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In today’s hiring market, DBAs get a lot of emails from recruiters that say things like:

“I am curious to know if you would be interested in (or know someone who is interested in) relocating to Big Falls East for the position discussed below….”

The job description never includes the salary range, and it rarely includes information about the industry – two things that should be important to a job candidate.  (If you don’t care about the industry, you should start caring – imagine going to work for Ford Motors, an airline, or a mortgage company in today’s economy.)

To handle these emails fast, go into your email program and create a new signature.  The signature should include a default reply text that is really generic, like this:

“Thanks for the email.  If you can forward on information about the salary range and the industry, I’ll pass it along to my peers.  After being repeatedly burned (hey, buddy, check out this job – oh, sorry, I didn’t know it only paid $X) I have a policy against forwarding jobs without salary & industry information.  Thanks, and have a great day.”

Most email programs will let you quickly change your signature for one specific email.  That way, when recruiter emails come in, just hit reply, insert your recruiter signature, and hit send.

When the next email comes in (either with the right info, or without it) you can handle it the right way.  If it includes good information, then it’s a good recruiter, and you should pass it on to your buddies.  If it doesn’t include any more information than the first email, just hit delete, because the recruiting process is off to a bad start.

I know recruiters will disagree, but here’s the deal: if a recruiter is desperate enough to send a blind email to a stranger without a resume, asking that stranger to pack up their house and move to another state, then there’s a reason.  They’ve already exhausted the local candidates – either because they’re not paying enough, the company has a bad reputation locally, or they need a hard-to-find skill set.  Think about that before replying with your resume, because the first two reasons will come back to haunt you, and the third reason means you’re worth a lot of money.

Sean McCown at Infoworld wrote a blog post today that said some negative things about Quest and LiteSpeed, and I had to respond. He’s switched away from using LiteSpeed, and he had an interesting set of reasons.

“I just don’t need the centralized repository in my lab, and I do enough demos that having native SQL syntax for my backups is worth something to me.”

Everybody has different needs.

Sean and I would totally agree that labs have a different set of needs than a typical enterprise or datacenter.

In fact, if I was just doing a lot of demos like Sean, and if I wanted native SQL syntax for my backups, I wouldn’t even use a third party product at all: I’d use SQL Server 2008’s new backup compression to make my life really easy. That way, you can stay purely native, and that makes for really easy demos.

Quest LiteSpeed, on the other hand, isn’t targeted just at labs and demos. It’s targeted at DBAs who need enterprise-ready backup solutions, complex needs like log shipping, centralized reporting, log reading with undo & redo for transactions, and so on. Not everybody needs the advanced features that LiteSpeed provides, and Sean doesn’t. We would both agree that LiteSpeed is not the right product for his lab.

“Even knowing any of the devs is hard these days, and getting anyone to make any changes is next to impossible.”

At smaller companies, especially startups with a minimum of customers, developers can work directly with end users. For better or worse, Quest has a lot of customers, and I’d like to think that’s because Quest has fantastic products. (It’s a pretty good problem to have.) Our product managers coordinate feature requests across all of our enterprise customers, large and small, which helps our developers focus on what they need to do: develop great software.

Just this week, in fact, Quest Software hosted a SQL Server Customer Advisory Board at the offices in Aliso Viejo. We flew out a dozen customers for two days of meetings about our road maps, upcoming features, and asking for their input on where we go next. I wish we could bring every Quest customer out there for the same input, but on the other hand, Steve Ballmer isn’t flying me up to Seattle anytime soon to ask me what SQL Server needs to do next.

We’re in a feature freeze for our new LiteSpeed v5.0. The management tools have been rewritten from the ground up, and I’m really impressed. But there comes a point where you have to stop adding new features and just focus on testing the code, and that’s where we’re at now. Heck, I have a long list of things I want to add, but even I can’t sneak ’em in – and I work for Quest! I’m already excited about the features I’m trying to cram into v5.1.

