This will be a quick update to my post from earlier this week.  As I mentioned previously, PASS has plans to do away with all paper evaluation forms in the future.  This change can come none to soon for me!  After I published Fridays blog, I was contacted by a speaker who had some evaluations in their report that obviously werent theirs.  So, after some digging, the staff at PASS HQ figured out that during data entry several evals were incorrectly included under this speakers session id.  We corrected the scores and doing so caused the overall “top 10” to change slightly.  The updated top sessions with ties is now actually a top 12 list where before it was actually a top 11.  Additionally doing this updated the track rankings in the BIA track as well.  I apologize for the mix up on these evals but, I guess this is not totally unexpected when hiring temporary workers to enter 8,000+ individual evals.  The updated rankings can be found here

Online Evaluations produce unexpected results

One interesting thing I noticed in this years online evals was that we received evals for all sorts of “events” that happened at the Summit.  Normally, we only get them for sessions but because of the way the session scheduler was automated and integrated into the session eval forms, we actually received evals on many other events that took place at the summit other than regular sessions.  Receiving candid feedback on these events was quite refreshing and will be worked back into next years similar events. 

Moving into the 21st century

This year since we offered online evaluations as well as paper evaluations I was interested to see what the turnout would be and while the amount of paper vs online evaluations entered was more lopsided towards paper than I’d have liked.  I believe that overall they were well used and next year we plan on only having online session evals.  I expect that if the room monitors push the online evals in the same manner they pushed the paper this year that we’ll get enough evals next year for this to be an effective option.  The real benefit other than costs of entering paper evals and killing trees is that if all of the evals come in a digital form I would see no reason that they shouldn’t be ready either real time or within a week or 2 from the end of the event but, Ill leave those details to next years Board member whose in charge of the Summit.   

Without Further ado, Here’s the link to the 2011 Summit top 10 list 

The top ten was calculated by averaging all of the evaluation answers then we excluded results if there were less than 20 evaluations or 20 attendees.

Also, if you were a speaker, You can log into the PASS Speaker portal site and get your full evaluation results (and the overall event scores) from the following link

http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/2011/Speakers/SpeakerPortal.aspx

Please join me again in congratulating all of the speakers from this years Summit, without them and their excellent contributions our community wouldnt be the same. 

Edited-> I had the wrong filter criteria on our exclusion of sessions from the top list specification.  I stated we excluded if there were less than 10 evals and 10 attendees when the number was 15 each, I apologize for my fading memory.

Like most in the SQL community who are fortunate enough to attend the annual summit I am looking forward to next Sunday.  But, unlike most I am probably looking forward to this years summit for slightly different reasons. I’m definitely ready for the plethora of sessions, the great networking and all of the regular things everyone looks forward to (SQLKARAOKE!) but, when you are as heavily involved as I am in leading the Summit Program Committee, just getting it “started” is a huge relief.

For the last four years Ive looked forward to the Sunday before the Summit like ive looked forward to no other Sunday of the year.  However this year is going to be different!  This year will be my last year of leading the Summit “Program Committee”.  Its truly bittersweet for me as Ive really loved doing this but Its time for me to focus on doing other things for our great community.

I plan on handing the reigns of the summit over to _____ after the end of this years Summit.  I wish I knew who was taking over so I could tell you, but as it is no one has volunteered and PASS doesn’t exactly have a structure in place to allow for transnational hand off(more on this later).  I wish I could say it will be all Rainbows and Unicorns for the next person leading the program committee but, the reality is it is a lot of work.  The payoff is quite large though in knowing that you lead a group of 30ish volunteers to do a large portion of the work in making the summit a success but, even with a dedicated support staff (PASSHQ) its still a challenge.  After doing every job from the bottom to the top of this small piece of PASS I  feel like ive literally “Been there, done that, got the T-shirt”

I’d guess Ive spent at least 10 hours a week on average working on the Summit for the last several years and this year I added on regular PASS Board member tasks and am regularly exceeding those 10 hours a week, unfortunately, its just not sustainable for me any longer.  Im happy to spend the time for the community but, Its time for a new challenge and fortunately being on the PASS Board affords me all of the community challenges I could ever need (including figuring out to handle transition within PASS mentioned earlier). 

If you spot me at the Summit, feel free to stop over and introduce yourself, I promise not to try and convince you to volunteer to take my PASS job!

