2010 May | Facility9

May 2010
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How Much Space Am I Taking Up?

May 27, ’10 8:00 AM

Are you running out of space? Filling up drives? Don’t know where to go? Is your SAN administrator complaining about your continued demands for more spindles? Do you need to juggle databases around on different servers but don’t know how you’re going to figure out the size of your index, table, and materialized view filegroups as well as the filegroups you’ve created for every schema just to piss off the DBA?

Take a step back and relax. I’ve got it covered.

-- i hate you too, temp table
IF OBJECT_ID(N'tempdb..#db_files') IS NOT NULL
  DROP TABLE #db_files ;

-- load up the temp table
SELECT  DB_NAME([dbid]) AS database_name ,
        [filename] ,
        UPPER(LEFT([filename], 1)) AS drive_letter ,
        ( size * 8 ) / 1024 AS size_in_mb
INTO    #db_files
FROM    sys.sysaltfiles AS saf
ORDER BY saf.[dbid]

-- how full is each drive?
SELECT  drive_letter ,
        SUM(size_in_mb) AS size_in_mb
FROM    #db_files AS df
GROUP BY drive_letter
ORDER BY drive_letter ;

-- how big is each database?
SELECT  COALESCE(database_name, 'RESOURCE DB') AS database_name ,
        SUM(size_in_mb) AS size_in_mb
FROM    #db_files AS df
GROUP BY database_name
ORDER BY database_name ;

-- what do the details look like?
SELECT  database_name ,
        [filename] ,
        size_in_mb
FROM    #db_files ;

Comments (9)

Better When You’re Not Alone

May 24, ’10 8:00 AM

In the last month, I’ve gone to three different concerts – once by myself and twice with a friend. They’ve all been great shows, but for different reasons.

The show I went to alone was one of my favorite bands. It was a great show, I had a great time and ran into a few old acquaintances, but it was still awkward being there alone: I didn’t know anyone and it’s hard to make new friends at a loud concert.

The next two shows, I went with friends. The experience was completely different. When you’re hanging out at a show with a friend, there’s a lot of shared fun that goes on. Everything is more entertaining. When a song is really good, you both notice it, you comment on it. Afterwards you have someone to talk to about the experience. What you witnessed gets better because there’s someone else to share the experience. For the record, I really didn’t like the most recent concert I went to. It was an average performance, but I had a good time. Why? I was there with a friend.

Going to user groups and conferences is the same way. It’s better if you already know someone, but what if you don’t?

I’m a naturally shy person and an introvert. I prefer one-on-one interaction to large groups of people. At the same time, when I go to a SQL Saturday, speak at a user group, or attend a conference I go out of my way to meet new people.

Why am I going out of my way to meet new people? Because odds are that I don’t know anyone at an event and if I don’t know someone, chances are that there are other people present who don’t know anyone. If you have a good time, you’re more likely to do something again, right? And, if you know somebody it’s easier to have fun, right?

I’m making new friends, having more fun, and we’re all more likely to do this again.

The next time you’re at a user group meeting, SQL Saturday, or a conference, take the time to make a friend. I guarantee that you’ll have fun.

Comments (1)

The Key is…

May 17, ’10 8:30 AM

It was a typical Saturday afternoon in Blacklick. The day had gone well – I had entertained a number of guests with some of my uproarious tales, a short self-penned one act opera, and a round of polo using burros instead of horses.

The classiest entertainment for the classiest people

After having one of my many servants clean the burro “leavings” from the polo field, we began setting up for the afternoon games – we mainly play lawn darts. The neighbors complained after their poodles went missing, but I informed them that there was no way I could hit a poodle in their lawn from my lawn because I have tried on a number of occasions but we were bear baiting last weekend and the bear got out and I hid under my car for an hour so I’m not really sure what happened to the poodle.

Does this thing play Spellicopter?

Long story short of it, we were rudely interrupted when the neighbor with the missing poodles brought over a misdelivered, but clearly addressed, package. I opened it and, to my surprise I found a strange key sealed in a clear material. With a note from my good friend, Lord Trololo of Ozar. I tried to open it with my hands, but it wouldn’t budge.

This is less than flattering, but I need that key!

