Ed Vassie, the creator of FineBuild, has revised and improved the tools since I last wrote about it.  Ed has naturally added a number of bug fixes and documentation improvements. Several new features… [READ MORE]

Here’s a run-down on my professional activities over the course of 2011:

• Articles: 3
• Conference Spoken: 14
• Customer Calls: 124
• Customer Visits: 7
• Magazine Columns: 14
• PASS Chapter Presentations: 12
• Pre-cons/Full-day Seminars: 7
• SQL Saturdays: 4
• SSWUG Sessions: 8
• Webcasts: 16

Plus, I got to got on an awesome SQLCruise and was featured on Richard Campbell’s RunAsRadio show at least once (Richard’s blog | twitter).  (I was thinking that I’d been on twice in 2011. But that other appearance may have been in late 2010. My records aren’t clear.)

I was also put in charge of the SQLServerPedia portion of the DBPedias sites.  Some statistics there:

• 133 contributing bloggers
• 4,500 blog posts added in 2011 (out of a total 9,000 blog posts)
• 57,000 content items added in 2011 (out of a total 138,000 content items)
• Monday-Thursday all Pedias average 8,700 visits combined
• 1.9 million visits in 2011 (out of a total 3.8 million visits to Pedia sites since SQLServerPedia was started in 2008)

2011 was also my year to jump into Twitter.  By years end, I had accumulated:

• 3,452 Tweets
• 531 Following
• 2,656 Followers
• 230 Listed

I think that my increase in tweets had a direct correlation on my decrease in blog posts.  Ironically, I have accumulated even more topics to blog about (I’ve somewhere around 630 nascent blog posts), but simply run out of time to put them into WordPress.  My blogging activity for 2011 was down to 77 entries, about half what I wrote in 2010.

I’ll talk a little about my plans for 2012 in another post.  I hope to see you following me on Twitter soon!  Thanks,

Kevin

These stories often turned out to be more interesting than the question or the answer in and of themselves.  For example, it’s a common public speaking best practice to repeat a question back to the attendee.  This helps ensure that you fully understood the question and, in case of a session recording that’s picked up only on the microphone, that the question is also recorded.  But when you’re immediate response, as the speaker, is “Your manager told you to do WHAT?!?”, you know you’ve hit a zinger, as in “Your manager told you that backups aren’t important?!?”

These stories came to be so fun, in the time-honored tradition of slowing down to carefully examine a car wreck on the highway to the point of clogging all other traffic, that I started to make IT Horror Stories a part of my regular presentation portfolio.  And I never have to repeat myself since something new and horrible aways seems to be happening and, in many situations, conference attendees specifically seek out these sessions just so they can air their grievances.

Want to share your IT Horror Story?  I’ll give you a free eBook for any that I post here!

In our first installment of IT Horror Stories, I bring you a little lesson from my friend and coworker, Richard Douglas (blog | twitter), a SQL Server enthusiast living in the Maidenhead UK region.  Richard writes:

The background story is that I was in a meeting with a few managers and they announced (as they tend to do) that in 20 minutes they were going to start UAT’ing on a machine I hadn’t heard of (let’s call it PC101) I asked what this
machine was as it wasn’t listed on my last estate audit using MAP (Ed: the Microsoft Assessment and Planning too, found here. I wrote it about on my SQL Server Pro magazine Tool Time column).

The manager told me that it was just a PC not a server with one spindle and only 2GB of RAM on Win 7 32bit OS to hold a suite of databases with a total size of 300GB with TDE enabled to boot – and they were going to be doing user testing on this!!!

I told them there was no way that this machine was going to be usable and the users would take a bad view of the new features because of the poor performance.  So I was given the challenge of doing what I could to improve performance - in 15 minutes.

Straight away, I rushed over to desktop support to see what spare machines they had lying about.  Luckily, they had some spare machines for new starters.  So I managed to grab a bit of extra RAM and a hard drive from another machine. We had trouble attaching the extra drive into the machine.  It just wasn’t going to fit.  So we ended up putting the drive on top and taped it on so it wouldn’t get knocked. All the log files were moved to the second drive to try to eliminate some of the disk contention and we also added a USB flash drive to make use of Readyboost.

