Category Archives: SQL Saturday

SQLRally, SQL Saturday and The Summit

“Gotta say it was a good day…”

-Ice Cube
 

On The SQL Saturday Circuit

I’ve been speaking at all the regional SQLSaturday events I can go to. I kicked off the year with SQLSaturday #57 in Houston. Then did a turn around to SQLSaturday #63 in Dallas, my second one there. I have submitted to Baton Rouge figuring I could drive it but after that I’d be tapped out on vacation time and money. Lucky for me, Idera started the A.C.E. program and chose me as part of the very first group to sponsor for this year. I’m now gearing up to submit to more SQLSaturday’s. Hopefully I’ll get picked!

Is this Thing On?

From Thomas Wanhoff via Flickr

I did my first live webinar on Idera’s Secrets of SQL Server  webcast series. It was a three part series over SQL Server and storage technologies. My first part pulled in around 900 people. Part 2 around 500 and part 3 around 350. All in all, I would call it a success. I had a great time doing them. I was terrified to do them. I have done a ton of public speaking and a short stint in radio broadcasting, but this felt completely different. It was in a way. I couldn’t just ham it up like I would on the radio and not having the feed back from a live audience made it difficult to tell if I was going off the rails.

On The National Stage

I was notified by SQLRally that I would be presenting my storage talk at the very first event in Orlando. I was stunned. First, that I made the initial cut. Secondly, that I was chosen by all of you over so many other great abstracts and speakers. I resolved to make this the best presentation I could. Later, I got the call that I had been chosen for a 90 minute deep dive session. I knew I could carry 90 minutes with the amount of material I’ve got handy so that wasn’t an issue. Not wanting to disappoint those who attended was though. Just to keep things interesting, I helped perform eScan’s first move into a real data center, got the flu oh and resigned to go to work for Dell. All of this right before SQLRally. My last day at work was on a Tuesday, I left at lunch got on the plane to Florida an gave it my all. The reaction was just overwhelming. The amount of people that kept coming up to me through the rest of the conforince to let me know how much they liked the session was just staggering. People that I’ve known for years kept telling me just how solid it was. I didn’t disagree with them but when I got the evaluations back I knew I’d knocked it out of the park.  They also just announced the top rated speakers and I came in number second, Adam Jorgensen (twitter|blog) just squeaking past me. I would have been jazzed just to be in the top 10. Again, I am humbled to be in such excellent company.

The Big Show

If all of that wasn’t enough I got the nod. For years I’ve dreamed of speaking at The Summit. I’ve been to almost every one of them. I submitted two sessions. My talk on the fundamentals of storage got the green light and my solid state storage was selected as an alternate. What do I say? I’m humbled, honored and very excited to be a speaker at the premiere SQL Server event of the year.

Now What?

I’m not sure to be honest. It is only June. I’ve got more stuff to get done for the local and regional PASS chapters, a SQL Saturday to host in Austin by the end of the year. I got to say, this is going down as one of my best years ever serving the SQL Server community.

I’m an ACE

I am happy to announce that I’ll be joining Idera’s Advisor & Community Educator for SQL Server program.

Getting More Involved

I’ve always appreciated Idera funding my local PASS chapter and funding SQLSaturday events. Recently the fine folks at Idera have decided to take a more active role in the community. Recently, you may have seen some new faces at SQLSaturday events helping out. Idera made a commitment to put boots on the ground at some SQLSaturday events to just help out. They weren’t there to sell software but to genuinely help out. Now they are taking it to the next level.

Why become an ACE?

For me, joining the program was a simple choice. It offers me the opportunity to work with Andy Warren (@sqlandy|www.sqlandy.com) someone I’ve known for a long time and have a lot of respect for. And to work with someone new, Mitch Bottel (@SacSQLDude|www.mitchespitch.com) who is working hard to grow in the community. It also allows me to extend my ability to teach, mentor and generally reach out to new people. I’ve been funding my own travel and expenses for the last few years to speak at events like SQLSaturday. While I don’t mind footing the bill it does limit how far I can travel. Idera’s ACEs program changes all of that. It is just a great opportunity to reach out to others and grow as a teacher.

Do you want to join?

That’s right! Idera is looking for three more candidates go to http://www.idera.com/About-Us/ACE/ read up on the program and decide if you too would like to work with Idera and help grow the community!

Changing Directions

I See Dead Tech….

Knowing when a technology is dying is always a good skill to have. Like most of my generation we weren’t the first on the computer scene but lived through several of it’s more painful transitions. As a college student I was forced to learn antiquated technologies and languages. I had to take a semester of COBOL. I also had to take two years of assembler for the IBM 390 mainframe and another year of assembler for the x86 focused on the i386 when the Pentium was already on the market. Again and again I’ve been forced to invest time in dying technologies. Well not any more!

Hard drives are dead LONG LIVE SOLID STATE!

I set the data on a delicate rinse cycle

I’m done with spinning disks. Since IBM invented them in nineteen and fifty seven they haven’t improved much over the years. They got smaller and faster yes but they never got sexier than the original. I mean, my mom was born in the fifties, I don’t want to be associated with something that old and way uncool. Wouldn’t you much rather have something at least invented in the modern age in your state of the art server?

