Kendal posted the announcement yesterday that we opened the design content on 99designs. I’ve used the site before and it’s a decent system, typically get a logo for around $200 – and you get to pick from a lot of options. I know most of us are data people, but probably more than a few of us know Photoshop or the equivalent, or someone that does, which means it could be someone from the SQL community that designs the next really big PASS logo. Why not give it a try?

One of the new products that Red Gate Software has released recently is SQL Source Control. I saw a demo of this product back in March as it was nearing completion, and I thought it was pretty cool. I have struggled with source control for years, and build a process that was mainly manual, and one that I’ve seen others use over the years.  It worked well, but it was prone to errors unless I was allowed to chastise developers on a regular basis for not adhering to the process.

Today I acted as emcee and moderator for a semi-private webinar that demo’d the product to the Friends of Red Gate, a group that is by invitation only, but lets some customers interact with Red Gate similar to how the MVP program grants some people access to Microsoft.

This was the first time I actually acted as a moderator, having been an attendee or presenter in the past. It went well, I think, though I definitely had a little dead air and struggled to keep up with questions and find a smooth way to interrupt the presenter. I would rather be the one presenting and let someone else handle the other work for sure.

I think we’ll be scheduling more of these on a regular basis for some Red Gate products to get the word out more and show how they can be used to solve problems. This is one of the few that I’d purchase myself if I was doing DBA work, so we’ll start here and see what happens.

I’m also hoping to do some other more regular webinars from SQLServerCentral, on more technical topics, across the next year.

I have a few people ask about this recently, so I thought I’d blog about it, and maybe get an explanation out there.

When we started accepting bloggers on SQLServerCentral, it was a challenge to get people to move their blogs. We had some people that just started blogging with us, but others that were already blogging elsewhere. At first I wasn’t sure what to do, but when SQLServerPedia started syndicating bloggers, using feeds, I requested similar functionality for SQLServerCentral.

We built it, and while it’s a little crude, and we’ve modified things a few times, here’s how it works:

• You send us a note with
  • Your SQLServerCentral registered email
  • A feed URL
• You blog in English (sorry, English only)
• We read the feed and publish your blog on SQLServerCentral.

The Scary DBA has syndicated his blog, so you can see how the different things look on our site v the source. Some things don’t come across cleanly, and I’m working on getting some of those things fixed.

Frequency

We used to read feeds once a day, now we do it once an hour. So if you blog about something, it ought to be on the SQLServerCentral site in under 2 hours. If you think there is an issue, please contact the webmaster.

Hints

I use Live Writer to actually publish this blog on Blogspot. It lets me test things, but also gives me a backup of my blog and control over what I write. I think it’s a good idea to own your content, as well as keep a backup of it on your own blog.

Live Writer is a great piece of software for drafting blogs, scheduling them, working offline, etc. I actually sync my Live Writer folders  across my desktop and laptops. That gives me some additional capabilities to draft stuff on one machine and finish it on another.

I highly recommend people tag stuff they want to syndicate with a specific tag and then send us the feed of that tag. That allows you to still blog about something that you want to publish, but not syndicate it if you don’t want to. I know some people do this to publish other stuff in other languages, or they mix their personal/career blog and don’t necessarily want to send everything to SSC.

Setup

If you want to get setup, send a note to the webmaster at SQLServerCentral.com and we’ll get you syndicated.

Back at the start of July I kicked off a survey around your plans for SSDs (see here) and now I present the results to you. There's not much to editorialize here, but the numbers are interesting to see.

 

The "other" answers were (verbatim):

• 3 x 'have bought and am trying them out'
• 3 x 'not sure if we need them or not'
• 2 x 'all production servers are hosted'
• 1 x 'bought them, tried them..not good enough yet for tempdb'
• 1 x 'Have some, want more, could you really every have enough?'
• 1 x 'We get every penny from or spinning media, and have no need for SSD'

The results reflect what I've been hearing when teaching classes and talking to customers/conference attendees over the last six months. People are becoming more interested in SSDs but there's still a lot of wariness about them and of course the whole money issue of being able to buy them. I'm also not surprised (given the general readership demographics of this blog) by the number of people who've analyzed their IOPS requirements and concluded that they don't need SSDs to accomplish that.