Of course, the users still complained about performance.  But I like to think that we helped things a little and it’s a great story of British ingenuity!

Manager: Of course we can get top-of-the-line performance with a little PC under a desk somewhere with minimal RAM, CPU, and IO capabilities.

ITPro: Are you kidding me? We might’ve been able to make it fast if we’d done a little planning beforehand. But this is rolling out RIGHT NOW!

Manager: Well, see what you can do with it.

ITPro: Ok. What can I spend to upgrade components?

Manager: Nothing.

ITPro: Gurgle… < Makes clutching motion at throat as if dying>

Follow me on Twitter! Enjoy,

-Kev

The Internet doesn’t forget either.  Recommendations that were once helpful, if not outright essential, now are neutral or even downright bad. So now, whenever I put together new presentations, I always spend a lot of time in research, reassessing my knowledge on the topic.  (That doesn’t mean that I’ll extemporaneously say it wrong, because I speak in an off-the-cuff and rapid style. But at least my notes are usually correct).

Case In Point

Take backup and recovery (B&R), for example.  I’ve been writing about and performing B&R for years.  I’m even part of the team that builds the most popular B&R tool in the SQL Server space.  It’s an extremely important part of what I do.  And yet, even after spending a couple days re-researching topics (yet again), I still manage to get a few of the more specific details wrong because of changes over the years in the feature set.  How so?

During an Expert’s Perspective webcast last week (and available on-demand) covering the top backup and recovery mistakes on Microsoft SQL Server, I mis-explained the details concerning how SQL Server performs a differential backup.  A very clever SC on our team who was also attending the webcast pointed out to me after the session that I’d described differentials working at an 8k page-level when, in fact, they work at the extend-level (that’s a block of eight 8k pages). #FACEPALM!

When describing the differential backup I said that a bit was flipped on each page header and SQL Server would only back up those pages. Instead, whenever a page is changed a bit is recorded on the differential change map (1bit per extent), the backup process then queries these map pages and backs up those extents that have been marked as changed.

• Watch the on-demand video of Performance Tuning SQL Server for Backups and Restores, with me, Iain Kick, and Brent Ozar (blog | twitter). Free, but registration required.
• Watch the on-demand video of Ten Incredibly Painful SQL Server Backup and Recovery Mistakes, with me and David Gugick.

The Research Reveals

The cool revelation here is not that I can admit my mistakes.  The take-away from this blog post are all the great articles I read writing my latest slide deck.  These blogs and articles were so good that I needed to spread the word.  Add these to your must read list:

Virtual Log Files must be tamed!

• Performance impact: a large number of virtual log files Part I and Part II by one of my favorite not-so-prolific bloggers, Linchi Shea (blog). The thing I love about Linchi’s content is its rich benchmarking information.  Few SQL Server experts out there routinely test the behavior and performance of specific SQL Server features like Linchi does.
• Slow recovery times and slow performance due to large numbers of Virtual Log Files, by Graham Kent (blog) of Microsoft Sweden, shows that VLFs impact not only the processing time of transactions but also B&R processes.
• Lots of VLFs are Bad, by Tony Rogerson (blog | twitter), was the article that first got me interested in this behavior.

Backup and Recovery Myth Busting

• Breaking the Backup Chain – Redux (Or ‘Eating Crow’), by Michael K. Campbell (blog), shows that out-of-band database backups break differentials not transaction log backups.
• Backup with COPY_ONLY, How to Avoid Breaking the Backup Chain, by the eminent Paul Randal (blog | twitter), uses clear writing and first-class demos to illustrate the principle of breaking backup chains in Microsoft SQL Server.  Other great blogs of a related nature from Paul include:
• Debunking a Couple Myths around Full Backup
• The Importance of Validating Backups
• 30 Backup Myths

Other Good Sources

And just in case you need a refreshing in the basics of SQL Server backup and recovery, check these out:

• Backup best practices from Brent Ozar
• Backup 101 – recovery models and transaction log management

I hate to admit it, but I’m a hoarder.  Yes, like those insane people on the A&E TV show.  Only my hoarding is all virtual.  For example, take the image above.  That’s just a tiny part of my Google Reader home page.  That’s a tiny part of my Google Reader home page AFTER reading most of the day on a recent Sunday. I still had thousands of entries to go after hours of reading.  On top of that, I subscribe to some technical e-newsletters.  I’m a member of quite a few LinkedIn discussion groups, each of which produce daily and weekly newsletters. (I only subscribe to the weekly versions).  Then there’s Twitter too.  In all, there are THOUSANDS of interesting floating through the ether which I’d been trying to collect and, occassionally, read. Bah humbug!

