I think most of you that are at the Summit in Seattle this week have felt the same way, but I wanted to get your opinions. This has been a tough econonmic year for many companies, and it's a large expense to send someone to the Summit for a week. It's Friday, and for this week's poll:

Why is that so? Why can't the "restore" script be stored as part of the backup file and let the user open it, and get notified if there are issues. Or walked through the process? If you open a diff, can't it include the "name" of the last full? Or search for that file in the folder? What about logs, can't SSMS just "figure out" what LSNs are in which files and load them up automatically? Shouldn't a log have the name of the last full backup in it? Or the name of the last and next log backup files?

There is a blog at ZDNet that talked about how Sharepoint is six products for Office bundled together, it has thousands of people working on it's development, and no one is quite sure where it fits in. Is it a content management system? Is it an enterprise social networking platform? I've never been quite sure what the big deal is.

Read the rest of Low Hanging Fruit at SQLServerCentral

I thought this might make a good Friday poll, so I'll ask you this week:

This election was a change from previous years in that the voting was done before the annual Summit. Typically I've scrambled to find some time during the Summit to vote, and haven't always remembered to do so. This year the candidates were a little more accessible electronically, with bios posted on the PASS site, and a great series of Interviews from Brent Ozar (Thomas LaRock, Brian Moran, Matt Morollo, and Jeremiah Peschka). The one with Matt Morollo was particularly engaging with lots of comments and debate in the discussion. It was a little controversial, and I think with good reason. It's worth a read, and it got me thinking about what we want from PASS, and what we want our board members to accomplish.

Why was it worth it? That's an easy one, and it's the same reason I went to the Business of Software conference last year, and why I'd recommend it for other people. It's why I go to the MVP Summit, and why I usually try to attend keynote speeches.

As the world changes, it seems that so many old paradigms and methods of doing business either evolve or die off. I think this is just the way the world changes, but I think that the last decade, and possibly the next one, will change the world quite dramatically.

Most of the time I get the sense that a particular person is just unaware of how to solve a small problem and some hints, sample code, or suggestions on what to try will help them solve a problem. However there are times that it seems that someone is way out of their league. I don't want to specifically cite a thread, but I have seen a few posts that were asking for help with a large problem, such as how to set up a high availability solution for their servers.

I thought about it over the years, wondering what it would be like to work at Microsoft. I'd known a lot of employees over the years, thought they were interesting people, and it seemed like an exciting place to work. There was a time I even wondered if I could take over Robert Scoble's job and be the "voice" of Microsoft.

For those of you hiring people, do you want to hire people like this? I'd like to think that you do and you look for people that present themselves as self-motivated. A person's history, the types of problems they've solved, the way others talk about them, show the way that they handle themselves at work.

For this Friday, I wanted to take the temperature of the readers out there with regard to their career. The poll I have in mind is:

I tried to read through the quickstart on Apache's site for the common core installation and walk through a few examples, but it's a little hard to tell what exactly the buzz is about. Wikipedia was more help, pointing me to the MapReduce papers that Google published. I'll see if I can work through them at some point. Hadoop is available under a free license and the list of companies using it for large data set processing is impressive: Yahoo!, Amazon, Facebook, and more.

That seems to be a story played out in many companies all around the world. Lots of creative, talented people, all stuck in boring jobs cranking out code that supports the business. Over time they become jaded, un-motivated, or burned out at their jobs, perhaps even questioning their choice of career.

I've mostly abandoned the goal of becoming a CIO, but I still read about the position, trying to better understand the management point of view for many issues. Recently I ran across an article on how CIOs can better support their CEOs and thought it had some good advice, and not just advice for current CIOs.

Read the rest of Support the Boss at SQLServerCentral.

When I came across this blog talking about information workers and how they use technology, I was pleasantly surprised. It seems that Gen X people are more likely to participate in the Web 2.0 technologies out there. That seems to match my experience where I find many younger, Gen Y-type people having very short attention spans and not being willing to give back as much to the world. They don't post as often, and tend to just want to consume things quickly and without effort. At least that's been my general experience. There are always people that don't fit the mold, but I see a lot of those trends in people that are younger than 30 years old.

As SQL Server professionals should we care? I think we ought to be aware of these issues because you never know when some of this software might be in use on a server. What if you have old versions of Quicktime or Adobe PDFs that you generate in one of your servers. An attack on that software could be aimed to move against the database supplying the information.

