Looks like August is definitely shaping up to be a busy one for me! First I’ll be presenting at SQL Saturday #16 in South Florida. That takes place on Saturday, August 8th. I’m really excited for this event since it’ll be the first SQL Saturday I’ve presented at.
Following that I’ll be heading over to Melbourne the following week on Thursday, August 13th for the Spacecoast SQL Server User Group meeting. At both locations I’ll be presenting my Policy Based Management 101 session. Then to finish off my month the following week I’m moving to a new place so August will definitely be an active one. Speaking of which, check out and participate in Active August! I’ll be writing up a series blog posts about my #activeaugust experience as well.
**UPDATE** Sweet! Looks like I just confirmed with Jack Corbett (Blog | Twitter) that I’ll be presenting for the Orlando SQL Server User Group on September 15th!
Tonight was our monthly SQL Server User Group meeting and our featured presenter this evening was Plamen Ratchev (Blog) presenting on performance tuning and query optimization. First off, he has an awesome accent. I think he’s of Croatian descent from what he mentioned but he rolls his R’s something fierce. I should’ve had him say the phrase “reporting services” a bunch of times just to make me giggle. Anyways, I’m way off topic…
He opened with a quote from Donald Knuth that stated
We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil
This was a good point to open with in that if you try to focus on only performance in the development phase you’re more than likely going to perform an epic fail. He then went on to show the differences between being reactive and proactive in terms of performance tuning. His take was that in Europe their development processes focused more on being proactive and trying to take care of issues before they become major problems as opposed to trying to run around putting out fires all the time like many a DBA (myself included) is forced to do on a daily basis. In an interesting story he relayed to us he told us about how he had come to the U.S. and pitched a European software that allowed a major car manufacturer to improve their processes. The software would basically alert you if anything in production fell “out of the norm” and would advise actions on how to fix it. The American company had a different approach to their process. They basically hired a team of high-priced consultants to come in for a week, measure everything nuts to bolts about what’s wrong in the production process, produce a report and leave (whether or not problem got fixed). What surprised me most was that he told us the manager told him if there’s a problem they pretty much just build another assembly line somewhere else rather than fix current issue. If you’re wondering why they need Federal bail-out money, this story should give you a slight clue.
The presentation continued on with things such as common performance issues you’re likely to find such as inefficient queries, retrieving too much data, inefficient or missing indexes and a few other things. This was a nice list to see for both devs and DBA’s alike so everyone is aware of these common mistakes. This lead to topic of problematic designs such as the “one-true lookup” table issue. This is when rather than normalizing your data someone decides its easier to just throw everything in to one large table and add columns as needed later on. I can see some of you cringe when you read that since you’ve probably seen that in production somewhere at some point.The surprising thing that came out of this example though (to me anyways) was that sometimes this setup actually makes sense for very specific applications such as a simple survey or a medical application that is only storing straight facts (i.e. patient monitor). Another oldie but a goodie is mismatched data types on join columns or filters. While this may work without a problem, when you throw a heavy work load at something like this you’ll see performance tank because behind the scenes the data engine is having to do lots of implicit conversions to process that query for you. So remember that little tidbit next time you’re planning with your devs and database developers.
The next interesting thing I learned was regarding data type optimization. Do you know what the one of the fundamental differences is between VARCHAR and NVARCHAR besides one taking up twice as much space as the other? NVARCHAR handles multiple collations while VARCHAR is more for single so if your application is only going to be delivered via a single, default collation then stick with using VARCHAR.
I could go on and on but needless to say this was an extremely insightful and useful presentation. Another user group member, Ron Dameron (Twitter), noted in Twitter this evening
…seen this deck twice now. Learned new stuff both times. Thx Plamen
If you ever get a chance to attend one of Plamen’s presentations at a live event I highly encourage you to do so as he’s a brilliant guy and presents well. If he’s not coming anywhere near you, you can still check out his presentation stylings by watching his videos over at JumpstartTV. In closing here’s some book recommendations he threw out at the end of his slide deck. Basically this is just an excuse for me to use the cool Carousel feature from Amazon!
