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It’s like a can of mixed nuts, except – actually, that’s pretty much exactly what it is.  In this extended video from yesterday’s Tech Triage Tuesday webcast, we talk TempDB, fragmentation, CXPACKET, resumes, and more:

Our clients often bring us in to interview their candidates for junior and senior positions. Whether you’re a junior, senior, or expert candidate, we’ve got questions that help us figure out whether you’ve really got the goods – or just faking it. In this 30-minute session, we’ll spend 10 minutes asking you our favorite junior, senior, and expert questions. Think fast: some answers will be multiple choice, and some questions will be open-ended. Will you make the cut?

Next week we’ll cover the answers.  See you there!

All four of us – Brent, Jeremiah, Jes, and Kendra – got sessions approved for the PASS Summit in November!  Here’s what we’ll be covering:

Shazam! We’re speaking at the PASS Summit!

A Developer’s Guide to Dangerous Queries – Jeremiah Peschka

Jeremiah says: “SQL Server does a good job of working with whatever garbage we throw at it, but sometimes a helping hand is needed to smooth things out. You may have meant well when you wrote that sloppy SQL, but that predicate lurking under the surface is poisoning your performance. This talk will expose your worst habits, anti-patterns, and bad practices. By the time we’re done, your T-SQL will be on the path to make things right again. This talk will be therapeutic for anyone from a junior DBA or a senior developer.”

Diagnose T-SQL Performance Problems Fast with sp_Blitz (Spotlight) – Brent Ozar

Brent says: “Every week, people tell me our sp_Blitz helped them quickly figure out what’s dangerously wrong with a server.  I wanted to take it to the next level and start making complex performance troubleshooting easy, too.  I’m building the next major version of sp_Blitz to analyze what queries have run recently on the server and help you find out why they’re slow.  At the PASS Summit, I’ll unveil this publicly for the first time and explain how it works.  I want to make you look like a genius – again!”

Real-Life SQL 2012 Availability Group Lessons Learned – Brent Ozar

Brent says: “SQL Server 2012′s new AlwaysOn features kick ass, and I’m deploying it in production for clients like StackOverflow.com, AllRecipes.com, and Discovery Education.  I still can’t believe I get paid to have this much fun, but it’s not all unicorns and bacon – there’s some gotchas too.  I’ll share some of the complexities involved with combinations of failover clustering and availability groups, solutions with all local solid state storage, and how to avoid painful surprises at go-live time.”

SQL Server First Responder Kit (Spotlight) – Kendra Little

This database is out of control. Kind of like you’ll be at Karaoke night.

Kendra says: “Know that horrible feeling you get when your critical SQL Servers are having a heart attack? In this session I’ll outfit you with a kit to abolish that not-so-fresh feeling. The SQL Server First Responder Kit sets you up to diagnose the toughest problems with confidence. I’ll share the proven methods that I train my clients to use when triaging in a crisis. Demos will cover SQL 2005, 2008, and will include new tools for SQL 2012 that will revolutionize the way we troubleshoot performance problems in SQL Server.”

Index Psychiatry: Diagnose and Treat the Top Five Disorders – Kendra Little

Kendra says: “Do you have the right indexes in place to make queries run faster without dragging down write performance? I find major disorders in indexes everywhere I turn– and I’m not just talking about fragmentation. At the PASS Summit I’ll introduce you to the top five index problems I find in the wild, from multiple personalities to narcissism. I’ll give you the scripts to demonstrate when your indexes are just plain crazy, and the steps to help you fix up the patient without calling Sigmund Freud.”

The What, Why, and How of Filegroups – Jes Schultz-Borland

Jes says: “Filegroups aren’t the new hotness, but they’re a reliable and flexible method for organizing data in your database. They’re often misunderstood. Come to my session at PASS Summit to learn about creating, managing, and maintaining Filegroups. I’ll discuss best practices for them. I’ll even wow you with a walk-through of a piecemeal restore!”

Wanna join us?  Register before June 30th and it’s just $1,395.  If you want help pitching it to your manager, read Brent’s post on How to Get Budget Approval for Conferences.

#SQLCruise Alaska: Class is In Session!