We have a very talented group of professionals that donate their time to help others, something that I do as well.

Having been in a number of technology departments, from small to large, I can say that I see both sides. On one hand technology departments spend a lot of time and money cleaning up mistakes and problems from users. On the other hand, new applications and enhancements can often increase the efficiency or effectiveness of workers that find a new way to do their jobs.

In most of my past jobs, I've implemented security like this:

But did you clean house? In other words, while getting ready for this upgrade, planning ,testing, and preparing, did you re-examine your system to see if there were objects, users, jobs, or something else in your database server that is old, obsolete, and ready for retirement? Did you look for things to delete while you were getting ready to make everything else better?

Since I'll be there for 3 days, I don't have a party to plan or run (this year), I decided to check out the list of sessions at the event. I've been watching the banners rotate by, and seeing a fantastic list of speakers. Most of them have a lot to teach me and you, so I'll give you my top list of sessions and why. Note that I'm not going by the schedule for now. I'll figure out what to do with conflicts later.

What's your education worth?

There was a time when I eagerly looked forward to the new 486 processors, the Pentiums, and the rising transistor counts along with the ever-increasing clock speeds. There was a race to build faster processors, which would make all my applications run quicker. That's something I like, since I hate waiting for splash screens to load applications and windows to render.

Is that a big deal? After all a few people pointed out administrators could reset passwords. However that's not the same thing. It's one thing for an administrator to make a change on SQL Server, but quite another thing for them to do it "as" another person and make it appear that other person made the change. That could be a major issue. What if a DBA impersonated the CFO to approve a purchase order?

But what's the best? The most efficient? The highest performing by some measure? The most stable? As with almost any SQL Server question, or even any question in other areas, the answer is "it depends."

It seems to me that it's harder, but I'm really not sure. I think you need a separate backup process, and a more complex recovery process, but perhaps that's not true. Maybe I'm just over-thinking it.  Since it's Friday, I decided this would make a good poll.

However I'm not sure how many executives will be able to do that themselves, or with a small number of non-technical people. More and more we find systems feeding data to each other in an automated fashion, so it might not be as simple as entering some incorrect values in a few places. So they might come to the DBA for help. And if someone comes to you, asking for changes to data, or worse, auditing systems, what do you do? If someone offers you money, or threatens your job, how do you handle it?

Someone then commented that you shouldn't have installed all that for an evaluation edition.

Read the rest of You Shouldn't Have Done That at SQLServerCentral.

The article talks about only needing your birthday, your zip code, and gender to positively identify the vast majority of people in the US. That's not much information, and it definitely means I'm definitely not giving out my birthday anymore to the vast majority of people that ask for it. I'll likely not even use my current zip code anymore since most of the places that ask about it are probably fine with knowing the general area and don't need the specific code.

These are symbolic events, and while I'd urge you to go see them if you can, they aren't really in place to provide security. In our lives and work, we have real security measures that are designed to protect things that we are really concerned about. In the technology business, one thing we do is change passwords.

We don't have a lot of apprenticeship type programs in the IT world. Too often we have people learning on their own (and doing a good job), without a lot of guidance from older workers. I think some of that is the rapidly changing field of technology has many people struggling to keep up, others jumping in to be the first with some new platform, and many older people sticking with what they know.

As SQL Server has grown wider and wider, incorporating more and more features, it almost seems to have all the features that might qualify it as its own operating system, but it still has dependencies on Windows, and exists as a service under Windows. That is both good and bad, since you can easily use your physical server for other applications, but those applications can take resources away from SQL Server and cause contention.

I ran across a blog post overselling yourself that had some interesting points. Points that I think more people should pay attention to as we become more connected, more "social", and more likely to be asked about something we've done in an interview. These days if you have written a blog, posted in a forum, or made a note on a social network it is likely that the next person you interview will read it. If you post a lot of information they won't read everything, but I would assume they'll read something you've written.

I think back in my career to jobs I've had, and I wonder how many times I've made changes to a system, fundamental changes like disabling or enabling auditing of something, changing a service account, adding or removing sysadmins or something else. All of these changes arguably could affect the stability of the instance. And in many cases I did them quickly because of some need I thought I have.

In researching Home Server, I saw a blog post about how RAID was a bad idea for a home network. It's complicated to manage and requires drives to be the same size, which can be a problem for someone at home. Since we rarely buy drives, and then we tend to buy them one at a time, matching sizes and speeds can be an issue.