The Downside of an Information Hoard

You might think that, as an IT professional, hoarding information is good for you.  After all, the more you know, the more effective you are at your job, right?  Uh – no.  I’ve discovered a few downsides to keeping all of this information around.  First, I lose time on administrivia, uh, I mean administration.  I can’t think of a time when a search on Google has not produced the information that I’m interested in.  So by spending time keeping up with my blog feeds, adding new blog feeds, deleting old ones, and so on, I lose time administrating something that really doesn’t need to be administrated.

Second, there’s the time it takes to read all of these entries – many long hours to read thousands of entries per month. I’ve actually figured out a little trick to make this go a lot faster. What’s that trick? Well, previously, I used to start reading my entries and then clicking “Next Entry” each time. Even when I skipped a lot of entries, just slogging through them all was a big time drain.  Now, I simply select large swathes of entries that I’m not interested in and click “Mark as Read” without ever opening them. Works great!  I’ve also gotten a lot more aggressive about dropping bloggers and RSS feeds that offer low value.  A lot of bloggers have popped up who only recount things which are available in Books On-Line.  Why spend any time on that at all?  I’m looking for strong insight, experiences, and analysis – not simple technology facts.  (A follow on thought to this tip is that “Bloggers Should Write Meaningful Article Titles!”)

Third, and more importantly, information hoarding takes a big emotional toll on me.  Maybe it’s a factor of just how my brain works and is completely inapplicable to you.  But in my case, I always carry a subtle nagging feeling when I have unread entries in my various accounts.  Even when I know that these entries are optional and that it’s not necessary for me to read any of these things, I still feel like I should read them. Basically, it makes me feel like I should be working all the dang time and that makes me feel anxious.  Anxiety makes me less productive and more prone to burn-out.  And anxiety bleeds through my work hours into my home life.  It makes it hard to enjoy a movie with the kids or some gardening in the yard.  All because there’s that feeling that I haven’t gotten the hoard processed yet.

The Solution to the Information Hoard

I mentioned a couple specific techniques for thinning out the hoard in paragraph two.  To summarize, first, subscribe to only those bloggers, feeds, and newsletters which add actual understanding to your life.  Second, open and read only those entries that matter and skip the rest. Those are techniques for dealing with lots of entries to read.  But my last problem, the anxiety issue, was a little bit harder to solve.

Like a lot of internal ways of handling life’s problem, the answer is simple but not easy.  Similar life problems with simple but difficult solutions might include feelings of guilt (the solution is confession) or anger (the solution is forgiveness, either of yourself or for the other party).  So what’s the solution to anxiety? Here’s my thought process – the answer to my information hoard is about values.  What do I mean?   I value these various things because they make me better at my job.  Losing things of value causes me some anxiety.  My anxiety has its roots in the feeling that I’m letting things of values (these various blog entries) slip through my hands.  Why would you ignore things of value, or even worse, get rid of them?!?  On the other hand, if you asked me what I really and truly valued most in this world, I’d answer with “my family and loved ones”.  But again, do I actually demonstrate this priority with my time? Not nearly enough. Therefore, the answer is to properly appraise the value of my time.  When I think about it rationally, I think that this sort of reading is worth about 30 minutes per day, maybe a full 60 minutes when there’s something really important to learn or someone really significant to listen to.

That’s it.  After 30 minutes, I can walk away from any sort of reading guilt-free.  So what’s my new solution to the information hoard and the anxieties that it’s been producing?  A quick check on the writers and topics I care about the most and then “MARK ALL AS READ”.  Yes, there will be more to read tomorrow.  But now I no longer carry an ever increasing load saying to myself “Someday I’ll get to that”.  I feel better already.

Feedback Requested

What’s your strategy to dealing with your information hoard?  Are you still keeping everything you ever produced or read digitally?  Does my approach sound reasonable and workable to you?  Or am I off base?

