SQLServerPedia

So, you have something to say about the technology you dabble in?  You have a depth of knowledge?  Why keep it to yourself or only discuss it with the 8 people that read your blog?  Put together a Powerpoint presentation, get out to your local user group and SPEAK!

Fear of public speaking is not something that only *you* have to deal with.  When you get in front of a group and present they are rooting for you to succeed.  No one comes to a user group meeting hoping the speaker talent will fail.  You enter with a built in cheering section.  So long as you can get your point across you’re 80% there already.

Think of Powerpoint as a series of tubes a collection of Tweets, with pictures.  Keep the slides to 140 characters; flesh out the rest with notes that you discuss off-the-cuff, and use your local peers as a sounding board.  Even better, work with the leadership of the user group to put on a speaker talent show where only first time speakers present on topics that cover your particular area of interest.  At the end of the night the *winner* receives a glowing piece of swag and all the participants receive recognition and a slightly less glowing piece of swag.

Everyone wins: the participants gain experience, get friendly feedback, and work the sharp edge off their fears.  The audience learns new things.  The leadership does not have to pimp themselves for speaker talent that month.  WIN - WIN - WIN.

Who knows, from there you may get the itch to start speaking at other user groups, regional meetings, or perhaps national conferences. 

It all starts small though, and dents and dings are anticipated in your first attempts.  Heck, ever listen to Stephen Hawking’s early lectures?  Dude was analog.

Google Reader is an RSS reader tool that helps you stay in touch with more web sites in less time. It consolidates new articles from sites all over the web in one single, easy-to-use interface, and helps you share your favorite articles with your friends. Brent Ozar explains Google Reader this four minute video tutorial.

In the videos, Brent talks about these sites:

• Google Reader – the online RSS reader tool.
• Brent’s Shared Google Reader items – if you want to get notified of his favorite SQL Server blog posts.
• AideRSS PostRank – the best/great/good filtering plugin for Reader that helps you catch up with the most popular blog entries quickly.
• URLFan – find out when other people mention your blog or link to it.
• Search.Twitter.com – find out when anyone mentions your name or your site’s name on Twitter.

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Lately there have been a lot of great blog articles with active discussions talking about questions to ask potential SQL Server DBA or Developer candidates. Off the top of my head (and by means no offense implied to the many others, check out my blog roll for some of the blogs I try and keep up with in my Google Reader) I can think of:

• Brent Ozar's post about questions to ask a developer
• Brad Mcgehee's post about DBA questions and characteristics to look for
• Thomas LaRock's questions for Jr. DBA candidates

From those posts you can see links to other posts as well. All great information and handy. I like the points and I tend to harp on some of those mentioned and especially on common sense (do you follow a troubleshooting methodology, do you search for empirical evidence or do you practice the shotgun approach to troubleshooting?)

How about questions to ask a company if you are a candidate?

Sure there are the basics you should ask:

• Clarify expected roles and responsibilities
• Understand how the peer level resources enjoy working at the company
• Learn about the growth opportunities that exist
• What is the work/life balance like? Depending on where in your career and family growth you are this is an important thing to feel out or directly ask. I have turned down some great opportunities that would have been a guaranteed tilt to the work side (busier weeks, on call time, releases etc are fine)

Even in this economy, if you are looking for the highest level people, if you are looking for the candidates who give back to the community as posted by Brent, Brad and Tom. If you are looking for people who will come in and provide value right off the bat there are some things that those candidates may be looking for in return. Yes we are in a down economy but judging by the contacts I have through friends and colleagues, I also know that A players are still in demand and coveted.

What kind of questions would I ask if I were looking? What kind of questions could you expect if you were a hiring manager? (Please don't see this as a smug arrogance, ultimatum list, etc. I hope these are fair questions that are met with open arms).

