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Scaling up or scaling out?

Last Updated September 15, 2021

When you need SQL Server to handle more load, there’s two big-picture ways to do it:

Scale up – use a more powerful SQL Server
Scale out – use more SQL Servers

Quick disclaimer first – before you try either of these solutions, the easiest thing is to circumvent the whole problem – don’t ask SQL Server to handle more load. Tuning your existing queries, schema, and server settings is almost always faster and cheaper than scaling up or scaling out. For today’s discussion, though, I’m going to assume you’ve already tuned the bejeezus out of your existing SQL Server setup and you’re worried about running out of options. Today, we’re going to focus on scaling up.

Scaling up means using a SQL Server with more oomph – more CPU power, more memory, or more storage throughput.

You have to fix the right bottleneck. Don’t go writing checks to hardware vendors without knowing the real thing holding back your server. SQL Server 2005 & newer track the bottlenecks for all queries, all the time, and they’re yours to discover by querying wait stats. Glenn Berry’s diagnostic queries are a useful tool for this job because they’re well-commented – you can run his queries step-by-step, read the comments, and understand what your SQL Server is telling you.

If Memory Is Your Bottleneck

If your bottleneck is memory, the good news is that memory’s easy to scale. Scaling up memory is one of the easier scaling solutions because in most cases, your boss didn’t max out the memory when he originally bought the server. The max amount of memory is usually leaps and bounds more expensive than the second-highest amount of memory. Take these memory upgrades for an HP DL785 server from Crucial:

An elephant never forgets to shop for his memory at Crucial — 2 + 2 = $5

16GB of memory is $1,300, and 8GB is $300. To double your memory, you have to spend four times as much. The good news is that memory prices drop over time, so by the time a server is a year old, it’s often more cost-effective to go back and double the memory. Unfortunately, the older a server gets, the reverse happens – it’s harder to find warranted memory for a long-out-of-production server.

If you can fit your entire database in memory, plus space for sorts & joins, you can get away with a cheaper IO subsystem. This is the approach StackOverflow takes with their database servers. The challenge is that the moment your data stops fitting in memory, performance falls off a cliff. Queries that used to fly through memory suddenly crawl because they have to fetch data off disk, which is exponentially slower than moving data around in memory. You have to stay keenly aware of your memory metrics and be willing to write checks to support new database tables and indexes, adding memory as you need space for data.

Every server has a maximum amount of memory that it can handle. Once you hit that max, you have to upgrade to a newer server, typically one with more memory slots. Physically small servers (like 1U rack mount pizza boxes) have a limited amount of real estate devoted to memory slots. Larger servers have more space for memory slots – but they also have more CPU sockets as well, and that’s where even more money comes in.

Now I just scale out. — I stopped scaling up in high school.

If CPU Power Is Your Bottleneck

If your bottleneck is CPU power, brace yourself to write big checks. Scaling up works fairly well from one CPU socket to the four-socket tier, but once you break past four CPU sockets, you’ll be spending significantly more on hardware. Getting an eight-CPU-socket server is usually much more than twice as expensive as a four-CPU-socket server.

CPU scaling challenges have these phases:

Replace the existing server with one having the same number of sockets, but more modern processors. Thanks to Intel and AMD pumping out the jams, we can usually get dramatically faster CPUs every year with more cores.
Switch from a 2-socket server to a 4-socket server. At this jump, we double our licensing costs, but we’re still using commodity off-the-rack hardware.
Switch from a 4-socket server to an 8-socket server. Suddenly, the pricetags get serious. 8-socket servers are enterprise-only. Thankfully, though, we can still use SQL Server Enterprise Edition.
Switch from an 8-socket server to a monster. Now we’re in the price tag tier where server manufacturers say, “Please call for details.” It gets worse, though – starting with SQL Server 2008 R2, database servers with more than eight CPU sockets require SQL Server Datacenter Edition at roughly $60,000 per socket. That’s half a million dollars just for the SQL Server license.

The first few steps are easy, but we have to figure out a solution before we get to phase 4. Thankfully, the multitudes of zeroes involved make it easier for managers to justify fixing bad code. If we have to choose between buying a Datacenter Edition class server or hiring a couple more programmers to fix the code, sometimes it’s easier to do the latter. (This is often where I come in – managers are out of options before they have to write a very, very large check, and a week of me performance tuning can help avoid a seven-figure purchase.) Speaking of seven-figure purchases….

If Storage Is Your Bottleneck

When dealing with a server that only has local storage (not a Storage Area Network), scaling storage throughput is the opposite of scaling memory. Your boss probably loaded the server up with storage throughput already. He might have gotten cheap with the quantity (meaning, bought 146GB drives instead of 300GB drives) but in most cases, swapping in drives twice as big isn’t going to make the server twice as fast. There are some niche cases where we can isolate a poorly designed database to its own drives, but that’s the exception rather than the rule.

If all of the server’s drive bays are filled up, there are three solutions to improve storage throughput:

Add storage that bypasses the drive bays altogether – like Fusion-IO or OCZ solid state drives on PCI Express cards
Swap out the storage for solid state drives – like Intel X-25 consumer drives as StackOverflow is doing
Reduce the amount of storage throughput required – by tuning indexes, queries, or procedural code

Notice how that last one keeps sneaking in? Over and over during scaling exercises, the cheapest answer is manpower. It’s so often safer to make code improvements rather than introduce new pieces of hardware or software into the mix. As a DBA, whenever I did performance tuning, I made sure to point out to my management that my work directly saved us from buying more hardware. Sometimes I would even avoid performance tuning altogether until the project managers and developers asked for my help. They’d say, “Brent! Our CPU use on the SQL Server is constantly high! What should we do?” That gave me the ability to answer with a choice: they could either spend $X upgrading to new hardware, or they could give me two weeks of uninterrupted time to tune the application. After those kinds of interactions, managers understood that my time really was worth money, and it helped to free up my agenda to do what I love most – performance tuning.

Continue to Part 2: Scaling Out SQL Server

The Joys of Tech Editing

Last Updated February 10, 2011

Brent Ozar

I like tech editing because it sharpens my skills. I think of it as honing my BS detector. When I read something that surprises me, I’m forced to go dig much deeper into SQL Server to find the real truth. I can’t just call someone’s work wrong – I have to be able to prove it, and that teaches me things.

I learned something today, too:

The spell checker just shot himself. — When Documents Go Bad

Wow. High score!

Consulting Lines: “Yes, that used to be a best practice, and…”

Last Updated February 12, 2017

Brent Ozar

Consulting Lines

One of the cool things about working with an established product like SQL Server is that there’s a ton of knowledge out there. The intertubes are chock full of advice about how to manage all kinds of problems.

Unfortunately, some of them are flat out wrong.

They may not have started out wrong – they might have been right when they were initially written, but over time, we’ve figured out better ways to work. When I started out working with SQL Server, everybody watched the Perfmon counter for Average Disk Queue Length in order to determine whether their storage subsystems were overloaded. These days, we know that’s not a good idea, but somebody who’s just getting started with SQL Server might stumble across a lot of that advice on sites that aren’t kept up to date. I know Brad (the author who originally wrote that article) and he was completely right at the time, but that web site hasn’t been updated by its current owners. Some pages never should have been published to begin with – on this Perfmon page, the author says if a server’s available MB of memory is <20-25% of its installed total, it doesn’t have enough memory. That is simply not true, period.

I run across this situation in consulting all the time – someone’s banging their head against the wall because they’re following what they think is solid advice from a good source, and they’re not getting the results they want. They truly want to do the right thing, and they’ve done at least a little research on the web to find the right solution. It just so happens that they found an incorrect answer, but it’s not their fault for trying. This week in my Consulting Lines series, I’m covering how to get past those misconceptions.

The Conversation

Me: “So I understand you’re having problems taking down the alien mother ship.”

David: “Yeah, I’ve written a virus on my Mac, and – ”

Me: “Wait, what? I thought Macs couldn’t get viruses?”

David: “I know, that’s what makes it so genius! They’ll never see it coming! So anyway, I’m trying to plug my Mac into the alien mainframe, and it’s not working. I can’t find a USB port.”

Me: “A what?”

David: “A USB port – you know, Universal Serial Bus. Alien ships are still from this universe, so they should have a USB port, right? That’s the best way to get files from one computer to another.”

Me: “Yes, that used to be a best practice, and it worked for the longest time. However, drives have gotten bigger and we’ve wanted to transfer more data, we’ve had to change our tactics. Here’s the latest trick we’re using to work around it – we’re using the cloud.”

What That Line Does

It’s almost easier to explain that line in terms of what it DOESN’T do. It doesn’t dispute the speaker’s claim, because you don’t want to go down the rathole of arguing about whether or not the point was right at the time. You could spend the entire day arguing about why USB has the word Universal as part of the name, but that’s beside the point. You need to get to the right solution as fast as possible, and sometimes that just means ignoring something that’s wrong.

It doesn’t chastise the other guy for not keeping up with the latest tips and tricks. It’s hard enough to just do our jobs, let alone keep up with blogs and training, and real life interferes. It lets the other person save face.

It doesn’t divide you against the other guy. I try to use the word “we” whenever I use this line, because I want to take the other guy along with me on the journey to fix this problem.

What Happens Next

This is one of my favorite lines because things almost always go the easy way. It lets everybody in the room continue to believe that they were doing the right thing, and that it’s not their fault things weren’t working.

If the other guy wants to pursue the original point, agree that he’s right. Agree vehemently that he’ll find lots of supporting evidence on the web from very credible people. The key is to keep saying yes, and explaining why the new technique is even better – not that the old way is bad, but the new way is better.

More of My Favorite Consulting Lines

How to Ask Your Boss for Training Money

Last Updated September 22, 2019

Brent Ozar

Professional Development

“I’m scared. Hold me.”

I hear that all the time from people who want to go to a conference or a training class. They’re terrified to walk into The Boss’s office because The Boss only says one word: “No.” Here’s some easy ways to start the conversation, handle objections, and seal the deal.