“Now, with the team being more corporate….”

If your main criteria for a backup product is easy access to the guy who wrote it, then Quest LiteSpeed is not the product for you.

Just a couple of months ago when I was a DBA instead of a Quest employee, though, that was not my main criteria for software selection. My main criteria included a global 24×7 support organization with experience across database technologies, a large QA team dedicated to testing mission-critical backup software on every possible platform and a product with an unbelievably strong track record. The fact that Quest was Microsoft’s 2007 Global ISV Partner of the Year again this year is proof that sometimes bigger is better.

Mark Garner came across a great list of free SQL Server tools & utilities.  I took one look at that page, bookmarked it, and realized it’s going to take me a week to go through that list!  Good stuff.

At this week’s Customer Advisory Board at Quest, I’ve had a great time sharing war stories with other database administrators.  One theme keeps popping up again and again: developers don’t trust DBAs and seem to refuse to take the DBA’s word for anything.  It seems that developers just want to keep learning things the hard way.

Case in point: a developer wants to loop through all string fields in every database in the shop looking for secure information.  They’re after things like social security numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers and so forth.  They want to check the contents of every char/varchar/nchar/nvarchar field in every table, look at the top X records, and check the string contents to see if it matches known text patterns.

In theory, this could be solved by a stored procedure.

In practice, a stored proc would be a bad idea.  SQL Server isn’t particularly good at string processing, and a query like this will instantly push the CPU to 100%, thereby severely slowing down other queries on the box.  Plus, large databases like SAP can have tens or hundreds of thousands of string fields, and storing the results will take gigs of memory and/or TempDB space on a large BI/BW data warehouse.

The DBA involved has repeatedly recommended against the stored proc approach, but the developer still wants to build one, saying he’s Googled for ways to do it and he’s getting some good leads.  At what point  the DBA will sit back and say, “You know what, go for it, because when your stored proc takes down a production box, I’ll be all too happy to explain whose code did it.”

Another case involved developers who want to store completely unstructured XML data inside the database as text fields, and want to parse through that XML data when searching millions of records for matching attributes.  The XML format will be extremely flexible, but when storing it as text, it’s just not going to perform.  The developers see that as a SQL Server performance problem, when in reality it’s a bad design that won’t scale.

We spent some time tonight at the CAB talking about where the DBA draws that line – where he gives up trying to protect the developer and just gives the developer enough rope to hang themselves.  It’s an interesting challenge politically, but the moral of the story is this: developers out there, if your DBA keeps recommending that you do something, and all of a sudden one day he caves in and sees things your way, be careful.  You might be in for a rocky ride.

I’m staying at an oceanside hotel in Laguna Beach, California for a meeting with some of our customers.  When I say oceanside, I mean oceanside: there’s a huge wave break about a hundred feet from my balcony, just two stories down.  The waves are deafening.

It’s a really romantic setting, but I was still surprised to find these at my bedside:

“Grande for Increased Protection?”  Wow.  I mean, it’s one thing to have this kind of gear provided for you by the hotel, but it’s still another when they give you the big ones.

Or maybe they just gave the big ones to me.  Maybe the front desk clerk called down to housekeeping and said, “Look, I’ve seen this guy.  You gotta give him the big ones.  No playing around here.”

If you want to see the full details of the hotel amenities, click on the photo.  I wouldn’t want to show the whole thing on my normal public page without clicking on it.

It’s the morning after the Caroline Collective grand opening party. The place was absolutely packed with interesting people, and that’s my definition of a success. For images of the evening, check out the Caroline Collective Flickr pool.

Seemed like everybody I talked to wanted to get in on the coworking action, and they had the same basic questions:

Q: When is Caroline open?

