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No matter what your job description says, you are being paid to get things done.

Being a successful salaried information worker is different than it was a few years ago.  Constant connectivity, home offices and global workforces change everything.

You are never – NEVER – going to be “caught up.”

You are always going to have more work to do.  No matter how many things you accomplish today, there will be more things that other people will want you to accomplish.  If you ever get to the point where no one has any work for you to do, you’ll have things that you personally want to accomplish to further your career.

Telecommuting makes the situation even worse: if you’re doing it right, your home office is an inviting place where you love the work you’re doing. Who would want to stop to take a break, especially if the alternative is just sitting in the living room watching mindless TV?  Telecommuting can turn into a neverending work day.

Making telecommuting work requires two things.

First: Doing the Right Thing at the Right Time

We’ve established that you’re always going to be behind.  (Slacker.)  Because the pressure’s never going to let up for the rest of your career, you need to be completely comfortable with your manager getting up in your grill, yelling, “What are you working on right now?  How come you’re not working on ____?”

To answer that question, you have to have an easily accessible and totally bulletproof list of tasks, organized in order.  When my boss, Christian, asks me this question (and he does, regularly) I can open up my task list on RememberTheMilk.com and tell him the top three things in my priority list.  At that point, we can have an intelligent discussion based on the priorities of those tasks without me stuttering through things like, “Uh, I think somebody asked me for something, but I can’t remember what it was…”

The book Getting Things Done by David Allen explains how to build this task list, how to organize it, and why your email inbox is not a substitute for a task list.  If that book feels a little too executive-ish for you, check out Time Management for Systems Administrators by Thomas Limoncelli.  It’s got the same concepts, but tailored specifically for IT workers.

Wait: This Sounds Like Motivational Crap

Productivity books are a dime a dozen, and they’re worth even less than that.  The difference with GTD is hidden in the subtitle: “The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.”  I’ve tried other productivity tools, and they’re too focused on productivity and not focused enough on the whole reason we want to get things done.  I want to be productive so I can stop working and relax.  I want to be coolly comfortable with what I’m doing, not racing through it like a headless chicken, and that’s what GTD helps you achieve.

For office workers, this task list zen is somewhat optional: you can survive as a DBA without it.  For telecommuters, though, it’s mandatory.  Otherwise, your manager will keep cracking the whip over and over because there’s always another urgent project coming down the pike, and they’re going to need you to work another few hours.  When you’re in the office, they can visually see when you’re working too long and you’re getting burned out.  When you’re working from home, they have no idea that you haven’t taken a shower in days, that you’re duct taping your eyelids open and that your family hasn’t seen you for a week.

Second: Know When Time Is Up

You know how your company says they’re one big happy family, and they love you like a brother/son/daughter/mistress, and that they’re always looking out for your best interests?  I’ve got bad news: that’s a boilerplate letter that they copy/paste out of the Human Resources textbooks.  What, did you really think they’d say, “We don’t give a rat’s behind about you or your family” – of course not.

I’m not saying they’re lying – they might actually care – but I’m suggesting that you shouldn’t rely on them to tell you when you’re working too hard or starting to burn out.

I’m also not saying that you should become a clock watcher, patiently waiting for the 5pm dinner bell to close down the laptop and pop open the beer.  I’m suggesting that you keep track of roughly how many hours you spend:

• Working on projects
• Working on hobbies (when you’re an IT geek, sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between these two)
• Keeping your skills up to date
• Doing the kinds of goof-off things you would have done in the office

Be comfortable with your time mix, and don’t hesitate to tell your boss, “No.”  Balance the need to be the best employee with your need to have a real life outside of work.  When your manager wants to throw more work on your plate, you have to be able to bring the conversation back to your bulletproof task list and your weekly status recap, then say the magic words:

“Which of these tasks do you want me to delay in order to do this new one?”

This is not a fun question to ask, and it doesn’t get easier over time – I had to do it just this week.  But it’s even less fun to face ugly questions from your spouse like, “Why haven’t we gone out to eat in a month?  Why haven’t we seen a movie yet this year?”  Managers (generally) understand this, too, and that’s why I usually mention Erika when I talk about my priorities, like this:

“This looks like a really cool project, and I’d love to do it.  I can’t do it this weekend, though – Erika’s gonna shoot me though if I spend another weekend working, and I’m already trying to figure out when I’m going to prep for that MCITP test you want me to take in my spare time.  Here’s my task list – which of these should I put off for a week or two?”

The only way you can do this with any credibility – without coming off like a whiner – is to have the task list and status recaps going out regularly.

This has a side benefit: when your boss is thinking about adding another employee, you can hand him your list of tasks and say, “Let’s highlight the ones that a second employee (like a junior DBA) would be able to take off my plate.”  As somebody who’s justified additional staff many a time, I can tell you this is priceless.  When you’re competing with other IT workers who also want more help, you look like a rock star when you can produce a list like this instantaneously, and it gives you more credibility.  Managers will say, “This person is on top of their tasks, and they’ll be the most likely to take advantage of the additional staff help instead of the bumbling bozo who has to go hunting through his email wondering what he’s supposed to do next.”

This Works at Home, Too

I use this same GTD technique at home with Erika.  I’ve got my personal task lists lined up with tons of things I want to do – planning vacations, fixing things around the house, which wines we want to try next, anything I want to do in my spare time.  As a result, when I punch out on the telecommuter clock, I can take a deep breath, open my task list, and know that what I’m about to do is the most important thing right now.

Sounds like a workaholic, right?  Just the opposite.  When I look at my task list and know exactly what I need to do next, then I find that I feel completely at peace with kicking back, opening a bottle of wine and enjoying a book or TV with Erika.  I know exactly what the opportunity cost is of avoiding my next to-do item, and I know whether or not it’s really urgent.  I know when I can relax, and when I need to get cracking.

