blogging Archives

July 21, 2011

Do You Like Your Writing Boring? Me Neither

In a brief Twitter conversation with Wendy Pastrick (blog | Twitter), who is also another great SQL person out there (just incase you didn’t know), she had this to say:
“I do wish whitepapers were more interesting of a read at times. I’ve fallen asleep on a few.”
I couldn’t agree more, and let me expound on that. (Hey, it’s my blog so I could do it anyway!)

If you don’t know, I’ve written quite a bit over the years (check out some of the links on the main SQLHA.com site which has some of them) including the books I’ve authored or co-authored. I’m always doing some kind of content, and doubt I’ll ever stop. However, when I’ve done some writing for clients, every now and then I’ll get the comments back that the writing style is not formal enough or that I use some colloquial phrases which won’t fly (oops! there’s one …). While I see their point, and in some cases they are probably right, I’ll go back to Wendy’s quote. Most people would rather it be a bit less formal and easy to read than stiff as a board. There is a happy medium somewhere that blends readability with great technical content. They do not need to be mutually exclusive.

I’m not saying more formal writing does not have its place nor were my reviewers wrong. In some cases over the years, reviewers were absolutely, 100% correct. Sometimes things can be a little too informal … and that’s why I have reviewers actually look at not only accuracy of content, but readability. Both are very important not only to me, but you, the reader. If you have content that is well written but sucks in terms of its technical accuracy, why even bother? Same for the reverse: if it is technically right but hard to read and ultimately misses its audience, it’s a waste of time for everyone involved.

I do want to say one thing about reviewers. I always read every comment they write – good or bad. Good ones will call me out on everything, even down to a missing period or a misspelling. If I blundered something technical, absolutely flog me. I have no ego about it. Did I completely miss something I should have talked about? Let me know. Sometimes it’s possible to add, in other cases, no for various reasons that could be their own blog post (ah, politics!).

With lots of reviews come lots of opinions. I often get polar opposites (loved it/hated it). At the end of the day, I need to figure out which one to go with and stick to my decision. I try to take consensus. If there is a lone dissenter, they’re often an outlayer (outside of being technically wrong). If it’s a lot of folks, genuine issue. If it’s some but not all, I need to think about it a bit more. One of the advantages of having multiple reviewers is that it’s invaluable, but it’s also a bit of a curse because it does add a lot of work for an author.

Back to the topic at hand. If doing a whitepaper or training course for someone like Microsoft or another company (which may or may not have my name attached to it), chances are it needs to be a bit more formal. Using colloquial phrases can be problematic even in informal writing because they are not always universal around the world. For example, saying something like, “Boy, implemeting things like this is like taking a swing for the fences and striking out.” While you can get the meaning from the context, it’s a baseball reference. Baseball is far from a universally known sport, let alone its idiosyncrasies and nuances. Over the years I’ve become much better at recognizing that and most of it gets excised before final drafts, but it does not always happen. So I apologize in advance if you do not always get some of that stuff in a publication that has me associated with it.

Having said that, I do rely on editors in this entire process. While I try to catch a lot of this kind of stuff, it’s really up to them to a large degree to try to fix any wording or verbiage that is not up to snuff, or mark it so I can deal with it. Good editors excel at this and bad ones miss it entirely. Every client may even have a “house style” as to how they prefer something to sound/read, and I’m fine with that – they just need to let me know.

Bottom line: realize before you get something to read, it’s been through a lot of people’s hands. One thing with editors that I’ve found is that if they are unfamiliar with SQL Server, sometimes they’ll alter wording in a way that is wrong so I’ll have to work with them to come up with something that works for both of us. Trust me, there’s a lot of work that goes into writing a document that no one ever sees. If it was easier, I think more people would do it (if they like to write, that is; most people hate to compose documentation of any sort).

I’ve had quite a few people over the years after reading some of my stuff (especially my 2005 and 2008 books) that they can hear “my voice” in them. That’s great, because I tend to think that people who know me or have possibly seen me speak can see that. One of the hardest things to do is take concepts that could be difficult or complex, and make them either relatable or easy to understand. For me, it’s not unlike writing a fiction story. What do I mean by that?