However there are some new types of databases being implemented in the world. Amazon's SimpleDB is mentioned in the article along with a few others that seem to be built to supplement a traditional RDBMS and provide some nice advantages in a distributed environment. For example, SimpleDB seems to be good for lookup data for remote systems, which could be web sites, mobile phones, or some other far flung technology that doesn't need to meet the ACID requirements necessary for transactional systems. Terracotta allows offloading of some transactional elements, preventing the need for so many round trips to the database.

Read the rest of New Databases at SQLServerCentral.com

It's an interesting question and one I've been thinking about a lot since reading Andy Warren's posts on the subject. He thought it was interesting enough to engage Don Gabor for his business and spend a little money to learn how to do it better. After having a few sessions, Andy thought it was helpful enough to get a pre-conference session at PASS on this topic. It's a short pre-con, 2 hours, and won't interfere with anything else you've booked. It's an additional $60, but I've paid my fee (it's a business expense) and will be there.

Some time ago I had the debate with someone about what the default fillfactor should be. It is 0 in 2008 (pages filled), but I'm not sure that's the best choice. Many people don't track page splits, or even know the ratio of reads to writes. Perhaps most applications are so heavily read weighted that this makes sense, but my feeling is that something more like 85 or 90 would be better.

However that changes this November when SQL Connections is being held on Nov 9-12 in Las Vegas. I've always supported the PASS Summit, and wondered how SQL Connections was run, but never attended. This year SQLServerCentral negotiated its own track at the show, with us supplying the speakers.

Recently Apple announced that they were looking to re-invent the album with the release of liner notes and booklets along with music. It looks like a way to give more value to consumers, and perhaps convince them to buy whole albums instead of particular songs. I think it’s interesting, and I am one of the few that misses browsing through albums and seeing the cover art that used to go with them. CD liners notes aren’t the same, and digital downloads seem far removed. For those of you that don’t remember what an album is, I’ve included a photo ;)

The long hours many people work can create lots of stress and impact the rest of your life. For every hour you work, that's one less hour for your family, your hobbies, or just time to decompress and relax, as my friend Tjay does.

So many business studies over the years have shown that it costs much, much more than acquire a new customer than retain an old one. And while you can only convince a person to spend so much money with you, that repeat, steady spending is the backbone of so many businesses. It would seem to me that not offering a discount for loyalty is a mistake in your business.

However these programs are implemented in many different ways, with different data requirements. Some use it to recommend other products, some might offer you discounts or coupons, some a free gift of some sort over time. All of these are good uses of the customer relationship, but I don’t think many of them are well thought out.

But what about stolen data? What's it worth to someone else? The values aren't always the same thing.

For example, I have an auger attachment for my tractor. I know it's a $600 cost to replace this tool (new), and various lesser amounts depending on what I've bent or broken recently. However my neighbor, who doesn't have a tractor, would value it much less. He doesn't have a way to use the tool, so it inherently just has less value for him.

is sharing the internal thoughts and documents that helped them develop the new version of their software. I think that this is one of those insights into a successful software company that could be adopted by other companies. I wish there were more details and specifics about why features or changes were included or left out so that others could get a better idea of how to apply this to their own process, but I understand that they might not want to provide that level of detail. I do appreciate the disclosure they have provided.

In reading through this, there was one very interesting part of their document. In the "customization" section they talk about building an API to allow plug-ins to work with their product. They say that it's better than having the source code, which is something I completely agree with.

I've attended a couple SQL Saturdays, and as you read this I'll flying to New Orleans, heading to SQL Saturday #17 in Baton Rouge. They've been great events and I think they've really helped bring some free training to many people that haven't had the chance to ever attend a conference or other paid event. I'll probably attend a few more over the next year, so let me know if you can get one organized and maybe I'll come.

I came across it in a post from Jeff Atwood, who commented on it at his Coding Horror blog. He talks a bit about how he's realized that he's not a software engineer, but rather a craftsman instead. So what's a craftsman?

Most people I know that run their own business, whether in software, construction, or anything else, work a lot of hours. It's almost assumed that if you own a business that you have to work insane hours. I also think there are lots of people in the Information Technology business that have the same expectation, even when they don't own the business. They think they have to work a lot of hours to succeed.

Recently I ran across an article from Ars Technica that was built out of some some discussions on their site from people involved in virtualizing servers at their companies. They published a five step guide to implementing a successful project. If you are thinking about a project, or even involved in one, I'd urge you to read this article.

