1. Finds SQL Servers in your environment
2. Track changes over time
3. Save the results into an easy-to-query database
4. Runs queries against them to find out what’s going on

When I looked at Discovery Wizard 2.0, we had #1 and #2 down pat.  We could add #3 pretty quickly (it’s already in the development builds of v3), but #4 was going to be a problem for a free product.  There wasn’t a way we could add that in without pouring a lot of resources into the product.

Building inventory queries is a never-ending task.  I got a brief taste of this when I spent a little time at JPMorgan Chase: every time the security teams came out with a new guideline, we had to write a new set of queries to figure out whether or not our servers met that guideline.  Every time we found out about a new performance best practice, out came the T-SQL queries.  And of course we didn’t have every single server in the shop running the same version, so that meant writing queries for SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008.

If Quest was going to bundle a complete set of inventory queries into Discovery Wizard, it would cost a lot of money to build, test and maintain those queries.

The Solution: Plugin Query Packs

Just like Firefox is built to enable developers to write their own plugins, Discovery Wizard 3.0 is being designed to take plugins too.  Example plugins might include:

• Best Practices for Disaster Recovery – the number of databases not backed up in X hours, last date/time each database was backed up, exposure window (how long the database has gone in any given time window without a backup)
• Best Practices for Performance – autoshrink turned off, basic memory configuration checks
• Best Practices for Security – number of sysadmins on the instance, number of schema changes in the last X hours, policy-based management enabled, encryption set up, accounts with empty passwords

Notice that a lot of these are called “Best Practices” – keep in mind that they’re just starting points.  You can take these, adapt them for your own use, and take out the rules you’re not interested in.  We’ll ship the product with a few basic query packs to use as examples, and you can take these and run with them.

How’s This Different From Other Products?

There’s a ton of products out there that check your servers against a policy. The first problem is they’re not easy for database administrators to use.

We’re database administrators: we live in T-SQL.  We have a zillion utility T-SQL scripts that we’ve written over the years.  We just need a utility that will discover new SQL Servers in our environment, run our queries against them, and compile the results centrally.

Discovery Wizard is a simple, straightforward tool that handles the icky parts and lets us do what we do best: T-SQL.  We don’t have to learn SSIS, we don’t have to learn PowerShell, we don’t have to upgrade our servers, we don’t have to reverse engineer a complicated schema – we just have to write queries and save them in a text file.

The Discovery Wizard Plugin File Format

Right now, we’re thinking of using XML files as plugin sources.  At a minimum, each XML file would include:

• The name, version and source URL of the Plugin Query Pack. We’ll host a community repository for these on SQLServerPedia, but you don’t have to upload yours if you create a private one for your own company’s use.
• The T-SQL query that will be run for each server. The query will need to detect the right version of SQL Server, and run the appropriate T-SQL against it.  For example, you can’t query DMVs on a SQL Server 2000 instance.
• A URL where the user can click for help if they have questions about the results of the query.  We’ll have a dedicated section in SQLServerPedia where DBAs can write documentation for their Plugin Query Pack.  For example, if your queries check to make sure all user databases are in full recovery mode, then on your explanation page, you can simply link to SQLServerPedia wiki links about recovery modes to explain why it’s important.

We’ve got ideas for more fields, like a priorities on how important each individual field is.  For example, if I’m designing a Plugin Query Pack for security, and if it returns a result saying the server has a blank SA password, I want that to be priority numero uno.

But this leads into next week’s post: the more things we add to the Discovery Wizard, the longer development takes.  We have to make some compromises to get it shipped, and we’ll talk about those next week.

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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.

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FeedBurner FeedPress Gets You RSS Stats

Some of your readers will subscribe to your blog using RSS feeds. I won’t explain RSS here, but the short story is that even if you use Google Analytics, you still won’t know how many people are subscribed to you unless you get a free FeedBurner account.  FeedBurner, also owned by Google, gives you easy-to-read statistics about how many people have their virtual eyes on you.

