It Depends

Operation Hands Free

Recently I was driving home and as I made that turn into the sub-division where I live, over the course of the next mile I noticed three of three cars going the other direction were all holding a cell phone to their ear. I hope most of you by now have realized that there is a fundamental difference in how we drive when talking to a passenger (or using headset or speaker phone) and how we drive when we actually hold the cell phone to our ear. I haven't looked into the science to see if proven, but my own observations (and now a few state laws) seem to support that, my guess being is that when we hold the phone we focus harder/differently than we do in conversation.

So, what's the point?

If you agree me with about the dangers of cell phones while driving, why don't we do something about it? No, I'm not thinking a chain email or a cute icon for your blog, but something more direct - why don't we influence the people we care about today? Do your children, parents, spouse, close fiends, all use some form of hands free? Wired headsets have been around a while and while reasonably idiotproof, I've always found them to be a pain and I suspect the same for many others. Moving to bluetooth, whether headset or speakerphone, requires a 10 minute trip into technical matters, after that it just works. Maybe Grandma can't set up bluetooth, but I bet she can use it!

If you haven't looked, the options are fairly inexpensive. For example, the Bluetooth Headet ($26) (I use this one myself, works fine), or a car speaker phone like the BlueAnt SuperTooth ($100). Corded headsets work, using the speaker phone on the cell phone works, but the downside is a little juggling to answer it and get the spaker phone on (but still better than holding the phone).

Not often I'll propose social engineering here, and in this case it's only because technology is an elegant solution and we are very comfortable with technology. If the only thing stopping someone close from being safer is a technology hurdle (or the cost of the technology) we're ideally suited to help with that. And on the social scale, doing this doesn't earn you any karma, it's something you do because you want to take care of people you care about.

Blogging on SQLServerCentral.com

Recently my friend Steve (managing editor of SSC) posted to his blog about The Bad Karma Project that has to do with the state of blogs here on SSC. Going back to the time when we added blogs to the site I was ambivalent about it at best, thinking dedicated blog sites did a better job than we ever could, but it is a service that people find value in it and I think Red Gate has done by the community to continue to maintain the service, but....it's badly in need of upgrade and while that seems to be in progress, it also seems to have been that way for a while!

For me there are four key improvements needed that I believe would be good for the bloggers as well as the overall community:

• Provide support for an offline writer. I'm not always connected so it helps to be able to write when I want to, but almost all of them have a built in spell checker and I make my share of spelling mistakes. Community benefits indirectly, potentially more posts and less typos - possibly not the greatest argument I've put forth!
• Filter the aggregate feed to only show posts that make sense to the audience. Mostly everyone that currently blogs here does so about SQL posts, though I have my share of non-SQL but career related posts. Filtering the feed might be an improvement for the community to reduce the noise.
• Encourage community members to add their blog URL to their profile and include it as part of the aggregate feed. More posts!
• Highlight blog entries of value in the newsletter, or maybe just pull the the aggregate feed in. All bloggers write to be seen.

Free, unsolicited advice about changes that I think could be made to SSC, and as a blogger I'm probably biased on all of them.

Tool Review: Servers Alive

Not all of us work at companies big enough to justify the expense/time it takes to implement something like MS Mom, Altiris, etc. For years I've recommended Servers Alive as a reasonably priced (about $200) solution that lets you do basic fault monitoring. It can alert on low disk space, check that a web page is running, login to a SQL Server (which isn't the same as saying the service is running!), and notify you via email, pager, or instant message when a problem is detected. You can monitor up to 10 items for free, after that you have to pay. Most of us in the DBA world use SQL Agent to do a lot of our monitoring/alerting, but on rare occasion SQL Agent can fail. It's nice to have a secondary level of monitoring running from a different machine.

There are probably similar products out there, it's one of those "I could write that!" type apps, and I stopped looking when I found something that met my needs.

Rebuilding Stats: Twice or Not at All Posted on SSC

Rebuilding Stats was published yesterday on SSC, some nice comments posted to it as well. The main point of the article was that if you're rebuilding indexes with the default options you're automatically getting stats update on those columns as well.

IP6 Addresses Could Break Your DB

I saw this post from Rick Strahl about IP6 Addresses in Vista breaking some code, and it immediately made sense that we're probably going to feel some pain on the db site. While all it may take is altering a column on our side (which increases space usage of course) but it could also result in proc changes, and even application code depending on how things were typed. As much as I read I tend to not focus on the networking side of things very much because I've either had a network admin, or just opted to do without one because we only had a couple servers. Not often that changes on their side affect us, but this is one.

I'd suggest checking tables for storage of IP addresses, applications that process server logs into tables, and application code/procs that log the users IP address (obviously common in web apps).

