PASS Archives

September 27, 2017

Off to dataMinds Connect, A Peek into PASS Summit 2017, and Other Updates

Can you believe it’s nearly October? I blinked and realized I hadn’t written a blog post since June. Max and I have been super busy with customer work here at the cozy confines of SQLHA. Some of that you’ll see publicly – like the documentation I’ve been writing for Microsoft on the availability features for SQL Server 2017 on Linux. Fun fact: it was announced that it will be generally available (GA) next Monday, October 2! It’s been a fun few months and what I’m working on will be out soon.

I’m heading to Europe to speak at dataMinds Connect next week. I’m looking forward to it – I’ve heard great things about the conference and it’l be my first time in Belgium. I’ll be delivering both a full day precon and a brand new session “Top Troubleshooting Tips for Clustered Implementations of SQL Server“. It would have been nice to also go to SQL Saturday Copenhagen (lovely town – I’ve been there a few times for conferences), but too much going on here to extend the trip.

I’ve also got three other major speaking things coming up (one of which will get its own section below): PASS Summit, SQL Server Live! in Orlando in November, and for the only time this year, the 4-day Mission Critical SQL Server class with labs. The class will be just outside of Philadelphia. There are still a few seats left. Use the code SEPBLOG for 25% off.

For SQL Server Live! I’ll be doing something new a full day of a bit of hybrid lab/instructional on November 12. It’s not a traditional precon, and it should be fun. If you plan on attending, use the code LSPK36 to get $500 off the standard price of $2,395 – you’ll only pay $1,895, or use one of the links I’ve provided. This link goes directly to the registration page.

If you’re in Minneapolis, go see Max at SQL Saturday next weekend, October 7, and definitely come up and say hi to both of us at PASS Summit since we’ll have a booth again with Denny Cherry and Associates.

RunAs Radio #51

I recorded a RunAs Radio session with my old friend Richard Campbell a few weeks ago. It had been way too long, and we had a blast catching up and talking about SQL Server, availability, and a bunch of stuff inbetween. It was just posted today – listen to it here.

PASS Summit and My Upcoming Precon

I want to talk for a moment about PASS as an organization as well as PASS Summit and my upcoming precon. I have only missed two or three Summits since its inception (Chicago, Orlando, and I think one of the Seattle ones early on). Sure, people can complain about the change of the meaning of the letters, etc., but under any guise, PASS – both Summit and the organization – has been a building block in my career. I could have never guessed that attending Summit in 2000 in San Francisco would be the start of a long journey for me from attendee to speaker to precon speaker to having a booth with SQLHA as a vendor.

Years ago the conference landscape 20 years ago was more stuff like Tech Ed than anything else. It’s funny to see now how many options we have now to speak and attend. Some of those events are downright fantastic. However, just because Summit is one of the biggest events in the Microsoft data platform world and one I still love going every year. Let me be clear: by no means do I think Summit is a perfect conference. I have my gripes, and always will, but for me, it is one of the “must do” data platform events even if I was not a speaker. Just the networking alone is fantastic. No, PASS is not paying me to say any of this, but it’s easy to get cynical about PASS as an organization and Summit as an event because it’s always just been there for most of us along with many other events including SQL Saturday. Many folks you know and love today in our small corner of the world got their “big breaks” at PASS Summit. Not all of them still attend Summit, which I understand, but reality is that Summit, and maybe PASS as an organization, worked for them at one point but they grew beyond it. There’s nothing wrong with that, but Summit still does a lot right for many folks. I mean it when I say I’m honored to be picked to speak at Summit and any event like dataMinds Connect, SQL Bits, SQL Saturday … you get the picture; I never assume, nor do not take an opportunity for granted. I’m not a DYKWIA (Do You Know Who I Am?) type. I’ve said no, but it’s for reasons like I have scehedule conflicts, etc.

As for my journey as a speaker, PASS Summit was integral for me. I remember my first speaking slot all those years ago, and then finally getting a nod for a precon. Could I fill a whole day’s worth of content? Seems silly now to think I couldn’t, and for those who really know me at this point, you are probably laughing your tuchus off because at this point, I can talk with no slides, no demo, and not even a whiteboard for as long as I need to do it.If you saw my SQL Server on Linux talk at SQL Saturday Boston this year, you know what I mean.

