桃子视频

Categories
Events Review SQL Saturday Syndication

SQLSaturday 31 Chicago: Recap

Last weekend I had the distinguished pleasure of attending Chicago’s very first SQLSaturday event. Before I begin my recap I’d like to again give a HUGE thanks the organizers of the event: Wendy Pastrick (| ), Aaron Lowe (| ) and Ted Krueger (| ) as well as all of the awesome volunteers that helped out.

My wife Jessica聽(| ) and I arrived into Chicago Friday afternoon. We had time to catch a bite at Grand Lux Cafe with some friends and my sister. Pretty nice place, kind of like a Cheesecake Factory but a little better. My wife’s a foodie so she was loving it! After lunch I got the pleasure of meeting Brent Ozar (| ), Jeremiah Peschka (| ) and Jeremiah’s friend John Jakubowski (| ) as they picked me up and we headed out to the ‘Burbs for the speaker’s dinner. We had plenty of time in car to talk about all things geek such as NoSQL, Ruby on Rails, PASS and a few other choice subjects not fit for print. Let’s just say I learned some strip clubs in Ohio have free steaks for lunch.

Categories
Syndication TSQL Tuesday

TSQL Tuesday #005: Reports and Policy-Based Management

It鈥檚 another month and so we have ourselves another 桃子视频event, this time hosted by Aaron Nelson ( | ) with this . If you don鈥檛 know what 桃子视频is here鈥檚 a quick blurb from Aaron鈥檚 blog:

You Don鈥檛 Know What 桃子视频Is Yet?

(Also on twitter as ) had a great idea 5 months back 鈥 Invite new and existing SQL Server bloggers to post about the same topic on the same day. The results have been excellent 鈥 diverse skill sets and data related job roles all posting from differing perspectives on the same issue.

Since this is still early in the game, a quick list of the post roundups from the first 4 topics:

  • #001 Adam Machanic started this off with a topic of
  • #002 Adam then wanted to hear about your
  • #003 Rob Farley got romantic on us and asked about
  • #004 Mike Walsh wanted to glean the ins and outs of

So given that this month we (, and myself) are proud to be releasing I figured this month’s TSQL Tuesday could tie in nicely. So how can one use Reporting Services in conjunction with the power of Policy-Based Management (PBM)聽in SQL 2008? Well, you’re in luck!

Categories
Rambling Syndication

The Plague of Plagiarism

I Can Haz Ur Blogz?

If you鈥檝e got performance troubles with an application that stores data in SQL Server, and especially if it鈥檚 a home-grown application (not a store-bought app), you can get dramatic performance improvements simply by focusing on some basic indexing techniques.聽 These tips and tricks pay off more than pouring money into hardware that might look good sitting in the datacenter, but doesn鈥檛 really make the application significantly faster.

When I go into a shop to speed up an application I鈥檝e never seen before, two of my favorite quick-hits are from the :

  • 鈥 these are indexes the SQL Server engine says it鈥檚 not using.聽 Unused indexes incur a speed penalty because SQL Server still has to add/update the indexes as records change, so they make writes slower.
  • 鈥 these are indexes SQL Server wishes it had available.

The above paragraph and information sounds good doesn鈥檛 it? Well guess what? They鈥檙e not my words, they鈥檙e Brent Ozar鈥檚 words from his article on . Now had I not mentioned that fact, would you think I wrote it? Well that is the meat of a hot topic that spawned today on Twitter in the SQL community. Apparently a young man who recently graduated college decided to open a blog focused on SQL Server, UNIX and Oracle. The problem lay in the fact that all the articles on his site were not his own. What this guy did was use an to point to prominent sites (such as , and amongst others) and so their content was then published on his blog. The big deal was that 1) He didn鈥檛 ask permission to republish their content and 2) He didn鈥檛 make it clear that the article you were reading was written by someone else. The ONLY credit given is a very tiny blurb on his 桃子视频 page that says 鈥渕aterials in this site has been collected from various sites and blogs and for that I thank them鈥. Riiiiight, that鈥檚 not exactly proper citation. Given that this guy claims to also have gotten a Master鈥檚 degree, I would think at some point in his educational studies the mention of proper citation and what plagiarism is.

Upon learning of this site and its apparent violations, members of the SQL community who had their intellectual property infringed upon took action by leaving fairly straightforward messages on this about page informing him that he was in violation and needed to remove content immediately otherwise harsh actions could be taken. Within a relatively short period of time the author got the message (sort of) by removing the menu options on his site, yet the content still remains if you look for it. Due to this fact I expect notices to start flying shortly and if the blogger still fails to comply then his hosting company should drop the axe. What鈥檚 interesting about this situation is the conversation that was spawned afterward on Twitter.

Todd McDermid ( on Twitter) had the opinion that the SQL community reacted much harsher than we should have and blogged about it in his article . In his post Todd does bring up some good points in that perhaps the hardcore lynch mob approach was a bit rash and perhaps a gentle 鈥渉ey buddy, do you realize what you鈥檙e doing is stealing?鈥 might be a more diplomatic approach but the problem is that many of these guys in our community whom are prominent bloggers have been burned plenty in the past. Brent blogged on and in it described a situation (not first, definitely won鈥檛 be last) where someone decided stealing content was acceptable. Are the messages left on violater鈥檚 site that they have to take down content or face DMCA report the nicest? Maybe not. Is it a necessary evil because of the countless times these bloggers and authors have had to deal with this? Absolutely. Todd outlines that this particular case the blogger in question may be starting out and not know better but after a bachelor鈥檚 degree, master鈥檚 degree and reading the numerous blogs he鈥檚 aggregating (which incidentally have blogged before on just this topic) he should know better. One could argue about what exactly constitutes 鈥渃ommon sense鈥 in this right but I鈥檇 argue someone who has gone through a master鈥檚 program should be very well versed in the art of writing and proper citation.