I must have the key. It was taunting me, humiliating me in front my guests.

I'm sorry it's had to come to this, key.

When I finally opened the key, I found that it was a device of the USBs. Knowing that Lord Trololo frequently listens to the melodies of Lady Gaga, I attempted to plug my stereophonic headset into the USBs key that he had sent me. ALAS, TWAS NOT MEANT TO BE!

Nary a bad romance to be found

Thank you, BrentO. I wish I could be at TechEd to trololo with you. It was not meant to be… this year.

Comments (4)

iPhones, Robots, and Cookies

May 11, ’10 9:00 AM

I traded my iPhone for a batch of cookies. That’s right: one white iPhone 3GS was traded for a batch of cookies. This has been a long time coming.

My Growing Disappointment

I’ve had an iPhone since Apple first unleashed them on unsuspecting consumers. I was happy with the first generation iPhone. I was even happier with my iPhone 3GS. It was fast, I could download applications, and everything integrated smoothly with the software on my MacBook.

Over the last six months, my disappointment has grown. There was no good way to sync my contacts between the iPhone and Google without some irritating third party add-ons for the Apple Address Book on my Mac. The same problems applied to my calendars – I could either have up to date calendars on Google or on my laptop. It was possible to sync everything using webcal (WebDAV for calendars), but it was not an optimal solution. Heck, I couldn’t even open a calendar invitation sent to my phone even though Apple wrote the original specification.

In order to sync third party applications with the apps on my computer, I had to manually sync each application. That’s not that bad when you only have one application, but once it starts growing you start to forget which apps you have and haven’t synced up – maintaining your external brain shouldn’t be a huge trial. Smart phones are supposed to make our lives easier. Instead I found myself doing more work to keep things up to date than I really liked. It wasn’t a ton of work, but it was still extra work.

Enter John

What does John have to do with this? Well, John Keyes (twitter) and I were talking on Friday. He pulled out his phone and I started asking him questions. John had an HTC Incredible. I’d never used an Android phone before and I wanted to take a look.

After just a few minutes I was really impressed with John’s phone. To be honest, I called around to a number of Verizon stores just to make sure I could get my stinky little hands on an HTC Incredible.

Fancy Robots

First impressions of Android on the Incredible – this is really nice. Some of the earlier Android phones were rough around the edges and I didn’t expect things to be as polished an iPhone. I was right: things weren’t quite as polished as the iPhone but they were really close. The icons were consistent, things were fairly smooth scrolling between the main application screens. Things got a little bit slow scrolling through the list of all programs, but it was nowhere near as bad as I’ve witnessed on other Droid phones.

Multitasking was a really nice change from the iPhone. I was able to stream music through last.fm, check my email, and chat on gtalk at the same time. Sure, I don’t normally use my phone like a computer, but because of the multitasking it was easy to accomplish some pretty cool things – I streamed music through last.fm while using my phone to get directions.

Getting Set Up

In order to get all of my calendar appointments on my phone, I exported them from iCal and then imported them into Google calendar. In a few minutes, everything was down on my phone. Completely and totally. I split everything into separate calendars. I even sent myself a meeting invitation from my work email to my phone and I was able to accept the appointment and it showed up on my calendar.

For three years I haven’t been able to accept a simple appointment on my phone. It was such a welcome relief to be able to see and accept an appointment on my phone and then have it show up in my calendar.

Contacts syncing was a bit hairier because Google doesn’t support contact synchronization from an exteral source (my address book) if there are multiple contacts with the same primary email address. This process has been manual but well worth it. I’ve culled about 300 contacts from my contact list. You know how Google will create a contact for anybody you’ve ever emailed or who has ever emailed you? Yeah, I have about 1,000 contacts like that. It makes you laugh and think you’re popular until you try to dial a phone number have to scroll through 14 pages of ‘\/1agra peni5 c0cks’ before you get to someone named Aaron. Thankfully it’s pretty easy to delete a giant pile of dong from Gmail’s contact manager (one of the few things it gets right), so my contact list was free of unwanted penises in no time.

The Rest of the Internet

One of the coolest things that I’ve found so far is that the phone has synced up my contacts from Facebook as well as the contacts I have in Google. I’ve been able to link them up so that I don’t have three or four entries for a single person in my phone. I can just tap their name and have all of their contact information immediately available.

