I took a big step in my life that my wife and I have been dreaming about for a long time, as of May 1^st, 2012 we are what is commonly known as Full Timers. The dream started about 5 years ago, when we bought our first motor home. Before that we had done a lot of camping but never really considered it that we would go as far with it as we have. A Full Timer is someone who lives in their camper year around. The last 4 or 5 years we have more or less been spending about 100 nights a year in our camper, but always dreamed about what it would be like to call it home. A couple more terms that I think you might want to know before I go on…

A Worker Camper (workamper) is someone who works at the place they are staying in exchange for lot rent and such; normally we see something along the lines of 20 hours a week for the lot rent and utilities. My wife is a Work Camper but does additional hours. During the summers in Colorado I am also a Work Camper on the weekends, because I like to work with the animals and doing the social aspect of the job.

A Snowbird is someone who more or less runs from the snow. In our case, this year we are spending the winter in the desert in Southern California. During the summers we have to go back to our home just south of Colorado Springs, Co.

So you might ask why I tell you all of this… Well I have noticed over the last few conference events that I have done that many people have questions about this lifestyle. Now granted there isn’t a lot of cross over between a DBA and a Work Camper. However, there are some discussion points when it comes to how I am able to work with this lifestyle, and the challenges I face. So, I have decided to start a new category on my blog that talks about this topic. I hope you enjoy reading it, and if you are here for the technical stuff, don’t worry I will keep posting those as well. If you are reading this via SQL Server Pedia please note that this will be my last post to that syndication about this topic. Those posts will remain technical only.

Where to start

With this being a new subject that I may post about I am not too sure where to start. So I figure I will start with why… Why do I choose to live in a camper? Well life is very simple this way; I guess I got tired of being tied down to the house, having to worry about stuff that just doesn’t matter like how good the yard looks. I found out a number of years ago that I have arthritis and if I were to live at a lower elevation that I would feel better. As we talked about how to do this and what is important to us, we were able to start removing requirements for our living situation off our list. For example, I don’t have to have a yard, to me it is nothing but work. I don’t need a lot of space, because it just stores more junk for me to spend money on and then keep around until it breaks. The more we thought about when we as a family are happiest and most comfortable it kept coming back to when we are camping, or when we are on vacation. Living in our camper full time is just like being on a permanent vacation. Some people really look at us like we are a bit odd, and well that is ok. We are happy with our dream and living in a house is just not a requirement.

Where are we now?

Right now I am at the kitchen table, no different than you sitting in a home office. We are currently calling the Riviera RV Resort our home, but by May we will be back in Colorado. We are staying on the Colorado River outside of a small town called Blythe in California. We are located about 3.5 hours outside of L.A. and about 2 hours outside of Phoenix right on the boarder of Arizona and California. We have great cell service, so I am not so we have no need for a land line here. The local cable company was able to run a cable modem right to our hooks ups, where I plugged in my Wi-Fi router. So from our rig we have everything we need for us to work. I do have an air card for internet connection as a backup. I travel about once a month back to Denver.

So our rig is a 40 Foot Alpine 3555 RL. It weighs about 13,000 pounds before we put in the washer dryer combo. Here is a video of the exact model we have, including the colors. Check out the video, I think it helps explain a lot. I had to trade in my Ford because it was just outside of the tow capacity, but got a Dodge Ram in the exact same color my charger use to be.

Well that is about all I can think of posting about it now. If you have any questions please by all means let me know, and I hope to post more about our challenges with this lifestyle soon.

It is that time of the year, where everyone is starting to think about what they need to do for next year. Many of us have time between Christmas and New Year’s day, where our systems are not working as hard as they do the rest of the year. I know that I like to take advantage of that time to get a lot of my maintenance completed when the impact to the end users is even less likely to occur. One of the tasks that I ensure I complete that week is my SQL Server Health Check. There are many aspects to these Health Checks:

Backups/Restores – I validate that all the backups are working as they should, granted it is one thing to make sure the backups are still kicking off like they should be, but just as important I validate that the backups meet the current recovery requirements. I validate the max potential data loss and ensure it meets business requirements.