Whenever I sit down to write something, especially a whitepaper or book, I try to figure out who my audience is and what story I want to tell. You need to start out at A and end up at Z. The thoughts need to be coherent and build on one another. For example, I’ve always maintained you can’t really talk about SQL Server failover clustering without understanding and explaining the Windows side of things. It’s why I put it in my books and cover it before I talk about the SQL part. However, when I explain the Windows side, I do it from a SQL perspective and address it that way so it ties everything together. So even though Windows is a bit of a left turn, it’s all part of the same thing. It’s up to me as the author, to tie it all together and wrap it up into a neat bow.

A big thanks to Wendy for inspiring this blog post, and all of this is quite relevant as I embark on the planning process for the Denali followup to the 2000, 2005, and 2008 books. By the time you see that book, the content will have been vetted technically by reviewers, massaged and altered (probably a few times), and had its makeup applied so it looks pretty for you. I’ll make a more formal announcement of my plans for the Denali book soon … it’s shaping up nicely.

February 15, 2011

Tweet, Message Board Post, Blog Post, Whitepaper, Or Book?

As I’ve started to use social media a bit more, it’s been an interesting experiment. Those who know me know that before blogging, Facebook, and Twitter, I did just a little bit of writing (insert sarcastic laugh here). I resisted Twitter for awhile and am still a bit iffy about it to be dead honest. I’m warming up to it.

Using Twitter has been informative on a few levels. Twitter has a basic limitation of 140 characters for a tweet, so if you exceed that (natively, not using another tool which allows more), you need multiple lines. The #sqlhelp hash tag is a great example where you may need multiple tweets to get an answer out.

This really begs the question: what is the best format for what you want to say? A single tweet? A post on a message board looking for responses that are more detailed? A blog post which will be more informative and detailed but not a tome? A whitepaper which can have more content than a blog post? Or do you just write a whole damn book?

Since I’ve done all of the above (in spades!), here’s some advice:

If you’re going to use the #sqlhelp hash tag with a complex question (for example, don’t ask for advice on a high availability architecture and expect a 140 character response that is definitive), put a link to a message board or somewhere similar (even a blog post) that people can respond in more detail.

As a responder – and I’m just as guilty on Twitter sometimes – having multiple answers is sometimes necessary, but if it gets too much, you may want to have the person contact you directly or blog about it. For me, Twitter is hard to follow versus a message board because of the lack of built-in, easy-to-use threading. As I know people do like to see resolutions on #sqlhelp because it may help them, it’s tough.

Having said that, I find #sqlhelp almost more immediate than, say, the MSDN or TechNet forums. There’s something very cool about that.

A tweet shouldn’t necessarily lead to a blog post or something bigger, but it may spark ideas.

If you like to blog (and who isn’t blogging these days?), the next logical step is something like a whitepaper. I find many people have short attention spans, so I try to keep my blog posts reasonable short (relatively speaking of course) and focused. Some people may do a series of related blog posts to break a topic up. That series may equate to a whitepaper. Personally, when I know I want to do a bigger topic.

Writing a whitepaper is easier than you think. Some tips:

1. Get it tech reviewed. Even the best of us have some things which are wrong or makes sense to us the way we word it but not to others.
2. If possible, get it edited by someone who does it for a living. It really does help.

That said, like a tweet or a blog post, sometimes you have a lot to say. I find most people’s tolerance for a whitepaper under 40 or 50 pages of text. If you’re writing a 181 page whitepaper, that’s pretty much a book.

Clearly a book is a big commitment. These days you can self publish if you really want. I’ve talked about it, Brent Ozar (blog | Twitter) has blogged about it, but don’t write a book if you expect to get rich. Do it because you want to and are passionate about the subject you are presenting. You employ all the techniques you would at the smaller levels, just on a much grander scale.

The problem I find with more instant media such as Twitter and blogging is that while it’s often right and good, there’s just as much out there that is bad and incorrect and can cause harm. Even if what is said is technically correct, it could be the wrong advice for some. You need to always put things in proper context. Before I say anything else, let me say I am far from perfect. I do get things wrong at times and if I do, I post corrections or note it in a way that people can see what the right answer is. The last thing I need is someone saying, “Well, Allan said this and it caused my <insert thing here> to fail.” Ugh.