 

The "other" answers were (verbatim):

• 3 x 'not in the budget'
• 1 x 'I plan to buy expensive drives and throw them at you, paul! love, conor'
• 1 x 'I'm going to do the same thing Conor will do. Denny'
• 1 x 'OLAP Scale Out'
• 1 x 'Use them as cache'
• 1 x 'Using in an EMC V-MAX SAN to dynamically move high workloads to SSD temporarily'

Ahem - thanks Conor and Denny :-)

Another unsurprising set of results that reflects what I've been hearing. One number I'd be interested in drilling deeper into is answer #3 - are people putting/planning to put tempdb on SSDs because that's what they've heard is the best thing to do, or because tempdb truly is the largest I/O bottleneck that can benefit the most from SSDs? That's a set of experiments I'd like to try out with my Fusion-io drives.

The final "other" answer is also interesting - I was talking to a couple of folks from EMC in Ireland about the V-MAX when we were there earlier this month. Very cool idea to migrate data up and down a set of devices with varying latencies (at the block level, not the file level) - I'd like to see more on how the technology copes with one-off operations like consistency checks or backups - do those IOs affect which layer a block resides in?

Anyway, hope you find these results interesting.

Thanks to all those who responded!

Victorious by Jack Campbell ($8 at Amazon) is the finale in the six part series about Black Jack Geary leading a space fleet back home from deep in enemy territory. I’ll try not to ruin it for you if you haven’t read them all yet!

The series is good, though I’ll admit to thinking it might have been done in five books or maybe even four. It’s naval battles set in space, with a lot of tactics in three dimensions. There is a bit of intrigue and politics, especially the latter in this last one. A big focus on honor and not descending to the level of opponents, stuff I largely agree with but is rarely so simple in real life, and the author manages to show some of that throughout the books.

The ending is reasonably happy, though parts of it feel rushed – a strange feeling given that overall the story was stretched too much. The villains end up feeling not quite as formidable as they seemed earlier on.

Still, I can easily recommend the series, and it’s always nice to know that when you read a book there are more to follow already done and waiting.

One of the more important tasks in the process of rolling out incremental developments to a multi-server production system is to double-check that all of the planned modifications, and nothing else, have been deployed. An Oracle expert, Bruce Armstrong, comes across SQL Compare for Oracle, and sees if it helps with this time-consuming task.

Last week we sat down with our good friends Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes of RunAs Radio and recorded an interview about how to learn effectively. It was incented by Paul's recent post as part of TSQL Tuesday: T-SQL Tuesday #008: Top ten mistakes to make when attending a class. Additionally, I've written some related posts on types of training here.

Here's the specific link to the show: Kim Tripp and Paul Randal Talk about Learning Effectively!

Enjoy!
kt

Last week we sat down with our good friends Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes of RunAs Radio and recorded an interview about how to learn effectively, plus some of the usual nonsense and insults.

Check it out at http://www.runasradio.com/default.aspx?showNum=169.

Enjoy!

Over the past couple years our local library system has been under financial pressure, resulting in some changes, and maybe not all of them bad, but still frustrating. Hoping those of you reading today might offer some insight into your local library policies so I can decide whether to dig deeper or just live with it!

• All branches closed on Friday
• Cannot checkout any books if any unpaid fine
• Cannot renew a checked out book more than 4 times
• Fines only paid in cash/check

The Friday closing I get, definitely savings to close the office, though I wish they would leave one branch open. More than once I’ve wanted to go on a Friday and couldn’t. They’ve told me that the reason behind requiring all fines to be paid is to increase circulation, but I find fault with that argument. You can return all your books, owe $.10, and not be able to check out any books. I rarely carry cash and there is no ATM machine in the building. I would have no problem paying the merchant fee on top of the fines. This is supposed to happen eventually, but it’s not been funded yet that I can see.

