Blog

Links, links, come get your hot fresh sausage-free links:

SQL Server Links

Consolidation and Virtualization Process Flow – so you’ve got too many servers, and you need to consolidate.  Tom LaRock explains with a simple decision tree diagram.

Poor (Wo)Man’s Graphing – Michelle Ufford shares a devilishly simple way to graph data in T-SQL.  MacGyver would love this.

Top 5 Reasons Your BI Project Will Fail – Rod Colledge says “I told you so” in advance.  Been there!  If you’re working in a BI project, take a minute to look at these 5 signs and ask yourself if they apply to your project.  If they do, start looking for a career exit strategy because the company will get pissed at the BI staff sooner or later.

When Will My Backup/Restore Finish? – very handy T-SQL script from Aaron Bertrand.

The Effects of SELECT DISTINCT – Joe Webb explains with scripts and diagrams.

Is Antivirus Strangling Your SQL Server? – some best practices around AV setup.  I never thought of adding exclusions for trace files – innteresting.

Hitting the Limits of Database Mirroring – I’ve heard similar anecdotal evidence to support Steve Jones’ experience too.

Quest Project Fuze Is Out – we’re making it easier to use Microsoft dev tools with an Oracle back end.

But It Worked In Development – Mike Walsh talks about why scripts work great in dev and then blow chunks in production.

New SQL MCA and MCMs – congrats to all of these gurus, especially Jimmy May (Blog – Twitter)!

SQL Server Training Videos

This week, I’m starting to include links to any new webcast archives and podcasts I’ve added lately so that you don’t have to check the Quest Webcast Archives page or the SQLServerPedia tutorials feed.

• Getting Started with SQL Server Management Studio – with Michelle Ufford. (one hour)
• How to Be a Backup & Recovery Hero – two shows for this one, one for small business DBAs and one for enterprise DBAs.  (one hour)
• How to Manage a Very Large Database (one hour)
• Instant File Initialization (short)
• Partitioning Very Large Databases (short)
• Resource Governor Basics (short)

Cloud and Virtualization Links

Private Clouds and the RDBMS – Jason Massie (of Terremark, a company that’s doing cloud work) talks about why you might have your own internal enterprise cloud inside your datacenter.  The “private cloud” term is thrown around more and more by analysts.  The more comfortable your company gets with internal virtualization, the more open they’re going to be to external clouds.

Hyper-V R2 Released – boot from USB, Live Migration and more, all free.  Will it be enough to gain market share?  If you’re using SQL Server in Hyper-V in production, I’d love to hear from you.

Using SSMS with SQL Azure – how to connect to your database in the cloud.  (I haven’t tested this – I’m not using SQL Azure yet.)

Quest Software in the Cloud – Dmitry Sotnikov shares a little about what we’re up to.

The Junk Drawer

Order Up!

Away For A While – Jonathan Kehayias is taking a break from the SQL Server world to serve our country.  I’d like to thank him and all of the awe-inspiring individuals who leave their families, friends and coworkers to travel away to dangerous locations like Afghanistan.  My brother-in-law just got back from Iraq, and I have nothing but respect and admiration for people who serve in the Armed Forces.  Next time you think you’ve got a hard job, think about what they’re doing and then shut the hell up.

Douchebag Express (SFW) – the bad news is you only bought a one-way ticket.

10 Photography Quotes You Should Know – little words of wisdom.

Complaining Versus Negotiating – when you want something, Buck Woody explains why whining probably won’t get it.

10 Best Non-Technical Blogs – including Presentation Zen and Seth Godin.

I know, I know, I do a lot of these posts, but Steven Murawski posted a tweet asking for our best questions to ask during an interview of Windows sysadmins and desktop administrators.  Here’s my favorites:

10. Pretend I’m a manager, and explain DNS to me.

Windows is increasingly tied to domain name resolution, and the bigger your company gets, the thornier DNS problems become.  If they can verbalize how end users’ computers make DNS requests and how forwarders work, and then if they can toss in Active Directory, they’ve solved some enterprise problems.

