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Heather Eichmann and I talked about some of the challenges around SQL Server consolidation, and you can hear our 5-minute interview at Quest Backstage.  Click on the Business & General tab at the right, and at the moment it’s the top podcast.

We talked about why consolidation is getting buzz right now, how DBAs can look good with consolidation projects, and some of the pitfalls I’ve run into during consolidation.  This interview ties in with Quest’s Consolidation Guide that we released at Tech-Ed, and the PDF should be available shortly.

They have a pretty nice audio playback thing on the site that streams right through the browser, or you can download the MP3 if you want too.

One of my articles just got posted up at SearchSQLServer. I cover some of the pros and cons of backing up data warehouses with SAN snapshots.

I wrote that just after we got done with a NetApp deployment at Southern Wine. The funny part is that we deployed the QA environment pretty quickly, but months after I’ve left, they still haven’t moved the production warehouse over to the NetApp. I should have borrowed that set of drives until they were ready to go live, heh.

Update as of 6/3 - I originally wrote that article for SearchSQLServer.com.  I didn’t see the article appear there for a while, and when it popped up on SSWUG, I assumed SearchSQLServer had transferred it over to SSWUG.  Turns out that’s not the case.  We’re working through the details of that now.

This isn’t the first time one of my articles has been “pirated” – used to happen to me when I wrote for HAL-PC – but this is the first time it’s happened with an article I actually got paid to write.  Next thing you know, I’m going to need an agent.  Or maybe not.

I moved my gear into my desk at Caroline Collective today – well, actually, it was more of a buy-and-move. Most of this stuff is a new copy of the gear I use at home.

The grand opening will be Saturday, June 7th from 7pm til 10pm. The invite reads as follows:

“We are (collectively) happy to announce the Grand Opening of the Caroline Collective, Houston’s first coworking venue! Please join us Saturday, June 7th from 7-10pm at the home of Caroline Collective for drinks, light refreshments and heavy celebration. The event will be co-hosted with ArtStorm featuring collage artist Patrick Turk and the esteemed tenants of Caroline. Your attendance is not only appreciated, it’s needed. After all, it’s about all of us. Tasty hops provided by Houston’s own Saint Arnold Brewery and delectable dishes by chef David Grossman.”

Caroline’s at 4820 Caroline Street, 77004 with easy access from the Wheeler stop on light rail. Parking is available. I’ll be there, so if you’re interested in meeting a strangely outgoing SQL Server guy from Quest Software, c’mon down.

This is also the same night as the Ladytron concert, for which I hold two tickets.  The concert starts at 9pm – the jury’s still out as to whether or not Erika and I will leave the CC grand opening for the concert.  If I’m debating tossing a pair of Ladytron tickets to stay here, then you know it’s going to be a good party.

I got a question from Ron G asking how to go about changing positions from help desk to DBA.  Here’s my thoughts:

Build on what you already know.

If you’re used to working on IBM AIX systems, for example, you’ll want to utilize some of that skillset by working with databases that run on AIX.  If you’re used to working on Windows computers (even in just a help desk environment), you want to stay on Windows.  Don’t try to learn both an operating system and an application at the same time if you can avoid it, because the faster you can get up to speed on just the database alone, the faster you’ll be able to get paid.

Attend free webinars.

Find third party vendors that support the database you’re trying to learn, and check out their marketing webinars.  They’re in the business of helping database administrators learn and grow, and they conduct some great training sessions for free just to get their products in front of you.  I’ve done a couple SQL Server training webcasts for Quest Software that cover how to accomplish common DBA chores using the native tools versus how much faster it is with the Quest tools.  I don’t know about you, but I learn a lot faster when I’m listening to a real human being talk instead of reading dry text, and webcasts are much more fun.

Join the local database user group.

You’d be surprised how many cities have user groups for databases.  Go, and promptly close your mouth, hahaha.  Don’t try to contribute, just sit, watch, listen and learn.  People will give presentations every month about database topics.  You’ll learn a little about databases, but more importantly, you’ll learn about the city’s market for the database you’re trying to learn.  Other people will get to know you, and down the road, you’ll find somebody who’s willing to show you the ropes.  (Everybody wants to hire junior DBAs.

