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• Enjoy Portland SQL Saturday without me

  - by merrillaldrich

  I was incredibly psyched to go to SQL Saturday #27 in Portland, but alas Sunday is my older son Will's birthday, and I can't manage both events in the same weekend. Chalk it up to work-life balance. Anyway, if you are going, have a great time! And maybe I'll see you in Redmond on June 12. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!...(read more)

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• Why Hekaton In-Memory OLTP Truly is Revolutionary

  - by merrillaldrich

  I just returned from the PASS Summit in Charlotte, NC – which was excellent, among the best I have attended – and I have had Dr. David DeWitt’s talk rolling around in my head since he gave it on Thursday. (Dr. DeWitt starts at 27:00 at that link.) I probably cannot do it justice, but I wanted to recap why Hekaton really is revolutionary, and not just a marketing buzzword. I am normally skeptical of product announcements, and I find too often that real technical innovation can be overwhelmed by the...(read more)

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• OT: Improbable use for an iPad?

  - by merrillaldrich

  Here's an interesting tidbit: I have noticed an even more pronounced trend toward centralized or virtual workstations lately. Both my wife and I can sit at home, as we are now, at the dining room table and work on our laptops (exciting life, I know!) but both of us are not actually working locally on these machines. We are both remoting into machines at our respective workplaces. Hers is a desktop machine physically located at her desk, while mine is a virtual workstation in my company's data center...(read more)

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• Windows Server 2003 network boogey men every DBA should know

  - by merrillaldrich

  Recently I was again visited by my old friends TCP Chimney and SynAttackProtect . (Yeah, sometimes I feel like I mostly blog about 5-year old problems, but many of us as DBA's have to work on older versions or older systems, and so repeat older problems :-). This has been written about before, but as I BinGoogled around I noticed you are more likely to find the documents if you search for the cause, and not the symptoms. Most people who face a problem, of course, know the symptoms but not the cause....(read more)

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• SCOM, 90 Days In, I

  - by merrillaldrich

  At my office we’re about 90 days into our implementation of System Center Operations Manager for Windows Server and SQL Server monitoring. All in all it’s been a good experience, and I’m really excited to have access to this tool. I’ve logged a fair number of years as a DBA on products like Idera’s SQL Diagnostic Manager and Quest Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise (and “roll-your-own” solutions) in smaller environments, and liked them, but they always, in my experience, struggled with really large...(read more)

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• T-SQL Tuesday #19: Blind Spots

  - by merrillaldrich

  A while ago I wrote a post, Visualize Disaster , prompted by a real incident we had at my office. Fortunately we came through it OK from a business point of view, but I took away an important lesson: it’s very easy, whether your organization and your team is savvy about disaster recovery or not, to have significant blind spots with regard to recovery in the face of some large, unexpected outage. We have very clear direction and decent budgets to work with, and the safety and recoverability of applications...(read more)

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• Worst code I've written in a while

  - by merrillaldrich

  Here's a nice, compact bit of WTF-ery I had to write for a prod issue today: Again: UPDATE TOP ( 1 ) dbo . someTable SET field3 = 'NEW' WHERE field2 = 'NEW' AND field3 = '' IF @@ROWCOUNT > 0 GOTO Again Can you guess from the code what awesomesauce issues I was working around? This was a reminder for me that sometimes there is time to do it right, but sometimes you just have to do it now. I need that lesson sometimes, as I tend to be a perfectionist. If you are trying to do it right , please don't...(read more)

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• POSH-y SQL Disk Space Monitoring

  - by merrillaldrich

  In a prior post I expressed my dismay that apparently Operations Manager (which I dig in other respects) has no love for SQL Server storage that uses mount points. Herewith, henceforth, forthwith is a PowerShell workaround I am using until I find out I am wrong, or there’s a management pack fix. The crux of the issue, I think, is that SQL Server itself has basically no visibility to the disks mounted using mount points, and that blind spot carries through to the management pack. That much is well...(read more)

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• Presenting Beginning PowerShell at SQL Saturday 149 MN

  - by merrillaldrich

  I am happy to be presenting a session on beginning PowerShell for DBAs at my new home town’s SQL Saturday! (I moved from Seattle to Saint Paul, MN a short time ago.) I will be sharpening this presentation up to make sure anyone who comes will not go away empty handed. BTW, WOW, the schedule is up and I must admit I did not expect nine tracks of awesome. This looks amazing. My session is geared toward helping those DBAs who have not seen PowerShell, or perhaps may find PowerShell syntax opaque or...(read more)

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• CIOs: Stop Mandating Training

  - by merrillaldrich

  I love to learn about new technology, and I especially love a long deep-dive technical session with a real expert or a well-crafted, inches thick technical book. Even if either one is expensive. Learning is probably my favorite thing to do. Yet I stand before you with an appeal: Stop “sending people to training.” Why would I say such a thing? Because failure is baked right into that very phrase: “sending people to training.” Death by Training Most of us in the IT world have probably experienced this...(read more)

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• T-SQL Tuesday #028: Whaddya Mean, “Not Your Job?”

