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About once a month, I use Google Analytics reports to find out if any posts are getting a lot of hits from search engines. In Analytics, I click Content, Top Landing Pages, which pulls up this report:

What the heck?  #5 is a joke post about SQL Server 2010’s features being leaked.  That surprises me, so next, I want to find out why users are searching for this information. I click on that page name, then click Entrance Keywords:

Innnteresting.  I never would have expected that this post would remain popular long after I wrote it, since it was pretty much a throwaway joke.  I bet you’ve got pages like this too – you casually wrote a blog post to address one specific issue, didn’t really think anything of it at the time, and now there’s hits coming that you didn’t expect.

Now that I know the post has gained popularity, I can make it even more successful.

Helping Search Engines Find Your Buried Treasure

We’re going to make a series of changes in order to improve our search engine rankings. Ideally, we’d be doing this legwork for every post we write, but we don’t usually have that much time, do we? After all, we’ve got day jobs.

First, edit the post’s keywords to include more of the keywords that users were searching for. This will make it rise higher in search engine rankings. If you’re using the excellent All-in-One SEO Plugin for WordPress, edit the post and scroll all the way to the bottom of the page. Fill in each of the All-in-One fields, which are empty by default:

The fields are:

• Title – defaults to empty, which just uses the original blog post title. If you wrote a funny post title that doesn’t really match up to the content, you can override it here. This override only affects how the search engines see your content, so you can be less funny and more accurate here.
• Keywords – use the search keywords end users used to find your page.
• Description – a one or two sentence description of the page that will show up as a search engine summary. WordPress uses the first sentence of your blog by default, but you might want to write something more descriptive.  It’ll show up in the Google results like this:

Presto! A nice, clean summary sentence instead of the article’s first sentence.

To be even more effective, we can tweak our post content too. I break up every few paragraphs of my posts with a header line. This uses the H3 tag in WordPress. Search engines give more relevance to your headers, so if you want to optimize your post for search engines, try to work keywords into your header lines.

Don’t go overboard. Readers can tell when you’re being slimy. It can be a tough line to walk, but at the end of the day you have to decide whether you want to be liked by search engines or by human beings. This post is a great example – my header lines here all talk about buried treasure, which frankly isn’t going to get me any search engine traffic at all. I’m fine with that, because this post isn’t the cornerstone of my blog. This is just for you, dear reader, and I’ll drive traffic to it another way.

Helping People Find Your Buried Treasure

Do a search in your own blog looking for related posts. You’ve probably written at least a couple of entries that somehow relate back to your newly popular page. Edit those pages, and add links directing people to your treasure.

If it’s a post you’re really proud of, link to it from every single page in your site. On BrentOzar.com, I have a Popular Articles section on the side of my site. It links to several of my most searched-for posts, plus a few posts that I just happen to think are spiffy.

Making the Buried Treasure More Valuable

If people are going wild and crazy over one of your buried treasures, put some elbow grease into it and polish it up. Add pictures, add sample code, and add most importantly, add links. If someone took the time to click on your link in a search result, they’ve probably got a lot of questions. Add a section at the end of the post called Related Reading, and include your own links plus the best you’ve found on the web. If you don’t know any offhand, take a few minutes to search. If you knew enough about the subject to write about it, then you probably know enough to pick out some good links in search that the reader would like. After all, they came to you for help – they may not know the good stuff from the bad right now.

Consider expanding your post to include more information covering the keywords that people were searching for. Let’s say you wrote about truncating SQL Server log files, for example, and people have started searching for how to truncate the log in SQL Server 2008 – which is no longer supported. You could add a paragraph or section to the post explaining that BACKUP LOG WITH TRUNCATE_ONLY no longer works, and include a copy of the error message users get when they try that stunt.

This is how my epic Twitter RT FAQ post got started. Originally, it was just a short post explaining what RT meant on Twitter because people kept asking me. Over time, I added more and more questions and answers because they were showing up in the search logs, and next thing you know, I’ve got a monster post going. The drawback is that my regular readers don’t see these added entries on such an old blog post, but frankly, I don’t write that material for my regular readers. I just keep adding to that post in order to help people who keep searching for Twitter information.

Rather than adding more and more to old posts, you can also write new posts to cover new information, and build links between your existing pages and your new ones. This comes back to the Related Reading topic we discussed earlier.

Sometimes, I find that I end up writing my Related Reading posts first! I start working on a post, and I realize I need some supporting material. That’s exactly what this post is doing here – it’s going to be link in tomorrow’s post. Stay tuned!

In my never-ending attempts to distract you from doing real work, I give you something you have absolutely no use for: a SQL Server database backup with about 100k tweets from people I’ve followed over the last couple of months.