Telecommuting Series Wrapup

I hope you’ve enjoyed my series on how to get a telecommuting job and be successful at it.  There’s a lot I didn’t cover, like:

• How to set up a good home office
• How to balance social networking with real working
• How to tell from afar when your company or your team is in trouble

Telecommuting is harder than it looks.  Done right, it’s a rewarding work/life balance.  Done wrong, you’re going to get fired because they think you’re lazy.  Choose wisely.

Hold on, stay with me for a second.

I know what you’re thinking: the only thing more boring than status reports is reading a BLOG about status reports.

My weekly status reports are different.  They’re just a few short, simple lines in a Monday morning email like this:

Last week I:

• Did task A
• Did task B
• Did task C

This week I plan to:

• Do task D
• Do task E
• Do task F

The end.  Each task takes at least 4 hours, preferably a day or more.

Managers don’t expect to see 40 hours worth of work in three bullet points, but they do expect to see your highlight reel.  Every employee, not just telecommuters, has all kinds of small things that suck up productivity time.  Your status report needs to show successful forward momentum that proves you’re getting big things done every week.

How I Write It

When I sit down Monday morning, I pull my status email from last week and copy/paste it in to give me a jump start on what I’d planned to do.  I then go back through my calendar to see if anybody sucked me into a last-minute meeting, and I go back through my Sent Items folder in Outlook to see if I’d forgotten anything else I was working on.  As a telecommuter, hot projects tend to show up in your Sent Items because you interact so much over email.

I’ve worked with other people who started a new draft every Monday morning, and then entered their big tasks through the week in preparation for sending that email the following Monday.  That doesn’t work for me, but I applaud their dedication.

How to Handle Meetings and Recurring Tasks

In the section for the coming week, I don’t include recurring tasks or meetings.  When I was a DBA, I didn’t include lines for tasks like checking servers for failures or problems, making sure backups made it offsite, or taking support calls as they came in.  These things were assumed to be in my job every single week.

On the other hand, in the section for last week, I include anything that popped up out of the ordinary.  While I may have been expected to take any support calls that came in, I would note any calls that took more than 4 hours to resolve.  This kept my manager in the loop about support issues and surprises.

I did include recurring meetings, though, because I wanted my manager to understand how many meetings I got forced into.  It helped them realize when I was getting bottlenecked in terms of time.  I list all meetings in a single task.  Example: “Attend meetings on project A, project B.  Plan & host meeting on project C.”

When Managers Ask Questions

90% of the time, my manager never even replies.  Managers are overwhelmed just like the rest of us.

If they do reply and ask me why I’m doing something, or ask why something is more urgent than another task they want me to do, I take their feedback and start asking questions.  If they’re even the least bit nervous about my priorities or what I’m taking on, I want to make sure I make them completely comfortable.  I want to do what THEY want me to do, not what I think is important, so I talk to them about their concerns in a way that puts them in the driver’s seat.

As a DBA, sure, I wanted my servers to all match best practices.  I’d love to have spent weeks configuring my servers to be Just Right.  However, my manager might have wanted four new reporting queries, or to help me train the developers on how to write faster queries.  I can’t take that personally – I’m on their payroll to do the business tasks, not the Microsoft best-practices tasks.

One line I use over and over in discussions with my managers is, “I totally don’t care what I do next.  I’m going to be busy the rest of my career here.  You tell me what you want me to do next, and I’m on it.”  This complete comfort with an overwhelming to-do list, and a simultaneous complete control over that list, is a key part of David Allen’s Getting Things Done philosophy.  Tomorrow in the last post in the series, I’ll talk about why that book is central to my telecommuting work.

Next: Getting Things Done as a Telecommuter

At today’s Microsoft TechEd 2009 conference in LA, Senior VP Bill Veghte started by talking about big-picture needs.  He discussed focusing Microsoft’s R&D on the ability to deliver anywhere access with end-user centricity: the ability for mobile users on laptops and PDAs to access applications securely and with IT control.

Office 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2 Release Date for CTP

Technical previews of both products are coming this year.  The SQL Server 2008 R2 CTP will be coming in the second half of 2009.  (PASS Summit, hopefully?)  From the TechEd press release:

“Finally, Microsoft announced that a Community Technology Preview of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 (formerly SQL Server code-named “Kilimanjaro”) will be available in the second half of 2009. SQL Server 2008 R2 will empower end users to make better decisions through self-service business intelligence, and help IT drive greater efficiency and reduce costs through new capabilities such as multi-server management and Master Data Services. In 2010, Microsoft will also introduce complex event processing for real-time insight into streaming information.”

The self-service BI stuff ties in with the Office 2010 release, and the technical preview for that will be available in July, but it’ll be a limited preview starting with the TechEd attendees.  More information is available at the Office 2010 Technical Preview site.

Windows 7 Notes and Improvements

He asked for as many people as possible to install and live with Windows 7 so that they can get telemetry: bug reports and device installation data.  The more data they get, the better the final release is.  They’re working on video drivers especially, which got a chuckle out of some of the attendees.  (In my humble opinion, video drivers are some of the buggiest things in an operating system, and it’s not Microsoft’s fault there.)

Microsoft worked with Intel on two things in Windows 7: power management (in core management and Nehalem) and hyperthreading scheduling.  The latter is starting to matter with Apple’s focus in Snow Leopard: Apple’s delivering something called Grand Central to ease multithreaded software development.  It’s nice that Microsoft is trying to compete on that.

