So, here you go, the reasons why I decided that being in Seattle was the right decision for PASS, in no particular order of importance, just what comes to mind.

Location

I think Seattle is a great location in terms of travel as it works very well for our friends in Asia/Pac. I found it interesting that people would comment about how the cost for them to go to Seattle would increase but not one person has mentioned that the cost for someone coming from Australia or India would find it cheaper (not to mention faster). Perhaps that means that the cost is the same for someone to go from Melbourne to Orlando as it would to Seattle? Certainly it will be faster and easier for them to get to Seattle.

No matter what location we choose, someone will end up paying more to attend, and it will take longer for them to get there. I’m currently on the East Coast and would love for the Summit to be closer to me, but I also recognize that what makes things easier for me makes things more difficult for others. About the only neutral location I can think of for everyone to share the burden of travel would be Antartica, which might be perfect because we could get Bill Gates to be our keynote speaker.

Money

PASS is not flush with cash these days. Most everything we do needs to be “budget-neutral”, as we simply do not have piles of cash laying around to throw at ideas to hope something sticks. Our budget is mostly funded by the Summit, so we need to make certain that the Summit continues to generate some revenue, otherwise we operate at a loss. For a non-profit, operating at a loss is not a good thing. If you do that for too long then you will simply cease to exist. You can see our financial situation at the Governance page (you need to login to view this section).

So, the safe choice is to stay in a location that we know “works” for us. We know how to hold a Summit in Seattle that allows for us to have a chance of breaking even and possibly even make a profit that we can then reinvest back into the community. Except for the Mayans, we cannot predict the future, and yet we need to book our conferences years in advance. I have no idea what things will be like in 2012, so I err on the side of caution and felt that Seattle was the wisest choice at this time.

Branding

I want PASS to become “the” SQL Server event, and I want that event to be in the same location every year. I also want the Summit to have over 10,000 attendees each year. And guess what? Seattle cannot hold a conference of that size. Given what we are as a community right now, Seattle is a fine location for us to build a brand around. For where I want us to be, we will need to relocate, and I would love for that day to come as soon as possible. But we aren’t there yet.

Microsoft

I am certain you are all aware that without Microsoft we wouldn’t be here, right? We are the Professional Association for SQL Server. We are dedicated to promoting SQL Server. So, what is wrong with making it easier for their employees to attend our Summit?

I read a few comments about how Microsoft is able to send employees to other conferences, such as TechEd. Does any of those other conferences get hundreds of dedicated SQL Server employees? I am sure TechEd has hundreds of Microsoft employees, but that is across a variety of products and not focused on just SQL Server.

Also, keep this fact in the back of your mind: the Microsoft attendees are paying to attend. We move the Summit, we lose their attendance, and our revenues go down. In case you missed it earlier, I’ll repeat this: we are not flush with cash these days. Having those attendees is a boost to our bottom line right now, and not one I want to walk away from so easily.

SQL Saturdays

PASS is looking to start some smaller events. The acquisition of SQL Saturday is a step in that direction. Another step would be hosting events that are in between a SQL Saturday and a full Summit. We haven’t worked out the logistics but one thing we do know is that we want to keep the Summit as the main event. The regional events along with the SQL Saturdays are events that would be ways for us to promote the main Summit.

There you go, my reasons for why I voted the way I did. I am willing to discuss this through UStream tonight. If enough (say 7-10) people tell me that they want to set aside 15-20 minutes to hear me speak about the reasons I listed above, then I’ll set up the broadcast stream to start at about 7:15PM and we can let the healing begin.

“Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.” -Sun-tzu

“It’s not personal, it’s business.” -Anthony Soprano

Tales of corporate espionage abound these days. Fake Twitter accounts and Facebook fan pages are the latest rage, each designed to engage people in conversations to extract information that can be used to gain an advantage, even if the advantage is minimal. For example, I can set up a fan page, allow the public to become a fan, and then my competitors can participate in conversations on my wall. If I am not careful, then I could give away some valued information without realizing it. In fact, that is the way most espionage works these days, through social engineering, which makes Twitter and Facebook quite attractive for such espionage.

Imagine if you knew some information about the people that attend a conference, say WPPI (where my wife happens to be this week). You know how far people travel, if they like traveling that far, if they would rather stay closer to home, if they like having a large presence from Canon, if they find value in the exhibit hall, and a host of other things about a random attendee. Now, if you were in the market to start up your own photography conference, you would have a lot of valuable information to get started with, right? And you are probably going to succeed in siphoning off attendees from WPPI as a result. And let’s not forget the vendors. You may be able to approach vendors and get them to decided to attend your conference and not WPPI, disrupting their event even further.