So many sites want to get this piece of information from you, often to ping you on your birthday or give you some gift. I've always been wary, however, and usually put in April 1 instead of my real birthday. It makes for lots of birthday wishes on that day, but that's OK. I appreciate the thoughts, even if they are a few months off.

In many ways that's true, but the lack of constraints in building software to me means that you have to decide on artificial limits or you can get too distracted. Lots of people don't like those limits, but I really believe they're critical to our success as humans. In many ways having too much freedom causes us problems.

It's interesting that he's talking about databases, and apparently SQL Server isn't one that works for him. You'd hope that people at Microsoft Research would be looking for ways to improve SQL Server, or have ideas that could be used to improve SQL Server.

That's the opposite extreme of a previous job I had. My friends used to joke that I had a headset attached to me head when I managed a DBA team. I would literally have 5-6 or more hours of meetings a day, often 6 or 7 scheduled almost every day of the week. I thought most of them were pointless, almost all were poorly run, and they didn't add a lot of value to the company. But I was a manager, and that's what we do, isn't it? Have meetings?

When I started in this business, the Certified Network Engineer (CNE) from Novell, was the certification many IT people I worked with strived for. It required a number of tests, and was hard. You had to study, and really learn about how the Novell Network Operating System worked. You took tests, which were multiple choice, but they really stretched the boundaries of your knowledge in many cases. Mostly, I think, because at the time there were few resources with which to "cheat" on the exams, and a lack of practice tests available.

I give a presentation where I advocate that you document things, keep track of them, and manage your brand. I'll be giving it at SQLSaturday #17 in Baton Rouge as well as SQL Connections in Las Vegas. I tell people that you ought to have your own presence somewhere out in the World Wide Web that you can refer people to in some manner. Keeping track of your work, finding ways to document your career, learning, and knowledge brings with it an interesting conundrum. So for this Friday's poll:

Really?

As long as people have been involved with information and data, the information gets leaked. It's human nature to want to share and want to help others with their jobs. And we tend to trust people, so we tend to get fooled often through social engineering. That likely will never change as we have plenty of rules, but people still break them regularly to help friends or themselves. It's not usually malicious; it's often just to make their jobs easier.

After a few minutes I realized Google was having major issues. They weren't down, but their site, and many others that depend on them, were essentially unusable. My workday was pretty shot for online work, but fortunately I always have a number of things I can do offline that keep my busy.

Read the rest of No Google at SQLServerCentral.com

I was thinking about how to address this with SQLServerCental, and what changes we might make. We are considering altering our forums to allow some different types of markings for answers, but all the ideas we have take considerable development, so I'm not sure we'll make changes soon.

The fact that anyone thinks this is acceptable is amazing to me. Asking for someone's online sites is one thing; their credentials crosses a line. In today's world where so often we find data being lost, stolen, or disclosed to others, this is an extremely bad policy. Not just for the privacy implications that it imposes on job applicants, but because it creates a huge liability for the city itself. Can you imagine if someone's account were accessed and something malicious posted to the account? I know I'd sue the city.

Prior to SQL Server 2005 this was pretty much impossible. The sysadmin group was considered to be like a god inside the SQL Server and could access most anything. With 2005 there are more restrictions you can place on the administrator, and with the addition of encryption capabilities, you can prevent casual access to certain data.

And it felt great!

And I'm not the only one. There are quite a few people in the SQL world whose advice is trusted, but not universally. How is that trust earned? How can you earn the trust of others? There is no secret, and it's the same way you do it every day in your life.

Here at SQLServerCentral, we've been attacked a few times. Our database has been the victim of SQL Injection attacks in the past, though I hope that we've closed all those holes by now. I haven't seen anything go awry recently (knock on wood), but I'm sure that we are probed or even attacked on a regular basis.

That seemed like a hard question to me. How do you know when someone is ready to be a DBA? There's no test to take, no definite measure. As many people have pointed out, we aren't even likely to agree on what a DBA is, much less what skills they need to have. Let me say that I'm talking about being a DBA in skill, not title. Plenty of people get stuck with the title and have no idea what they're doing.

One of the very few success stories I'd seen back in college was from NASA, that often criticized group for various failures. The group that writes the software for the US Space Shuttle was put forth as a model of software development, earning a CMM level 5 from the Software Engineering Institute. I was reminded of this recently with an article in FastCompany magazine called They Write the Right Stuff.

