I’m not sure I could ever thank them for taking the time to write a foreword for my book. I owe them both a debt of thanks for a lot of help they have given me over the years. Kevin introduced me to my love Operations Manager (we dated for a while and then married four years ago) and Buck once helped me disable a logon trigger using the DAC during a chat session in a LiveMeeting that we were both attending. Having them both agree to write a foreword was easy: I didn’t tell them about each other. But, now with the book out, they are sure to find out I was cheating on them with the other. So, I might as well go public with the info and wanted to share with you what they wrote.

Kevin and Buck, thanks for your help.

The Modern Language Association hasn’t made up all the new rules yet to govern how one blogger should reverence, er, reference another in their blog posts.  But they should!  Let’s get that ball rolling for them.

I’m not exactly sure who started this format, but it’s my favorite.  When writing a blog post in which you mention another person’s blog, let’s do it like this:

“blogger name (blog_hyperlink | twitter_hyperlink)”

So, we might read a blog post by my friend Kimberly Tripp (blog | twitter) that might look something like this:

“…the Scottish Terrier was so well known in early American society that as recently as the 1910’s, Manhattanite nannies instructed their young charges to be good else the “Scottish Terrier” would eat them, after a lengthy session of slobbery nuzzling and years of canine devotion.  It is for this very reason that I’ve given my Scots/English husband, Paul Randal (blog |twitter), several variations of the nickname  “Scottish terrier”, “scotty”, “snotty”, and “scotsnots” until such a time as needed for me to roll up the newspaper, give him a good spanking, and stick his nose in …”

Well, you get the point.  And didja notice that I worked in not just one, but TWO entire examples of the blog-reference syntax?!?  I can hardly believe my own craftiness.  I went to university for four years to learn that y’know – and to learn how to funnel beer – but I digress.

The Call To Action

One thing I love about the SQL Server community is our very community-ness.  (I also like the fact that you’ll let me invent stupid words on the fly without too much criticism.)  So, let’s make the glob, {ah! damned dyslexia!} , blog reference business even easier by having you (yes, YOU) post your own blog & twitter links as a comment here.

I repeat – post a comment here containing your name, blog (with embedded hyperlink to your blog), and twitter (with embedded hyperlink to my twitter, er, YOUR twitter account).

I’ll then repost a brand new shiny article with a full compendium to everyone’s blog & twitter hyperlinks (except Brent Ozar’s (blog | twitter) ) which you can save to some obscure cranny of Outlook or WordPerfect to call up at a moments notice when the urge to both blog and reference other bloggers strikes you.

Thanks and looking forward to seeing your blog reference soon!

-Kev

-Twitter @kekline

Predicting the future with bold certainty is not for the faint of heart. It’s a hard job. A few get it right; most just get egg on their face.

Want some examples?

• In 1948, the Chicago Daily Tribune gambled that Dewey would beat Truman in the US Presidential election and ran the presses before the final result was certain, a mistake that literally made front page news.
• In 1936, the New York Times asserted that “A rocket will never leave the earth’s atmosphere.” Wrong.
• Tradition attributes “There is a world market for maybe 5 computers.” to Thomas Watson of IBM in 1943. Wrong again.

Finding More Time

In a similar vein, pundits and marketing folks predicted that the personal computer would revolutionize the way we work, that we would get more done in less time, and that the work week may actually shrink to 25 or 30 hours as a result of our increased productivity.

Ha! I wish that was the case! Most people that I know are working longer and harder than ever. There just seems to be much more to do in our professional and personal lives just to keep up, not to mention trying to get ahead.

Hey Buddy, do you have the time?

With so many activities and only a finite amount of time to devote to them, something has to give. You can either stop doing some of the activities. Or, you can somehow find more time. Since most people either really enjoy their activities (leisure) or feel compelled to keep at them (work), finding more time is the more appealing option.

But how to find more time? Unless you get into Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, time is a fixed asset. Everyone has exactly the same amount of time during the course of a week: 168 hours.

The answer: offload some of your activities to someone else, also known as delegation. But what if you don’t have anyone that reports to you? What if you don’t have an assistant to whom to delegate?

Enter: the Virtual Assistant.

