task checklist
• Utility Database
• Monitoring
• Release Management
• Data File Size monitoring and manipulations
• Documentation

All these topics will be presented in such a way as to help you, the attendee, the ability to learn valuable skills, and implement them when back in the office the next Monday.

After all this, I am asking you to look at the sessions available at SQL Rally. If you have some that stand out to you, vote for them. I would hope that mine would be voted for as well. Even if you will not be attending, know that this session will help someone out.

I hope to be able to present it. If not at SQL Rally, then another time, another place. I will continue to push this session. Practicing the presentation. Fine tuning it. Sharing my knowledge and ideas. Hopefully helping someone, somewhere, sometime.

Go and visit Chris Shaw's blog where he too pleads for your votes here.

So You Want To Be a DBA?

I recently was contacted by SSWUG.org to write a few articles. Its with trepidation that I accepted this challenge. There will be 6 articles in a 6 month period with various topics.

The first of these topics was what i thought it meant to be a DBA, and advice I could give others about this job, its tasks, and what motivates me to do it.

I sat down a couple times to write this article. I had a couple failed starts, like most writing inspires from time to time. However, as I thought about it, and about what inspires me, I was reminded of the tale I have been telling folks for years now. That I feel as if I am in charge of keeping a light on in a room in my company. That's the simplest explanation I have repeated over the years. Not a lot of glory, but its a necessity. As I thought about this, I expanded this tale into a couple of sentences and then a few paragraphs. This became the intro to my article.

I was worried about the word count. When one is given an arbitrary number of something to create, it always seems to worry me. 750 words seemed like a huge amount of words. The end article ended up having 3600 words to contain all the spewing about the subject I could muster. After a lot of editing, and tweeking, the count stood fairly high. They were all important words. They conveyed the meaning I wished to convey. So I went with it.

The article basically tells the tale I mentioned above, embellishing a bit to paint the picture in your mind. It then breaks down the tasks into 2 main tasks. Learn about your Data and Love your Data. Within each of these, you can further break down more individual tasks.

The article was broken up into 3 parts and will run 1 each week for 3 weeks. I hope that you enjoy it. Enjoy my perspective. Enjoy my tale and my verbiage. Enjoy the information that I hope to help you learn. Enjoy my article.

Here's my article

SQL Saturday - Colorado Springs #104

I had a great opportunity to go to a SQL Saturday event in Colorado Springs recently. It was my second time attending this event.

As a Regional Mentor for PASS, I have felt responsibility to contact and assist user group leaders in my area of stewardship. As I have contacted these individuals and fostered relationships with them I have become friends with many of them. Chris Shaw (blog | twitter) is one of these individuals that I have become friends with. Last year, Randy Knight (twitter|blog) and myself flew out from Utah to attend. The event was so much fun and we made so many great contacts that the next Utah SQL Saturday we had a large contingent from Colorado to attend our event. In response to this, I again felt the need to attend their event.

This time, instead of presenting during the regular SQL Saturday event, I had decided to try my hand at a Pre-Con session. I had discussed with Chris Shaw the possibility of combining our skills in presenting and dbaness to share a pre-con. It seemed like a good idea and I hoped that we would work well together. We had not really done anything together, so I was leery that we'd fit. I also didn't realize that when I asked him, he was the primary leader for the SQL Saturday event. With all that said, he agreed, and over the course of the months between SQL PASS Summit and the SQL Saturday event, we planed, schemed, and created presentations to present.

In an effort to sit down and do some final work on our session I asked if I could hang with Chris the night before the pre-con, staying at his house. This would simply afford us a lot more time to spend together as we prepared for the next day. Chris was a trooper and allowed me to hang with him, even picking me up at the airport in COS. I arrived a little after 3pm, and planned on spending the evening preparing for our presentation. What I had no idea that was going to occur was the quantity of stuff that needed to be done still for the event.

You see, Chris's wife, Gia Shaw(twitter), had been working like crazy to prepare for this event. Imagine your dining room in your house. A normal sized dining room, in a normal sized house. Now on the dining room table, picture boxes full of stuff. Now picture boxes full of stuff on the floor. In fact, picture boxes almost in every nook and cranny of your dining room. This is what Gia and Chris had produced in the past few weeks and days prior to the event. An incredible amount of stuff had been collected and needed to be transported to the event. AS soon as we got to Casa Shaw we started loading stuff up for a trip to Mr. Biggs event location to deposit items. We filled a vehicle up with gear. All in all, I believe 4 vehicles of stuff was transported to the event.

After dumping things off, we went to dinner nearby. My brother and his wife met us for dinner, along with Christina Leo (twitter|blog). We had a great dinner, actually being served dinner by a Tom LaRock (twitter|blog) look alike. After dinner and antics, Chris and I returned to his house and prepared for our pre-con. We ended up staying up later than we should have, but got enough sleep to get up early for the pre-con day of Friday.

The morning was without issue as we took loaded vehicles to the even location and got ready to present. We had to setup the projectors and get things situated to present, as attendees started showing up. And before we knew it, the event was underway and we were presenting on ourUtility Belt session. I felt that the session went well, lots of discussions occurred with the attendees. Happily, after the session was completed, I believe 5 different attendees handed us jump drives so that we could copy our slides, demos and templates for them. This always makes me happy to provide information as well as something tangible to assist folks in their day to day jobs. This is why those of us that present, present. To share. I love it.

I had no idea if I could make an entire day of presenting. Granted it was not a single pre-con where I talked the entire time myself, but it was not as hard as I thought it might be, and the time flew by. I was happy that I had enough information to share and had a great time doing it. I even heard from someone that heard from someone that it had gone well and they had enjoyed it. I'll take it. I love hearing that it went well.