Some would argue that “nobody lost out” by what this guy was doing but I would disagree. This is a violation of someone’s intellectual property. When you decide to blog on a technical level you are taking your time to help educate the masses. You’re putting in a lot of hard work into formulating something that is uniquely yours and sharing it. “But Jorge, this guy was just sharing FOR you (well not me because I’m not worth stealing from which is comforting on some level for the moment)”, yeah but he wasn’t making it clearly known that it was not his work. If someone has a SQL problem and they quickly Boogle out a question what if they come across the aggregator’s content before they get to yours (the source)? If the person needing a quick answer simply finds the answer on his blog and goes on his way, guess who gets credit for that? The thief. Sure this guy put a very tiny note in his about page but who is going to look in there when reading content? Now let’s take this up a notch. You’re on the job market and the prospective company (like many do) do a search for you on the internet to see what pops up. Imagine how good your word and reputation would be to them if they saw an entire community backlashing on you because you were knowingly stealing content? It’s not worth it!

So what does one do? Well you could ask the author for permission to repost content. For the record I asked Brent if I could borrow that first paragraph for this purpose (thanks Brent!). Or, and I know this is crazy, COME UP WITH YOUR OWN CONTENT! It’s not easy but it definitely pays off and in the end you get mad street cred *fist bump*. So don’t steal content, people work hard to produce this stuff and in the end you’re only going to make yourself look worse by pretending to be something you’re not.

Categories
Syndication

Real-world Value of Twitter at Work

This post is actually going to be a copy/paste job from a comment I left on Colin Stasiuk’s (| ) post encouraging his user group, EDMPASS ( chapter of SQL PASS user group), for hockey tickets. In his post Colin asks his members to join Twitter, if they haven’t already, follow at least 10 SQL Tweeps, and share a story of a positive experience they had with fellow SQL Tweeps. In the past year I’ve come to find that Twitter has become an invaluable tool for me professionally as I can get many quick answers and sometimes (as you’ll see below) even more complicated issues resolved. Without further ado here’s my tale:

I鈥檓 really not eligible but I鈥檒l share a story that I used during my SQL+Twitter talk at SQLSaturday (and also whenever I tell anyone about the value of Twitter).

For those who don鈥檛 know Paul Randal ( on Twitter), I liken him as such: If the SQL World were the Star Wars Universe he and Kimberly Tripp ( on Twitter) would sit on the Jedi Council. That being said they鈥檙e pretty important in the SQL world.

One fine day I got a call from a coworker whose server had run out of space because the transaction log file had grown too much (whoops). Rather than call me to fix the problem he did the thing all DBAs dread鈥e deleted the .LDF file and thought restarting SQL would rebuild a new one. Needless to say this pained me deeply. I tweeted my plight to the world (as I do whenever I鈥檓 working on something interesting) and Paul responded. Now the reason this was so exciting to me is for a few reasons: 1-This guy WROTE the code for DBCC CHECKDB and knows every nook and cranny of how the database engine works and how/why corruptions happen and how to fix them. If you鈥檙e interested in the technical bits of the story check out Paul鈥檚 blog post on it:

Long story short, thanks to the relationships I鈥檝e fostered with fellow SQL professionals I got world-class, one-on-one help (he and I emailed back/forth that afternoon while he walked me through what to look for, commands to run, etc.) and all for free. Simply put I cannot stress enough how much Twitter has enhanced my worklife and helped me to be a better DBA as now I have the power of so many sql resources at my fingertips almost instantly. Outside of SQL I also had another great experience the other day with Shay Levy (@shaylevy), Powershell guru extraordinaire. I don鈥檛 know PS well yet and he connected with me via Google voice chat and he helped review the script I was writing with me. Oh yeah, did I mention that Shay lives in Israel?!? Yeah, international help FTW!!!!

Lastly how can I forget my connection with you Colin? Another international connection forged from the fires of Twitter. Now thanks to our connecting via Twitter you and I are collaborating with yet another SQL Tweep on writing a . I really should just copy/paste this on to my blog and make it a post as I鈥檝e apparently rambled on enough for this.

So there you have it kids! Do you have a positive story from Twitter you’d like to share? I’d love to hear about it so leave your comments/stories below.

Categories
Syndication Tips

Need #SQLHelp? Throw up the Bat-Signal

Get yourself some #SQLHelp
Get yourself some #SQLHelp

Brent Ozar ()聽and Aaron Nelson ()聽were talking discussing on Twitter the creation of聽.聽聽As Brent is known for doing, he magically whipped up a blog post on the matter explaining how this new hashtag, #SQLHELP, should be used. I highly recommend you head over to . I’ve found Twitter to be an invaluable tool for getting quick responses to any SQL (and non-SQL as well) questions I have. If anything this should be a great hashtag to search on and show to management as a good business-value for Twitter in the workplace!