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.

Update: It’s completely remiss of me not to tag the person who tagged me. Carey Payette singled me out this year. I can’t say enough great things about her community involvement and the time she puts in to running the Central Ohio dot Net Developers Group.

Mladen Prajdić – Mladen is slowly becoming better known in the SQL Server community, in large part because of SSMS Tools Pack. What many people don’t realize is that Mladen is a phenomenal SQL developer in his own right and is more than happy to share that knowledge via twitter and email. He even braved the time zone difference (he lives in Slovenia) and presented for the PASS Application Development virtual chapter. He is easily able to explain complex concepts and has always been more than happy to share his knowledge with others.

Thomas LaRock – Tom helps out PASS as a member of the Board of Directors. He helps out the community as an active blogger and twitterer. Outside of blogging and tweeting, Tom is always a phenomenal voice of reason and is able to see both sides of a situation – both as a developer/DBA and from the perspective of business users.

Michelle Ufford – Michelle is a developer DBA with GoDaddy.com and an active member of the SQL Server community. In addition to being a blogger, she is heavily involved in the I380 Corridor PASS chapter, organizing the East Iowa SQL Saturday, and maintaining her index maintenance scripts at SQL Server Pedia. Michelle is active on twitter as sqlfool and is always willing to help out with SQL questions. Michelle has also been working heavily to start up the Performance virtual chapter for PASS.

Brent Ozar – Brent’s involvement in the SQL Server community never ceases to amaze. He blogs prolifically on his personal website, is the Editor-in-Chief of SQL Server Pedia, is building up the Virtualization virtual chapter of PASS, records podcasts, presents for user groups both in person and remotely, and is very active on twitter as BrentO. Brent is incredibly knowledgable about SQL Server, SAN configuration, T-SQL, and server consolidation and virtualization. He has always taken the time to help me understand SQL Server concepts and has guided my knoweldge as I’ve been learning more about performance tuning SQL Server and the underlying OS and disk structure.

All of these people happily contribute their knowledge and free time to make the SQL Server community a better place.

This is going to be my second PASS Summit, so I’m not an expert on picking sessions, but I have an idea based on what worked well last year. Last year, I had an exhaustive list of sessions picked out. Then, when I arrived at the Summit I marked them all on my program, which I promptly lost. Brent was kind enough to give me his program. I drew stick people on it. I also didn’t attend a lot of the sessions I was planning on attending.

1. I grossly underestimated my own abilities and ended up leaving sessions because I thought I could gain a lot. Don’t underestimate yourself. Challenge yourself. Pick sessions that you think there’s no way you can understand them. I attended Jimmy May’s presentation on Disk Partition Alignment with Brent. I thought I would be completely lost. Then I realized that a lot of the low-level disk information bore at least a passing similarity to inode structures in the ext2/ext3 family of file systems on Linux systems. Once I translated that knowledge I was able to follow along, roughly, and be challenged in my thinking.
2. A lot of very smart, really great people gave me suggestions on sessions to attend. The friends I made at PASS helped me find sessions that would better fit what I wanted to learn about. They were right.

What am I going to different this year to make sure that I get the most out of the Summit? How can you do the same?

1. Ask someone who has the job you want. Say you’re a database developer and you want to be a database architect. Find one. Ask them which sessions you might benefit from. Better yet, ask them “I want your job. Which of these sessions will help me get there?”
2. Pick something you don’t know anything about and attend it. If you want to learn about something, learn through a trial by fire. But, like I said earlier, don’t underestimate yourself. If you know even the slightest bit about SSRS, an introduction to Report Builder 2 is probably going to bore you. Take a gamble and go to an intermediate session.
3. Make a back up list. Make a list of sessions that sound like they would be very valuable to advancing your career path interesting. Pick things that sound cool. Pick features you haven’t played with. Learn some Business Intelligence mojo.

Honestly, I’m going to do all three of these things. There’s a lot that I want to learn. I know people who are already there. I’m going to pick their brains for how to get there. Just remember that you’re going to the Summit not just to learn, but to interact with your peers. Make sure you socialize, too. I still think I learned more sitting on the floor talking to Brent Ozar, Donald Farmer, and a few other people than I would have if I had gone to whichever session I originally planned to attend.

Denis Gobo provides a double dose of dynamic SQL hotness via Changing exec to sp_executesql doesn’t provide any benefit if you are not using parameters correctly and Avoid Conversions In Execution Plans By Using sp_executesql Instead of Exec. Following his tips in here will net you some considerable benefits in how your dynamic SQL behaves and performs in your production applications. The best part is that he provides a huge amount of example code to back up everything he’s saying.

