Common SQL Server Licensing Myths

The people in this maze might be better off than us.

I am going to talk about some of the more common myths I’ve encountered with licensing throughout my career and consulting. Microsoft has some decent SQL Server licensing resources including some PDFs (some short and some nearing legislation size with flowcharts abound). This quick guide is a good start to look at. Which brings me to a disclaimer:

This blog post does not replace your own research and understanding of licensing guidelines from Microsoft.  The thoughts presented here are my own and represent my views of Microsoft licensing guidelines and my interpretations thereof. My perspective has the potential to be wrong (I’m a husband, so I’m likely wrong, come to think of it ) and could become outdated with future changes. Check with Microsoft and your licensing representative to make any final decisions.

On to the myths I encounter…

You Need Enterprise

Look at the edition feature matrix for your version (2008, 2008 R2, 2005) and see what you need and anticipate needing – it can save you around $15k + per CPU to go with Standard over Enterprise. I have commonly bumped into people believing that they need enterprise licenses when they don’t when it comes to things like:

• Log Shipping (Standard is fine)
• Clustering (You can have a single instance two node cluster on Standard)
• Mirroring (Some types are allowed in Standard)

In fact, this post was inspired recently when I was able to see a project at a company to roll out Enterprise Edition simply because of Log Shipping. No other enterprise features needed. This company had great pricing on Standard and I was able to save them almost $60,000 in Enterprise licenses they didn’t need. Wait. There’s more! Act now and you can save even more because another myth sounds like this:

You Need To License Your Mirrored Copy Also

In most situations (yours may be different, double check), a DR standby (For mirroring or log shipping) doesn’t need to be licensed by default. Now there are certain triggers (pardon me) that will hit you with a license cost (Being failed over to it for more than 30 days or reporting off of a snapshot of the mirror, for a couple examples) but by default, many simple options don’t. This same company had an Enterprise License purchase (single CPU) for the fail over site. Another $19,000 saved with no standard license even needed because that instance can sit there “unlicensed”.

I Can Put SSAS, SSRS and the DB Engine anywhere…

You can. And, as a best practice in busier environments I’d say you should. But you can’t do it for nothing. You can put them all on the same box and they will be licensed as though you just had one (under most circumstances). The moment you split them out (again, generally a best practice for performance) you must license each component separately. While I’ve saved some companies money, here I’ve cost some money… Sorry. I don’t like it either but it is what it is.

Multiple Instances Still Means Multiple Licenses

I hate typing this because just as soon as I do, I am sure some pointy headed boss someplace will say, let’s consolidate every instance onto one machine! Don’t do that. But this myth isn’t true – you pay by the CPU by the machine. If you have two instances on one machine each using 2 CPUs, you only need one 2 CPU license. Add another instance to it? Same thing, no new license, you pay by the machine not the instance. This is great and can really help save some license expenses at smaller shops but just do so carefully as I wrote when I first drafted this SQLServerPedia wiki article on multiple instance decision making.

SQL Server Licenses Are By Core, Like Oracle

Or at least like Oracle was last time I checked… SQL Server (today.. I don’t know of anything changing, but you never know) licenses by the socket. By the actual die that goes into the socket. Not by the core or thread. So you can have a Quad core proc with hyperthreading that looks like 8 CPUs in perfmon but you are paying for a single CPU license. This is good to know. Might make that hardware upgrade more worthwhile. Who knows how long this will last and, for all I know, maybe it is gone by the time you read this, so double check yourself.

Virtual Server Licensing Works Just Like Physical

I’m not going to say anything except to say this isn’t necessarily true. There are all sorts of scenarios and differences depending on if you are using standard or enterprise. The IRS has a hotline (800-829-1040). So does Microsoft, if you aren’t sure it may be worth a call or e-mail.