Using a Virtual Assistant

With this in mind, I recently decided to try a Virtual Assistant. This is an industry that has really gained in popularity over recent years. If you’re not familiar with the term, essentially it’s like having a personal assistant that’s on call when you need him. A Virtual Assistant can pretty much do anything that doesn’t require their physcial presence.

There are varying levels of experience and skills available from Virtual Assistant companies. Some are highly skilled and can help you with such activities as keeping your financial books, updating your web page, and even drumming up new leads for your business. Other Virtual Assistants focus on doing the more mundane tasks for you like making travel arrangements and doing internet research.

Since this was my first experience with a Virtual Assistant, I decided to go with the a company that specializes in taking care of the many short duration but very distracting tasks that come up throughout the day.

After a fair amount of research on the internet (a task I would have loved to have delegated to a Virtual Assistant), I discovered a relatively new comer to the business, TimeSvr that repeatedly received great reviews from their clients. I decided to give them a try. I won’t fully restate their service offerings here; you can visit their web site for that. Sufficed to say that for 69 USD, you receive up to 8 tasks daily that require 15 to 20 each to complete.

My Trial Period with TimeSvr

I signed up with free three-day trial period with the company on Monday morning. It took just a few minutes and was relatively painless. Shortly thereafter, I received a welcome email describing the many ways I can submit tasks: the dashboard, Skype, email, and a telephone call are all available.

My First Task: A Clarification

I decided to test out the timeliness of their responses so my first request was very easy. I asked for some clarification on their services. Within an hour, I received a very polite email explaining exactly how they can help me to save time during the day. I was impressed since I know that the company is based on the other side of the world and it was night time there.

My Second Task: Location Information

For my second request, I asked my Virtual Assistant to find the closest UPS drop-off location that would accept a box of a certain size. Within 20 minutes, I received another email providing me with the location address. The email even included the name of the person that my Virtual Assistant spoke with confirming that they’d accept packages of the size I’d indicated.

My Third Request: Internet Research

The third task I asked of my Virtual Assistant was a bit more difficult. I asked him to find some possible course materials for a technical class that I may deliver to a client. I gave him a basic outline with a list of topics that I’d like to cover. I also explained some other preferences I have.

This request took much longer to complete; in fact it took nine hours to for me to receive a reply. I can’t say if the research took that long or if there may have been some kind of technical glitch in their system that prevented my Virtual Assistant from becoming aware of my new task.

I did however submit a fourth task before this one was complete and within one-half hour of delegating that task, this one was also completed.

My Forth Request: Internet Searching

My fourth request was very straightforward. I asked for a recipe for cooking pizza in a Dutch Oven. I made it easy for them by providing some potential locations for the information.

In half an hour, I received links to several recipes, along with a link to some instructions for cooking with Dutch Ovens. A nice touch, I thought.

Parting Thoughts

Overall, I was very impressed with the timeliness and quality of services that I’ve received from TimsSvr. Every person I’ve communicated with has been very professional and pleasant.

I’ve only used the Dashboard to submit tasks so I cannot comment on the other means. However the Dashboard has proven very convenient. It even has a good mobile front end page too.

70 USD isn’t cheap, but for what you get from TimeSvr, it’s worth it. The way I see it, if it saves me one hour a month the service has more than paid for itself.

As an aside, I didn’t receive any free compensation for this review. However my Virtual Assistant did have a hand it helping me to put it together. I asked him to find the pictures for me and to find me a list of predictive quotes that later proved to be false. Not bad, eh?

Oh, and one more thing. I’ve referred through this post to my Virtual Assistant. In actuality, it’s a team of people that field my requests. You can, if you prefer, actually contract with a specific individual within TimeSvr. I may consider that one day but for now this arrangement meets my needs.

Now some questions for you:

1. Have you used a Virtual Assistant?
2. Would you be comfortable using a Virtual Assistant for more complex tasks?
3. What are some tasks that you’d like to outsource?

When it comes to free SQL Server training I tend to think of things in terms of “what does the Intertubz provide to me?” That’s easy: blogs, podcasts, LiveMeeting, and forums.