My favorite PASS memory isnt actually a single memory at all, its actually the conglomeration of all the SHARED experiences I have with all the hundreds(?) of people that I have gotten to know rather well over the years.  One of the most important things about our community of SQL professionals that I can never seem to put into words are those “Shared experiences”, they are what makes us unique.  Some first timers will listen to the conversations and think “what in the world is so funny” or “really, did that actually happen” or more likely, “what in the heck are they talking about” and I can see that there would be some intimidation factor with that but, the reality is you just have to jump in and start making those shared experiences of your own.  While some of my favorite shared experiences are from 2004-2006 that doesnt mean that I dont have some great ones from 2010 with people I had just met.  My point really is those experiences (which un/fortunately become memories) whether made at the Summit, a SQL Rally, SQL Saturday, or a local UG meeting are the things that actually tie us together as a group of professionals.  Sure, we all talk SQL and geek about it but, without the shared experience factor we’d all just be names behind posts on a Newsgroup/Forum which wouldnt be nearly as much fun!  

just choose one

If I had to list a single memory though it would be from 2004, where it all started for me.  You see I had just met Pat Wright, and Tom Larock and somehow they convinced me to attend the early morning (7AM If I recall) PASS volunteer session.  Im not an early morning person AT ALL so I definelty felt some peer pressure to go but, I can honestly say sitting in that session hosted by Wayne Snyder has probably changed my professional career as much or more than anything else.  Wayne is a very dynamic speaker and he had us all believing we could change the world, or at least the SQL portion of it.  I really miss those sessions, and wish we could find a way to ressurect them because this introvert would have never become involved with PASS had it not been for that 1 single session (and the encouragement of Tom and Pat) Thanks to the 3 of you for that!

This week is a busy week for 2011 Summit planning.  Some things need direct community participation and Id like to draw your attention to them

• Lightning Talks (5 minute “mini sessions”) Call for speakers closes today at 6:59 UTC (11:59 Pacific)

If you have an idea that you’d like to talk about for 5 minutes, Id encourage you to submit.  These sessions were well received last year and I expect the same this year

• Session Preferencing is open until  6:59 UTC on Aug 20 (Aug 19 11:59 Pacific time)

The Summit schedule creator(s) will make extensive use of this to properly size the rooms for each session.  There is more art than science to building the schedule but, the more data we have the better.

• Applications for the Nominations Committee
  

Lots of hard volunteer work went into the forming of this years process.  Please support it by offering your time if you have it to give.

Last year PASS decided to invest in the development of our own tools to manage the educational portion of the summit.  This investment has proven to be an excellent idea as it has made running the program a lot simpler.  In the past we had 2 or 3 different tools to manage the summit and thats not including the massive amount of excel spreadsheets that were passed around.  This would create obvious problems when changes weren’t propagated through all the tools in the same way.  In prior years it was a herculean effort to get the Summit program handled on time, this year however it has been markedly easier.  Maybe its not herculean anymore but, its definitely still takes a great deal of effort from a large number of volunteers.  Additionally, the same system we are using for the Summit in 2011 was used for both SQL Rally’s so in that way, the data and use of the system should start to form one experience for the entire community (speakers, volunteers & attendees)  Sometimes its the small behind the scenes things that really make a difference on the admin side that the public may not see and in this case I cant say it enough how thankful I am the past PASS BOD made that decision to invest.

As part of this tools upgrade, we are able to do some interesting things that we may not otherwise be able to do like…

Produce an OData “feed” of event sessions

If your familiar with OData you can try it out here

http://feeds.sqlpass.org/public/events/OratorDataService.svc

If you want to see the Summit 2011 Sessions for instance, try this link. Feel free to give it a try and let me know if you see any issues, but note the sessions arent scheduled yet so those data elements wont be correct

Hopefully having a service like this will open up the data enough that it will be useful to someone out there.  We have several internal uses planned for this feed including updating the mobile application we trialed at the SQL Rally “guidebook“  Yes, we will have a fully functioning mobile application for this years summit (and most other PASS events shortly)

Hopefully Ill be able to keep this place updated with something relevant way more often

(edit: somehow I forgot the Nomcom!! oops)

I apologize for the tardiness of this post, its been a busy week with PASS finalizing the Summit Sessions.

As always, there were some awesome posts this month!  If youve ever wondered why you need to prepare to recover your databases, or your life for that matter I suggest reading through the huge amount of content below.

The good stuff

Rob Farley (B | T) Writes us a two part post with half being technical about migrations, downtime and high availability and the other half being personal with regards to dealing with and controlling life’s disasters.  Hats off to Rob for pouring it all out there.  (sometimes it just feels better to write it all down and put it in perspective)

Noel McKinney (B | T) recounts a bad situation where he played the part of message queue during a human disaster where a developers spouse unplugged the telephone in the middle of the night (surprising this didnt cost someone a job)

John Pertell (B | T) tells us about times where he learned lessons the hard way about backups and restores.  His stories hit home for me and im sure they will for most other seasoned DBAs.  Ive lost more SAN arrays over the years to firmware flashes than I care to think about, so much so that I cringe when the SAN admin calls and even utters the word firmware.

