Tag Archives: SQL Server

Wheeling, WV to Dallas, TX? A SQL Saturday 56 Recap

Posted on October 28, 2010 by johnsterrett| 4 Comments

Why would I travel from Wheeling, WV to Dallas, TX to speak at a free SQL Saturday? First, of all SQL Saturday’s in general are bleeping awesome. In a nutshell SQL Saturday is an all day multi-track, multi-session learning opportunity to learn SQL Server.  SQL Saturday #56 was was the first Business Intelligence SQL Saturday in the nation.  Second, I am blessed to have a great mother-in-law and father-in-law in Dallas and I enjoy hanging out with them so this was a huge bonus. Third, I enjoy connecting with people in the SQL Server Community so I can network and talk shop and see how we do things differently.

Facility & Logistics

First of all let me say this Pittsburgh we got gipped. Microsoft’s Campus in Dallas (yes campus not floor) was super cool. When I walk in the main door the first thing I saw was servers. You know I am a geek when I love the fact that servers are the first thing I see when I enter a business building. Anyways back to how the facility worked with the SQL Saturday event. The facility was a great fit for the 200+ attendees. There were several rooms that held 50 or more attendees and a gigantic room for the opening, main events and the end of day raffle. There were also some smaller rooms that brought everyone in closer and made for some good collaborative sessions.

Sessions

I attended Jen McCowen (twitter) SSRS from Ground Zero session and was very impressed especially when I found out Jen only had one day to prepare. I already know the basics in SSRS so I was really interested in picking up a few tips while I see how an experienced speaker gives an introduction session.  I really liked Jen’s style as she just dove straight into BIDS and went over key concepts you need to know to start using SSRS.  I also got to steal a few minutes after the presentation and see how she records her videos for midnightDBA.  For those out there who are interested in recording demos it looks like she uses Camtasia Studio and from what she showed me it looks like it’s not hard to use. More on camtasia a little later.

Another session I attended focused on evaluating use case personas for a new feature coming up in the next edition of SQL Server.  I really enjoyed this session because it basically was an hour group discussion about how we do things in our shop.   I would love to go into more details but I signed an NDA. 

My Session

I gave a talk on SQL Server 2008 for Developers.  Overall I think the session went well and I was glad to take part as a speaker.  The session was interactive as there were great questions from the audience.  I didn’t do a head count so I would estimate that there were about 30 attendees in the session. 

The host crew did a great job with speaker evaluations.  I even recieved my evaluations a few minutes after my session was complete.  In fact, I had a really helpful evaluation from an attendee who mentioned I should have went over Change Data Capture and MERGE in more detail and skipped the other features.   Being that this was a BI SQL Saturday I agree so I am going to evaluate Camtasia and see if I can record a video over these features and add them to my blog over the next two weeks.

Networking

On of my favorite parts of attending SQL Saturday is networking.  I was able to meet a lot of great people.  I apologize in advance as I am sure I am leaving some super cool people off this paragraph.  I meet Ryan Adams and had a great discussion about how he uses visual basic to perform actions on alerts with MOM for SQL Server. I also shared some information about our TFS configuration with Robert Crocker during lunch.  I also meet Thomas LeBlanc, Tim Mitchell, David Stein and had several great conversation in the speakers room and at the after party.

Other Posts

The following is a short list of other bloggers recaps on SQL Saturday 56

Conclusion

In conclusion this was a great event. The North Texas SQL Server User Group did a great job.  I would love to speak at another one of their SQL Saturday’s.  I cannot believe they are going to have three within a twelve month period.

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Pittsburgh Code Camp – SQL 2008 for Developers

Posted on October 16, 2010 by johnsterrett| Leave a comment

This past weekend I presented SQL Server 2008 for Developers at the PGH.NET Code Camp.   You can download the slides here if you would like a copy.  You can also check out my scheduled speaking engagements.