SQL Server Blogs

I maintain a list of prominent SQL Server Bloggers, and would recommend you start there. I try to keep the list updated frequently, moving people in and out as needed, so that the list stays as current as possible. I never liked blogrolls, they always seem to be full of stale or dead links, so that’s why I created and maintain my list. The other thing I don’t like are blogs that are cutting and pasting from manuals or stealing content from other bloggers, so you won’t find those on my lists. What you get are real people, with real knowledge, and real stories. I also include their Twitter handles, so you can follow them there as well. And if you use Twitter, ask questions with the #sqlhelp hashtag, you’ll get a quality answer probably from one or more of the people in my list.

Don’t like to read? Are you more apt to learn from watching or listening to videos? Well then the next section is for you.

SQL Server Podcasts

Microsoft makes available a wide variety of podcasts. You can even subscribe to the RSS feed specific for SQL Server podcasts. And if you want to listen to people with funny accents, then you should check out the SQL Down Under podcasts. Or you can listen to the Midnight DBA podcast series. SQLServerPedia also makes available some training videos.

I am willing to bet that you could easily find over 100 hours worth of quality videos just at the sites I have listed above.

SQL Server User Group Meetings

There are a lot of SQL Server user groups in existence, some of which may be located right near where you live. PASS maintains a list of chapters, and each chapter is also a SQL user group. This may not be helpful to you if the nearest group you can find is more than an hour’s drive away, especially if the meeting is done at night.

A handful of user groups will broadcast their meetings, for free, so that you can participate without having to leave your home (or desk). PASS has a dedicated group of Virtual Chapters that use LiveMeeting to broadcast their presentations each month, for example.

Still another option is to take part in a SQL Saturday, which are free events held in locations where there is an established local user group base. Youcan view the current list of events already scheduled to see if there is one coming to a location near you.

SQL Server Forums

Yet another resource available on the Intertubz are forums or newsgroups, which is an acceptable way for some people to get information about SQL Server, but this is where you will find that “you get what you pay for” comes into play far too often. Honestly, I don’t use forums or newsgroups, they just are not my style. I find a majority (not all!) of the answers to be unreliable and I cannot stand reading about two or more people having an argument in a thread.

But, since there is some valuable information there (mostly in the questions themselves), I want to point you to two places to go for SQL specific information. The first are the forums over at SQLServerCentral.com, which are well maintained and many of the people that participate and respond in the forums are leaders in the SQL community. The second is ServerFault.com, a wonderful place that is part forum, part newsgroup, part wiki, part blog, and all awesome. You can spend a lot of time on these sites just absorbing some wonderful SQL knowledge.

Now,  there is a cost for accessing the tubes that make up the internet, so let’s just agree that those costs exist. Otherwise, you can just head to the library and grab some books. Which books? I’m glad you asked!

SQL Server Books

I also happen to maintain a list of SQL Server books for DBAs. You can start adding these to your own personal library. Check out the authors I have on my shelf and remember their names. If you come across another book written by one of them you should feel comfortable purchasing it as well. My library has a mix of technical and non-technical books. If I had to single one book out for anyone to get started with I would recommend Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 T-SQL Fundamentals (PRO-Developer) by Itzik Ben-Gan, as that would give anyone (developer or administrator) the best fundamental skills with regards to T-SQL.

Let’s say that you have a team member that is unable to come to work one day, for whatever reason. Now, as the manager you have a specific workload to get done, so you need someone to do it, but the person you wanted is not able to get the job done. What do you do? The way I see it, you have two choices: force them to get it done, or ask for someone else on the team to help out (I suppose a third option is to do the work yourself, but we’ll lump that in with having someone else on the team help out).

If you force that person to get the job done, do you end up with a better, stronger team as an end result? If we are talking a military situation, the answer may very well be “yes”. You could have the situation arise where you need for someone to go above and beyond their capabilities, but usually that involves a life or death situation. Let’s consider a sports team as another example. Most sport team management is about putting the right people in the right places at the right time to be successful. In sports, it is often finding a way to limit your mistakes that allow for you to win. So, forcing someone to play a role that they are not very good at could be disastrous for the team as a result. I have seen teams rally around such individual efforts but by and large this is always a short-term gain. The end result is not always a stronger team, just a team that managed to get through one or two games while short-handed.