Robert Davis (B | T) writes about backing up system configurations in the case of a complete server failure.  Good info in one place here about what you would loose if you lost one of the system databases.

Ricardo Leka (B | T) turns in his post letting us know that its important to have a backup plan but even more important to have a recovery plan! (his post was in portugese so if I’m way off I blame google translate!  Thanks for the post Ricardo)

Merrill Aldrich (B | T) reminds us to be aware of blind spots in the recovery scenario of our companies.  He shares some great info about cultures that can cause disasters to be unrecoverable.

Jack Vamvas (B) Shows us how he uses powershell to gather an inventory of SQL Server info that may be needed in the case of a disaster.

Mark Broadbent (B | T) Writes a post about how others mistakes can often become your problem when corruption lands in your lap.

Muthukkumaran Kaliyamoorthy (B) Goes over the various ways that you can build HA/DR system including Clusters, Mirroring, Replication, etc

Jason E Bacani (B | T) shows once again that backing up a database is important but making sure you are backing up what you think you are backing up is even more important

Bob Pusateri (B | T) recounts a story of a former employer and the resulting problems from having a “if it isn’t broken dont fix it attitude”

Chad Miller (B | T) writes about using powershell and CMS to inventory your SQL Servers

Ryan Adams (B | T) Writes some tips about using and configuring mirroring to prevent disasters

Gail Shaw (B | T) does her best to remind us that disasters arent just huge events in the world but rather most of them involve smaller more isolated events.  Id agree with her analysis and I live in the bullseye of hurricane country!

Nic Cain (B | T) writes about a full scale disaster at a former place of employment.  I see a running joke in these posts about san firmware upgrades being the cause of most DBA disasters.

Robert Pearl (B | T) shares his story of 9/11 and recovering from that disaster.  Things have certainly changed in the years since then.

Amit Banerjee (B | T) gives us 10 key points to keep in mind when thinking about disasters and how to best deal with them

Pinal Dave (B | T) recounts his early days as a DBA and 4 pieces of wisdom that he learned early on

Steve Jones (B | T) Writes about small disasters that arent natural disasters.  He’s right, these types disasters are considerably more likely than a massive natural disaster.

Thomas Rushton (B | T) Shared not one but two posts for this months edition of TSQLTuesda.  He reminds us to test our DR plans and recounts a story of what was likely someone updating every record in a database with the same value.  Which is a common disaster indeed.

Jason Brimhall (B | T) Shared a story of three personal disasters. included is a good tip about recovering the registered servers in ssms after a reinstall

Nick Haslam (B | T) wrote about an experience at a retail organization where a loss of power took out all of the systems.  Seems its often the small things that get overlooked (not that power is small but, often taken for granted)

John Samson (B | T) shared links to his prior posts about DBA responsibilities in planning for recoveries

Nancy Hidy Wilson (B | T) who lives just up the road from me in Houston recounts her own personal story from Hurricane Ike.  I learned I need a chainsaw and a tractor to recover from a hurricane.  Also I was reminded just how far our modern jobs have come in that we can personally experience disaster and move a few hundred miles away and continue to work our day jobs since their systems *should* be designed for uptime!

Thanks again to everyone who participated this month! 

Be on the watch for next months host and consider participating if you havent before!

Its the first week of June and for those of us living along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts of the US, that brings the beginning of hurricane season.  It also means its time for this months installment of T-SQL Tuesday.

This Months Topic

There goes your weekend/month

Disaster Recovery.  This topic is very near and dear to me based on the fact that I live on a barrier island that was the site to the deadliest natural disaster in US history and more recently destroyed by the third costliest hurricane in history.  Needless to say preparing for disasters is nearly instinctive to me which might explain why I’m a DBA but I digress.  Anything you’d like to blog about related to preparing for or recovering from a disaster would be fair game, have a great tip you use to keep backups and recovers running smoothly, a horrific story of recovery gone wrong? or anything else related to keeping your systems online during calamity.  We want to hear it!

My street a month after Hurricane Ike

T-SQL Tuesday info

Originally an idea dreamed up by Adam Machanic (Blog|Twitter), it has become a monthly blog party where the host picks a topic and encourages anyone to write a post on that topic then a day or 3 later produces a roundup post of all the different perspectives from the community.

Rules

• Your post must be published between 00:00 GMT Tuesday June 14, 2011, and 00:00 GMT Wednesday June 15, 2011
• Your post must contain the T-SQL Tuesday logo from above and the image should link back to this blog post.
• Trackbacks should work, but if you don’t see one please link to your post in the comments section below so everyone can see your work

Nice to haves!