Volunteer after hours with your DBA.

Talk to the friendliest DBA at your company (or another company in the user group) and tell them you’re interested in learning more.  Tell them that you’re willing to show up after hours if they’re doing maintenance and watch & learn.  This isn’t going to be an easy sell – with telecommuting these days, a lot of maintenance is done remotely via VPN – but if you’re lucky, you’ll find a taker.  At Southern Wine, I had a relationship like this with a junior DBA: whenever I planned after hours maintenance, I’d email him to tell him when it’d take place.  If he wanted to join me, we’d meet up at the office that night and I’d explain each of the steps I was doing as I did it.  It slowed me down as a DBA, but the payoff came when I wanted to take vacations, because he was already familiar with more systems than he’d ordinarily come across.

Find local database software companies.

Companies all over the US build add-on software for your database platform of choice.  They build things like performance monitoring tools, backup software, database utilities, etc., and all of this software needs support.  They have a help desk, and they’d love to hire people who want to grow their database experience.  You’ll be able to make a quick career change, plus get into a position where you’re learning databases on the job.  You can find these companies by Googling for your database platform name plus tools or management, like “SQL Server management” or “SQL Server tools”.  Also check the magazines for these (yes, there are database magazines, even!) and look at each of the advertisers to see where they’re located.  Call them and ask if they have an office in your city, because some of these companies are pretty big.  (Quest has over 3,000 employees all over the globe.)

Avoid consulting companies unless you know another employee there.

I know I’ll get email for this one, but here’s the deal: a lot of shady consulting companies are willing to throw anybody into a position just to make billable hours.  They pay you $X per hour, and they bill the client twice as much.  Presto, they’re making money off you, and they don’t care whether you know what you’re doing or not.  The client won’t find out right away because the consulting company won’t let them talk to you directly – they’ll manage all meetings via a project manager who does all the client interaction.  After a few months, when the client figures out that you don’t know what you’re doing, the consulting company can shuffle you off to another project.  You won’t learn much (there won’t be another DBA there to help you) and you’ll get demotivated.

Most importantly, be honest.

Don’t be afraid to say you don’t know the answer to something.  My official job title at Quest is “SQL Server Domain Expert”, and I get a big chuckle out of that.  Yesterday I met with two people for three hours (hi, Eyal and Melanie) and it would take two hands to count the number of times I said, “I don’t know the answer to that.”  Granted, my job puts me in the line of fire for some really tough technical questions, but you get the point.  Database administrators can’t know everything – today’s databases cover way too much functionality – and that’s okay.  Nobody expects you to know everything, but they’ll expect you to know where to find the right answers quickly.

More DBA Career Articles

• Moving from Help Desk to DBA – a reader asked how to do it, and I gave a few ways to get started.
• Development DBA or Production DBA? – job duties are different for these two DBA roles.  Developers become one kind of DBA, and network administrators or sysadmins become a different kind.  I explain why.
• Recommended Books for DBAs – the books that should be on your shopping list.
• Ask for a List of Servers – DBA candidates need to ask as many questions as they answer during the interview.
• Are you a Junior or Senior DBA? – Sometimes it’s hard to tell, but I explain how to gauge DBA experience by the size of databases you’ve worked with.
• So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star – Part 1 and Part 2 – wanna know what it takes to have “SQL Server Expert” on your business card?  I explain.
• Becoming a DBA – my list of articles about database administration as a career.

Twitter is like public instant messaging. Users like me post short notes, and anybody who follows a Twitter user gets a copy of the message. You get a stream-of-consciousness view into some of the most interesting people on the web. (That’s not to say I’m one of the most interesting people on the web – I use Twitter so that I can FOLLOW the interesting people!)

This is helpful for DBAs because there’s some really SQL-savvy people using Twitter. It ends up being a fast question-and-answer session sometimes. If I’ve got a SQL question, I can post it with Twitter and get an answer back within a few minutes if one of my SQL buddies happens to see it. If not, no problem, I didn’t bother anybody.

A great example of this happened the other day: one of the people I follow Twittered a note asking if there were any reasons he shouldn’t name his differential backups with a .diff extension instead of .bak. I wrote back and said yes, make sure you’ve got your antivirus software set up to exclude .diff files before you do it. Presto.