• What is the company commitment to training and conference attendance? If you are asking me about my community involvement, my giving back on forums, user group attendance, etc. I want to know how you feel about me spending some company time at the PASS Summit. I want to know if it's okay if I am effectively getting my job done and answer a few forum questions here and there without interfering with deliverables or deadlines. I used to think expert meant, knows all the answers never has to ask. I think an expert (of which I am certainly not claiming to be) is someone who knows they don't know a lot and is seeking to help fill that gap while knowing they never can. This means ongoing training is important, ongoing time learning from those who "write the books" is huge. Do you?
• Do you listen well? Great question to ask a candidate but a great question to ask back (worded differently). What I mean is if I use my experience in an area and identify issues will they be taken seriously? You are hiring me for my experience, there is a hope for a "trust but verify" environment and a "break-in" period is expected. That being said, if I can explain something clearly, point out deficiencies (even if it means some things were done wrong before), propose a plan for making it better, etc. are you going to listen and consider? Or will it be ignored and when a $250/hr consultant comes in and suggests the same thing will it be taken as axiomatic truth?
• Where is this role empowered? If I am coming in as a DBA with goals and being put into a senior DBA role, will the development staff follow guidelines and best practices? Will the server and storage team laugh at me when I suggest a better I/O subsystem? What kind of support am I going to get from you to accomplish the goals we discussed in the interview? I don't want to see a world of opportunity and have the ideas quashed before discussion (you can kill my ideas after a reasoned discussion but not quashed "because that is how we have always done it").
• Speaking of idea crushing, what is the typical dialog around new ideas? I am going to be wrong some, existing employees are going to be wrong some also. What kind of dialog does the company have around ideas and improvements? Is weight given to the best solution for the company (regardless of the team or person who came up with it)? or is it given based on some strange political system that I don't want to try and learn?
• A scenario based question: You are sitting in your office working when the phone rings. The CIO is telling you that the important application the CEO relies heavily on just died (again). What is the business and management style used here to respond? I am looking to know if the existing employees like to do happy clicking, if it is encouraged by a panic from above or if methodology and sanity tend to at least be felt in part during a serious production outage. I want to know if there is a commitment to a favorite past time of mine (Root Cause Analysis - or making sure that same failure doesn't happen like that again). I want to see if I can detect any hint of the blame game being well practiced there. I am looking to see if the company practices what it was trying to get out of me during the interview. Sometimes there must be blame but the blame game takes time away from Root Cause Analysis and takes the focus off of the problem statement (the users hate the system, are angry at IT and just want a working system) and puts folks on the defensive. I want to make sure that the focus is on the customer and making things better in the long run.

What do you ask? Or do you just sit there and ask the questions they want to hear? I hate it when I interview someone and get asked those kind of questions (or no questions)...

Last week I released a post titled Willie and the $0.85 Hand Jive about my personal quest for new music.  Thanks to some of my readers I’m now listening to some great new music. 

It was not long after that I received a tweet from Lori Edwards (twitter) concerning the name of the post.  In her words it “seems horrifying and yet compelling”.  I was about to counter her with a witty comment about that being how I lead my life when it dawned on me that it would be much more interesting to come up with a personal and professional statement of under six words to describe myself and then challenge others out there to do likewise and see what we come up with collectively.  This is not one just for the geeks, wonks, nerds, dorks, etc.  This challenge goes out to all those less fortunate to have such lofty labels as well.

I can’t really call this a thesis statement, but more of a personal abstract; it’s harder that I thought it would be. 

Mine are:

• Personal:  “loves family friends… OOH something shiny”
• Professional:  ”innovation skills allows supporting heavy workload”

I’m not going to out-and-out challenge anyone, but would appreciate a link-back to this post from any bloggers that take up the challenge or a tinyurl link in any Twitter post that answers this question.  The six word limit should keep well within the bounds of 140 characters in that medium. Use hashtag #my6 when tweeting out please.