I use Tweet-SQL to cache and analyze a lot of things from Twitter.  This database isn’t the actual one I use, but it’s just an export of a subset of tables:

• Users – the tweeps.  The “id” field is Twitter’s internal number for you, not my own – comes from their API.  The cached_* and subscription_* fields are my own, not Twitter’s.
• UsersHistory – whenever I fetch results from the Twitter API and someone’s information has changed, I store the old version of their profile in this table.  Typically, the field that’s changing is their followers_count.  The “id” field is my own identity number, not from Twitter’s API.
• Statuses – the tweets (and yes, Twitter calls them Statuses).  The “id” field is from Twitter’s API.

Sample Queries

This will give you the most loudmouthed tweeps:

Resulting in:

And this query gives you the hours when people tweet the most (in Central time):

Resulting in:

Things to Know About the Data

There’s some holes in the data when my server bombed or the Twitter API didn’t return data correctly, and unfortunately, a lot of those holes are around the PASS Summit.  I wanted to refetch that data before giving you this database, but I’m running out of time and I’ve got other things on my plate, so I figured I’d just let this loose as is.

The database doesn’t include people with protected tweets, and it only includes things I’d see on my home page.  If someone mentioned me but I’m not following them, you won’t see it in this database export.

You can download the SQL Server database backup and restore it onto a SQL 2005 (or newer) server.  If you find anything interesting in the backup, post it here in the comments.  I’d love to see what you find!  And of course, I’d highly recommend Tweet-SQL – it’s a fun little tool if you’d like to analyze Twitter data like who’s following who, who gets retweeted the most, or what you’re missing when you’re gone.

David Allen’s productivity book, Getting Things Done, has made me a better person.

After using its methods for years, I’m even more convinced it can help anybody in IT. Today, I’m going to explain how I worked before GTD, and how I work with it now.

How I Handled Tasks Before GTD

Years ago, I tracked my to-do list in a text file. I broke the file up into two sections, Work and Home. My Work section looked something like this:

Everything I did was tactical – it was all about putting out fires. I arranged tasks in order of priority, with the first tasks being the most urgent. When someone walked into my cube with a new task, I would open my text file and say, “Where does this new task fit in with my priorities?” We would agree upon a position, and I’d add their task to my list.

I used this same approach with all incoming tasks – whether email, phone calls, or in person. Sometimes I’d send my actual text file, and sometimes I’d just walk them through it verbally over the phone. Upon seeing my task list, more often than not their eyes would bug out and they’d shake their heads. “Sorry – I need it fast, but it looks like you’re pretty busy. I’ll go bother someone else,” they’d say. That worked really well for me!

As I completed tasks, I changed the minus sign to a plus and moved it to the top of the “Done” section. Every now and then, when my manager asked what I’d been up to lately, I could whip out my trusty text file and copy/paste the appropriate sections into an email.

While that helped keep unimportant new tasks out of my way, it didn’t stop me from spending my time firefighting. My tasks were determined by what other people wanted from me. There’s nothing wrong with pleasing your customers, but – well, actually, there is something wrong with it. It’s the cliched movie character who focuses on making everybody else happy, yet never stops to take care of themselves.

GTD and the Big Picture

Unlike productivity methods like Franklin Covey that revolve around your ability to shell out big bucks for paper day planners, GTD is system-agnostic. If you’d like to track your GTD tasks with a text file, and if it works for you, that’s totally fine. There’s a bunch of ways you can accomplish GTD.

GTD wants you to get from Point A to Point B. It doesn’t dwell on whether you drive a Maserati, take a bus, or hoof it. Instead, it just focuses you on Point B.

GTD separates the means from the end, because you’ve probably lost focus on the end already.  GTD asks you to build a set of 50,000 foot goals for yourself – things that you ultimately want to accomplish before you die. Preferably, long then. The best way to illustrate it is to share my own 50k goals, which aren’t in any particular order because they’re all equally important:

• Be very financially secure.
• Be a fantastic partner for Erika.
• Enjoy life while I can.
• Be strong and healthy.
• Be a good son and brother.
• Be a good Catholic.

The more ambitious GTD practitioners create a set of 40,000 foot goals that map up to the 50k ones, and then a set of 30k foot goals. For example, under my “Be very financially secure” goal, my 40k foot goals are:

• Increase my income. These are tasks that, when performed, result in money in my bank account shortly thereafter. 30k goals under here might include taking on side consulting work, but during the day, being a good employee matters here. I have to make my managers and internal customers happy if I want to get a raise. If I was really anal, I could map out a set of 20k goals like keeping my manager updated, staying abreast of the company’s overall goals, and so forth, but I’m not quite that serious about GTD (yet).
• Increase my marketability. These are tasks that might not pay off tomorrow, but they have a high likelihood of putting me in a good position down the road. Blogging falls into this category, as does helping other people.
• Reduce my expenses. Budgeting, rereading Dave Ramsey’s books, avoiding gadget purchases, and improving my credit rating all come into play here.
• Improve my financial position. Tasks here might include increasing my savings, being properly insured, and meeting with a financial advisor.