Now, think about all of that and compare it to the PASS survey results. While we would love to release the results, in full details, our marketing team has advised us to err on the side of caution. It’s not that we don’t want to release the information to the community, in fact we thought it would be great to let everyone try to slice and dice the data for themselves. The simple fact is that we are not sure if the data could put us at a disadvantage or not. And yes, believe it or not, we are in competition with other conferences and events, including some by Microsoft! Every event is clamoring for attendees these days, and for people that can only chose one conference to attend we would really like for them to choose PASS.

Right now it would seem to me that the biggest issue here is that the community is clamoring for access to the data, and those that currently have the data (PASS HQ) have not necessarily made it a priority to find a way to get it to you. There is nothing evil at play here, just a slight communication problem. And one we can fix. The board is meeting in two weeks and I am certain we will find a resolution to the disconnect at that time. In the meantime, if anyone has any suggestions as to how the data can be presented so that it will not put us at a disadvantage in any way, just let us know. Believe me, we would love to get the results to you, just help us to make it happen.

As for the swing and a miss, well…we’re still at bat, right?

[This blog post are my thoughts, and my thoughts alone, please do not consider this an official response from PASS, thanks.]

Technically the rules for this chainpost do not call for me to recall a MacGyver moment only from my IT history. As such, many of my moments come from coaching. I would gladly recount for you the time we came from seven points down with two minutes to play, quite possibly my best coaching moment ever, but I doubt you want to read about that. I could tell you about the fantasy football website I built in ASP.NET on top of MS Access ‘97 and the late nights I put in trying to figure out a way to enforce the league rules by building various arrays, but that doesn’t seem too exciting either. And there are the handful of times I have coded a solution that helped streamline one thing or another, but it really doesn’t strike me as “MacGyver-esque”.

So, I decided to think about someone who is like MacGyver in real life. Someone who constantly makes something out of nothing and is able to get himself out of seemingly any situation. Watch this video and you’ll agree how nothing we do in IT can compare to what a real MacGyver would do in real life while thinking of England.

I’m tagging Kevin Kline, and only Kevin Kline, because I don’t want to hear him whine anymore.

The title of the talk will be “DBA Survivor (or What to Expect When You Are Expecting to Be a DBA)”, and you can see more details here. The link for the LiveMeeting will be enabled as we get closer to game time (6:30 PM EST) and you can use this link.

As always, please…no wagering. And if you want to know more about my book, you can check out the DBA Survivor website at http://dbasurvivor.com.

If you have nothing else to do tonight set aside some time to learn how to survive life as a DBA and how you can thrive in your career. I’ll cover a lot of topics including how you get started on your first day as a DBA, how to get yourself organized, how to help manage expectations, and how to build relationships with others that will be key to your success.

Food and drinks will be provided, but not by me, and only for those physically in C-Bus that arrive on time. For those of us joining remotely (like me) we will have to feed ourselves. Please mute your microphones, thanks.

I am about a 90 minute drive from Waltham, meaning in order to make it to SQLSaturday for the 8AM start time I was up even earlier than I would be for a routine day of work. That’s how much I love SQL Server. And box lunches. But mostly the SQL thing. I showed up, was recognized by Adam Machanic (@AdamMachanic) and Grant Fritchey (@gfritchey), Grant immediately called for security, and I ducked into the speaker room to chat up Tim Ford (@SQLAgentman).

There were six session slots lined up for the day, each one lasting about 75 minutes. I was able to attend six talks during the day, which I thought was a fantastic way to spend a cold winter day near Boston. Who wouldn’t, right?

The first talk of the day was by Mike Walsh (blog | twitter), speaking on “As a DBA, Where Do I Start?” Mike had some great advice to give to new DBA’s (whom he called ‘reluctant’ DBA’s), including a brief section on meeting expectations. He had a couple of things I wish I would had included in my book but it is too late to stuff anything else in there. I spoke with Mike briefly afterwards and found it it was the first time he had given the talk. For a first take on professional development, Mike did a great job.

The next talk I attended was by Grant Fritchey talking about “Best Practices for Working with Execution Plans”. It was the same talk that he presented at the PASS Summit this past November. The room was packed, I would estimate about 120 people. I still had my jacket on and needed to get some fresh air so I ducked out after about 15 minutes. But Grant was doing very well, he really knows how to work a room.