Thanks!

-Kev

-Follow me on Twitter

I know that I did just that, for years.  It wasn’t until I was trying to performance tune some existing code that I realized I hadn’t actually taken caching of data and execution plans into account.  So all those modified stored procedures that I was so proud of might not actually be faster than the first generation of procedures because I hadn’t checked to ensure that I was testing cached programs against uncached programs (and, by extension, the data used by those programs).  That’s easy enough to fix with a test harness.  Test harness were originally an actual, physical harness used by engineers to clamp down parts of an electrical or mechanical device they were prototyping.  Ours is no different.  It locks down all of the assumptions about our code (like my early, false assumption that I didn’t need to clear the caches) and adds a metric or two for good measure – literally – so we can better measure what’s happening in that code.

Here’s what my test harness looks like:

/* Transact-SQL test harness by Kevin Kline, http://KevinEKline.com, Twitter at kekline */

/* Flush dirty pages from the buffer to the database files. */

CHECKPOINT;

/* Flush the data cache and procedure cache, respectively. For DEV environments only! */

DBCC DROPCLEANBUFFERS;

DBCC FREEPROCCACHE;

/* Enable statistics tracking for IO and timings. Remember, SET commands remain enabled during a session until disabled. */

SET STATISTICS IO ON;

SET STATISTICS TIME ON;

-- Whatever SQL code you'd like to process goes below.

SELECT SalesOrderID

FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader H

WHERE CustomerID = 344

GO

SET STATISTICS IO OFF;

SET STATISTICS TIME OFF;

/* Textual Execution Plans, if desired.

SET SHOWPLAN_TEXT ON;

SET SHOWPLAN_TEXT OFF;

*/

I also like to include the execution plans a lot of the time.  You might wonder why I don’t save the execution plans for the GUI in SSMS?  Well, I’m a big advocate of scripting in general because I like to automate activities.  By pulling the execution plans using scripts, I can use SQLCMD to schedule a large number of query executions during the evening and have the results ready for analysis when I come back into the office in the morning.  Workin’ smarter, not harder, Baby!

So how does this test harness work for you?  Do you use other elements in yours?  If so, share your experiences here!

Thanks,

-Kevin

-Follow me on Twitter

For my test, I grabbed a simple CSV data file containing the following data:
City,User_ID,Name,Street_Address,Status
“Dallas”,47,”Janet Fuller”,”445 Upland Pl.”,”Trial”
“Lyon”,38,”Andrew Heiniger”,”347 College Av.”,”Active”
“Dallas”,43,”Susanne Smith”,”2 Upland Pl.”,”Active”
“Berne”,22,”Bill Ott”,”250 – 20th Ave.”,”Active”
“Boston”,32,”Michael Ott”,”339 College Av.”,”Trial”
“New York”,41,”Bill King”,”546 College Av.”,”Deleted”
“Oslo”,45,”Janet May”,”396 Seventh Av.”,”Active”
As you can see from the diagram below, the import of the data to create a schema was not difficult at all:
Once the schema is configured, I can create the following simple data flow to move data from my CSV input file to my target table in SQL Server:

While there are other tools available for performing similar tasks, CSVexpress makes it very simple and intuitive.  However, as I mentioned earlier, where it starts getting really interesting is when you need to pre-process and clean-up the data prior to loading it.   Whether it involves enriching the data from external data sources or web services, or identifying and repairing bad data, CSVexpress maintains a simple interface for all of that.  
The best part – it’s all free of charge.  The version you can download from www.csvexpress.com is expressor’s free Community Edition.  expressor also offers a licensed Desktop and Standard Edition with even more advanced features, which are available for a 30-day trial.   As a matter of fact, at the end of November, expressor will be introducing Salesforce support into their commercial editions and CSVexpress will feature a 30-day trial version.  You will be able to load Salesforce just as easily as if loading to SQL Server, or download your Salesforce contact, lead, and opportunity data and transform it before generating the right CSV output file (or files) that meets your daily, weekly, and monthly Excel reporting and analysis needs.  Now that’s easy!

“Login failed for user ‘<user_name>’. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 18456)”.

The challenge when troubleshooting this error message is that you may have a problem with SQL Server or you may have a problem with Active Directory or Kerberos, if you’re using one of those authentication technologies.