That’s just the financial one. It might seem common-sense, but here’s where it gets interesting.

When I get a new idea or an assigned task, I line it up to one (or more) of these goals. If something doesn’t line up with these goals, it doesn’t get into my task list. If something conflicts with these goals, it doesn’t get into my task list. The rejected tasks are either delegated to someone else or politely refused.

That’s the theory, anyway.

Periodically Revisiting Goals and Tasks

In practice, I get distracted by bright shiny things. Some sexy new technology comes out, or I think somebody’s got a brilliant idea, or I don’t want to let somebody down, and next thing you know it I’ve got a couple of bad tasks in my list. I don’t realize it right away because I’m so enchanted with the idea itself, and I’m perfectly content to let it sit in the list.

I confuse “I can” with “I should.”

David Allen instructs GTD practitioners to periodically revisit their 50k goals and their task list to make sure everything lines up. I do this once per quarter on a long plane flight, and sure enough, I come up with things that have weaseled into my task list despite my best intentions. For example, this quarter I built a Twitter bot account to randomly spout off random jokes every couple of hours just because it was an interesting technical exercise. I don’t pull my hair out and wail about the time I put into it, but it’s just an example of how I got sidetracked by something fun. All work and no play does make Brent a dull guy, but it’s not like I don’t have enough fun stuff planned in the pipeline.

I use a hybrid of systems to manage my GTD goals and tasks. I track my 50k and 40k goals in a text file, and I keep my day-to-day tactical to-dos in RememberTheMilk.com. RememberTheMilk’s Pro level ($25/year) has a slick iPhone app that syncs over the air, and it works when disconnected too, like on planes. I can review my tasks on the plane, make changes to them, and RTM automatically syncs them when I’m back on the ground.

To do my quarterly review, I pull up my 50k/40k text file and save it with a new name for the new quarter, like GTD2009Q4.txt. I review these big-picture goals and make very small tweaks where necessary. After a few quarters, I’m surprised that these still adapt and evolve over time as I learn more about myself and what I want from life. After updating my goals, I leave those up on the screen and get out the iPhone. I scan through my tasks in RememberTheMilk and make sure they each line up to one of my 50k/40k goals, and that they’re in the right priority order.

I only prioritize things that I think I’m going to accomplish in the next couple of weeks. Generally I find that I get enough incoming fires to keep me pretty busy, and I don’t need to prioritize more than a dozen or so tasks at a time. The rest just stay in a murky pool at the bottom – I’ll get to ’em when I’ll get to ’em.

The Result: Peaceful Focus and Productivity

When I step off the plane, I know where I’m going – and I don’t mean baggage claim. I know what I need to do, and I’m perfectly comfortable with the volume of tasks. I know I can only accomplish a limited amount of things in the time I have each day, and I believe I’ve made the best choices possible given my long-term priorities.

GTD helps me to do a better job of saying no. I’m acutely aware of the opportunity cost of taking on new tasks, and I know what’s most important to me. For example, I can’t take on more work if it means spending less time with the ones I love, or if it causes me to sacrifice my health. Because I’m freshly aware of my big-picture goals, it’s that much easier for me to explain to myself why I wouldn’t take on a particular task.

GTD helps me to do a better job of saying yes, too. When something is truly important and lines up with my priorities, I’m more able to push things around in order to accomplish it. When someone comes up with an emergency task, I can do a much better job of being the guy to fix it, because I know exactly what I have to push aside in order to do it. For example, I can more easily say, “I’ll help you fix this, but I need you to get Sam to handle these three tasks for me right now.” When managers see someone so on top of their priority lists and make great tradeoff decisions, they’re more likely to give you the backup you need. If you just say, “But boss, I don’t want to work late again!” they’re more likely to tell you to suck it up.

I don’t think I’m a better employee due to Getting Things Done, but overall, I’m a much better person.

I’m certainly not done with my 50k tasks – I have one hell of a lot of work to do. However, every time I do a quarterly review, I’m pleasantly happy with any progress I’ve made. After all, before GTD, I didn’t even SEE those 50k goals!

Every year, Microsoft MVPs gather for a summit where they talk about <NDA> and <NDA>.  Just like any other conference, they want to talk about this stuff over social networking sites like Twitter, but they can’t because it’s NDA.

There’s an app for that.

Yammer is a free private version of Twitter.  You sign up with your company’s email address, and you can only see tweets (yams?) from people with that same domain name.  For example, us Questies use it to communicate about internal projects we’re working on. It’s not perfect – it doesn’t work with Twitter clients, for example, but at least there’s Windows desktop clients and even an iPhone client.

Wouldn’t it be cool if every MVP had an account on a specific domain (like, say, MVPs.org) and then we all used Yammer to communicate during the MVP summit (and beyond)?  Here’s one way someone could make happen:

1. Set up an email server with Active Directory accounts for each MVP
2. Do some kind of screen-scraping to find out when MVP profiles disappear, and then revoke the associated user’s AD account
3. Profit!  Okay, not really, but you’d endear yourself to a lot of very high-profile IT people, and maybe get consulting gigs out of it, so possibly profit.