Starting with a generic open-ended question like that tests a candidate’s communication skills, too.  Bonus points for making a tough concept seem easy.

9. What’s a Windows profile? When would you delete one, and what gets deleted?

If you’re looking for someone to do desktop support, they should have at least a vague idea of where the user’s data can be stored.  Bonus points if they can explain where common application settings are stored, what the Registry is, and how roaming profiles work.

8. When an end user says a file went missing, what do you do?

End users delete files all the time, but before you recover it from backup, first do a search on the drive to make sure they didn’t drag & drop it to another folder.  (Normally I don’t give interview answers here, but that one’s an exception.)  Then, after they explain that, I’d ask them to cover things like VSS snapshots, end user recovery in Explorer and how to restore from their favorite backup program.

7. How do you recover one SQL Server database or one Exchange mailbox?

Different backup systems have different ways of dealing with this, so I may not be able to vet their exact answer if I haven’t used the same backup system they’re using.  However, I can do a pretty good job of sniffing out when someone doesn’t understand the complexities involved.  If they shrug and just say “I click restore and it’s done,” then they’re bluffing.

For example, when restoring an Exchange mailbox, do you really want to pave over every email the user has received since the last backup?  Or does the user just need one or two important emails pulled out of the archive?

6. If you get hired and you can pick any laptop, what do you get?

I wanna see ‘em get all excited.  I wanna see ‘em giddy with glee at the thought of picking out their own shiny new hardware.  The more excited they get, the more I know systems administration is a way of life for them, not just a hobby.

5. What’s the first software you’d install?

Hardcore sysadmins have their own favorite tools they like to use.  Listen with an open mind, too – the more sysadmins you interview, the more cool tools you’ll discover.  If they mention a tool you haven’t used before, drill into it.  Find out why they use it and how it saves them time.  If it’s a tool they’re passionate enough to mention, then they can probably describe some underlying concepts and technologies involved, and it’ll give you more confidence that they know what they’re doing.

4. What do the letters PST mean to you?

I want to know if they’ve experienced the pains (both technical and legal) involved with these files.  How do they back up PST files if the end user leaves their laptop online all the time?  Are there any size concerns with PST files?  Is there a good way to use PSTs?

3. What’s PowerShell, and how do you feel about it?

I don’t necessarily need PowerShell experience (although it’s a big plus for Windows sysadmins) but I want to know that they’re at least vaguely aware of the concept and what it means.  Bonus points if they can relate scripting to the *nix world, and if they bring up Windows Core.

2. Are you involved with any local user groups?

Be it Windows or just a hardware hacker group, I love candidates who love communities.  I like seeing someone get so involved in what they do that they seek out other people who share similar interests.

1. What do you want to do next?

Windows systems administration is a cool gateway into a lot of different careers.  Do they want to manage Exchange?  Become a SQL Server DBA?  Go into management to be the next CIO?  Having a drive and a passion means they’ll try to do a better job so they can keep moving up the ladder.

Want help interviewing your candidates?  Check out our services.

Tonight, Twitter changed their public page – the one you see before you log in – to focus on something completely different:

New Twitter Home Page

Now the home page revolves around search by saying, “See what people are saying about…”, offering a big prominent search box, and showing the trending topics at the bottom of the page.

This is the culmination of Twitter’s purchase of Summize, a Twitter search engine.  Just one year ago, Twitter didn’t even have a search engine of its own, and now search has proven to be so important that it’s the first thing you see when you go to Twitter.com.

When you want to find out knowledge on the internet, now there are two places to go: go to Google (or Bing or whatever) when you want long-term knowledge, and to Twitter when you want current events.  Innnnteresting.

Any bets on how long it’ll be before ads turn up on the search result pages?