After the pre-cons, we were able to make our way over to the speaker dinner just a bit north of the event location. Here we were able to see all the speakers, some sponsors, and many volunteers of the event. It is always a great time to spend with #SQLFamily prior to and after an event. This networking is always a great time and very profitable. Not always in the means of dollars, but profitable to your career. I had the unique experience of meeting one of my heroes, and was pleasantly surprised to have him introduce himself to me, eager to meet me as well. This always makes my day.

After the speaker dinner, my brother picked me up and took me to his house for the night. You can see that I try to spend as little as possible on these events. I try to scrimp where I can, so that I can attend more and more of these events. Bundling these events with seeing friends and family is a bonus. Seeing my brother and his wife and kids was a joy. We spent most of the time I was at his house wrestling and playing with cork pop guns. They were a blast to see and play with, and exhausting. We stayed up too late, as is normal for these events. We played. We talked. We enjoyed each other.

The next morning, Saturday, I got up early and took off, without seeing anyone from my brother's family. He lent me his truck to drive myself to the event. I made it a little later than I expected, but early enough to get some breakfast before the rocket of SQL Lurn took off. I love to volunteer for these events and learn as well as serve where I can. I was grabbed by Kieth Tate (twitter) grabbed me and asked for assistance as he presented. This was his first time presenting, and i was more than humbled to be asked to help. I sat in on his presentation and learned some things I took to my team to implement.

One of the favorite things with this event is the networking that occurs. Between certain sessions, games are played that thrust us attendees into situations where we must interact with each other. Bowling, pool, lasertag. You would think that these are simply fun activities, but they afford those that play a chance to interact with each other and build friendships, outside the normal SQL LURN. Its unique. Its a blast. It adds to the overall experience. I love it.

I volunteered to help run the SQL PASS desk, along with Sarah Strate (blog | twitter) and Jason Strate (blog | twitter), I helped out with lasertag. I helped organize the vendors end of day give-aways. I ran various errands. I learned from experts. I networked with friends and new friends. I discussed stuff with vendors. I made a great connection that may be monetarily profitable. I had a blast.

After the event we all retired to dinner at a nearby hotel. Some more final shmoozing and networking. Some great food. Great friends. Good times. I ended up leaving a bit early and heading over to another location with Red-Gaters Annabel Bradford (twitter), Max and Grant Fritchey (blog | twitter). Along with Tim Ford (blog | twitter). After some great food and talk, I retired early to visit with my brother and family again. I only had 1 more night in Colorado and wanted to spend as much time with them as I had with my SQL People.

The next day I flew home to Utah, after having spent the morning playing cork pop gun wars, shooting BB guns, tag with the kids and the dog, building a fire in the family room, taking pictures with the kids, making scrambled eggs, eating an incredible coffee cake, and a great talk with my bro about growing up and being a dad and all that that entails.

As usual, throwing myself into these events, and using as much time as possible to network, learn, and enjoy made for an incredible weekend. Its so full, so much fun, so quick, yet so full.

SQL Saturday. When are you attending your first? or your next? I can't wait for my next. I hope to see you there!

How long will this backup take?

It's a Friday afternoon. You just did an oops and need to fix it. You think you need a backup. You know you need a backup, before you do anything. You quickly kick off a backup job and let it start performing the backup. Now, you know that this job has executed in the past, daily, probably. You can check the history of the job and get an idea of how long it will take.

The last execution was 1:10. A previous execution completed in :45. So you can safely guess that you are in for at least an hour of wait time before completion. This displeases you as you realize that it is already 3:30pm, on a Friday. The backup is already going, so it's a waiting game at this point. Wait, wait, wait.

Your boss suggested that you take off and get some away time, knowing that once the backup completes that there will be a hectic time performing the needed tasks to fix the oops. You consider leaving, after all, the backup will be running for an hour or so... Maybe sooner, maybe longer.

Since this isn't a backup from the UI, you do not have the handy dandy percentage showing up in the corner of the screen, giving you an idea for how long it may take. All you have is a small window saying that the job started, and the spiny guy showing you it's still going. And will complete. At some point.

So, how long will it really take? Only a time machine will truly tell you. But we can make logical guesses. A quick few clicks in Google/Bing would show you several scripts that could help. Here is the one that I found.

SELECT

CONVERT(NVARCHAR(60),DB_NAME(database_id)) AS [database],
CASE command
WHEN 'BACKUP DATABASE' THEN 'DB'
WHEN 'RESTORE DATABASE' THEN 'RESTORE'
ELSE 'LOG BACKUP'
END AS [type],
start_time AS [started],
DATEADD(mi,estimated_completion_time/60000,GETDATE()) AS [finishing],
DATEDIFF(mi, start_time, (DATEADD(mi,estimated_completion_time/60000,GETDATE()))) - wait_time/60000 AS [mins left],
DATEDIFF(mi, start_time, (DATEADD(mi,estimated_completion_time/60000,GETDATE()))) AS [total wait mins (est)],
CONVERT(VARCHAR(5),CAST((percent_complete) AS DECIMAL (4,1))) AS [% complete],
GETDATE() AS [current time]
FROM sys.dm_exec_requests
WHERE command IN ('BACKUP DATABASE','BACKUP LOG','RESTORE DATABASE')


It simply queries the dm_exec_requests and looks for items that indicate a backup. The other fields will massage the resultant data into something that you can use to see how long it may take.

Once I executed this, I was sad, because it showed me over 2 hours to complete. The sad was the duration was longer than I had hoped. The good was that I now had a goal. A time when other tasks would start, after the backup completed. This allowed me a better chance to plan and prepare for those tasks.