Read the rest of Grown Up Software at SQLServerCentral.com

In SS2K5, we got a subsystem based on SSIS that allowed more complex maintenance plans than existed in SQL Server 2000.

That got me thinking. Do you really want to see the best minds when you go to a conference? What about a SQLSaturday? Do you want to see the best, or are you happy to see someone that's put an effort into learning about a topic and can teach you something? What about at user groups?

It did get better as I went through the entries. I read some interesting stories, and found there are some great DBAs out there doing amazing work. And I realized they're mostly people that many of you have never heard of.

I have learned a lot about many things in my time working for various companies, and I've learned a lot about myself as well. I've made good and bad choices, and I don't think I have many regrets about my decisions. I think all of them have helped me to either succeed directly, or learn what not to do and succeed indirectly.

I'm really not sure what the truth is in some cases. Things have gotten so complex that often I think even if everything worked as expected, if every API was solid, we'd still have "bugs" from these complicated interactions that no one had thought of between the various components and parts of the system.

Some people have decided they don't want to stay, and quite a few executives, and Google wants to try and see if they can keep them. So they are looking for signs that a person might think about leaving, and then hopefully doing something about it. And in typical Google fashion, they've built an application that crunches data to identify those people likely to leave.

I'm not sure what impact that has on us as SQL Server professionals, but it should mean that Microsoft can afford to continue to invest in its products for some time. The profitable ones, like SQL Server, should continue to receive a lot of this investment for a long time, along with plenty of marketing, sales, etc. Your company might not be doing well right now, but improving your SQL Server skills should pay dividends for some time to come in the overall job market.

So this being Friday, I wanted to see what others thought out there.

And I agree with this blog post:sometimes the problem is you.

When SOX was introduced I was working as a corporate DBA, and the interpretation of the law at that time meant we had to do a lot of documentation to comply. It sounded like a huge hassle for all the employees and management. We all expected this process to cost a lot of money, and reduce revenues a little. Not a lot since everyone would be expected to work more!

We have active forums at SQLServerCentral, there are plenty at MSDN, and various other sites where people ask questions and get answers. Heck, I even use TractorByNet, which recently helped me fix a troubling bush hog problem. The people that answer questions on these forums are experts in their fields, but there are also plenty of people just like you that take a few minutes out of their day to contribute some of their knowledge

How many of you know what your colleagues make? How many of you are upset with what your colleagues earn? Or how many of you suspect that someone you know is overpaid? I think many people have these types of feelings at different points in their careers.

I've worked for a couple start ups in my career and had one literally fold while I was working there. I helped carry out equipment on a Monday morning after the doors were locked and employees were turned away. In the weeks that followed, I helped to move some equipment around, and even install our software at a few former clients (we hosted their data previously) and helped them get up and running.  Those customer's data went to them, at least a usable copy of it, and they had negotiated the right for an escrowed copy of our system.

With that in mind, for a Friday poll that has nothing to do with SQL Server, technology, or work, I wanted to ask:

One of my thoughts is that it's hard to do this because people don't often know they have issues. We see so many people buy hardware that's overkill for the SQL Server instance that 4 people connect to and while it might be horribly inefficiently written, 4 people can't kill the server. Or not enough to matter. Or, hopefully, not that often.

The message from Brian today was that we ought to give our best and not abide by some certain minimum amount of effort. Effort can be measured however we choose, but our goal ought to be to do our best for that time, and not necessarily abide by some measuring stick we've arbitrarily set.

There actually are other industries for all of these cases, but they're not numerous, and they differ from software. The business of building and selling software is fascinating, and I'm always learning more about it. I constantly see great questions in the forums at the Business of Software social network site. I'll also plug the Business of Software 2009 Conference; if you're a software person, consider attending this event. I went last year and found it very stimulating and educational, forcing me to think a lot about how that industry works.

In the IT world, you'd think that ones skills should continue to grow. We are constantly learning new things, there is value to experience, it's not a physical effort (in general), and so you would think the wise old DBA or programmer would be able to perform better than the young turks. And do so in less time.

Recently I've been plagued by back pain, specifically lower back muscles that have knocked me out of some activity. In fact, last weekend I spent a good portion of the weekend lying in bed, watching basketball on TV. While I enjoyed the basketball, it got old, and I felt guilty for not getting some chores done around the ranch I live on. I couldn't even get ahead much on work; being unable to sit up made it hard to type in bed.