SQL Saturday #273 Recap

I attended and spoke at SQL Saturday #273 on February 22, 2014.

Selfie in @aboutsqlserver session

My presentation "SQL Server Security Easy Button" went off without a hitch. My presentation files can be found here.



This was the first time the event was held at the University of South Florida's College of Business Building on the main campus in Tampa, FL.  It was an excellent facility for a SQL Saturday. No crowding, no bottlenecks, great classrooms. The atrium in this building provided the perfect place for vendors to setup and for people to network. As usual, an excellent lunch was provided by Latam's. A college campus is the perfect venue for a SQL Saturday. They have well-equipped classrooms and it gives students a chance to interact with people who are working the real jobs for which they are studying. 



Our event provided another public service. We were able to thaw out several people from the Great White North. Tom LaRock, Allen White, Grant Fritchey to name only a few were successfully thawed. Thank you for coming. ;-)

The sessions I attended were:

"Eternal story on temporal objects" by Dmitri Korotkevitch.  Dmitri reviewed all the possible temporal objects that SQL Server used and demonstrated the best way to use them. Afterwards, Dmitri told me that his Twitter account gained 25 followers after myself and Grant Fritchey tweeted during his session. He said, he now has more followers than tweets! I told him that he had to be capable of one epic tweet per day. The pictures he used to illustrate tempdb amusingly demonstrated his talking points.

Allen White's "Managing SQL Server Efficiently with PowerShell Remoting". Allen did an excellent job demonstrating how remoting makes it much easier to manage multiple machines and describing the maturation of PowerShell. It's much easier to build and configure a new database instance on Windows Server 2012 with the V4 cmdlets.

Chris Skorlinkski's "Your Best Interview Ever". 

I was familiar with most of the material that Chris covered. The main concept I took away from this session was to have an "elevator speech" ready to describe yourself to potential employers. I loved the example he used for it. It accomplishes all the goals of an elevator speech. Identify yourself, describe what you can do, and what your objective is.

Thank you to Pam Shaw, Leigh Freijo, sponsors, speakers, and volunteers for putting on a great event! I especially appreciated that the volunteers printed and cut up the SpeedPass for the speakers!



Also, thank you to Brian Mitchell and Jonathan Keyahias for answering some questions I had related to projects I have in progress at work.



Finally, the best juggler at SQL Saturday #273 was Eric Wisdahl.

SQLSaturday #232 Orlando - The case of the pesky projector

On Saturday, September 14, 2013, I presented my session "Cure your sysadmin addiction" at SQL Saturday #232 in Orlando at Seminole State College. 



I can prove it. I have pictures. 



On the left, I'm wearing my speaker shirt "Bubba-style". 













The best #SQLSat232 tweet was...

My session was right after lunch and the speaker group picture so I had to hurry to my session at 2 PM



Once again, getting the projector to play nice with my laptop proved to be difficult.



I could not get PowerPoint Presenter View to work correctly.  



Running Windows 8 as a guest OS in VirtualBox on a Ubuntu Linux 12.04 LTS host should not be this difficult.  Should it?



Why does this always happens when Rob Volk is in the room?

That's Rob on the right.


























I did test my setup prior to my talk.  It worked at home.  Here's proof.  

Believe me now Mr. Dunagan?  ;-)

I think I need to run the Guest OS in Fullscreen mode for it to work correctly.

It might have been a resolution issue also. Adjusting the resolution I'm sending to the projector may have helped. I'll keep that in mind next time.



Despite the issues with the projector, I did get through my entire presentation and still had time to answer questions along the way.  It was my third time presenting this session so I was pretty pleased I remembered most of my notes.



If you need another good reason to manage sysadmin strictly, consider this.



Another great job by Karla Landrum, Kendal Van Dyke and the team in Orlando.  Seminole State College is one of the best SQL Saturday venues. Keller's BBQ provided a great lunch again with the speakers serving up the goodies. I'm glad the speaker shirts were the standard polo.  I can wear it to work although I could be mistaken for a Florida Gators or Clemson Tigers fan.



I'll get a chance to do my talk again at the Tampa SQL User group meeting at the end of this month.  Hopefully, I can get the pesky projector working.

SQL Saturday #232 Orlando - I'm speaking!

I'll be speaking at SQL Saturday #232 in Orlando, FL on Saturday, September 14, 2013.



The information for this always outstanding event can be found here.



I will be presenting "Cure your sysadmin addiction".  If you have the requirement to reduce DBA permissions in your Production environment due to Risk and Compliance mandates, you should attend. 



This will be my third time speaking in Orlando and my eleventh SQL Saturday overall.



SQL Saturdays are an extremely inexpensive way for IT Pros to gain an edge in a competitive job market and to develop a network that can help you at your current job or find that next job.



Get an edge, attend!