A False Trail

When times are good, and you’re able to make a connection, you can always query sys.dm_exec_connections, to see how you’re connecting, for example, using NTLM rather than Kerberos.  But that doesn’t help us when we can’t connect to the server at all.

In other situations, your problem might be caused by duplicate SPMs in Active Directory.  MVP Russell Fields documented a nice solution for ridding Active Directory of duplicate SPNs here.  Microsoft Support also mentions some troubleshooting steps forauthentication problems here.  Ok, that helps. But it’s not my solution. 

MVPs to the Rescue

Fortunately, my MVP buddies Edwin Sarmiento (blog | twitter) of Canada and Bitemo Erik Gergely (blog) of Hungaria had already discussed and solved the problem for me!

Something Erik pointed out, but hadn’t occurred to me at first, is that if you’re getting this SQL Server error message then you’ve actually reached the server and probably aren’t having a full disconnect error.  The second thing that Erik pointed out is the importance of the state element of this error message.  A lot of the time, you can simply ignore the
state element of an error message.  But not this time.  As it turns out, state is the key to solving the problem.  For example, a state of 18 indicates that the password must be changed.

Microsoft provides a pretty good description of the states of error 18456 here, but it leaves out a few things.  (You’ll get more useful info if you read all of the comments too).  But
again, Erik comes to the rescue by providing a complete and concise list of error 18456 states here.

Microsoft Improves the Documentation

Even better for all troubleshooting situation involving state information, Microsoft has now added state descriptions for errors in Books Online, including error 18456.  When you look in your SQL Server error log, you see the state of the error and be able to make an accurate deduction about  the nature of the error!

Hope this helps,

-Kev

-Follow me on Twitter

If you were to mention “Wayne Snyder” to me, I’d instantly start to grin and, probably, nod a little bit.  Wayne is the kind of leader who always comes to mind with overpowering and emotional warmth.  Sometimes when you visualize a memory of a person, you see them in your mind’s eye stooped over a console deep in thought or pontificating at a meeting somewhere deep in corporate America.  But when I recall Wayne, I always see an image of Wayne smiling with his arms out wide as if he’s going to wrap you in the biggest, most comforting, Southern-fried, big brother  hug you’ve had all year.  And that image is loaded with all kinds of deep positive connotations: supportive, enthusiastic, sincere offer you thoughtful conversation, honest convictions, and straight answers. 

To use an analogy, some leaders are only the “thermostat” of their organization – they set the temperature for everyone else.  But Wayne was also the “thermometer” as well – he showed what temperature at which our organization was running.  And that temperature is warm. As a PASS member, you knew within a heartbeat that it was ok to give a shout-out back to the speaker in a crowded auditorium, that there were no stupid questions, that it was ok to be the one who knew the least in the room because, in fact, he was the guy who knew the least in the room once and here he was to help you become the one who knew the most in the room! I honestly can’t count the number of people who Wayne recruited into the ranks of PASS simply by being Wayne.

Thank you, Wayne, for your many years of service to our community.  And thank you most of all for acting as the wellspring of our communities exuberant, uplifting, and just plain fun attitude of embodied in our motto of “Learn. Grow. Share”.  No one does it better than you.

Now, it goes without saying that Dr. Dewitt’s keynote is one of the singlemost anticipated sessions of the entire event.  Why?  As Dr. Dewitt mentions himself, the hallmark of his sessions are a semester of graduate school IT learning distilled into one hour of awesomeness.  There are lots of great resources discussing NoSQL on the internet (and I’ve pointed out a lot of them in the past).  But who wouldn’t rather leapfrog months of on-the-side research learning about NoSQL by enjoying Dr. Dewitt’s keynote?  Watch the streaming video at this SQLPASS link.

And if you’re here at the PASS Summit on Day 3, I hope to see you in my two sessions this afternoon:

Crash! Boom! Bang! 10 Ways to Blow Up Castle SQL Server and the Techniques that Catch Them (DBA-318)
Enterprise Database, Administration and Deployment, Regular Session (75 minutes) in 3AB

Are you a Linchpin? Career management lessons to help you become indispensible. (PD-200)
Professional Development, Regular Session (75 minutes) in 4C4

 Follow me on Twitter!