• include a reference to T-SQL Tuesday in the title of your post
• tweet about your post using the hash tag #TSQL2sDay
• consider hosting T-SQL Tuesday yourself. Adam Machanic keeps the list, if he let me do it you’re bound to qualify!

Check back in a few days to see the roundup post of all the great stories your peers shared

Stepping out

For as long as I can remember Ive been involved in one way or another with the PASS Summit.. This simply means I have a short memory because I think I first started with the summit in 2006 or maybe it was 2005.  Either way its been a long run at making the premiere event for SQL Professionals a success. During the last PASS Board meeting I let it be known to the other directors that I would like to move on to other things within PASS.  I have spent a huge amount of energy over the last few years attempting to remake the processes around the summit education program.  Ive worked with a great set of volunteers over the years and together we have had some great success in making the processes better and more “translucent” as my favorite volunteer would say.  However, I think its time for a new challenge and Id like to put the same effort into one of the other PASS portfolios.  This will also give someone else with a renewed energy and vision a chance to make their mark on the Summit program.  This is where I’d like to start the handoff, unfortunately there isnt exactly a line at my door of people wanting to take it from me.  So, if you ever wanted to give up your life free time for the good of the SQL community feel free to drop me a line!

Stepping up

At the same board meeting, I stepped up and decided to put my name on the ballot for the PASS executive board.  There are lots of rules and regulations in the bylaws about who can run and when, I wont bore you with all the details but, the end result is out of those eligible to run: Myself, Tom LaRock, Rick Heiges and Douglas McDowell are running for the 2 vice president seats while Bill Graziano is running unopposed for President.  I admittedly didnt start that week thinking I was going to run for the executive board of PASS but, as it turns out it fits nicely with what I want to do for PASS going forward so I decided give it a shot and run.  Hopefully enough of the board will see that I have the right kind of energy to do good in one of the positions.

I appreciate the challenges and opportunity that have been given to me over the years in this community and hope this is merely the next logical step in my service to our community.

This year we decided to try something new and allow any PASS member input into the Summit session selections.  Hopefully it will provide good info for the session reviewers to use.  They always have a very tough job choosing sessions since there are so many good choices.  For instance the DBA review team will have looked over 200 different abstracts when they are done!  I hope that the preference results will give them a little more info when deciding between 2 equally good sessions.

Preconference seminars

Dont forget to let us know specifically which precons you’d like to see, these results are going to be used more stringently than the regular sessions so the more results we can get the better!

Hurry

Use of the tool ends today so hurry and log in to the Preferencing site and chose as many sessions as you’d like.  There is no limit but, beware choosing too many isn’t exactly helping the situation

Ill put out an update once the selections are over on how helpful the preferencing info turned out to be.

Promoting top speakers from within

PASS has many different types of events, these days, everything from a single chapter meeting with 5-10 people all the way up to the annual summit where I’d guess we top out over 3000 this year.  I think as speakers hone their craft It should be our goal to reward them in any way we can.  To that end, Im pleased to announce a couple of what I think are exciting things.

Spring 24 Hours of PASS

The Spring 2011 24 Hours of PASS was a great success with many great speakers and topics highlighted.  We decided to pull the top 3 speakers (within some guidelines) and give them automatic session spots at the annual Summit that is being held in Seattle this year.  These speakers will be given the opportunity to give a session on the same topic that was so successful at the 24hours of pass event.  In addition, these abstracts will be in the running for one of the coveted Spotlight sessions at this years Summit.

The Guidelines for selecting top 3 were pretty simple, we used the session evaluations and removed the “rate the quality of livemeeting” question.  The only additional eliminating factor was that we required the attendance number to have been in the top 75%, that is to say if a session was in the bottom 1/4 of attendance it was excluded.

SQL Rally

Are you a presenter at this years Rally?  If so, Id encourage you to bring your best presentation because we’re going to do the same thing for the Rally.  The top 3 Sessions will get automatic sessions at the Summit and the ability to be selected as a spotlight.  I havent decided on the exact guildelines for the selection yet but, I expect it will be very similar to the guidelines we used to select who received the spotlight invitations this year.

Just in case the top three 24 hours of PASS presenters want to know early, or you want to congratulate them! (their emails will be going out shortly)

Gail Shaw — Bad Plan! Sit!

Karen Lopez — Five Physical Database Design Blunders and How to Avoid them

Audrey Hammonds — T-SQL Awesomeness: 3 ways to Write Cool SQL

Edited to clarify the fact the top 3 were chosen based on 24hop session evals