Don’t you want the new hotness?

I mean seriously, isn’t this much cooler? I’m not building any new servers or desktop systems unless they are sporting flash drives. But don’t think this will last. You must stay vigilant, NAND flash won’t age like a fine wine ether. There will be something new in a few years and you must be willing to spend whatever it takes to deploy the “solid state killer” when it comes out.

Tell Gandpa Relational is Soooo last century

The relational model was developed by Dr. EF Codd while at IBM in 1970, two years before I was born. Using some fancy math called tuple calculus he proved that the relational model was better at seeking data on these new “hard drives” that IBM had laying around. That later tuned into relational algebra that is used today. Holy cow! I hated algebra AND calculus in high school why would I want to work with that crap now?

NoSQL Is The Future!

PhD’s, all neck ties and crazy gray hair.

Internet Scale, web 2.0 has a much better haircut.

In this new fast paced world of web 2.0 and databases that have to go all the way to Internet scale, the old crusty relational databases just can’t hang. Enter, NoSQL! I know that NoSQL covers a lot of different technologies, but some of the core things they do very well is scale up to millions of users and I need to scale that high. They do this by side stepping things like relationships, transactions and verified writes to disk. This makes them blazingly fast! Plus, I don’t have to learn any SQL languages, I can stay with what I love best javascript and JSON. Personally, I think MongoDB is the best of the bunch they don’t have a ton of fancy PhD’s, they are getting it done in the real world! Hey, they have a Success Engineer for crying out loud!!! Plus if you are using Ruby, Python, Erlang or any other real Web 2.0 language it just works out of the box. Don’t flame me about your NoSQL solution and why it is better, I just don’t care. I’m gearing up to hit all the major NoSQL conferences this year and canceling all my SQL Server related stuff. So long PASS Summit, no more hanging out with people obsessed with outdated skills.

Head in the CLOUD

Racks and Racks of Spaghetti photo by: Andrew McKaskill

Do you want this to manage?

Or this?

With all that said, I probably won’t be building to many more servers anyway. There is a new way of getting your data and servers without the hassle of buying hardware and securing it, THE CLOUD!

“Cloud computing is computation, software, data access, and storage services that do not require end-user knowledge of the physical location and configuration of the system that delivers the services. Parallels to this concept can be drawn with the electricity grid where end-users consume power resources without any necessary understanding of the component devices in the grid required to provide the service.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing

Now that’s what I’m talking about! I just plug in my code and out comes money. I don’t need to know how it all works on the back end. I’m all about convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources. You know, kind of like when I was at college and sent my program to a sysadmin to get a time slice on the mainframe. I don’t need to know the details just run my program. Heck, I can even have a private cloud connected to other public and private clouds to make up The Intercloud(tm). Now that is sexy!

To my new ends I will be closing this blog and starting up NoSQLServerNoIOTheCloud.com to document my new jersey, I’ll only be posting once a year though, on April 1st.

See you next year!

SQLSaturday #57 Houston, Smashing Success!

I attended and spoke at SQLSaturday #57, and it was an awesome event! Here are my notes and observations on the trip as a whole.

As always, I try to be in town on Friday night to do the speaker dinner. It’s always worth it. Even if you hate the food, resturant or the part of town the PEOPLE make it so worth wild. I always meet someone new and get to cultivate relationships that normally would only get some TLC at The Summit. To me SQLSaturday is a cheap way to keep my speaking skills sharp, educate some folks and get to spend quality time with a great group of people.

Friday night I got to do one of the things on my “bucket list”, guest on DBAs@Midnight with my friends Sean, Jen and Patrick. I’ve worked in broadcasting but it’s never easy to do. Sean and Jen put quite a bit of work into these weekly shows and being on the other side of the camera reminded me of that!

I was surprised at how nice the facilities were. It wasn’t what I had in mind when I saw it was at a church. It is always cool to see people looking to other communities besides the traditional venues for this kind of event. The food was awesome. Being a meat eater having hot brisket was a big plus for me! There were two things that will be corrected the next time around. Signage and room numbering. It wasn’t a huge deal just a rough spot in an otherwise flawless event.

You can download my slide deck here.

Again, thanks for putting on such a great event and allowing me to come speak!

SQLSaturday 57 In Houston, Here I Come!

Another year and staring it off right! I’ll be speaking at SQLSaturday in Houston, TX on the fundamentals of storage and SQL Server. I love this talk. I give it regularly and it’s like an old friend to me. Near and dear to my heart, IO subsystems and SQL Server have been my bread and butter for quite a while. So, if you are going to Houston come find me and say hi. There is only one thing more than educating people, and that is getting to know those people.

Understanding SQL Server and Storage Systems

The most important part of your SQL Server is also the slowest, Storage. This talk will take you through the fundamentals of your server’s Disk I/O System. From how hard drives work, through RAID configurations, and how to configure the file system. This session should give you a solid foundation over storage systems and help you understand why they are slow and how to overcome some of their limitations.

Session Goals

  • Understand the physical characteristics of IO hardware.
  • Understand the fundamentals of RAID.
  • Understand how to configure the file system.

See you there!