Growth – Often SQL Server databases are hosted by hardware that just meets the requirements for performance and redundancy. As a database grows and more users rely on it the requirements may change. It is important to validate that the current host meets the current requirements.

Performance Baselines – Something that I prefer to do during busy times on the server. Perf Mon Counters and Monitoring Products give you part of the picture, but ensure you understand the system as a whole. Talk with the end users and watch performance indicators inside the database such has how fast the stored procedures are running. It is critical to know what these indicators are, what they mean and when they are considered good or bad. If you are looking for these indicators reflect back to when someone calls you to inform you that the system is slow, what are they using to make that determination?

Alerts/Notifications – Are you watching for all the alerts that you should be, things like free disk space, database growth, severity errors over 17? What happens when these alerts are fired, are you notified via email is the email configuration correct?

Security – Has the permissions of your users changed, what about new logins, or group membership?

Documentation – One of the more helpful tools is documentation; it can help when recovering a server, troubleshooting problems along with many other uses. Yet it is so easy for this to become outdated, and forgotten about. In your health check, make sure that your documentation is current.

Configurations – Validate the current configuration, has there been any unexpected changes? Are you seeing anything that could improve or hurt your performance?

POC’s – A current list of all your points of contacts is helpful when trying to complete tasks quickly. Do you have all the information you need to have backup tapes returned from off-site storage, or do you know all the technical support numbers for all the products that you use?

Service Packs and Patches – Are you testing these, and staying on top of keeping your system updates with the most recent releases?

I spend many hours each year performing health checks for many different clients, and this is just a quick insight into how I complete these studies. Yet I am always surprised at how many problems could have been avoided just by performing these simple checks. I hope you enjoy your holidays.

Wow, I could not think of better timing for the question today being presented and hosted by a personal friend Chris Yates (T|B). Chris wants to know what the SQL Community means to me. Sure I agree that the end of the racing season is never a good thing, I did however miss the opportunity to go to the race last Sunday, and I am really regretting it after catching up with what happened (Chris Yates made mention that this time of year is difficult for those of us seeing our sport seasons come to an end). The timing for me however is spot on here because of a number of situations that I have been faced with over the last few weeks…

Currently I am faced with a number of design questions, questions that often are only answered by experience, trial and error, along with testing. Questions like best way to store images with the database, or should a PK have the name of ID. I am also working on the fine line between being flexible, and standing my ground when I believe that something could potentially impact a database. These are just a few of my recent challenges. A great source for helping me navigate many of the pitfalls that surround implanting such things is the SQL Community. If there is a something that I have not had the opportunity to see in production then I know I can always count on my #SQLFamily to be a great sounding board. I often come back to this train of thought, even last week when I tweeted…

There are certain things or emotions that you just cannot explain, things like love, or in an easy reference point for something us Jar Heads call esprit de corps. Words like brother, cohesion, family, morale, and support all come to mind. In my own words I explain it as the brotherhood with Marines who have come before and will come after me. It is the all for one and one for all attitude with the never ending support and trust because when your face is in the dirt and the enemy is over the hill right in front of you. Your trust and your safety lie with the Marine that is next to you. You count on them to watch your back as you sleep and they count on you to watch their back as they sleep.

The SQL Community is a group of people who have gone so far beyond just having the same career path as I do, they help me when I fall or when I need someone to cover my back. When my family is in need, the SQL Community has helped me. When I am not sure if I have the right approach to a problem, they talk it out with me. When they have a question or are looking for work, I hope they count on me for help. We raise a glass together and share the great times, we laugh together when we can. We work side by side, when the mountain is too tough to climb alone.

