You could be here!

Do you enjoy working with SQL Server? Do you enjoy relaxing in wine country? Would you like to work with SQL server AND relax in wine country at the same time?

I know I would. And so would Denny Cherry. In fact, Denny liked the idea so much he decided to create SQL Excursions, a series of events where people can get together to learn about SQL in a relaxing manner. And I was honored that Denny asked me to be the first guest presenter with him for the very first SQL Excursion coming up in Napa, CA from May 17-19.

Check out the agenda for the event. If you want I can summarize it for you here: #SQLWINNING

Performance Tuning Made Easy - This will be similar to the half-day session offered at PASS that had 250 people in the room and another 100 that were turned away. If you were one of those 100, you will want to attend as I plan on taking a deeper dive into how to help you be more effective in your current role, something I cannot do when speaking to hundreds of people at once.

Storage Configuration and Tuning - Denny Cherry is one of the top experts in the world when it comes to storage configuration and tuning and a Microsoft Certified Master in SQL Server. Come listen to him teach you some tips and tricks with regards to storage, which will lead nicely into…

Virtualization and SQL Server - …Denny and I sharing our experiences with SQL Server running in a virtualized environment. We expect to not only show you some examples of VMWare and Hyper-V, but we are also planning on having you put your hands on the products as well. We want you to leave Napa feeling comfortable navigating your way through a virtual environment.

SQL Server Indexing Top Down - Denny will walk you through indexing and SQL Server, discussing strategies for how you can tune queries using proper indexing and how to conduct proper index maintenance.

How Table Partitioning Works to Save You Money - Denny has been helping clients for years save money with some very simple partitioning techniques. Denny will help you understand how to get this done for your shop as well.

Hands On Troubleshooting - This will be similar to the series of “Choose Your Own Adventure” talks that I have been participating in recently. We will walk you through real scenarios where you will need to troubleshoot using native tools only. This shared learning experience will provide you a solid base for how to troubleshoot the vast majority of performance issues in your own shop.

OK, now comes the important part: go here to register. Don’t forget we will have wine tastings, wonderful weather, great food, and an opportunity to network and build relationships with your peers that will serve you well going forward.

I can’t wait to see you there!

Never eat alone!

Today I did a guest post over at the SQL Server team blog and you can click here to go read it for yourself. Go ahead, I can wait.

Done?

Good.

I listed out three things that you can do right now to jumpstart your career. Of course there’s more ways than just those. Some of my favorite ones include: writing, speaking, and never eat alone.

If you are not writing (or speaking), get started. The simple effort of improving your communication skills will serve you well and I always finds leads to greater job satisfaction. No, not for that lousy job you have now, but for the next job. You know, the one that will be better because they need someone with good communication skills. Yeah, that one.

And never, ever eat alone. Check out this email I sent back in 2004:

—–Original Message—–
From: LaRock, Thomas W
Sent: Thursday, October 21, 2004 2:11 PM
To: Kinsel, Allen; Wright, Patrick
Subject: hermits

OK, I’ll be the first one to send off a quick email to the others. No reason for all of us to be anti-social.

It was nice to meet both of you while at PASS this year. I hope that we can stay in touch from time to time.

I received an email requesting some info about myself for volunteering for PASS. I decided to walk the walk and sent back some info so I should be getting involved with a committee or two of some sort. Hopefully we will be able to stay in touch through PASS, if not through regular email.

Best,

Thomas LaRock
Database Administration Manager

Had I chosen to eat alone at the 2004 PASS Summit I am certain my path would have been very, very different.

Since I wrote just last week about interview questions for a DBA, I came across this article and wanted to share it here also. I don’t believe that an interview should be a trivia contest. These questions aren’t about knowing a trivial piece of information. They are (probably) designed to illicit a response that helps everyone to understand your thought process.

http://mashable.com/2011/12/27/glassdoor-interview-questions-2011/

When it comes to a job interview my advice is this: don’t panic. Be yourself, have a conversation, and let people know who you are and how you think. If you pretend to be somebody else and get hired the end result is often a poor fit.

