Search results matching tag 'productivity'

March Update to Rules-Driven Maintenance

merrillaldrich — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 02:56:00 GMT

This month I have a minor update to the Rules-Driven Maintenance code I originally posted back in August 2012. This update has just two enhancements, but they are nice ones, I think:

Much improved handling for instances that use database snapshots.
Ability to do intra-day differential backups purely by setting maintenance times and limits in the policy table.

The code posted here is cumulative, and replaces entirely the original code, but please refer back to that original blog post for description, instructions and details. This update can be installed right over an existing deployment, or be installed all by itself as a complete solution but – as always – please test and be cautious.

Enjoy!

Update to Rules-Driven Maintenance

merrillaldrich — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 18:34:00 GMT

Back in August I posted a first version of a rules-driven solution for backups, index and statistics maintenance and integrity checks. The system in general has been working well, and has saved my team a huge amount of time and effort. We are coming to the anniversary of its use in production soon.

Today I offer an update that contains a few enhancements, performance improvements and a bug fix.

To recap, this is a system or framework to manage many small databases across many instances on many servers in a policy-based/automated way. The details about how to deploy and how to use the system are in the original post, but at a high level:

First deploy the code across a collection of servers using the included PowerShell script DeployMaintenance.ps1. That will create an administrative database on every instance (or use one that you provide) and populate it with the required tables, procedures, etc. The deployment script will also make a handful of SQL Agent jobs that handle all the maintenance on all the databases.
Visit the instances. If there is maintenance already in place, disable or remove it so as not to perform this work twice. If necessary, change or override the default preferences for this solution in the admin database for each type of maintenance. This includes the time of maintenance windows, whether to use features like differential backups or Litespeed, whether there are databases that should be treated as exceptions, with different settings, etc.
Enable the new policy jobs in SQL Agent.
Monitor to make sure things are running smoothly.

The theory behind this project is to save work configuring servers (efficiency), to ensure that the maintenance is in fact deployed and working for ALL databases in the environment (quality), to ensure that it works in a truly consistent way everywhere (consistency), and to make it so that the servers don’t have to be touched by a DBA when changes happen, such as adding or dropping databases (resiliency).

Changes

The updates in this 1.1 version include

Better reporting of errors. The jobs now write log files to the default error log location for SQL Server.
Better recovery from errors. The jobs in some cases continue on error – for example, one failed backup will not stop the backup job and leave other databases without backups.
Performance enhancements for examining backup history and system counters (mainly % log used).
One bug fix for the log backup logic on a server that uses both log shipping and Litespeed.

Disclaimers

The code for the system is posted here, and you are welcome to download it and try it out. Please note that this is not a commercial solution, and that while you may test or deploy this, you do so at your sole risk. Edits to the code almost certainly will be required for your environment. Please read, understand and test the code thoroughly before you even imagine using this in production. I do not want to cause you or your employer any pain. License for using this solution is GPL 3.0: http://opensource.org/licenses/GPL-3.0. You may use and modify this code, but not sell it.

This has been run on SQL Server versions from 2005 to 2008 R2. It probably works on 2012, but I have not tested it thoroughly.

I run only case-insensitive collation; if you are on a case-sensitive system, then you have my sympathy, and you might have to edit a few things to make this work.

There is coverage for Quest Litespeed backups in the solution; other third-party backup products could be incorporated easily, but have not been. It should be possible to follow the pattern used to handle Litespeed and extend it to any other third-party stored procedures.

If you haven’t done index maintenance for a while, and you flip this solution on you might blow up your transaction log. Be sure that you have plenty of log space and plenty of log backup space, and watch the process the first few runs. This is especially true if the combination of Standard Edition of SQL Server and the preference for Online index maintenance applies in your environment, because the maintenance process will perform index maintenance using reorganize (defrag), which produces a lot of log.

Lastly, this is a solution for the type of environment that has many small databases, not the type with a few big, performance intensive databases. Databases that are large and require detailed attention may not be suitable for a one-size-fits-all solution like this.

The Year That Was - 2012

KKline — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 19:31:00 GMT

2012 was, simply stated, a year that kicked my butt. When I wasn't struggling professionally, I was struggling personally. Health issues, culminating in a diagnosis of Type II diabetes, and the passing of my father soon after Thanksgiving marked my biggest struggles. I apologize to those of you who are normally on my Christmas card list for not sending any this year. The wind was not in my sails. On the positive side of the ledger, I made a scary but exciting leap to SQL Sentry midyear. This was a huge shake-up after 10 years with my previous employer, but one which has been met with unbridled enthusiasm everywhere I've gone. Thank you for the handshakes, high-fives, and hugs! We're doing some really exciting things at SQL Sentry (such as SQLPerformance.com and Plan Explorer Pro) and I hope to engage with you more than ever in 2013.