Veghte said he was surprised that he didn’t get more feedback on Internet Explorer v7 and v8, especially around security.  I’ll break the insightful answer right here on BrentOzar.com first for my readers: it’s because we’re using Firefox and Chrome. <rimshot>

Windows Server 2008 R2 Improvements

Windows 2008 R2 brings tools with VDI, local printer support, PowerShell, etc to make it easier to manage lots of desktops and remote offices.  60-70% of the “run rate” has become portable machines, which makes management tougher.  The Windows Server 2008 R2 RC is available now.  One of the new key features is BranchCache, which caches file server content at branch offices to speed access for branch office users.

Vighte demoed BitLocker to Go, which encrypts USB flash drives.  Mark Russinovich then came onstage and showed a little about policy management (GPO) that can enforce the requirement of BitLocker so users can’t just plug in drives and use bad passwords.

Russinovich also introduced AppLocker, an improved version of SRM, and neither of these terms mean anything to me.  He pointed out a bug in the application and said that even though the app on his screen said Sysinternals, he clearly didn’t write it because it had a bug – and his software never has bugs. Ha! Nice.

He demoed Problem Steps Recorder, a troubleshooting tool that end users can use to record a mini-screencast of problems.  When they’re experiencing a problem, they start the tool, which captures a series of screenshots of each thing they click on.  It produces a chtml file with all of the screenshots embedded, making it easy to email that file over to tech support.

Windows will be able to access and create VHDs (virtual hard drives) very similar to disks.  In Disk Manager, you can create a new VHD, partition it and format it just like a hard drive, and it uses thin provisioning.  Users can create a 10gb VHD, but it won’t immediately start at 10gb – it just uses the necessary space to accommodate the files contained inside.  Windows will also be able to boot into a VHD by editing the boot configuration file: users can download a new VHD to test a new operating system, for example, and then reboot straight into it.

PowerShell v2 will be able to script Group Policy.

Application Compatibility and Virtualization

Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V) was demoed by Russinovich as a way for enterprises to continue to deploy and manage their older applications that aren’t Windows 7 compatible.  In addition, enterprises can specify specific URLs that will launch in older browsers via virtualization: if you have an old intranet web app that only works in IE6 or IE7, your users won’t have to know the difference.  The right browser will launch based on the site they visit.

He showed Application Virtualization (APP-V) as another piece in the lost-laptop puzzle: the way IT employees can rapidly redeploy laptops to users. Roaming profiles handles the storage of settings, folder redirection handles document storage, and APP-V handles the fast provision of applications on the fly.  All of this relies on extremely fast bandwidth, though: you can’t simply drop-ship a new laptop to someone in a remote office and expect them to pull their profile, folders and APP-V apps over the wire.  For in-office workers, it’s great though.

Windows 7 Release Date: “Before the Holiday”

Veghte came back onstage to talk more about application compatibility with Windows Vista applications, and emphasized that developers need to test their Vista apps to make sure they’ll work with the final release of Windows 7 since it’s coming fast.  He didn’t mention Windows XP applications, which rather surprised me until I realized Windows 7 Professional will come with a virtual XP – but not a virtual Vista.

He said that the release candidate work went on schedule, and it looks like it’s tracking for a wide availability before the holiday.  “The Holiday.”  No name, just “The Holiday.”  How politically correct. We know he means Hanukkah, though.

Windows Server 2008 R2

Iain McDonald, GM of Windows Server, came onstage to jokingly announce that TechEd 2009 is the coming-out party for Windows Server 2008 R2 because Windows 7 has hogged the spotlight too long.  Windows 2008 R2 is also on track for a holiday delivery, and that there won’t be a workload it can’t handle.

Several factors combine to make this release interesting for shops with a large number of servers: the ability to boot from VHD, the ability to run .NET apps on Windows Core, and PowerShell.  Between these, you could conceivably copy VHDs out to all servers in a farm, tweak their boot config files to update to the new VHD file, and reboot them.  If I managed web farms or application server farms, this would get me really excited, and down the road if SQL Server scales out, this has good implications for better server management too.

A new File Classification Infrastructure will let administrators set extended properties on files, like confidentiality.  For example, if a file is marked confidential, it will be moved to a specific area on a file server, a symlink will be left in its place, and the document will be handled the way the sysadmins want.  Even if the file isn’t marked confidential, Windows Server 2008 R2 will include OCR capabilities to recognize terms like “Microsoft Confidential” in scanned documents, and automatically add the appropriate metadata tags.

Exchange 2010

Iain called Exchange one of the most deployed applications in the world, and talked about wanting to deploy it similarly whether it was deployed locally or in the cloud. The goals for Exchange 2010 were making it:

• Great at dealing with information overload
• More reliable and easier to manage
• Protecting data better for compliance needs

He demonstrated sending a piece of email from a member of the legal team to an executive – or rather, tried to, and he got two straight failures.  Whoops.  If the document had key phrases, it would recognize that the email should be confidential and would be marked as such.

Outlook Web Access in Exchange 2010 will work “beautifully” in other browsers (only Firefox and Safari were mentioned, not Chrome).

System Center Virtual Machine Manager

SCVMM’s aim is to manage both physical and virtual servers, and manage virtual servers no matter whose platform it is (Hyper-V, Xen, VMware, etc).  His demo showed a server with a high level of CPU utilization, and he migrated it to another node (host) the same way as VMware vMotion.

Interestingly, like SQL Server has done since 2005, SCVMM also has a Script button that will show the script that will be executed behind the scenes to accomplish the task.  This feature in SSMS 2005 was a boon for DBAs because it encouraged them to learn T-SQL scripts by example, and this might do the same thing for PowerShell users.

Summary Wrapup: A Good Time for DBAs to Attend Remotely

I’ve never attended TechEd in person, and this year’s economic climate meant that I was really happy Microsoft did such a good job of webcasting the keynote.  I was able to watch it, research in realtime, and liveblog it from the comfort of a quiet Barnes & Noble with my headphones on.

