I have a number of event announcements for this week, but on the way into work I heard on the radio that most Toy for Tots programs are well under 50% of what they need to help children have any sort of Christmas this year. Here in the Denver area they were talking about how they had 70,000 requests for a toy for a child yet they had only received 20,000 donations from the community. I know that times are tough for many right now, and I hope that things are picking up but if you are walking around the store this weekend or this week during this crazy Christmas rush I ask that you buy a small gift if you can afford one, maybe even two. Maybe we can help a few more children have a great Christmas.
Sorry to be so off topic, tomorrow I hope to have the ability to announce a couple more events that are just around the corner. Yesterday SSWUG release an article of mine on how to determine if a stored procedure is being used. You may want to check it out.
How do you get around that sales pitch? I talked to a vendor yesterday that was telling me all about the product that they offered that would help me do backups in a whole new way. I really did like the idea when I first heard about it but when I started to inquire about how it backups with SQL Server the water started to get a little murky.
See this product is for companies to backup everything, not just SQL Server. So they do Exchange and file servers and so on. Now I started to ask question about do they support log shipping or replication because they told me they use VSS and volume shadow copy. This is the link that they sent me.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms175536.aspx
If you look at the bottom it is very clear that it does not support log backups, that makes me think it does not support log operations at all, so how could they look at replication, t-log shipping or database mirroring. The thing that gets me, when they claim they can backup a SQL Server on the home page you would believe that they could do it without impacting any of the SQL Server features that you are using. What they really mean is we sort of support SQL Server.
I do like the product and there is a way that I can support I just have to think about how much I trust a company that hides what the product can or cannot do… What do you think?
This entry is really to get you in the mode of answering questions that you would for a job interview. There are always the standard ones but I find that many times people running the interview will ask you a question that you don’t have a canned answer for. May I should have for this one. It was the second time I had been asked. The funny thing is that it relates to a question that I use to ask a lot, but it’s now been changed. My question was or use to be.
Where do you want to be in 5 years?
But now I am being asked.
If you were to define your role would you define it as. What would be the perfect job?
I think all of the questions were fair and I glad I had some time to think about them. I am going to have to send my mind into think mode because I can tell you that I never really thought about it. But I will now.
On a side note hope you had a great turkey day.
I was bouncing around looking at some list server posts and today I say on that when summarized asked:
I am being asked to justify upgrading to SQL Server 2008 over SQL Server 2005. I have a list of the many features that the new version has but I don’t have any benchmarks that describe in detail the benefits of upgrading to SQL Server 2008. The other requirement is that this needs to be done with the database existing as it is now with no changes to the code.
One person had mentioned that Backup compression that comes with Enterprise edition could be a good point to consider. Not too long after a reply came that mentioned the price difference between enterprise edition and many of the backup software packages. A bigger gap is created when you compare the type of licenses such as per processor (SQL Server Licenses) to per instance or per server licenses that many of the software packages are sold as.
A Quick note about SQL Server 2008 R2, It will have the standard edition with the backup compression feature enabled.
But more to the point, If you are looking to justify upgrading to Enterprise Edition of SQL Server 2008 for a single feature you may be missing out on many of the other tools in there that assist in managing a production environment. A great example is looking at the Policy based Management to ensure that you SQL Servers are not in violation of any of the companies policies or just best practices. But I believe my favorite feature is the Data Collector, but again if that is the only feature you plan on using you may want to consider the cost implications.
You may not utilize all the feature sets right out of the gate when you upgrade to SQL Server 2008 however you can’t put a price on making sure all your servers are following the policies that you have set forth.
It has been quiet on here as of late. There have been a number of things that are happening and I look forward to sharing many of them however it may be a little bit longer before I can go into a lot more detail. At this point I can tell you that I am very excited to be speaking at the Colorado Springs SQL Server User Group on November 18th, 2009. It has been a while since I have spoken at the user group with a full hour long presentation. This group in particular is my favorite.
Topic:
Disaster Recovery Planning (The points often forgotten)
Description:
Too often companies have no plan for disaster recovery. Yet something as simple as a RAID configuration shows some steps have been taken to prepare for a disaster. We will spend time looking at what may be missing to complete the disaster recovery plan. This session can help you start to get documents in place that will help with the ease of working through a disaster successfully. Discussion at the end of the session is directed around a flood disaster that left a bank crippled and how they were able to recover.
Location:
Consortio Services, LLC
2914 Austin Bluffs Parkway
Suite 104
Colorado Springs, CO 80918
Hope to see you there.
Well last week was an exciting week, in the SSWUG conference we did a few things that we had never done before. Any time you try something new there is a bit of the nerves that set in but you keep your head down and continue to press through them. Here is a short list of the firsts:
- We did a SKYPE Video Call with one of the speakers. The video was shown live to the conference attendees.
- We did a SKYPE Audio Call with an attendee in London. It was awesome to talk to someone so far away about a conference we were doing live.
- We had a whole room that was dedicated to all live sessions all day. Speakers in this room were delivering sessions without the safety of a recording. This gave attendees from around the world the chance to ask questions in the middle of a session.