Here’s a video explaining Twitter in plain English:

You can sign up for free at Twitter.com, and after you sign up, you’ll want to start following people. Start by following me – go to http://twitter.com/BrentO and click the Follow button at the top left.

Here’s the best list of SQL Server DBAs on Twitter.  It’s a wiki, so you can add yourself too!

The next thing you’ll want to do is install a program to alert you when people send Twitters. Sure, you could go to Twitter.com, but you won’t think to do that very often, and you’ll miss out on all the fun conversations that happen so quickly. Twitterific is my favorite Mac-based Twitter program, but there’s others for the PC. Twhirl works on multiple platforms, and seems to have a big following.

Another benefit to Twhirl is that it has some FriendFeed integration. FriendFeed gives you an RSS feed of what your friends are doing across all of their online services – Flickr, Twitter, their blogs, Facebook, etc. I’ll do a separate post on FriendFeed soon, but in the meantime, if you’re already using RSS, here’s my FriendFeed.

More DBA Career Articles

• Moving from Help Desk to DBA – a reader asked how to do it, and I gave a few ways to get started.
• Development DBA or Production DBA? – job duties are different for these two DBA roles.  Developers become one kind of DBA, and network administrators or sysadmins become a different kind.  I explain why.
• Recommended Books for DBAs – the books that should be on your shopping list.
• Ask for a List of Servers – DBA candidates need to ask as many questions as they answer during the interview.
• Are you a Junior or Senior DBA? – Sometimes it’s hard to tell, but I explain how to gauge DBA experience by the size of databases you’ve worked with.
• So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star – Part 1 and Part 2 – wanna know what it takes to have “SQL Server Expert” on your business card?  I explain.
• Becoming a DBA – my list of articles about database administration as a career.

I use a Macbook Pro with VMware Fusion, which lets me run a bunch of virtual Windows machines for testing. I upgraded my internal drive to a quick 320gb one a few weeks ago, intending to run all my VMs off that internal drive, making it easier to do testing on airplanes or in coffee shops. Problem is, one of the things I test is Quest LiteSpeed, database backup software that does a lot of disk I/O, and during heavy backup/restore testing, I couldn’t do much multitasking because the internal laptop drive was being hit so hard.

I figure it’s a matter of time before I put a second hard drive in the Macbook Pro, but for now, I’ll stick with external drives.

I’ve got a bunch of USB drives, so I did some comparisons to see which ones got the fastest storage performance inside VMware. I wanted to find out how much performance I’d really gain by switching to an external drive, and did it make a difference whether I used FireWire or USB.

Keep in mind that this is not the native performance of each drive – this is the performance as seen inside a VMware Windows XP guest. I didn’t care what the native performance is, because that doesn’t do me any good. I’m only interested in performance as seen by the VMware guests because that’s the only thing I’d use the external drives for.

Here’s the benchmarking results from HD Tune:

Internal Western Digital 320gb 2.5″ WD3200BEVT:

Big, bulky external Maxtor OneTouch III 3.5″ 500gb connected via FireWire 400:

Whoa. That’s only averaging 35.5 MB/sec, whereas the internal gave me 48.5 MB/sec. I’m surprised there.

External Maxtor OneTouch III 3.5″ 500gb connected via USB:

Not much difference in speed between FireWire and USB as far as speed goes, but the USB connection used almost double the CPU power.

External USB enclosure with a Fujitsu MHY2120BH 2.5″ 120gb (the Macbook Pro’s original internal drive):

I’ve also got an external SATA RAID enclosure that does mirroring & striping, and I’ll test that later just out of curiosity, but there’s no way I’d put my virtual machines on there because it weighs more than my laptop and it makes a loud racket.

These results are not scientific – I just did one pass of testing on each drive. Your mileage may vary. Offer not valid in all fifty states. No purchase required to win. See participating locations for details.

My verdict: I’ll put the virtual machines on the 2.5″ external enclosure.  It’s tiny, doesn’t require external power, and it won’t be as fast as the internal drive – but at least it’ll let me multitask.