The Opening Lines

“You know that project we’ve got coming up this year?” If you’re planning a project around virtualization, SAN storage, performance tuning, or version upgrade, you can get trained before the project starts. Bosses understand that the training needs to happen first, and you’ve got a killer line here: “If I get trained first, I bet I can save us from spending too much on the wrong storage or doing something that makes the project fail. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

“I’m tired of relying on consultants who don’t know what they’re doing.” If your company has been burned lately by consultants who are fumbling their way through your systems, now’s your chance to offer yourself up as an alternative. With seriously advanced training, you’ll be able to do seriously advanced tasks. All of the training I do is focused on giving you things you can take back to the office and make your systems faster and more reliable. At the very least, you’ll be able to call the consultants’ bluff when they’re faking it. Your boss is probably sick of spending money on people they don’t trust, but they DO trust you. Investing in you is a safer bet than spending more on strangers.

“I know we can’t get raises this year, but…” Economic realities mean some companies are still in a wage freeze. If you’re good, your boss probably wants to keep you around. He can’t go offering training to everyone, but if you’re one of The Good Guys and you show initiative to ask, he’ll bend the rules for you. Don’t ask if you’ve got a training budget, because that’s likely to make him say no, and you want to get to yes. Instead, say something like, “I know we can’t get raises this year, but you know what’d make me just as happy? Getting training.”

How to Handle Objections Gracefully

Here’s the most common objections I’ve heard from managers:

“I can’t send you because conferences are boondoggles.” Managers have probably been to conferences themselves, and they know that conferences involve just as much partying as they do learning – if not more. Even worse, THEIR managers believe conferences are boondoggles too, because once you get to the upper management level, “conferences” involve a whole lot of golf and hanging out with buddies. Your manager may not want to be seen as sending their own employees to conferences. It’s tough to fight this image (especially when the web is full of conference party pictures) – so take a different tack. The easy response is, “That’s fair – how about I go to training instead? Brent Ozar Unlimited offers 4-day training classes, no partying involved.”

“Why can’t you just go to training locally?” Training companies like New Horizons have offices in most major cities and they periodically offer SQL Server classes. Yes, I’m actually linking to one of our competitors – because people who have attended those types of classes will usually tell you there’s no competition at all. One easy response is, “I want to learn from someone who’s actually doing this work, not somebody who’s reading from a script. Brent Ozar Unlimited®’s people win awards from their attendees, like Best of PASS Summit and Top Ten of TechEd.”

“I can’t have you unavailable for a week.” I remember what it’s like to be not just the DBA, but also the developer, the sysadmin, and the coffeemaker. My favorite response to this is, “I’ll take my laptop and I can pair it with my phone to get internet access. If there’s an emergency, I’ll leave the class. I’d rather get some training than no training, and I’ll log in every night to do as much preventative maintenance as I can after class.”

“What’s the ROI?” Managers love Return On Investment – a calculation that shows the money they spend on something pays for itself. Yes, training really does have an ROI, and here’s how to calculate it. Tell your manager, “We’ll spend about $5k on the training including hotel and airfare, and here’s what we get in return:”

“We’ll avoid spending money on new hardware.” My clients constantly tell me that after learning my performance tuning techniques, SAN troubleshooting tips, and virtualization configuration tricks, they’re able to get by with a lot less hardware.
“We’ll spend less on consultants.” We focus on training you how to do the same things we do day in and day out. You’ll be empowered to do things that you used to rely on outsiders for.

How to Seal the Deal

“I’ll bring back the material I learned and re-present the highlights to the team.” At training events, presenters don’t always hand out their PowerPoint files, but they do give handouts with the slide content printed out. This material is usually copyrighted, and you should never re-present this material to the public, but re-presenting it to your own team is a way to bring value back to the rest of the staff who didn’t get to attend. You can filter the entire week’s worth of training down to just an hour or two of material that is especially relevant to your own team, helping them fix problems that are happening in your environment right now.

“I can ask questions about our environment and get the very best free help.” I’ve gotta be honest – hiring a good consultant for a few hours is really expensive. During training sessions, I’ve fielded questions from audience members about specific issues they’re running into in their environment. After the training, I’ve even sat with students as they VPN’d into their company and pointed out problematic servers, thereby troubleshooting with them right then and there. Not only are we able to give good answers, but we also ask the entire class. Our audience has decades of SQL Server experience, and sometimes the best answer is sitting next to you.

“There’s a $500 early bird discount if we register now.” Saving money quickly helps motivate managers.

I still remember the first time I got up the courage to ask my boss for training money. I was blown away that he said yes, and I kicked myself for not asking sooner. Don’t sit around waiting for someone else to offer you training money – it just won’t happen. Take control of your career and use these techniques to pop the big question. If your boss still says no, post the reason why here in the comments, and as a group, we’ll figure out how to help you get to yes!

Update: it worked! @ShadyRudy read this post and was inspired to ask his boss. I’ll be meeting him at a class in March!

Consulting Lines: “Would you mind driving?”

Last Updated February 12, 2017

Brent Ozar

Consulting Lines

We nicknamed one of our favorite project managers “The Bus Driver.” She didn’t throw people under the bus herself, but she ran over many a reputation. If you didn’t know what you were doing, you didn’t want to be anywhere near her bus route, because she wasn’t hitting the brakes on her project for any reason whatsoever. I loved her to death because she was predictable, and I knew what I was doing.

If somebody I didn’t like wanted to implement a bad database solution on one of The Bus Driver’s projects, I was more than happy to hand them a set of car keys and point them toward her bus route. This week in my Consulting Lines series, I’m sharing that technique.

The Situation: Second-Guessing Micro-Managers

I’m blessed to be at a point in my life where people don’t usually stand over my shoulder and bark orders, but every now and then, it still happens. It happened a whole lot more when I was a production DBA, though, and one technique has served me well through the years.

Sometimes people read a magazine article or a blog post about something, and they bring it up as an absolute authority – even though they’ve never actually done it themselves. In the midst of a heated discussion about a problem, they’ll whip out the buzzword and expect you to make the magic happen. This doesn’t just happen with managers, either – I’ve had developers throw SQL Server features at me as if they’re as easy as flipping a switch, and expect me to implement crazy things instantly.

The conversation goes something like:

Me: “We can’t get security auditing working on the new cluster. I’ve tried every trick I know, and I’m fresh out.”

Them: “All you have to do is implement Gatekeeper.”

Me: “Gatekeeper never works right on clusters. It crashes whenever there’s a node failover.”

Them: “It works fine – you just have to close the back door. Angela Bennett blogs about it all the time.”

Me: “OK, would you mind driving?”

What That Line Does

Like the first line in my Consulting Lines series, this line focuses attention back on the person asking for the work. It doesn’t directly say they don’t know what they’re talking about, but at the same time, it puts the onus on them to deliver the goods. This line isn’t just about taking their word for the solution – it’s about them doing the work. If they believe so much in that solution, then they should be able to perform it themselves.

One warning about this line: it works best when delivered in front of a group with everybody’s manager listening in (or The Bus Driver.) If you let someone else drive, implement a change, and then it doesn’t work, you’re the one who’s responsible. You have to make sure everybody in your group understands that the other guy’s in charge of what’s about to happen – be it a good result or a bad result. Don’t deliver this line as if you’re about to throw somebody under the bus, but rather deliver it in the style of a student who’s eager to learn. (You *are* eager to learn, aren’t you?)

This line keeps me humble because the other person might indeed know what they’re talking about. In consulting, I’m forced to constantly work with complete strangers, and I have no idea what their real skill level is. I’m really bad at judging people, so I try to give everybody the maximum credit until proven otherwise. I might think there’s no way to get Gatekeeper working, but maybe – just maybe – I’m wrong and they’re right. This line finds out the real answer.

Career-limiting versions of this line include:

“Put up or shut up.”
“No way am I gonna sign my name on a solution like that.”
“If you say so.”

What Happens Next: The Easy Way

Them: “What do you mean?”

Me: “It sounds like you’re on to something, and that you’ve done it before. Would you mind driving the keyboard and mouse, and I’ll watch? I could really stand to learn how that works.”

Them: “Uh, I’ve never done it. I’ve just read blogs about it. I wouldn’t really be comfortable driving.”

Me: “Ah, okay – that makes two of us!”

And then shut up. Don’t rub it in, just identify yourself with the other guy and put yourself on his team. He can’t fight as easily when you put yourself on his level. If you’re delivering this line in front of a group, now’s the chance for the manager to step in and bring things back to your original question.

What Happens Next: The Hard Way

We need to work on our conflict resolution.

This line can produce some explosive results, but in the right scenario, that’s actually a good thing. If the other guy reacts in an angry, confrontational way, channel your inner Columbo. The other guy believes they know more than you do, and you want to paint them as the solution, not the problem.

Them: “Why would I drive? That’s not my job – it’s yours.”

Me: “<sigh> Yeah, and I’ve tried that several times and I just can’t make it work. I know you’ve gotta be really busy, but I could really use your help here. Do you have any friends we can bring in who’ve done this?”

Them: “No! Don’t you?”

Me: “Yeah, I’m really active in the local user group, and I’ve pinged my friends who do this stuff, and they all said the same thing – Gatekeeper is a mess on clusters. If you can make it work, it’d save us from calling in a consultant.”

Turn to the manager and shrug. At this point, we’ve established that:

The Other Guy doesn’t know anybody else he can bring in to do it.
Your local free contacts can’t do it.
The Other Guy implies that he can do it, but he doesn’t have enough time.
There’s only one other solution – calling in a consultant. (That might not even be true, but by throwing it into the last sentence, you set it up as the default solution.)

Ideally, the manager will challenge The Other Guy on his solution, and The Other Guy will back out somehow. (Hey, he could have backed out easier earlier, but that’s his problem.) Then you’ll get the help you want.

Oh, And About The Bus Driver

After working with The Bus Driver on a couple of projects, she figured out my trick. She’d seen me graciously give the car keys to drunken idiots, and to geniuses. She knew I recognized the limits of my own skills, and that I wasn’t necessarily the best judge of who should be driving. She, on the other hand, had fantastic judgment skills about who was bluffing and who was good, so she started participating in my little trick.

When someone called me out on a project task and I suggested they should drive, she started jumping in right then and there. If she thought the other person was capable, she’d nod at me, and she’d sweet-talk them into driving. If she thought the other person was a blowhard who might endanger her bus project, she’d short-circuit the conversation right there.