The limit of 4 renewals – don’t know. They only let you renew if no one has a hold on it, but I can see that there should be a max, whether 4 or 14. This one annoyed me recently when I returned books and forgot one that I’d had for a while (about growing tomatoes) and actually remembered to bring cash with me, but I couldn’t renew the book, couldn’t pay the fine on it because it wouldn’t calculate until returned – leaving me the option of paying for the book plus a $10 fee (which I considered), or having them hold all the books I’d selected on a Thursday evening that I wanted for a rare Friday at at the beach.

So, I’m trying not to rant, yet I’m not sure those policies are all that customer friendly.

The hardest thing, I think, for most new organizers of a SQL Saturday is the fundraising. A few years ago I heard Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys, give his 5 rules for being a good salesman.

Number one is ask for the money. He couldn’t remember the other four :)

I think that’s a fine set of rules, but for many people, it’s really hard to ask for money. Surprisingly they are scared to do it. Maybe not surprisingly since I find it hard as well. It’s not though, as I’ve learned over the year, but I still feel trepidation that I’m asking for more than I’m giving at times.

I caught a great blog from one half of the Midnight DBA, Jen McCown (Blog|Twitter) on SQL Saturday sponsorships. It’s a great read, and there’s another good one from Ryan Adams. Sponsorship is important to a degree because there are some costs with a SQL Saturday. You might get free space, but often have to pay insurance. There’s lunch, though you can charge people. There’s signage, badges, other incidentals, but they still cost money and your significant other might not be thrilled with you paying out of pocket.

I don’t think it’s hard to get some sponsors, and I know that my company, Red Gate, is usually happy to help out some, PASS gives a little, a few other vendors will likely chip in. There are two keys that I’ve seen from talking with people.

1. Communicate often and clearly
2. Negotiate and be willing to take less (and give less).

You might think if you don’t get a response that your email was clear and that someone just doesn’t want to sponsor you. I will tell you that if you send 10, I bet that 7 of them aren’t clear to the receiver, or they aren’t read. 2 or 3 people might need to think about it and then will forget it. That means maybe one positive response from your email.

What do you do?

Send more emails. Send them repeatedly. Not botheringly-often like every day, but every week to ten days repeat them. Try new sponsors, try making a call or setting up a 10 minute meeting to talk about it. Use clear materials like Jen lists, and then be willing to work with them. Someone might not want to sponsor you for $1000, but they might be willing to do $200. If that’s the case, offer less. Be willing to shift slightly on your rate card, and negotiate with them. Ryan has good advice for being sure you deliver on your promises, keep them happy, and have them sponsor you again.

And have fun with it. It’s not the end of the world if someone walks away, and there are usually lots of sponsors to choose from. You don’t need a huge budget, and I’d plan for a small one. You can add things in easier than taking them away.

To make progress as a relational Database programmer, you have to think in terms of sets, rather than lists, arrays or sequential data. Until that point, you'll feel the need to pass lists, arrays and the like to functions and procedures. Joe suggests some unusual ways around the difficulty and broods on the power of the VALUES constructor.

In retrospect, it was probably the inclusion of the OUTPUT clause in the MERGE statement that gave SQL Server 2008 its most powerful SQL enhancement.. It isn't the easiest of features to explain, but Bob does it in his usual clear and careful way.

Often, there is a huge difference between software being easy to use, and easy to develop. When your pilot users tell you "by week three of any development project you've thrown out anything that takes time or just gets in your way", then it is time to be serious about usability, as well as quality. We decided to find out from some of those at the sharp end of the development of Red Gate's SQL Source Control.

Sometimes, its just the smallest of details that can make all the difference. For example, on my test system (see the end of this posting for a description), I created a new 50GB database. The database creation process took about 5 minutes and 50 seconds to complete.

Next, I populated the database with over 61 million rows of data, which virtually occupied all of the available space within the newly created database. After that, I backed up the database using SSMS, and then I deleted the original database.

At this point, I restored the database from the backup using SSMS. Below, you see the typical Restore Database screen.