Microsoft just put out a service pack for Microsoft Office 2008 for the Mac. Don’t install it. Nothing about this service pack appears to be unusual until you try to open certain files in Excel, PowerPoint or Word:

Microsoft PowerPoint Error

Clicking Yes takes you to a page titled, “I can’t open an Office document after I install Office 2008 SP2 Update,” which includes this gem:

Cause: This is a known issue with Office 2008 SP2 Update.
Solution: Save your Excel workbook by using an earlier version of Office 2008 for Mac.

Uh, how?  You just expect everyone to have another computer sitting around that hasn’t been patched yet?

Further investigation brings up a Microsoft knowledge base article about the Office 2008 SP2 problem, which states:

If updates do not resolve the issue, you can re-create or save the Excel workbook, Word document, or PowerPoint presentation in a file format other than Open XML. For example, you can save the file in the .xls, .doc, or .ppt file format.

That’s right – Office can’t open its own files.  I wasn’t doing any fancy file formatting, just using Office’s own defaults.  So I have to find another machine with an un-updated version of Office, then save the files in the last generation Office file format (thereby losing some cool formatting in the process too.)  I’m seeing similar complaints from other users in forums around the intertubez.

Unbelievable, inexcusable and frustrating.

Update August 6th: Good News and Bad News

So the good news is, Microsoft came out with a patch for the XML file issue.  The bad news is – well, I’ll let the screenshot speak for itself:

Fail Fail Fail Fail

C’mon, guys…  And then thirty seconds later:

Nothing To See Here, Move Along

Who knows?  Who cares?  I can open my files again.  I’m not going to ask any more questions.

The good news: in the official press release announcing the winners of the Chicago-Mac sailing race, the Hannah Frances was included along with the winners.

Hannah Frances Skipper Mike Cook Receiving the Pickle Boat Trophy

The bad news was the way we got mentioned:

“While 33 boats chose to retire, most citing reasons related to the slow conditions such as lack of provisions or crew commitments elsewhere, at nearly 6:00 am Wednesday morning the last of the fleet arrived on Mackinac. The boat was the cruising division boat the Hannah Frances, who starting on Friday, raced with an elapsed time of almost 111 hours. Congratulations to the crew of the Hannah Frances for sticking it out in a very tough race.”

That’s right: we came in dead last – both on real time and corrected time.  In sailing parlance, this is known as being The Pickle Boat, and we even won an official Pickle Boat Trophy (a green Heineken DraughtKeg) from the Chicago Yacht Club. We entered the race just hoping to finish, though, so I can’t complain about the outcome.

When they say “very tough race”, they don’t mean the race was close.  Boats retired because the race was a rock-and-roller-coaster of conditions.  The first day we had 20-knot winds that shifted all over the place, especially during the start.  We almost ran into a city water intake, and we beat the bejeezus out of ourselves and the boat.  I remember holding out as long as possible before making the trip from the bunk to the bathroom due to the pain and effort involved in the ten-foot journey, and once inside the head, I received the beating of a lifetime.  Picture, if you will, your bathroom being thrown ten feet in the air like a giant pizza while you take care of your bodily functions.  Good times.  I found myself wishing the toilet had a seat belt.  And yes, it’s as unclean as you might imagine.

By day 3, we were sitting idle off the Manitous, surrounded by sailboats with sails hanging straight down.  It was so calm, I could actually hear people coughing on other boats.  We had to ration water because our slow progress meant we might be in for a week-long race.  Don’t feel bad for us, though – rationing water just meant we had to drink beer.  Mike had warned us about the possible slow speed ahead of time, so we’d all taken at least a week off for vacation in order to stick with it rather than retire from the race.

Toward the end of the race, we were back into nasty winds coming from exactly the wrong direction.  At one point, we were in 18-knot winds and 4-6 foot seas making just 2 knots of forward progress.  I think I saw a camera crew from Wipeout filming an episode in the v-berth.  Our closest competition, a slightly smaller boat from the same manufacturer, retired from the race just a few miles short of the finish line rather than continue to tack through these treacherous conditions.  Imagine doing over 300 miles in a 333-mile race, and then giving up – that’s how bad the wind and waves were.

