Speaking: Refactoring SQL

I spoke about Refactoring SQL (PDF slides). I’ve given this talk a few times in the past and this was by far the most comfortable I’ve been with the material as well as the most nervous I’ve ever been. The room I was in seemed like a cavern, but could probably hold around 300 people. By the time I started talking, it was around 40% full.

I’ve received 3.33 stars out of 5 over 9 ratings. I’m secretly hoping more people will pop in and rate me a 5, but I’m not holding my breath. A few people didn’t learn anything in the talk – I’m sorry. A few people learned a lot – WOOHOO! A lot of people said they loved my slides – hell yeah!

To everyone who attended my talk: thank you. I appreciate it. The slides are online, so download them and take a look. A few people stuck around to ask questions, offer suggestions, and just say “thanks for presenting.” A double thanks to you folks.

Attending

OSCON was split into three separate conferences this year – the main OSCON track (Wednesday through Friday) and then two new mini-conferences on Monday and Tuesday (OSCON: Data and OSCON: Java). As a speaker, I got access to the entire week, so I went hog wild and attended every session that I could.

Instead of writing up every session that I attended, I think it’s better to run over the themes that I noticed as I went from presentation to presentation.

The First Theme: Technology Doesn’t Matter

You might think that speakers would be pushing their favorite technology, language, or library through a technology conference. In this case, you’d be wrong. Throughout keynotes one message was clear: technology doesn’t matter. There was a focus from Microsoft, Google, and a host of other companies that the technology stack wasn’t as important as choosing the right tool for the job and making your data available through well-documented APIs, protocols, and standards.

That message continued outside of the keynotes. Very few presenters gave overviews of their favorite language, library, or feature. Almost every talk I attended was about how to solve a problem.

The Second Theme: Never Stop Exploring

One of O’Reilly’s biggest pushes is that we never stop exploring. The keynotes were full of speakers who challenged what they knew and what they were told. Ariel Waldman’s talk on Hacking Space Exploration gave examples of how we could involve ourselves in space exploration every day – from teaching kids about science, putting your own astronauts into orbit, to getting a job at NASA. Many regular sessions covered how companies solved problems, or came up with new products, by continually exploring the world of software, hardware, and human interaction.

The Third Theme: Simple is Good

Simple is good.

Simplicity doesn’t always sit well with people. We want more features, more bells, more whistles, and more fins. Complexity leads to software that’s difficult to maintain, difficult to operate, and difficult to get people to use.

Etsy are famous for releasing code frequently. One of the ways that they’re able to do this (apart from being crazy) is by releasing the simplest code possible. By deploying simple solutions, Etsy are able to carefully monitor their releases and make sure that things are still going well by only shipping simple changes. By focusing on the smallest unit of code possible, they can isolate bugs and roll out changes 30 or more times a day.

The Fourth Theme: Monitor Everything

Humans generate huge amounts of data. But it’s our interactions with hardware and software that generates even more data. Every time you hit a web page, tens or hundreds of requests are made to load images, read from external web sites, and do who knows what else. All of those interactions are logged somewhere. The only way to know when anything is going wrong is to monitor everything.

There are a lot of frameworks that we can use to monitor software in the application tier, and there are a lot tools out there to let DBAs monitor the database as well. In order to have an accurate view of a complex application, it’s necessary to instrument everything. SQL Server has hundreds of instrumentation points, Windows has even more. OS X alone has around 60,000 instrumentation points. Shouldn’t we be adding them to our application as well?

Bonus Round

It turned out that a few people I know from Basho were at the conference. Kendra and I met up with them before things started and I got to make a few new friends at Basho. It’s always fun to get together with geeks and talk about whatever comes to mind. Throughout the week, I met a lot of great people, both from the Portland area and from around the world. One of the best things about conferences is that you get to rub elbows with luminaries in your field and make friends with people like you, who are just trying to do their job from one day to the next.

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Upcoming free webcasts: SQL and SSDs: A Valentine's Day Love Story and Anatomy of the SQL Server Log File.

Jeremiah Peschka

Jeremiah Peschka has worked as a database and emerging technology expert at Quest Software where he researched new trends and technologies in the world of data storage. Over the course of his career he’s worked with companies across many industries as a system administrator, developer, and DBA. He’s been involved with all aspects of application development and deployment. He likes cheesecake, coffee, and ice cream.

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Upcoming free webcasts: SQL and SSDs: A Valentine's Day Love Story and Anatomy of the SQL Server Log File.

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

Website - Twitter - Facebook - More Posts

What video card did you use? You should have used ___. Read back through my Linux blog category to read my troubles with video cards. The short story: I tried a GeForce2, a GeForce4, and a Radeon. Half of the readers say I should have bought an NVidia because ATI sucks, and the other half says NVidia sucks and ATI is the only way to go. That’s precisely why I didn’t mention the video card by name in the story, because I wanted to see what my readership would say.

What distribution did you try? You should have tried ___. I tried RedHat, Fedora Core 1, Mandrake 9, Mandrake 10, Knoppix, and Xandros Business. (Yes, I shelled out $90 for Xandros.) I didn’t try Lindows or Lycoris because they hadn’t been updated in over a year, and I knew my hardware wasn’t going to work out of the box. None of the distributions listed were able to install on both my Dell Dimension 4600 (P4, 1gb ram, ATI Radeon) and my IBM Thinkpad T21 (P3, 384mb ram, onboard 3com Hurricane chipset). Linux had problems with the onboard 3com Hurricane ethernet chipset and the 1400×1050 display in the laptop, and with the Dell’s setup of two flat panels hooked up to a single ATI Radeon. Xandros came the closest on both, so I went with that.

The only distro to successfully work with everything on the Thinkpad T21 was…(drumroll)…FreeBSD! Odd. I stuck with that on the laptop for a while just for kicks.

Were you dual booting? No, I was trying to quit cold turkey.

Are you still running Linux? Not on the desktop (associated blog entry) but I’m sticking with Linux on my servers. I wouldn’t go back to Exchange and Active Directory for anything, and Linux is simply outstanding on the server side. I’m an old-school DOS user, and I love being able to configure my mail server and web server in simple text files instead of convoluted registry entries.

You sounded a little biased. More than that – I was heavily biased – but heavily biased against Microsoft! I was ready to do anything to get out from under running my own Active Directory and Exchange servers. I wanted something that just flat out worked, worked all the time, worked without setup hassles. I was willing to spend money (and I did, on video cards and Xandros) to get away from MS. In fact, I spent as much money during my Linux migration as I did buying my most recent desktop computer from Dell.

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Upcoming free webcasts: SQL and SSDs: A Valentine's Day Love Story and Anatomy of the SQL Server Log File.

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

Website - Twitter - Facebook - More Posts

Lots of things going on. I’m on the Communications Committee for the neighborhood homeowners association, and I slapped together a web site for us. ParkSquareHouston.com will be a place for the Park Square residents to post news, hang out in the forums, post photos, etc.

That was my first portal using Xoops, an open-source PHP portal. I gotta say I was impressed – very slick installation, great modules, easy to administer. Had the whole thing up and running in less than an hour, and spent the next few hours tweaking it.

I’m pooped. Time for bed.

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Upcoming free webcasts: SQL and SSDs: A Valentine's Day Love Story and Anatomy of the SQL Server Log File.

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

Website - Twitter - Facebook - More Posts