The Brent Ozar PLF crew sailed on SQLCruise Alaska last week. Brent, Jeremiah, and Kendra each taught a session (or two) on the cruise. There was much talk of transactions, performance killers, and SSDs. There were lessons on backups, PowerShell, and boat drinks.

As a sponsor, we got to design a contest for the cruisers. We decided that above all else, we wanted to hear each cruiser tell us a story.

The rules: The story could be on any topic, and it could be a story of success or failure, of glory or defeat. The story needed to be told aloud to the group in person and take less than three minutes.

When it came time for SQL Storytelling, everyone gathered round on couches and the tales of technology began. We heard stories about power outages, about sql injection, about attempts to back up tempdb (don’t try this at home, kids), and even stories about sausage!  We enjoyed every story. It was the best contest ever.

For our grand prize winner, we selected a story we loved. It was thoughtful, perfectly timed, and told with friendly humility, grace, and a little bit of mystery. Our winner received a shiny new Kindle Fire, and we are sharing her story with you here on the blog.

How I Became Friends with the VMWare Administrator

By Darcy Williams (twitter)

As a DBA I’m often challenged by developers, application owners and vendors but on this occasion it was the VMWare admin. I had heard some rumblings around the office about a puzzling SQL Server.  It seems the VM folks built a high end lightning fast machine to host their SQL Server database but to their surprise the application was painfully slow.

Meet Darcy Williams and her boxer, Harley

Several months passed and the mystery remained unsolved.  I heard they were planning an upgrade to the VMWare application during my on call weekend and Saturday afternoon my pager went off with a message to call the VM admin.  Seems he had been up most of the night working on the upgrade.  He said the database was so slow he would be up until 3am just to finish the updates and was there anything I could do?  I felt bad for the guy and thought for sure he would be up all night since I have no idea how to speed up his VMWare Server.

He seemed desperate so I thought I could run the “what we are waiting for DMV” just to cover all the bases.  I was skeptical because I’ve ran it before and it usually generates more questions than answers but surprisingly this time it worked.  One of the top wait types was related to mirroring and I thought the Primary server might be slow because it was waiting for transactions to be committed on the Mirror.

I explained to him how mirroring works and that it needs to complete the transaction on the Mirror server before returning control to the application.  We paused mirroring to test the theory and ran a few update statements.  The mystery was solved because the updates ran incredibly fast.

Turned out the VM folks built two completely different servers. One was blazing fast with all high end components and the other with less than par hardware, slow disks and minimal RAM.  The following week the Mirror got a much needed face lift to match the Primary and the end result was a blazing fast application and happy customers.

Do You Have a Story?

We love Darcy’s story because it celebrates the simple glories of life as a DBA. We think this story may remind you of your stories.  Sometimes when that pager goes off, you solve big problems and make a real difference. Stop and enjoy those achievements, and share your story to help others.

We’re looking for a few good database professionals.

Well, actually, right now we’re just looking for one.  Things are going really well here at Brent Ozar PLF, and it’s time to grow our family.  We’re hiring our first full time employee, and just like everything else we do, we figured we’d blog about it.  We figure we suck a lot less than most companies, so this is a fun way to introduce ourselves as potential employers.  Let’s start by covering what the job is like.

What We Do for Clients

Sometimes we even get to go to clients' weddings! Thanks, Yanni!

People email us when their database applications are causing them pain.  We start new clients the same way an emergency room handles new patients – well, actually, nothing like that, because emergency rooms have a lot of paperwork and they smell bad.  What I really mean is that we triage the patient with a SQL Server Health Checkup: we spend 2-3 days together (usually remotely over WebEx) going through an extensive health review to pinpoint the cause of their technology pains.

This health check involves:

• Querying the DMVs
• Reviewing database schema (tables, indexes, stored procs)
• Checking the plan cache for resource-intensive queries
• Examining the server’s hardware
• Digging into storage (SAN) and VMware, and much more

Unlike an emergency room, we actually teach the patient – I mean, client – as we go along.  We show them how to diagnose health and performance issues so they can repeat this same process on their other servers.  We go off on wild tangents to answer questions that they’ve always wondered about how SQL Server works.