“…but you can hear it on the coconut telegraph…”

Well, it happened. Again. I got tagged by Tim Ford (@SQLAgentman), who talks about surviving for six months on a tropical island with your only sustenance being coconuts and you spend the time dreaming about all the things you would like to be spending time doing if you were back in your shop. Which makes complete sense if your shop was, say, a place that built canoes. Or signal flares. Or a butcher shop. But since my work involves managing a piece of software that manages data that is stored in files on a server, it really seems silly for me to spend any time thinking about such things and instead I would be focusing on seeing if I could get Red Lobster to open a franchise nearby because chances are the fish would be abundant anyway. 

But I do not want to upset the man, so I will play along. Here are the things I would be happily thinking about rather than my family, friends, basketball, or the wings at Hooters.

Wow Tim, what a great question. And I am not just saying that because I don’t want you to get control of my laptop again when I am not looking. No, this question is good because it applies outside of work as well. I mean, there are lots of things I would want to do if I had the time, little distractions, and no need to work for food. Things like more golf. Or to properly train for a marathon. Or to train for a few UFC contests. Or just to work on my tan, which I guess I can do on the island anyway. But since you want to focus on work related items, we can do that for now.

Reporting

I would love to get all of my reporting in order. Right now we have a jumbled mess of data that we can query ad-hoc, but it would be nice if we had a set of dashboard reports that we could rely on daily. At least we have the data…somewhere…which is quite an accomplishment to start with. We never really got around to the reporting aspect, which brings me to the next item.

The BI Stack

I have a cursory amount of knowledge on the BI stack. Just enough to serve as an administrator, but not enough to be considered a power user. At least, not yet. I hope to change that in time, but if I could speed that up by getting it done in six months by being allowed to focus on that, it would be great. I understand the value in information, and I would much rather help my business by teaching them how to get the information they need to make the right decisions at the right time instead of spending my time doing backups, restores, and password resets.

Microsoft Certified Master

Give me the time, and the money, and let me earn my MCM, please. ’nuff said there.

Of course everyone knows you are most productive when you are allowed to focus on exactly two distinct tasks, right? You didn’t know that? Well, you do now. That’s right. If you only have one thing to do, then you are underutilized. If you have three or more then you cannot focus enough attention to details and your work suffers. Two items is the sweet spot for success, and you will notice how the three items above are really two because I am that serious. Give me six months and $30k and let me earn my MCM and play around with the BI stack. That is all I ask.

Then I will come back and I promise to bring enough shrimp for everyone. But you’ll need to supply the cocktail sauce.

Deal?

Oh, and since I dare not break the chain, I am tagging Kimberly L. Tripp and Paul Randal, simply because I can.

“…but you can hear it on the coconut telegraph…”

Well, it happened. Again. I got tagged by Tim Ford (@SQLAgentman), who talks about surviving for six months on a tropical island with your only sustenance being coconuts and you spend the time dreaming about all the things you would like to be spending time doing if you were back in your shop. Which makes complete sense if your shop was, say, a place that built canoes. Or signal flares. Or a butcher shop. But since my work involves managing a piece of software that manages data that is stored in files on a server, it really seems silly for me to spend any time thinking about such things and instead I would be focusing on seeing if I could get Red Lobster to open a franchise nearby because chances are the fish would be abundant anyway. 

But I do not want to upset the man, so I will play along. Here are the things I would be happily thinking about rather than my family, friends, basketball, or the wings at Hooters.

Wow Tim, what a great question. And I am not just saying that because I don’t want you to get control of my laptop again when I am not looking. No, this question is good because it applies outside of work as well. I mean, there are lots of things I would want to do if I had the time, little distractions, and no need to work for food. Things like more golf. Or to properly train for a marathon. Or to train for a few UFC contests. Or just to work on my tan, which I guess I can do on the island anyway. But since you want to focus on work related items, we can do that for now.