 

At the bottom, right-hand side of the screen in the Progress box, notice the “Executing (0%)” indicator. Between the time I clicked the OK button to begin the restore, and when the “Executing (0%)” counter began to move, it took about 5 minutes and 50 seconds. At that point, the counter began to increment and the database was restored.

Now I make one very small change to my SQL Server instance (I’ll describe it in just a moment), and then I repeat the above steps (after deleting the database I just restored). First, I created a new 50GB database. This time, instead of taking 5 minutes and 50 seconds to create the database, it takes just under 2 seconds, a savings of about 5 minutes and 48 seconds. Next, I populated the database with the same amount of data as before, backed it up, and then deleted the original file. When I restored the database this time around, instead of having to wait 5 minutes and 50 seconds before the backup began to restore, I only had to wait just under 2 seconds. In both of these cases, I saved a significant amount of time.

So what was the very small change that I made, and why did it radically reduce the amount of time for database creation and database restoration to occur? I turned instant file initialization on.

What is Instant File Initialization?

In my first two examples, before instance file initialization was turned on, the reason it took so long for the database to be created, or the database to be restored (before a database can be restored, its space must first be pre-allocated, much like creating a new database), SQL Server had to go to every page in the 50 GB database and zero each one of them out. It can take a lot of time for SQL Server to go to every 8K page in a file (especially very large files) and physically zero out each page. When instant file initialization is turned on, SQL Server doesn’t have to zero out every 8K page that has been allocated. Instead, the space is just allocated to SQL Server by the operating system in one fell swoop, which is a very quick process, potentially saving you a great deal of time.

How Do You Turn Instant File Initialization On?

Unlike most configuration features in SQL Server, there is no on/off switch for instant file initialization. Instead, you have to assign a specific user right to the SQL Server Service (mssqlserver) account. Here’s what you need to do to turn on instant file initialization.

First of all, to use instant file initialization with SQL Server in a production environment, you must be using some combination of:

• Windows Server 2003 or
• Windows Server 2008 or
• Windows Server 2008 R2

and using:

• SQL Server 2005 (any edition) or
• SQL Server 2008 (any edition) or
• SQL Server 2008 R2 (any edition)

Second, you must assign the SQL Server Service (mssqlserver) a special user right called “Perform volume maintenance tasks”. To do this, start the Local Security Policy tool (you must be a local administrator to perform this task), then drill down to Security Settings | Local Policies | User Rights Assignment | Perform volume maintenance tasks, as you see in the screenshot below.

Once you have located “Perform volume maintenance tasks”, right-click on it and select “Properties”, and the “Perform volume maintenance tasks Properties” screen appears. Click on “Add User or Group” and then proceed through the remaining screens until you select the account that is being used as the service account for SQL Server. In the screen shot below, notice that I have added the BRADMCGEHEE\sqlserverservice account to this user rights assignment. This is the user account I use on my test server to run my SQL Server instance.

Once the SQL Server service account has been assigned this user right, you will have to restart the SQL Server service (of course, only when it is not being used), and from this point forward, instant file initialization is turned on for all MDF files in your SQL Server instance.

Note: If your SQL Server service account is a member of the local administrators group, then the account already has the “Perform volume maintenance tasks” user right and you don’t need to assign it again.

Why Isn’t Instant File Initialization Turned On by Default?

When a SQL Server instance is first installed, one of the things you must enter is a SQL Server service account. If you follow the best practice and select a domain user account to be used as the SQL Server service account, the setup process automatically assigns the domain user account with only just enough rights and permissions to run SQL Server. The “Perform volume maintenance tasks” user right is not automatically assigned during installation because it is not required to run SQL Server, and because allowing the service account to have this additional user right introduces a very small security risk.

Oh no, a security risk! Well, not really much of a security risk. Here’s the possible security risk scenario. The disk that is being used to create the new database on has been used for storing data that has been previously deleted. As you may know, when data is deleted from disk by the operating system, it really is not physically deleted; the space holding the data is just marked as being available. At some point, the older data will be overwritten with new data. This occurs all the time on millions of computers throughout the world every day. And as such, any data that has been marked for deletion, but not yet overwritten, is potentially available for access if you have the right tools and know what you are doing. In fact, undelete software uses this to recover data that has been accidently deleted.