The PGH.NET 2010.2 Code Camp was organized very well.  I want to give a big shout out to organizers as they did a great job.  My favorite session of the day was Scrum 101 with Eric Kepes (Blog | Twitter).  Personally, I knew very little about Scrum coming in to the presentation so this was a great opportunity for me to see how others have implemented it in their shops.  The presentation lead to some great debates.

If you would like to see Eric’s presentation or download a Scrum worksheet check out his blog post.

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Table Value Parameters with SQL Server and .NET

Posted on September 29, 2010 by johnsterrett| Leave a comment

Have you ever wanted to send multiple insert statements using one round-trip to the database? This month I published a tip on mssqltips.com to do this implementing Table Value Parameters with .NET.  It will be the first of many tips and blog entries on SQL Server 2008 Development as I am schedule to present at a few events across the country.

For more on Table Value Parameters check out my links.

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Upcoming Speaking Engagements

Posted on September 14, 2010 by johnsterrett| 3 Comments

With football season starting I thought I would share some travel dates.  If you are at any of the following events please don’t be shy and say hi.  I look forward to hitting the road and making some new friends as I continue to connect, share and learn.

Sept 18th : Reston, VA
Microsoft Regional Leadership Summit (Non speaking)

Oct 16th : Pittsburgh, PA
Pgh.NET Code Camp 2010.2 (SQL Server 2008 for Developers)

Oct 23rd : Dallas, TX
SQL Saturday #56 BI Edition (Submitted: SQL Server 2008 for Developers)

Nov 8th – 12th : Seattle, WA
SQL Server PASS Member Summit (Submitted Chalk Talk – SQL Server 2008 for Developers)

Nov 19th : Pipestown, WV
AITP Region 18 Fall Conference

Jan 29th : Houston, TX
SQL Saturday #57  (Submitted  SQL Server 2008 for Developers)

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SQL PASS Summit 2010 on a Budget

Posted on August 26, 2010 by johnsterrett| 3 Comments

The following is some information I would like to share with the community about how I plan to travel to Seattle for the SQL Server Pass Summit.  Please take my information with a grain of salt because this is the first time I am attending.  Everything below comes from research and tweets. If you are a regular please leave comments so others can see your travel tips.

Summit 2010

PASS%20Summit%20Banner%20300x300
Can we fast forward to November?

The SQL PASS Summit 2010 is the best opportunity for SQL Server DBA’s to connect, share and learn. Your first obstacle towards getting into the Summit is to well pay for general admission to the summit. You basically have two options here, either you pay the general admission fee (this is what I am doing this year) or you can get someone to sponsor you. A great option here would be your employer. Your employer also isn’t your only option for sponsorship. Speaking of getting someone else to sponsor you MSSQLTIPS and Idera is currently looking to send someone to PASS.  Give it a shot it could be you!

If you are paying for yourself you will want to pay ASAP because PASS has a sliding scale.  Just like many other conferences there is a price before sessions are announced and different prices as you get closer to the event.  You want to avoid paying at the door because the price is usually a lot more.

The following are some links that will help you save some money on attending the 2010 Summit.

How do I get there?

How you get to the PASS Summit will depend on your location and its distance to Seattle.  I  live in Wheeling, WV which is an easy hour drive to Pittsburgh so I will be flying.  If you are also flying you might want to checkout bing.com and setup email alerts to track the change in flight prices.  At this time I see that there are round-trip flights under $300 from Pittsburgh.

In order to travel through the Seattle Metro area check out the public transportation system.  It looks like they have bus, and a monorail.  The Seattle Center Monorail can take you from the airport to downtown for $5.00 round-trip.

Where Should I stay?

The PASS website recommends the following two hotels.

Looking at bing.com and  traveladvisor.com I found a few hotels within a miles of the convention center under $100 per night.  If you are trying to stretch your money I would recommend checking them out.

Do you have any friends that are attending PASS? If so, you might want to recommend sharing a room. This is a great way for you to split the costs of a hotel room.

Where should I eat?

