It Depends

Building Raffle Tickets for SQLSaturday

Raffle tickets have become a mainstay of our events, making it easy to handle the large volume of items donated by our sponsors. Back in SQLSaturday #1 they looked more like business cards due to time constraints, but as we've learned and had time to reflect we've been upgrading here and there, so recently I spent some time making up some 'real' raffle tickets - see the sample below.

I used a template I found at www.nashua.com to get me started in Word, then marked it up extensively. They print 8 to a sheet on blank raffle tickets available from OfficeMax ($20 for 50 sheets), but we bought 1000 sheets from www.perforatedpaper.com for $80 plus shipping. The latter has coarser perfing, doesn't work well in a laser but hoping my local printer dude can make it work. If you look at the bottom of the image you can see the barcode - Code 39 - using a font from Morovia that was $99 (I tried the free ones, but they didn't seem to scan well for me). The barcode itself is first four characters of last name plus their registration id. That's there to make it easy for sponsors, they can bring us the stack and we'll just scan the list, then look it up against our data instead of them having to key/scan in all the data.

An interesting project. Word actually does a pretty good job of mail merge, and I found it easier to achieve the results I wanted with it over Access (neither Access or Reporting Services does well at showing you column views - you have to export it to see them). As for the design, making things look good isn't my forte, I just make it work!

More on Mentoring

Two weeks ago I did five posts on mentoring, and based on that I received a couple interesting notes, here is one, posted with the permission of the sender:

"I have been in the position of having a mentor.  A good mentor is the best friend and guide you can have.  Of course, a bad mentor can do serious damage.  When I began seriously coding in Perl I had the most wonderful mentor.  He worked with a group of us:  answering questions, suggesting ways to do things or areas we should research, but never actually doing our work for us.  He made us learn.  And daily he held a half hour group session when we covered one command or question or just some batch of code we all wanted to understand better. 

In all my years in computers, I think I learned more in the years I had a mentor than in all the years I tried to figure things out for myself.  A good mentor doesn't just give you the answer, he forces you to think and reason out the answer.  He's a guide, saving hours in needless research, but providing the tools and knowledge to point us to the answers.  He doesn't try to force his way of thinking on you, he discusses and tosses ideas around, and with brainstorming and involvement comes understanding and learning.  Mentors involve you in your own learning process, and I believe everyone learns better when they feel a part of the process, not the brunt of it."

Imagine having that kind of impact on another person!

SQLSaturday #3 Jacksonville - Final Reminder!

Just checked the registrations and we're at 354, with plenty of room for more! Brian has been busy tweaking the schedule and getting his crew of volunteers ready to go, Friday they'll be buying all the stuff needed to make the event happen. There are some really great sessions on the schedule, if you're anywhere near Jacksonville I think you'll find it time well spent to attend. Lunch is from Jason's Deli, no pizza for us:-)

Register at http://www.sqlsaturday.com/eventhome.aspx?eventid=3

Visiting the Space Coast .Net Users Group in June

My friend Ken Tucker invited me to speak on June 11, I'll be doing a short presentation on SQL performance and then trying to answer as many questions as I can with the goal of showing developers how and why the DBA's make such harsh demands of developers:-) It'll be fun to visit his group, and I'm hoping it clarifies for me a little why there is such a gap between DBA and developer.

Their web site is http://www.scdnug.org/. 

Orlando Heroes Launch Event

I attended this on Friday along with fellow oPASS members Mike Antonovich and Ulysses Vasquez to represent PASS, and we were joined at the community table along with Shawn Weisfeld of The Orlando .Net Users Group and Ken Tucker of The Space Coast .Net Users Group. We saw a lot of people we already knew and met quite a few new people too. They had us set up the same room as the lunch boxes (nice MS fabric bags with snacks, water, and juice) so we had pretty good traffic flow by the table.

PASS sent a box for raffle tickets, some issues of the SQL Server Standard, raffle entry tickets, and three PASS logo'd polo's for us to wear (more than INETA sent for the .Net guys). Haven't counted but we probably had 50 people enter the raffle, some that are already oPASS members. Found at near the end that MS could have provided a bar code reader for $295 if we'd asked (could have brought my own as well) which would have really made a difference.