We finish the health check with a presentation that covers the source of the pain points and a prioritized to-do list for the client’s staff.  We don’t just jiggle a few knobs and call it good – we teach the client what needs to be done so they can do a better job of solving their problems quickly going forward.  Sometimes it’s a query change, sometimes it’s a server configuration change, and sometimes it’s rearchitecting a new way to store and access data.

Doing these health checks requires a tremendous amount of expertise in SQL Server, hardware, storage, virtualization, application coding, and frankly, politics.  Your job as a consultant will eventually be to run these health checks yourself – but we don’t expect you to get there overnight.

What We’ll Do for You

If you want to relieve technology pain, you’ve gotta do research and development – and that takes time and effort.  To stay current on the latest techniques, we usually work 3-4 billable days per week.  Your 1-2 non-billable days per week will be spent improving our products (health checks & training), learning about SQL Server, and giving back to the community.  If you’d like to blog and present, you’ll have plenty of opportunity with our blogs, our free weekly webcasts, our email newsletter, our free posters, our online video library, and giving back on #SQLhelp  – we’re always looking for new ways to help people for free.

Going into consulting with us is like a turbo button for your SQL Server experience: you’ll be exposed to amazing clients doing cool things with SQL Server, hardware, virtualization, and the cloud.  This week, for example, Jeremiah is helping a business move their SQL Servers into the cloud, Brent’s planning a SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn deployment for a TV network, and Kendra’s doing a health check and training a client on index tuning.  (Tim’s decided not to go the consulting route, so he’s taking the SQLCruise portion of Brent Ozar PLF and going a separate way – here’s his post about it.)  You get to shadow us on work to increase your skills, and when you’ve got a question, you can get in-depth answers from 3 of the funniest people in the business.

Dining with Buck Woody on SQLCruise Alaska

We want happy people, so we offer great benefits:

• 6 weeks paid vacation per year
• 2 fully paid domestic conferences (you don’t have to be a speaker) and that doesn’t count against your vacation time
• If you’re an MVP, we’ll pay for your travel & time to the annual MVP Summit too
• Health insurance
• Full time telecommuting with a max of 1 week of travel per 2 months
• Paid certification attempts (whether you pass or fail)
• Home internet/VOIP/cell phone expenses paid
• $3,000 hardware/software budget every 2 years to pick your own tools (we like Apple gear, but you can pick whatever you want – you’re your own IT department)

Even though it’s full time telecommuting, this position is only open to US residents already authorized to work in the US full time.  We can’t sponsor visas, and most of our clients are in the US, so we need to keep US travel expenses & time zones in mind.

How We’ll Pick the Right Candidate

Jeremiah Peschka eating tempura fried bacon. You read that right.

We’re looking for people with at least a couple of years of hands-on database administration experience.  We love all kinds of database professionals, and we might hire the rest of you later too, but this role is specifically for performing and improving our database health checks, and we want DBA experience there.  No, we don’t have a name for this role yet – we’re not too big on titles, and we’re actually looking for input from you to define your title.  Leave your job title ideas in the comments even if you’re not applying.  The current front runners are Expert, Consultant, and Bacon Wrangler.  I’m thinking about merging all three into Expert Bacon Wrangler Consultant.

If you’re the kind of person who loves to share by writing and presenting even when you’re not getting paid to do it, we’ll know you’re passionate about technology, and that’s what’s most important to us.  You don’t have to be a Microsoft Certified Master – you just have to be genuinely excited by Microsoft SQL Server and willing to share your enthusiasm with others.

Sound like your kind of job?  Email us at Help@BrentOzar.com.  If you’ve got a resume, include it, but don’t go to any work to build a new one.  We’ll Google your name to see what you’ve been doing for the community and where you’ve been speaking, and that’s better than almost any resume we could read.

And if you haven’t been giving back to the community by writing and presenting, well – here’s your sign that it’s time to start.

Because this won’t be the last person we hire.

UPDATE Friday 16th: We found our dream hire! Stay tuned….and if you didn’t have time to apply, drop us a line. We’ll keep you on our radar for next time.