When instant file initialization is not turned on, and when SQL Server allocates space for an MDF file, each of the pages allocated for the database is zeroed out, which removes the older data, in theory, preventing it from being accessed. I say “in theory” because there are computer forensics techniques that can even recover data that has been overwritten, but that discussion is really not applicable here.

So if instant file initialization is turned on, there is a very slight risk that someone could go to the pages allocated for the new database and read any older data that still may exist there. This is essentially a non-issue in virtually every organization, other than those that require very high security. But because of this potential security issue, instant file initialization is not turned on by default.

If instant file initialization is turned on, and pages are not zeroed out when the database is initially created, SQL Server will automatically overwrite any data that might have been on those pages when SQL Server needs that space.

When Is Instant File Initialization Used?

If instant file initialization is turned on, it is used in all of these cases:

• When a database is first created
• When a an existing database’s size is manually increased
• When tempdb is recreated each time SQL Server is restarted
• When autogrowth kicks in
• When backups are restored (as the space has to be pre-allocated before a restore can occur) 

Instant file initialization only affects MDF and NDF files, not LDF files. In other words, transaction log files can’t take advantage of instant file initialization. This is because log files are circular in nature and must be zeroed out, as random data in transaction log pages can be problematic. In my earlier test, when I created a new 50 GB database, the MDF file was 50 GB and the log file was only 1 MB. If I had created a large log file (which is not uncommon), it would have taken awhile for the log to be created, although the MDF file would have been instantly created. This is also true when you manually increase the size of a log file, or when log file autogrowth occurs. In other words, don’t expect to have all of your databases (MDF and LDF files) created in less than 2 seconds like in my test. While the MDF will be created virtually instantly, the log file may take awhile to be created.

When I was working with SQL Server 2000 a few years back, which does not support instant file initialization, one of the things that annoyed me the most when restoring large databases was waiting for the database space to be allocated before the restore actually began. During emergency database restores, this wasted a lot of precious time, preventing me from getting the database back into production as fast as I would have preferred. If you aren’t using instant file initialization today, you are facing this same problem. That’s why I recommend all SQL Server 2005/2008 instances have instant file initialization turned on. The time saved when restoring databases is the best reason to use instant file initialization.

Check to See if Your SQL Server Instances Have Instant File Initialization Turned On

Hopefully, by now, you see the benefits of using instant file initialization. Assuming that you don’t already know if instant file initialization is turned on or off on the SQL Servers your manage, I challenge you to check and see, and if you find it turned off, turn it on and reap its many benefits.

 

Test Hardware

• Dell T610 Tower, with a single, 6-core CPU (Intel Xeon X5670, 2.93 Ghz, 12M Cache, HT, 1333MHz FSB); 32GB 1333MHz RAM; a PERC H700 RAID controller; two 146GB 15K SAS Drives; one dual-port HBA (to connect to the DAS); and dual network connections. Hyper-threading turned off.
• One PowerVault MD3000 DAS with two, dual-port controllers, and 15 146GB 15K SAS drives. MDF files located on RAID 10 array with 10 spindles, LDF files on RAID 10 array with 4 spindles, backup drive on a single spindle.

 

 

 

 

I keep seeing lots of debate about Android v the iPhone 4. I have friends talking about how cool Windows Mobile 7 will be, and even some talk about Nokia making a comeback. However it seems that so many people are just missing what’s cool about the iPhone.

It just works.

Not perfectly, not all the time, but it’s just so simple to make things happen. And if you want to try something else, there’s likely a dozen apps that do that one, quirky thing you want, and you can pick the one that works for you.

As an example. I was on the phone with a friend today and they recommended Career Warfare to me. He told me the author and while he spent 2-3 minutes explaining what he’d learned from it and why he’d recommend it, I surfed over to Amazon, found the book in a Kindle edition, selected my phone, and shot the book to it. A quick $12 purchase for me, some money for the author and Amazon, and befoer I got off the phone, I clicked the Kindle app and saw it download through wi-fi.