Blogging Activity, Plus Leadership Skills & Professionalism

2012 marked a bit of a shift in my content creation direction. I've seen an uptick in struggles in the non-IT part of our career - communications, leadership, motivation, goal-keeping, all of those sort of things. I feel like I have some wisdom to contribute in that space. So, in addition to technical blog posts, I been putting down more of my experiences and lessons learned on the interpersonal side of the IT career path. My top ten blog posts for the year reflect some of that new direction:

Do You Have One of "the Three W’s" to Sit on a Board of Directors? -- Important tips for any IT pro considering a role in strategy and executive leadership.
Timewarp: What Is a Relational Database? -- With all the talk about NoSQL databases, let's go back to the fundamentals.
Want Another Reason to Hate iTunes? -- A throw-away article that precipitated a maelstrom of comments. Them Apple fanboys are passionate!
Why Do IT Pros Make Awful Managers? -- Not all IT pros make awful managers, but when they're awful it's often for similar reasons.
High-Availability White Papers and Resources for SQL Server -- Read the latest about AlwaysOn Availability Groups, and more.
New White Paper: SQL Server Extended Events and Notifications -- SQL Server 2012 great augments the Extended Events feature set. Find out how.
Build Your Own Microsoft Operations Management Pack -- Resources to build out your own SCOM management pack.
Help Me Update the History of SQL Server -- I started with SQL Server when it was still an OS/2 product. Jeesh! Lots of versions have come out since then.
TIE: Recorded Webcast Available: Extend SCOM to Optimize SQL Server Performance Management and The Expert's Conference (TEC) - For AD, SharePoint, Exchange, PowerShell and Other Admins -- Pointers to a webcast about extending SCOM and the TEC conference.
A Fond Farewell to Quest Software -- I learned so much in 10 years at Quest Software.

As I mentioned in the opening paragraph about blogging, I'm putting more energy into best practices for professional growth among IT pros. Along those lines of thought, I started a website called ForITPros.com with my long-time friend Joe Webb (Twitter | Blog) and, in partnership with SSWUG, developed a 2-DVD set and streaming media class called Leadership Skills for IT Professionals containing 14 hours of leadership and soft skills training specifically crafted for IT teams.

I've also been working with PASS on the Professional Development Virtual Chapter (VC), led by Mark Caldwell (Twitter). We've already got a full year of content schedule and are trying to figure out how fit in more sessions. Maybe moving to more than one webcast per month? The PASS Professional Development VC archive has lots of great content for you to review and future sessions are detailed at the PASS Professional Development VC homepage.

In-Person Activity

2012 was busy where I actually appeared in person or put in a big effort to write or create content. Here's a run-down: Articles (2), Conference Spoken (12), Customer Calls (88), Customer Visits (4), Magazine Columns (14) at SQLMag.com and DBTA.com, New Books (1) with Ross Mistry, PASS Chapter Presentations (12), Pre-cons/Full-day Seminars (4), SQL Saturdays (4), SSWUG Sessions (4), TechNet Radio Broadcasts (2), Technical Book Reviews (3), and Webcasts (10).

In 2013, I expect to travel a bit less. But I also expect to do many more webcasts. Let me know if you have some ideas about what you'd like to learn! One business trip that I refuse to give up, though, is SQLCruise. (Register!) I know it sounds like the worst possible way to learn. I mean who'd want to learn on a cruise ship in the Caribbean?!? (I hope you could detect the sarcasm dripping from those two sentences.) But here are two favorite aspects of of SQLCruise that are totally ferreals - 1) You simultaneously can relax and focus on learning. You are disconnected from the mainland. You don't have to worry about the mobile phone going off. 2) You get extended ours in a intimate setting with the top talent in the SQL Server world. It's always a pleasure to attend a conference session from the best in the industry. But you'll get hours of time to talk with these veterans of the industry about your specific problems and situations. It just doesn't get better than that.

Social Media

It's hard to believe that only a year ago, 2011, was my first year on Twitter. By years end, here's where my stats had moved: 5,507 tweets (up from 3,452 tweets), 661 following (up from 531), and 3,720 followers (up from 2,656) . I didn't check my social media numbers last year, so I've got no point of comparison. But I'm currently sitting at 2,327 LinkedIn connections and 1,157 Facebook friends. One of my standing policies on Facebook is that I don't "friend" someone who I haven't personally met. That doesn't help detangle the hopeless mess I've created by having only one identify on Facebook, both personal and public. So, on the one hand, I owe all of my longtime friends a big apology for all of the SQL talk and, on the other hand, a big apology to all of my professional friends for not posting enough news and advice while dilute my status updates with personal minutia. Oh well - it is what it is.