If you are attending the Summit there is good news. Breakfast and Lunch is included daily. This means you will only have to worry about dinner.   There will also be some evening events where you might be able to snag a bite to eat.  On Monday night you can attend the PASS Summit 2010 Welcome Reception.  On Tuesday night you can also attend the Exhibitor Reception.

Another thought towards saving some $$ on dinner is to talk it up with the vendors.  They are there to get to know you and see if their products can solve your problems.  If your team has a budget for SQL tools (I really hope your team does) I bet you could convince a vendor to take you out to dinner.  Even if you don’t have a budget for SQL Tools I bet you could convince some vendors to take you out to dinner.  Remember most people in sales try to build relationships before they sell you on a product or idea.

Can you buy me a drink?

I never really was a big fan of beer and alcohol until I started my career in Information Technology (we will leave the company name out of this story). There were several internal functions to attend for networking and they all had beer.  I quickly noticed that all the bigwigs always had a beer in their hands. Being fresh out of college I followed suite and soon fell in love with beer (a trip with the wife to tour Samuel Adams in Boston also helped).

Anyways back to saving money. If you like to grab a drink (I defiantly fall into this category) it looks like its cheaper to go away from the convention center.

According to @SQLDBA its cheaper to go to the Tap House across the street from the convention center. If you also like to sample local beer the Rock Bottom Brewery is another  recommended place within walking distance from downtown.

What are your travel plans?

PASS Summit vets what am I missing? How else can people save some $$ on their quest to their first Summit conference? Let us know we are all looking forward to your recommendations.

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Cutover 30+ GB databases in 60 seconds with SQL Server 2005/2008

Posted on February 23, 2010 by johnsterrett| 2 Comments
You kid brother just messed up a database migration.  You now have sixty seconds to migrate a 30 GB database or you kid brother is…

Okay I gave it a shot :-)

If you are familiar with moving databases across servers most likely you are using one of the following methods.  Today I am going to write about what goes on during these methods with a focus on speed and provide another option that might work for you.

  • Detach/Attach
  • Copy Database Wizard
  • Backup/Restore
  • 3rd Party Tools

Detach/Attach

The detach/attach method allows you to detach and reattach databases. Therefore, in order to move a database from one server to another you have to detach the database, physically move the data and log files to the new server and then attach the database.  An unforeseen bottleneck with this strategy might be network latency. While this method is very straight forward and simple how long can the database be offline while you are moving the database files (mdf, ndf, ldf) during the detach/attach process?

Copy Database Wizard

The copy database wizard is a tool that leverages SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) to copy a database from one server to another.  The account that the package uses at runtime has to have sysadmin role on both the source and destination instances.  You have two options during the copy process.  The first method is detach/attach see the paragraph above for feedback on using detach/attach.  The second method includes using SMO to script database objects.  This method keeps the source database online during the copy but is much slower than the detach/attach.  Therefore, I have no feedback on this method.  Have you used it? If so please add your comments.

Backup/Restore

Assuming you are using the Full recovery mode for your database the backup restore method for moving a database involves taking a full backup and a transactional log backup where you backup the tail of the log, and leave the database in restoring state.  This will take the source database offline keep the data in sync.  With restore time being a factor you could restore the full backup and do incremental transaction logs up to the point of cutting over assuming assuming no full backups occurred on your database while you started applying transactional backups.

And the winner is…

Drum roll please……..  And the winner is Database Mirroring in High Availability Mode as it can allow you to cutover failover to migrate huge databases in less than sixty seconds.  Okay I might be cheating, it will take much more than sixty seconds to configure. The important fact is that it will seam like it only took seconds to the end users. If your application uses .NET 2.0+ framework and you configure client side redirect the end users might not experience an outage at all.

To setup database mirroring it is highly recommended to make sure the principal and mirror database engine services are using service accounts, they also need access the the ports used by SQL endpoints, and more….  Check out the MSDN site for a great guide for Database Mirroring. 

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Posted in SQL Server 2008, SQLServerPedia Syndication

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