“Shut up. We’re doing it Brent’s way. On to the next task.”

More of My Favorite Consulting Lines

Snowpocalypse Webcams in Chicago (Now offline)

Last Updated February 3, 2011

Brent Ozar

For the folks from out of town, I’ve set up public access for my webcam. Here’s a live shot of Snowpocalypse 2011:

Where's BrentO? — Live Snowpocalypse Webcam

Just kidding. Here’s the real webcams:

(Update Feb 3 – now offline since the snowpocalypse is over.)

The username is operator, password operator. Here’s shots as of 1PM so you can see if visibility drops:

I really like these little webcams for the price – under $100 from Amazon. They’ve served me well over the last year. We originally bought ’em to watch our dog Ernie when we went on vacation and to make sure our dogsitter was coming at the right times. The features include:

WiFi or wired Ethernet support
Motorized pan & tilt
Automatically switches to infrared at night (and the night vision, though black & white, works surprisingly well)
Streams live video AND works with iPhones & iPads! We watched Ernie from the cruise ship in Alaska.
Motion detection – can automatically upload images to an FTP server when things move in the frame

Apple MacBook Air 2011 13″ Review

Last Updated June 28, 2011

Brent Ozar

As I was finishing recording the Microsoft Certified Master videos last month, my beloved and well-traveled MacBook Pro started giving me fits. It survived three very rough years on the road, encoding HD videos at home, and running multiple simultaneous heavy-load VMs. I was really pleased that it lasted as long as it did, but I have to confess that I’ve had my eyes on a new MacBook Pro for a while.

As much as I love whipping out the plastic at the Apple Store, December 2010 was a really, really bad time to buy a new laptop. Intel’s new Sandy Bridge processors were scheduled for release at CES in January, and that meant an all-new lineup of laptops arriving too. Sandy Bridge CPUs were said to be 10-23% faster while using less electricity – great numbers for a laptop.

I took a deep breath and evaluated my needs:

One heavy-duty laptop to demo clustering – and I really wanted that to have 16GB of memory, something unavailable in Apple’s 2010 laptop lineup.
One backup presentation device – ever since my epic 2009 European trip disaster when my laptop failed and I had to use a Swedish-speaking netbook, I always travel with two devices capable of giving presentations. The iPad fulfilled that role.

I was pretty happy with the iPad, but not completely. It has a phenomenal 8-12 hour battery life, keeps me occupied on airplanes with movies & games, and shows PowerPoint slides. Well, that’s not entirely true, because it doesn’t import all PowerPoint features perfectly. Custom fonts, SmartArt, and animations don’t always work, and I hated having to make excuses for imperfections in my slide decks. (Other than the factual errors, which everybody expects from me anyway.)

Suddenly the light went off – what if I bought a new MacBook Air to be my backup presentation device? It could run the real PowerPoint, displaying my slides in all their font-perfect glory. Sure, it would suck as a primary laptop due to its limited CPU power, memory, and storage space, but as a backup presentation device, it made pretty good sense.

Choosing Between the 11″ and 13″ Air (2011 Model)

The 13″ has faster available processors, longer battery life, and an SD card slot, but for me, the decision point boiled down to this:

11″ – sexy, but maxes out at 128GB of storage
13″ – conventional laptop footprint, 256GB of storage

The drive space is especially important because the Air uses a new format of SSD drive that isn’t available to consumers yet. It’s technically end-user-replaceable, but you just can’t buy a replacement off the shelf yet, so love the one you’re with. For me, that made the 128GB drive a deal-breaker because I wanted to sync my complete home directory with all my client documents, presentations, and music. I didn’t want to hassle with picking a subset of data to sync.

One of the cool things about replacing Apple gear is the Time Machine backup system. You simply boot up your new Mac at home, and it asks if you’d like to transfer data from an existing Time Machine backup. I use an Apple Time Capsule for my backups, and the Air detected it automatically and asked which of my Macs I was replacing with the Air. I picked my old MacBook Pro, and a few hours later, it was just as if my old laptop had been transformed into an Air. OSX backups include all of your applications, settings, documents, you name it.

Sort of.

The problem with replacing your main machine with an Air is that the Air probably doesn’t have enough hard drive space to accommodate your years of junk. Before I did the Time Capsule boogie, I did some strategic drive planning.

How I Store Stuff on the Air

Before the Air, I had a simple strategy – all my stuff went on the laptop’s internal drive except virtual machines. I stored my VMs on an external hard drive. My old MBP had a 750GB internal drive with around 400GB used, and I needed to identify the drive space hogs.

I fired up GrandPerspective, a free tool that scans your hard drive and builds a graph of the big files and directories. It’s easy to move your mouse around over the map and figure out which paths and files are sucking up too much space. I made a few quick passes, deleting stuff I didn’t need anymore, and suddenly my entire drive was down to just about 300GB used. I got excited – what if I could actually use my MacBook Air as my primary machine? Unfortunately, one big thing kept me from squeaking under the 256GB border: my iPhoto library, already over 100GB and growing daily.

After a lot of sighs – really, just 256GB, Apple? – here’s how I decided to carve up my storage:

Internal 256GB SSD drive – my documents, music, and my most commonly used virtual machine. I run one VM with SQL Server 2008 R2 for most of my demos and client work.

USB 1TB drive – my iPhoto library, movies, virtual machines, and downloaded software. The drive has four folders:

\Backed Up and \Not Backed Up – almost everything goes into subfolders of these. For example, my downloaded Microsoft software goes to \Not Backed Up\Software because I can always re-download it from MSDN, but software I buy online goes into \Backed Up\Software.
\iMovie Events and \iMovie Projects – I’m futzing with iMovie to produce a HD podcast on the cheap, and that means lots and lots of big video files. I don’t want those on the solid state drive, so I put them on the external, but iMovie won’t allow you to pick a specific FOLDER to store your videos – only a drive. Ideally I’d put these in \Backed Up, but I’m sure Apple knows better about this sort of thing than I do. </sarcasm>

I use the built-in Time Machine software for backups, and by default, Time Machine doesn’t back up external USB drives. It implements that by adding an entry in the exclusions list for the root of each USB drive. I removed the exclusion for my 1TB USB drive, then added an exclusion for its \Not Backed Up folder. That way my \Backed Up and iMovie folders automatically find their way to my Time Capsule. (Yes, the Time Capsule is overpriced, but it matches my computing lifestyle: I’m willing to pay more if things get easier so I can focus on what I love to do.)

My storage design means I can’t use iMovie or iPhoto if I’m on the road without my USB drive. Not a showstopper for me, since I use an Eye-Fi SD card anyway, which automatically uploads my photos to Flickr or Facebook. However, it’s a little annoying when I plug in my iPhone – OS X asks what iPhoto library I’d like to use because my USB drive isn’t plugged in.

Mini-review of the Eye-Fi SD card: As long as I’m mentioning it, everybody should own an Eye-Fi Explore. It’s a $90 SD card with built-in geotagging (marking your photos with physical locations), WiFi, plus hotspot access. Your friends and family at home can follow along with your adventures without you having to drag a computer around to upload stuff. It’ll even selectively upload only the pictures you choose (handled by your camera’s lock-image function – if it’s locked, it gets uploaded). Even if all your pictures are taken at home, you’ll appreciate the Eye-Fi’s automatic uploading of pictures to your desktop computer – my photos automatically go straight into iPhoto as soon as my camera is turned on within wireless range of my Mac. I can configure the Eye-Fi to tweet, post FaceBook messages, or send emails whenever new photos go out, so my friends & family can see what I’ve been up to. Topping things off, the Eye-Fi has an “unlimited memory” setting: when your card hits 80% used, it starts deleting images that have already been uploaded to your computer. Your friends and relatives who hate computers will love this card because it’s automagical. (Your friends who take dirty pictures, however, should think twice.) $90. Just do it.

Now back to the laptop. The Air has an SD card slot, and while 32GB SD cards have gotten pretty cheap, I wouldn’t recommend using those as a full-time storage device. The Air’s SD card slot isn’t full depth – cards stick out of the side – and the klutz in me would break that pretty quickly. I do use a 32GB SD card to back up my primary demo VM because it’s just so darned convenient. I leave the postage-stamp size card in my laptop bag as insurance against demo disasters.

My kind of brick — Now THAT is the right size for a laptop power supply.

What I Like About the 2011 Air

When I want to work at a cafe, I grab the Air and go. No charger (not that the charger is bulky, either), no cables, and most of the time, I don’t even put the Air into a case. I just walk out the door with it under my arm because the one-piece aluminum body is rock freakin’ solid. The battery life is astounding for such a lightweight device, and the best way I can explain it is to say that I don’t care about battery life anymore. The Air’s battery can outlast my ability to work at a cafe, period. I’ve ordered coffee at 7AM, worked until 1-2PM, and still had battery life left. Anandtech said it best in their Air review:

“The 11-inch Air delivers nearly 7 hours on a single charge and the 13-inch managed 11.2 hours. For a writer, you can’t do better than this.”

As an IT professional, though, we need more than web browsers and Word, and that’s where virtualization comes in. With just 4GB of memory, I can’t do complicated clustering demos on the Air, but for a single virtual machine running SQL Server 2008R2 and my array of utilities, it’s perfectly fine.

What I like the most, though, is the speed. The Air uses an ancient CPU, but the solid state drive and the OS optimizations make it feel blazing fast. Close the lid and it sleeps instantly – then open the lid again, and you’re working within two seconds. Tell it to shut down, and the screen’s dark within three seconds. Coming from my three-year-old MacBook Pro with a spinning hard drive, the Air is an upgrade. Sitting next to Paul Randal’s brand-new $6,000 laptop running Windows, the Air still seems faster at basic tasks – I shake my head while I watch him power down. “I just need another few seconds, it’s almost there…”

What I Meh About the 2011 Air

To get to this tiny form factor, Apple stripped out a couple of features that Apple veterans loved: FireWire and a backlit keyboard. I miss the backlit keyboard when I’m working on dark flights. I miss FireWire every time I do a videoconference because I used to use a real camcorder plugged in via FireWire. The built-in iSight camera isn’t bad, but it doesn’t hold a candle to a real camcorder. (Those of you who think your HD webcam is good should check out the results of even a $250 consumer-level camcorder with FireWire out – the camcorder’s low-light handling is much, much better.)