A few weeks back I presented at the Tampa SSUG meeting on Policy Based Management with SQL 2008. Unfortunately due to sickness and apparently my own laziness, I never got around to doing a follow-up post or posting my slide deck. First the slide deck:
As a warning the deck itself is a bit sparse with how-to info as the meat of my presentation is in demo format. Given that fact, I will start a series of blog posts covering Policy Based Management and how/what you can do with it. Keep an eye out in the coming weeks for those! In the meantime a big thank you for everyone that attended the Tampa presentation, hopefully I’ll be giving this same presentation again at SQL Saturday South Florida in August.
Just wanted to post that tomorrow night I’ll be presenting on Policy Based Management in SQL 2008 at the Tampa SQL Server User Group meeting. The details of the meeting are below, hope to see you there!
Date: 6/16/2009
Topic: Policy Based Management
Speakers: Jorge Segarra
Location: Franklin Templeton Buidling ( Directions )
Description:
Jorge Segarra will be presenting Policy Based Management. We will be learning an overview of this powerful new feature in SQL 2008 and how you can leverage it to help manage your existing SQL environment. This will include plenty of demos, best practices and Q&A so by the end you should be able to walk away ready to take control of your SQL Servers!
Jorge has been a SQL DBA for over 5 years with experience with SQL 2000, 2005 and 2008. Some of his other specialties include virtualization, specifically on the VMware platform. He is currently the Database Administrator for University Community Hospital (www.universitycommunityhospital.org) in Tampa. Check out his blog at: http://sqlchicken.blogspot.com.
Food and drinks will be provided by Jane Powell of CIBER, Inc. CIBER is a pure-play international system integration consultancy and outsourcing company with superior value-priced services and reliable delivery for both private and government sector clients. CIBER’s services are offered globally on an outsourced, project, or staffing basis, in both custom and ERP package environments, and across all technology platforms, operating systems and infrastructures.
As usual, SWAG from the group’s stash will be raffled. SWAG will include Office 2007, books and other items.
Today was Quest Software’s bi-weekly Pain-of-the-Week webcast and this week’s topic was Getting Started with SQL Server Management Studio. We were lucky enough to have not one, but two SQL rock stars presenting today in Brent Ozar (Blog | Twitter) and Michelle Ufford (Blog | Twitter).
Brent kicked it off with a quick intro and then handed it over to Michelle to walk us through the basics such as creating a database, adding tables/columns/objects/etc as well as going through all the options available such as creating Maintenance Plans, creating backups from within SSMS, and the SQL Server Agent. They even demoed some of the nice little tools available in the latest SSMS such as activity monitor and the built-in reports. A question was raised about if the new SSMS offered a view equivalent to the taskpad view in SQL 2000 Enterprise Manager and the answer is…kind of. If you’re using SSMS 2008 (which you should be since you can install it without having to have a SQL 2008 instance) that view has been replaced by the built-in reports. You can access the reports by right-clicking your Instance or even a database itself, go to Reports, go to Standard Reports and select which report you’d like to view. And like we learned yesterday, some of these reports come from our default trace! Another fun tidbit of information learned from this presentation was that if you choose to (granted this isn’t recommended) right-click a table and select the Edit Top 200 records, it opens the records in an Access-like grid and allows you to change data directly. But this is cool and useful, why isn’t it recommended? Well when you open records like this it puts a lock on those records so nobody else can get to them. So in a production environment clearly this is a no-no but at least you know the feature’s there. For the record the recommended method would be to do something like this:
After Michelle wrapped up our tour of SSMS, Brent then gave us a quick tour of Quest Software’s Toad for SQL Server product. This is a pretty slick product that is aimed towards the development community. It gives you basically the same things as SSMS for the most part but it also gives you so much more. For instance you are able to do a query and re-sort your results using column sorting as you would in Excel (i.e. click column name to change order). You can also do filtering via this method as well. What’s the big deal about this? Well every time you change your ordering you don’t have to make a roundtrip to the server to re-query your data, it holds everything locally so its speedy. This is where Borat pops up and says “very niiiiiiiiice”. There was also some slick thing it did with pivots but that was the point where my desktop froze so all I got was audio from the phone call, though the people commenting on Twitter seemed to like…whatever it is it did. But don’t take my word for it, try it out yourself and go download a 30-day demo of the product at Quest’s website!
That pretty much summed up the webcast this week! They’ll be doing a follow-up webcast on June 11th with more advanced tips as well. you can register for that webcast here. If this post didn’t quite do it for you, you can catch all POTW webcasts on-demand over at Quest’s website. Today’s presentation should be up in a few days.