The other mediums such as whitepapers and books tend to have reviewers who will ensure that things are right and the messaging is on point. Even that is a tricky process because if you get multiple opinions about something, it’s up to the author to make “the call”.

It’s great that we have all of this content out there and the ability to do our own – we just need to choose the right one for our messages!

January 19, 2011

IP, You P, We All Want Some Free IP

There’s been a bit of churn and unrest in the SQL community as of late, with some of it centered around things like protecting blog content, sharing, and why people give back to the community (or why they choose not to) – see Aaron Bertrand’s post here as a good launching point. I’m going to use music again for an analogy.

Home Taping Is Killing Music (original BPI logo) Source: Wikipedia.

In the modern age of music where physical media is considered passe to many, there are clearly legal ways to obtain music wherever you live in the world. Some artists also choose to put free MP3s or clips on their websites or songs on social sites like Myspace (which has fallen on hard times as of late). Whether the artist is on a major label or independent, at the end of the day, their music is their intellectual property (IP). For that, artists can copyright their works and/or get a mechanical license to use a song if it is a cover to protect themselves.

Going back to the days of reel to reel and cassettes (some of you young’uns may not have ever seen or used ’em), the main concern from the RIAA and its brothers and sisters around the world has been has been piracy. It’s all about getting paid. If someone could take a source, record it to a cassette or easily copy it (such as those old dual well cassette decks), people could steal music. With MP3s (and other file formats; MP3 to me is like calling a Windows machine a PC even though it’s no longer really associated with IBM), torrent sites, etc., music piracy has reached a whole new fervor. Heck, the RIAA for awhile was suing people.

Now, what the listener has no clue about is what it cost to make and produce that music. It could have been done in their bedroom, a hotel room, or a real studio. Each has different costs, and at some point, that artist may (and most likely will) want to recoup that. If music is their full time job, there’s no question they would like to make some money on some music they produce. Some artists make most of their income from touring and merchandise if they’re big enough, but a $10 CD sold at a show for a smaller artist is important for them because the profit goes right back to them. And if you think you make a lot of money in music, even big artists who had a hit single or album often are in debt to record companies and rarely see a dime until all costs are recouped. There are many stories out there.

With cassettes, someone somewhere had to buy the product to start any kind of duplication. A lot of us made mix tapes back in the day for cars or your Walkman, significant others, etc. There was no malicious intent. I know I sometimes bought music based on that stuff.

Did some just copy albums and give them to friends? Sure, but even dubbing at 2x, cassettes were not the most convenient format to copy and if you were recording from LP, well, it was in real time. Fast forward to now. With the introduction of CDs and the ability for computers to copy them, all of a sudden copying got much easier. Then you had music files – not just CDs. Once a file leaks out, you get a bit-perfect copy of the original unless it has been altered (for example, converted from a lossless into a lossy format). It can be sent to a friend in a matter of seconds.

Here’s where the sides come in. I have known a few people over the years that accumulate music files. Size matters – the more the merrier. They probably stopped buying any music from even legitimate sites years ago. They’re not downloading it to sample it to see if they like it and then legitimately purchase it; they’re just getting it like it’s their right to grab it for free. They think it’s their right to just take it, 24×7, with no impunity. Any value has been stripped out.

Who benefits from this other than the person who has the file? No one who needs to. Look at the record companies. Now, I’m not saying they’re right in all of this equation as prices have remained fairly high on CDs even after eliminating the packaging they said was keeping costs up, and they have done enough stupid business things over the years to put themselves in a difficult financial spot, but what’s the incentive for a label to pay an artist if they get nothing back? If the record company isn’t getting paid, the artists aren’t. For independents, it’s worse. If an up-and-coming artist sunk their life’s savings into making the perfect record and someone just throws it up on a torrent site, who gets hurt? The person who gets the file isn’t; +1 in the files column. However, it removes the incentive for those making the music to even do it unless it’s a hobby (and even then, it may kill it for them).