At the Finish Line

You can view my photos of the 2009 Chicago-Mac Race, but it doesn’t really convey the difficulty.  I captured a lot of the light, fun moments like cooking, but when the seas are nasty and the boat is pitching all over the place, you need both hands to hang on to the boat.  Forget taking pictures.

Would I do it again?  Probably not, and that was the same verdict from all of the crew (save the captain, who’s still thinking it over). I saw the Northern Lights and the International Space Station, shared great stories with truly hilarious people, got a nice tan, and had some good sailing, but it was physically exhausting and dangerous.  We fought mechanical problems like dead batteries, a borked depth finder, and bilge pump valve that decided to let water into the boat rather than keep it out.  I couldn’t stay awake long enough to witness our passage under the Mackinac Bridge because I’d steered the boat for several hours prior, and needed a nap before we hit the finish line.  It took me a few days of sleep to get back to my normal schedule, and I’ve still got sea legs.  Amazing experience, but I only need to do it once to remember it for a lifetime.

I do have one nagging thought – if the losers get a trophy made out of beer, what would it be like to win?

Chad Miller put out a new SQL Server PowerPack for Quest’s free PowerShell tool, PowerGUI, which got me to thinking – I wonder if there’s been more PowerShell adoption lately?

[poll id="2"]

And because the results can get skewed by job description:

[poll id="3"]

Thanks for taking the time to answer!  Your feedback is a giant wooden stick that, depending on its content, will either be used to beat me up or beat up others.

If you’re using PowerShell, I’d love to hear about it in the comments – especially how it’s saved you time in your day-to-day work.

When my Grandpa Ozar wanted to find out if his 10 megabyte 5.25″ hard drive was responding fast enough to handle his database loads, he monitored the Perfmon counter Physical Disk: Disk Queue Length. This metric told him how many requests that the 486sx/33 processor had sent off to the hard drive that hadn’t come back yet. Average disk queue lengths greater than 2 meant that the hard drive wasn’t quite keeping up.

How My Grandpa Ozar Met Grandma (No, Not Really)

To fix performance problems, Grandpa upgraded to RAID arrays with multiple hard drives. When his end users complained that his array of 9 gigabyte SCSI drives weren’t returning their queries quickly, he still monitored that same Disk Queue Length metric. He interpreted the results differently, though, because he had multiple drives in each array. He multiplied the old 2-queue-length guideline times the number of drives he had in the array. A RAID 5 array with 8 drives might be underperforming if the queue lengths averaged 16 or more. At night, Grandpa followed Usenet debates about whether to include the parity drive, and how to handle differences between read and write queues on RAID 10.

Dad Started Using a Stopwatch

By the time Dad started getting involved in system administration, Storage Area Networks (SANs) had made things complicated. He couldn’t count the number of drives in a particular array because that number kept changing, and those drives were shared between multiple servers. In a SAN, a twenty-drive RAID 10 array might be shared between a couple of database servers and a file server with different load patterns, different peak load hours, and different capacities.

Instead of measuring queue lengths, Dad watched response times. He used Avg Disk Seconds per Read to find out how long the SAN took to return data back to the Pentiums, and he referred to Microsoft’s published guidelines for OLTP and OLAP expected response times for reads and writes. Just finding out if drives were “fast enough” meant finding out what kinds of databases were involved and what they were doing, which made things confusing for end users.

The New New Way: Wait Stats

While I’d like to think my family line has been carefully bred for systems administration abilities, the reality is that I’m the product of decades of hospitality industry work in close proximity to large quantities of alcohol. Mercifully, systems administration has changed over time to be less math-oriented and more logic-oriented.

To find out what to tune, ask a simple question: what’s the server waiting on?

I love me some Perfmon metrics, but more and more database administrators are turning to a different way of performance tuning: wait statistics. SQL Server tracks what it spends time waiting for, and analyzing those statistics are the most efficient way to find the bottleneck. Who cares if the storage takes 10 or 100 milliseconds to return data from a particular query – the more important question is, was SQL Server waiting during that time, or was it working on something else anyway?