There wasn’t much news for the SQL Server community in the keynote.  The “accidental DBA” community – developers and sysadmins who spend most of their time managing applications or servers – got more out of TechEd than DBAs did.  The timing of SQL Server 2008 R2’s CTP date means that the PASS Summit will probably get the meat of the SQL Server news.

My take: this schedule makes attending the 2009 PASS Summit even more attractive for database administrators.  We’ll likely be getting our first good looks at SQL Server 2008 R2 at the summit, and since it’s in Seattle again this year, we’ll be able to talk to more Microsoft people about the release.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, it looks like those yoga books are 30% off.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been trying to build a cheap, fast and reliable Hackintosh: a home-built desktop capable of running Apple Mac OSX.

You can read the story over at the Houston Chronicle’s TechBlog, where Dwight Silverman let me post as a guest blogger.  It also got picked up on Digg, MacSurfer and CrunchGear.

Some of the FAQ’s in the comments include:

“Why didn’t you just buy an iMac and plug an extra monitor into it?”  Because I already have a 28″ monitor and two 22″ monitors.  I couldn’t hook up all three to an iMac, I didn’t want to throw away hardware, and I didn’t want to rebuy a monitor I already had.  Plus the iMac only has a single internal hard drive, and I wanted more IO speed.

“You don’t really need more IO speed.” Yes, I do, actually.  I’m a former SAN & SQL Server administrator, and I do testing with data warehouse-size databases of a terabyte or more.  The faster I can back up and restore those databases, the faster I can get my work done.  To give you some indication, my other machine is a Dell PowerEdge 1900 with six drives in a RAID 10 array.  This issue came up several times in the comments, which always infuriates me with the intertubez: people love to tell you what you don’t need.

“Why not plug a bunch of FireWire drives into an iMac?” Because an iMac only has one FireWire 800 port, and I’d be daisy chaining things together like crazy and bottlenecking my bandwidth.  Plus a bunch of FireWire drive enclosures are ugly and expensive.

“Why not buy an iMac and a Drobo?” Were you even listening about the cheap part?  The smallest 24″ iMac is $1,500 and the cheapest 4-bay Drobo is $500. At that point, I’m within spitting distance of a Mac Pro, which takes more memory, more CPUs and has 4 internal drive bays.

“I installed OSX on my Dell Mini 9 netbook and it works great.” Yep, you nailed the cheap part.  Now about the fast part…

Once you’ve gotten a telecommuting job like I explained yesterday, it can be tough to stay motivated and get things done.  There’s so many temptations.  Today, I’ll talk about some of the ways I stay focused and productive.

Set Your Working Hours by Your Body Clock

8am to 5pm probably isn’t your natural peak time.  Telecommuters need to be available during a set range of hours, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s when they should be working.

To find out when your peak mental hours are, start a simple spreadsheet and record how “work-friendly” you feel every hour. Across the top, make four columns:

• Date/Time
• Alert
• Happy
• Creative

Ugh, sounds all shiny-happy-positive, right?  Not so much.  Set yourself an egg timer alarm for 60 minutes.  Every hour, write down the date/time and on a 1-10 scale, how alert, happy and sociable you feel.  Do this all day long, every day for a week.  After a week of monitoring, you’ll discover that your body really does have some natural rhythms.  Don’t fight them: set your working hours to align with your body clock.

My personal schedule:

• 6am-11am – I’m very alert, very happy and very creative.  I wanna crank out work like writing whitepapers, recording videos or building things.
• 11am-3pm – I’m a zombie.  I’m not alert, and I feel meh.  I use this time to do mindless work like filing paperwork, doing expense reports, planning trips, etc.  If I don’t have mindless work-related stuff to do, I’ll take a break from work and do mindless things around the house like laundry or dishes.  I don’t try to learn anything new during this time window, because it’s generally time wasted.
• 3pm-6pm – I’m back on the alert track, but not creative.  It’s a good time for me to work on detail-oriented stuff.

At first glance at my email times or tweets, people might think I work from 6am to 6pm, but I’m only working 8 hours a day.  Most importantly, it’s the 8 hours a day where I’m more effective at actually working.

Not every job has the flexibility to pick what to work on next, but knowing your body clock helps you schedule tasks through the day.  When I telecommuted as a production DBA, I would build new scripts or do troubleshooting in the mornings when I was most focused, and save the paperwork and meetings for later in the afternoon.

Separate Yourself From Your Family

After years of telecommuting, this is still the toughest one for me.  My friends and family don’t quite understand that I’m working during the day, and that I can’t break out and play hooky whenever the urge strikes me.  So far, here’s what I’ve done to stay focused:

• Have a separate home office with a door and a stereo – if you can hear your family, you’re going to have a tough time.  Even just hearing Erika and Ernie play downstairs is enough to take me off my game.
• If you have a phone in the office, turn off the ringer – friends and family will call you during the workday and you’ll be tempted to answer.  I have my phone behind my monitor with the ringer off.  Erika knows that if she really needs me, she can email me, and I can integrate that into my workflow better.
• Get family to schedule things ahead of time – there’s nothing wrong with blowing off work for a few hours and running errands or taking care of something home-related.  It’s better, though, if you can get your family to schedule those in advance.  If I know ahead of time that I need to take the dog to the groomer, then I can schedule my workday around it.  On the other hand, if I get a last-minute knock on the door asking if I can do it, then I’m probably going to get frustrated.
• Communicate schedules ahead of time – every now and then, Erika wants to cook me something special for lunch, but she doesn’t want it to hang around getting cold while I sit through a conference call.  In the morning, I talk to her about what I’ve got going on today and tomorrow, so that way she knows when she can surprise me versus when I’ll be eating something out of the microwave.