I left Grant’s session in the hope that I could sit in on the last part of Aaron Bertrand (@aaronbertrand) talk “Management Studio Tips & Tricks”. But a funny thing happened on my way to see Aaron. I got sidetracked by the guys from Confio sotware. I enjoyed learning more about their product (Ignite) and would encourage you to download a free trial. In a nutshell, their product is focused on performance gathering and they use wait stats in order to help you diagnose issues quickly.

The next session was by Matt Van Horn and it was on “Developing with SQL Azure”. All I can say about this is that if you are planning to work with SQL Azure, or to give a talk that includes a demo on SQL Azure, you should make sure you can connect to the intertubz. Unless, of course, you either (1) want to show people the biggest reason to not push your app to the cloud or (2) show people what to do when they lose connectivity and how important it is to have your data local, just in case. Still, Matt gave about 30 minutes before he ended his talk, and I did manage to take away a few items even without a demo. I also spent a few minutes chatting with Matt afterwards and I hope to stay in touch with him in the very near future.

After lunch it was time to listen to Tim Ford talk about “Index DMV’s”.Tim did a great job despite being heckled from the front row by myself, Grant, and Aaron. We had our own MVP corner right there and more than once when Tim would ask a question he would have to tell us to not bother answering in order to let someone else answer. Tim also told me that every time I shrink a database I am feeding a live kitten to an alligator. Which actually sounds kinda cool. I mean, n alligator’s gotta eat, right? I have no idea what they eat, it could be stray cats for all I know, so I decided to shrink a few hundred databases today.

The next talk was by Dean Richards from Confio, his talk was “Tuna Helper for SQL Server DBA’s”. I had no clue what the title was about and later fund out ‘tuna’ was a play on the word ‘tuning’, so I can only assume Dean spent time in Boston at one point. As clever as the title was, the content inside was just as good, and so was Dean’s polished delivery. I am guessing he has spoken at least once or twice before. And during the talk he gave me a glimpse into ‘SQL Diagramming’, a concept he attributed to Dan Tow. If you already know about SQL Diagramming, then you are lucky. If you don’t, then get to know about it, because it is something that can make a marked improvement in performance.

The last talk as by Peter Tassmer, “Storage Design for SQL Server”. Peter gave a nice overview of how to tune your database server regardless if you are using DASD or SAN storage. His method of delivery was god as well, he could tell a story well enough and knew how to work the room. You could tell he had spoken before to large groups, and that he was comfortable with the material. While some of the details he shared were already familiar to me, he did raise my awareness for the need to define an acceptable iops threshold for an application and to measure against the iops periodically. If we are not getting the throughput we require, then we need to present our empirical evidence to our storage team and work together on a solution.

Overall I would say that the event was a smashing success. I only wish I had more time to spend learning and sharing knowledge with colleagues. I look forward to the next SQL Saturday and expect to present at that one.

Thanks to Adam and Grant for getting this event done.

The title of the talk will be “DBA Survivor (or What to Expect When You Are Expecting to Be a DBA)”, and you can see more details here. The link for the LiveMeeting isn’t working right now, but I am sure once they are not distracted by all those screaming kids they will get it fixed so that it more resembles this link.

As always, please…no wagering. And if you want to know more about my book, you can check out the DBA Survivor website at http://dbasurvivor.com.

If you have nothing else to do on February 11th set aside some time to learn how to survive life as a DBA and how you can thrive in your career. I’ll cover a lot of topics including how you get started on your first day as a DBA, how to get yourself organized, how to help manage expectations, and how to build relationships with others that will be key to your success.

Food and drinks will be provided, but not by me, and only for those physically in C-Bus that arrive on time.

Size Matters

Forget what you may have heard in the past. Size matters.

Our conference is at roughly 2,500 members, give or take. A conference of that size can only be held in a specific number of venues across North America. In other words, not every city can accommodate a conference of our size, as even fewer will be able to host our conference should it grow to say, 10,000 attendees (my lofty goal). When you start getting to be that big then you have to really start spreading yourselves out, or run sessions into the night (or both). One of the things that works well for us right now is that we are able to hold everything inside of one place. We would want to continue to find venues that allow for everyone to gather together when possible.