I’m throwin’ it out there because I’m an idea guy.  (Translation: I have no Exchange or screen-scraping skills.)

At #SQLbits, Jamie Thomson (Blog – Twitter) demoed the following SSIS add-ins:

• Kimball SDC
• Trace File Source
• XMLify
• File Watcher
• Dynamic Data Flow
• Rank Transform
• Normaliser
• Twitter
• Compression

XMLify

Jamie find this useful when parsing error output from other SSIS steps, which often have several result sets with different columns.  XMLify dumps all of the data into a single XML file for easier error storage.

It’s currently only available for SQL 2005 on Codeplex, but Jamie’s updated it for 2008.  He expects to upload it to Codeplex shortly.

Kimball SDC

SSIS includes a Slowly Changing Dimensions wizard, but Jamie says it has extremely poor performance due to the amount of lookups it does, plus you can’t modify your work.  You have to reuse the wizard.  One workaround is the KimballSCD tool on Codeplex, which handles Type 1 and Type 2 dimensions.  These dimensions track the history of our data – for example, as our customers change from Single to Married to Divorced, we may want to capture those changes so we can view their status over time.

The KimballSCD component takes your incoming stream of data and dumps out separate streams with new records, changed records, deleted records, invalid input, and so forth.  It has a staggering array of configuration choices on how to handle errors.

Twitter Task

Built by Andy Leonard and Jessica Moss, this SSIS component can fetch and retrieve tweets.  Of course, when he went to demo Twitter.com, the page took forever to load.  Ah, the curse of using Twitter and WiFi networks for demos!

He demoed how to send tweets, then how to receive them and pipe the results through the Term Extraction task.  It’s basically data mining for text – it finds the most popular phrases in the stream of tweets.  Jamie asked if attendees found it interesting, and they definitely did.  A couple of attendees wanted to know when Twitter search integration would be included.  Doh!

Normaliser

This component takes a flat source like a list of orders that includes both header and detail info in the same row, and then normalizes it.  You have to pass in the data in the right sort number, because it uses those sorts to determine duplicates.  You pick which fields determine a header versus a detail record using checkboxes.

Rank Transform

The ranking T-SQL functions in SQL 2005 will take a set of data and add a rank column, and this SSIS component does the same thing.  Jamie says it’s still a little buggy, but he’ll work out the bugs in the next few days.  (Honesty is the best policy!)  The bugs are problems with the UI – checkboxes don’t show up as checked when they’re supposed to be.  The data under the covers works though.

It has nice options for rank, dense rank, row number, and row number by partition.  Rank and dense rank are two different ways to handle ties.

Compression Task

Pass in a file – but only one file at a time – and this task will gzip it.  It works for SQL 2005, and there’s a newer version coming on Codeplex to work in SQL Server 2008’s SSIS.  There’s an identical task to unzip.  I can see this as being useful for passing big XML files over networks.

File Watcher

This task watches a directory and waits for files to arrive.  When a file is created, it goes on to the next task in the package.  The File Watcher passes the name of the newly created file to the next task as well, so you can process that file.

Trace Reader

This takes a SQL Server trace file as a source, and then splits it out into three data outputs: short queries that took under 300ms, queries that took 300-1,000ms, and queries that took over a second.  Useful for DBAs who want to automate performance tuning on a large scale.

Dynamic Data Flow

The only non-free tool in the demo, Dynamic Data Flow is by a company called CozyRoc.  You can use one destination in SSIS, but populate different tables based on the contents of your data.

I bailed out just before the last task was shown because I had to get to my own session.

End of the Line

Jamie did an awesome job of demoing a lot of stuff in a short period of time without being overwhelming.  I can really appreciate how much work he had to put into these demos – every single component needed its own set of data.  Fantastic work.

At SQLBits, MVP Jasper Smith of SQLDBATips.com held a session on what’s newin SQL Server 2008 R2 for database administrators.

Application and Multi-Server Management

To illustrate the problem with server sprawl, Jasper gave some quick stats about a big enterprise.  Microsoft IT has around 5,000 SQL Server instances with 100,000 databases, averaging CPU utilization under 10%.

To help solve this problem, SQL 2008 R2 introduced Data-Tier Applications (DAC packs) as a new unit of deployment for T-SQL apps.  They contain developer intent as policies – for example, the developers may want high availability, 2 CPUs and 2 gigs of memory.  Of course, this can present problems down the road – developers will always want more resources.  Jasper demoed the SQL Server Control Point.