Outside of the Marine Corps, I have never run across a better group of people. So when it comes to my Marine brothers and sisters, sleep tight, I got my watch and you can count on me. When it comes to my SQL Family, move ahead without fear, not only will I watch behind you, you have the support of thousands of SQL Professionals around the world… United we stand and divided we will fall. Some may only see the next task as a failed job, or a slow running query. I see these as situations where a community member needs assistance, and I will be there because I know when I need assistance they will be there as well.

I just came back from Starbucks… I pulled up to the window, and the barista smiled at me, and it was not because of my incredibly good looks. She announced in a loud commanding voice… The guy behind you said, “Buy the Marine a drink”. My brain was filled with all the stuff I have to do today, and that guy made my day. I wish I had more time to put this post together. Expect a better organized one from me next year. But here is what I am thinking…

Many people say they support the troops, so many people show the kindness. But they put their life on the line for you, for you to vote, for you to have the ability to sleep safe at night, the ability for you to have and share your own opinions without the fear of repercussions. So today I am calling each and every one of you out. If you see a Vet, buy them a drink. Coffee, beer or lunch, it does not matter. Help a stranger feel the way that someone just made me feel. I would love to see comments on this blog, or tweets with the hash tag #TYVet. Let’s show the world we are not just a military, not just a government and policies but we are a country, and we support those who support us.

This is not a political statement, this is a chance to stop talking, and take a chance to Thank a Vet.

Welcome to the 2012 PASS Summit.

So you made it, and you may have even gone to the Frist Timers meeting, or you might not even be a first timer (no matter how long you have been here, what suggestions do you have). Now that you are here, make sure you make the most of your time.

Bring business cards…

Hand them out, and make sure you ask for them. Take it one step further, bring a pen. As soon as you walk away from meeting someone new, jot some notes on the back of the card. There are so many people to meet that notes can help you remember who they are.

Read what others have said, these are just a few I grabbed really quick

http://www.mssqlgirl.com/first-timer-experience-at-pass-summit-2011.html

http://wcompute.org/2012/01/22/first-time-pass-summit-2011-attendee-so-how-was-my-experience/

http://markvsql.com/2011/10/pass-summit-2011-top-ten-list/

http://professionaldevelopment.sqlpass.org/Blog/entryid/393/Summit-First-Timer-Follow-Up.aspx

http://clarkcreations.net/blog/2011/11/14/post-sqlpass/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

Twitter

Really? Do we really need to talk about why? It is so cool to have this community. Follow #SQLPASS

Meeting People

Pick  just a few names out of the people that you want to meet, speakers or authors and even Microsoft guys and Gals. Force yourself to go shake their hand, I challenge you to not just go meet them, but tell them why they are on your list. There is so much work that goes into speaking, writing and well it is not very often that as a presenter, or as an author has the honor of knowing what we did to help individuals. I can tell you that the people who have shared with me how I helped them encourage me, and motivate me to do more. Tonight someone mentioned they went to a session I did a while back, and the applied what they had learned in one of my sessions and their salary increased because of it. The way he told me about it was, hey… you made me $14,000.00.

Most speakers have hobbies or interests outside of SQL Server. This is a great way to talk with people that you may feel odd going up to and talking with, watch what people tweet about that is outside SQL Server. Do you have something in common, and if so use that as a way to strike up a discussion. You can always ask me about my friend, sparky…

If we have meet in the years past, and I don’t remember your name I am so sorry. It does not indicate that I didn’t enjoy talking to you, but I do try to meet as many people as I can and well I never was really good about matching names and faces. But if you remind me of past discussion I bet I will recall.

The More you Put Into It

The more you will get out of it. Get involved, and step out of your comfort zone. Is it scary? Yes it is, I was a first timer once, and I was nervous about many of the things you may be. I still am… But today I bought a Kilt and I even went out a cut a rug a little, very little but I did it. Will stepping out of your comfort zone always turn into a great experience, maybe I can’t tell you, but you won’t know until you try.