I thought the lack of integrated 3G wireless would bother me, because that seamless connectivity is one of the things I love about my iPad. It hasn’t been an issue because the Air pairs over Bluetooth with my iPhone whenever I can’t get WiFi coverage. That does deplete battery life quicker on both the phone and the laptop, though, so it’s not ideal.

High definition Flash videos make the fan kick on. Most PC users I know don’t notice this because their computer fan always runs anyway, but on a completely silent Air with a solid state drive, even the slightest noise stands out. This isn’t really a problem with the Air as much as it is a problem with Adobe’s craptastic programming, but it bears mentioning. The Air can still play 1080p videos without stuttering.

Okay, let’s get to the elephant in the room – money. The total purchase price including AppleCare and a few video adapter cables rang up a little over $2,300. That is one hell of a lot of money for a backup presentation device, and it’s the most I’ve ever spent on a laptop. (My prior laptops have all been company machines or gifts.) It’s pretty much the cost I would expect to spend on a very nice primary laptop, which brings me to…

What Surprised Me About the MacBook Air

1. It’s become my only laptop.

With my trusty $320 28″ monitor, my old-school Microsoft Natural Keyboard, and my Magic Mouse, I work on this thing all day long and it rarely crosses my mind that this is an ultralight laptop. Even the new Sandy Bridge laptops haven’t tempted me at all, and I can see using the Air as my only laptop for the next couple of years. Now I just have to figure out portable demos for clustering & virtualization – right now, I’m leaning toward cloud-based solutions.

2. It’s almost replaced my iPad.

I loved my iPad for its light weight, more-than-good-enough speed, and long battery life. It’s such a pleasure to use that I found myself trying to figure out how to make it my primary travel device, but the iOS apps just aren’t there yet. The Air sacrifices some of the iPad’s strengths – it’s a little heavier, and the battery life isn’t quite as good – but adds in all the application goodness of a real laptop.

If you’re considering an iPad with 3G, go take a MacBook Air for a spin. You were probably going to spend $899 on the 64GB iPad, and for just $70 more, you can get the MacBook Air 11″.

Just be careful.

Once you take a sip of the OS X Kool-Aid, you’ll never be the same.

Wanna learn more? Read my post about How To Buy Your First Mac.

Consulting Lines: “Sounds like you’ve got it all under control.”

Last Updated February 12, 2017

Brent Ozar

Consulting Lines

For us geeks, the hardest part about consulting isn’t the technology. Technology’s easy. I know when I poke SQL Server a certain way, it’s going to respond a certain way. That part of consulting is predictable and reliable.

The hardest part is the people.

I’ve been consulting part time for years, and the last six months of full-time consulting has been a real eye-opener. Thanks to other consultants and writers, I’ve been able to accumulate a little treasure trove of ways to poke people the same way I poke technology and achieve predictable results. I’ve been sharing my Consulting Lines series with you, fellow geek, so you can help manage your end users and managers.

The Situation: Experienced and Frustrated Client

This particular situation usually pops up in groups. Our players are:

The Manager – he’s frustrated because the application isn’t performing the way he wants.
The Techie – he’s got years, maybe a decade of experience, and he’s just as frustrated. The tips, techniques, and tools he’s used have never done him wrong, but this one problem has him frazzled. He might be a little offended that the company is second-guessing him by bringing in an outsider, and he sees it as an intrusion on his territory.
Me – your hero, but in this conversation, imagine the part being played by Brad Pitt, only sexier.

The conversation goes a little something like this:

Me: “Based on everything I’ve seen so far, it looks like the flux capacitor needs to be rotated to the right. That’ll get us the extra power we need to reach 88 miles per hour under load.”

The Techie: “That’s impossible. You should never rotate the flux capacitator to the right. It leads to burned-out muffler bearings.”

Me: “Normally that’s true, but in this particular case – ”

The Techie: “No, you just can’t do that. I’ve read it in all the books, and I sat in Marty’s session last year when he said rotating the flux capacitor to the right is one of the most common mistakes. It just won’t work. Clearly, the problem is our impeller.”

Me: “So it sounds like you’ve got it under control then.”

What That Line Does

The Techie is trying to corner me into his version of the problem. He’s come to a conclusion that I don’t agree with, and this line is my way of refocusing the conversation back on him. If he knows what the problem is, and he knows how to fix it, now is his chance to deliver.

Except, of course, that he can’t.

If his answer was right, he would have tried it already, and his manager wouldn’t have brought me in. There’s two ways the conversation can go next, but either way, it’s absolutely imperative that you handle the situation with grace. The Techie really believes in his skills, and you don’t want to pull his pants down in front of his manager. Any consultant can get one gig – to be successful, you have to be invited back, and that’s not gonna happen if the client staff are all walking around with red behinds because you spanked ’em so hard.

What Happens Next: The Easy Way

The Techie: “Ummm – well – it’s not working.”

Me: “Ouch – replacing the impeller didn’t work?”

The Techie: “No, we still only make it to 83mph.”

Me: “Yeah, been there. Do you have any other ideas or options?”

The Techie: “No, everything I try isn’t working.”

Me: “Let’s try rotating the flux capacitor. If it doesn’t work right away, you can put it back. If it explodes, hey, now’s your chance to blame the stupid consultant and look like a hero, right?”

You have to smile really big when you say that, and you have to actually be willing to put your reputation on the line with The Manager. At this point, The Techie has admitted out loud that he’s out of options, but you haven’t shoehorned him into saying he’s wrong. You’re just presenting it as an option, and you’re only presenting it because they don’t have the situation under control. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always go this easily….

What Happens Next: The Hard Way

If it turns confrontational,

The Techie: “So you agree with me that the problem is the impeller?”

Me: “Hmmm, well, that hasn’t been my experience, but you know how that goes – the answer to any SQL Server question is that it depends. If replacing the impeller fixes the problem here, that’s great.”

The Technie: “So you’ll replace the impeller for us?”

Me: “Me? Well, I can, but I wouldn’t do it under these situations. Besides, I bet you know how to replace the impeller, right? The Manager would probably rather have you replace the impeller than me, since I’m more expensive than one of Charlie Sheen’s dates. If that doesn’t work, let me know, but otherwise, it sounds like you’ve got it under control.”

Keep dancing away from the gun with that same line, and force The Techie to take his own shots. If The Techie absolutely demands that a certain change be made, he needs to be the one pulling the trigger. Whether you’re a consultant or an in-house employee, never do something you don’t believe in. If someone else believes in the change, they need to make it.

More of My Favorite Consulting Lines

Book Review: Applied Architecture Patterns on the Microsoft Platform

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Brent Ozar

Book Reviews

I usually hate architecture books. I can’t stand ’em. Seems like every one I’ve ever read has been targeted at architecture astronauts – people who spend all their time talking theory, not practice.

Buy it. It's good. — Applied Architecture Patterns on the Microsoft Platform

This book is different. Reading this book is like having drinks in the pub with a team of rock star consultants who’ve spent the last year jumping around from one cool project to another. They give you the low-down on all the technologies they’ve been working with, telling you just enough information to help you understand what each technology is used for, but not so much that it’s boring.

Every chapter begins with a business challenge, discusses the requirements, and then compares and contrasts the abilities of various Microsoft tools to answer the business needs. Every tool gets either a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down in four attributes: design, delivery, operations, and organization. After picking the most appropriate tool, the authors show just enough sample code to illustrate how the tool works. You can’t pick up this book and suddenly become a rock star consultant with any of the tools – that’s not the goal. Instead, the goal is to help you pick the right tool for your needs, and then you go learn the right tool instead of trying to use a hammer to fix every problem.

You, dear reader, can pick up this book with no background in architecture, consulting, or the Microsoft stack, and just start skimming. When a business scenario jumps out as interesting, dig deeper into that chapter. Along the way, you’ll learn about a bunch of Microsoft products:

Windows Communication Foundation
Windows Server AppFabric
BizTalk
SQL Server Integration Services
SQL Azure
Windows Azure
Service Broker
SharePoint
StreamInsight
Hyper-V

Every developer, DBA, and project manager who works with consultants needs this book because it opens your eyes to new solutions you might not have considered before, and it wises you up to real-world weaknesses. This isn’t a sales-pitch whitepaper by somebody’s marketing team – it’s honest material that fesses up where products fall down.

I don’t say this lightly: this was the best tech book I read in 2010. I’m very grateful to Ewan Fairweather, one of the authors, for giving me a copy.

Here’s where to learn more:

Interview with 2 of the authors on MSDN
Book review by Bill Zack
Book review by Randal van Splunteren (BizTalk consultant)
Book mentioned by Buck Woody
Buy the paperback at Amazon or buy the ebook from Packt

Pimp My MCM Certificate Contest Winner

Last Updated February 12, 2017

Brent Ozar

Humor, Microsoft Certified Master (MCM)

Wow – you guys are creative! I got a lot of laughs out of the contest entries, and here’s some of the highlights.

Doug Lane certified Admiral Ackbar as a Master of Trap Recognition and Countermeasures:

Michael Swart captured the essence of what it feels like when Microsoft says you actually passed:

Robert Davis got a slightly different MCM – a Metallica Certified Master of Puppets:

NotAndy came up with a couple of good ones:

Another from NotAndy – gotta love the seal and the Gold Record Certified Musician:

Matt Velic catered to my SQLskills cohorts right down to the sheep seal:

Will Banta made me lol with his “Official Seal of Microsoft.”

And of course, it wouldn’t be a fun blog post without ripping on Microsoft Access. Crys Manson does the honors.

It was a tough decision, but I gotta hand it to Rudy Rodarte. He spun the certificate around and put it in my official Microsoft file:

Congratulations, Rudy, and your $50 Amazon gift certificate is on the way. Thanks to everybody who participated for making my weekend funnier.

Three Questions You Should Never Ask Software Vendors

Last Updated January 7, 2011

Brent Ozar

So your manager’s got some money burning a hole in her budget, and she wants you to go out and buy a management or monitoring tool.