Free SQL Server tools that might make your life a little easier Mladen Prajdic maintains an amazing list of free tools to help data folks get their job done. SSMS Tools Pack (which Mladen created and maintains) is incredibly helpful. I suspect that if he finds these other tools useful, they’ll probably save you many many hours over the years to come.

SQL Server Troubleshooting Tips and Tricks This isn’t a blog post so much as it is really important to keep around. It’s just a list of tips and tricks to keep things easy and painless with SSMS. If you didn’t check out the pain of the week webcast with Michelle Ufford and Brent Ozar on SSMS, you should do so when you get the chance, it’s well worth it!

More SQL Server Training Videos Training. Free. Videos. I’m in there, that’s really all the reason you need to visit that link.

BONUSTen SQL Server Functions That You Have Ignored Until Now Bonus link from Denis Gobo, once again, covering some great, little known, SQL Server functions.

Development

Unit Testing is Not a “Figure It Out Later” Read this. Read this now. Do it. We’ll still be here. Stop what you’re doing and read this. I cannot stress how important it is for you to read this, even us data folks. If I could put a blink tag around this paragraph, I would. (Thanks to Stephen Wright for finding this link.)

Defensive Programming – Assumptions Must be Guaranteed or Tested Aaron Alton blogs about the importance of defensive programming. While this is specifically from a SQL Server standpoint, it’s important no matter which language you’re using. In fact, Aaron proves an important point – you can put any development practice to use in any language.

Stuff & Things

Improving your intranet – keep it sustainable using kaizen – Patrick Walsh talks about using kaizen to produce evolutionary improvements to an intranet. You could do this with anything, really, but it’s a good read either way you look at it.

I cheated and stole the last two links from Lifehacker, but they’re just too good to not share.

CopyPasteCharacter.com Makes Special Characters Easy to Paste Yup, easy. Nice. Easy mode: engage.

LiberKey Installs 200+ Portable Applications I have too many thumbdrives laying around the house. Now I have a use for them.

Details here, however the general gist is that Brent Ozar and I will be talking about using SQL Server Express edition in a presentation titled “Developing Something for Nothing”.

So, let’s recap, shall we?

So You’re On A Deserted Island With WiFi and you’re still on the clock at work. Okay, so not a very good situational exercise here, but let’s roll with it; we’ll call it a virtual deserted island. Perhaps what I should simply ask is if you had a month without any walk-up work, no projects due, no performance issues that require you to devote time from anything other than a wishlist of items you’ve been wanting to get accomplished at work but keep getting pulled away from I ask this question: what would be the top items that would get your attention?

There are a few things that have been on my plate recently.

Development

I’m not going to lie – I want to do a little bit of programming now and then. The CLR contains some phenomenal features that can be leveraged both inside and outside of the database. As a consultant and database developer, it’s incredibly important that I stay up to speed on techniques to access the database. Why? Different technologies have different paradigms and idiosyncrasies. It’s important to understand how developers are interacting with data so you can steer them towards the appropriate data access methodologies for their particular technology stack/platform. Different data access methods also have different performance profiles. It’s important to understand how LINQ to SQL performs in relation to NHibernate and why you might want to use it.

Plus, I really want to get my brain wrapped around NHibernate because it looks like an easy and powerful way to model data.

TSQL and the Storage Engine

I’m currently reading Itzik Ben-Gan’s amazing book: Inside Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008: T-SQL Querying. I would love to have the time to dive into this and read it a few times and experiment with the knowledge and techniques contained within its covers. Why? Part of what I do is tune SQL Server to run very fast. Part of making SQL Server run very fast is knowing how to write very fast queries.

The next book on my reading list is Kalen Delaney’s book: Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Internals (Pro – Developer). Like Itzik’s book, this contains a lot of information that I’m itching to get a hold of. I know a bit about the query engine and it fascinates me. I would love to sit down and carefully devote my time to studying how it works and how I can take advantage of its inner workings to make my queries run fast.

Data Mining

Like Brent Ozar, I really want to wrap my brain around data mining and dig into it. There is phenomenal knowledge and power hidden inside of data.

Let’s say you run a restaurant. You don’t know where your customers come from, but you know on any given Friday night you have the restaurant about 80% full, on average, all night. You advertise in the local paper that’s handed out in the area. You’re successful. This is good.