My blogging activity for 2012 was the lowest it's been in many years, down to 44 entries, down from 77 in 2011 and well into the hundreds in 2010. My answer to that sort of doldrums for 2013 is to get sloppy! And by that, I mean less of a perfectionist and more of a content machine that just cranks it out! Most of you, as my readers, have been very forgiving of a misplaced verb, a missing punctuation, or -heck- a totally malformed sentence that makes no sense at all. So I'm going to try much harder to churn through the 700+ nascent blog posts in my notes folder and get those ideas out there!

I hope to see you following me on Twitter soon! Thanks,

-Kevin

Let's Talk Licensing and Virtualization for SQL Server

KKline — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 19:23:00 GMT

I have two new articles up on Database Trends & Applications magazine. I'd love to get your thoughts and feedback!

Welcome to the Weird, Wild World of SQL Server Licensing

Not long in the past, SQL Server licensing was an easy and straightforward process. You used to take one of a few paths to get your SQL Server licenses. The first and easiest path was to buy your SQL Server license with your hardware. Want to buy a HP Proliant DL380 for a SQL Server application? Why not get your SQL Server Enterprise Edition license with it at the same time? Just pay the hardware vendor for the whole stack, from the bare metal all the way through to the Microsoft OS and SQL Server....

DBTA E-Edition - December 2012 Issue

Virtualization Conquers the Database

I was privileged to deliver a session entitled Managing SQL Server in a Virtual World at the PASS Summit 2012, the largest annual conference for Microsoft SQL Server. It was a packed house, literally at standing-room-only capacity. I delivered the session with my friend David Klee and we were swarmed by attendees after the session wrapped up. With almost 600 people in the room, we conducted one of those informal polls that speakers like to do along the lines of "Raise your hands if …" and the informal findings were very telling. Probably around 90% of the attendees used VMware and SQL Server in some capacity and at least 60% used it in production environments. Another important fact was that only 10% of the attendees were actually able to get information on the performance of the actual VMs themselves. Most had to get all of their information and support from the VM / System administration staff....

DBTA E-Edition - November E-Edition Issue

Follow me on Twitter!

Resource Center for Microsoft Office

KKline — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 15:18:00 GMT

Every now and then I go off on a tangent away from databases and try to improve some of my other important skills, like maximizing my knowledge of the various Microsoft Office products I use in-and-out everyday. (Let me tell ya, a good shortcut cheat sheet is worth its weight in gold! Let me know where I can find some of those for the Office products, if you know of any.) Anyway, I learned about some new(ish) resources on my latest productivity expedition that I thought I'd so that you can take advantage of them too. (Let me know if any of these links go dead).

Microsoft Office Social Media

I'm kind'a surprised by the value of some social media pages. Others, not so much. Here's some good ones to investigate:

Facebook – www.facebook.com/office
Facebook - www.facebook.com/OfficeLive
YouTube – www.youtube.com/officevideos
YouTube - www.youtube.com/OfficeLive
Twitter – www.twitter.com/office
Twitter - www.twitter.com/Office_Live
LinkedIn – http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Microsoft-Office-1913738

The Office Blog

I used to read a ton of different email newsletters from Microsoft. Now, I just go to The Office Blog. It's comprised of all of those older newsletters, like Inside Office Online, Office Offline, Templates & Clip Art, and Crabby Office Lady blogs. So now we have a single place to get (and share productivity stories, find useful ideas, and build better solutions on top of Microsoft Office. You can also get involved and join the conversation. When you leave comments, you can include links to your Web site, blogs, and Twitter feeds so that the world can learn more about you. They even want contributions! (Let the staff writers know if you have an idea or want to contribute a blog post).

Office 2010 Resource Center

There are so many other great resources out there, depending on your special needs. I'm tossing a bunch of these additional resources below because A) it's easy to just cut-n-paste and I'm basically lazy, and B) you might not already know about them.

Office 2010 General

Microsoft Office 2010 Engineering

Office Web Apps Official Blog

Microsoft Office Resource Kit Blog

Office Solutions

Microsoft Office Sustained Engineering Blog

Microsoft Answers for Office

Office 2010 Backstage

Microsoft Office Product Blogs

Get insight directly from the product teams. They sometimes even know what they're talking about!

Microsoft Access 2010 Team Blog

Microsoft Excel 2010 Team Blog

PowerPivot Team Blog

Microsoft Outlook 2010 Team blog

Microsoft PowerPoint Team Blog

Microsoft Word 2010 Team Blog

Microsoft Project Team Blog

Microsoft Publisher 2010 Team Blog

Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog

SharePoint Workspace Team Blog

SharePoint Designer Team Blog

SharePoint for End Users Blog

PerformancePoint Services

Microsoft Visio 2010 Team Blog

Microsoft InfoPath Team Blog

Mostly OneNote

Some Miscellaneous Microsoft Office Links

This stuff isn't my cup of tea (except for the BI content), but maybe you haven't heard of it and it'd be helpful for you:

Microsoft Business Connectivity Services

Microsoft Business Intelligence Team Blog

Office International

Office Global Experience Blog

Office Development for Visual Studio 2010

Microsoft Office 2010 Partner Site

SharePoint 2010 Community

Again, let me know if any of these links go dead or you have other resources you'd like to post here. Thanks!