Don’t ask, “How much overhead does this software have?”

Asking this question is a lot like saying, “Gosh, I sure would like to read a book to learn, but how long will it take to read?” I bet your SQL Server has at least 3-5% CPU available most of the time, and that’s a typical number for a monitoring tool to require. Besides, if your SQL Server is really running at 100% CPU, that is exactly when you need a tool to help. You do want to reduce the load on your server, right? That’s what a monitoring tool helps you do – identify the ugly queries, fix them in the least amount of time possible, and make your server healthier.

Every single time I’ve seen a good performance tool go in, the DBA has been able to quickly find performance problems they never would have caught otherwise in the same amount of time, then been able to fix those problems and reduce their server load by more than the load required by the monitoring tool. Game over.

Monitoring and management tools all have overhead. All of them. Every single one. It absolutely stuns me that the very same DBAs say these same two sentences:

“Hey, Mr. Developer, you need to move your code into stored procedures rather than ad-hoc queries so I can improve performance.”
“Hey, Mr. Vendor, you shouldn’t leave any code in my database server because that’s overhead.”

See the conflict? Properly-engineered databases and stored procs can be a much faster way of gathering data than pushing ad-hoc code and output data all over the place. (Note that I said properly-engineered – this is not a blog post about why vendor code sucks, and before you go throwing stones, let’s open up your code, Einstein.)

Here’s the worst part: the vendors all know what you want to hear (“zero overhead”) so some of them will actually tell you what you want to hear.

They’re lying.

Some tools even take it to the next level by hiding their own overhead in their performance reports. If you look at any performance tool’s report and you don’t see queries from the performance tool itself, ask why – because they’re probably hiding it from you. That’s bad, because you can bust your hump tuning your own queries only to find out that the tool itself is a bottleneck! Thankfully, that’s an exception rather than the rule.

Ask instead, “How do you gather your data?” Ask them to list DMVs, system tables, traces, and any other collection methods. If you download a demo, trace what it’s doing. When in doubt about the performance effectiveness or data accuracy, ask the community. Transparency is the best way to get the right answers about overhead and ensure that the vendor’s using the lowest-impact methods possible.

Don’t ask, “What’s coming in the next version?”

Like the stock people say, “Past performance is not an indicator of future outcomes.” Development dates slip, features get pulled out of the product at the last moment, and bugs get unearthed as the product’s going out the door. You probably don’t want to deploy any .0 versions on a production server, and it’ll take at least a couple of months to get the bug fixes released. Therefore, don’t gamble on the future version of any product – buy what’s out there today. Every software vendor is putting resources into vNext of their product. When your maintenance agreement is about to expire, revisit the market again.

Ask instead, “Can I see the supported SQL Server version list?” Supporting new versions of SQL Server is hard work – especially now that Microsoft’s starting to push out feature pack releases like SQL Server 2008 R2. You want to know if your vendor will support the latest and greatest SQL Server version, and how long it takes them to do it.

Don’t ask, “Does this software require SA access?”

One of the most eye-opening experiences I had working for a vendor was Microsoft telling me, “If you want to use the ___ feature in SQL Server, you have to be SA. End of story. No plans to change it.” Tweaking some security features doesn’t sell more licenses of SQL Server, and customers aren’t clamoring for it. As a result, the vendor is stuck requiring sysadmin-equivalent permissions in order to do ridiculously common tasks like back up a database via the VDI interface. As long as even one tiny part of the third party product requires SA privileges, then the whole thing does.

Ask instead, “Does this software use the SA account?” While the software might need sysadmin-level privileges, it should not require access to the SA account itself. You should be able to create a separate login for this software, make an absurdly complex password, and lock it away in a vault. This makes security audits and whodunit investigations much easier.

MCM Certificate Photoshop Contest

Last Updated January 11, 2011

Brent Ozar

The SQL MCMs just got access to digital copies of our achievement certificates, and you know what that means.

It’s time for some good old fashioned plagiarism!

Whip out that Photoshop and show me what you’ve got. Change the name, the signature, the cert, the product, whatever you think most needs to be changed. Or maybe it just needs more cowbell.

Show me what you’ve got! Tweak the image and put a link to it in the comments by the end of the day Thursday, January 13th. I’ll pick the funniest one to win a $50 Amazon gift certificate via email.

Good luck! Show me some lolz.

How to Rehearse a Presentation

Last Updated December 1, 2012

Brent Ozar

Writing and Presenting

Buck Woody (Blog – @BuckWoody) and I did a presentation at the PASS Summit called, “You’re Not Attractive, But Your Presentations Can Be.” The audience asked a lot of good questions, and I wanted to recap some of ’em as blog posts. The first one – and one of the most frequent questions I get – is, “How often do you really practice presentations before giving them?”

Teleprompters - also invented by Al Gore. — Teleprompters – also invented by Al Gore.

I’m really, really picky about the transitions between slides – and I don’t mean animations. I love it when people tell me, “Wow, you must have given this a hundred times, because every time you popped the next slide, it was just perfect timing.” For some reason, that one attribute really screams PROFESSIONAL to me. Therefore, when I think I’m done writing a presentation, I’ll step through it a few times just talking through my transitions. I won’t say every word of the content, but I’ll talk through my last point on the slide, hit next, and keep talking – and it has to be out loud. During that process, I’ll usually find things that don’t work as well as I’d like, or things that are tongue twisters. I’ll rework the slide order to tell the story better, or come up with better pictures to be punch lines.

There’s a drawback to my presentation style: I don’t always leave an opening for the audience to ask questions mid-presentation. I’m so focused on my slide segues that I don’t pause at the end of a slide and say, “Any questions?” Instead, I try to build in points every few slides where there’s a natural pause. I’m also learning to build in more pop quizzes to encourage audience interaction. As I’m going through the presentation, I try to count the number of slides between audience interactions so that it doesn’t become a barrage of Brent.

When I’ve got the transitions done, then I’ll step through the whole thing out loud once and time it. One of the points Buck and I made was to over-prepare, then cut – build up way more material than you think you need, then cut down to fit the time you’ve got. If I’m doing a 45-minute presentation, I like to have 60-75 minutes worth of spoken material, and then I choose which sections I can skip entirely, yet still have smooth transitions and deliver the audience everything I promised in the abstract.

Confident that I’ve got good timing and transitions, I’ll hide the clock and give the presentation out loud from start to finish at least twice. I check the time at the start and end, and that helps me make sure I’m guesstimating the right time for my natural delivery.

Don't even get me started. — Don’t even get me started.

After I’ve given it a couple of times and it feels comfortable to me, then I review it for questions. On each slide, I ask myself, “What questions are going to come up from this slide? What technology on this slide sounds too good to be true or too tough to bother with? What common errors will people struggle with, and what objections will they raise?” For example, when I’m talking about the missing index DMVs, people usually ask about heaps, ask when the DMVs reset, or complain that the DMVs give bad suggestions. I think about how I’d respond to those questions, and if I need a slide to show an answer, I’ll build it – but leave that slide hidden. That way, when the question comes up, I can wow ’em with a slide answer instead of going, “Well, uh, I, uh, never thought about that.” Picture how your worst enemy would try to pick your presentation apart, and then arm yourself to defend your position. If you can’t defend what you’re saying, pull it out – you’re not ready to present that point yet. You will be someday, but just not yet.

If I have to do demos in front of a live audience, I try to have a dedicated virtual machine per presentation. For example, I’ve got a VM dedicated just to my Blitz presentation. I know exactly how that server is configured and how it will react. I get the VM set up for the first time, then shut it down and save a copy of it to a different drive. Then I start it back up, step through my demos, and make sure they work. If they don’t, I set it back up again, save another copy of the VM, and try again. When I’ve got it fully baked and it works perfectly, I save copies of it on two USB hard drives under three names like BLITZ1, BLITZ2, and BLITZ_Original.

It gets worse. On presentation day, I fire up both BLITZ1 and BLITZ2. I do my demos on BLITZ1, but if it blows chunks, I switch to BLITZ2. It’s like database mirroring for your demos. When my demos are done, I copy BLITZ_Original over BLITZ1 and BLITZ2 so that I’m ready to go next time. That way, if I did anything to disrupt the status of that VM (like fix one of the purposely-broken databases), I don’t screw up my next Blitz demo.

And when your demo works, you have to say 'Boom.' — And when your demo works, you have to say ‘Boom.’

I know I sound black-helicopters-and-aluminum-foil-hat paranoid, but I believe the audience deserves it. I am just so sick and tired of seeing professionals up on the stage saying, “Hmm, I’m not sure why my demo did that. Well, here’s what it should have done….” If you’re going to stand up in front of an audience of a hundred people, think of their time as $100 per hour – so your demo is $10,000 per hour. Take some basic precautions to ensure that your demo, like Colt 45, works every time.

Finally, I give the presentation in front of people. I try to never give a presentation for the first time at the regional or national level or on a webcast. Webcasts are tough because it’s hard to gauge the audience to know whether or not you’re holding their attention and bringing it home. Regional and national audiences tend to be bigger rooms, and I don’t want to be experimenting in front of more than 50 people. As I’m giving it, I make mental notes about what felt like it worked, and what needs to be reworked.

When people stop me during the presentation to ask a question that I hadn’t anticipated, I’ll stop right there and write down the question or type it into the PowerPoint slide notes. If someone cares enough to ask it out loud, there’s probably a few more people in the audience who wanted to ask but were afraid, so I’ll build it into the next version of the presentation. If nobody asks questions or laughs when I expect them too, I’ll note that, because I gotta keep things engaging. My goal isn’t to eliminate the questions; my goal is to be able to celebrate them happily and intelligently when they occur.

I often respond to questions by saying, “That’s a good question,” and it’s not because I’m buttering them up for good evaluation surveys. I believe it’s a good question because I thought of that exact same question during my preparations, and I’m mentally excited because it means two great things have happened. I’ve engaged them enough to think like I think, and I’ve prepared myself enough to think like they’ll think! I’m at one with the audience. It’s my very own moment of Zen.