Because the answers might surprise you.

An interview should be a conversation, not a trivia contest. I’m not looking to stump someone during an interview. I don’t need for my DBA to know obscure facts such as database mirroring is only supported starting with SQL 2005 SP1.

Memorizing such facts does not mean that you will handle the pressure of being a production DBA. The role does not require you to know the answer as much as being able to find the answer. And in order to truly be successful as a DBA you will need good communication skills. A good DBA will be able to teach, and train, others.

So how do you find such a person? The answer is easy: you talk with them. I always describe the interview process as being a lot like dating. You want to have a conversation, get to know someone, without assuming anything beforehand. Since people tend to embellish on their resumes, if you aren’t familiar with a person or their previous work then you are going to want to set a baseline. For me, that baseline are the following five questions that I have used over the years. I find that they help guide me through having a good conversation and by the end I know whether or not I want to call them again in the morning.

1. What is a database?

I always like to start with the basics. While it may seem silly to ask this question keep one thing in mind: there are no silly interview questions. No matter how ridiculous a question may seem to both the person asking it and the person responding, they will always serve a purpose. In this case you may find the candidate talking about MS Access, or Filemaker, or whatever they have been exposed to previously. Let their response be an indication of their fundamental knowledge of some RDBMS system. See if they can explain the difference between a data and a log file, for example.

Remember, people tend to embellish on resumes. If you have never met the person before, why not ask the most basic question you can, right from the start? The answer may surprise you, but the conversation is likely to reveal the depth of their experience right from the start.

2. Who is the most important user of a database?

This question helps you get an understanding if they candidate knows who the “stars” are. And who are the stars? Well, everyone. That’s right. Every connection to a database server is as important as any other. What’s that? You say it is only a development server, so it is not that important? Well, a development server is considered a production server to a developer. In other words, every person and every connection is important, no matter if they sit in the corner office or not.

I once had a candidate tell me that the CEO was the most important user, and they were adamant that they were right. Sadly, most CEO’s aren’t doing the day-to-day data entry that others are doing, so I found it hard to agree that such an absolute answer was correct.

If the candidate lists out only a handful of people or groups as important and fails to understand that everyone is important, consider that a red flag.

3. Which is faster: Inserting one million rows of data, or updating one million rows of data?

This could be one of the more technical questions you could ask a candidate. You are not looking for the correct answer (which is “it depends”). If they do answer correctly then examine the scenarios they lay out before you. It should be very insightful, you should get a real sense for how they think. Chances are they will guess at one or the other, which gives you the chance to talk with them. And when you do so, take the opportunity to see how the discussion goes. If they ask you lots of questions, that is a very good sign. If they just sit there, listen to your every word, accept everything you say as the truth, then consider that another red flag. No one is perfect, not even you, and you do not want to surround yourself with someone that just follows your every word. You need someone that is insightful enough to ask you more questions, you want someone that is always looking to learn.

I recall asking this question once and was told that it was a trick question because you couldn’t update (or insert) that many rows at once, you could only do them one at a time. Yes, that’s right, they told me that everything was done through cursors, and didn’t understand the concept of set-based updates.

4. If I asked you to learn how to make a query faster, what would you do?

Does the candidate look like a person that shows some ambition? Do they read any web sites with regularity? Have they ever opened a user manual, or the BOL? Who do they consider to be an expert? Do they have their own library of books, or their own toolbox of scripts? How do they typically attack a query with regards to performance tuning?