All of this along with a number of other sessions and activities really lead to an awesome event.
If you attended this event make sure you fill out your survey. We look for these to help us plan for the next conference from the dates to the event to the subject.
Speaking of awesome events there has been a number of Saturday events around the country over the last few years. One of these a friend of mine is a coordinator and is really excited to be involved with this.
They plan on having various tracks, such as development, architecture, administration, and end users with 4 hands on lab sessions for SharePoint 2010. All the breakout sessions will be a mix between 2007 and 2010 topics. Our registration page is located at http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/kc. This year we are lucky to have Joel Oleson, former MS SharePoint Product Team Member and SharePoint Evangelist for Quest Software, keynoting our event.
If you have any interest in Share Point and will be around KC Dec 12th, 2009 you may want to check out this Share Point Saturday. This is a free event and I know there will be a number of National Speakers there.
Day 1 for the conference is in the book. It was a great event with SQL Rockstar otherwise known as Thomas La Rock. We were getting a lot of questions and there was some great talk about if you as a DBA want to be Mr. Right or Mr. Right Now. I can’t go through and type his whole session, but here is the break down…
Mr. Right – This is the guy who is right all the time. He is known for being right and may not be known for the best customer service. You may have met this guy in the past. See the thing about Mr. Right is that he plans there may not be a lot of quick fixes. Mr. Right is confidant and does things the right way.
Mr. Right Now – Always has a phone to his ear and is spending most of his time working manual workaround issues. Mr. Right Now is very well like and is everyone’s best friend. He would be a big hit at all the parties, however he is working to make sure that everyone else’s mistakes have been corrected or should we say band-aided.
Maybe the descriptions are a bit drastic. But really is the mindset of proactive or reactive. Awesome discussion Mr. Rockstar, what a way to start our first all live all day all room confernce. It was a pleasure to meet you. I hope to work with you in the future.
In the morning we have Ted Malone, I am sure he is going to have some great information to pass along as well.
I have a lot going on this week. 3 big presentations that are keeping my attention plus knowing I will be in Tucson next week for the conference. If you haven’t had a chance to look at it yet you should check out the lineup. I hope that I have more time next week to post some more information.
Only a couple of days left to register!
Want to Stay Up To Speed with SQL Server?
Oct 21, 22, 23 – SSWUG.ORG Virtual Conference [Register Here]
75+ sessions, expert speakers, time is running out to register.
Oct 26, 27, 28 – Smart Database Design Class with Paul Nielson
In-person, hands-on class about best practices, approaches and more. Seats VERY limited. (West Coast – Tucson, AZ)
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I have about 100 e-mail address like I am sure that everyone else does as well now a days. Many of them I never check, but today I got an e-mail from a friend that I use to work with. I met this friend about 10 years ago when we worked at the same company. I am sure that his first memory was of me taking all the admin access away from about 15 developers (Not a great day in my career). Back then I was very adamant that all code must be done in stored procedures, he wanted to know how I felt about it today. Today I know that I am not always going to be so lucky, however that does not mean that I cannot share my opinion on a professional level.
So I took 5 min to write down what first came to my mind on the Pro’s and Con’s of using stored procs:
Pro’s
- There is a lot of flexibility in using dynamic SQL statement.
- Developers have more control over how data is returned.
Con’s
- When code is embedded in web pages the risk of SQL Injection is very high. Over the last few years we have seen actual examples from clients who have not changed over to Proc’s What use to be a matter of just sanitizing your inputs is now a matter of being able to catch the hack at all. Many of the hack are coming across as Hex so there is no way to sanitize. I have actual code examples of this.
- There is always the fact that SQL Server has no idea what is coming at it, so it has to continue to compile the procs and look at Stats to see what is the best index to use.
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When the code is not in procs the performance tuning is left up to the developer of the application or it put a major load on the DBA trying to find the bad code using 3rd party procs and or trace files and performance monitors
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Security is a concern when direct table access is allowed. Even in a Select statement. There have been many times when I have seen a Select statements hurt the performance of a production server.
I am sure I missed a bunch of Pro’s and Con’s. If you make a note on here I would be more than happy to add them.
I was thinking today about the many things that you can do with SQL Server. Things that go beyond what database servers are really designed to do. As I was thinking about the subject it reminded me of a discussion I had one time with a boss of mine right after I got out of the Marine Corp. This boss of mine was named Bill and Bill played a huge role in getting me back into thinking like a civilian and understanding what you need to do to succeed. Anyhow, we had this employee that worked for me and whenever we had an idea on how we can make something better or a new benefit to being a client of ours this employee would always come up with reasons not to do it. This guy’s name was John and John was 100% sure that the product we offered at that time could not get any better.
If you think about John he may be bringing valid points to a subject. There may have been many finer more specific points of a suggestion that he would just fight us on. If Microsoft handled business this way we would not have many of the cool neat new features that we do. To take it one step beyond that, another company may have produced something that had been tabled causing us to lose that money.
OK, I am done rambling. I am just saying when new subjects come across your desk maybe we should take a look at how it can be done, not always why it cannot be done. There is always the question on if you should do something that needs to be addressed. In my opinion it’s all in the attitude.