The event itself seemed to go fine, reasonably organized, plenty of stuff to drink and some snacks for the attendees. Im guessing 500 attended the morning session and about the same in the afternoon. Didn't have the 'wow' factor that you see at some MS events, but maybe thats good:-)

SQL Server in the Cloud

The April 15, 2008 edition of SDTimes (PDF download here) has some information about SSDS, the SQL Server in the cloud that was announced not long ago (and still in private beta). I'll mention a couple points here, but worth reading the article!

• Says that it doesn't use the same entity model as SQL Server
• Developers must use LINQ to access the data!
• Automatically indexes

An analyst in the article notes that "SQL Server is for more experienced DBA's".

Cloud computing is damned interesting. I've lived in the real SQL Server/database world for too long to want to use a light weight engine, but I can understand why many would. I'm starting to think that we need to training all deveopers to be mini DBA's. They see the power and possibility of LINQ, Silverlight, etc, etc, what is about SQL Server that they don't like?

More LINQ Discussion

Steve Jones recently posted an editorial about LINQ and the resulting discussion encapsulates most of the points of view on the topic. The biggest problem "we" have is we just don't have a good picture of the time savings for developers using LINQ (and I really mean LINQ to SQL) so that we have a better discussion about the value of trading off security & DBA maintainability in favor of reduced building cost/quicker time to market - both valid concerns of any business.

Worth reading his post and the conversation with an open mind, see if you can see the value in the side of the conversation you don't agree with:-)

Tribute to Jim Gray

Ran across this in the Mar/Apr ACM Queue, http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/IPRO/JimGrayTribute/ will be held at UC Berkeley on May 31st, 2008. Jim Gray was a Microsoft researcher that focused on databases and was lost at sea some time ago.

Desktop or Laptop

Most of that do any time of training or consulting typically use laptops, and they are even reasonably common in the corporate world - even for those that have 'desk' jobs. I have a couple desktops at home, but I've used a laptop for work for close to 9 years now. No complaints, let's me do most of what I need to do.

But my laptop is pretty junked up now, you know how it is. You install what you need, try the odd piece of software, next thing you know it takes 5 minutes to boot. For a while everytime I closed Explorer I got an error message, finally an update fixed that! So it's time for the old format/reinstall and/or buy a new one.

We bought a desktop for the office for dev work, just a vanilla Dell Vostro with 4g RAM and dual video cards, dev work on that machine is definitely nice! Ran about $1000. Chris - our developer - very happy with it plus dual 22" wide screen monitors. So, thinking that if I bought another desktop and configured it just for dev work (I do some here and there), that would ease some of the pain of cleaning up the laptop. So, buy another Dell, or ?

Decided to get off the corporate path, bought a machine from cyberpowerpc.com. Quad processor (yeah, a real four way, no tricks), 2G of memory, dual 512m video cards, no OS - out the door for about $850. That's a lot of machine! Paid $10 extra to get the clear panel and internal blue lighting, but other than its just nice. Plenty of ports, drive bays, even has ports on top of the machine - handy because it sits under the desk. I've just loaded XP SP2 (sorry MS, no time for Vista) plus VS 2008 plus SQL 2005 and patched it all, should be interesting to see if the software can make sure of the hardware. I know 2G not a lot of memory, but easy enough to add 2 more if needed.

Interesting Web Hosting Option

Ran across this from Mosso, a spin off from Rackspace. Pricing looks very attractive, and there are some interesting twists. One is that you can run PHP/ASP.Net on the same server, no problem. You can get SQL Server for another $5 a month (hosting starts at $100 and includes a lot of stuff), the only downside I saw was that they don't support SQL Agent - making it a solution that doesn't work easily for me (and because I suspect it's hard to virtualize the agent). They've online chat if you've got questions, and noticed that they support reselling as well - wouldn't take many clients to pay the $100 a month!

SQLSaturday #4 in Orlando - With a Twist!

As you may know MS Teched is two weeks this year and is being held in Orlando. Turns out that they have it leased for two full weeks, but nothing planned for the middle weekend. That presented an opportunity for the local MS communities to do something with the space. Joe Healy, our local Developer Evangelist (DE of the year in 2007 even) got a bunch of email going with the various community leaders, did a conference call, and things were moving!