-Kevin

Twitter | Facebook | YouTube | LinkedIn | Blog

Do You Have One of "the Three W’s" to Sit on a Board of Directors?

KKline — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 17:28:00 GMT

Let’s get one thing clear right off the bat – I’m not typing “Board of Directors” repeatedly throughout this blog post. It’s just too much typing. BoD will have to do. Live with it.

Perhaps, you’ve been paying attention to the PASS Twitter feed, read the newsletters, or otherwise stay abreast of happenings within PASS. If you haven’t, here’s a news alert – it’s time for a new round of the PASS leadership cycle. And since this is the season of PASS nominations, I thought it’d be an appropriate time to share some of my lessons learned about effective BoDs.

Having spent over a decade sitting on various BoD’s, I can testify that the most effective directors are those that bring at least one of the three W’s to the table. (I learned the three W's from a former executive director of PASS, Jon Lindberg). Note that the three W’s are not characteristics or traits. They are behaviors, that is, observable sets of activities. The keywords in the previous sentence are observable and activities. You might have every intention in the world of doing the three W's. But if other people on the BoD cannot observe that you are performing the actions, they don't exist. The three W behaviors are Wealth, Work, and Wisdom. They’re major behaviors in my leadership ethos, called servant leadership. (I’ll talk about servant leadership in another post at some time).

Let’s talk about the three W’s in detail:

Wealth

This is simple and direct. Some directors come to the boardroom with a checkbook and they’re willing to use it to further the goals of the organization. Because they fund strategic initiatives of the organization in cash or in-kind, they literally change the reality for the organization. Directors with this W remove barriers and constraints that would otherwise end many discussions and initiatives before they got off the ground due to lack of resources.

However, directors with wealth are usually their as a part of their job. In other words, their employer has a strategic reason for supporting the success of the organization. Therefore, directors with wealth often seek to ensure that the organization is tracking against certain high-level goals that coincide with the goals of their employer. This is not to say that such directors have ulterior motives. They are typically very ethical and insightful members of a given BoD. But this perspective also means that a director with wealth may be interested in activities or metrics which other directors have considered. After all, if you were to pony up big dollars for a new initiative on your child’s soccer team (say, new training equipment) you’d also want to ensure that money was spent to greatest effect.

Note that wealth doesn’t always mean cash. It can mean many other things - your presence is a form of value. (Many times, directors come to BoD meetings and proceed to work on their email. That's a major breach of sharing your wealth of knowledge). Here’s a more concrete example. Back in the early 2000’s, around 2003, PASS received a significant amount of in-kind support from Compaq Corporation at the encouragement of then Microsoft liaison and board member Ryan Trout. (In-kind support, by the way, is support that has a cash value, but is an action or activity offered instead of actual cash). In effect, Compaq conducted a major direct mail campaign to their sizeable SQL Server user base to help drive attendance at the PASS Summit and to encourage interest in both the international organization and local user groups. This contribution marked a major turning point for PASS both in terms of high-level vendor support and in visibility to the SQL Server user community.

Axiom: The golden rule, for directors with wealth, is “he who has the gold makes the rules” with all the positive and negative connotations that holds.

Work

There’s no getting around the fact that the directors who are most willing to invest personal time and energy are the most effective. (And I mean the term “effective” in the most literal sense of “having a measurable effect on the enterprise”). In a typical strategically-oriented board, the extent of work is usually to remain current on all important reading material, to strive to be aware of shareholder issues and concerns, and to formulate opinions on important strategies for the organization to consider or implement as a form of guidance for the CEO and COO.

In a portfolio-oriented board, such as the structure used by PASS and many other large IT professional associations (including most of the other major database BoD’s such as IOUG, IDUG, ISUG, ITUG, and Share), directors not only have the burden of the strategic director, but also act as the head of a specific function of the organization. For example, in a portfolio-oriented BoD, a single director might be responsible for growing and guiding the local chapters of the association (the Chapter Portfolio), another might be responsible for driving value back to members (the Membership Portfolio), a third might be responsible for the selection and implementation of the content delivered at major events (the Program Portfolio), and so on. There is no doubt that some directors are much more effective than others at managing a portfolio and leading a group of volunteers within that portfolio.