This is especially important in the age of virtualization and consolidation. Corporate management is less concerned about achieving the best possible performance, and more concerned about Good Enough. We have to be very careful to spend money only on the components that will truly make an order-of-magnitude performance difference, and not throw away money on things that will only make an incremental improvement.

Wanna learn how to measure performance with wait stats? Here’s my recommended reading:

• Performance Tuning with Wait Statistics – Joe Sack’s presentation on how to use wait stats.  Definitely the best place to start.
• SQL Server 2005 Waits and Queues – Microsoft whitepaper by Tom Davidson.
• Firefighting with Wait Stats – Jason Massie’s T-SQL query that keeps refreshing itself to show what the server’s waiting on right now.
• Jimmy May’s wait stats links – a collection of links for getting started with wait stats.
• Wait Events section at SQLServerPedia – with several articles and sample queries.
• Performance Management 2.0 webcast – explains wait stat analysis.
• Quest Foglight Performance Analysis demo webcast – Foglight PA uses wait stats to analyze performance instead of older queue-based metrics.

After wait stats, what’s the future of performance management? I have no idea – but I’m the end of the Ozar family line anyway.

(Note – I’m on vacation, so I probably won’t be responding to comments for a few days. I scheduled this post ahead of time. I’m on a sailboat in Lake Michigan, and I’ll respond if I get within wireless range. And yes, I’m bringing my laptop.)

I’ve been really lucky so far: I hardly ever get sick.

Steak Tartare

Every now and then, I engage in risky eating behavior and I come down with food poisoning. I should know better, but I just can’t help myself when I get the chance to try steak tartare, sushi, deep fried goat cheese or a Popeye’s #2 Extra Spicy, all of which have given me food poisoning. Yes, I know what Food Best Practices is, and generally I do a decent job of eating right, but who doesn’t fall off the wagon now and then?

Years of experience (including days in hotel bathrooms) have taught me how to handle basic health problems like a cold, a flu, or the aftermath of eating raw steak. I don’t usually see a medical professional for those symptoms. I know how to address those myself, and I can nurse myself back to health.

Nonetheless, once a year I shuffle into a doctor’s office in perfectly good health in order to get a physical and blood tests. The doc uses his skills and expensive equipment to find things about to go wrong – hopefully while they’re easy to catch and fix. At my last physical, for example, we determined that I was starting to suffer from GERD. My doctor explained how to handle it, and now I’m equipped to keep an eye on it and do preventative maintenance to ward it off. Without help from my doctor, I wouldn’t have been prepared, and I would have suffered some nasty problems down the road.

Your SQL Server Needs a Physical Too

As a database administrator, you’re better equipped than most people to handle database health problems. You do an above-average job of staying current with news and tips from other DBAs, and you understand a lot about how your systems work. If you’re like me, you know much more about what makes a database server tick than how your own body works. (My own medical knowledge comes exclusively from the game Amateur Surgeon, in which a pizza delivery guy uses a pizza cutter and salad tongs to get the job done.)

Please remove your clothes and wait for the DBA.

Don’t get overconfident, though: despite your SQL Server skills, you’re probably still a nurse, not a doctor. Even though you spend a lot of your spare time reading up on how to be a better database administrator, you don’t get the benefit of hands-on experience with the latest and greatest health technologies and techniques. While getting medical attention from a nurse is still better than a pizza delivery guy, it’s still no substitute for seeing a doctor.

Enter the SQL Server Health Check: a visit from a highly experienced consultant. Relax – there’s no paper gown involved. A consultant comes to your office for a few days or longer, uses a series of exotic scripts and tools on your server, and delivers an exhaustively detailed report. The resulting information tells you what’s going right and what’s going wrong, plus what you need to nip in the bud before it becomes an expensive disaster. I blogged about my Microsoft health check experience a couple of years ago, saying:

“I would highly recommend that anyone with a Premier Support agreement get a SQL Health Check. Even if you’re not having problems with your database servers, you’ll walk away with a useful set of knowledge about how to verify that everything’s functioning as it should.”