The outcome is that we'll be doing SQLSaturday#4 on June 7. One DBA track, one Developer/Data Access track, and one BI track. We're using speakers that have done well for us at previous events because we don't have a lot of time to get everything set up. MS is handling the food and other logistics, so for once we don't have to find sponsors, figure out shirt sizes, and all the rest that goes into a 'normal' SQLSaturday. We didn't want to pass up the opportunity to participate in a  huge community event (there is also a Code Camp plus some other stuff going on at the same time) and it's a chance to try a SQLSaturday with a slightly different formula.

On Sunday Brian & I will be hosting what is for now called SQL University, and that will be hands on training - bring your laptop. Half a day of SSIS and half a day of DBA Admin. Should be fun! 

Schedule isn't quite complete but registration is open for both events at www.sqlsaturday.com. If you're going to both please register twice so we can make sure we have lunch for you.

Where are Profiler User Defined Templates Stored?

Someone asked me this recently and I really had no idea. Quick look in BOL didn't yield any results, so curiousity won out. First step was to use Profiler to monitor while I created a new template (with the standard like '%profiler% filter removed!) and didn't see anything. Loaded FileMon and it only took a couple minutes to see that templates are written to your user profile on disk as TDF files, in my case it was C:\Documents and Settings\Andy Warren\Application Data\Microsoft\SQL Profiler\9.0\Templates\Microsoft SQL Server\80. Also turns out that the files are binary, not the more handy text or XML you might expect. I did a quick search with Regmon to see if Profiler was loading the template folder from a key and didn't see anything, so appears to be a built in value.

Good part is the templates are available for use in any database you profile from the machine containing the template, bad part is that you won't have access to your templates if you're running Profiler on another machine. Changing/creating templates isn't hard of course, but now I've got the answer when someone asks.

Information on Dell/Equilogic ISCSI

Our Dell rep sent over this link about Equilogic ISCSI SAN's, pricing is not yet posted but according to him, supposed to be very very interesting. Note that I don't own Dell stock, they just happen to be who we work with most of time.

Professional Development Links

Someone asked me for these recently as they predate the blog. All were posted on SSC over the past couple years.

Professional Development

Beginning Professional Development

Time for Training

Thoughts on Mentoring - Part 5

As a mentor I'm looking for someone with the drive to learn and grow, and willing to acknowledge that they don't know it all yet/could possibly learn something from me. It's certainly not that I know it all, I'm reminded daily that is not the case! But if they can't admit openly areas of weakness, you just won't make any progress. The door to learning opens when you can say 'I have something to learn about this'. A protege has to work hard at assignments, but they have to work harder at thinking and following through. Mentoring a protege might seem like child raising, but it's not. If a protege continously drops the ball without making the attempt to reset expectations, things will ultimately fail. Cold hard fact - I'm investing time in someone that in most cases is a gift, I'll never make money from it (or want to), and all I want is to see that time used well.

As a protege remember to think! Move beyond your comfort zone and really think and challenge your mentor during discussions. They are not always right, but they have hard won experience and if you're smart, learn the lessons by proxy where you can. Be patient when your mentor challenges you with assignments that don't thrill you. For example, several years ago I had a protege/employee that had a lot of aptitude, but just didn't seem to understand how to be a good employee. Three months as a team lead with real responsibility quickly showed how painful it is to deal with those that don't complete tasks, don't follow up, don't communicate, etc, etc. It didn't fix everything, but it was a window into the next step, and taught some valuable lessons about how not to be the pain in the ass some of his peers were when he was leading.

Remember that it doesn't always have to be hard core long term mentoring. As a trainer I spend a lot of time with those wanting to learn, and we often have ad hoc conversations about how they might take the next career steps. You might be surprised how much a 15 minute conversation can do to open doors for someone that doesn't see the path.

Finally, I'll add that mentoring works best in person, but that doesn't mean it can't work via phone or email. Just remember that you have fixed resources and that you want to do well by your protege (or two), and not short change them by spreading yourself too thin. Mentoring is a gift, and you get to choose who to give it to based on whatever criteria you want!