PASS Security Virtual Chapter webinar - Cure Your Sysadmin Addiction

I had the pleasure of presenting for the new PASS Security Virtual Chapter on August 29, 2013.  



My presentation  "Cure your sysadmin addiction" describes the fundamentals of Separation of Duties, reviews SQL Server fixed server roles and granular permissions and the steps I took to reduce DBA permissions in our Production environments to satisfy a mandate from the management and our IT Risk and Compliance group.



If you missed it, the session was recorded. 

Please forgive the audio difficulties at the beginning. Once I dialed into the session, it went smoothly.



Thank you to K. Brian Kelley, Argenis Fernandez, and Robert Davis for the opportunity.

PASS Summit 2012 - Red Gate SQL in the City

http://community.invisionpower.com/gallery/image/7454-space-needle-downtown-and-mt-rainier-seattle/

I was fortunate enough to get my company's approval to travel for the entire week.



My week began with Red Gate SQL in the City on Monday at the Bell Harbor Conference Center on the Seattle waterfront. SQL in the City is a FREE community event solely sponsored by Red Gate that deftly walks the line between vendor showcase and community event.  Upon arrival, I immediately got some great news regarding product enhancements that will help resolve issues at work. It included a great lineup of speakers and attendees like Brent Ozar, Jeremiah Peschka, Allen White, Gail Shaw, Steve Jones, Grant Fritchey and Buck Woody.



I met fellow PowerShell fan, Laerte Junior from Brazil in person for the first time at this event.  Laerte ended up with the best collection of photos and shared them via Twitter.  He could have been the official photographer for the PASS Summit.

A great lunch was served and the event finished up with a Drinks Celebration at the end. This event just further confirmed the awesomeness that is Red Gate Software.  

SQL Saturday #85

I'll be speaking at SQL Saturday #85 this weekend in Orlando.

Here's another example we'll review during my session "PowerShell by Example".

This example uses the SQLPSX 1.6 function get-sqlserver to return server properties.




This example was inspired by @PaulRandal's Ponderings on the instance-wide fillfactor setting in his SQLskills Insider Tips newsletter of 9/3/2011.  

To become a SQLskills insider, go here.




Looking forward to seeing everyone at SQL Saturday #85!

   1:  # In response to Paul Randal's Ponderings of Sep 3, 2011 regarding fill factor set at the instance level...

   2:  # His Call To Action is to verify it is set to 100. This script provides the basic means to check it on multiple instances.  

   3:  # The results are sent to a csv file

   4:   

   5:  $FilePath = "C:\Output"

   6:  $OutFile = Join-Path -path $FilePath -childPath ("ServerWide_FillFactor" + (get-date).toString('yyyyMMdd_hhmmtt') + ".csv")

   7:   

   8:  # Provide a list of servers one way or another...

   9:  $Servers = 'RED50\SQLEXPRESS'

  10:  #$Servers = get-content 'C:\Input\Servers.txt'

  11:   

  12:  @(

  13:  foreach ($svr in $Servers)

  14:  {

  15:      $s = get-sqlserver $svr

  16:      $s.Configuration | select parent,{$_.Fillfactor.RunValue}

  17:      

  18:  }

  19:  ) | export-csv -noType $OutFile

SQL Rally abstracts submitted

I've submitted two abstracts for the SQLRally.

If you're interested in learning PowerShell by example or want to hear how I automated our login provisioning and compliance reporting. Vote for my sessions.

It's a win-win situation in the PowerShell track for attendees no matter who you vote for.

Another great bunch of abstracts in the DBA track.

Get out and vote.

Opinion: SQL Rally Abstract Process

I'm really enjoying the process that the SQL Rally is using to select speakers.

I've submitted abstracts to several SQL Saturdays and the PASS Summit but this has been the most interesting process so far. What I really liked about the SQL Rally submission process:

• Blind submission


• Two abstract limit


• Community votes for the final slate of speakers.

The blind submission process eliminates being concerned about what others will do. Submit what you have, if it's worthy, it will be selected. If not, move on.      

The two abstract limit levels the playing field for less experienced speakers who haven't compiled as much content but have gained enough speaking experience at the local level to move up to the regional level.  I think this limit also has produced better abstracts.  I think the candidates spent more time sharpening their abstracts because they only had two chances to get a slot.

Finally, letting the PASS community vote was a great idea but stretching the voting out over a month is brilliant from a marketing perspective.  The organizers have developed a very community focused method of creating maximum interest in this event.  Well done!

I'd like to see all or parts of this process used for future PASS events.

NEVER CHANGE RESOLUTION BEFORE A PRESENTATION!

I had the honor of speaking at SQL Saturday #62 this past weekend in Tampa.