If you need a DBA that can help troubleshoot poorly performing code, and to do so quickly, then you want to make sure they aren’t the type to panic when the pressure is on. In short, find out how would they start to look for answers. Which also happens to be a great segue into the final question…

5. How do you troubleshoot problems in your current role?

The ideal candidate will be able to clearly explain their thought process in how they troubleshoot something. Developers will most likely discuss with you some piece of code that worked well on one server but not on another. A Windows admin might talk about a service that stopped and would not restart no matter how many times they clicked on that little arrow. In either case, you want to identify someone who is articulate to a certain degree, can explain themselves, stand up for their decisions, and also be open to the possibility that there was more than one way to solve the problem at hand.

You need to know more about their thought process when it comes to solving problems. If their troubleshooting skills consist of “call the vendor for help”, that won’t suffice. You don’t want someone with all the answers (and such persons don’t exist anyway), you want someone that has a clear and defined thought process.

In addition to the questions, and the conversation that ensues, you are also going to want to evaluate the candidate in other areas. For example, you can look for certain things that would have the candidate stand out among the others, or where they fail to measure up.

And there you have it, my five questions to ask of any DBA in an interview. You can alter these to fit your needs for whatever role you are trying to fill, just keep in mind that you want to frame everything in the form of a conversation. After these five questions you can move into more targeted questions with any candidate that has done well.

If you can follow this outline and have a good conversation then you are going to be able to identify the right candidate.

Here is the video from the  SQL Inspire event last Fall in NYC. I hope you enjoy the talk, it took me a lifetime to create. You can read more about SQL Someday over at the Someday page. I plan on adding to that page over time.

Saw this review today and wanted to share it with everyone here:

http://www.mikefal.net/2012/01/03/dba-survivor-learning-how-to-rock-out-with-databases/

I’m touched that Mike would take the time to write such a wonderful (and unsolicited) review of “that little book” I wrote almost two years ago now. I’d like for you to read his entire review, but I am going to share his last paragraph with you here:

“Now many folks probably think this is just a book for the junior DBA, for someone who’s just getting started, but I know this book has value for data professionals of all levels. This book is not a detailed guide or roadmap for solving specific problems, but a series of highway sign posts to get people headed in the right direction. Maybe you are a fresh DBA, looking to get in to the industry or just survive your first week on the job. Or maybe you’re like me, a career DBA who is looking to refocus my career and looking for that “big picture view”. No matter how you got here, DBA Survivor is an excellent starting point for the rest of your database career.”

The holiday shopping season may be over, but my book would still make an excellent gift at any time of the year (yes, that *is* my opinion, thankyouverymuch).

Thanks Mike, next time I see you the bacon is on me!

It’s Thanksgiving week here in the USA. I have two things I want to mention.

First, last Wednesday I did a product demo for Confio Software, you can read more details about that inside my post title Help Me To Feed Others. We raised close to $1,000 for Community Food Share, which will help to feed many families this week. I could not be happier to know that I played a part in making that happen. Thank you for attending and helping us last week.

Second, after hearing that Congress has declared pizza to be a vegetable, it struck me that as a DBA we need our own “food plate“. Why would we need this? Simple:

Many people have no idea what a DBA does for daily work.

Sadly, most new DBAs also have no idea what they are supposed to be doing, and no mentor to help them along the way. This is especially true in Microsoft shops, where the installation and use of SQL Server is so easy that many forget the fact that you need someone to administer what has been installed.

So, I decided to borrow the “food plate” idea and apply it for DBAs.

Everything is there, really. Backups should be the biggest part of your plate, followed by maintenance. Monitoring and tuning come next, and you should have a side plate of training as well. I hope this clears up everything. What’s that? You need more details? OK then, how about this…

Backups

The number one responsibility for any DBA is the ability to recover. If you cannot recover you should find a different career. And that word (“recover”) can mean a lot of different things. It could be your ability to recover as the result of a large scale disaster. It could be your ability to recover the piece of data that was updated inside of one row, in one table, in one database, in some obscure instance of SQL hundreds of miles away. And it could also be everything in between those two events.

And you can’t do any of that without having backups in place, having them running in a consistent manner, the ability to check that they are running, and even testing that they are valid by doing some periodic restores.