Location, Location, Location

The next thing to consider is the location. Not just the location of the Summit venue, but the locations of all our members. We are a global association. We have members fly in from all over the world. In order to alleviate some of the travel pains it is best to be located in a city that is either an international hub, or can be reached in one flight from an international hub. But being a hub itself is even better. Combine this factor with the size factor and the number of available cities drops.

As much as a pain as it can be for me to skip backwards three time zones I know and understand it is even more of an issue for those coming from farther away. So I try to keep my whining about such matters to myself although my family is never pleased with my return flight options from Seattle.

And let’s not forget any of the disasters, natural or otherwise, that have affected previous Summits. Location matters, as well as your timing. Having a major conference in Hurricane Alley during hurricane season may not be the wisest choice. Neither would having it in Detroit during…well…ever.

Variety is the Spice of Life

I enjoy new experiences, I think most people do. I also enjoy routines. I think it is wise for the Summit to be located in Seattle, but it would also be wise to have it rotate out. I like the idea of trying to time our Summit with the launch of a new version, but I am not certain how practical that may be given the amount of time involved. For example, we have to commit to the 2011 Summit soon, and Microsoft could say that is their target for a launch. But while our commitment would stand firm, their ship date may change by six months, meaning we are in Seattle and miss the launch we were expecting.

Is there enough demand for us to have a second Summit, perhaps in May? We already have a European Summit, usually in the Spring, so technically we would be having three events a year. If we had a second event in North America, how would people decide which one to attend? Given the current financial structure of putting on a Summit, we would take a large scale financial loss if we were to put on a Summit and no one came.

Talk To Me

So, how frequently do we rotate it out, if ever? I don’t know. That’s why I asked. And that is why it is important that we hear back from the community. We are here to serve you. Tell us what you want. Review the facts and give us your thoughts. We know we will never be able to please everyone, but unless we collect feedback then we really have no idea what it is that people want.

If you want to stay in Seattle forever, then tell us. If you want to visit a new city each year, then tell us. If you want us to go to a new city and stay there forever, instead of Seattle, then tell us.

Last December I was asked by Wayne Snyder if I would be willing to serve a one year appointment to fill a vacant seat on the PASS Board. I accepted and was handed the SIG portfolio and instructed to “do something with this” (my words, not theirs). The rough outline I was given was to get the SIG to a point where they could be transitioned into either the Chapter portfolio or into the Virtual Community portfolio.

With help from Blythe Morrow a plan was born where we would rebrand the SIGs as Virtual Chapters and transition oversight to a new portfolio by the end of June. Since June never happened in 2009 we missed out on achieving that part of our plan. But we nailed everything else.

That was essentially the only official task I was handed for 2009. Since I was sitting in for the one year appointment and no one knew if I was going to be elected in the Fall, I am not certain that people were looking to dump a lot of items in my lap. I tried to help others where I could and expressed interest in trying to get a portfolio dedicated to membership started again. But there is a slight shift going on with regards to how PASS Board members are going to be assigned work. Rushabh tries to explain in more detail but I will give you the abridged version:

We are moving away from portfolios and more towards strategic assignments.

Rushabh talked with me for about an hour regarding what I want to do for PASS during the next two years. I told him the same things I said at PASS in November. My top priority is to grow the Summit, which aligns with the overall goals of PASS at this time (grow chapters, grow membership, grow conference). I want to grow the Summit well beyond the 2k attendees. I don’t know how to get that job done yet, but I do know that I want to try. That is my passion right now.

The way I see things we have three areas to improve upon for the Summit. These are my opinions that I am sharing with you and not something handed down to me at this time:

1. Improve our customer retention. We had about 40% of the attendees respond that this was their first conference. That is about 800 people. It is my goal that this percentage declines steadily with each passing year. Getting new people is great, but we need to find ways to make certain they come back year after year. I want 800 new people to be 10% of our total (or less).
2. Improve the customer experience. My guess is that if we improve the customer experience then we improve the customer retention. There are a lot of people that come to PASS knowing zero (0) other people, and they leave PASS without meeting anyone else as well. We need to make certain that everyone at PASS interacts with someone else so that they are more inclined to want to return.
3. Improve our profit margins. I don’t have the exact numbers with me so I will use hypothetical numbers to explain what I mean. Let’s say that at this year’s conference we made a profit of $100 per attendee. I want to find ways to increase that net amount. It seems that each year the Summit is not only our biggest revenue generator but also our biggest expense. PASS is not a wealthy organization by any measuring stick and every dime we earn we look to invest back into the community. Operating a Summit and hoping that we break even is not the business model I want us to continue to have in five or ten years. I want to see something that is able to generate more revenue (and also have PASS find additional revenue streams outside of the Summit).