  - by merrillaldrich

  This T-SQL Tuesday, hosted by Argenis Fernandez ( Blog | Twitter ) is devoted to the question, “Are you a Jack-of-all-Trades? Or a specialist?” This question really hits home for me, on a number of levels. (Aside: I have huge respect for Argenis – he’s smart, funny, no-nonsense, very accomplished. If you don’t follow him, do.) If you have read any of my previous ramblings on this blog, you may know I was originally educated as an architect – the bricks and mortar kind, not the information systems...(read more)

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• New Project Starting. Got Gas?

  - by merrillaldrich

  “Storage is just like gasoline,” said a fellow DBA at the office the other day. This DBA, Mike is his name, is one of the smartest people I know, so I pressed him, in my subtle and erudite way, to elaborate. “Um, whut?” I said. “Yeah. Now that everything is shared – VMs or consolidated SQL Servers and shared storage – if you want to do a big project, like, say, drive to Vegas, you better fill the car with gas. Drive back and forth to work every day? Gas. Same for storage.” This was a light-bulb-above-my-head...(read more)

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• Speaker Prep Tip: Use the AV Studio Built into that Laptop

  - by merrillaldrich

  Over at erinstellato.com there is a great post this week about tips for new presenters. Ms. Stellato suggests, insightfully, that we record ourselves, which is really a fantastic piece of advice. What’s extra-cool is that today you don’t need any special equipment or expensive software to do just that. This week I “filmed” two run-throughs of my talk for SQL Saturday tomorrow. For me, the timing is the hardest thing – figuring out how much content I can really present in the time allowed without...(read more)

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• T-SQL Tuesday #028: Whaddya Mean, “Not Your Job?”

  - by merrillaldrich

  This T-SQL Tuesday, hosted by Argenis Fernandez ( Blog | Twitter ) is devoted to the question, “Are you a Jack-of-all-Trades? Or a specialist?” This question really hits home for me, on a number of levels. (Aside: I have huge respect for Argenis – he’s smart, funny, no-nonsense, very accomplished. If you don’t follow him, do.) If you have read any of my previous ramblings on this blog, you may know I was originally educated as an architect – the bricks and mortar kind, not the information systems...(read more)

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• Server Migration Checklist

  - by merrillaldrich

  During the past six months or so I have had to manage quite a lot of SQL Server migration/consolidation, and with each effort I’ve refined a checklist to try to make things go more smoothly. I just hate getting that call after a migration where something unexpected is broken :-). What follows is imperfect, but I thought I’d throw it up here anyway, if only as a starting point for other people. Some basic assumptions: I have been moving SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition and SQL Server 2000 data, so...(read more)

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• T-SQL Tuesday #34: HELP!

  - by merrillaldrich

  I owe my career to the SQL Server community, specifically the Internet SQL Server community, so this month’s T-SQL Tuesday is especially poignant. I changed careers “cold” about eight years ago, and, while I had some educational background in computer science, I had relatively little real-world DBA experience. Someone gave me a shot in the form of an entry level job, for which I am grateful, but I also had to make the argument to him that I would figure out whatever I needed to do to be successful...(read more)

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• One Database or Ten?

  - by merrillaldrich

  In my career to date I’ve worked as a DBA for mainly “buy don’t build” scenarios. One advantage - and hair-graying problem, if I am honest - has been that I think I’ve seen upward of one or two hundred different ISV-provided applications’ SQL Server databases. It’s a great learning opportunity, as I can see successes and failures in a large variety of designs, and sort of “fast-forward” to version five or eight of a given design pattern to see things like whether it scales, or has storage problems,...(read more)

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• STOP! Wrong Server!

  - by merrillaldrich

  Some time ago I wrote a post about old-time T-SQL flow control . Part of the idea was to illustrate how to make scripts abort on errors, which is surprisingly convoluted in T-SQL. Today I have a more specific example: how can I check that we are really about to execute in the right database on the right server, and halt if not. Perhaps you’ve connected to the wrong server, or the database you intend to modify doesn’t have the name your script expected. “USE database” is wonderful, but what if it...(read more)

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