Now let’s consider our world of Information Technology. Unless you are working in IT for the NSA, chances of your role having life-or-death implications is very slim. And you are not exactly equivalent to a sports team unless everyone in your office is living and showering together. So, we have a different dynamic at play here. As a manager you have the need for someone to come in on a Saturday. You have your mind set on a specific individual. That individual informs you they are not available on that specific day. And then you essentially “force” them to come in to work, making them change whatever plans they had, and tell them that they need to “be a team player”.

What about being a “team manager”? If your team relies on one specific person to perform one specific role on one specific day, then I would argue that your team is far too specialized to ever be considered effective, or successful. The best teams have interchangeable parts, allowing for flexibility when it comes to roles. That way, should a team member not be available, someone else can step in and you have no loss of service. And teams function well in this way because we all have times when we need to be unavailable, so we all look to help out when we need to step in to fill a temporary gap left by others.

I am sitting in the terminal at Charlotte’s airport waiting for my flight back, it’s a bit delayed so I have time to reflect on a great SQL Saturday. This was my second SQLSaturday and it was a fantastic event. Boston was also great, as I blogged about but I was here a bit longer and had more time to interact with a lot of great speakers and attendees. I also had a great time hanging out wit the folks at SQL Sentry for their first Product Advisory Council meeting.

I am excited to be heading home to my family but it is actually a bit sad leaving some of the great people I got to hang out with. Once again, there were some great speakers (It is intimidating to be speaking at an event with the names who spoke today).

I’m going to take a walk through my weekend with a few lenses. If you are interested, come along for the journey…

Product Advisory Council Meeting

Wow. A great time. I felt a little odd being there with crowd of gurus and MVPs that they had assembled but I wasn’t lost in the conversations. I’ll blog about this a bit more in a separate non-syndicated post since it is related to a product. Suffice it to say, I learned a lot and was able to provide (hopefully meaningful) input. I had a great time hanging out with the team and hitting the speaker party on Friday. What a great time put on by the platinum sponsor of this SQL Saturday – SQL Sentry. Great food and some awesome conversations with some familiar faces from PASS and the blogosphere.

SQL Saturday Presenter

I am balding faster than I realized...

So last month was my first time speaking at a community event and I was a lot more nervous and a bit more rigid then than I was today. I had a really fun time presenting both sessions today. A bit more fun in the first talk (more on that in a second) but the audience was great, the atmosphere was relaxed, I had laughs where I was hoping to, had some good interaction back from all y’alls in the audience.

I know what I need to improve on and am hoping to get some feedback to know what I don’t know I need to improve on but I really want to speak some more, it is a great next step in the learning continuum (I learned preparing, learned through the questions during and after the talks,etc)

First Talk – “As a DBA, Where Do I start?”

If I had to rate myself, I’d say this was the better of the two. I was in a 20 capacity room and the chairs filled up with some folks standing around in the back and sitting on the floor/tables. I liked the smaller room, the fuller feeling room and being closer to the audience made it flow better, I think.

The questions from this talk told me that I was heading in the right direction. I think I might tweak it to include some more demos and perhaps better show a priority of steps. I want to keep doing this chat, there are a lot of accidental DBAs out there.

I need to work on my slide design. I like the minimalist approach and the images I use in this deck to provide some levity (the waterboarding of vendors seemed to be a universally well accepted practice down here) but I want to link back to more points (Like Buck Woody’s checklist for DBAs) and maybe spend some more time on practical aspects, perhaps as a follow on to that conversation. Maybe a screen cast to make.

Second Talk – “You Can Tune Your Own SQL Code”

I saw a fair number of familiar faces in this talk from my first talk. That was nice, made me feel that much better about the first talk and inspire some confidence. That and all the sweet tea cursing through my system (I discovered and fell in love with the stuff down here… Did I mention I don’t get out of New England a whole lot?) made me definitely energetic for this talk. This talk was really crowded, I was a bit late getting over there because of the previous session and I had to fight a crowd to get in. It was a 20 person room but the tables and aisles were well filled. Hoping folks found what they were expecting.