While a full discussion of the best practices that make some directors really effective at this second W could fill a couple additional posts, I’ll put a few quick hallmarks here in case you’re curious:

Priorities

Smart directors set their sights on a very short list of goals that follow the SMART standard. And by “short list”, I mean a list with no more than three goals. The goals are achievable and, usually, not terribly expensive nor complex to implement. If one of their top goals turns out to be much more expensive or complex to get rolling, then they move on to their next most important goal that is easily achievable.

Axiom: It is better to make small, measurable gains than to set big goals that never get accomplished.

Alignment

Smart directors make sure that the goals they’re working to achieve complement the overall strategy of the organization. This alignment provides a strong incentive for other members of the BoD to back their proposals and to act as allies in the event that a board vote is needed to settle the way resources will be directed or whether a proposed goal is accepted by the board as a new policy or program. Alignment of goals with the top-level strategy of the organization also means that successor directors will have a much easier time continuing where the original board member left off because the work simply makes sense. Plus, when a director’s goals seem unusual or very different than other goals of the organization, organizational resistance is sure to come in to play.

Axiom: Unless there’s an emergency, it is better to couch visionary change within the overall strategy of the organization than it is to introduce changes that represent a major shift in long-standing culture, priorities, or processes.

Focus

Directors who have a short list of goals are also much more successful when they devote their energies to …, oh wait a sec, gotta check email. Just kidding. But I hope you get the idea.

I’ve seen a lot of brilliant individual directors who, upon prioritizing their work, spent enormous amounts of time and energy working on other people’s problems, working on their own issues at the wrong level, or talking about an issue way after its major parameters have been decided. I’m not saying stop helping others or stop discussions. But I am saying that a portfolio director must remember that the success of their team is their success. Many IT professionals are used to being individual contributors and so they feel that if they’re busy and working hard, it must be good, right? No. If the director isn’t working to achieve the goals of their portfolio, they’re basically not working at all. Here are some common traps that damage focus:

A common way IT pros on a BoD lose their focus is to get into the details of a new program or process. For example, say that PASS wanted to introduce a cool new feature on their website. An unfocused director would immediately begin to start designing the system in their mind – “We’ll use Active Directory to authenticate new users and then they’ll connect to the services using that cool REST-ful technology I’ve wanted to try. And maybe we could use SSIS packages to…” You get the picture. The BoD hasn't even fully fleshed out the business plan for the new program and yet this director is off and running after the specific technological solution to the problem. The problem that is not yet fully mapped out and understood. Remember, directors are supposed to assess and manage the business value of any given process or new organization program, not sling code. By focusing on the intimate details of the technology first, the director short-changes the business value of the initiative. It's like the programmer who starts writing code before any requirements are understood or documented. I’ve seen directors invest huge amounts of time into initiative which, in the broad analysis, were only half-baked and not worth pursuing. The focus must for a director, first and foremost, be about business value. (As a side-bar to this line of thought, many directors are the only person who can make certain important decisions. If that person is encumbered with relatively routine but demanding work, they actually shortchange the organization of their true value. If the VP of Finance is spending a lot of time working on a technology problem, they're not just working on technology - they're also NOT WORKING on financial matters).

Another common mistake that IT pros make when managing a portfolio is failing at delegation. IT pros, as I mentioned earlier, are usually most successful when they’re a strong individual contributor. They’re used to being judged on their own technical skill. They’re not used to being judged on the success of a team. Consequently, inexperienced directors frequently under-delegate and/or under-communicate which leaves volunteers feeling unwanted and unimportant. In the same vein, directors may act rudely to their committee members or other volunteers, or may simply treat them like employees –definitely not the way to treat a volunteer. This behavior is like torching your own support network. Volunteers can quickly become demoralized, or even quit, when they feel unproductive or unwanted.

Axiom: As a smart director of a portfolio, it is better to focus on business outcomes and the success of the team than it is to perform the detailed work yourself.

Wisdom

Dictionary.com tells me that wisdom is “knowledge of what is true or right coupled with just judgment as to action”. Money cannot buy wisdom. It can only be earned through many years of manifold experiences. Some young people are wise and insightful, but frankly it’s usually the grey-headed types who’ve usually lived through enough dumb decisions to recognize when a pattern in a social situation or set of human behaviors is being repeated. A great example of wisdom on the PASS board comes from the two CA representatives who sit on the board, Neil Buchwalter and Rick Bolesta. In addition to serving on the PASS board for perhaps longer than any other sitting board member, they’ve also both sat on other boards before and concurrently with the PASS board. Their stability, deep history, and analysis of the interplay between people (or groups of people) are extremely important to the successful workings of the board.

You might thing, based on what I’ve said described about wisdom, that a wise director is prone to pontificate and engage in long-winded discourse. Nothing could be further from the truth in my experience. The typical wise director tends to be brief, interjecting comments and thoughts of great weight and importance. What they say is usually worth careful consideration. Conversely, directors who spend a lot of time talking are often the least worth listening to. Many long-winded directors often use discussion to figure out what it is they really think about a given situation. Wise directors already know what they think and, when the speak, produce fully formed thoughts and arguments in a given situation.

