It’s a new year and a new budget, but your boss is still cheap, right? Ain’t that somethin’? Well, good news – got more free SQL Server training events coming at ya.
January 28 Pain of the Week Webcast:
“But It Worked On My Machine!”
Ari Weil and I will show you how to catch bad code and how to prove to your developers why it won’t scale up to production loads. Find out how to recognize common mistakes before they go into production, such as:
- Scalar UDFs that process too much data
- Oversized fields
- Over-reliance on TempDB
Register now for this completely free one-hour LiveMeeting.
February 2 – West Chicago PASS
Perfmon and Profiler 101
These two tools are the key to successful performance tuning. I’ll show you how to get started with these tools, how to slice and dice the results, and even how to data mine the results to look for interesting trends. Whether you like to monitor performance with native tools or third party utilities, knowing how the native tools work will help you get better results out of your tools.
Attendees will learn:
- Why Perfmon is like a Nissan GT-R’s dashboard
- What Perfmon counters to measure, and what they mean
- Four common performance symptoms and how to cure the problems
This will be the inaugural meeting of the new West Chicago chapter, and I’ll be giving away a couple of signed copies of our new book to celebrate! The meeting will be held at 6pm in the Microsoft offices at 3025 Highland Parkway, Suite 300, Downers Grove, IL, 60515. Yes, I used Google Maps for the link, not Bing, because Google Maps has integration with the Chicago Transit Authority so you can get directions via public transit.
If you want to come, email Kim Young to get your name on the list. Pizza starts at 6, and then my presentation starts at 6:30.
February 9 – PASS Virtualization Virtual Chapter
SQL Meets Virtual CPUs, Memory, and Storage
SQL Server can run great in virtual environments like Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere, but you can dramatically increase the odds of success if you know which knobs to tweak. Just like SQL Server, virtualization software doesn’t always work best with the default settings, and knowing which settings change SQL Server performance is key. In this session, I will explain:
Attendees will learn:
- Why virtual CPUs, memory, and storage are different
- Hidden gotchas that often hurt virtual performance
- How to stress test your virtual server to find limits
To attend, go to Virtualization.SQLPass.org and click Register at the top right. We’ll email the LiveMeeting coordinates to all registered members before the meeting.
March 3rd: All-Day Free Virtual Event
Performance Tuning & Troubleshooting with DMVs
We’re doing an all-day live virtual conference on how to use dynamic management views (DMVs) to do SQL Server performance tuning and troubleshooting. The whole thing will be broadcast live in 720p, and we’ll be taking questions via chat and Twitter. We’re going to have sessions at the beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels taught by:
- Kevin Kline (Blog – Twitter) – Microsoft MVP since 2004, author of SQL in a Nutshell, founding board member of the Professional Association for SQL Server, and all around good guy.
- Ari Weil (Blog – Twitter) – Product Manager for Quest’s performance products, and knows way more about waits, performance tuning, and SQL Server architecture than anybody should.
- Brent Ozar (Blog – Twitter) – your humble author. Okay, well, author anyway.
Register now and just for registering, you’ll be entered into a contest for free goodies!
Hey Brent, I want to thank you for having such a helpful blog with such helpful links (most of the time to your own stuff!). I’m a .Net/C programmer wanting to become a database developer, and maybe a DBA eventually.
Quick questions: If I get an MCTS on SQL Server 2008 and maybe even an MCITP (both for database development) will that make it easier to get a DB Dev job? (I have no work experience with databases)? And is having a Bachelor’s degree important for one’s DB Dev / DBA career? Thanks from your newest reader.
Hi, James! About the certifications – in most cases, a certification alone won’t get you the job. I talked about that here:
http://www.brentozar.com/archive/2009/04/certifications-are-the-icing-on-the-cake/
(I just had to link to that since you said I link to my own stuff, hahaha.) However, since you’ve got programming experience, the combination of programming plus the database certification is probably enough to get you in the door at a large shop where you’ll have coworkers to mentor you. I would also start installing SQL Server Development Edition or SQL Server Express on your workstation and writing .NET/C# code to query it. That’ll help get you some practical experience that you can use in combination with the certs.
The Bachelor’s degree – hoo, boy, that’s tougher. Most companies require it these days, even if it’s not a Computer Science degree. I know a lot of successful DBAs who have completely unrelated college degrees, but in order to get into the first interview, you usually need a degree of some sort. I don’t have one, but I can tell you that it made my career path harder. Along the way, I had two jobs in the bag until the HR department found out I didn’t have a degree. The technical people were fine with it, but the company policies prohibited hiring anybody at that high of a level (not receptionist) without a degree.
I wouldn’t go back to school if you don’t have one, but take that same amount of time and apply it to doing the one thing that will get you around this requirement: network. Get out in your local tech community and help people build things. They’ll hire you for who you are, not the certifications you carry.
Oh, and welcome to the blog!
I know that first comment is the toughest.
Hi Brent,
)
Most material out there are not for people coming from a non-database programming background I guess, so it was difficult to understand the hype behind this brand new thing (for SS 2005) when used for non-recursive purposes. I guess that’s why I’m reading T-SQL Fundamentals.
My real name is Peter – I used something else because I was at work and probably wearing my tinfoil hat – please excuse me for that, old habits die hard.
Thanks for the welcome!
I appreciate the very helpful reply. It was interesting to discover you don’t have a degree either. I started working as a programmer at a very young age (17) so I never really saw a reason to go to college at the time, seeing that I already had the job I wanted. I did actually enroll and started taking classes but then dropped out. I think maybe just in order not be filtered by HRs, I could enroll in one of those online college degree things and be a “paper bachelor”
I have an MSDN license via my employer so I’ll take a look at the Development Edition – I currently have SSMS installed and have been playing with it and doing the exercises from SQL Queries for Mere Mortals. I’ll work on interfacing with SQL Server using C#/VB.Net also. (When I said I was a C programmer I really meant C – we were doing things where speed was essential
And yes I had already read your article on certs but I wondered if the “experience” you mentioned was only SQL- or Database-related experience or if, in the case of a developer position, having non-database programming experience also counted. I’m glad to know it does.
From all your articles and videos you always come out as a very approachable, down-to-earth and immensely helpful guy. I really enjoy your blog and will become a regular here. I’m more of a lurker but I’ll say hi every now and again. Thank you again for all the work you put into this all – I can’t describe how much I appreciate it.
P.S.: I just had my CTE moment of clarity a few moments ago (while reading about it). I wasn’t foreign to recursion but for a newcomer it’s confusing to understand the use of a non-recursive CTE.
You’re welcome! I know what you mean about the CTE moment-of-clarity stuff. I didn’t get the hype either, and I just saw it as useful for the first time a few weeks ago! Funny coincidence. I still haven’t actually used one in the wild though.
I registered for this..am sure it will be as great as the vcon last year. One odd logistic quirk though that i must mention – I got two emails one confirming i registerd and the other with userid,password and link. None of them had a conference date on it. Now being a busy dba i just registed assuming the date would come on the email and funny nothing was there. Went to quest website (home page), again some more conferences but no mention of this. I figured i’d find it on Brent’s blog..sure i did. Thanks, and if you can pass that on please do so. What would a person do with a confirmation with no date on it?
Hi! Sorry it was so tough to find that date – I’ve passed this on to our team to get that addressed. Thanks for the feedback!