The FeedPress plugin changes most (but not all) of the links on your blog to point to your FeedBurner feed, which gets you the statistics.  If you’re using a custom WordPress theme to change the way your blog looks, that theme may have hard-coded links pointing to your own WordPress theme.  (I had that problem here on my own blog.)  We won’t cover hand-editing WordPress themes here, although I will touch on that in my next and final How-to-Blog entry.

FlickrRSS Shows Your Photos

I use Flickr to store my photos online.  They have a free service that lets you upload a certain amount of photos per month that fits most people, and a $25/year Pro service for wackos like me who upload gigs of photos per month.

This plugin shows your most recent photos down the side of your blog.  I like seeing that other bloggers have a real life in meatspace outside of their blog, and I like looking at their pictures to see what they’re up to.  Adds some personality to your site.

After installing the FlickrRSS plugin, you have to use its widget.  With WordPress, your sidebars (and in some themes, your footer) is configurable as a widget, and you can drag & drop different things in there.  Drag the FlickrRSS plugin into one of your sidebars in the management UI to enable it.  I won’t cover that here because it’s about to change in WordPress 2.7.

MobilePress Enables Phone and PDA Users

I know, I know, you don’t care if iPhone users can see your blog or not, but this is really cool and easy.  Just grab this free plugin, and your web site will look amazing on iPhones, Blackberries, etc., and it doesn’t change the way your site looks on “normal” browsers.  It’s so easy that you can’t help but do it.

PingPressFM Gets The Word Out About New Entries

Whenever I post a new blog entry here, my blog automatically updates my status on Facebook, Twitter, Brightkite, etc to let people know that I posted a new blog entry.

There’s two parts to this: first, set up an account on Ping.FM and set up your social networks there.  Ping.fm is a cool web service that lets you update all of your networks in one spot.

Next, install the PingPressFM plugin and configure it with your Ping.FM info.  Then, whenever you post a blog entry, schazam, people know about it.  It even works when you schedule blog posts in advance – this particular post was written days before it actually went live, but when WordPress published it on a scheduled basis, bam, out went the Tweets and whatnot.  I do this because I’m not always in a writing mood: when I am, I’ll crank out a week’s worth of posts in a few hours.

Subscribe to Comments Keeps the Conversation Going

When I read blogs, sometimes I’ll leave a comment if I have a question for the author, if I disagree with something, or if I just want to thank the author for doing a great job on the topic.  But I’ll never know if the person responded, because I rarely go back to the same blog entry again to check for updated comments.

The Subscribe to Comments plugin solves that problem by letting commenters check a box to get emailed whenever a new comment is added to that entry.  That way, if a user posts a question and then I answer that question in the comments, they’ll get an email notification.  That quick feedback helps viewers know you’re paying attention to their comments.

There’s another way to solve this issue using Intense Debate, a company WordPress bought recently, but WordPress is undergoing changes and I don’t recommend this plugin for beginning bloggers. I use it here on my site, but it’s not quite ready for public consumption. It’s buggy as hell.

WordPress Database Backup Plugin Handles the Boring Stuff

Nice blog you got there.

It’d be a shame if something happened to it.

Rather than paying the mafia for protection, grab this plugin and it will email database backups to you every night.  Works best with email providers like GMail who allow absurdly large inboxes.

Make a Little Money with WhyDoWork AdSense

If you want to make money from your blog, you can show Google Ads on it.  I’d recommend only showing ads on posts older than a couple of weeks – that way you won’t annoy your regular readers, but if someone finds your older posts via a search engine, they’ll help pay your bills.  You won’t get rich – as of this writing, I’m making less than $100/mo – but it’s free money when your site gathers enough volume.

To use it, sign up for Google Ads, then go into WordPress and put your ad codes into Settings, WhyDoWork Adsense.