Browsing has been great. Since Verizon’s 3G network is allegedly the best in the universe, I decided to put Verizon’s tubes to the test. I streamed last.fm in my car between Cinci and Columbus. I would routinely lose any form of signal on AT&T’s network. Instead of losing signal, I was able to listen to some of my favorite music while finding new music. Uncanny. The experience of browsing the internet has been remarkably similar. I suspect that both run similar builds of WebKit optimized for a mobile device. Either way, it works and it works well.

It Works and It Works Well

At the end of the day, that’s what I have to say about this HTC Incredible: It works and it works well.

Is it as polished as the iPhone? I’m not sure. As I get used to the phone, I think that it might be as polished as the iPhone, just different. Things work in a way that makes sense to me. Settings are accessed through each application and not a global settings menu. Applications are consistent.

I am, on the whole, quite pleased.

Comments (11)

What I Do At PASS

May 5, ’10 10:00 AM

I haven’t blogged about what I do on the Board of Directors until now. I didn’t think people would be interested in it because there are times when it’s not the most thrilling thing on earth to me – ask your manager to describe the most thrilling part of his job, I guarantee that it isn’t going to be “getting into fights with panthers.” Just in case you don’t know, I’m on the PASS Board of Directors where I am currently the director in charge of the program for the annual Summit. I have expanded that portfolio (using the jaws of life and about 85 gallons of expanding marine epoxy) to include education in general. When I’m not working on the PASS Summit I’m making school children read Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2008: T-SQL Programming.

Here’s what I do during my week.

Program Committee

PASS Summit Planning HQ

The PASS Program Committee is the group of people that work to bring you the sessions at the PASS Summit. There are a lot of volunteers involved in the entire process, but Allen Kinsel and Lori Edwards help out on a weekly basis. Many of you know Allen from his previous involvement with the PASS Program Committee. Lori came on board this year to help out running a lot of the projects and teams that come up around the program selection process.

What do we do, exactly? Well, we have a conference call every week. On this conference call we (Allen, Lori, and Elena and Craig from PASS HQ) work through the processes and challenges around the PASS Summit. This year we’ve done a lot of work around changing the vendor we partner with for the abstract submission process.

There are a number of smaller committees for each of the session tracks and pre/post conference sessions. In order to get everything working, we had to re-work the handbook for each of the committees to use to select abstracts. The handbook is designed to help everyone select the best abstracts and outline all of the processes used to select the abstracts.

After the phone call I usually go down to Don Pablo’s for a rockin’ good time.

Certifications

One of the things that I took on when I was elected to the Board of Directors was working on the certification process. A lot of people have expressed dissatisfaction with the current situation. I’ve started working with Microsoft Learning on ways to make the process better. So far we’ve had a few conference calls, emails, and I’ve spoken with a few people in the community about this whole process.

This is slow going, it takes a lot of time and effort to look at what people want, put it together in a meaningful fashion, and then build a plan of action. I know that there’s some frustration in the community around this, I’ve read the forum post on SQL Server Central, I’ve talked to you guys at SQL Saturdays, and I’ve traded emails back and forth. If you want to get involved or if you’ve got an opinion, shoot me an email or sound off in the comments.

Speaking

There are a lot of people in the community who would like to share what they know. But they don’t. I’ve thought a lot about why people don’t get up and share what they know. The best way for me to think about it is to remember how I got started.

I first got started presenting several years ago at a previous job. We held regular lunch and learn sessions because it’s a good way to get people together and it’s a good way to share what you know. After a lunch and learn the organizer would sit down with the presenter and go over the results of the evaluation. This was incredibly helpful. The organizer might not have been an expert presenter, but then again I’m not an expert presenter either. The important part is that someone was there to help me and guide me through those early, introductory, steps.

Where is this leading? I’m not sure yet. Elena, my counterpart at PASS HQ, and I are working on some ideas that we think will bring a lot to the table and give everyone the opportunity to contribute and learn.

Summary

So, there you have it – this is what I do in the 10+ hours a week I spend working on all of my Boardly (Directorish?) duties. It’s a lot like middle management but without the pay or corporate parking spot.