It doesn’t have an “official” schedule yet, just whenever a tenant shows up. The tenants have keys. I’m here on weekdays by 7-8am, and from then on there’s somebody here until pretty late. Join BrightKite.com – it’s like Twitter, but for physical locations – and you can get notified whenever one of the tenants checks in at 4820 Caroline. Sometimes we’re here, but we just forget to unlock the doors – send a Twitter or a BrightKite note and it’ll rouse us.

Q: Is everybody in the web business?

No, that’s what I thought it was going to be too, but it turns out that’s not the case. The only web folks we have here (off the top of my head) are True Light Resources, and everybody else is all over the map. Caroline tenants include software developers, a TV producer, a photographer, a foundation, and of course, the ArtStorm crowd next door. It’s a really broad pool of people.

Q: What’s it take to join?

Anybody can show up anytime Caroline’s open and just sit down at an available desk. There’s free WiFi and free coffee. If you like what you see, there’s a few membership levels. At the $300/mo level, you get your own desk, which is pretty cool because you can leave your stuff there – monitor, speakers, whatever.

Q: What’s it take to get an office?

Patience, grasshopper. Those went first – as of a couple days ago, they’re all taken. We’ve got plenty of desks available, though.

Q: Who were those two well-dressed hotties?

Those would be Ned Doddington (left) and Matthew Wettergreen, the founders of Caroline:

Excellent photo by Ed Schipul, and excellent vision by Matt & Ned.  This place was absolutely awesome last night, and the energy was so positive.  Everybody seemed to “get” the whole coworking concept, and I’m excited at what’ll happen over the coming weeks.  Congratulations, guys!

I know, I just told you guys that I got all settled in at Quest and I’m loving it and everything, but I just had the most unbelievable offer come in. It just came out of nowhere straight into my email, and what can I say – I just can’t pass it up. It’s perfect for my background.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so with no further ado, here’s the email itself:

Look out, Zohan.  A former SQL Server DBA makes an even better hairstylist.  They said it themselves – I’m the perfect candidate.  Hooah!

One of my articles just got posted up at SearchSQLServer. I cover some of the pros and cons of backing up data warehouses with SAN snapshots.

I wrote that just after we got done with a NetApp deployment at Southern Wine. The funny part is that we deployed the QA environment pretty quickly, but months after I’ve left, they still haven’t moved the production warehouse over to the NetApp. I should have borrowed that set of drives until they were ready to go live, heh.

Update as of 6/3 – I originally wrote that article for SearchSQLServer.com.  I didn’t see the article appear there for a while, and when it popped up on SSWUG, I assumed SearchSQLServer had transferred it over to SSWUG.  Turns out that’s not the case.  We’re working through the details of that now.

This isn’t the first time one of my articles has been “pirated” – used to happen to me when I wrote for HAL-PC – but this is the first time it’s happened with an article I actually got paid to write.  Next thing you know, I’m going to need an agent.  Or maybe not.

I moved my gear into my desk at Caroline Collective today – well, actually, it was more of a buy-and-move. Most of this stuff is a new copy of the gear I use at home.

The grand opening will be Saturday, June 7th from 7pm til 10pm. The invite reads as follows:

“We are (collectively) happy to announce the Grand Opening of the Caroline Collective, Houston’s first coworking venue! Please join us Saturday, June 7th from 7-10pm at the home of Caroline Collective for drinks, light refreshments and heavy celebration. The event will be co-hosted with ArtStorm featuring collage artist Patrick Turk and the esteemed tenants of Caroline. Your attendance is not only appreciated, it’s needed. After all, it’s about all of us. Tasty hops provided by Houston’s own Saint Arnold Brewery and delectable dishes by chef David Grossman.”

Caroline’s at 4820 Caroline Street, 77004 with easy access from the Wheeler stop on light rail. Parking is available. I’ll be there, so if you’re interested in meeting a strangely outgoing SQL Server guy from Quest Software, c’mon down.