Developer Edition Works for All Developers

Well that may be true most of the time. Your developers could probably use developer edition but keep a few things in mind: 1.) Did you pay for it? Or is it just a download everyone shares? If you are covered by MSDN (For each developer who touches the instance) or some sort of enterprise agreement then you may be fine. If you paid for the product and a proper license you are fine for the intended use in the agreement. If not, you aren’t. But also – consider this: What is production going to be? If your production environment is standard, do you necessarily want the product developed and tested on developer edition, which is Enterprise Edition by features, Developer edition only be price tag and EULA?? There may be a reason (especially if you have MSDN licenses for each developer, a good investment typically) to make sure an app is developed and tested in something other than Enterprise. Consider the end goal and end edition. It would stink to see Dev and QA using Developer and relying on some enterprise feature that never failed a test only to find a deploy gone wild.

Licensing, Just Like SQL Server, Is Set-It-And-Forget-It

No. No to both. Depending on your agreement with Microsoft the day may come when they come to do a true up of your environment. They will discover your SQL instances with you and verify you are using what you purchased. If you haven’t you’ll be buying more licenses and you are in violation of laws and software agreements. You could face fines as a company or a individual, potentially. An answer? Do your own True Ups. Awhile ago I blogged about using the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAP) to discover your SQL instances. The report it spits out shows you all sorts of great details (server name, edition, version, CPU count, etc). Do your own true up, no reason you can’t. Are you in line? If not fix it by adding licenses or consolidating and saving the company hard earned cash (“Hey, boss, I just want 1%…”)

Summing It Up

A simple look at a few of the more common myths I bump into around licensing. They can all be summed up with the same advice, do your homework, understand the license agreements with factual information (not someones recollection or interpretation) and always double check. Even if the information comes from a trusted vendor (you know how I feel about that), you could be breaking the law or throwing away company money. Neither are great career advancement moves.

What about you? Do you have a licensing horror story? A tip for someone else out here. Leave it in the comments or blog about it and let us know when your post goes up, I’ll be more than happy to link to any tips to help folks avoid making a mistake up front.

Getting Organized Series Outline

• Introduction and License Giveaway
• A Task’s Life
• The Death of a Task, Man
• 451 Degrees – Good For Notebooks

In the first part I made a promise for a contest giveaway if I had comments from 10 unique individuals. The giveaway isn’t anything magical, but a premium license to Evernote to hopefully hook someone else on staying organized. No, I’m not saying you need this tool and in the last post I talked about some concerns and short comings. I do feel, however, that you need to use some tool and perhaps giving away the premium license will act as a motivator.

And The Winner Is…

Jordan Bullock who left this comment,

Really enjoyed this, Mike. I’ve been using Evernote a little here and there, but plan on using it more and more in the future. Another neat tool I’ve been using for a while for to-do’s is ToodleDo–they have a great website and iOS app (and mobile site) and a lot of powerful features, like goal-setting and such. I wish I could somehow consolidate the two apps into one ultimate app, though. Maybe someday.

Congratulations, Jordan! I’ll send you an e-mail with details and coordinate the gift license purchase & transfer with you this week.

I Must Seek To Add Complexity To Everything I Touch…

12 commenters on a simple contest for a small blog for a relatively inexpensive prize. Should have been an easy thing to pick a winner…

I was originally going to just make it a “blogger’s whim” kind of decision based on whatever criteria I liked at the time. The problem is, I couldn’t do that. I was going to go on a “needs” basis but that didn’t work, too subjective. Then a “most excited” perspective but there were a few positive entries (Though Stefan seemed to leave the most comments and have the most interaction offline on the topic). Then I felt like I wanted to be able to give back to someone who seems genuinely interested in the success and happiness of others (not to name any names)… But, I just couldn’t be the one to pick So I used a simple random name generator and let the bits and bytes select and they selected Jordan. Jordan is active in his local SQL Server community and always striving to learn and apply new technologies or aspects of his career, so the randomizer made a good choice on its own criteria.

Getting Organized Series Outline

• Introduction and License Giveaway
• A Task’s Life
• The Death of a Task, Man
• 451 Degrees – Good For Notebooks

Welcome to the final post of the series. There will be a post the following week announcing the winner of the premium license from the license giveaway in the comments of the first post (contest entries close Friday 7/23).  We’ve talked about why I came to this software (and more importantly, a renewed desire to manage tasks); how I setup tasks in my system; and some ways I am attempting to add discipline.