Getting opportunities like a precon challenged me. It made me better. Sometimes I failed. Most times, I succeed. Last year was phenomenal – the most people I’ve had doing labs simultaneously to date. When I introduced a lab component a few years ago into some of my precons, I started way before I did it at a big conference like PASS Summit in smaller doses as a proof of concept. No one else had tried to attempt 100 people doing labs at the same time where there is often crap connectivity. Crazy talk! I had no idea if it would be great or terrible, but I knew I wanted to do more. PASS put their faith in me and I’ve been lucky to be given a chance to do labs ever since, this year included.

I’m putting the finishing touches on the lab for the Summit precon in the next few days . This year’s precon is “Advanced SQL Server Availability and Storage Solutions”. Designing lab content and the instructional design around labs is one of the hardest things I do, and it’s even harder finding that balance in a one day event like a precon where you have a lot to talk about and demo, too. In one of my multi-day classes, it’s much easier. I do enjoy the challenge, and I urge you to reserve your spot because the last few years have completely sold out (and we’re nearly there already). I do cap the number of students who can attend since there’s only one of me and I can only have so many proctors. I hope to see you there.

Other Updates

I hit a big milestone. In August, I celebrated 10 years of going independent. I remember when I did it I thought let me give this a go for a year and see how it goes. One became two and the rest is history. Thanks to everyone who has supported me over the years and done business with me. I look forward to many more years doing this.
I was re-awarded my dual Microsoft MVP. I can’t believe I’m coming up on nearly 10 years as a Microsoft MVP. Time flies!
I did three sessions at VMworld in Las Vegas. Hope to be back next year.

June 23, 2016

PASS Summit, VMworld, and More – Oh My!

I know it’s been awhile since I’ve done a blog post, but we’re in the midst of a few heads down customer engagements. We’re also busy in other ways and the second half of the year and the early parts of 2017 are already filling up. Besides the already scheduled Mission Critical SQL Server class in Chicago from August 8 – 11, I will be presenting at the Chicago SQL Server User Group on the 11th to wrap up my week in the Windy City.

In a few weeks, on July 12, I will be presenting for the PASS High Availability and Disaster Recovery virtual chapter doing an all new SQL Server 2016 topic which should be a lot of fun.

If all of this wasn’t enough, I’m very honored to have been selected to speak at PASS Summit once again, and for the first time, I will be speaking at VMworld, VMware’s annual conference, later this summer. At VMworld, I will be doing a high availability talk as well as a panel discussion with some other folks you know. At Summit, I will be doing a pre-con on Monday as well as a half day session, and I’m very proud to say that Max will also be speaking at PASS Summit with two lightning talk. Of course, we’ll be in our Consultant’s Corner booth, too.

There may be a handful of other things popping up on the calendar for the second half of 2016, too.

Looking ahead to 2017, the first confirmed dates are for my Mission Critical SQL Server class in London in March. There will be much more in 2017 – we’re just getting started.

As an aside, I will be doing a blog post specifically about the book in the upcoming weeks since so many have asked what is going on.

See you online or in person soon!

October 27, 2015

Aftermath of a PASS Summit Preconference Session

It’s currently the Tuesday morning after my PASS Summit 2015 preconference session “Advanced SQL Server Availability Architectures and Deployments“. Before I say anything, I wanted to thank all of the attendees for taking the time out of their schedules to spend a day with lil’ ol’ me and using their training budget for my session. I really do appreciate it. I know they have a choice, and it’s why I do things like stay for an hour after the session to answer questions. Needless to say, I was a bit fried by the time I was done. I grabbed dinner with my business partner Max Myrick, and as soon as I got back to the hotel, it was time for la la land.

The early buzz on Twitter so far has been very good. I am both humbled and pleased since I never make any assumptions going into things. When you put an event like this together, you sometimes have no idea how it’ll go. There were more, but below is a sampling of some of the comments posted (with their relevant links … I don’t make this stuff up).