Buy a DVR and Watch TV During Downtime

I love my Tivo, but any DVR works: just set it up to record your favorite shows.  At lunchtime, step away from the desk and go watch an hour-long TV show start to finish.  When you fast forward past the commercials, it’s not a full hour, which gives you enough time to prep lunch and then sit and relax.  It takes your mind off work for a while.

If you can’t bear to tear yourself away from the computer at lunch, at least set your instant messenger status to Lunchtime and spend the time surfing the web or catching up on personal emails.

If You’re On a Roll, Keep Doing the Same Thing

Sometimes I’ll write a blog post or design a stored procedure because I have an impending deadline that I have to meet.  When I finish that particular piece of work, I’ll find that I’m “in the zone” for that kind of task – I feel like writing more blogs or coding more T-SQL.  If I’m in the right frame of mind, I’ll just keep going with that style of task regardless of what’s on my to-do list for the week.

Like right now – I just finished up a completely unrelated blog post that I had to do right away for an upcoming event, and I found myself editing & scheduling several other pending blog posts I’d been working on.  By doing these things ahead of time when I’m in the zone, I do better work on that style of task.

That might sound irrelevant to you since you’re probably not blogging for a livin’, but the same rule applies to you.  When I was a DBA and I found myself happy to be troubleshooting a slow query, I’d go hit the DMV’s to find other slow queries on other servers.  When you’re thinking like a performance tuner, you don’t want to stop after just one query – go knock out more.  Avoiding context switching: it’s not just for servers anymore.

In order to get this flexibility of scheduling, you have to make sure your boss doesn’t micromanage you.  Next, I’ll talk about the key to making your manager comfortable.

Next in the Series: How to Write a Telecommuting Status Report

My computer has to be nearly silent because I use it to record video podcasts about SQL Server. I can’t have a big whirring fan noise in the background while I’m recording.  Normally I use a Macbook Pro, which is completely silent, but as part of my Hackintosh experiment I tried to build a silent PC.

I didn’t want to sacrifice speed in the name of silence: no mini-ITX, underpowered computer for me.  I used a Core 2 Duo 3GHz dual-core CPU, 8gb of memory, and five SATA drives (four in a RAID 10, one for backups).

Picking the Best Quiet PC Parts

I chose an Antec Mini P180 case (Antec – Newegg – Review) because:

• It handles five 3.5″ internal drives (I plan on doing a big RAID)
• The 7200 RPM drives are going to need some silencing
• It’s kitted out for silence – rubber grommets for drives, quiet low-RPM fans, 3-ply sidewalls, etc
• I knew I’d be taking pictures of it for my web site (and thus, expensing the project. Woohoo, business tax deductions!)
• It’s a little smaller than typical noise-reducing cases
• Because I like nice stuff. Seriously, is that so wrong? This whole project cost me under $800 out of pocket. Who cares if I splurged $200 on a case and power supply? If I wanted an ugly computer I’d go buy one.

In the picture here, the Antec still has a plastic sheet covering its smooth charcoal exterior.  No, I’m not that annoying relative who leaves plastic covers on their furniture: I did take the plastic off once I’d gotten everything set up.

For power, I picked up an Antec BP550 (Antec – Newegg) because, uh, well, it was the Newegg deal of the day for almost half off.  It wasn’t my first choice, but it looked pretty quiet.  It’s no longer on sale, so if you’re going to choose from scratch, check out Anandtech’s reviews of 300w-450w power supplies and 500w-550w power supplies.  They do a good job of evaluating power supplies by noise and efficiency.

To cool the CPU, I was originally just going to use the stock heatsink/fan that comes with the Intel CPU.  The stock heatsink/fan combo is currently on FrostyTech’s Top 10 Heatsinks list in the low-noise category.  However, I’m one of the clumsiest people on the earth, and in the process of installing the CPU fan, the crappy pushpin mounting system broke on me.  I get the feeling the pushpin mounting system was designed by an accountant to save costs.  No engineer in his right mind would design this setup.  Nobody had a set of replacement pins in stock locally, so as long as I was placing an order anyway….

I got the Xigmatek HDT-S1283 (Xigmatek – Newegg – Review) because it struck the best balance between several factors:

• Good cooling – reviews show that it does a great job of shedding heat on overclocked CPUs. I’m not going to overclock (although I will do it briefly to see how it performs.)
• Low noise – because the heatsink alone cools well, it doesn’t require a fast fan.
• Tight space – some CPU heatsinks out there are absolutely massive. Check out a picture of FrostyTech’s #1 rated low-noise heatsink.
• Low price – it’s under $40.  If you’re like me, that sounds like a heck of a lot of money for a heatsink and fan, but in the overclocking world, this is still pretty cheap.

I also paid a little extra for a screw-in mounting kit instead of the crappy pushpins.  Be aware that a screw-in mounting kit, while more secure for big heavy heat sinks, bolts onto both sides of the motherboard.  If your motherboard is already in your PC case, you’ll need to remove it completely in order to use a screw-in heatsink mounting kit.

Another wise investment might be replacing the Xigmatek’s included fan with a quieter one, but Antec threw in an extra 120mm quiet fan for my case, so I used that one.  (They don’t include an extra fan with all cases.)

Putting the Parts Together

The hard drives are fastened in with screws and nifty silicone grommets that isolate vibration as shown here.  The drive (A) floats on top of a silicone grommet.  The grommet itself (B) is a little rubbery sponge, and it’s held in suspension with an extended screw (C).  Antec includes specific instructions warning the user not to overtighten the screws, because that would negate the advantage of the silicone grommets.

I might be easy to please, but I was tickled pink with this approach.  When I turned on the system for the first time, I could definitely tell that the drives were quieter than with a conventional case.