There’s nothing magic here, and Kindle is on Android now, but that platform, with things being that easy, is what makes the iPhone cool. Most apps are that easy to find, and I can find them in iTunes, see large screenshots and read reviews easily in a way that I couldn’t in the early Android Marketplace. Maybe it’s easier now, and maybe I can “send” things to my phone, and if so, they’re learning.

That cool, simple, seamless platform that just seems to work so often and intuitively, is the reason I love the iPhone.

A bit of a silly title, but an interesting story. A few weeks back I posted a note about attending TechEd and how popcorn seemed to be a big hit when it was served one afternoon. Last week following the oPASS meeting one of our regulars – Bob Blaydes – asked if I’d like to have popcorn at SQLSaturday #49 this fall. Sure, of course! But what led to this fortuitous question? Turns out he had read the blog post and happened to own a professional quality popcorn machine.

 

It’s a small win, yet it’s a big win too. Here’s a case of my network working for me, and vice versa. Bob would have volunteered regardless to help out for #49, but now he gets to make a greater contribution for the same effort. We get popcorn at cost, and we’ll try to subsidize that by selling a ‘popcorn sponsorship’ complete with vendor logo on the popcorn bags!

It’s also a lesson to me that I still don’t always know how/when to use my network to best effect.I don’t think it would have been appropriate to send an email to my networking asking ‘do you know anyone that owns a popcorn machine?’, yet I could have mentioned it on the oPASS/SQLSaturday sites at the least. It’s a long shot that it works, yet it’s relatively cheap to ask. It’s also a good case for expanding your network, to increase the chances of finding that one connection.

One thing I learned years ago in C programming was the elegance of using operators and simplifying expressions. This sometimes involved doing two things in a single statement, if it makes sense. For example,

x=y++;

Those of you that have done some programming will recognize this as incrementing y and assigning a value to x at the same time. Well not the same time, but in one line.

I knew that you could some things like this in T-SQL, but it didn’t trigger in my mind when someone asked about building their own sequencing table. This person wanted to update a table with an incremented value and return the value to the calling program without causing any locks/blocks.

Paul White posted this fantastic piece of code that illustrates this:

UPDATE  dbo.GPK

SET     @NewID = next_value = next_value + 1


WHERE   table_name = @table_name;

In this code the GPK table is being updated, with the next_value column being incremented. At the same time, @NewID, a variable that is an output parameter for a stored proc in this example, is assigned the value from next_value.

The value assigned is the incremented value, so if next_Value contains a 1 before this is run, @NewID will get 2. The increment/update occurs first, with the new value being assigned to the variable.

I think this is really cool, and it’s something I need to remember for future T-SQL problems.

Why are they here? Why is anyone?

I saw this post (please do read it) about introducing speakers and it reminded me that I wanted to write about it too. At the July oPASS meeting I did the introduction for Kendal Van Dyke, and it just felt like the right thing to do. We’ve been a little lax about it, and in fact this month we didn’t do it very well. I think it happens a lot because the meeting organizer has been communicating and/or knows the speaker and forgets that the rest of the attendees don’t have that background yet.

Most speakers include a slide of background/qualifications (which I agree with), but reading it is often awkward – feels like the presentation is about selling the speaker and not teaching the attendees. A good intro both helps the speaker build their brand (the most common reason for speaking) and gives them the best chance of success by helping the attendees learn about their qualifications from someone who is allowed to be openly enthusiastic about.

Not sure I said all that well, but hoping for the best. I’d like to see the SQL community really adopt this as a practice, from chapter meetings right up through the Summit.

 

The application form mentions that the quite a bit of what you include will be made public. While I won’t want to repeat everything, I’ll include a few of my responses about why and what I want to do with PASS and take some early comments.

I have to give thanks to Andy Warren, Andy Leonard, and Joe Webb for agreeing to write recommendation letters for me. I greatly respect the opinions of those three men and am honored they were willing to lend me support on this endeavor.

I am including the question in bold/italics and then my answer below.