At the PASS Summit, an audience member asked how Buck and I pulled all these rehearsals off since we live in different cities. We were lucky enough to get together a couple of times before the Summit to rehearse, and we focused on the transitions. When you’re co-presenting in front of big audiences, it’s so important to know how the handoffs will work. With smaller audiences, I don’t mind winging it when I’m co-presenting with someone I know well. I’ve co-presented in front of 15-20 people with Tim Ford and Tom LaRock on various occasions, and because we know each other’s backgrounds, it’s easy for us to pause mid-slide and hand things over with a question. If you have to co-present with minimal planning, think basketball: don’t hog the ball. Pass back and forth as frequently as you can. The audience appreciates the banter and chemistry.

If you get the chance to be a guest on a podcast or interview, listen to a couple of past episodes to learn the rhythm and host personalities. For example, when I’m on Virtumania, I know I can play things fast and loose with the innuendos, but on a SQL Server Magazine interview I have to keep things a little more straight-laced. You get massive bonus points with the host if you know some of the in-jokes they use, like running gags or sound effects on the show. Give them ample opportunities to interact with you – stop, take a breath, and ask questions like, “Have you had any experiences like that?” Remember that you’re a guest, not a host, but by all means, speak up. I keep a stopwatch up on the screen so that I can see seconds moving, and when I start talking, I make a mental note of the time. If I’ve gone on for more than 45-60 seconds, it’s time to shut up and let ’em get a word in edgewise.

If you’re invited to a panel discussion or roundtable – a presentation where several speakers share the stage – that stopwatch advice is especially relevant. Before the event starts, I jot down a few talking points on a Post-It note or a napkin, whatever’s handy, so that I can jump start discussions if things get quiet. On the other hand, I also do some quick math: I take the length of the session, divide it by the number of speakers (including the moderator), and that’s my share. If there’s an hour-long session with four speakers and a moderator, that means I get about 12 minutes. It’s my duty to help the moderator by livening up the room with 12 minutes of fun banter, and it’s my responsibility to the other presenters to make sure they get their 12 minutes.

Reading back through this, I realize I’m probably making it sound more intimidating than it is. I certainly didn’t start out rehearsing my presentations this thoroughly! The only reason I approach it this way today is that I’ve come to realize my presentations are a valuable library. When I’m working with a client, I love being able to say, “Here’s the issue you’re having, and I’ve got a presentation that talks about how to solve it. Let’s get the staff together for an hour and we’ll cover this presentation with specifics about your environment.” My clients love this highly personalized training, and they see real value in it.

Yes, companies will actually pay you to give your presentations to their staff – even the very same presentations that might be available for free on the web. The value is having the right presenter give the right presentation at the right time. There’s an overwhelming amount of free material online, and nobody’s got the time to peruse it all.

Your presentations are worth the effort. Your audience and your clients will love you for it!

Free SQL Server Training Videos from SQLbits

Last Updated January 23, 2011

Brent Ozar

I am so screwed.

I’ve got an iPad full of PASS Summit 2010 recorded sessions that I need to watch, and now the guys at SQLbits go and release all of their videos for free too. I’m never gonna catch up. Not only can you watch the SQLbits sessions live over the web, but you can download ’em to your portable media player too. Just go to SQLbits.com, scroll down to the bottom, and start clicking on session titles. Here’s mine:

Virtualization and SAN Basics for DBAs

SQL Server Storage at the Terabyte Level

Some other sessions to check out:

Ugh. There goes my free time in 2011.

Goals? Where we’re going, we don’t need goals.

Last Updated December 30, 2010

Brent Ozar

Denis Gobo tagged me in his post about his 2010 goals, and challenged a few of us to gauge our success for 2010 too by revealing our yearly goals and how we did. I should have seen it coming, because he tagged me on this before.

I’m all over the Getting Things Done philosophy, which involves setting some 50,000 foot goals to keep your overall life on track – but my GTD 50,000 foot goals aren’t “goals” in the way we usually think of goals. They are:

It's hard work looking this good. — Goal for 2011: Improve My Poker Face

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.

None of those can be crossed off, so to speak – I’m never done enjoying life or being very financially secure. These are big-picture guidelines, more of a compass direction than a map destination. Underneath each of those 50,000 foot goals, I’ve got a series of – wait for it – 40,000 foot goals, then 30k, and so on, getting more and more tactical.

I’m not so anal-retentive that all of my day-to-day tasks are mapped up all the way through the list. Because I know my 50k goals, it’s easy for me to know at a glance whether an incoming task maps up to the big picture, or whether it might not be something I should take on. Every couple of weeks, I go through my task list just to be safe (called a GTD review), and make sure nothing snuck in when I wasn’t really thinking straight. I re-prioritize things, decide to postpone things indefinitely, and so on.

My big picture (the 50k foot goals) are very static – they haven’t changed in years – but the lower you get in altitude, the more the landscape changes from month to month. Having a really solid grasp on the direction I want to go helps me be more flexible when new opportunities arise. If someone presents me with an opportunity or if I get a wacko idea, I do a quick gut check: does this match up to my 50k foot goals, and will it skew the amount of time I spend on each goal? For example, I often turn down new clients that need help RIGHT FREAKIN’ NOW because if I took it on, I would spend less time with Erika and I would enjoy life less.

Having said all that, let’s look at what I checked off under some of the big-picture goals this year.

Be Very Financially Secure

Life threw me a curveball when Quest asked if I’d like to pursue the Microsoft Certified Master of SQL Server program. This hadn’t been part of my life’s goals, but I said hell yes because it would make me more valuable. I busted my hump studying, so saying yes to this temporarily threw my goal system way out of whack. I sacrificed some of my other goals in order to make this happen.

After I passed, life threw me another curveball when Microsoft reworked the MCM. They decided to offer it to the public without the Microsoft-based training component, which meant that I could offer MCM training myself. I looked at this as a gold mine opportunity – if I moved fast, I could write MCM training materials and make a lot more money doing training. I had absolutely zero interest in leaving Quest initially, even after I got my MCM, but the MCM program changes meant I had to think fast. Leaving Quest was tough, and leaving the security of a full-time salary job was especially tough. If I hadn’t been working on this particular GTD goal for a few years, I wouldn’t have been able to give up the salary and health insurance.

Be a Fantastic Partner for Erika

I’ve committed to Erika that I’m only going to travel one week per month on average. I struggled to keep this in 2010, and I didn’t do as well as I’d have liked when I mixed consulting and conferences. In 2011, I’ve had to say no to some really attractive events like SQLRally because I just can’t be gone all the time, and I don’t make money at those events (or SQLSaturdays). If I have only one week away per month, and I have to decide between making money at a client or losing money at an event, I gotta take care of business. (See the first GTD goal.)

Erika’s wanted new furniture for a while, so we refurnished the whole house this year. The last bits and pieces, a pair of mirrored nightstands, arrive Friday 12/31.

I did other stuff but I’m not posting that here. Mostly involved a turkey baster, a clown suit, and a videocamera.

I'm On a Boat! — SQLCruise 2010 Leaving Miami

Enjoy Life While I Can

This one suffered a lot during my efforts to pass the MCM program and start consulting, but I managed to sneak a few boo-yahs in.

I never would have predicted that Tim Ford and I would have launched SQLCruise. It came out of nowhere – I was so sick and tired of Seattle in the winter (seriously, PASS, what the hell are you thinking?) and was desperate to go somewhere fun at the right time of year and talk SQL Server. This was one of my most fun weeks of the year.

I’ve always wanted to learn more about photography, and this year I finally broke down and bought an interchangeable-lens camera, a couple of books, and subscribed to photography magazines. I’m slowly upping my game here, and I really enjoy this as a hobby.

Be a Good Son and Brother

By chance, I found out Dad had always wanted to go to Alaska, so I surprised Dad & Caryl (my stepmom) with their first cruise – an Alaska one out of Seattle. We had a wonderful time, saw bears and eagles and whales, oh my.

I took Mom on her first cruise this year, a 5-day one out of Miami. She had a blast (just like I hoped she would), and in 2011 I’m taking her on another cruise for her birthday.

Again this year, I made a point of telling my parents in person how much I love them, and how thankful I am for how they raised me. I’ve learned that I need to do that every single year because I learn something new every year. This year, I found out my mom feels guilty for spanking me. No, Mom, that was not a bad thing, and yes, I deserved it, and it make me a better grown-up. (I’m a big believer in spanking, although it’s easy for me to say in public because I don’t have any kids. Your kids, though, they need a swift slap across the bottom. Especially you, the lady in Oysy the other night. For crying out loud, if you can’t control your damn kids, take them to Chuck E Cheese, not a sushi restaurant. You’re not doing any of us any favors, including your kids.)

I sucked as a brother this year. My sister and her husband are hilarious, and I gotta hang out more with them.

Summary

Looking up at this list, almost none of it was predictable on 1/1/2010. I’ve done annual goals in the past and been nothing but disappointed because life changed my plans along the way. Life kept throwing me curveballs, but because of my GTD 50k foot goals, I was able to knock some of ’em out of the park.

I do have some things at the top of my to-do list at the moment that I’ll share, though:

Build more training material – I’m taking my game up a notch and writing sessions that really make me proud. This maps up to my financial security goal.
Get a maid – Paul & Kim have a personal assistant, and seeing her in action, I was sold. I talked Erika into letting us get a cleaning service in for starters. This maps up to me being a better partner, plus enjoying life.
Improve my accounting – I’ve been using a web-based accounting package, and I’m switching to Quickbooks. I hate accounting, but as an entrepreneur, you gotta do what you gotta do. Also maps up to my financial security goal.
Start podcasting – I’m working on a new way to share my interests with you in an easier, more enjoyable way, and that maps up to me enjoying life and financial security. Stay tuned!

To learn more about GTD, check out how I use 50,000 foot goals.

Christmas Caption Contest

Last Updated February 12, 2017

Brent Ozar

Humor

It’s the holidays, and you’re not working that hard anyway. In the comments, give me your best caption for this photo by midnight GMT on Sunday, December 26th, 2010:

I’ll pick the winner on Monday morning and post it here. The winner gets these stickers, SQLskills stickers, and the EFF prize pack including a t-shirt, hat, and EFF stickers that I got for donating $250 to the EFF to fight blog plagiarism. Contest limited to US and Canada residents only because international shipping is such a pain in the rear. If you’re abroad, you can still enter, but you won’t get the prize – I’ll designate an honorary US/Canada winner on your behalf.

