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Who Wants Free Learning?

Aug 3, ’09 10:53 AM

I want free learning. Lots and lots of free learning. Why? Because nobody else is going to pay for it in these troubling economic times.

You might now be wondering “How can I get some free learning?” Well, I’ll tell you how: The Internets.

By using the internets you have access to a ton of free training. Crazy Helpful people just write up blog posts and give presentations via LiveMeeting out of nothing more than kindness so that you can get your learn on for free.

Understanding Execution Plans On Tuesday, August 11th at 1pm EST Grant Fritchey will be sharing some of his execution plan knowledge with everyone! This is a LiveMeeting and audio will be provided via the computer, not your telephone, so bring headphones to work if you want to listen in.

Quest Connect 2009 Brent has a great article up on his upcoming speaking engagement at Quest Connect, which will also feature Tim Ford and Tom LaRock. Brent was also kind enough to include links to multiple other sources of free training.

24 Hours of PASS Starting at midnight GMT on September 2nd, there will be 24 hours of PASS presentations available for the world to see. Check out the list of sessions and speakers. This is a great free event, don’t miss this opportunity to learn from some incredibly sharp people. Ready for the best part? The speakers will be available to take your questions while you watch the presentation. So go ahead and register. You can learn while you eat corn flakes.

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The Terror of Isolation

Jul 28, ’09 12:26 PM

I work in isolation. I don’t mean physical isolation – I have coworkers and we talk and go to lunch and do all kinds of coworker things. I work in physical isolation from other practicing database professionals. My manager is a former DBA, but he hasn’t worked with SQL Server newer than SQL 2005 and most of his experience is with SQL 2000 and Oracle as a developer. The vast majority of the time, this isn’t an impediment to what I do – I have IM, email, twitter, and forums to keep me immediately in touch with my peers. However, this becomes a problem when I want to bounce ideas off of someone.

Over the last month, I’ve been tasked with coming up with and implementing three new SQL Server installations. These are brand new servers that will have brand new drives and we’re starting from the ground up. For those of you who are production DBAs, this might be that terrifying, but keep in mind that 1) I’m primarily a database developer (development DBA, whatever) and 2) I’m a consultant. I’m being tasked with a decision that will last long after I’m gone from my client. While this may be old hat to some people, this is well outside of my comfort zone. Typically I say something like “write the biggest check you can.” Unfortunately, that’s not an acceptable recommendation.

What’s a lone data monkey to do?

I took to Google. Luckily Kendal Van Dyke had written a great set of articles about physical storage configuration. After reading through his series, I was able to determine our disk formatting requirements and justify them to the Windows administrators. I remembered that Rod Colledge had written a post about storage/SAN configuration that I had initially dismissed because “I’m a development DBA and I’ll never have to configure a SAN!” Thankfully I was able to track down Rod’s excellent article on storage configuration and, after a few questions on twitter, Brent Ozar took the time out of his day to answer some of my questions about SANs (turns out they aren’t magic boxes). Brent was kind enough to continue a back and forth conversation via email about my proposed SQL Server configuration. After outlining everything in detail, I was absolutely overjoyed to see the first sentence of his reply contain these words “you made a lot of good decisions there”.

Where the hell am I taking this feel good story?

Remember how I said I work in physical isolation? Well, I still do work in physical isolation. Having access to my RSS feeds, twitter, email, and forums makes that physical isolation a lot less apparent. I’m able to access the collective wisdom of a lot of experienced DBAs, take their combined wisdom, and synthesize a solution that meets the needs of my current situation. Would it have been a lot easier to sit down with someone over coffee and outline the situation and wait for recommendations? Yes. Would I have learned as much? No.

Why haven’t I actually said anything about the configuration we’ve ended up with? One, it’s not actually in place yet. Two, I need to write it up and get explicit approval from management before I release any information to the public. They are quite secretive about their configuration and schema and I can completely respect that. Hopefully, though, I will put the scenario together and will be able to share it with the world.