Please discuss why you would like to serve on the PASS Board of Directors:

I have been a member of PASS since 1999 and have worked with the organization in various ways over the years. It is an organization that I both support and believe in, and I would like to see the organization help the SQL Server community and the professionals that work with SQL Server more. I have been frustrated at times by the way that the organization has been run and would like to try and influence PASS to be more relevant in the lives of its members as well as grow the organization’s membership to encompass more SQL Server professionals by contributing to the decisions made by the board of directors.

If elected to the PASS Board, what goal would you set to contribute to the benefit of PASS? How would you work to accomplish that goal?

I think that one of the failings of PASS over the last decade has been a lack of communication with its members. While PASS has matured as an organization in the last decade, it has also appeared to stagnate in its membership growth. I have felt that the lack of communication has been one of the issues that has slowed growth in the SQL Server community. I would like to work towards finding ways to better engage and speak with the community about what PASS does for them, and what they would like to get out of a professional organization. I feel this would go a long way towards helping PASS grow its membership. One of my contributions would be to use my skills in communicating and inspiring people to spread the message about PASS.

I also feel that the SQL Server community is much larger than PASS, but I don't think it needs to be. I would like to see more events, engagements, and/or benefits from PASS that convince more people working with SQL Server to join PASS. I think that PASS can help provide some additional certification resources, either with their own certification/testing process or with formal study groups/sessions/materials for MS certifications. These would add member value. I would like to see more training opportunities alongside the current SQL Saturday/SQL Rally/Summit choices, some of which could be paid events and help grow PASS revenue. These could be separate events, perhaps Beginner 101 days or boot camps or pre-conference sessions at other events. Having helped to get SQL Saturday off the ground, and working with other events in the past, I think that some of the volunteer efforts and speaker enthusiasm could be channelled into other events, and that the board of PASS is in the position to help promote those events. I would be willing to help organize and promote these events.

I also feel that PASS has at times not been relevant to the average SQL Server professional on a regular basis. There has not been a reason to be interested in PASS aside from the annual Summit in the US. I would like to see PASS doing more to engage with SQL Server professionals and becoming a more valuable part of their lives each year. Not every week, but at least once a quarter I'd like to have more people finding some reason to interact with PASS. I am not sure of what the best way to accomplish this is, but one thing I think needs to happen is more interaction from the board, and committee volunteers, with the average person and soliciting and responding to the feedback they may have. One of my strengths over the years has been communicating with people, motivating them, and encouraging them to move forward in their careers. I think I can bring that same efforts to PASS communications and find ways to make PASS more relevant in their career.

Please describe your past involvement with PASS:

• I have presented sessions at PASS Summits and SQL Saturdays.
• I have hosted numerous SQL Server user groups to help them function as PASS chapters when PASS was unable to provide the hosting support in its early years.
• I have both presented at, and sponsored the PASS Camp events in Colorado in an effort to reach out to the local community.
• I participated in the first 24 hours of PASS as a speaker.
• I worked with PASS to provide the printed version of the SQL Server Standard to PASS membership and attended a few board meetings. I was responsible for coordinating content and advertisements with the PASS management group.
• My company, SQLServerCentral, has had a promotional arrangement for the PASS Summit for many years in which we drive significant traffic to PASS and host an opening night party that has become very popular.
• I worked with Andy Warren to create SQL Saturday, grow it, and then arrange for its transition to PASS.
• I served on the Program Selection Committee for the 2010 Summit.

Please describe your volunteer experience with PASS, including an example of a project you worked on, that you followed through to completion. Describe how your specific contribution has benefited the PASS organization:

My main volunteer experience with PASS has been on the Program Selection Committee. I had complained about the selections the previous year and decided to volunteer and try to improve the process. I attended a training session, communicated with other volunteers and speakers to ensure that my criteria and process were similar to others. I completed my ratings in a timely manner and then debated the selections in real time with the committee and made selections.

Throughout this process I also sent feedback to volunteers and PASS about issues or potential improvements that I found in the process. A final follow-up call is being scheduled.