So, how do I plan on getting this done? I have no idea, really. Except that I know I will need help. So plan on me reaching out to you at some point for some help. See, I may have some ideas in my head but I am only one person, who was elected to represent thousands of others. So I need you to help me understand the ideas that we all feel will work best.

Here is what I have in mind so far.

1. Create “PASS-talk”, an online broadcast where Board members interact with the community. We answer questions. We listen to concerns. We float ideas and get some response back from the community. In other words, we stop doing most of our work in a vacuum behind closed doors and we find ways to get more of it done in a collaboration. The last few hours I had in Seattle this year I floated ten ideas around with about fifty people in order to get a sense of what will and will not work best in the coming year. Now, imagine if all the Board members did that exact same thing on a regular basis through UStream? Did you imagine it? Did it look like bacon?
2. Create a “Big Bother / Big Sister” type of program at the Summit for new attendees. We know who the new people are, we can even find them by giving them a badge to wear if they want to be recognized. But when they register we can go one step further and assign them to a volunteer that will arrange to meet with them during the Welcome Reception. It is a similar idea to the types of Orientation Committee that many colleges do. We get a group of say six new people, get them to talk with each other, and have the volunteer help them to meet others. Got a question about DBCC commands? There’s Paul Randal, let me introduce you.
3. Help locate volunteers to head up new Virtual Chapters dedicated to specific industries such as Healthcare or Finance. In addition to all the technical VCs we have (as well as the Professional Development VC), it would be great if we had some community members that wanted to launch a VC that would be specific to an industry. That way we could have industry professionals (not just SQL professionals) become more familiar with our community and hopefully entice them to join in on the conversations.

That’s all I have for now in my mind. There are some smaller ideas I have as well, but I am going to try to focus on only 2-3 items in the coming year. Any more and I may lose focus on one or more which would be a disservice to those projects. So if something new comes up then I will just reorganize what is on my plate at that time and do my best to keep my focus on only a few items and not on everything under the Sun.

In the next few weeks I expect that Rushabh and I will be talking again only this time he will be handing me specific assignments to help drive PASS forward. I do not know if he will be handing me a portfolio assignment or not, but I do know he is going to be handing me something! And chances are it is going to align closely with where my passion currently lies: growing the Summit.

 
I attended Don’s seminar at the PASS Summit and was impressed with the effectiveness of his simple approach to remembering names. I am dreadful at remembering names but have been practicing with Don’s techniques for the past few weeks and have had moderate success. And it always seems that around the holidays I end up meeting a lot of new people so having these techniques at remembering names is very useful.

I added this book to my Professional Development library as well. You can find additional reference books listed there. As always, if you know of a book you feel I should list just drop me an email with the name of the book and I will do my very best to read it.

Did you know that your transaction log file is circular in nature? That is, when your log has reached the end of the physical file it will go back to the very beginning and overwrite any virtual log file (VLF) segments that have been ‘cleared’? Well, it will, and it does. That is how log files work, like a cat chasing her tail in the middle of the kitchen while you try to bake some bacon for dinner.

Now, if your log file is properly sized, and you are able to ensure checkpoints occur frequently enough, then the end of the logical log file (or the active log) will never reach the beginning of the logical log file. If it does, then you will either get an error message that your log file is full, your log file will grow (if you have autgrowth enabled), or you trip over your cat.

Now for the tidbit. The catalog view, sys.databases, includes the column log_reuse_wait_desc. This column describes what your transaction log is waiting for in order to reuse VLF space. That means this statement:

SELECT name, log_reuse_wait_desc FROM sys.databases

can be used in conjunction with your database backups. How? Well, if you were to monitor your databases, say with Operations Manager, you could find a database with a log file waiting for LOG BACKUP. Armed with this information, you could issue a transaction log backup immediately. (NOTE: just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.)

But in theory, you would be able to key off of this column in order to build yourself and even smarter backup process than what you have currently. Imagine if an end user inadvertently kicked off an ad-hoc process that was causing a lot of logged activity. Despite spending days and weeks to ensure that everything was properly sized, your log file is poised to grow in size, fragment itself, and cause some performance degredation. You could avoid that by having a check in place on the log_reuse_wait_desc column, issue an ad-hoc transaction log backup, and clear those VLF’s to be reused as needed.

I can also think of another good use of this column, but will leave that as an exercise for the reader.