The power supply has a separate chamber at the bottom of the case as shown here.  Theoretically, the power supply will draw in its own fresh air from the bottom of the case, where Antec designed a vent covered with a washable filter.  The power supply’s hot exhaust air is sent out of the back of the case, and all of its heat is kept away from the rest of the heat-sensitive gear by a metal wall.  Cables can be routed up from the power supply chamber through a sliding window, or through the back side of the case under the motherboard.

The CPU, drives and memory generate their own heat, and Antec handles that with a ginormous 240mm fan at the top of the case and a 120mm fan at the back.  These fans draw fresh air from the front of the case, through the hard drives, and out the top & back of the case.  The fans are huge, but they’re designed to spin slowly, thereby moving a lot of air without making a lot of noise and vibration.

This design works well in combination with the Xigmatek HDT-S1283 CPU heatsink: the Xigmatek ends up aligned with the exhaust fan.  I bet I could run without a fan on the Xigmatek at all.

All of this airflow design only works if the airflow isn’t blocked by a mess of cables, so the Antec Mini P180 is designed so that cables are routed through the back side of the case, underneath the motherboard.  This area is just deep enough to handle plastic cables like SATA power plugs, but not much more than that.  I had to wiggle and squish the cables flat in order to get the doors closed.  If you plan on frequently changing motherboards, this is not the case for you.

The Antec Mini P180 is a little smaller than conventional noise-reducing cases, so some of my buying decisions came back to haunt me.  For example, the GeIL memory sticks have built-in heat sinks and they’re taller than conventional memory sticks.  They came perilously close to my hard drives, close enough that I had to reroute the SATA and power cables to get it all to fit.  If I were to do the whole thing over again, I might have gone with a full-sized Antec P182 (Antec – Review) to get more wiggle room.

The End Result: A Quiet (not Silent) PC

When I first turned the PC on, I breathed a sigh of relief. I could still hear the fans barely whirring, but when I put the case under my desk, the noise was almost inaudible.  The power supply, even though it wasn’t marketed as a quiet model, was still more than good enough.

The Xigmatek’s stock fan was the loudest part of my setup, and I would recommend replacing it with a quieter 120mm fan like I did.

While installing Windows, despite four SATA drives busily scratching away in a RAID 10 config, I could only hear occasional noises – not the loud, steady mechanical seek noises I heard from them in another desktop.  The combination of the noise isolating grommets and closed case doors really made a difference.  Even with the case doors open, the noise was completely tolerable.

Bottom line: the case, power supply, and CPU heatsink made my fast PC almost as quiet as my relatively slow Macbook Pro.  Now if only it ran OSX….

You can view more pictures of my quiet PC on Flickr.

The good news: I’ve been getting a lot of web visitors lately.

The bad news: I’ve been getting a lot of web visitors lately.  The last dot is April (the down-slope is May, Google’s graph labels are goofy.)

I don’t write my stuff in order to get hits.  I’ve always taken a simple approach to what I write: if I’ve got a problem, and I can’t find the solution quickly online, then I document my solution on my site.  Sometimes it’s about SQL Server, sometimes it’s about Twitter, and soon I’ll have a big post on how to build a Hackintosh.  The thing is, when you write something useful, other people do come visit, and it really starts to build up steam.

How I Started: A Shared Web Host

For years, I’ve relied on a shared web host plan from HostGator and been very happy with it.  For about $25/mo, you get 24gb of drive space and 250mb of bandwidth.  In April, I used around 3gb of disk space and 25gb of bandwidth to serve about 50k visitors.

However, as a SQL Server DBA, I can tell you that storage space and bandwidth have nothing to do with performance.

You can serve static HTML files all day long from a cheap shared web host, but when you introduce applications like WordPress, MySQL and 3rd party plugin applications, suddenly you’re talking about CPU and memory capacity issues.

The first workaround is to use caching: if your web site isn’t changing that fast (like if people aren’t leaving comments like crazy) then it makes sense to cache as much as possible.  Serve pages out of memory instead of rebuilding them every time, and you’ll cut down on the number of requests sent back to the database.  For WordPress bloggers, that’s as simple as using the plugin WP-Super-Cache: just install and enable it, and it automatically serves cached pages to your visitors.

Caching Isn’t That Easy

I lied: caching isn’t as easy as installing a plugin.  Oh, sure, that’s what the sysadmins will tell you, but it only works if all of your other plugins work correctly with WP-Super-Cache.  How can you tell?  Well, uh, you can’t.  The first problem I ran into was that the MobilePress plugin (which makes your site look better on iPhones and Blackberries) doesn’t always work correctly if WP-Super-Cache is enabled.  I decided to abandon mobile support in favor of caching, because I didn’t want my site to fall over when I got linked by someone famous.

Later, I played around with plugins to display ads on my blog if the visitor was coming from a search engine.  Statistics show that visitors from Google stumble in looking for a particular solution, and they’re more likely than other users to click ads.  Bloggers should avoid showing ads to their regular readers, because those folks aren’t tempted to click ads.  I dabbled with running ads on my old posts, and I ended up making around $100/month.  However, when I ran ads, the caching didn’t work correctly: they would cache the ad status based on the first visitor to the page.  If that visitor was eligible to get ads, then everybody who saw the cached page also saw ads.  I could disable caching, and then everybody got the right content, but then I was running a risk of putting too much load on my web site again.  That time, I decided to abandon ads in favor of caching.

This past Sunday I redesigned BrentOzar.com, and in the process, I temporarily disabled caching so that I could test my changes in several browsers & OS’s in rapid fire.  Sundays are usually low-traffic days, so I wasn’t too worried about load.  Erika and I drove over to my parents’ house to say goodbye before they embarked on a road trip, and when I came back home, my web site was down.