I also publically have blogged about the process and some thoughts, getting feedback from the community: some good, some bad. I think that overall that I have pushed PASS to re-examine the way things are done, and look to improve the process. I don't know if that was done in the past, so I cannot comment on whether or not PASS is better for my efforts.

-----

This isn’t necessarily related to PASS, but I’ll include it as it gives a little basis for why I might be qualified.

Please describe your management and leadership background, listing specific examples of teams or projects:

My life has been a constant shift between working and leadership positions. I have been a technical lead in development projects, a manager of people, the owner of a company, and a member of a board of directors.

I took a management position at a company that required me to both manage development resources and operational resources. Since this was a new company for me, I was able to assume charge of the group without and prior relationships with people. Without disrupting existing processes, I did require people to begin explaining the reasons for and documenting their actions. From there I worked with them to re-examine their beliefs and habits to try and build better processes. I was able to, with lots of help from my staff, create a much more stable environment and ensure a few large clients did not leave the company because of the way the IT group had been run previously.

Specifically we had developers that previously had administrator access in production. Early on I found them making a change the resulted in the wrong image appearing for a client. I removed access, apologized to the client, and showed them the change in permissions. I explained that this would not happen again, but balanced that by saying some requested changes would be slower to implement. This large client (40% of our sales) was mollified and ceased negotiations with a competitor. I also had a case where my developers and system administrators were arguing with a large NY bank about network issues. I knew that there fundamentally was a problem and brought in a senior consultant that I knew would be able to explain the issue and have more credibility than I with the bank. They were able to solve the issue in an afternoon since both sides could listen to a third party more objectively.

I worked for a large Fortune 1000 company as a DBA at another time. We were purchased by another large Fortune 500 company and I was promoted to be the operational DBA manager of 10 other people, including two that I had previously worked with. This team was dispersed across two states, which required me to travel monthly to another location and also manage each part of my team remotely at times. I also had to learn to step back and work with these people to get objectives accomplished without doing the work myself. Prior to this I had always been able to step in and lend a hand when needed, but in this role I had to step back and strictly manage people.

I also had to manage former peers, which required a changing of the relationship. I learned to ensuring we could work together and I respected my peers' opinions, but also that I balance that with the need to make decisions, sometimes unpopular. I had to bring people in to work late hours at times, and required them to complete unfinished documentation, something that I had not liked doing myself. I also had to manage people that made more money than I and were older than I was with more experience on their own systems.

We had large DB2 and Oracle systems that were critical to the company, so I had to manage these people without understanding what specifically they did. My technique when we had technical issues (scalability problems on DB2 and technical issues with Oracle) was to probe their knowledge, their technical decisions and get them to question themselves. Since we often had scalability issues and the corporate culture was to gather a large crisis group together and yell at vendors, I learned how to mediate issues between groups and get people to focus on the technical issues, proceeding more methodically without assumptions than they were used to. I also learned to brief executive management (VP/CIO) on the status of issues while ensuring that I kept more immediate management (director level) in the loop. I am not sure I was that successful at changing the culture, but I did learn to accept small victories and move on.

My HOA experience is listed above in general, but specifically I worked on the architectural committee in discussion a homeowner's decision to build a large structure on his property. This was approved prior to my election, but constructed during my tenure. As a result I had to listen to complaints, sometimes yelled complaints, from other homeowners, and then explain that this had been approved. I also had to inspect the construction, which the homeowner was not pleased about and expressed his displeasure loudly as well. This was a position that was unwinnable, necessary, and forced me to learn tolerance and patience in working through a problem without quitting. I also had to negotiate changes to a new development adjacent to our community that required our approval. I received concerns from homeowners, solicited others by explaining the potential issues to them and then presented those to the developers, negotiating some changes to their plans that would ensure our community was not adversely affected by parking placement, a proposed golf course, and the obstruction of sight lines.

-------------------

I would like any comments you have, preferably on your own blog if you have them and a link posted here. The comment section below doesn’t really do well in allowing a nice, well thought out response or comment.

I’ll look to add in responses and thoughts to the blog every week based on what people ask or want to know.