In some cases, a BoD can help build institutional wisdom through diversity. As I mentioned earlier, wisdom is earned through experiences (usually bad experiences). When the members of a governing body like a BoD are young and/or inexperienced, they can supplement their breadth of experiences by selecting members of a variety of background, ethnicities, nationalities, ideologies, orientation, etc. This broaden of perspective raises the quality of dialog, helps identify problems and issues in policy discussion, and helps to foresee major obstacles on the horizon.

Axiom: Wisdom and insight are crucial in building a base of institutional knowledge, context for key decisions, and insight into the highest-probability for success in socially complex situations.

If you’re involved in a governing body of some kind or are considering volunteering with PASS (or any other BoD for a professional association), do a little introspection. Do you possess one or more of the three W’s? Or do you have big dreams or a burning ember of ambition? What do you need to learn to equip yourself with one of the W’s?

Let me know what you think!

-Kevin

ITPro, Re-architect Your Life

KKline — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 14:21:00 GMT

Have you ever found yourself wanting to make a major shift - in skills, in roles, in relationships? One of my good friends, Jimmy May (Blog | Twitter), accomplished a set of major career and lifestyle revisions including relocating to Redmond, taking on a huge new level of job responsibility as part of the Microsoft SQL Customer Advisory Team, and achieving the noted accreditation of Microsoft Certified Master.

Jimmy and I were chatting about undertaking major life changes like these and, as is often the case, his thoughts were too good not to share. Be sure to explore these excellent career development resources. So here were some great pointers from Jimmy:

I’ve referred you before to J.D. Meier. Incredibly powerful guy. Here are some brief yet powerful posts:
What’s the Challenge?
http://sourcesofinsight.com/2011/06/24/whats-the-challenge
101 Ways to Motivate Yourself and Others
http://sourcesofinsight.com/101-ways-to-motivate-yourself-and-others/

Want more?
30 Days of Getting Results
http://sourcesofinsight.com/30-days-of-getting-results
Take a Tour of Sources of Insight
http://sourcesofinsight.com/2011/06/21/take-a-tour-of-sources-of-insight
Still not enough? Here are his three blogs:
www.sourcesofinsight.com
www.gettingresults.com
http://blogs.msdn.com/jmeier

Let me know what other resources you enjoy for professional and career development!

And if you're really interested in developing your IT leadership and management skills, I encourage you to attend my Leadership Skills for IT Professionals seminar. I'm presenting this full-day seminar in Dallas at the SQLRally on May 8, and in Louisville at SQL Saturday 122 on June 19. Hope to see you there!

Thanks,

-Kev

-Follow me on Twitter at @KEKline

Leaking Money?

merrillaldrich — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 02:00:18 GMT

Does Your Group Spend Too Much or Too Little?

I haven’t been blogging much this winter, as I’ve been buried under a fairly complicated an ugly upgrade project, which, I’m happy to say, is behind me now. There was one notion that kept coming back to me during that project that I thought I’d share. It seems obvious, but it’s an idea that it seems many IT groups have difficulty discussing or making intentional, informed decisions about: that is the idea of “good enough.” If an IT system is a key part of your business, it’s important to realize, and then make purchasing and staffing decisions on, an accurate notion of what level of quality you really need. Consider this (admittedly crude) diagram:

To the left on the bottom axis we have something approaching the perfectly engineered system: no flaws, perfect redundancy, perfect uptime, infinitely expensive. Near here is where I would expect NASA to want to be for manned spaceflight. Perhaps the engineers of an atomic clock, or, sadly, an atomic bomb. This land is spendy, and hopefully the systems created here are near perfect.

To the right we have junk-ola. Systems that need a huge amount of hand-holding by IT staff, that are prone to break down in both routine and new, unexpected ways. These are the systems that page people all the time (or, worse, don’t page people and should.) These certainly were cheap to put together. Someone probably thought they would save money.

On the y-axis we have cost, higher at the top. The curve represents the planned, expected and visible cost of a project or a piece of IT infrastructure. Approaching perfection gets to be expensive, and the closer you get to perfect the faster the cost rises. This is why, for example, going from zero-nines to two nines in uptime is expensive, but going from that to three and then to four forces cost up dramatically. As we go to the right, we start to buy or build junk, and things look cheaper. Obviously clever people can bend this curve to get better systems for less, which is great, but as a rule this pattern holds true. Fairly obvious, I think.