I’ve covered the mechanics of setting it up, and I’ve left the look and feel for last.  Hey, isn’t that how we IT people always work?

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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

Use Self-Hosted WordPress to Run Your Blog

There’s a bunch of ways to get your domain name up and running on the interwebz, and I think WordPress is the best because:

• It’s open source, so it’s likely to stick around for a while
• It’s absurdly popular, so there’s a ton of documentation on it
• There’s a bazillion plugins to extend it in cool ways

The easiest way to get started is to use a hosting company.  BlueHost, GoDaddy, and Hostgator offer one year of web hosting for around $100. (There are many more hosting companies, but I’ve used these two for a couple of years and been very happy.) Between this and your domain name, we’re talking about $110 per year, which is a lot more than a free hosted solution, but this is an investment in your career.

After setting up your blog, it’s tempting to start working on the way it looks so that it suits your personality. I’m going to hold off on that particular topic for now because it’s a monster, and it involves designing and building a personal brand. I think that’s really important, but it needs to be a separate article. Instead, I’m going to keep going and hit the technical side of blog setup first.

Configure WordPress for Search Engine Optimization

Ugh, that phrase Search Engine Optimization is so slimy. It’s an industry of snake oil salesmen. I hate it. But here’s the reality: if people are going to find you, you have to show up in search engines, and there’s a few easy tweaks we can make to WordPress to help Google do a better job of analyzing your content.

With the WordPress default setup (as of this writing, WordPress 2.6 in late 2008) the default WordPress link to a blog post looks something like this:

http://www.myblogname.com/?p=125

That means nothing to me, and it means nothing to search engines either. Go into WordPress, Settings, Permalinks and choose Custom.  Put this in the edit box:

/archive/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/

And click save. (There are some people who don’t recommend using the year & month fields, and skipping those is completely OK too.)  That will make your blog post links look something like this:

http://www.myblogname.com/archive/2008/12/how-to-write-a-stored-procedure

That makes more sense to end users, and it’ll make more sense to Google too. Search engines use lots of bits of information to determine exactly what is on the web page it’s looking at, and the URL is just one part of that complicated formula.

Show the Full Post in Your RSS Feed

(Thanks to Jason Massie of StatisticsIO.com for reminding me of this one!)

Go into WordPress, Settings, Reading and set “For each article in a feed, show” to “Full text”.  That puts the full text of your blog posts in the RSS feeds.  RSS feeds are a convenient way for readers to stay on top of dozens or hundreds of blogs without pulling their hair out.

The other option is to just show the first paragraph or so in the blog post, and then force readers to click on a link to visit your blog site.  Readers hate that because it slows them down, and the whole reason they use RSS in the first place is to read more blogs faster.  Readers (me included) will simply unsubscribe from a blog that pulls that trick.

Why would people ever use that option? Because they have ads on their web site and they want people to see the ads.  We’re not that kind of people, remember, because we decided early on that we were blogging for career development, not to make $15 per month.

The All-In-One SEO Plugin

This does some behind-the-scenes housekeeping to make WordPress blogs more accessible to search engines.

To install it, go to the All-in-One SEO Plugin web site and download it.  Unzip it and FTP the contents to your web site’s /wp-content/plugins directory.  WordPress automagically detects plugins in any subdirectory of that, so I like to make a subdirectory per plugin to keep the housekeeping simple.  After uploading it, go into WordPress, Plugins, and scroll to the bottom where it lists plugins that can be activated.  Click Activate on this plugin, and you’re in business.

It works great out of the box, but if you’re really ambitious, you can pay attention to these fields when you write a blog:

Title – the text that appears in your browser’s title bar. If you look at the top of your web browser right now, the title of the program window is “Best WordPress Plugins | BrentOzar.com SQL Server DBA”. If you scroll down and look at the text at the top of the article, though, the page starts with “How to Start a Technical Blog, Part 2: WordPress.” The All-in-One SEO Plugin makes this magic happen. There’s a lot of weird science here, but in a nutshell, the Title should be very search-engine-friendly, whereas the blog article title should be short, funny and friendly. Don’t take this as the gospel truth, by the way – this is just what I hear from our SEO guys.