Tool Review: Microsoft Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel

It's downright common these days to download programs as ISO images, but XP doesn't have a native viewer for them. The Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel is an easy way to create a virtual drive letter, point it at the ISO, and then it 'mounts' the drive so that it looks like you have the files on CD. As far as I know it doesn't support DVD images. It's free and easy to use.

Blogging Thoughts - Part 2

Earlier I wrote Blogging Thoughts - Part 1 where I discussed the various approaches I've seen in blogs (blogging when you learn something new, blog only technical, etc, etc) as part of the work I'm doing to make recommendations to those asking for advice on building a blog. Note that I'm not exactly a blog expert, at this point I'm basing this on a little over a year of blogging - much of it every day - and reading a lot of blogs.

So why do you want to blog? Money, fame, career, or just because? How will you measure success?

Yes, it's worth thinking about measuring success. I'll assume that we all aspire just a bit to fame and fortune, but more likely we're blogging as a way to support our careers. If we blog for a year and get a better job, is that a success? If we get job offers once a week via our blog? It is success if we get a 100 views per post? 1000 views per post? What's a realistic goal? Job offers are easy to measure if they arrive, but how long would we blog waiting for the first one? More likely the blog is just another part of our resume. Is it more/less work to maintain a blog than it is to get a cert or go to a class? Cheaper if nothing else!

So imagine I'm heading out for an interview today. Should I mention that I blog? Would an employer reading this blog find it something that helped them make a positive decision about hiring me, or a negative one? That's the first and most important point that goes into how you blog - it becomes who you are, whether it really is or not! If you blog every 2-3 weeks about learning something new, will they be impressed with what you learned, or not impressed because they think you should have known that already? What if you criticize MS in some way and they are super pro MS? Do you project an image of thinking too highly of yourself?  Of being a deep thinker? Of having a work/life balance?

Ultimately I find few things worse than a blog started and not maintained, or a blog that doesn't seem to have a common thread. Blogs take a certain amount of work, probably 15 minutess per post or more. Not sure you've got the right stuff? Blog into a Word document for 4-6 weeks using whatever style you want to try. If you can stick to it for that long, then it's time to set up a blog somewhere and start putting those posts up. On the other hand if you can't maintain it, you haven't put up a half done blog that may reflect badly on you.

Tool Review: TaskSwitchXP

For longer than I care to count I've used the Alt-Tab Powertoy from MS to get a nicer view of running applications, alt-tab being one of those things that is hard wired into my brain at this point. It works, but occasionally it's flaky, doesn't want to change to a window unless you change to a different window first. For the last year or so I've switched to TaskSwitchXP, which does the same thing except better! One very nice feature is that you can alt-tab to bring up the app list, you get a preview window of the selected app, and you can actually just scroll/click to the app you need, you don't have to alt-tab 17 times to get there. This is for XP of course, if you're a Vista user you get similar functionality out of the box.

I haven't seen the first glitch and the price is still right; free!

Blogging Thoughts - Part 1

One of the things I've been looking at is different blogging styles and trying to figure out which to recommend to beginners, and why. Part 1 will be looking at the styles, and Part 2 will be my thoughts on which to recommend.

1. When I learn something new. This tends to be the least commonly updated because new things, or at least new things worthy of discussion, don't happen every day
2. When something "big" happens. Releases of new products, service packs, acquisitions, etc.
3. About what they are doing. This is done is hyper real time for many via Twitter (bah!), but more commonly about articles written, visits to various events, as well as projects at work where it can be discussed.
4. Regular bloggers. They post daily/weekly/etc and pretty much stick to a schedule.
5. Really focused. It's either totally about SQL (usually technical) or it's not, and the "nots" don't get posted.
6. Not really focused. Tends to have posts about their car and hobbies as much as it is about SQL
7. Because they have to. These are fun to try to spot, posts appear forced and are often short.
8. Highly technical. Deep, dark analysis of the inner most details.

Think about the blogs you read. Do you read them just for the content? To see what person X is doing? Do you despise off topic posts or enjoy the humanity it brings to the blog? Here's a fun question; for the people that you know that blog, does their blog do a decent job of reflecting their skills and biases? Said differently, let's say you were interviewing me for a job and I mentioned I had a blog. Would reading this blog make you more or less likely to consider me qualified? Desirable?

That last question is where it gets interesting - why do you blog, and what do you hope to achieve? Few of us blog for direction compensation, few of us generate enough traffic to make money on ads, so you're either blogging to support your career (interesting) or blogging the equivalent of a diary (no so interesting?).

Disabling Indexes Published on SQLServerCentral.com

It's been a while since I had anything up on SSC, a combination of Steve being in good shape on content and me being busier than usual, but early July I had a break and got 4 articles done. Disabling indexes isn't a complicated option of course, but one of the things I see in classes is that we all tend to use a pretty narrow subset of the available functionality, for better or worse! Articles like this are hopefully ways to expand the set of tools you use, much in the same way you read the word of the day (you do read that don't you?).