It's only the second time I've presented using my Windows 7 laptop and the first time I presented using the Presenter View in Powerpoint 2010.  We still run Windows XP at work so I don't use Windows 7 on a daily basis.  I arrived early to setup for my presentation, connected the projector and booted the laptop.  The laptop auto set the resolution to 800x600. I didn't like the setting so I increased the resolution to a higher level and started up the presentation and went into Presenter View.  Cue foreboding music...





By this time, the first attendees started rolling in.  I looked at the first few slides to check everything was OK and then went back to the first slide in the deck.  I started my presentation, got to the fourth slide on the deck and the picture was missing!  The next slide was blank!  WTF?  The slides looked good in the ribbon at the bottom of Presenter View but weren't rendering correctly on the screen or in the Presenter View's left pane. 





Needless to say, this really threw me off.  Thankfully, one of the attendees suggested I switch to the editor view and present from that.  So, I muddled through the rest of the presentation and my demos.  Despite my PowerPoint woes, I did receive decent reviews via Twitter but I was not happy. I had to figure out what went wrong. I kept thinking and talking about it with other people for the next couple of hours.  





Finally, I thought changing the resolution might have been the crux of the issue.  I went back in the room during the lunch break and plugged my laptop into the projector.  This time, I did not touch the resolution.  The deck displayed correctly.  Head slap!





So, the sole purpose of this post is to save some other speaker newbie from repeating this mistake.  





Thanks to @BrentO for his post on Presenter View and @mrdenny and @brianwmitchell for their input while I was trying to figure this out.

SQL PASS Summit Helium Talks

I've started listening to the PASS Summit DVD sessions during my commute.  By accident, I discovered that my Sansa Clip+ mp3 player has a playback speed option while listening to the Lightning Talks. 





Buck Woody, Brent Ozar, Adam Machanic are great speakers but the fun begins when you change the playback speed option to FAST. It really sounds like Helium has been introduced into the room. It's really entertaining, you can still understand the speakers and you get through the content quicker.





One final note, Michelle Ufford must have been talking REALLY fast.   

  

SQL Saturday #62

I'll be speaking at SQL Saturday #62 in Tampa, FL on January 15, 2011.





I'm presenting a session called "Why Learn PowerShell" because there was a request for a beginning PowerShell session.  Tons of speaker submissions for this SQL Saturday so the organizers gave most speakers one slot to give the maximum amount of people the chance to speak.  They are still trying to secure additional space to expand the schedule.

   

If you have any interest in learning PowerShell, I encourage you attend this session.  

I'll explain why it's worth learning and provide REAL WORLD examples that I use regularly.

To further convince you that SQL Saturday is worth your time consider the following:

• The variety of topics is pretty amazing for a FREE event.


• Local, regional, and national speakers will present.


• Several 2010 PASS Summit presenters will speak.


• The Microsoft Scripting Guy and The Scripting Wife will be attending


• A local Microsoft Certified Master will be presenting on the Parallel Data Warehouse.


• The best lunch of any SQL Saturday will be served.

I've also registered for the Day of Data session "Virtualization and Storage for the DBA" by Denny Cherry being held the day before at the Italian Club in Ybor City.

I encourage all IT Pros to attend this event.

PASS Summit Final Thoughts

I've got to figure out how to get to the PASS Summit every year!  It was AWESOME!





It was great to meet more of the tweeps I follow and reconnect with those that I've met before.

It was my first time to Seattle also.  The weather was better than expected. I had a great time walking around the city when time allowed. I also had the opportunity to try the local restaurants and visit the Space Needle.  Everything was great.  Especially the coffee at Top Pot Doughnuts.





Every time slot had several sessions I wanted to attend. You can't get to all the sessions you would like so buying the Conference DVDs is a must.  





Participating in my local PASS user group, SQL Saturdays, and Twitter made being a FIRST TIMER at this year's PASS Summit a non-issue. I did not feel like a FIRST TIMER. I knew a lot of people because of participating locally.  I just blended right in, had fun, and learned a ton.





Being a FIRST TIMER, I didn't realize I could download the slide decks before the DVDs arrive. A prompt from a co-worker made me aware of this benefit.  I downloaded over a dozen decks so far and reviewed them.  Great benefit. Still tons more to go through.





So, the most significant takeaways for me:

1. Meeting Ola Hallengren and Paul Randal. Talking to them about Ola's Maintenance Solution was invaluable.


2. The changes to the MCM programming have me thinking about making it a 2011 New Year's resolution. I'll have a post on that later.


3. The Separation of Duties Framework that Lara Rubbelke and ll Sung Lee debuted has me thinking how to use it back in the real world.

Suggestions for next year:

1. Any possibility of getting Youtube videos on the conference DVDs for the Top 10 highest rated sessions?


2. Put Twitter handles on the conference badges.


3. Select one of my speaker abstracts.  ;-)

I've told my manager that we should be sending a representative every year. No excuses.

I had a great time at my First PASS Summit!