SQL Server Connection Director & Connection Plans

Right now, SQL Server connection strings are tied to the server name and database name.  It’s not easy for DBAs to move heavily utilized databases to a more powerful server because we have to touch every client.  The problem is made worse because over time, we need to continuously consolidate databases together as older databases seem to stay on old SQL Server versions.  Take SQL Server 2000 – many of us are still managing a handful of 7 or 2000 servers because a handful of apps just won’t work on newer versions.  We need to combine these old things onto the minimum number of servers possible, but database moves are painful.

There’s help coming in the long term, but not in SQL Server 2008 R2.  The CTPs of SQL Server and Visual Studio for next year’s release contain a feature called the Connection Director, but Microsoft has already said Connection Director won’t be included in the RTM builds.  Bummer!

The new declarative connection plans will let us specify connection strings that lives in Active Directory or on a file share as shown in Books Online.  We can specify a cache refresh interval much like DNS time-to-live parameters – we would put a long cache refresh interval in the plan normally, and then turn that time down shorter when we plan to do maintenance.  Jasper demoed doing exactly this, changing the plan while running an app that regularly connects to SQL.

Me likey!  Can’t wait for that to be introduced.

At SQLbits, Donald Farmer (@DonaldDotFarmer) talked about IT in terms of data, and did it with an interesting picture story from the early 20th century.  Data today isn’t all that different from the messy desktops and clean library card catalogs of the last century.

IT professionals still break into the same 3 roles that existed a century ago:

• Acquiring and storing data
• Validating the data quality
• Managing calculations on the data

Our roles, though, conflict with those of analysts – power users who want to do this work themselves.

Letting People Build Something Cool

Analysts do their slicing and dicing in our “approved” tools, but when they bang up against the ceilings of our capabilities, what do they do?  Universally, they export to Excel, and then start doing crazy things in this radically familiar environment.

To build the future of BI, Microsoft is delivering PowerPivot as an optional add-in for Excel 2010.  Excel 2010 installs side-by-side with older versions, so users can install it without violating corporate policies on using older Excels.  Farmer demoed PowerPivot with a >100 million row table using his laptop, sorting & dicing it in real time.  This demo still hasn’t gotten old for me yet – I love seeing that.  Since PowerPivot is a column-oriented data storage mechanism, it performs really well in memory.  It still takes a long time to get 100 million rows into PowerPivot (over the network, for example) but once it’s there, it flies.

PowerPivot data is read-only, though – once it’s been pulled in and compressed into column-based storage, it’s pretty much stuck.  If you need to make modifications, the easiest way is to use linked tables, and modify the linked ones.  Farmer demoed how to create relationships with those tables, and how PowerPivot helps detect which relationships don’t violate integrity rules.

To get that data into PowerPivot, one easy way is to use RSS. Business users can click the RSS icon on new SSRS reports, and Excel will open the feed to create a PowerPivot document.  From there, users can easily do their own slicing & dicing.

When we look at Excel spreadsheets from analysts, often the front couple of sheets are nicely formatted reports.  The rest of the sheets are various intermediate pivot tables and aggregates hitting other sheets of source tabs.  Excel’s new formulas in PowerPivot help you get those well-formatted aggregates faster with less intermediate steps.

I Made Something Cool! Now What?

Once users have built something cool in Excel, they didn’t have a solid way to share that with multiple users.  Farmer says SharePoint 2010 is like the ultimate file share for Excel because:

• IT knows the files are backed up
• IT knows who’s building the reports
• IT knows who’s accessing the files (which means we can tell which reports we may need to take over)
• People can consume the data without actually having PowerPivot or even Excel – it just works in the web

PowerPivot spreadsheets with slicers look fantastic in SharePoint.  I can envision people building their own report portals without BI team help.  There’s still a question of where the data’s coming from and how accurate it is, but that’s the case no matter how reports are delivered anyway.

Farmer says that this new self-service BI doesn’t interfere with real BI teams – you still need real BI in order to get analytics.  The self-service BI delivers the answers to the “background noise” of analytics requests – small, quick-hit requests that never end.  Farmer says self-service BI isn’t for the big projects, and the big tools aren’t right for self-servie needs either.

To try out PowerPivot, hit:

• http://www.powerpivot.com
• http://www.powerpivotpro.com
• http://www.powerpivotgeek.com
• http://twitter.com/powerpivot
• http://twitter.com/powerpivotpro

I’m jumping into the Chicago SQL Server community with both feet as soon as I get back.  I’m speaking at the next ChiPASS meeting on Thursday, December 10th in downtown Chicago.  I’ll be presenting the same Disaster Recovery 101 presentation I gave at the PASS Summit.  You must RSVP if you plan to attend, because they have to put you on the security list to get into the building.  And no, that has nothing to do with the fact that I’m presenting, ha ha ho ho.

I’m also submitting sessions for the upcoming SQLSaturday in Chicago next April, and you can join me!  It’ll be on April 17th, but the planning starts now, and we need your help to make the event successful.  SQLSaturdays are completely free events for the attendees, and speaking there is a great way to give back to the community.