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From Tables to Objects – Follow Up

Jul 24, ’09 9:14 AM

First off, I want to say thank you to the Central Ohio .NET Developers Group for giving me the opportunity to speak last night. I really enjoyed it and I was glad that I could share some of the things that I’ve learned with such a great group of people.

Everyone at CONDG was very welcoming, as they always have been, and the questions from the audience were fantastic. It’s always good to hear that I’m not the only one who has run into some of the scenarios I mentioned in the presentation, and it’s also always great to hear real life success stories from developers who have made use of the techniques that I’m speaking about – in this case NHibernate.

I have to take this opportunity, as well, to think my host, admin, and brother who took time out of his evening to make sure that the presentation resources automatically posted on time through WordPress. Unfortunately, they didn’t post on time and he looked into to the problem to make sure that the resources would be there by the time the presentation was done. So a big thanks to Mike for keeping things running and going the extra mile to make sure the resources were available for everyone to download when the presentation was over.

97 people were able to make it to the presentation. If you weren’t able to attend and would like to see this presentation, let me know. If there’s enough support I can either schedule a LiveMeeting to do this presentation again one evening, or I can record it and make it available online for viewing. Let me know in the comments or send me an email and let me know.

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So Much Slacking, So Little Time

Jul 22, ’09 1:19 PM

I’ve been slacking on the blogging front. Which is a shame, because I’ve been busy doing some really fun things recently. Want to know about one of them? I hope you do, because I’m going to talk about it regardless.

I spent last weekend at the Columbus Give Camp. What was the point of this? Well, the point of Give Camp is for a bunch of geeks to get together and help out various charities.

Over the course of the weekend, I worked on the website for HopeMongers. A lot of the underlying work had been completed, but the public facing portion of the site needed some style and panache to bring it inline with the expectations of Sam Henry, the man behind HopeMongers.

There are a few great things that come out of a weekend like this one.

  • You get a chance to provide much needed help to a charity. Would the work on HopeMongers have been completed if we weren’t involved? Probably, but it would have taken a lot longer.
  • You get to work with a lot of talented people, while you help out a charity. If I were doing this alone, I might not have had as much motivation – I won’t lie about that. But working with other people is great. Especially when you’re all in the same room, sitting around a single table, writing code until the small hours of the morning (or if you’re like me, late hours of the evening). There’s a great collaborative, startup, feel to the whole thing. Ideas bounce around. People help each other solve problems. There’s so much collaboration.
  • You learn a lot about yourself. I learned that I really liked working with Sam on the HopeMongers website. Which in turn made me realize that what I really liked was helping out.

Thanks to everyone involved in the Columbus Give Camp for putting things together and letting me help out by building a database schema for the back end of the site.

A big thanks to Steve Andrews, Chris Funk, Kevin Kuebler, Marwan Saleh, Phil Japiske, Kevin Malone, Carey Payette, and anyone else who worked on the HopeMongers project that I left out. You guys made it a great weekend and I’m glad I had the opportunity to work with all of you.

And a special thanks to Sam Henry for the wonderful project, the great experience, and the opportunity to keep giving back.

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It’s Always About You

Jul 14, ’09 12:16 PM

I’m in the process of finishing up a presentation for the Central Ohio .NET Developers Group, and this got me to thinking about how I structure my presentations. Luckily, right around the time I was musing on this subject I ran across Jeff Atwood’s article Who Needs Talent When You Have Intensity? (which lead to Users shouldn’t think about YOU).

I’ve long held the opinion that a good presentation is one that is immediately useful in your day to day work. After reading Jeff’s post, and Kathy Sierra’s post that Jeff linked to, I’m revising my opinion.

A great presentation helps the audience do their job better.

Thinking back over the presentations that I’ve given in the past, the ones that I’ve felt were the most successful, and the ones where people have given me the best reviews, have been the ones where I’ve gotten out of the way and talked about how to do a better job rather than how I did my job well.