This is also the same night as the Ladytron concert, for which I hold two tickets.  The concert starts at 9pm – the jury’s still out as to whether or not Erika and I will leave the CC grand opening for the concert.  If I’m debating tossing a pair of Ladytron tickets to stay here, then you know it’s going to be a good party.

Junior DBAs, warm up your printers. The Microsoft SQL Customer Advisory Team, aka SQLCAT, has published a flowchart explaining how to troubleshoot performance issues with SQL Server. This is by far the best visual representation I’ve seen into how a senior DBA’s brain works:

SQL Customer Advisory Team’s Troubleshooting SQL Server 2005/2008 Performance and Scalability Flowchart

And just think – the rest of us had to learn this stuff the hard way – by reading manuals!

Yesterday afternoon, I stopped by the Caroline Collective and signed a lease on my very own desk.  Sounds odd to lease a desk, eh?  Especially sight unseen – there’s no actual desks in the space, just a big empty room with concrete floors, white & blue walls, and fluorescent lights dangling from a low ceiling.

Matt & Ned nervously showed me their prototype wood desk, and I could tell they weren’t sure whether or not I was going to “get” it.  One of them said something about how the desk would be finished off, and I had to laugh.  Finishing anything off isn’t the point.  It’s not that coworking needs to be unpolished, but the finish on the desks doesn’t matter.  Although, I do have to confess that I cringed when I read Ned’s Twitter about Knoll furniture – I thought to myself, please, God, don’t go buying high-end office furniture this early in the game.  I love modern stuff like that, but damn, it’s expensive for a startup business.  Anyway, I was relieved to see the desks were inexpensive but well-crafted wood jobs instead.

I get the whole coworking thing, especially as somebody who telecommuted for five years, but I bet most people aren’t going to foresee it until the desks and the personalities go in.  The factor that makes coworking tick is the chemistry – the unique mix of people from different backgrounds, different companies (or no company at all), the laid-back informal discussions that don’t come from meetings organized on a calendar.

When the people are in, when the artists are slinging paint, when the beer is in the fridge, when the desks are filled haphazardly with relics of different careers, that’s when people will get it, and it’ll happen like wildfire in a city like Houston.

And you’ll wish you’d have signed a lease on a desk while they were still available.  Trust me.

I’m testing the new builds of LiteSpeed and Toad.  I’m not to the point where I’m using my L337 SQL skillz yet because I take a very basic ground-level approach to testing.

I go through an entire program and click on every menu item.

Everywhere that it lets me add something, I add it, and then I go back and edit that something to see if it looks the same as what I added.  Then I delete it.

That’s all.

Sounds simple, but it takes days, and it finds a surprising number of bugs.  You would not believe the number of things that cause a program to crash just by clicking on them.  I’ve done these tests with developers in the same room, and they say things like, “Why on earth would you click there?”  Well, because you put a button there, and somebody’s going to click it.  If it’s not supposed to be clicked, get it off the screen.

In a week or two, I’ll get to the point where I’m testing advanced concepts inside the software, but for now, it’s Click City.

The other benefit of this approach is that you learn just about every piece of the software, every nook and cranny.  In the case of Toad, it’s mind-blowing.  I thought it was just a SQL Server development tool, and I don’t believe in unitaskers, but oh no – this is one serious multitasker.  I can see many Toad-centric howto blog posts in my future.

When DBAs ask where to go for simple, straightforward SQL Server tips, I usually point them to SQL-Server-Performance.com.  That site puts out a fantastic daily newsletter with SQL notes, questions & answers, and general tips.

I’m not wild about daily email newsletters, but this one’s a gem.  It’s gotten even better since Peter Wardy started putting a personal editorial at the top of each issue.  Here’s the one from today:

“I was tasked to buy a mattress under blanket for a bed today and who would have thought that the process would be so complicated. I thought it would be as simple as choosing the correct size—king or queen. Little did I know that the decisions were endless; from summer and winter mattress protectors to underlay blankets with wool and magnetic touch zones and prices that ranged from $60 to over $800. When I think about the purchase decision of an under blanket it is very similar to an open source database.