PASS Summit Speaker Feedback

Last Updated February 7, 2018

Brent Ozar

SQL Server

The 2010 PASS Summit attendee feedback just arrived, and I’m very, very honored to have two sessions in the top 10. Last year, I had one session in the top 10. Based on the trends of this data, I look forward to the 2019 PASS Summit evals when I will have all 10 of the top 10 sessions. WORLD DOMINATION, MUHAHAHA!

I’ve already talked to a few other speakers about their feedback, and if you’re a speaker reading this, remember something: it’s an honor to even be chosen to speak at the Summit.

But enough about you – let’s talk about me again. Here’s the scores and feedback for my sessions, along with my own feedback about the questions themselves. I used to work for a survey company, so I’m really anal about this kind of thing.

Virtualization and SAN Basics for DBAs (DBA283S)

How would you rate the usefulness of the information presented in your day-to-day environment?

Average – 4.76 (out of 5)
5s – 94
4s – 27
3s – 1

I hate this question because it’s not the speaker’s fault. It’s up to the attendee to choose the right session, and there’s already a separate question asking about the accuracy of the abstract. Sometimes people want to go to completely irrelevant sessions just to learn – take the cloud or future versions of SQL Server, for example – and it’s unfair to penalize the speaker for talking about futures or esoteric stuff. I don’t pride myself on getting a high score on this question, and I don’t kick myself for low scores. I got a really low score on this when I did a cloud session at the Summit last year, but I knew it’d be low because nobody was using the cloud back then.

How would you rate the Speaker’s presentation skills?

Average – 4.88
5s – 107
4s – 15

I have a rather goofy presentation style – fast, loose, and casual – and I know it can generate extreme reactions on surveys. If you sit through a Paul Randal session, a Kimberly Tripp session, and then a session from me back-to-back, you’ll see completely different styles. There is no one right style for presentations. You have to find your own voice as a presenter, then hone the bejeezus out of that voice. I’m proud of this score because it means I’m continuing to refine my approach.

Finding your voice is only part of this score, though – if somebody comes into my session expecting a Paul Randal style of delivery, they’re going to give me horrendous marks. Before people sit down in my Summit sessions, it helps if they’ve already seen me speak online or at a user group. If someone sees my session and style online and decides they don’t like my presentation methods, they won’t sit in my session at the Summit either. The more people see you speak, the higher your scores become on this question.

How would you rate the Speaker’s knowledge of the subject?

Average – 4.91
5s – 111
4s – 11

Jeez, I hope so. I’m a Microsoft Certified Master and I specialize in virtualization and SANs.

But seriously, I think getting a high score here means showing the audience something they didn’t already know. In the future, I’d like to surprise every attendee in every session with at least one slide. That’s insanely difficult in the age of blogs, but that’s what it takes to ace this question.

How would you rate the accuracy of the session title, description and experience level to the actual session?

Average – 4.79
5s – 74
4s – 41
3s – 5
2s – 2

This is all on me, and it sucks. I’m completely dissatisfied with this score. I have to do a better job of crafting my abstracts. My problem has been that I start by writing an abstract, then I write the deck, then I deliver the deck several times at different places, and I gradually refine the deck over time. Unfortunately, the abstract reflects the original session because I had to write it so far in advance to get approved for the Summit! I have to make this work better.

How would you rate the amount of time allocated to cover the topic/session?

Average – 4.53
5s – 74
4s – 41
3s – 5
2s – 2

This is where the marketing guy in me comes out: this score is too high. I have a full-day session on this exact same topic, and I’ve got around 12 hours of material on it. In my 1-2 hour session on this topic, I go out of my way to emphasize this to the audience by saying things like, “I wish I had a whole day to cover this, but because we’ve only got an hour, I’m going to give you some of the most important topics.” I want them to walk away saying, “Wow, I wish I could have heard him talk more about this.”

Why? Because that’s how you sell training.

I want the audience to give horrendous marks on this question and leave comments like, “I wish this session was four hours long.” For me, that’s a win, because they can pay to hear me talk all day on these topics. The trick is to get low scores on this question, yet get high enough scores on the other questions to make it into the top ten. This is one of the reasons I’m amazed I made it into the top 10 this year.

How would you rate the quality of the presentation materials?

Average – 4.68
5s – 90
4s – 26
3s – 5
2s – 1

I think the attendees were being generous here. The only way I can justify this score is because of my resources page approach – I put all of the links on a single page on my site, and keep referring to it throughout the presentation. Otherwise, I don’t think the deck itself was as good as I’d like, and I don’t have demos for this one.

Attendee Comments:

Ran out of copies of handout. – (From Brent: errr, I don’t have handouts.)
There wasn’t a question he couldn’t answer.
This could have been a 90 minute session. – (From Brent: good answer!)
This guy knows how to present and keep presentation topic entertaining and interesting.
This was great, thanks!
Very direct, personable and funny! Time flew by.
Very good introduction with lots of useable information.
Very good!
Very informitive session and best practicle tips.
Very interesting, keeps your attention, very amusing.
virtualization isn’t all vnware. Would like to hear a bit on hyperv. – (From Brent: This is where I need to perfect my abstracts. When I first wrote the deck, it was a mix of Hyper-V and VMware, but the attendees *overwhelmingly* tell me they only use VMware, so I gradually phased out the Hyper-V material.)
wish it could have been a bit longer, good info.
Perfect combination of basic and advanced information.
Wish you would have did a day session! Great work!! Really liked the tips! Your session was very useful. – (From Brent: Awesome with the day-session stuff – again, love that.)
Wonderful! After seeing Brent’s presentation at 24 hours of PASS I don’t want to miss another mc. He is fantastic.
Very informative and love the energy. Happy Birthday and Thank you! Great session.
Need to do it a bit louder, we had issue hearing on the last row.
Entertaining and educatinal.
Loved it. Thanks for the repeat.
Could’ve used a longer session on this.
Could use more time.– (From Brent: Woohoo! See the trend here? I’m really proud that my evil subliminal messaging worked.)
Brent’s sarcasm and wit always keep his presentations entertaining. Good content makes it worth it. Great links from his site also help facilitate learning after the fact.
Brent is very engaging and informible. Excellent speaker, very comfortable in front of a large group.
Excellent insights.
Brent – always impressive!!
Awesome presentation and timely as we are in progress with these issues.
As normal, nice job!
As always, good info from Brent. Thanks for helping new guys like me grow as a DBA!
A bit longer, more of SAN details and a longer question and answer period. Thanks!
Awesome presentation.
Excellent presentation. Best so far.
Excellent. Thank you!
Fantastic presenter, gave a lot of useful info that I will use when I’m back at work.
Loved it.
Like drinking from a firehose but in a less painful way. thanks for all the info and links. Now it’s time to go learn.
Informative and entertaining, as always.
If you can extend the session to 90 minutes that will be great. – (From Brent: Remember when reading feedback that the attendees don’t understand what’s under your control, versus what’s controlled by the conference.)
I will highly consider attending any presentation he does with only the topic being my final decision!
Have many virtualized servers and would like to understand better.
Great!
Great tips for SAN
Great job! Good lines and good level of detail.
Great job!
Giving me lots to go back to work and look at.
More time. Brent could have spoken for 2 more hours. – (From Brent: Yes, indeed I could, or even several days.)
Awesome! Very deep knowledge and great topics.

You’re Not Attractive – But Your Presentations Can Be (PD193S)

I co-presented this with Buck Woody, and lemme just say that he was the best co-presenter a guy could ask for. He is the reason this session is in the top 10 – I simply couldn’t have done a good job without him. The bantering back and forth made that session so enjoyable.

How would you rate the usefulness of the information presented in your day-to-day environment?

Average – 4.71 (out of 5)
5s – 53
4s – 12
3s – 4

I think the attendees were being generous here. Realistically, you’re not presenting day-to-day, although we did cover how to communicate things better to your managers.

How would you rate the Speaker’s presentation skills?

Average – 4.93
5s – 67
4s – 1
1s – 1

I got such a laugh out of the person who said “1.” Awesome. But really, this score is kind of self-fulfilling: if you choose to attend a presentation about how to present, odds are you’re going because you admire the presentation skills of the presenter already. If somebody thinks Buck and I suck at presenting, they’re not going to come to our “how to present” session because they don’t want our advice. This is a high score, but I’m not particularly proud of it. I’m not saying I’m not proud of the presentation we did – I had a hilariously good time with Buck – but the score isn’t an indication of our presentation skills. The real score here is the number of people who attended, and I’m proud of that.

How would you rate the Speaker’s knowledge of the subject?

Average – 4.93
5s – 64
4s – 5

We’re really good at faking it.

How would you rate the accuracy of the session title, description and experience level to the actual session?

Average – 4.90
5s – 62
4s – 7

Compare this to my score on the virtualization & SAN presentation and you’ll see why I need to work on my abstracts. Buck and I wrote this abstract specifically for this one presentation, and we never honed the deck. The abstract exactly lined up with the original deck.

How would you rate the amount of time allocated to cover the topic/session?

Average – 4.74
5s – 53
4s – 15
2s – 1

The funny thing is that Buck and I finished the material after 30-40 minutes, and we riffed for the rest of the time. The only reason we scored well here is because of great attendee questions that let us elaborate. If we didn’t have a fired-up, friendly audience, we’d have bombed here.

How would you rate the quality of the presentation materials?

Average – 4.72
5s – 56
4s – 10
3s – 1
2s – 1
1s – 1

I think the audience is being generous here too, because our slides were just a handful of pictures. We wanted you to focus on us, not bullet points, and we wanted the flexibility to go off on tangents. It worked for us, but if someone else took our deck and tried to read it without attending the session, they’d be disgusted.