Stop taking notes

Go ahead give it a try. OK maybe this is a little drastic, take very few notes. The idea I am trying to pass along is that there is so much more to most topics than what will fit into the time slots. Chances are if you are going to move a new technology into production and you are using the conference to give you a little information on it, then you are going to be doing some more research before you roll it out. If this is the case, is your time better spent focusing on the speaker and what the talking points, or is it better to take as many detailed notes as you can? Don’t miss the big picture because you are so focused on making detailed notes.

Have you seen PASS TV yet?

It is a YouTube channel that has a lot of really great information on it. I recommend you check it out.

This year, I have the honor of presenting a session from the 2012 PASS Summit that will have a live stream to the channel if I understand it correctly. One of the reasons that I am so excited about this opportunity is because I know there are a lot of SQL Server Professionals that really wanted to be at the Summit this year, but for one reason or another are not able to make it. PASS TV gives those people the opportunity to get touch of what is going on at the event.

At the same time there are many people looking at becoming a SQL Server Professional and this might help them see how we as a community support each other and the value of coming to the Summit. As I get more information on how this is going to be played over the internet, I will be sure to pass it along to you.

As of now, here is the information that I have, I know there are other sessions that will be on PASS TV, but I am unable to find a schedule just yet.

My session is going to be Thursday, November 8th 4:25 PM PST to 5:00 PM PST

I believe the feed will be located here - http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/2012/

And the Session that I will be presenting on is “The Not SQL skills you need“

The motivation behind this topic comes from my years of studying how to be a better DBA. I always thought the skills I needed would all be in SQL Server, such as working with the language, or maintenance of servers. What I have found to be true is that I spend almost as much time (if not more time) outside of SQL Server completing tasks that will lead to work in SQL Server. In other words I have spent a lot of time learning how to do what I want with SQL Server, and not enough time in learning how to manage what I need to get done in SQL Server.

Right now I plan on the discussion to be focused on technical and non-technical Skills that SQL Server Professionals need. Skills like:

• How to market yourself
• Why you should get involved in networking and social community
• Tools that make life easier that you might want to consider using
• Technology areas that you might want to focus on

I hope to see you there at the Summit, but if I can’t… I hope you have the time to check out this session.

– I have updated the live feed link.

This time of the year, a common question that I am asked not only at User Group Meetings, but over email and such is why I am such a big fan of the PASS Summit and why I believe this is a must attend event for everyone. This year I even have the opportunity to have an answer posted on the TechNet SQL Server Blog, that I think is being posted later this week. There are so many reasons as why to attend PASS, but a big one for me is the opportunity to have visibility into SQL Server features that I haven’t had the opportunity to work with. If you are at all like me, my time researching is spent looking at things that will make my current or known future projects even better. I am not spending time like I should learning about features that don’t impact me today, I would love to but I just don’t have all that time.

One of the really neat things about the PASS summit is the ability to attend sessions, make notes on features that I use for reference at a later date, when that information is more relevant to the projects I am working on. Here is a great example; I am really looking forward to attending this session by David DeWitt. A great speaker with a lot of good information, this session will give me some great insight that I might be able to use in the near future.

Big Data Meets SQL Server [DBA-410-S]

During my “Big Data” keynote at the 2011 PASS conference, I introduced the concept of an “enterprise data manager” – a new class of database systems capable of executing queries against both traditional structured data stored in a relational DBMS and unstructured data stored in HDFS, Hadoop’s distributed file system. In this talk I will describe the progress we have been making on this concept at the Gray Systems Lab. Extending the Query Processor in SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse by adding a new table distribution type for data stored in HDFS, we give it the ability to query data stored in HDFS without first having to load the data into PDW. By leveraging a database QP, we can perform real optimization – transform selections, projections, aggregates and other operations on HDFS files into MapReduce jobs and execute them on the Hadoop cluster as part of the query execution plan it generates.