I’m still surprised by how few people are aware of the health check process, but the other DBAs who’ve done it have given it glowing reviews too. At the recent Quest Customer Advisory Board meetings, several of us shared our health check experiences and I learned about a new source for health checks: Solid Quality Mentors. Microsoft’s health checks are only done for Microsoft Premier customers, which tend to be large enterprise shops, but even small companies can get a SQL Server health check from SolidQ.

Health Checks Are Like a Blood Test

All of us have our own ways to poke around and find out if our server is doing okay, but we don’t have the skills or time to really dive deep. Microsoft and Solid Quality have invested thousands of hours into building very complex auditing tools that look into every nook and cranny of your server configuration and schema. I was stunned during my health check to see the number of things covered in such a short amount of time, and the consultant was kind enough to show me the contents of one of the auditing scripts. My jaw hit the floor – I just couldn’t believe how much logic was built into the tool.

After my health check finished, my first thought was to go build my own auditing script. I took a shot at it, but I quickly gave up because of the amount of time required. I’m glad I did, too, because I never would have been able to match it.

Only one local doctor takes my health insurance plan.

See, these companies continually strengthen their auditing tools based on feedback from their consultants. As they’re brought in to resolve performance problems, they learn new obscure issues faced by database administrators. They build scripts to check for the symptoms and add these scripts into the health check auditing tool. Something that might have taken days or weeks to stumble across now takes just seconds, and it happens automatically as part of the health check audit. When you get a health check, you’re taking advantage of the knowledge gained from consulting gig the company’s performed in the past. That’s like a blood testing machine: it’s crazy expensive, and us nurses can’t afford to have that kind of gear sitting around the house. Sure, an individual blood test only takes a matter of minutes, but think about how much skill and money it took to get there.

My generous, magnificent and good-looking employer, Quest Software, sells tools like Spotlight and Foglight Performance Analysis that do some of this same kind of analysis, so at first glance we look like competitors – not at all. Health checks are reasonably priced, but you probably can’t afford to have a full-time, round-the-clock expert from Microsoft or SolidQ watching all of your database servers. Quest’s tools give you that 24/7 insight into your servers so that when problems pop up, you can investigate and fix it immediately. Health checks are planned engagements that dive deeply into all aspects of a server’s performance, looking at areas our tools can’t reach. For example, we don’t investigate the number of indexes per table, which is something that SolidQ checks. I believe that even if you have all of the Quest tools, you’ll still benefit from getting a regular health check on your most important or worst-performing servers. (Hopefully those aren’t the same ones.)

As much as I’m gushing about health checks, you might think I’m getting paid for this endorsement. I’m purely doing this out of the goodness of my heart. I remember vividly how much I liked my health check and how much it expanded my knowledge, and if I was a DBA, I’d want to know this kind of option was out there.

How to Get a SQL Server Health Check

Begin by scoping out how many blood tests your server needs. Health checks can examine:

• Hardware configuration
• Windows configuration
• SQL Server configuration
• Database schema & queries

Choose which ones of those is most important to you first, and communicate that to the consultants as a part of the price quote process. That’ll help the consultants figure out the right person for your needs and build a timeline that will be long enough to accomplish your goals. For example, my first health check solely focused on the Windows and SQL Server configuration because the application team was convinced the problem wasn’t their queries.

After your team has agreed on a basic scope, contact Microsoft Premier Services or Solid Quality Mentors to find out how much it’ll cost.  In large cities, you may also have local consulting options too, but make sure the consultant has real-world experience with a lot of servers.  Don’t get a SQL Server database engine health check from someone who’s spent the last year managing an SSRS deployment, for example – their skills won’t be up-to-date with the latest performance and configuration techniques.  (If you’re reading this and your company offers these types of health check services, feel free to add a comment below this post with your web site & contact info.)