Backups: It’s what’s for DBA dinner.

Maintenance

This part of your plate is for things like the rebuild/reorganizing of indexes, or the updating of statistics. Essentially, anything that helps to maintain the current performance levels for your end users are what I consider to be “maintenance”. However there is also administrative maintenance, such as the removal of logins that are no longer used, or running DBCC CHECKDB.

Monitoring

This part of your plate is for the items you want to be alerted and take action upon. For example, running low on disk space, or seeing a spike in CPU utilization, or having one of your SQL Agent jobs fail. As a DBA we are keen to collect all sorts of details about our instances and databases because we never know which particular piece of data is going to help us diagnose and resolve an issue. But you should only collect the pieces of information that help you to take action. If you try to monitor everything possible then you may find that the biggest performance impact on your system is yourself!

Tuning

This part of your plate is when you roll up your sleeves and make adjustments to your instances in some way. Tuning could be the rewriting of T-SQL statements, it could be adding memory to a server, or even the partitioning of data to align with tiered storage. In essence, anything that goes beyond the traditional maintenance tasks is what I would consider to be tuning.

Training

This is the little side plate to everything else that you do. Think of it like having a few strips of bacon with your meal. You need to be constantly keeping up to date with the latest trends in technology. Most of this training is a lot of self-help, but you can also attend events such as SQL Saturdays or the PASS Summit. Just make certain that you reinforce whatever you have been taught by taking the time to lay your hands on the product or piece of functionality.

Happy Thanksgiving.

I see the phrase “SQL Server training” tossed around a lot these days and often times it makes me want to stick a fork in my eye because I know what is being offered is not training, but something different. I was discussing this recently with some colleagues and being the set-based geeks we are I decided it was time to classify the types of presentations that exist out there.

The reason I am writing this post is to help clear up confusion about what is (and is not) considered to be training. When an employer pays for an employee to go to “training” they are more than likely expecting the employee is going to put their hands on a product in some way, and most likely that means lab exercises. When the employee returns and informs the employer that they sat in sessions and never touched a product, the employer is likely to not send that employee back. This hurts everyone involved and is why we need to make certain we can use these terms in a consistent manner.

The last formal training classes I attended were for Six Sigma. The formula was simple: we were taught something, we were given an exercise to practice what we were just taught, then we were taught something new but was built upon the concepts we had just been taught (and touched). The one thing that really stands out for me here is Minitab. We were told about it, we used it, and then we built upon that foundation. That’s what training is for me, and I believe for others as well.

Training Presentations

If you aren’t putting your hands on the product, you aren’t being trained.

When you enter the military you go through what is called “basic training”. This training is not a series of PowerPoint presentations on guns and grenades with the hope that you’ll know what to do the day of a battle. No, they actually put guns and grenades in your hands so that when the time comes you’ll already know what to do.

Proper training classes take longer to prepare and as a result often cost more. And when employers pay for a training class, they are expecting to get proper training.

Now, think about the times you have heard the phrase “SQL Server training” and you were just shown a handful of slides. You aren’t being trained. You are being lectured to, which is the next classification…

Teaching Presentations

This is the lecture style format, usually involving a slide deck (or maybe an overhead projector, remember those?) This is effective at providing information for a group of people at the same time but where actual training is impractical. Think about the first Star Wars movie, where they get together to discuss how to defeat the Death Star. They didn’t use slides, they used animated visuals in order to deliver the briefing to the pilots. But this wasn’t training the pilots for what they were going to experience in that trench.