So anyway, this is just one other reason why I really believe the PASS Summit is a can’t miss event. I hope to see you there.

A number of months ago Oracle Ace Kellyn Pot’Vin (T|B) had talked with me about being an Author to an upcoming book about SQL Server Best Practices. After a number of discussions with the editors, and a lot of deliberation on my part on what I should write about I joined the team of authors. I got to tell you that this is a great team of Authors and I honored to be even mentioned in the same discussions as them. Here is the list that I pulled from the Apress site. Bradley Ball , TJay Belt , Glenn Berry , Jes Borland , Carlos Bossy , Louis Davidson , Ben DeBow , Grant Fritchey , Jonathan Gardner , Jeremy Lowell , Jesper Johansen , Wendy Pastrick , Kellyn Pot’vin , Mladen Prajdić , Herve Roggero , Gail Shaw , Jason Strate and then there is me… Chris Shaw.

One of the biggest challenges for me to committing to work on a book is the amount of time that it takes to complete the task. There are a number of authors who can write complete books, and continue with other commitments and still do a great job. For me, I think it is difficult to make sure that the information I am trying to pass along is clear and easy to read. I end up re-writing so many parts of it that I think it takes me much longer than other authors. This is why a book like this is so attractive to me; I get the opportunity to work on one chapter that is focused on something I am passionate about without the stress of many more chapters after that to complete is not looming over me.

So I am proud to announce that the Pro SQL Server 2012 Practices book is complete. If you have pre-ordered it I image it will not be long before you get your copy sent over to you. The book is described as:

“Expert SQL Server Practices 2012 Edition is an anthology of high-end wisdom from a group of accomplished database administrators and developers who are quietly but relentlessly pushing the performance and feature envelope of Microsoft SQL Server 2012.”

I hope you like it, and I look forward to hearing your comments about it. If you haven’t ordered it yet, I think you can do so on Amazon here. If you like this style of book with many Authors working on topics they are passionate about, I also worked on the SQL Server MVP Deep Dive Vol. 2 book. All the profits of the Deep Dives book are donated to Operation Smile.

Nick Haslam (T|B) is hosting the T-SQL Tuesday question for this month. Nick makes a reference to an older Sci-Fi movie that well to be honest, I am not sure I have ever heard of. I will take his word for it, and assume it is a great movie. It must be a good movie if it got him thinking about the question that has been prompted to us for the month. This month’s question is:

“So, what I’d like to know is, what is your most horrifying discovery from your work with SQL Server?”

It did not take me long to come up with the answer on this one, sure I have a number of stories about different situations that I have been in with SQL Server, here is a few of the notable ones, before I dive deeper into what I think is the most horrifying.

• At one point in time in my career, a long, long time ago… I was asked by the CFO of the company that I worked for to grant him direct read access to our client table, rather than him having to use stored procedures for the website. For some reason this made me raise an eyebrow, and well end result was I denied the request. I leaned an important lesson that day, do the right thing even if you know it will be over ruled by someone else, or make you look foolish by not cooperating. The CFO when to the President of the company and requested the same access, the President hurried right over to my office and made sure that I carried out the exact permissions. Well, this is a long story, the end result? 6 months later we found out that the CFO passed the list to his wife, and they formed a company in her name. The new company, then directly solicited our customers. Sometimes I really hate it when I am right.
• I could tell you about company I worked with that ended up building the server room under the water main. Here in Colorado it is not unheard of that we have these break on occasion, well… it did.
• One of my first “real jobs”, I was working on tracking down an audible alert one weekend. I called my manager, the guy who set up the hardware and when he got there it determined that it was one of the drives in the RAID 5. He pulled the drive to force a rebuild over to the hot spare, but when the noise didn’t go away he determined he pulled the wrong drive, there was another one that was not flashing green as much as the others so he determined to pull that one as well. He had plenty of space on the RAID so he could lose that potential storage. If you don’t know what happened then I will let you in on a little secret. Don’t pull 2 drives of a RAID 5. Because it will turn into a RAID nothing, and your data goes down. What makes a stupid mistake like this approach the top of my list? Well.. He said, “The only mistake I made here was hiring you”. He had a long outage; I had a long weekend (and a new job within 3 hours), and a learning experience that has impacted me 15 years later. Don’t guess at solutions or problems. Develop an educated theory, confirm it to be true, and then test the solution.