The Hidden Cost of Junk

Here’s the detail that I find true in many shops, which is much harder for people to talk about:

As you move to the left on the graph, attaining high quality generally means things like planning, testing, development, schedules, manpower, fixes, careful deployment – all of it planned into the project with a cost assigned. The cost goes into budgets and estimates and gets scrutiny and conversation. In some places that also means it gets canceled, trimmed, cut back, edited, sent back to “sharpen the pencil.” Such is the nature of “visible cost.”

As we move to that left boundary, the idea that things will entail a lot of operational handholding and unexpected expense goes down. NASA, for example, would not launch the shuttle (back when NASA did that) and then, once in orbit, have to run out and unexpectedly hire a bunch of expensive consultants to see if they can figure out how to land it. One assumes they had worked that out ahead of time, and spent planned dollars to do so. The dashed line for hidden/unexpected cost should go way down as we build highly-engineered systems.

Over on the right, though, is a familiar place for a lot of businesses: a company buys some system, service or software on the cheap, hopeful about the original price tag, and then finds themselves trapped in a vortex of unexpected costs: to fix it, to keep it running, to manually execute tedious monkey work required due to missing features. In short, they spend a huge number of either man-hours, opportunity cost while the system is down, customer good will or consulting dollars, trying to repair something with an artificially low up-front cost. Most of the time there is also a strange psychology in play where they keep hoping against hope that they will still save money and be able to stop doing that. Often the idea of changing out the system seems prohibitively expensive and difficult.

So, where should we be? In the happy place, if possible:

The happy place is where we didn’t spend too much for extravagant, gold-plated systems that overreach what the company really needed – like a five-nines, always on system for workers that use it from 8 to 5. The happy place also is where we don’t spend thousands of hours (time is money) trying to force some piece of junk to keep running, where it isn’t up to the task, and in the process leak dollars day and night, paying people to do non-productive work that doesn’t move the organization forward.

The happy place is in a different spot based on your business. You might really need to have 24x7 always-on redundant systems. Or perhaps not. But it’s key that the leadership in your team:

Knows about this graph
Does not have some strange fantasy about where you really are on this graph
Has the right strategic vision to put you in the right place on this graph

I am very lucky to have a great job in a place that I think understands this – though every team, I think, has disagreements or times when this is hard to articulate.

Entropy Pushes to the Right

Another powerful sense I had in the last two months is that in IT, when you are an FTE inside a business, systems naturally, relentlessly, slide to the right on this graph. As a DBA or a system administrator, I find that one of the most important strategic roles I can play is always to push things to the left, just to counteract their natural slide to the right.

Here’s what happens: company buys a system that is sort of OK, and kind of meets their needs. But Jim in department X finds this little piece unworkable, and customizes, and Sue in department Y would like a little adjustment over here, then Dave in Ops makes an ad-hoc job for Sheila the VP, and on and on. The intern in HR learns a little ~~Access~~ Reporting Services and makes a bunch of “useful” widgets. Each small band-aid looks great in isolation, but over time they accrete into this Rube Goldberg machinery around the system. This is practically an irresistible force.

So, what to do? Those people need those changes to be productive. It can really help their jobs and mental state to work around flaws with the software (which are there, really.) The best I can come up with is to try to always make the little tactical moves add up to a strategy that counteracts the inevitable right-ward slide to Junk-dom.

Always attempt to apply best practices, even in apparently small situations.
Document.
Realize that everything we make is probably permanent. People very rarely go back and fix things, really. If something really does end up temporary, then rejoice in the exception.
Try to make the tactical moves fit into some larger architecture that has some staying power, and won’t just become a pain to maintain later on.

How about you? When budgeting decisions look baffling, or you can’t get approval to purchase something you need, is it really because your team is moving across this chart? Going the right direction or the wrong direction?

T-SQL Tuesday #25 : T-SQL Tips 'n' Tricks

AaronBertrand — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 18:50:00 GMT

This month's T-SQL Tuesday is being hosted by Allen White (@SQLRunr) and is about sharing your T-SQL tips and tricks. Since I know many people will share their T-SQL magic and wizardry, I thought I would share a couple of productivity tips - so still T-SQL related, but more how to take advantage of some features in SSMS.

Drag column list onto your query window

Whenever I give my Bad Habits to Kick presentation, I remind people that - even if they're not using 3rd party code completion tools (many of which offer SELECT * expansion) - there's little excuse to use SELECT *. This is because Management Studio makes it very easy to list out all of your columns in one motion. I'm always amazed when I ask how many people didn't already know about this - and most times it's more than half the room.

The process is quite simple - expand your table, click on the Columns node, drag it onto your query window and let go:

Now, it's probably not in the exact format you want, it won't properly delimit any [keyword] or [reserved word] you use for a column name, and you'll have to do this multiple times when you're performing a join (and you'll have to add your own table/alias prefixes to each column as well). But I'd rather spend time using TAB and ENTER to correct formatting than to try and type out all the column names individually.