It started out well. I feel like I had some good audience interaction and some good laughter (where I was alright hearing laughter, mind you) and some fun with the crowd. I need to rework and re-rehearse this presentation more, though. My timing of the slides to demos was off, I was too rushed in the demo. I also need to better tweak what I talk about, I only have 60 minutes and I can’t get into every single detail (like the side track on the whiteboard of B-Trees, those kind of discussions can happen later). I think the Phone Book trick worked to help illustrate SARGable queries and I’ll keep that. I will, however, re-time everything and make a better flow. All in all, I don’t think I outright bombed (please leave a comment if I did! It can be anonymous, My speaker rate account is completely anonymous if you prefer- Mike Walsh speaker rate). I had some questions afterwards, requests for cards, etc. but I didn’t feel as good about this one as the first talk. I want to give a better experience for the next time I deliver this talk.

SQL Saturday Attendee

I went to the following sessions:

Kendal Van Dyke (@SQLDBA on twitter) – He gave a talk on an introduction to Blogging and Speaking. He asked me if I would help on the panel but it was all his presentation. It was a great presentation, really shows what our community is about – Community. We don’t want to exclude speakers or bloggers, we want more! I blogged about that in the post series on blogging. A few people in the audience said they would start blogging or speaking. I really hope they do. Great presentation!

Tim Ford (@SQLAgentMan on twitter) – He said he was off because he was sick but he gave a good presentation anyway. He talked about tips for harnessing the power of Lazy as a DBA. Some good tips (including using templates for a baseline server installation process. That is awesome and I have a huge need for that in my day job, I’ll be implementing his idea very soon)

Kendal Van Dyke (again) – He gave a great presentation on SSD storage options with pros/cons and honest feedback/caveats. I haven’t yet played with it and his talk gave me some great food for thought. I was very impressed by his cold reboot mid-presentation. I have never seen a Windows laptop reboot so quick. One thing I may do is change my laptop drive real soon

Jeffry Schwartz – I met Jeffry at the PAC meeting. He is a really thoughtful, intelligent and in tune with performance kind of guy. His talk was great. He didn’t talk a lot about SQL Server but he talked about “performance outside the box”. He got into counters I don’t play with much in perfmon (DPCs, Processor interrupts) and talked about a lot of really good, geeky hardware and OS information. I am used to SQL Server sessions devoted a lot more to performance counters within SQL and SQL performance. Jeffry reminded us of something that should be common sense (but not always is a first instinct for folks) –> sometimes performance problems have nothing to do with SQL. He showed us some tools and tips to help see when someone else on your SAN is the blame, or when the system is to blame or even a driver/NIC configuration. I really hope to see Jeffry speak at the PASS Summit for a longer session.

Going Home Mike

Well that’s it. Going home Mike is tired (the sugar rush from the sweet tea is wearing off), filled with knowledge and excited to speak again. I won’t be doing any SQL Saturday’s until at least fall with baby number 3 (Sam) coming sometime around the end of May. I pay my own way and have a family to support. Plus my time will be devoted to getting the Seacoast NH/ME/MA SQL chapter working with our first meeting coming in April.

I may even to submit a Professional Development chat to PASS or perhaps even a variation of my DBA talk from SQL Saturday.

Again, thanks to the sponsors, this was a memorable time! I stole my picture from this stream: http://sqlsentry.smugmug.com/Events/2010-03-SQLsaturday33/11432245_nDzgG I am hoping they don’t mind

Did you go? What did you go listen to? What did you take away? Let us know in the comments or a post of your own.

Currently ranked #128,373!

Yeah, it is starting to feel real now. I have not heard about an official release date, but I think we are still on target for March 15th. I’ll let you know once I get a copy into my hands.

Also, let me know if you want to do a book review. If so, head over here and fill out the contact form so we get your details sent to the right people.

I’m really not sure how that happened, but I’d just like to thank everyone who reads my ramblings either so that you can get some new info, or for some sort of entertainment value, or whatever.  Just thanks for reading and I hope that you’ll keep reading my blog.

I know that the title of my blog if “SQL Server with MrDenny” and that I don’t always post about SQL Server, but there is so much more to my job than SQL Server so I pretty much have been writing about everything that comes up.

Again, thanks for reading.

Thanks,

Denny

How To Get a Job as a DBA

There you will find a handful of resources that I consider to be quite vital in your job search. I reference other blogs, job websites, as well as some helpful books. In time I hope to build it out a bit more, but for now it should suffice for most anyone that is looking to find out more about a job in database administration.

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.