So, what is my number 1?

One of my first clients was with a company who had paid for a consulting firm to come in and do a DR plan for him. The quoted him $500,000 for a system that that could be down a week, and had very few data changes. The data was less than 3 gigs, and rarely changed. He and I developed a backup rotation plan, and a way to get new hardware at the local electronics store, for less than 5k. What makes this just sick to my stomach was during the review of his back up process, I noticed a lot of transaction log backups but not a single full backup. When I asked the client, he mentioned that the company that configured the server, made a full backup, gave him the backup on removable media and then told him all he would need from that point was t-log backups. That was 4 years before I reviewed the system, so I checked and he was spot on, there were close to 14,000 transaction log files sitting on the hard disk. I mentioned it looked like we were missing a few (about 16,000), and if he know where they were. He replied yes, he needed some added space so they had been deleted.

Here is a client who things his system is recoverable and how paid for that service. Yet there was no way I could recover it without all the files, and even if I had them no telling how long it would have taken to restore 35,000 T-Logs. I felt a lot of satisfaction in helping my first client. This was all done remotely and I had a chance to meet him in person a year later. He and his employees thanked me for my help with a card and took me to dinner.

Remote Desktop Manager Product Review

Stating the obvious:

As a SQL Server Professional, I spend most of my time working within SQL Server.

What about the not so obvious:

There are so many aspects to my professional life that have nothing to do with SQL Server, things like email, managing tasks or to-do lists, creating power points, and keeping all my remote connections secure and organized. Think about the large amount of sensitive information that you have to retain to just simply connect to the servers that you need to work on;

• Server Name (not always as obvious and friendly as you might like)
• User Accounts
• Passwords

And those are just for starters. There are service accounts, administrative accounts, dev accounts and the list goes on and on. A couple years ago I found a tool that Microsoft had called the Remote Desktop Connection Manager; this tool allows me to save all my remote connection information, and access it from one place. There are a number of basic functions that make life a lot easier for me, however as I added more and more to it, and wanted it to do just a little bit more I found the tool to be lacking in what I needed it to do. That is how my search started.

Before too long I ran across a product by Devolutions called Remote Desktop Manager. A couple inquiries on twitter were giving me more information than I could ever want. It did not take long for me to be off and running. There are a number of features that I like but some of them make my management of connections so much easier, for me I like the ability to tie into KeePass to save my credentials or I can just save them to my local machine, and the ability to group my connections in folders and sub folders.

The more that I work with the tool, I am finding places where I can store personal information for my own use, or there is the ability to use a central repository where I can share connection information with other people that I am working with. The first question that comes to mind is how secure this is, but there is the ability to set default credentials and then over ride them for Individual users.

The flexibility in how I organize my servers in the User Interface help me find and narrow down what I am looking for quickly, each one of the sessions (connections that I make to a server) that I start, uses saved information such as server name, user account and password all ready to go.

The purpose of this post is to share what I have been using as a tool to help me navigate around the servers and connections that I use when I have so much information to keep track of. This is so much more secure than the many options that I have used or seen used in the past, and the speed to access the information or the servers is incredibly fast and easy.

There is so much more to this tool that I cannot do it justice with a simple product review. After I installed the tool, I was connected to servers using VPN and remote desktop in an organized fashion in just minutes. Remote Desktop Manager was so easy to set up and configure that I was back to working on the many needed task before I could take the time to look at all the features.