Scoping your health check doesn’t mean the consultant will completely ignore any other aspects, though. In my health check, after reviewing Windows and SQL Server, the consultant did a brief review of the database and showed why no hardware, OS or SQL Server changes would be able to accommodate the application – it needed serious reworking. The final health check report didn’t go into any depth on the schema or how to mitigate its problems, but the overall report was enough information to tell us what to do next.

The CAB members echoed my favorite part about an external health check; it’s like getting a second opinion from another doctor. As the in-house DBA, you may have been preaching the same story over and over to your developers and Windows admins. You may have been telling them for months/years/decades that they need to rewrite a particular cursor or they shouldn’t put TempDB on the C drive. Bringing in an independent outsider to take an objective look at your system and give an impartial report can help you effect the changes you’ve always wanted. There’s nothing more empowering than sitting in a conference room while the final report is discussed and saying, “See, I told you guys this was a problem, and now we can work to fix it together.”

Health Checks Are Training In Disguise

Health checks aren’t just ammo for the blame game – they’re also DBA training cleverly disguised as consulting costs. You’re having a hard time getting training money approved, right? Try getting a health check approved instead, but don’t tell your boss it’s actually training, muhahaha. I learned more during my one-week health check than I’d learned the rest of the year. Health checks at your office are great learning tools because they use your own servers as the examples. Instead of learning about theoretical problems with AdventureWorks samples, you’re learning things that are directly applicable to your own environment.

Before the consultant comes on site, block out your calendar for the health check dates. Plan to spend every available minute with the consultant to suck their brain dry. Even when they’re just sitting around waiting for results to come in, you should take advantage of their presence. Ask them about their recent horror stories at other shops and how they fixed the issues. Ask them what they like to look for first when examining performance problems. Listen and learn.

If I had the choice between going to a week of training versus getting a one-week health check on my nastiest database servers, I’d opt for the health check. The health check kills two birds with one stone: it shows me what’s wrong with my servers, and shows me how to correct it.

(Note – I’m on vacation, so I probably won’t be responding to comments for a few days. I scheduled this post ahead of time. I’m on a sailboat in Lake Michigan, and I’ll respond if I get within wireless range. And yes, I’m bringing my laptop.)

Every year, Quest Software convenes a Customer Advisory Board at the home office in Aliso Viejo, California.  We bring some of our highly experienced customers out for a couple of days to talk about what’s happening with technology, and good times are had by all.

At the welcome reception, I was struck by how many of them had a great sense of humor.  I was standing in a room with a couple dozen seasoned and talented IT people, yet jokes were flying around left and right.  Let’s face it, us geeks aren’t exactly renown for our ability to light up a room.  We can be funny-ha-ha in private or on the intertubez, but this was a group of near-strangers that were cutting things up.

Funny Ha Ha

The morning after, as I was thinking back about it, I figured there were two possibilities:

Option 1: We Hand-Picked Funny Customers

If we hand-picked the comedians, then I bet we’re not the only company who would do something like that.  I bet funny people are more likely to get invited to events like this because they’re more enjoyable to be around.  After all, who wants to invite a bunch of grumpy people to hang out in a conference room for a few days?  If I wanted that, I’d just call a team meeting. <rimshot>

For the record, funny customers doesn’t mean happy customers – we’re not surrounding ourselves with yes-men by any means.  To force the products to get better, we have to hear brutally honest and honestly brutal feedback.

Option 2: Funny People Are More Likely to Succeed in IT

Who gets promoted into higher-level IT positions like DBA management?

To answer that question, back up and ask yourself who does the actual promotions.  When was the last time the CIO came to you and said, “Hey, I’m thinking about appointing a new DBA manager.  Who’s the best person for the job?”