Reporting

I would love to get all of my reporting in order. Right now we have a jumbled mess of data that we can query ad-hoc, but it would be nice if we had a set of dashboard reports that we could rely on daily. At least we have the data…somewhere…which is quite an accomplishment to start with. We never really got around to the reporting aspect, which brings me to the next item.

The BI Stack

I have a cursory amount of knowledge on the BI stack. Just enough to serve as an administrator, but not enough to be considered a power user. At least, not yet. I hope to change that in time, but if I could speed that up by getting it done in six months by being allowed to focus on that, it would be great. I understand the value in information, and I would much rather help my business by teaching them how to get the information they need to make the right decisions at the right time instead of spending my time doing backups, restores, and password resets.

Microsoft Certified Master

Give me the time, and the money, and let me earn my MCM, please. ’nuff said there.

Of course everyone knows you are most productive when you are allowed to focus on exactly two distinct tasks, right? You didn’t know that? Well, you do now. That’s right. If you only have one thing to do, then you are underutilized. If you have three or more then you cannot focus enough attention to details and your work suffers. Two items is the sweet spot for success, and you will notice how the three items above are really two because I am that serious. Give me six months and $30k and let me earn my MCM and play around with the BI stack. That is all I ask.

Then I will come back and I promise to bring enough shrimp for everyone. But you’ll need to supply the cocktail sauce.

Deal?

Oh, and since I dare not break the chain, I am tagging Kimberly L. Tripp and Paul Randal, simply because I can.

I was going about my own business today when I got an e-mail from Brent Ozar (twitter, blog) who is the editor-in-chief of SQLServerPedia. Apparently a wiki article that was made from my blog posts on shrinking has received the honor of being the first to receive the "Wiki of the month" recognition.

Great honor as there are a lot of great articles on this site. Which brings me to the point of my post. Do you use community resources? There are some truly great blogs and edited sites with content for the SQL Server space.

I learned a long time ago that the true expert is not one who has all of the answers. It's someone who is not afraid to admit they don't know something, knows where to go and gets excited to continue learning.

This is not an exhaustive list and I am sure I am missing some great resources but some of the free places I frequently go for SQL Server content include:

• SQLServerPedia --> Great blog syndication, wiki articles and sources of some great webcasts. Quest Software puts this out free to the community (and the site is not marketware for Quest. It exists for us in the SQL community. That is pretty neat)
• SQL Server Central --> Published articles from the community (including one on troubleshooting by yours truly), very helpful forums, some great blogs.
• SQLBlog --> Group of SQL gurus blogging about a wide range of topics
• SQLSkills --> Some great bloggers. Most notably Paul Randal and Kimberly Tripp with very frequent posts.
• MSDN Forums --> Got a question? Ask for some help and you'll get a response (usually). Please test your answers first. Or you'll get to hear me rant about empirical evidence...

Alright now I am going to play around on the Quest "Experts Community" that I get to go at and start figuring out where to hide the box of SWAG that is en route to my house (sorry Mrs. Walsh, more junk in the house... The same kind I brought back from PASS... Maybe there will be another monitor brush or squishy ball. More stuff for the kids to play with, more T-Shirts for me to mess up the closet with)  = )

For whatever reason, the older I get the more I understand the power of networks. I seriously wish I had understood this dynamic a lot sooner. Although, to some degree I did understand it as it related to coaching basketball. See, I was well aware that your next job was out there, waiting for you, as long as you met the right people along the way. Still, it never dawned on me to make the connection between that and life in the corporate world, at least not until the last seven years or so.

So, why do people network? For some it is about career opportunities. They network in order to find a job. That was definitely true for me when coaching, because you are practically homeless when you start out. You have no money, you work eighty hours a week and twice a week you get a few hundred people together to tell you all the things you are doing wrong for roughly ninety minutes. Believe me, you are really hoping that someone will help you along and networking is a great way to get it done.

