Blog Archives
I Am Passionate About Best Practices
After writing for the Tribal SQL project, I think I’ve realized just how passionate I am about best practices. For example, the other day I asked my wife if she could change our bed sheets to which she replied that they had only been on there two weeks. My retort was that best practices dictated changing the sheets weekly for optimum comfort in sleeping performance. Yes, I’m coocoo for Cocoa Puffs over best practices!
In the shower this morning, as that is where most of my brilliance comes from, I decided to start preparing myself to do a presentation. That has been a long time coming with my left side usually talking my right side out of it. Or was it the other way around? I can’t recall, moving on. Part of the stumbling block for doing a presentation was finding a niche in the SQL Server community and now I think I have resolved myself to that niche so I am slowly chiseling away at my excuses for not presenting at a SQL Saturday or my local user group. There are only a couple of excuses left now and those are slowly fading away, so now I must harness the power of the SQL Force! Next stop SQL Saturday, then possibly a SQL Rally and then SQL PASS; whereby my plan for global domination will be complete.
Enjoy!
Back In the Saddle Again
After spending a week at Paul Randal’s Immersion Event training, a week dedicated to standing up our new clusters, and then SQL Saturday this past weekend in Tampa, I am glad to get back to my SQL Servers. I missed them. Does anyone else ever feel like Gollum from Lord of the Rings, me neither. Now to get caught up on my various administrative duties that have queued up in the meantime. I am back in the saddle again!
I am going to be working on some blog posts for Best Practices this week after getting my new clusters all best practiced up! I am also working on some write ups for things I learned at SQL Saturday #110 in Tampa. I hope you enjoy!
Today is SQL Saturday Letdown Day!
SQL Saturday #110 in Tampa is in the books. Done. Finito. Over. The Sunday after SQL Saturday is the proverbial sugar crash for the weekend. What comes up must come down.
The build up for months of anticipation meets the pre-cons and then comes the big day SQL SATURDAY! Meeting all of the #SQLFamily, meeting local user group friends, meeting new peers and SQL rock stars makes for an excellent day, and oh yeah there was some amazing FREE training thrown in there, too.
Now we must face the reality: we have one year to wait until the next Tampa SQL Saturday! Well not really, as we are one of the lucky ones that has two events, our second one is for business intelligence held in the fall. And I won’t mention that we have one in Orlando in the late summer, early fall. Ok, I’ll admit that we are spoiled here, but I never get enough of these events.
I had planned this year to attend the events in Jacksonville and Atlanta, however I have exams on both of those weekends for one of my college courses. What a bummer! I may then have to expand out to South Florida or Pensacola to make up for the loss! See you there!
Enjoy!
We Interrupt This Regularly Scheduled Blog
We interrupt our regularly schedule blog, the SQL Saturday Schoolhouse, to bring you a blog live from SQL Saturday #110 from KForce in beautiful, historic Ybor City (aka Tampa). With around 350 registered attendees and several big name speakers flying in to our beautiful state, the excitement level was through the roof.
I have attended several great sessions today, learned a few new things, goofed off on twitter hoping to catch speakers with their twitter feed on, took my picture with a Lamborghini Countach, met a bunch of twitter friends in real life, remotely fixed a production systems administration problem, got some new laptop stickers, got some new pens, talked to some vendors about things that pain me in my daily world, ate some great Cuban food, saw SQLChicken rap like Vanilla Ice, created the blog world’s longest and most annoying string of disjointed phrases, and once again had a wonderful #SQLFamily day! I hope you too are taking advantage of this wonderful, FREE resource.
Enjoy!
SQL Saturday #110 Countdown
SQL Saturday #110 in Tampa is only a few days away…have you registered yet? Check out the schedule of speakers, especially if you have already setup your Guidebook app as there has been some minor shuffling over the last few days. There will be 35 great sessions and lunch is provided thanks to our great sponsors.
If you are interested in volunteering, please sign up now as your help is always appreciated. I look forward to seeing you there on Friday, if you are volunteering, and Saturday for some great #SQLAwesomeness!!
Enjoy!
SQL Saturday #110 – Tampa
We interrupt this episode on Sunday Funday to remind everyone that next Saturday, March 10th, is SQL Saturday #110 in Tampa. Over the last year, I have become a passionate proponent of attending SQL Saturdays working diligently to attend ones that are close to me. How can you pass up free training?
If you have not signed up to attend this SQL Saturday, then what are waiting for? Check out the schedule of sessions, as we have some pretty top-notch speakers. My biggest problem is that there are too many good sessions and inevitably, I miss a great one. That is a good problem to have! If you want to help out with this SQL Saturday, be sure to fill out the volunteer section of your registration. If you see me at SQL Saturday, feel free to say howdy!