Junior DBAs, warm up your printers. The Microsoft SQL Customer Advisory Team, aka SQLCAT, has published a flowchart explaining how to troubleshoot performance issues with SQL Server. This is by far the best visual representation I’ve seen into how a senior DBA’s brain works:

SQL Customer Advisory Team’s Troubleshooting SQL Server 2005/2008 Performance and Scalability Flowchart

And just think – the rest of us had to learn this stuff the hard way – by reading manuals!

Yesterday afternoon, I stopped by the Caroline Collective and signed a lease on my very own desk.  Sounds odd to lease a desk, eh?  Especially sight unseen – there’s no actual desks in the space, just a big empty room with concrete floors, white & blue walls, and fluorescent lights dangling from a low ceiling.

Matt & Ned nervously showed me their prototype wood desk, and I could tell they weren’t sure whether or not I was going to “get” it.  One of them said something about how the desk would be finished off, and I had to laugh.  Finishing anything off isn’t the point.  It’s not that coworking needs to be unpolished, but the finish on the desks doesn’t matter.  Although, I do have to confess that I cringed when I read Ned’s Twitter about Knoll furniture – I thought to myself, please, God, don’t go buying high-end office furniture this early in the game.  I love modern stuff like that, but damn, it’s expensive for a startup business.  Anyway, I was relieved to see the desks were inexpensive but well-crafted wood jobs instead.

I get the whole coworking thing, especially as somebody who telecommuted for five years, but I bet most people aren’t going to foresee it until the desks and the personalities go in.  The factor that makes coworking tick is the chemistry – the unique mix of people from different backgrounds, different companies (or no company at all), the laid-back informal discussions that don’t come from meetings organized on a calendar.

When the people are in, when the artists are slinging paint, when the beer is in the fridge, when the desks are filled haphazardly with relics of different careers, that’s when people will get it, and it’ll happen like wildfire in a city like Houston.

And you’ll wish you’d have signed a lease on a desk while they were still available.  Trust me.

Great news – Pedro Costa has got a working solution!  Apple Mac Mini 2010, 2011, and 2012 models all boot a patched version of VMware ESX 5.0:

VMware ESXi 5 Running on an Apple Mac Mini

I’d always wanted a small VMware vSphere 5 (ESXi) lab farm up and running, and I wanted to use Apple Mac Minis just for compactness and the silence.  It has to be vSphere ESX or ESXi, not VMware Fusion or Parallels, because my clients all use ESXi and I wanted to be able to do things like VMotion and Storage VMotion.

These ISOs work for my Apple Mac Mini 2011 (5.1):

• http://goo.gl/VreXa EFI Version
• http://goo.gl/7M5kX NoEFI Version

Download the ISO, burn it to CD, and boot from it.  The install goes flawlessly.  The USB keyboard works, video out (via HDMI!) works, and the onboard Ethernet wired network card works.  WiFi doesn’t, but that’s okay – I wouldn’t even run a lab off that.

Presto – my Ikea datacenter comes to life!

My Ikea Datacenter

That’s two Mac Minis running VMware ESXi 5, a cheap $250 Netgear NAS handling the storage duties for shared storage, and a few other pieces of unrelated tech gear.

Thanks, Pedro!

I’m doing a webcast with David Swanson about SQL Server consolidation on Thursday, May 15th at 8am PST.  You can learn more about it and register online, or you can just read the description of “SQL Server expert Brent Ozar” and chuckle like I do.  I still have a hard time with the word “expert” – I prefer the term “guy who learned a whole lot the hard way.”

It will definitely be an interesting webcast.  At Southern Wine, we went through a few rounds of database server consolidation, and we had our successes and failures.  I learned a lot, and I think there’s a lot we can talk about to make it easier for other DBAs.

I like to tell database administrators that even if they don’t start consolidating their database servers, they’re going to get consolidated by somebody else.  Your Windows admins are drooling at the thought of reducing server headcount with Windows 2008 Hyper-V and VMware.  Microsoft and VMware distribute plenty of marketing collateral that say it’s perfectly okay to virtualize SQL Servers.  If you disagree, then you need to start doing your own consolidation to head the Wintel admins off, and this webcast will help give you the tools you need to do a successful consolidation.

If you’ve got consolidation questions, feel free to drop me a line too, and we’ll try to answer them during the webcast.  See you there!