You’ll also be polishing your presentation skills, which pays off when you’re up against tons of other speakers for coveted PASS Summit sessions.  Remember, if you get sessions approved for the Summit, you get a free registration!  Think of your SQLSaturday sessions as a down payment towards your Summit skills.

Enter your session abstract today, and as a thank-you, I’ll give each SQLSaturday Chicago speaker a personal thank-you gift at the event.  Don’t get too excited though – it won’t be a free TabletPC like those PDC attendees got (I’m not bitter.)

Update: I’ve gotten a couple of emails asking if I’d fly out to local user group meetings to speak.  I would love to, but the reality is that I have to focus on reaching the most number of people possible in relation to my travel time.  When I fly out to speak at a user group, I spend several hours in flight back & forth, plus I often have to overnight at a hotel because the user group meeting takes place after the last flight out.  All of that costs money and time, and frankly, doing that for a 10-30 person group for 1 hour is pretty painful.  I already travel too much (especially if you ask my wonderful girlfriend who already puts up with too much).  I’m completely open to doing remote presentations, but if I have to travel, I need to combine several events, or reach a lot more than 10-30 people.  Just like your company is asking you to do more with less, Quest is asking us to figure out how to reach more people with less, and usually that means virtual conferences or focusing on big (several-hundred-people) meetings.

Lest you think my European trips consist of walking around shooting pictures in Rome, I shall share with you a recap of my trip so far.

Thursday – the entire Rome sales force is out sick. There’s a flu going around, so my staff training sessions turn into a day of me catching up on work.  Friday, two salespeople show up.  It’s an improvement over the day before, so I’ll take it, and I take revenge by having fun walking around Rome on Saturday.

Sunday – British Airways loses one of my bags. Only one of my two bags made it to Stockholm.  Being a DBA on a two-week trip, I’d planned ahead and packed two bags with equally divided gear.  Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy.  I didn’t pack more than I needed, mind you, I just striped my clothing, as it were.  I didn’t stress out, but it didn’t make things easier.

Sunday – I arrive in Stockholm in the rain. I can’t find a taxi, so I take the train into town.  From the train station, I try to catch a cab to my hotel, only to be told by the cabbies that it’s just around the corner, and they won’t take me – I have to walk instead.  I walk two blocks in the rain, try to check in, and it’s not the right Radisson.  I walk back to the cab stand, point angrily at the map, and we come to an agreement.

Monday lunchtime – our Stockholm lunch & learn seminar draws 0 attendees. The salespeople frantically call customers to find out what’s going on, and turns out they all either had production emergencies or they just didn’t want to leave the office.  I spend a couple of hours training the sales staff instead.

Monday evening – my beloved Macbook Pro won’t boot.  It turns on, and then displays a no-smoking style circle with a slash through it.  I’m not worried about my data, because I’ve got a second internal hard drive with Time Machine, but I can’t read that drive without another Mac.  Since nobody’s got them in the Copenhagen team, I briefly consider buying a second Macbook when I get to the London airport, but European prices for Apple gear are outrageous.  I’ve got a two-week-old backup of all my decks on a USB flash drive with me, but I’d tweaked them for SQLbits.  Oh, and yeah, I’m supposed to present Tuesday morning in Copenhagen.

Tuesday morning – I present with a borrowed laptop using my USB backups.  It goes smashingly – lots of attendees, lots of good questions, and lots of thumbs-up.  Whew.  One success.  I’d love to walk around through Copenhagen snapping pictures, but I have a tight timeline now if I’m gonna get my decks updated for SQLBits on Friday.

Tuesday afternoon – I buy a Swedish netbook, a Lenovo S10-2 with Windows XP, because it’s the only sub-$1,000 one I can find in stock after visiting three computer stores, and I’m running out of time.  Upon powering it on, I discover that it’s not the multi-language version of XP – it’s just all Chef, all the time.  I can almost deal with it, but even the built-in Office is Swedish, and I keep running into slide problems with it.  I work until midnight getting it reinstalled with an English build of Windows and Office using an MSDN account, a USB key, a paper clip and two socks.

Wednesday morning – I’m scheduled to leave Copenhagen at 8am, but of course that doesn’t go right either.  British Airways tells us we have to delay boarding for 20 minutes because there’s high winds in London, and there’s no sense in us getting onto a plane that can’t leave the airport.  20 minutes later, they board us onto the plane and pull away from the jetway.  They proceed to inform us that yes, there’s still high winds in London, and no, we still can’t depart yet, but they stuffed us onto the plane anyway.  We taxi to a remote area of the airport and they shut the engines down for an hour, because they figure as long as their employees are unhappy, we should be unhappy too.  I’m quite okay with the delay, because my netbook’s got a full battery, so I continue knocking out my presentations.