Description – the text shown to users when they see your web site in search engine results, like this:

Keywords – a few words or phrases that really describe what the blog post is about.  For example, in this blog entry, I might use these keywords:

• blogging
• WordPress
• WordPress plugins
• configuring WordPress

Whew – what a pain in the rear, right?  I know, I rarely screw with that stuff too.  But before you abandon hope, forget manual configuration – there’s a few more plugins we can install that’ll make it much easier for people to find your blog.

Use the Google Sitemaps Plugin and Google Webmaster Tools

This builds a sitemap file that Google’s bots use to analyze the contents of your entire web site without having to actually scan your entire web site. It’s a map of your site, and for each page, the Google Sitemaps plugin notes how often that page has been updated. That makes it easier for Google’s bots to find what’s new on your web site more frequently. This is only anecdotal evidence, but I can say that before I had a sitemap, my blog’s front page wasn’t updated very often in Google – say, maybe once a week if I was lucky. Now, Google updates its cache of my site’s front page every single day. That’s helpful because I blog about recent technology news, and when people search for information about breaking SQL Server news, they can find it on my site easier – instead of not seeing it for a week or more.

Next, tell Google about your newly created sitemap. Go to Google Webmaster Tools and set up your web site. Tell Google about your site’s sitemap, and check back a day or two later. Google Webmaster Tools will tell you about any problems it’s encountered on your site (which shouldn’t be the case if you haven’t done anything nasty in WordPress) and provide you with some interesting metrics about how many sites link to yours, how many people are reading your RSS feed, and so on.

That’s only scratching the surface of metrics, though. To really dive in, Google gives us another free tool…

Use Google Analytics

Go to http://analytics.google.com and sign up for web site reports about your site. Google will give you a small snippet of code to put on your web site. The easiest way to make that happen is to install the Google Analyticator plugin for WordPress, which will automatically insert the Google ad tracking code on every page.

Even if you don’t care how many people are reading your blog, I’d suggest setting up Analytics because if you start caring down the road, you’ll have a nice in-depth history of your site’s activity. It doesn’t cost anything, doesn’t slow your site down, and doesn’t affect your readers.

Google Analytics tracks a ton of metrics about your site. Here’s some quick definitions:

• Visits and Pages/Hits – Visits is the number of people who came, and pages (or hits) is the number of pages that were viewed.
• Bounce Rate – the percentage of people who saw one page and left. Obviously, you want that as low as possible.
• Avg Time – how long people are spending on the site. I don’t think this is really useful for the site overall, but it IS useful when you’re comparing your pages. I like to know which pages people are spending the most time on, because that means they’re reading it carefully and digesting it.
• Entry pages – Entry pages are where people came in, and no, it’s not always your home page. Search engine users will land on whatever page they found in the search engine, and referred people (folks who clicked on a link to you from some other site) land on whatever page the other site linked to.
• Exit pages – The last page the user saw before they screamed in horror and closed their browser (or clicked on a link to go somewhere else.)

I’m a DBA, so of course I love to slice and dice my data, and that’s where Segments come in. Segments break up your audience into groups like Search Engine Traffic, Referrals (people who clicked into your site via a link) and Direct Traffic (people who came straight to your place). If you’re just getting started, then you won’t have too much data to slice and dice, but just make a mental note of that capability and come back to it in six months.

That’s a Good Start

Even if you don’t do anything else to your blog, you’ve already made a big difference in your ability to be found by readers.  But there’s a whole lot more, and in my next post, I’ll list the rest of the plugins and techniques that I use to help people interact with me.

Continue to Part 3: The Best WordPress Plugins

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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