Enjoy!
Do You Value Training?
Today is the first day of my SQLskills.com Immersion training, thus I prepared this blog post a few days ago.
If you have been reading my blog, then you should be able to surmise that I love learning. Being in the IT field, I am not sure how you can get by without training because of the speed at which technology changes. Luckily, my current employer also believes in and values training. When they ask me if I want to go to training, I submit three or four different classes. Of course, they do not all get approved, but all they can do is say no. Thus, it is worth the effort on my part and it demonstrates my committment to my career.
Do you value training? Are you taking advantage of the training opportunities provided by your employer?
If the budget is tight, there is no reason why you cannot attend many of the free webinars, code camps, SQL Saturdays, and especially local users groups. If you are not advancing your skills, then maybe technology is not the right field for you. So sign up for training. Go! Do it now!
Enjoy!
And so it begins…..
After attending SQLAndy’s SQL Saturday session on “Building a Professional Development Plan” a couple of months ago, I have been determined to develop my own Professional Development Plan. Over the next week or so, I will be formulating this plan here on this blog. At this point, I have a few goals for 2012 to begin the discussion.
- I want to dedicate time everyday to this blog and giving back to the SQL community that has helped me so much over the years.
- I want to continue to dedicate time to the SQL community in social media.
- I want to attend at least ten events this year consisting of SQL Saturdays, training, code camps, and possible SQL Rally and/or SQL PASS.
Stay tuned as we formulate this plan….
SQLSat86 Session Review: Andy Warren’s ‘Building a Professional Development Plan’
Before we begin, I must first admit that when I saw ‘Building a Professional Development Plan’ in the SQL Saturday 85 Schedule in Orlando back in September, I was not enthusiastic about attending this session as I thought it was more for consultants or for those looking to start their own business. Quite simply, I was thinking business plan and not individual plan. In hindsight, I wish I had attended this session back then, but I digress.
As most everyone knows, Andy Warren is the father of SQL Saturday and his status in the SQL community is legendary. With that being said I will now list the things that I learned from this session.
- Generally we do not like setting goals as there is an inherit risk of failure.
- The professional development plan, or PDP, is essentially your business plan as you are essentially a business with a plan.
- The PDP should be a pretty good mixture of growth items as well as technical items, such as:
- Formal Education
- Training
- Projects
- The PDP should have goals, milestones, as well as tasks necessary to accomplish these items.
- Questions you should ask yourself when developing the PDP include the following:
- Am I learning skills that only apply to my current job?
- What will be the next job that I search for?
- Will it be within my company?
- Am I being siloed into a narrow skill set in order to accomplish my existing responsibilities?
- If you are not being paid enough for your existing skill set then you are leaving money on the table.
- Where are you going and what do you want should be reflected in your PDP. What is the balance of the following items:
- More Money
- Stability
- Challenges
- Responsibility
- The following is a breakdown of the amount of time needed to reach different levels of success, how much are you willing to spend?
| 0-20 hours | No goal, no plan–Just work |
| 21-50 hours | Standard Maintenance |
| 51-100 hours | Slow growth, adding one skill |
| 101-200 hours | Serious investment |
| 200+ hours | Different focus / Hyper Growth |
- A Personal Development Plan should include the following:
- Networking, you should always try to meet three new people at each event or training.
- Writing / Communication skills
- Leadership / Management training
- Formal Education (or degree)
- Teaching / Presenting
- Professional Organizations / Events
- Blogging is important to your PDP for the following reasons:
- Networking
- It gives you practice writing
- It shows your level of consistency and follow through to future employers
- It shows that you participate in your profession
- You should keep up with new features for SQL Server. It is not possible to master all of the features but knowing what they are or do can be beneficial to your career.
I thoroughly enjoyed this session and will be developing my own Professional Development Plan before the end of the year. Thanks, Andy.
SQLSat86 Session Review: Adam Jorgensen’s “0 to SSAS”
The first session of the morning for me was Adam Jorgensen’s “0 to SSAS” presentation. Before this event, I had never had the privilege of attending one of Adam’s sessions and I do not work directly with SSAS, but his reputation as a good speaker enticed me to attend. Needless to say that I was not disappointed. Below are some random things that I learned from Adam:
- AS is the most powerful engine in the SQL Server line (designed to do table scans which would kill the DB engine)
- The Standard Edition for SQL Server is missing some of the AS functionality.
- AS uses BIDS aka Visual Studio with different project types
- AS works best with the STAR schema but might get the job done if your snowflake schema is not too diluted and you do not mind manually adding the dimensions.
- “Add related tables” will only find one level of relations which makes the STAR schema optimized for this.
- It was not said but I am guessing that the constellation schema would kill the engine 😉
SQL Swampland 