Wednesday – news breaks that PDC09 attendees (the conference I really wanted to see this week) all get free tablet PC laptops with multitouch, Office 2010, and more.  I contrast that with my Swedish netbook that cost a minor fortune, and I think I just might have gotten slapped in the face with the short end of the stick.

Wednesday afternoon – I check into the Quest corporate house. We’ve got an actual house in Maidenhead, a London suburb, because so many folks breeze through here.  I really like the place, although it’s about a mile’s walk from food, and boy do I need a drink.  I walk to a pub, down a big Guinness and a burger, then get chastised when I try to pay with a credit card.  The waitress angrily informs me that nobody’s allowed to pay less than ten pounds with a credit card, so she rounds the bill up.  She then proceeds to hand me the 3+ pounds in cash, something an American would never do.  I happily hand it back to her and tell her to keep it, and it immediately brightens her day.  Hopefully she won’t be as cranky on my next visit.  I go back to the Quest house and throw a load of laundry into the washer/dryer, something really handy when you’re on the road for two weeks.  Ideally, I’d be in a hotel with dry cleaning and restaurants that do room charges, but I don’t mind sucking it up now and then.

Wednesday evening – I can’t pay with a credit card, but I can’t find cash anywhere. I’m somewhat hungry, but not enough to eat ten pounds worth of food.  Knowing now about the credit card minimums, I ask around at a couple of nearby restaurants, and none will take credit cards for less than ten or twenty pounds.  They point me to a cash machine half a mile away, but upon my arrival, it’s out of commission.  The shop owner doesn’t know of another nearby one.  I try ordering pizza, but the systems wig out when my delivery address doesn’t match my billing address, plus the billing address is in America.  I give in and just get a pizza to eat in the restaurant, then take the leftovers home for breakfast.  My status as a foodie is diminished.

Wednesday 11pm – I get a surprise visitor. I’m working on a presentation alone, in the dark, when I hear someone fumbling at the front door.  Thankfully, I’m not working in my undies, because in walks another Questie who’s just as surprised as I am that he’s not alone.  We end up talking into the wee hours of the night about IT, but man, that could have been ugly.  He’s thankful for my leftover pizza.

Thursday morning – I check my clothes in the “dryer” and they’re soaking wet. The dryer’s drain is plugged, so my clothes just rolled around in a pool of water for an hour.  I hang my clothes out on a line, knowing full well they won’t dry before Iain comes to pick me up in a couple of hours.  I’ll be dry cleaning those the instant I get to the hotel for SQLbits.

Travel isn’t all unicorns, rainbows, and meals at WD50.  Part of me really wants to extend my trip by one day to attend the ComputerWeekly blog awards in London next week, where I’m in the running for Best Individual IT Male (hint: vote today! and often!), but the rest of me can’t wait to get back home to the States.  I love Europe, but I’d rather live here, not travel through it.  Traveling anywhere, not just Europe, is a royal pain when things don’t go as planned.

If you see me presenting at SQLbits this weekend and I seem even more relaxed than normal, it’s because at this point, I’m at one with the chaos.  Bring it on.  If my projector bursts into flames and my audience consists of hecklers wearing “I Love Microsoft Access” shirts, I’m still going to be grinning.

David Stein (Blog – Twitter) wrote a post called “Pop Quiz Hotshot” about starting your disaster recovery plan *now*.  It’s a great read with good points that everyone needs to act on, but the comments indicate that not everybody’s seeing eye to eye.  As usual, I rely on similes because I’m lazy.

How to Lose Weight

Get your pencils ready, because I’m about to give you the ultimate weight loss tip.  It’s going to sound almost too good to be true because it’s so darned easy, and here’s the craziest part – it can actually save you money!  That’s right – this is the tip that the exercise equipment industry, the personal trainer industry, and the vitamin industry are desperately trying to keep under wraps.  You ready?  Here it comes.  Don’t blink – you might miss it.

Eat less.  A lot less.

I know – it sounds ridiculous, but that wild technique helped me drop 40 pounds in under a year.  I didn’t exercise one bit, either.

I know what you’re thinking – you’re thinking, “But Brent, how can I possibly lose weight without spending money?  Don’t I have to spend a fortune on the FlabBlaster 3000 just like Chuck Norris tells me to?”  Far be it from me to disagree with Chuck – very far – but…

Buying Hardware Doesn’t Fix Bad Practices

No matter how much you spend on exercise equipment or systems management, you and your servers aren’t going to get healthier when the stuff sits on the shelf.

Money can’t buy you health.

It can pay for experts to come in and fix you when you’re sick, but it can’t keep you healthy – that part is up to you.  The very first step to getting healthier, and this goes for both your servers and your thighs, is to change your habits.  Elbow grease has amazing results when applied liberally.

Start Testing Your Restores. Now.