“RDMA? RDMA! Happy as a pig in poop at @SQLHA presentation …”

“Geek heaven, lots of hardware discussions because guess what SQL runs on…:D”
@Ms_Alaina

“Best session ever! Addressed many pain points in design and implementation! Thanks!”
@mssqlranger

Thanks for the great session today @SQLHA lots of stuff I can use when I get back to work
@RutherfordTX

Lab creation setup for @SQLHA #PASS #Summit15 precon is *really* cool. I’d like to see something like that for training/sandbox inhouse 🙂

great class material, great class vibe 🙂

– @sqL_handLe

I will admit – it’s always fun to see 100 people doing labs simultaneously which are all hosted in the cloud (and no, not Azure or Amazon). This is the second year in a row I’ve done had labs at a PASS precon, and it’s gratifying to see months of hard work come together. Last year was the grand experiment. I remember many people thinking I was insane for even attempting it. And yes, the rumors are true – I demoed an Availability Group that spanned both Azure IaaS and Amazon EC2. Maybe I’ll blog about that configuration at some point.

Labs are fun …

You don’t just show up in October and do a precon with labs at a major event. The process begins much earlier in the year when the call for speakers happens. In my “go big or go home” philosophy, as if doing what did last year was not hard enough, I decided to one up myself and submit a higher level session that was more advanced. Why? Taking the challenge aspect out for me (I love a good one …), there’s a lot of people who have been asking for more than “What is clustering?” type of content. There’s always a risk in submitting something more advanced because one person’s 200 level is another’s 500 level. But what the heck, you only live once, right?

Before I even submitted another precon abstract with labs, I asked PASS if they would let me do it if it was selected. There’s a practical reason for this: cost. There are some very tangible things that are not free when it comes to doing a precon with labs. They said yes, so abstract submitted, and thankfully, accepted a few months later. Away we go – the real work now begins.

I truly believe that everyone learns differently, but for what I do, hands on experience is pretty essential. My labs are not some canned thing someone else does and I’m reusing; I spend time doing instructional design so it fits the content I will be presenting. I try to add a hands on component where I can in all that I do. It’s not always possible. For the lab portion, each student gets their own lab environment. The labs for this one had two main lab exercises which encompassed 10 VMs (six for Lab 1, four for Lab 2). That’s just under 200 GB of VMs for every student.

While doing my four day Mission Critical SQL Server class is one thing, making sure 100 people can all do labs at the same time is another. There’s a lot of back and forth making sure that not only the venue has enough bandwidth, but the company that I use for the labs will have enough horsepower reserved to ensure all of the attendees can use up to 1000 VMs simultaneously. There’s also the fact that all of this, again, costs money so it has to be practical. This is why PASS and I agreed both years to cap the attendees to a maximum of 100 people.

When labs start in a session of this size, there are always some issues to deal with (for example, resetting login or password information, various connectivity issues), but time in and time out, things have worked with only minor things to deal with. I want to give a quick shout out to the Washington State Convention Center folks. They handled a few issues with the wired connections as well as power pretty quickly yesterday. They’re also very nice to deal with (they even remembered the requirements from last year). I also need proctors – it’s nearly impossible in a class of that size to answer everyone’s questions on my own. A special thanks to Max as well as Nic Cain (blog | Twitter) for helping out yesterday. I also have to thank the folks back at PASS HQ, especially Leeza Zelmer. None of this is possible without them, but Leeza really was my main contact and helped facilitate quite a bit behind the scenes.

Will there be another precon at PASS Summit with labs in my future? Who knows … let’s see what 2016 brings. At the moment, I need a bit of time not to be worrying about VMs, connectivity, or labs for a few weeks, but chances are high I’ll be having the same “Will you allow me to do this?” conversation with PASS in the spring again. All the effort and time is worth it when students have comments like the above because the day really isn’t about me; it’s all about them and for them.

I’m looking forward to the formal start of PASS Summit tomorrow morning. See you at the keynote!

July 7, 2015

Defending Fort SQL Server

I’m seeing a common theme with a subset of our customers. It goes something like this: An enemy horde is on the horizon and the database team has banded together and barred the gates of Fort SQL Server to keep it at bay or die trying.

Unfortunately, the enemy is “change” and the DBAs have about as much chance of winning as cocker spaniel does in a fight against a pack of velociraptors. It really is just a matter of time.

The particular change du jour that some are stalwartly resisting is the encroachment of virtualization into the hallowed halls of SQL Server. This puzzles me because virtualization is a potentially beneficial change. However, conversations along those lines usually result in a “Keep that virtualization away from my SQL Server!” cry from these DBAs.

In computer history terms, virtualization is by no means a “new” technology. It’s been around for more than a decade. It has already been accepted as the foundation of the modern datacenter and the secret sauce for both public and private clouds. It is also the queen of the fully automated test environment.

Logic, logic, wherefore art thou logic? Can virtualization really be good for everything else, but not good for SQL Server?