When Sysadmins Attack

Sherri Shepherd, co-host of The View, had Tweeted a link to my Twitter tips.  (Side note – after chatting with her for a while, I can see why she’s a host – she’s one of those people you just naturally want to open up to.)  She had about 68,000 followers at the time, and enough of them clicked on the link to make my web host notice.  HostGator’s sysadmins shut my site down for using too much CPU/memory, but they didn’t call me to tell me that.  Instead, they simply changed permissions on one of the PHP pages on my site so that WordPress wouldn’t work.  I had no idea my account had been shut down, so I started troubleshooting the site.

I found the permissions problem, contacted HostGator, and things went rapidly downhill from there.  I’m not going to go into details here because it’s not going to fix the problem, but I’ll give one particular lowlight: I was told by an engineer that I would need to call back later after the security team was done with their current stuff.  I wasn’t allowed to hold – I had to call back later when it might be a better time for them.  Riiight.

Douglas Hanna, the Customer Service Manager for HostGator, followed up with me the next day:

“I really can’t apologize enough for what seems like you serving as a example of Murphy’s Law at HostGator. Issues like this are difficult to deal with in the first place and I completely understand your frustration when we don’t deal with the issues properly on our end.”

Douglas and I had a long and constructive email thread about the problems I encountered, and he’s already started taking actions to make sure they don’t happen again.  At that point, though, I’d already moved my main site onto another hosting provider (MediaTemple) temporarily while I research the best dedicated hosting provider for my needs.

When You Should Upgrade Your Hosting Plan

In the process of researching hosting plans, I ran across a good summary of WordPress loads by David Seah:

• 500 pageviews a day will be your first sign of strain if you’re using one of the el-cheapo $5/mo “unlimited” hosting plans.  You’ll need to look at caching or reducing your WordPress plugin use.
• 1,500-2,000 pageviews a day will be your next wall with reseller web hosting plans.  You have to start paying attention to image sizes, plugins that load a lot of external files, comment spam, reliance on other web sites, and so on.
• 3,000-5,000 pageviews a day starts to run into problems on shared server plans like my $25/mo plan at HostGator.  At this point you have to be really careful with your configuration, or consider moving to a private virtual server.

I’ve been doing around 3-4k pageviews on weekdays, but on peaks when I get links like Sherri’s, I hit 8-10k pageviews per day.  Even though I could probably hunker down, do some serious tweaking, and make it work on HostGator, it was time to kick it up a notch.  A dedicated virtual server would give me the power I need to run ads for Google visitors again, and that would pay for itself.

Even with moving to my own server, though, I still couldn’t ensure that the site wouldn’t fall over if Sherri tells Barbara Walters about it, so I’m taking another step too.

Caching Images on Amazon S3

Images take a lot of time to download relative to the text of a web page.  Even my fairly minimal web site had a lot of small images after my redesign.  To see how images impact page load time, get the free Firefox extension Firebug.  It shows a complete breakdown of all the factors involved with a page load.  The most obvious example is the large picture across the top of the site, which shows several of my portraits by TheFuzzball.  That image is roughly 70kb, and when hosted on my web server, it took over a second to download.

Instead of hosting that image on my web server, I copied it to Amazon S3, a cloud-based file storage service that can also act as a web server for static files.  I’ve talked about S3 here before, like when I started selling Twitter t-shirts with a site hosted on Amazon S3.  (Latest tally on that project: in the black by $50.)  The domain name i.brentozar.com points to an Amazon S3 storage bucket.  I changed the web template to pull the header image from S3, and now the download takes around 300ms instead of 1200ms.  Still not blazing fast, but better than 1 second, and furthermore, it takes more load off my web server in the event that I get a ton of sudden traffic.

This same technique can be used for images embedded in posts, too.  The TanTan Amazon S3 plugin for WordPress seamlessly swaps out the WordPress upload code behind the scenes so that when you upload pictures for your posts, they’re automatically stored in Amazon S3 instead.  Unfortunately, there’s not a quick way to migrate all of the pre-existing post images over to S3, but on the plus side, they still work fine on the local web server.  They just don’t take advantage of the Amazon S3 speed boost.  This weekend I’ll go through my high-volume posts (like the Twitter ones) and moving the images over to S3 manually, but I’ll leave the rest of the older ones on the local server for now.

Every Image Counts – and Costs

Every little image counts, though.  I recently added the WordPress plugin Social Homes, which shows little icons for all of your social networks.  Visitors can click on those links to jump to your profile on other web sites.  I loved the way it looked, but it had a horrendous impact on my page load times.  Other sites aren’t using the fastest web servers around, and they took quite a while to deliver the favicon files involved.

Here’s a screenshot of FireBug when loading my site, and notice all the favicon.ico files loaded from all over the web.

This didn’t make my web server perform poorly – after all, the images were already hosted on the other web sites – but it made my page load slowly.  Even worse, if one of the social networking sites was down (which happens more than you’d think) then the “Loading” stage would last forever on my web site.  To the visitors, it seemed like the page was loading slow, and that sucks.

The first thing I did was copy all of those favicon.ico files to Amazon S3 so I could cache them all myself.

Next, I copied the HTML produced by Social Homes, and used a text editor to replace the image names so that they pointed to my own site:

Old: <img src=”http://www.facebook.com/favicon.ico”…

New: <img src=”https://www.brentozar.com/favicon-facebook.ico” …

Then I removed the Social Homes widget and replaced it with a plain text widget with my copy/pasted HTML.  Presto, faster page load times.

There’s a cost to this: I pay for bandwidth used at S3 as well as $.01 per 10,000 “get” requests.  If you sit here hitting refresh on my web page, you can run me out of pocket change.  On the plus side, though, my web site stays fast and stays up even if Ashton Kutcher name-drops me.