If you don’t have a spare server lying around, use somebody’s spare desktop.  We all have ancient machines sitting in closets from our last upgrade or that employee who just got fired because he couldn’t restore a dropped table.  (Get it? That’s a hint.)  Get that machine, and throw in a 1.5 terabyte drive for about $100.  Yes, use your own money if the company won’t pay, because this is an investment in your career.  If you’ve got several machines lying around, consider combining their memory if possible, but don’t sweat it – this is only your training wheels system.

Install the OS again from scratch, and put SQL Server Developer Edition on there or the 180-day evaluation version of SQL Server 2005 or 2008.  Don’t overcomplicate your life by trying to get every best practice ideally perfect – even if everything’s installed on a 1.5tb C drive, this system will still work for the basics.

Start by testing your restores once per week.  The first few times you do it, don’t try to script the whole thing out – just use SQL Server Management Studio and point/click your way through it.  Remember, high bang, low buck/effort: we want this whole thing to take less than two hours per week of your time, max. The restores aren’t going to be fast, but the point is to even figure out if we can do them, period.  After a couple of weeks, you’ll start scripting your work as you find more and more things that aren’t included in your test system – logins, DTS packages, jobs, whatever.  Document what you’re doing along the way, because every time you find something else that has to be done to make the server work, that’s one less lesson you’d need to learn under the gun.

One Month Later: Add the Apps

After you’re comfortable restoring the database, try to configure your application.  Install IIS, DLLs, code, whatever else you might need to get the app to run.  If you don’t manage the app, ask the app guys to take another old desktop and try to do their part to set up a restore testbed for themselves.  If they don’t want to, that’s okay – but now you’re starting to build up some cover for your rear end.

Some things might not work in your environment.  For example, if you’re using the evil xp_cmdshell, your developers may have hard-coded paths and files into their code.  The faster you find things like this, the faster you can get them fixed before disaster strikes.  When disaster strikes, these problems won’t be seen as developer mistakes – you’ll get blamed, because you can’t make the server work the way it used to.  99% of your problems won’t stem from hardware that you can buy with a check, though – they’ll stem from practices.  Stop waiting for the company to buy you a Thighmaster, and start doing pushups.  It’s better than nothing, and when disaster strikes, the last thing you want to have is nothing.

When there’s enough basic plumbing in place that you think everything works, format the box and start over.  Use your documentation and try to repeat the whole process.  The first several times you do this, you’re going to continue to find more errors and gotchas.

When you think your documentation is complete, format the box and hand the documentation to your junior person or your manager.  Say, “I’ve got a set of steps to follow when disaster strikes, and I want you to test them for me, because if I’m not around then you’ll be the one doing it.”  They will be shocked, but down the road they’ll appreciate your due diligence.

This kind of disciplined effort is why experienced DBAs walk around with an air of confidence.  The best DBAs aren’t worried about what happens when disaster strikes, because they’ve already practiced it again and again and again.  When I was a DBA, I liked to say that disaster struck every week for me – it just struck in my lab.

Now this is just plain liquid awesome:

When WROX decided to dump the author photos on the book covers, I was bummed out.  One of the big selling points of a book is to have your name on it, to point to it in the bookstore and say, “I made that.”  Having the authors on the cover was even cooler, especially in a platform like SQL Server where the personalities are so identifiable.  The new book covers don’t seem to have anything to do with the content, and they don’t have any personality.  They scream “cheap stock photo.”

But when I found out ours had a race car on the front, I cheered.  No, cars don’t have anything to do with internals or troubleshooting – but it’s a car, and it’s going fast!  Woohoo!  I can’t wait to say, “Look for my book in the SQL Server section.  It’s the one with a race car on the front.”  Shazam!

Here’s a postcard Wiley/WROX is using to promote the book at SQLBits next weekend:

I’ve read the other authors’ chapters, and I can tell you with complete authority that I am by far the dumbest guy involved with this book – not just the brilliant authors on the cover, either, but also including two other folks involved, Cindy Gross and Jonathan Kehayias.  I am completely riding on their coattails.

Before I did this, I glanced at books and just figured that any author on the cover knew everything that was in the book.  For example, when I saw my buddy Jean-Claude Armand on the cover of Professional SQL Server 2005 Administration, I just assumed he was a genius who knew everything in that book cover to cover.  While JC is indeed a genius, don’t assume that I knew everything in our book’s chapters – on the contrary, I’ve learned a *lot* in every single chapter I’ve had the privilege to read.  Christian Bolton’s chapter on memory alone was worth the entire book, because the Quest LiteSpeed support folks are always asking me questions about MemToLeave and my answers suck.  Now, my answers suck much less.

I’m starting to see what authors mean when they say the writing process doesn’t seem as bad when it starts to fade into the rearview mirror.  Now that the book’s coming closer to press time, I’m feeling more and more psyched about it.  My junk still hurts, but there’s a very small part of my brain that’s starting to think about how to make it easier next time.

The book’s scheduled to be available in late December or early January, and you can preorder it now from Amazon for around $38.