This is the most familiar of presentations for many of us, and are often also called webinars, meetings, or sessions. They are meant to teach us something, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we can take action on the subject. For example, I learned a lot about big data from Dr. DeWitt this year at the PASS Summit, but it wasn’t training, and it is not something I can take action upon at the moment. Which leads us to the last classification…

Helping Presentations

These presentations are the ones that give practical advice that people can use to take action upon immediately, and are my favorite to build and present. I built a talk this past year titled “SQL Server Memory Management” and it was geared towards helping people understand the very basics of how server memory works in conjunction with SQL. It was not meant to be a deep dive, because 80% of the people in the audience don’t need a deep dive, they need to understand why 64-bit versions of an O/S are better than 32-bit. And when a server is suffering from memory pressure I wanted to give them some easy steps to follow in order to triage the situation.

In other words, I wanted them to leave with something they could use to take action upon should the need arise. My talk wasn’t training (we didn’t touch anything), and it wasn’t a lecture on something they couldn’t act upon after leaving the room. It was designed for them to go back to their desk, sit down, and take real action.

Is there overlap between the three? Of course! But when I see someone talk about offering training and you don’t actually put your hands on anything then it isn’t training, and that drives me crazy.

[Special thanks go to the amazing Karen Lopez (blog | @datachick), Buck Woody (blog | @buckwoody), and Andy Leonard (blog | @AndyLeonard) for their help with this post. Thanks for being part of my SQL Family.]

If you are not one of the few lucky folks who scored a ticket to SQL Inspire this weekend (where I will be giving my talk that I have simply named “SQL Someday”) and you are looking for something to do this weekend with all your spare time, I have a suggestion for you: go virtual.

Over at TechNet they offer a boatload of labs for you to use, and they are FREE! Seriously, why are you still reading this post? Go and get your learn on!

If you are looking for the SQL Server 2008 (and R2) labs, you can find them here.

As always, you’re welcome.

Yeah, the other Steve Jobs book which you can order by clicking on this link: The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience

I recently picked up a copy of this book. And by “picked up” I mean it was a gift from the amazing Suzanne Larocque (blog | @FemmeFoto) who wanted to help me become better at presenting. The only downside to the gift was that I received it the week before the PASS Summit, which meant is was far too late for me to incorporate any of the ideas into my talks at PASS.

Or was it?

And and even better question: Was I already doing some of the things mentioned?

I read the book in one evening, I simply could not devour it fast enough. Not because it was an amazing piece of work, but because I was fascinated by the structure. For the areas where I felt I was already succeeding in my presentations it was nice to have that affirmation. And for the areas where I am lacking it was nice to just ponder how I could alter my style but still remain “Tom”.

So, first disclaimer: I have been presenting and speaking to groups of people for over 20 years. I know that shocks some people, for different reasons I’m sure, but it is true. And I still get nervous every time.

Second disclaimer: I don’t think for a moment that I am Steve Jobs. And reading this book won’t change that. But I do have a desire to continue to get better at how I present my talks, whether it is at a SQL Saturday, a local PASS Chapter, a product demo for Confio, or while I introduce a keynote speaker for the PASS Summit (yeah…that WILL happen in 2012, so maybe the Mayans were right).

So what did I learn from the book? The section headers say it all, really:

1. Create the Story
2. Deliver the experience
3. Refine and rehearse

Now, there’s a LOT more to it than just that, but those three points are enough for me to rethink how I have been building my talks previously. One of the finer details mentioned in the book is a chapter called “Reveal a ‘Holy Shit’ Moment”, which has details accounts of presentations such as the time Jobs took that MacBook Air out of a fracken envelope while saying the words “the worlds thinnest notebook” over and over to the point you think Jobs had an MBA in “re-education”.

For most people I know that build talks they never really are able to accomplish ‘creating the story’, they just put text onto PowerPoint slides. It is something I struggle with as well. Two years ago or so I started doing my best to create the story first before I ever built one slide. I’d like to think it has helped my talks, given them more structure than they would have had otherwise.

And of course there is the delivery style. You need to know when you can make a joke, or when to pause, or raise your voice, etc. Lots of those details are in this book as well including the need for an antagonist (I plan on using @SQLClippy).

Oh, and one more thing: I need more props for my talks.