Our customers that embrace virtualization and allow us to help them tend to find that it:

Adds almost no overhead (1-2% in most cases)
Provides some nice options for building (and rebuilding in DR scenarios) standardized servers from templates
Gives the only type of failover (either vMotion of Live Migration depending on your invading virtualization horde of choice) that keeps SQL Server’s hard earned self-tuning knowledge
Increases the available options for server consolidation which usually improves both hardware utilization and HA/DR options

That is not to say that the pathway to virtualization is a cakewalk which doesn’t have its challenges. Typically, there is new knowledge to be gained and new skills to master. Service monitoring becomes a must have to thwart the “noisy neighbor” scenario and other resource conflicts. At many companies, the DBAs become more reliant on the IT operations staff for certain tasks they previously owned – up to and including some types of failover. However, none of these is by any means terrifying to IT professionals. This is partially because no other field progresses as fast as computing, and over time we’ve gotten used to the pace of our changing technologies.

My business partner Allan has also seen quite a few of these SQL-under-siege situations. It is one of the main reasons that we are teaming up for a talk about virtualizing SQL coming up on Wednesday July 8 at noon EDT for the PASS Virtualization virtual chapter (http://virtualization.sqlpass.org/). If you are interested, please join us there. Click here to register.

Our goal is to help you understand what long-term benefits Hyper-V brings to the table so you will be leading the team doing the planning and deployment. In the end, a great Hyper-V implementation the best defense of all.

June 11, 2015

Features Should Not Dictate Mission Critical System Designs

I was working up a new presentation for the upcoming 24 Hours of PASS on mission critical system design (a bit more on that later) when one of those puzzles of life we all have cooking away on the back burners of the mind suddenly snapped into focus. The story of that puzzle goes a little something like this…

The development team ships a great feature called ladders for changing those light bulbs in high ceilings. They also have a fashionable feature called yellow polka dot cloth, which is just perfect for those retro 70s swimming trunks and bikinis that are all the rage. And they put in a cleverly-engineered tricycle feature loved by our active 4 year olds. Nothing at all wrong here.

Yet many times I arrive onsite to help a new customer with their mission critical system only to find that they’ve currently got a three wheeled, yellow polka dot, monster truck jacked up on stilts. I always used to wonder just how on earth they ever got to this point.

Now, thanks to last week’s epiphany, I finally understand. There is a natural tendency of humans to map what they need to what they have – regardless of any actual correlation between the two. There’s probably a law of needs way down the list about this already, and if not there should be because it really is true.

I guess this was correct in most natural situations. If a caveman needed a weapon to fight off a sabertooth tiger, picking one that was close at hand would be a critical survival skill. Clearly this is no time to start with a blank page and work through exactly what the best weapon would be to kill a huge, hungry cat that is looking at you like you are the answer to all his culinary dreams.

But therein lies the real moral of the story, and it’s just as true for DBAs.

Under pressure you’ll have to take the existing features which are, after all, designed to implement high availability and disaster recovery. The funny thing is that this is relative cheap and fast, but just always seems to fit like that sweater your aunt knitted you for Christmas – one sleeve too short, one too long, a bit tight around the neck, and never draping just right.

The features that ship in the product are great. However, chances are that if you sat down and wrote out real wants and needs for your particular applications and environment you would find that those existing features can get you only part of the way to success. Suddenly the gaps that you never saw when you just implemented HA/DR features become all too noticeable. The plan becomes a bit more complex and you wind up using a feature for this, part of a feature for that, writing some scripts over here, and adding a bit of custom hardware over there. It starts to be, well, work. But now the solution fits. It just feels right and does what it should when it should.

Of course, some knowledge always helps, and I mentioned that I was working on a new session for 24 Hours of PASS called “The Art and the Science of Designing a Mission Critical SQL Server Solution”. If you’ve ever thought about taking out that blank page and starting from scratch, I believe you’ll find it gives you some fresh new ideas and a nice starting point.

I hope some of you will join me there on Wednesday, June 24^th at 8PM Pacific/11PM Eastern. Alternatively, feel free to try to fend off that big cat with a convenient tree branch – but we both know down deep that it’s probably going to end with one very happy feline.

If I’ve achieved nothing else, I hope you take away that what you really need is rarely what you have conveniently at hand and that you must actively resist human nature to see that this is the case.

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