Some people network because they enjoy meeting others. This is true for me as well, although I am a shy person by nature. And if I walk into a room where I know one person I am going to cling to that one person all night long because I am uncomfortable talking with strangers. And to be successful at networking you need to be able to spend more time with the people you don’t know. Not an easy thing for someone like me, but for others this is why they enjoy networking.

Others enjoy networking because they like helping others. One of the nice things about networking comes when you meet someone new and you can introduce them to someone else that they would be interested in meeting. It is a lot like matchmaking except you don’t have to feel like a pimp. Unless you take money, of course.

So, why do I network? I am a shy person. I swear it is true, although many people are surprised when I tell them that I am shy. I find networking to be very difficult. So why do I do it? Well, somewhere along my professional career I started to understand just how powerful it was to have a reliable network of colleagues that you can talk with on a regular basis. And if you are like me, and work in a shop with very few DBA’s, you really start to understand just how powerful it can be when you have the ability to ask questions to a much larger collective.

Also, I do it because I hope to get better at networking. I would very much like to be able to not only meet other people much more easily, but to be able to connect other as well. I enjoy being able to put people in touch with each other, but in order to do that I need to continue to meet new people, which is something that is outside my comfort zone. Since I know I am not always going to be able to provide answers for people I try to be someone that can still provide help by getting the right people together when possible.

One of the hardest things for me is to enter a room full of people I do not know. This is something I really struggle with, and something I hope to change over time. Of course in order to change I need practice, and quite honestly there is no better place for me to practice than at the upcoming PASS Summit.

Sure, you think I am talking about the Summit because I am on the PASS Board. I can live with that perception. But the truth is I speak so well about PASS because it is the Professional Association for SQL Server. Let me type that in another way. It is the association of SQL Server professionals. Does that make it more clear? I joined PASS for one purpose, and one purpose only: professional development. That could mean more technical knowledge, but it also meant work on other things, such as soft skills, networking, and bacon consumption.

Why is PASS so valuable? Quite simply the PASS Summit is where you will find the greatest congregation of SQL Server influencers. It truly is the premier gathering of the best of the best…of the best…of the best. Will you be able to see some of the speakers elsewhere? Sure. But I challenge you to find a deeper list of influencers than what PASS has each and every year. Last year I was able to see Donald Farmer, Buck Woody, Paul Randal, Kimberly Tripp, Kevin Kline, Louis Davidson, Greg Low, Steve Jones, Brad McGahee, Andy Warren, Gail Shaw, Tony Davis, Dan Jones, Allen White, … do I need to go on?

And on top of that I dare you to find a conference that has more dedicated database professionals (developers, administrators, etc.) that are interested in technology as well as each other. That’s why PASS is the top event, and that is why I will continue to attend even after I become CEO of SQLBacon an stop doing the daily database work and concentrate more on pork bellies and futures.

Who are some of the people I look forward to meeting this year? All of them. In fact, I am going to start keeping a running list of all the people I have not met in person yet, but will have the opportunity to do so at PASS this year. So, if you are attending PASS and want to meet me just drop me an email or leave a comment and I will add your name to a list on this blog post. As we get closer to the actual conference I will figure out a good time and place for me to meet each and every one of you, even if that means I have to sit at the conference entrance and wait for you to appear.

People that have indicated they are attending that I want to meet:

• Aaron Alton
• Jason Massie
• Jorge Segarra (tentative, he may need to bum a ride, and a place to crash)
• Nic Smith
• Colin Stasiuk
• Michelle Ufford
• Kendal Van Dyke

PASS has started up a monthly email newsletter for people interested in attending upcoming free webinars. If you want to subscribe and get on the mailing list just drop an email to Blythe Morrow. Did I mention that these webinars are free? Check out the names listed and tell me if you are going to get a better bargain anywhere else.