Attendee Comments:

So engaging
Smile 🙂
Simple, good and effective.
Some examples of good power point and other presentation materials.
ran out of time. – (From Brent: Wha? We finished early!)
perfect
not just a good show-but great content as well.
Not as focused on tips to improve presentations as I expected- based on title.
No new information-but good refresher and well presented.
Ppt was not very inspiring-presentaion depended the skillsof the presenter-if you’re not a charismatic speaker, not much to help you out. – (From Brent: that’s completely fair. I would argue that there are no good speakers that don’t have charisma. Charisma is not optional for great presenters, and that’s why we explained that you HAVE to go to something like Toastmasters. PowerPoint slides alone can’t carry you to the top.)
Speakers were in shadows-lighting could be improved. – (From Brent: That’s to protect us from the snipers.)
Very entertaining!! Thank you!!
“The talk is excellent with very practical tips.
I wished you could include some of the info as bullets – (From Brent: I’ve got your bullet right here. Just kidding.)
You answered the one nagging question I’ve had for ALL my presentations; Don’t read your bullets. Thanks 🙂
wish it could go on and on and on
Wasn’t sure what to exactly to expect coming into this. I have great struggles with telling a story with data (lots of data and sometimes there really isn’t a story). I think some of the referencs that you cited may deal with that. I enjoyed the presentation a great deal. Thanks! – (From Brent: Edward Tufte‘s stuff is fantastic about lots of data, and he explains that there’s always a story. One of my favorite examples is on pages 56-57 of Envisioning Information when David Hellerstein explains the economics of health care by telling the story of just one receipt.)
Very polished speakers, their lifetime of presentation work shows.
very pleasant speaking voice.
Very informative session!!! Thanks.
more time would have been ok.
very entertaining and usefull at the same time.
Very engaging-high energy, funny.
trololololoooooooo!!
Thought it would just be funny with some good tips, but it was incredibly useful. Even for daily life. NOt fjust for when presenting. (and of course it was very funny as well).
Take a Bow!!!
I am a budding/new speaker for pass events (chapter/SQL Saturday) and trying to find my “groove” this session was really helpful.
“*phenominal & absolutely excellent.
*Ver applicable to everyone.”
Great tips-the wacom/draw your preso is priceless.
Fabulous, excellent conversational
Excellent ideas for improvement and ideas to get audience involved and engaged!
Excellent coverage of how to prepare a preso. Great tips on how to tell stories, final pics. When to use power point? Good stuff. How many times to reherse. Where does he come up with his retorts? Great!!!
Entertaining, lots of content. Thanks!
Do you think Dora the Explorer is an excellent presenter?
Both guys are the top of the heap.
Awesome!!!!
Awesome presentation, funny and inforative.
Awesome presentation – would love a longer session discussing methods and stlyes.
Amazing, funny
You guys suck. 🙂
Fun with lots of good info.
“Great way to end the day.
Good info presented quickly and to the point while still entertaining.”
Fun, informative and more fun on many, many levels.
getr the point across and entertaining also.
Great Team!
Great Presentation
Great Job!! Thanks
Great information. Appreciate the tips. Really want to someday (soon) apply them or at least pass them on. Great audience questons.
Great info as I start doing more demo’s/ presentations.
Great ideas, suggestons & links.
Great humor and great points.
Great deck.
Good, fun presentation, but hard to say how much information will help improve attendee’s presentation. Nice way to wrap up the day.
Good Stuff
Good Detail. Very much enjoyed the follow up as well. Looking forward to using this on my execs.
Funny and extremely relevant. Great job!!!!
You guys sucked. Thanks!!! 🙂

What a way to finish up the year. Thank you so much for filling out your evaluations, and I’m humbled by your appreciation for what I do. I have a great time doing this stuff, and I’m amazed that I get to do this stuff for a living.

Jeremiah Peschka & Buck Woody Talk Database Communities

Last Updated December 17, 2010

Brent Ozar

Two of my favorite members and best speakers in the SQL Server community have made big changes – they’re refocusing their careers and their community work outside of SQL Server. Is it the beginning of a trend? What’s going on in the NoSQL and cloud database world that’s so attractive to these guys? I interviewed them to find out.

Buck Woody (Blog – @BuckWoody) has worked for Microsoft since 2006, and until recently, he was our Inside Man – a fighter for the SQL Server data professional. He switched roles over to the Azure team a couple of months ago.

Jeremiah Peschka (Blog – @Peschkaj) joined Quest Software this year as a sort of technology evangelist, working with NoSQL and cloud databases. Prior to that, he’s worked with SQL Server as a developer, database administrator, and consultant. He just resigned from the PASS Board of Directors to spend more time working with the NoSQL communities.

Brent: Question 1. WHAT, SQL SERVER ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU? Okay, well, if I’m honest, it isn’t good enough for me either, because there’s always more stuff I wish it did. But what is it about these other database movements that excited you enough to focus more on those? Give me your elevator pitch.

Buck: No – it isn’t good enough :). But then, nothing ever is when you’re a curious person – and I’m one of those! I feel that utility-based computing is inevitable, and it’s all just data anyway – so Azure was a slam-dunk for me, a natural progression in my career. The tougher part was actually getting the position, since lots of really smart folks at Microsoft wanted the job. But I have those pictures….

Jeremiah: I’m excited because these new databases focus on one thing and doing it well. They each scratch a particular itch. SQL Server is a great general purpose database, but there are some things it doesn’t do very well – batch processing, massive parallelism, and scale out. Many of these databases build on the skills that developers already have (object-oriented programming) to create complex solutions for ETL, analytics, and distributed storage – they’re good frameworks for complex tasks.

Brent: You’ve both been transitioning away from SQL Server for a few months. What’s the state of these new database communities? What are they like compared to the SQL Server community today?

Buck: Vague, undefined, and unordered. No, wait, that’s the cloud! So of course the audience mimics the product structure. Since Azure is essentially an online operating system that you write almost any code you want against, the users have a huge – I mean absolutely huge – range of skills, ages, interests and so on. So the community isn’t anywhere near as defined as SQL Server is. Not only that, it’s a new product, so the community hasn’t had time to define itself. I think over time we’ll get enough vertical interest groups that communities will form. It will just take time.

Me, Aaron Nelson, and Jeremiah Peschka at SQLSaturday Chicago

Jeremiah: The emerging database communities are very young right now. It’s difficult to figure out which databases will stick around for a while, but the communities are vibrant, changing, and open to new ideas. There’s a lot of energy, enthusiasm, and passion. People want to share what they know.

Brent: What can the SQL Server community learn from the NoSQL and cloud communities?

Jeremiah: The biggest thing that I’ve had to re-learn is that it’s important to look at every problem fresh and evaluate all of the options available before determining what to use. Sometimes it only needs to be a cursory glance, but other times it’s worth really examining what’s going to be happening and figuring out the best solution for the problem.

Buck: Agility and adoption, and focus on solving a problem, regardless of the technology. I don’t see nearly the stratification of the developers as data professionals, and the developers seem very willing to try anything new, as long as it solves their problem. They are also ready to move to the latest technologies.

Brent: How far away are we from the time when European or financial customers can adopt these new technologies?

Jeremiah: A number of European and financial customers are already using a variety of NoSQL databases. Booz Allen Hamilton are providing consulting services around Hadoop and Bank of America is also using Hadoop. a number of companies are using other NoSQL databases – ComCast are using Riak, and the New York Times and Intuit are using MongoDB. There are a bunch of NoSQL conferences happening in Europe – NoSQL:EU and Business Cloud 9. I think that some aspects of cloud computing are further away in Europe due to EU regulations, but I could be wrong. I’m not as familiar with cloud databases as I am with the NoSQL space.

Buck: They are doing it now. In fact, after I type this I’m off to meet with a financial firm on their latest Azure application. It’s moving faster than most people realize, to Azure, Google, and Amazon.

Brent: If I wanted to keep an eye on the databases you’re working with, what are the top few blogs I should check out?

Jeremiah: I’d keep your eye on the NoSQLPedia blog aggregator, for starters. We’re adding more people on a weekly basis. Outside of that site specifically, things are still pretty fragmented at the moment. In general, I watch Lars George for Hadoop and HBase news, the Basho blog for Riak, MongoTips and Snail in a Turtleneck for MongoDB news, Planet CouchDB for CouchDB, antirez.com for Redis, and http://facility9.com (of course) for my take on the entire thing.

Buck: I tend to like http://blogs.msdn.com/buckwoody :), but anything Wayne Walter Berry writes is tres-awesome.

Brent: If – okay, when – I talk to you again in a year about you’re doing, what do you hope to have pulled off?

Buck: A significant growth in the “Azure Marketplace” – a site where you can sell your Azure “Apps” to other devs or even end-users. I’d like to see that thing eventually become the iTunes of the cloud.

Jeremiah: I want to see people actively using hybrid database solutions in their production environments. If I hear about someone using SQL Server for their RDBMS, Hadoop for batch processing, Hive for analytics, and Riak for caching and data distribution, I’ll be a very happy guy.

Who Won an iPad and @RedGate SQL Monitor?

Last Updated December 24, 2010

Brent Ozar

And now, the moment we’ve all been waiting for. The select statement, please:

Congratulations to the lucky winners, who will each get an Apple iPad 16GB with 3G and Red Gate SQL Monitor!

I’d like to thank Red Gate Software for making this contest possible and making our holiday spirits bright. Reading everybody’s thoughts about where they’d go if they didn’t have to worry about their SQL Servers gave me a lot of laughs. The holidays help us refocus on what really matters: our friends and family. We work hard so that we can enjoy our time with them, and anything that can help me relax and let go of my 9-5 work, I’m all over it.

Grant Fritchey picked 10 winners who identified their most common causes of server outages, and Steve Jones picked 10 winners who talked about things they could do better with a tablet. Happy Holidays everybody, and enjoy your new iPads and SQL Monitor.

Happy One Year Anniversary, #SQLHelp!

Last Updated December 17, 2010

Brent Ozar

One year ago today, #SQLHelp was born. Aaron Nelson (Blog – @SQLVariant) had the brilliant idea to set up a hash tag on Twitter that anyone could use whenever they had a question. I thought it was sheer genius, so I explained how to use #SQLhelp on my blog, and it took off.

These days, I love watching questions – and answers – trickle through #SQLHelp at all hours of the day. It’s just another example of how the SQL Server community is vibrant, helpful, and everywhere.

If you’re on Twitter, join me in thanking @SQLVariant not just for #SQLHelp, but for everything he does for the SQL Server, PowerShell, and SQLSaturday communities.