Keynote

Rushabh Mehta, the PASS president, spent a few moments extolling the value of community and the achievements of the professional association.  And he’s got a lot to be proud of.  PASS has come such a long way.  One of the most telling facts about the significance of PASS, to me, is that important SQL Server announcements now happen at the PASS Summit.  There was a time, and not very long ago too, in which Microsoft made important SQL Server announcements at other Microsoft events like PDC and TechEd.  No longer!  PASS is the nexus for Microsoft’s data management users.  And it shows.

Ted Kummert, Microsoft’s top data executive, had a lot of exciting talking points about how the community has grown.  PASS now has hundreds of chapters worldwide and nearly ninety thousand members.  The event has over 4000 paying attendees this year, which means probably around 6000 total attendees including press, exhibitors, speakers, etc.  That’s big!  In fact, that’s just about the peak capacity for the Washington State Convention Center here in Seattle.  No wonder PASS will be at other locations in the future.

It’s Officially called SQL Server 2012

SQL Server “Denali” is officially rolling out as SQL Server 2012.  There are a lot of interesting new developments with SQL12 regarding the way the product is splitting into multiple types of appliances designed for specific workloads and customer needs.  Need a massive processing appliance, check! That’s PDW.  Need a hybrid solution for data housed both on premises and in the cloud?  Check.  Need processing power for BigData?  Need processing for non-relational and unstructured data?  Check.

Microsoft’s improving tools will culminate in a new release of development tools called “SQL Server Data Tools”, formerly known as Project Juneau, while the business intelligence side of the house will have a new set of tools in “Power View”, formerly known as Project Crescent.  Hadoop figured large in the keynote, as Microsoft acknowledges that many BigData problems are best served by non-relational data stores.  Denny Lee, of SQLCAT, proposed an in-house data marketplace during his demos.  My face lit up like a kid at a surprise 10-yr birthday party.  Really?!?  FOR ME?!!?  I laugh because I’d been doing that at jobs throughout my career, offering up what I used to call the “data feedstore” to managers within my team.  +! for validation of your ideas.

First Session of the Day

From there I headed out to my first presentation of the conference, which I was delivering with my pal Buck Woody (blog | twitter) of Microsoft. Our session was all about Cloud 101 – when it’s appropriate to use the cloud and where you can learn more about the specific technologies like IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.  Many IT pros don’t know the difference and are being subjected to the “implement it!” decrees of their bosses who simply read an article on an airplane saying that the cloud is the future.  The best quote from the Twittersphere about our session?  “Elastic is fantastic”  I couldn’t have said it better!

Speaking of conference sessions, my buddy Brent Ozar (blog | twitter) pointed out this great mobile schedule planning resource:

Go to Guidebook and download the app for your iPhone, Windows Phone 7, Android, or Blackberry.  After launching it, you’ll be prompted to download a guide.  Type in PASS Summit, and we’re near the bottom of the list.

Voila! Instant mobile schedule guidebook to the PASS Summit.

The Energy is Nuts!

After delivering my session, it was off to the Exhibit Hall, where I played the role of booth jockey for Quest Software for the rest of the proceedings that day.  I noticed two things of significance.  First, the crowds were thicker and more energetic than I’ve seen in years.  Wow!  I knew attendance was our highest ever, but the crowd was near to bursting out at the seems like a 14-year old kid wearing last season’s clothes.  So either the Washington State Convention Center is no longer big enough or more planning is needed to make this venue work.  When I was in leadership for PASS, planning and properly utilizing the venue was always a logistical nightmare.  So I don’t envy the current leadership in figuring out how to make the PASS Summit scale to an even larger size.  The second thing I noticed was how focused the crowd was.  Usually, you get a lot of tire-kickers in the booth who, deep down inside, only want your vendor swag.  Yes, we had some cute swag this year (a Toad beanie baby and some cool ribbons for your badge).  But we also had huge crowds even after we ran out of swag.  And, in case you didn’t detect the important part of the previous sentence, we ran out of swag! That’s right we gave out everything on day 1 of a 3 day event.  I nearly freaked the freak out. What is going on here, folks?  Haven’t you heard that there’s a recession going on?