Introduction to SSIS Custom Component Development

Speaker: Anthony Dangelo
Tuesday, May 12th, 12:00pm ET

You have tried so hard not to write code inside of SSIS, but the day has arrived when you tired of writing the same script task over and over again. Don’t fret creating a Custom Component is not as daunting as you might think. This session will integrate your logic with SSIS Components: variables, pipeline, and events. This session will explore the desgin-time and run-time events, the difference between Syncronous and Asyncronous Components, and debugging techniques.

For dial in information, click here.

To add this meeting to your calendar, click here.

Custom Security with Reporting Services

Speaker: Cherie Sheriff
Thursday, May 14th, at 1:00pm ET

In this session we will discuss different custom security approaches with SSRS and what considerations need to be made when deciding upon a strategy for security as well as the risks and benefits of each approach.

For dial in information, click here.

To add this meeting to your calendar, click here.

Rolling Your Own Replication

Speaker: Brent Ozar
Tuesday, May 19th, 1:00pm ET

SQL Server’s built-in replication has made great strides in the last couple of versions, but what if it’s still not enough?  One team needed more flexibility, easier administration and higher scalability, so they built their own solution instead.  Brent Ozar will discuss how the system was architected, the pros and cons, and how you can build a similar solution for your own needs.  He’ll explain some of the lessons learned in scaling this out to thousands of remote SQL Servers.

For dial in information, click here.

To add this meeting to your calendar, click here.

Multi-dimensional Modeling for Performance Management

Speaker: Cherie Sheriff
Thursday, May 21st, 1:00pm ET

The first in a short series about how you can use multi-dimensional modeling to show how well you are performing, how to create budgets or strategic plans and how to create forecasts.  Learn how to leverage SSAS and SSRS to give your company the tools it needs to save time and money.  In the Performance Management session, learn how to generate easily understood views of the actuals.

For dial in information, click here.

To add this meeting to your calendar, click here.

Introduction to SSAS Dimensions

Speaker: Jessica M. Moss
May 26th 12:00pm ET

Topic Description: SQL Server MVP Jessica M. Moss will provide an introduction to dimensions in SQL Server Analysis Services.  The presentation will discuss the different types of dimensions and how to create dimension attributes, hierarchies, and properties.  Finally, we’ll discuss the different properties of dimensions used to create more performant SSAS processing and querying.

For dial in information, click here.

To add this meeting to your calendar, click here.

I have been quite busy the past few weeks. So busy that I completely forgot to blog about this last Friday. Oh well, better late than never.

The early bird discount for the PASS 2009 Community Summit ends this Friday, May 1st. For a complete price breakdown, check out this page. If you (or your boss, or whoever foots your bill these days) needs some ROI justification, then check out this page.

Still need more reasons to attend? Well, here are the Top Ten Reasons You Can’t Afford to Miss PASS Summit Unite 2009.

1. Network with over 2,000 SQL Server and BI professionals plus hundreds of Microsoft SQL Server and BI team members
2. Gain new skills and strategies to optimize SQL Server and BI, with over 160 technical sessions, hands-on labs, and pre- and post-conference seminars
3. Get the answers you need-immediately-at the “Ask the Experts” Lounge and Microsoft CSS First Aid Station
4. Learn SQL Server best practices you can implement right away
5. Meet with key Microsoft executives, engineers, and top SQL Server vendors
6. Gain insights into new advances, roadmaps, and plans for Microsoft SQL
7. Get new ideas, get re-invigorated, and be inspired! Attendees tell us this is one of the most valuable things they get out of PASS Summit, year after year
8. Learn how to do even more with what you have and increase the ROI of your SQL Server investment
9. Bring information and copies of presentations for others in your organization. Attendees can also purchase a DVD set containing all the sessions at a special, Summit attendee rate for in-depth learning all year long
10. Get the early bird rate of only $1,195 if you register by Friday, May 1!

Actually, let’s add one more to the list:

11.You can meet me, SQLBatman, and I will personally help you network your way through the conference attendees.

Register. Now. Seriously, it is the event of the year.