When I went to the shop today all I wanted was an under blanket that would protect the mattress, keep me warm and provide some comfort. Whether that was a cotton one or a wool blend with a high pile did not worry me, I just wanted something that worked. When I choose a database it is the same as an under blanket, I want a database where I do not need to make decisions about which database engine I want to use. I want an engine that works no matter what my requirements rather than having to choose a different engine if I want transactions or a different engine again if I want Foreign Key constraints. I think one of the key benefits of SQL Server is that the behaviour is typically the same whether a single user is running Express Edition or a multinational corporation is running Enterprise Edition.” – Peter Wardy

The only things that would make this newsletter better are searchable online archives and an easier-to-find subscription link.  I can help out with that last one:

Subscribe to the SQL-Server-Performance.com Newsletter

On my trip to DC this week, I ran across a couple of Nintendo Wiis in stock at Target.  For those of you who don’t follow video games, the Nintendo Wii is a notoriously hard-to-find game system.  It’s been out for months, but you still can’t walk into a store and just buy one.  Prospective customers learn through the grapevine when new shipments of Wiis will be delivered at local stores, and then patiently wait outside before the store opens in the hope that they’ll snag one.  Some are bought just to make a profit – people resell them on Craigslist for $0-$200 more than their $250 sticker price.

The Wii’s selling point is the motion-sensing remote control.  When playing the baseball game that comes with the Wii, you don’t push a series of buttons to swing when the baseball comes at you.  Instead, you simply hold the remote control like a bat, and swing it.  The better your swing, the better you hit the ball inside the game.  Same with tennis: hold the controller like a tennis racket and put topspin on the ball, and presto, the virtual ball spins.  It’s pretty impressive, and it’s playable by young and old alike.  As long as you can wave the controller around, you can play.

This simple, intuitive control system makes the Wii a smash hit at parties.  Anybody can grab the controller and play tennis, baseball, golf, whatever.  No skills required.  I’ve been wanting to throw myself a welcome-to-Houston party to get back in touch with our Texas friends, and I thought the Wii would be a great icebreaker.  I’m not into video games – I haven’t owned a console in years – but when I saw the Wii in stock, I had to get it.

Then I started thinking – why not take it to Emily’s house and show it to her 4-year-old stepson?  When we arrived, he had a friend over, and his friend recognized the Wii with wide eyes.  They got all excited, and I had a great time watching them jumping around the living room swinging at virtual baseballs, swinging virtual golf clubs, and rolling virtual bowling balls.  The other kid’s mom came over and went, “Wow, you have a Wii?  How’d you get it?”  She’d been dying to get one for her three kids.

It took me back to my childhood when one of our neighbors, Foster Cuthoff, had the coolest video game system on the block.  We’d all go over to his basement and play Contra for hours and hours.  Everybody thought it was so cool, and we would get all antsy over who would play next.

And then it happened.  My feeble mind connected the dots, and I realized I’m the wrong owner for that Wii.  It made so much more sense for Em to have it.  I’d only dabble with it every now and then at parties, because to me games aren’t really any fun unless they’re shared.  So, I gave it to Em.  Her stepson was so excited that Em says he’s still going around saying how much he loves me.

Awesome.  If that’s not success, I don’t know what is.  Granted, I didn’t save anybody’s life or anything, but it’s a hell of a good feeling.

My blog has been quiet the last few days because I’ve been in Washington DC visiting my Mom and my sister Emily.  I wanted to sneak in a quick visit between jobs.  I took the opportunity to redo both of their wireless networks and achieved a 0% success rate – I had to get two new wireless routers for different reasons.  As a reuslt, I haven’t had much connectivity, so no blogs for you.

Today, I’m flying to California to start work at Quest.  I’ve got my laptop cellular card all rigged up, got my camera charged up, and got my game face on.  Expect mucho bloggo.