Promotions aren’t handled by underlings – the higher-ranking folks pick and choose who they promote.  For better or for worse, they often don’t do it with the feedback of the rest of us.  They think they know what we think and who we like, and they might take it into account, but they may not.  However, they know exactly who they like – they like people who are easy to get along with, easy to interact with, and easy to sit in a conference room with.  Sadly, management involves meeting after meeting after meeting.  Why bring bores to the meeting?

Either way, if you wanna get ahead, have a sense of humor about what you’re doing.  If you think things are too serious in your job now, then brace yourself, because problems get worse as you go up the corporate ladder.  Getting promoted to management means worrying about who you’re going to lay off, how you’re going to handle Johnny’s drug problem, or how you’re going to decide who gets a raise.  Employees are much harder to manage than technology, because servers don’t bring a gun into the office to take revenge.

Life is short and workdays are long.  To get the most out of both, get yourself a sense of humor pronto.  Stop taking yourself so seriously, and people will be more likely to invite you to fun stuff and bring you up the corporate ladder.

(Note – I’m on vacation, so I probably won’t be responding to comments for a few days. I scheduled this post ahead of time. I’m on a sailboat in Lake Michigan, and I’ll respond if I get within wireless range. And yes, I’m bringing my laptop.)

Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays long-distance sailors from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.  Chicago-Mac race sailors stand a pretty good chance of running into bad weather, so I picked up a set of foulies.

Not Pictured - Dignity

Pictured here: bibs, just one part of the foul weather gear.  Sailing in foul weather has its own unique set of needs.  Of course the gear has to be waterproof because sailors get soaked from spray and rain, but the bibs also need heavily reinforced knees and rear ends.  (Insert sailor joke here.)  Sailboats have rough non-skid coatings all over the deck so folks don’t slip off the boat.  Unlike powerboats, sailboats spend long periods of time heeling sideways due to the strength of the wind, so traction is important.  The same rough surfaces that help Brent stay on the boat also wreak havoc on knees and butts.

The overalls make me look like a circus freak.  The photo would lead you to believe that I’m seven feet tall.  Everybody looks this way, though – at least, that’s what the salesman said when he wasn’t laughing.

Not pictured: a red foul weather jacket.  Word has it that yellow attracts biting flies.  We’re doing 4-hour shifts, and if it’s raining, that means four straight hours of trudging around a sailboat in the rain and spray.  To make that misery more enjoyable, the jacket has a built-in interior iPod pocket with cable routing for headphones.

Other goodies: 3/4 finger gloves (to keep your fingertips free to tie knots), boots, and a Tyvek jumper to keep the flies off in light weather.

All in all, I spent a disturbing amount of money, but I want Mother Nature at my side at the gambling table.  I don’t want to bet on dry, calm weather in Lake Michigan.  To find out how my bet went, let’s take a look at the current satellite map for the first leg of our journey, going from Whitehall (top right of the map) to Chicago (bottom left) for the race start.

Current Radar for the First Leg

Yep, looks like I did okay there.

Tracking Our Progress

We’re heading out late this afternoon from Whitehall, Michigan to Chicago.  Google Maps shows the car route, but they don’t have routes for sailors, oddly.  I’ll check in when we get to Chicago in a day or so.

Starting Friday at around 3pm, you’ll be able to track each boat’s progress.  We’re aboard the Hannah Frances.  When in doubt, look towards the back of the pack.  Don’t let Friday’s progress fool you – we’ll be pulling ahead only because they let the cruising boats start a day early.  (I wouldn’t be surprised if tracking wasn’t turned on until Saturday morning for the race boat start, either.)

Other links:

• WeatherUnderground satellite map for Lake Michigan
• WeatherUnderground radar map from Chicago and from Gaylord
• Sailing Weather Service for the race (if you’re a landlubber, you won’t like this one)
• The official @RaceToMackinac Twitter account (seems a little light on info though)
• American Sailors – a show on WGN on 7/26 about last year’s Chicago-Mac race.  You can watch the trailer.
• For more information like the schedule, history and participants, check out the Chicago-Mac official site.

And now, I’m off to the sailboat!