I’m ready.  Coming soon: how to build your own Hackintosh Pro.

In the Quest booth at the SSWUG Virtual Conference, somehow we got started naming new editions of SQL Server, and I just had to move the discussion into Twitter to let everybody else in on the fun.

Here’s been some of the funny ones:

• SQL Server MVP Edition: <NDA> (sorry I can’t tell you what it does) – BenchmarkIT
• SQL Server Google Edition: Returns 10,000,000 results, most of them duplicates. – BradDBA
• SQL Server General Motors Edition: it costs $3 billion. Wait, $4 billion. Hang on, I think it’s $12 billion. – BrentO
• SQL Server Apple Edition: It looks good and works perfectly right out of the box. Pity about the price tag. – PeschkaJ
• SQL Server Paris Hilton Edition: No security… EVERYONE gets in 🙂 – BenchmarkIT
• SQL Server FriendFeed Edition: Friends and random people can comment on how good your data is – carpdeus
• SQL Server Foreign Nightclub Edn: works great, but one morning you wake up in a bathtub and your tables are gone. – BrentO
• SQL Server Ozar edition: I know there’s good data in there, but each query just keeps coming back with witty snark instead. – BrianArn

You can read the #sqleditions in real time on Twitter as they come in.  To join the fun, just Tweet with #sqleditions in your tweet and it’ll be shown in the feed.

I name my computers after Sesame Street and Muppet Show characters.  Big Bird has historically been my workstation – at the moment, it’s an Apple Macbook Pro from 2008, the original all-silver design.  The rest are a revolving mix:

• Gonzo – a Dell Latitude D830 laptop that acts as a backup workstation.
• CookieMonster – a Dell PowerEdge 1900 server that weighs over a hundred pounds. No, really. Acts as my VMware host.
• SwedishChef – a Dell OptiPlex 755 running Windows and Vizioncore’s vRanger Pro (a VMware backup tool from a Quest subsidiary).  The Swedish Chef has long been my favorite Muppet Show character, and I just had to name my vRanger server after him because I rely on it when things are bork-bork-borked.

How do you name your machines?

Jorge Segarra aka @SQLChicken tagged me in a quiz asking how DBAs got started in the business, and I can’t believe I haven’t blogged about this earlier.  Great question.

I Started as a Developer

That’s right – I was one of THEM.

But wait – it gets better.  I started as a VBscript classic ASP developer.  Using a Macromedia drag-and-drop GUI to build code.  Hitting Microsoft Access at first, no less. I should probably break you in gently though.

In 1997-1999, I worked for a hotel management company as a jack-of-all-trades computer guy.  I ran the network cables, I fixed the printers, I installed the OS’s, bought the desktops, yadda yadda yadda.  As we speak, I’m wearing one of the shirts that PCConnection used to throw in the box whenever you bought a certain kind of HP LaserJet printer.

I’d come up through the ranks of the hotel business, and I was intimately familiar with the statistics that hotel regional managers wanted to see first thing every morning.  How many rooms had each hotel sold?  What was the average rate?  How much revenue did the restaurant pull in?  Every regional manager at every hotel company wanted this data, and they all had absurdly archaic ways of getting it.  I decided to build a little web application so that the hotel night auditor could input the data, and then it would get emailed to the regional managers when all the data came in.

I started out using Macromedia UltraDev (which later became Adobe Dreamweaver) because it offered a slick, intuitive GUI that let you build code by dragging and dropping components onto the page.  It worked great in the sense that a programming virgin like me could build an application that actually worked.

Right before the Y2K crisis, I went to work for a software company and learned Topspeed Clarion, a programming language that was supposedly database-agnostic.  In theory, programmers could make a change to their data dictionary, target a different database platform, recompile, and bam – hook their app up to a totally different database platform.  Unfortunately, if the program had anything hard-coded to take advantage of a particular RDBMS feature, then it didn’t work.  I spent a lot of time learning the differences between Clarion’s native database format, Microsoft Access, and Microsoft SQL Server.

Getting Off the Hamster Wheel

After a few years of programming, project management, armchair architecture and honing my skillz, we decided that we had to get out of the dying Clarion and into a language with more legs.  We were torn between Java and .NET, and spent several months building stuff with each one, trying to figure out what would suit our needs better.  Suddenly, I realized no matter which one I picked, I was going to spend the rest of my programming career learning new programming languages every 5-6 years.  I love to learn – but not new languages.  I looked around at technologies to figure out what I could specialize in without constantly relearning languages.

It dawned on me that SQL as a language is pretty stagnant.  DBAs don’t have to relearn a new language every time a new version of SQL Server comes out.  Even better, if a DBA wants to change platforms from SQL Server to, say, Oracle or MySQL, they don’t have to relearn the language.  They have to learn new tuning techniques and new management techniques, but not the language itself.  Stick with standard ANSI SQL, and you’re pretty much safe.

That was it – I was hooked.  From that point forward, I went from spending 20-40% of my time in the database to spending as much time as I possibly could.  I’ve never looked back.  This is one of the reasons I’m not really interested in learning PowerShell.  A new language that I can use to manage SQL Server, Exchange, IIS and Windows, but not Oracle or MySQL?  Thanks, but no thanks.  I’ve seen what Exchange, IIS and Windows guys have to go through, and that’s the last direction I want to take my career.

In my presentations, I give developers a lot of flack, but it’s because I’ve been there.  I know how hard it is to stay current and become a great developer in your primary development language, and mastering something else (like SQL Server) makes it even tougher.  There’s just not enough hours in the day.

Who I’m Tagging

I’m tagging people who I’ve talked with a lot on Twitter, but I have no idea how they got started in SQL Server:

• Andy Leonard
• Denny Cherry
• Mladen Prajdic