It’s like Newton’s third law in a way: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

The Internet is a funny thing. Like all of you, I read tons of blogs and learn a lot; I don’t just write blog posts. It’s awesome that there’s such a wealth of information for people of all skills from experts who you would have never had access to in the past. Remember the good old days before everyone started blogging you would wait and hopefully MS would release a whitepaper or something useful outside of Books Online? I do. These days, all you have to do more often than not is just do a search with your engine of choice or go to a forum. You may find the information or answer in seconds more often than not. The question is this: is what you found correct? I mean, isn’t everything you read on the Internet correct? If you trust the source, well, it probably is.

The SQL Server community is one of the few I’ve had the privilege of participating in where a lot of us (myself included) like to give back freely and often. To some degree, we police ourselves and will call out bad advice and praise good advice. Even if we’re not full time DBAs or developers but help them, we can relate to your pain because we still see it every day when we’re onsite consulting or delivering training. We know you need correct advice and technical information, not just some hair brained thing we devised for the heck of it that may get you in trouble and take you out of support. That’s why a lot of our blog posts are well thought out and take hours, days, and sometimes weeks to do (I’m in the midst of doing one that requires a bit of testing that will happen over the next few weeks).

When you download free software from many vendors, often they ask you to register or enter some information. You don’t think they are asking for that for the heck of it, do you? They’re hoping that you like it and you want to buy whatever it is you downloaded (if there’s a Pro version of the freeware or it is timed to expire), or they can e-mail you in the future. They’re looking to get paid at some point. Not everyone bites, but they assume some of you will.

For someone like myself, I hope my genuine desire to give back and help here or elsewhere (including on forums, Twitter, and anything else I do) translates into potential customers for the services I offer. Helping is a big part of being in the SQL Server community at large. What I am giving away is my IP that helps make me unique. This is why some bloggers out there will go to great lengths to protect their IP and put taglines in scripts or make it so you can’t copy their text.

Unfortunately, there are other bloggers who would want to steal it and call it their own – welcome to the piracy for the blogger community. See Brent Ozar’s (Twitter) great posts he made during what he deemed Plagiarism Week. In Finding the Slimy Slimeballs, he sums a lot of what I feel perfectly and it really needs to be repeated:

“I have to keep playing because I make a living off my content – it’s my marketing tool to bring in new consulting customers. This is especially important to me now that I’ve become a full time consultant; I don’t get paid unless I’m working for a client. I’m not getting paid to write this, either, but I do it because I’m passionate about helping the community and helping bloggers protect their content.”

I am VERY appreciative of the opportunities I’ve been given over the years, and especially since I’ve gone independent. I take none of it for granted. Being able to pay my bills with the day job provides me with the ability to donate my time to do things like blog, pay (out of my own pocket) to attend and speak at SQL Saturdays, etc. I really do enjoy it. There is no greater feeling than seeing a lightbulb moment on the face of someone. When all you’ve got is the Internet or free resources like a SQL Saturday because your boss won’t/can’t pay for anything like going to PASS or a formal training class, getting that information from sources you trust (and I hope I’ve established that) is invaluable. Those of us that give of our time know this and want to give you our best.

What we don’t want is others taking credit for things that we’ve put lots of hours into, even if we give it away for free. There still is a cost involved, even if we never pass it on to you. We hope to get it back in other ways. I know I love to hear it when people come up to me and thank me for some bit of content or another that they read and helped them. But what is the incentive for those of us that really do like to give back at no monetary cost to you when others just want to leech the content from us, post it elsewhere, and call it their own?

No, we’re not going to put a PayPal link on our sites and ask you to each donate money to access content. That’s insulting to you and us. I know I’d never do it. Since we’re giving of our time and our content because we want to make sure you guys are successful, all we ask is to respect us and link back to where you got it from or give us some credit if you repost bits or do something public with it. That’s not an unreasonable request, is it?