Tool Review: Password Safe

I think we all struggle to keep up with various credentials needed to live our internet lives (single sign on still a dream!) and too often fall back on using the same password over and over again. A few years ago Steve Jones introduced me to Password Safe when he used it to manage credentials we might need across the business (SA, Dell account, etc). It was originally spawned by Bruce Schneier and is now open source. It's a small download, unobstrusive, and has worked for me for quite a while. The only downside I've seen is that it occasionally doesn't get it right when it plugs your credentials into a form (seems to just do username, tab, password) and I've never bothered to try to fix in the cases it fails, just doing 'copy password', pasting, and moving on. It definitely makes it easy/less painful to user stronger/different passwords. The price is right: free!

Lately I've been looking at RoboForm as a possible replacement. It's about $30 and seems to offer a richer experience, but I haven't used enough to know if richer = better.

Why Are Stored Procedures Too Hard?

Recently I was going through the buy or build process on a small segment of functionality needed for a project, and ran across something that looked like it would work, price point was realistic, and when I looked at the source they made available was thrilled to find it used stored procedures. Skipping over some interim steps, the final product that was for sale did not have stored procedures. When I inquired about that, the decision was made to simplify use of it for their customers. Now this is C# ASPX code and requires a database to support it, so I wouldn't call it something a novice is likely to buy or install.  A better reason - though not one I subcribe to - would be to remove the procs to make the data access code more generic, enabling use of Access, MySQL, and other products. I can understand the allure of write once and use on many platforms, though you wind up with a lowest common denominator solution.

So in theory (my theory that is) you're selling code to someone that understands C#, web sites, and at least how to get a SQL Server database up and running and how to run a few scripts against it. Does adding stored procedure really increase the complexity, or it only perceived complexity? It is complexity during the install, or more likely, when they need to change/extend the code (which is why they bought it, or so I'd think).

We're back to a subject that confounds me; I swear developers don't like data access! How can developers that get abstraction and indirection not understand the relatively simple concept of using a stored procedure as packaging and the associated gains? Or even if they don't like it, surely it's not a hard concept to follow/amend if needed?

More on this on another day, for now - consider, are we doing our part to make our technology approachable?

Follow Up Notes on the Custom Whiteboard

A few months back I posted about our latest whiteboard and I thought I'd report back with an update. Initially it seemed to work very well, the markers wiped off easily with a nice soft cloth. Then it started to get more difficult, requiring more friction than should be necessary. Our first thought was that we had finally worked our way through some film that had been applied to the plexiglass, but then the next week it seemed to be fine again? Our guess is either something about the humidity, or the makeup of the individual markers determines how hard it is to remove.

But the answer finally appeared - Magic Erasers remove the ink with no effort, and they are soft enough not to scratch up the plexiglass. Interesting stuff on the eraser part, worth following the link!

Comments on Dissecting SQL Server Execution Plans by Grant Fitchey

Long time SSC participant Grant Fitchey has published a great book on reading/understanding execution plans. I finally had the chance to read it last week (on vacation) and was pleased with it, he did a great job covering the concepts and I noted that he had the answers to many of the common questions I hear from students. In particular I like the extended coverage of cursors (not commonly used, but they still happen) and XML within query plans (which I use rarely and will be re-reading that chapter). Dissecting SQL Server Execution Plans is available at Amazon, and Red Gate has also been offering it as a free PDF download (check their site). I'll be adding it to my list of recommended reading for those that train with us in Orlando.

These are unsolicited/unpaid comments - no agenda other than recognizing a book that will be valuable to many.

Jacksonville Code Camp Set for August 23, 2008

The fourth annual Jacksonville Code Camp is set for August 23, 2008 and it looks like they are off to a good start. Last years event was only a mild success, they've gotten started a little earlier this year so that should translate to a better event.

I see a couple of interesting differences from previous years. One is that they are taking "suggestions" for sessions and they will have the users vote to see which sessions are accepted. That's a step beyond what we do for SQLSaturday where we ask speakers to submit and also ask registrants to suggest sessions, the later being very handy if you're a want to be speaker looking for a topic. I suspect from looking at the suggestions that most were submitted by the speaker, so I'm not sure if the change in the first part matters, but the second part, the vote? It'll be interesting to see, but I think I'd vote for a slightly less democratic approach - thats why you have an event organizer, someone to try to juggle the priorities so that you can get appropriate content if you are a beginner, expert, or proverbial propeller head.

The second change is that they actually have a written sponsor policy, something we've focused on from the beginning at the SQLSaturday events and which I think has really helped us cover expenses and treat sponsors as partners. These are good changes and I look forward to attending to see what else they've come up with to make it even better than before.