One thing that I have long held is that it’s okay to say “I don’t know” but only when you follow it with “talk to me afterward and we’ll figure out how.” Ultimately, when presenting, it’s the presenter’s job to help the audience learn the subject matter. If the presenter doesn’t know, that’s okay. But, it’s important to make sure that the audience is given an avenue to find the answer – either through an email follow up, a follow up later that day, or follow up by the next day of class.

My final thought is that Kathy Sierra hits it right on the head: “Too many learning experiences and books leave the learner feeling impressed as hell with the instructor/author, but… stupid.” The learning process is about the student, not about the teacher. When I think back to the past few presentations that I’ve attended, the presenters haven’t included themselves more than a few times. On the rare occasions when a presenter has said “I”, it has been in the context of “I made this mistake a lot until I got the hang of this. Here’s how you can avoid this and why”. When they include themselves, presenters aren’t talking about how great they are: they’re exposing when they made mistakes and how everyone else can learn without having to repeat that mistake.

In the end, the only thing that matters is that the audience is learning.

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Happy Contribupendence Day

Jul 3, ’09 4:28 PM

Last year, Jeff Blankeburg came up with the idea of Contribupendence Day. To save you from visiting Jeff’s site and reading another blog post, Contribupendence day is a day when we acknowledge the people who help out our community.

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.

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Columbus Give Camp is Just Two Weeks Away

Jul 2, ’09 7:11 AM

The Columbus Give Camp is only two weeks away but it’s still not too late for both charities and volunteers to sign up.

GiveCamp is a weekend-long event where software developers, designers, and database administrators donate their time to create custom software for non-profit organizations. This custom software could be a new website for the nonprofit organization, a small data-collection application to keep track of members, or a application for the Red Cross that automatically emails a blood donor three months after they’ve donated blood to remind them that they are now eligible to donate again. The only limitation is that the project should be scoped to be able to be completed in a weekend.

During GiveCamp, developers are welcome to go home in the evenings or camp out all weekend long. There are usually food and drink provided at the event. There are sometimes even game systems set up for when you and your need a little break! Overall, it’s a great opportunity for people to work together, developing new friendships, and doing something important for their community.

At GiveCamp, there is an expectation of “What Happens at GiveCamp, Stays at GiveCamp”. Therefore, all source code must be turned over to the charities at the end of the weekend (developers cannot ask for payment) and the charities are responsible for maintaining the code moving forward (charities cannot expect the developers to maintain the codebase).

The deadline is July 8th, so get your charity proposals and volunteer submissions in!

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Columbus Give Camp

Jun 15, ’09 6:41 AM

The Columbus Give Camp site has gone live.

What’s a give camp? Basically, to paraphrase the about page, a give camp is an opportunity for developers to give back to the local community by contributing time and effort to create custom software for non-profits.

How can you help?

Why am I plugging this?

  1. It’s a cool idea
  2. I designed and built the database
  3. I plan on being there

What are you waiting for? Head on over to Columbus Give Camp and volunteer!

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What I’ve Learned at PASS

Jun 9, ’09 5:16 PM

So, there’s this contest going on. So, what’s the contest? Write the best thing you’ve learned at a previous PASS conference and you could win a free registration or free hotel stay at PASS Summit 2009!

I went to my first PASS Summit many many months ago in November of 2008. I didn’t know many people in the SQL Server community, but I knew a few people. Throughout the PASS Summit, I spent time getting to know people. I met a lot of great people at the Summit and I’ve stayed in touch and become friends with many of them.

But, the best thing I learned at PASS was that there’s always something to learn from everyone. We’re all part of a community and we get better by learning from each other.

See? It’s just that easy! You could win a free registration to PASS. I could win a free registration. Maybe we both could win a free registration and meet at PASS and hang out!

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CBusPASS Meeting – June 11th

Jun 4, ’09 9:39 PM

Is it nearing the second Thursday of the month already? That must mean it’s time to announce the meeting topic for CBusPASS!

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!

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