Now, I do see the downside of going overly militant, too. You may alienate the very readers you seek to help. There is the concept of “fair use”. It is a royal pain to try to use something, only realizing you need to chop out or comment out things to use it. I know 99% of the people out there have no malicious intent, but it’s that 1% that makes some people do what they feel they need to do to protect their IP. When I write scripts, I just put the right info in comments so it doesn’t impede anything and I hope it doesn’t get stripped out. I do know I can’t control it once it’s out in the wild, so I have to hope for the best.

Here’s something that may shock you (hopefully not): there are very few original and revolutionary ideas in IT at this stage of the game. To some degree it’s all been done before. We’re offering a new approach or new information not available before to that “old” concept. New things in IT make up a small percentage.

For example, when I talk about SLAs, and their newer bretheren RTOs and RPOs, I didn’t come up with those concepts. But if I decide to write a blog post about them, I can certainly help you navigate them and give you ways and ideas to implement them as they relate to SQL Server and your environments based on my years of experience. That’s what you want from me – something you can put to use. If you wanted a generic interpretation, there are any number of places you can get it. That’s the value add a good blogger should be able to provide and keeps you coming back for more.

I wish things were black and white here. They’re not. They’re a wonderful shade of gray.

April 17, 2010

The Hosting Merry-go-round

Back in February, I wrote a blog post entitled “The Blog and Site Are Back (or, Don’t Change Hosting Providers If You Don’t Have To“. Since then, I’ve changed hosting providers for sqlha.com another two times. Why all the change? Well, a lot of it has to do with this blog.

Let’s start with the original hosting provider. That blog post tells the high level tale of woe which I will not rehash. That opened the door for Hosting Company #2. They in many ways were just as bad as the original one – I couldn’t get the blog working right to save my life. They were hard to get support from and after about a month of trying to troubleshoot, I gave up. That was unfortunate as I really liked their e-mail solution and they were flexible with domains and databases (relatively speaking).

Hosting Company #3 came into play early in April at my frustration with #2. By all accounts, everything has worked, but the problem is their flexibility with domains and what I got for my money. Quite frankly, I’m not a high volume user, but demanding in other ways, and by just hosting sqlha.com with them, it was more expensive. (I also do a couple of other domains for personal stuff, too, and I prefer to have it all under one house so-to-speak.)

Enter Hosting Company #4 for sqlha.com, who winds up being the hosting provider for one of my long running websites. I was going to possibly move that one, but their new hosting plans are flexible, pretty cheap, and solid. I know what I’m getting from them as my one domain has been there for ten years. They’re always responsive and helpful. They fully support BlogEngine.NET and I spent quite a bit of time porting over my old posts to here. This should be the final move. Now all of my domains are under one roof.

All of this was going on behind the scenes between a few business trips, a lot of work (including writing a 70+ page whitepaper), and so on. Anyone who thinks those of us running our own businesses and being self employed is easy, think again! If I had lots of minions I’d have tasked all of this domain business to other folks to get finished. Instead, I’m head chef, sous chef, dishwasher, and waiter all rolled up in one.

June 17, 2009

Sorry It’s Been Awhile Since My Last Post

Well, it’s been about a month since I last posted, but I’ve been pretty busy. I’m literally in the final stages of the book (looking at the final few PDF proofs), so that’s consumed a lot of time. I also delivered my first SQL Server 2008 failover clustering training class down in Dallas for four days last week, and spent a bunch of time getting the demo/test environments up and running. The class went well and I’m looking forward to doing it more if people ask for it. If you’re interested in a delivery, contact me.

This week I’m out in Redmond working on a project and have a few meetings with some Microsoft folks.

One of my PASS abstracts was accepted (Advanced Failover Clustering Installation Techniques with SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008), and I’ll be presenting in November. I have a few that were accepted as alternates, and I’ll know soon enough if they make the final cut.

I’m also presenting two sessions at the Best Practices Conference which is in Reston, VA, from August 24 – 26. The sessions are DBA359 – Tips and Tricks for Successful Database Mirroring Deployments with Microsoft SQL Server and DBA366 – Planning a SQL Server 2005 or 2008 Failover Cluster with Windows Server 2008.

I promise once I’m back from this trip and the book is done, I’ll be a bit more active.

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