What if I could tell you the following about your average customer:

• 35-44 years old
• male
• spends an average of $48
• tips an average of 18%
• lives 12 miles away in zip code 43004
• likes pie

Of course, if I could cross reference this with an even larger body of data, I could probably determine where this average customer is most likely to shop, how much he spends, and what kinds of mass media he’s most likely to pay attention to, etc. Suddenly you know where to spend your money, you know who to target, and you have a better idea of how to appeal to your best customers. This kind of information, as Brent mentioned, is money. Giant filthy piles of money.

Who is next in this horrible glorious chain letter?

• Jonathan Kehayias – SQL CLR maste rand builder of clusters
• Tim Beinninghoff – bug enthusiast, PowerShell student, fighter of good fights, and all around good guy.
• Rick Kierner – a filthy developer, coworker, and good friend.

This time around Brent Ozar and I will be talking about SQL Server Express Edition in a presentation titled “Developing Something for Nothing”

The abstract looks something like this:

Join SQL Server expert Brent Ozar and SQL Server developer Jeremiah Peschka as they give an overview of the free tools you can’t afford to ignore in tough economic times! In this presentation, you’ll see how to improve your productivity with SQL Server Express Edition.

• SQL Server Express Edition – the free version of SQL Server
• SQL Server Management Studio Express – the free way to manage your Express Edition instances

The meeting will take place at 6:30 PM on June 11th, Eastern at Battelle For Kids – 1160 Dublin Rd Suite 500, Columbus, OH 43215

LiveMeeting will be available for this event – click here to attend.

Add it to your calendar!

Audio Information
Computer Audio
To use computer audio, you need speakers and microphone, or a headset.
First Time Users:
To save time before the meeting, check your system to make sure it is ready to use Microsoft Office Live Meeting.
Troubleshooting
Unable to join the meeting? Follow these steps:

1. Copy this address and paste it into your web browser:
https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/usergroups/join
2. Copy and paste the required information:
Meeting ID: Q754Q2
Entry Code: XQX<6\s\G
Location: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/usergroups

If you still cannot enter the meeting, contact support

SQL Server

SQL Server 2008 Developer Training Kit Available for Download Denis Gobo provides a link and a quick summary of Microsoft’s most recent training offering for developers that will help get people up to speed with SQL Server 2008.

PASS Virtualization Virtual Chapter That’s right, we have a new thing at PASS. Well, the same old thing has a new name. SIGs are now Virtual Chapters. And Brent Ozar is now in charge of the PASS Virtualization Chapter. Check it out!

Download – SQL Server 2008 Developer Training Kit Free training. Free training. Freetraining. freetraining.

Excel Functions for SQL Server Sometimes I’ll find myself using SQL Server and longing for something from Excel that one of my more management-type friends has shown me. Now I can, in theory, have some of that Excel love right in SQL Server.

What’s a ‘DBA’? I’ve known for a long time that, while I love data, I’m not a DBA… not 100%, at least. Sam Bendayan answers the question and talks about what job title options there are for database professionals

Development

MvcFluentHtml – Fluent HTML Interface For MS MVC ASP.NET MVC doesn’t us a bad method to generate HTML, but there are definitely smoother ways, depending on how preference. Fluent HTML uses one paradigm to make it a bit easier to generate HTML in your views. It’s closer to how Ruby on Rails does things, and I like Rails. A lot. Almost as much as I like SQL Server.

Dear Art Director…

Stuff & Things

The Information Architecture of Personal Music Collections Dan Brown, famed Information Architect not famed author, spent a lot of time thinking about how people interact with music libraries. The poster is from 2005 but, shockingly, not a lot has changed since then.

11 Striking Findings From an Eye Tracking Study Eye tracking is some great stuff, it’s right up there with click tracking. It helps us, as bloggers, figure out what you, the readers, are paying attention to.

How to Maintain a Healthy Lifestyle When You’re Too Busy To Care Title says it all. Lazy? Want to get in better shape? Do this.

Evil Lair: On the Architecture of the Enemy in Videogame Worlds I don’t know what to say about this, really. This is a fascinating article about how architecture current works its way into video games and also how it could be used.

10 for $10 hardcore summer tour This is the coolest idea for a summer tour – 10 bands for $10. If you’re at all into hardcore punk, it’ll be a great show. If you aren’t (which is more than likely since you’re reading this blog), take note because it’s an interesting idea that you might see more of in the future.

How to Build Your Own PC WARNING: NOT SAFE FOR WORK SomethingAwful.com is often flagged as adult content. Don’t visit it if you like keeping your job. That being said, this is a hilarious look at building your own computer. It’s based on Brent Ozar‘s experiences building his hackintosh.