Use snippets

If you find yourself writing the same type of code over and over again, the new snippets feature in SQL Server 2012 will likely be very useful for you. What does this have over templates? For one, I find it much easier to use once you have your snippets created. There is no hokey VB6-style dialog to perform token replacements, and you can actually store all your custom snippets in a network location - so if you want to enforce coding standards you have a fighting chance by pointing everyone's SSMS at the same snippet location. I'll be honest, though, setting up the template is a bit of a pain - you need to hand-massage XML manually because as of yet there is no easy way to generate these from within Management Studio. But once they're in place, they're very easy to work with. Just right-click within the query window, choose "Insert Snippet", and follow the rabbit:

One of the pieces of code I write a lot for administrative tasks (or for helping folks out in the wild) is a cursor. I tend to have a hard time memorizing the options I always try to use to make a cursor as efficient as possible (something else I cover in my Bad Habits to Kick presentation). The snippet eliminates this problem. Once I've selected the "Declare Cursor" snippet I've saved, I get the following in my query window:

You'll notice in the diagram that "c" is currently highlighted and the cursor is there; all other instances of "c" are lightly outlined. I can type any name I want to overwrite "c" and, once I hit tab (which moves me to the next token), it will replace all instances of that token with the new name I've typed. So this is a little easier to work with than the floating window in templates, though you lose this easy editing capability if you start doing other things with the script first (need to remind myself to file a bug or suggestion about that). Changing "c" to "x" throughout this code sample took two keystrokes, and I'm ready to add the actual query:

I plan to write a much more thorough blog post on the snippets feature, because I think it will become a pretty popular time saver once the latest version of Management Studio becomes more common on the desktop. In the meantime, if you're already playing with SQL Server 2012 RC0, I highly recommend you check this feature out!

Avoid dynamic SQL in generated scripts

I see a lot of people complain that when they script objects from Management Studio the object text ends up in dynamic SQL. I don't blame them - this makes it very cumbersome to read, never mind modify, the object text before copying, running or saving the script.

In SQL Server 2008 R2, this is controlled by the option Tools > Options > SQL Server Object Explorer> Scripting > Include IF NOT EXISTS clause:

In SQL Server 2012, the option has changed slightly to Tools > Options > SQL Server Object Explorer > Scripting > Check for Object Existence:

Why did it change? Because, depending on the action, it actually performs an IF EXISTS check (e.g. for a DROP or ALTER), not always an IF NOT EXISTS check (for a CREATE). Some background in the following Connect items:

http://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/242799

http://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/264310

http://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/624075

(As an aside, I think it's funny that they call the options category "SQL Server Object Explorer" - good thing they're specific, because you might get it confused with the Lego Object Explorer, Oracle Object Explorer or Windows Explorer Object Explorer.)

In any case, when these options are set to True, the scripts you generate often yield dynamic SQL, and even when they're set to false they still sometimes perform the check for existence (specifically in 2008 R2). Here is a brief wireframe of the options and how they affect each scripting method:

Note that with the "DROP and CREATE" option, the existence check for the CREATE is unnecessary - after all, if the object already exists, the script should have just dropped the object (though both checks may have failed if there is an object with the same name that is *not* a procedure). In general, most people won't want to perform a DROP and CREATE anyway - they lose dependencies and permissions when they do this (though permissions can be scripted with a different option in the same category). Until they develop "CREATE or REPLACE" functionality (please vote and comment!), ideally you should have a script that creates a stub for the object only if it doesn't already exist, then runs an ALTER - then you don't have to re-apply permissions, you don't have to worry about whether the object already exists, and as an added bonus you retain dependency chains. So your scripts can look like this (still using dynamic SQL, but it's very simple and doesn't present parsing or reading issues):

IF OBJECT_ID('dbo.proc_name') IS NULL
BEGIN
    EXEC sp_executesql N'CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.proc_name AS SELECT 1;';
END
GO

ALTER PROCEDURE dbo.proc_name
AS
... -- actual script body from source control or elsewhere goes here

Unfortunately there is no way to train SSMS to do this today, unless you write a scripting add-in.

Wrapping up

I hope that at least one of these little tricks helps you in some way. It's always fun participating in T-SQL Tuesday, even if I'm often trying to bend the rules a little bit.

Must-Have Resources - SQL Server Backup & Recovery

KKline — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 20:36:00 GMT

One of the things that drives me crazy as I'm getting older is that my brain is losing the capacity to differentiate version numbers. As I speak travel around speaking with customers and at conferences, I find my self saying things like "I can't recall if this problem was fixed in SQL Server 2000 or 2005. But you don't have to worry about that any more." Or things like "That feature was added in SQL Server 2008 R2, eh, or was that version 6.5. DOH!" followed by a loud slapping sound as I whap my palm into my forehead. 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:

Other Good Sources

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