We’ll finish this series by talking about some other features I use in this tool,my attempt to go paperless, what I plan on doing in the future and a few frustrations/concerns.

Before Starting – thanks to one of my readers, Chris who left an excellent comment in Part 3. (There are other great tips as well in the threads of these posts, worth checking out.) He gave us some good tips, a different program to try and I really liked his ideas for task priorities. If you recall, in part 2 I had priority titles like “Due Today, Due Soon, Due Someday, etc”. His are simpler and yet fully explain the priority, “Now!, Gotta, Outta, Wanna”. I like them and am thinking about trying them out for a while as replacements.

Burn The Notebooks

In part 1, I showed a picture of a typical notebook of mine. In a word: disheveled. Since installing Evernote a few weeks ago, I haven’t used a notebook once. I miss the uniball roller pens I love to write with but not that much; typing on the Macbook is also nice

I had several notebooks and I used them frequently. A good friend and a great resource on all things social media and blogging, Jon DiPietro who blogs about DomesticatingIT gave a great tip about blogging: “Always Be Collecting“. He suggests using a moleskin notebook and camera.  That is great, but.. I can’t read my notes and don’t always have the blog notebook (or the same one) with me. Now when an idea comes to me (even if in the middle of the night feeding the newborn), I reach over to wherever my smartphone is and I type a new note in the blog fodder category (If I am really tired or in a hurry, I won’t categorize.. it will be there in the inbox for me tomorrow). I have saved or created numerous ideas for work, blog topics, honey-do items, etc and that stimulates me to keep using the tool.

Several times now I have wanted to recall what we discussed in a meeting or a piece of tribal knowledge as I am still new to my company. Under my old system. I guarantee you I would have a 60% at best chance of finding the exact information in a notebook or single sheet of paper. I would then have an 80% chance of reading my scribbles, Now? I just search and find it. I can type fairly fast and I’m developing some short hand to consistently express the same thoughts the same way when typing the notes. I’ve even used the notes in a meeting to help someone else remember a point from a meeting.

I plan on banging away notes while at the PASS Summit sessions this year. Tasks will be things to research or look into in my own environment. Everything else will be blog topics or reference data for later on the gobs of knowledge gleaned. (Or the clever ways to insult people learned from Buck Woody).

To me, this is the biggest feature. The note taking is simple and works great. Adding the task management categories, notebooks and priorities made it even easier.

Burn The Business Cards

From any device with a camera, I can take a quick picture or iSight note (on the mac client) of a business card. Save it with the “persona” tag about which Mike the relationship is for and dump it into the contacts notebook. I don’t need your business card, just a picture. I have it on every device that I use Evernote with and I can search it (with OCR so not perfectly but fairly well). I can’t copy and paste the found text though (See wishlist). On the mac the process is a simple as:

1. Take a Picture of the card through EverNote’s iSight note

The back of my card says "Practice Your Restores!"

2. Save The Image To Evernote. Give it a title of the contact name, assign a tag. Add any other notes about the contact you wish to add

3. Search for the contact later in the contacts folder, or by contacts folder and which persona you know the contact through

My wife already told me - that is a big picture on the card...

I can do that with any picture, not just business cards. With the premium edition, I can also import just about any file format I wish to import and I can search through PDF files, I believe.

Burn A Tweet (Or E-Mail)

Ok, well I actually don’t mean with fire this time. I mean, burn a copy. With twitter interaction, I can send a tweet to @myen and it comes into my evernote account. The other day Karen Lopez (better known as @DataChick to the twitterers out there), who blogs at InfoAdvisors, sent out a tweet to a flickr picture with the message “this could be useful”. I agree, could use it in a post or a blog (but then I saw the Creative Commons license, no I can’t). But yeah, I can send myself a note through twitter. Same thing with e-mail, I can forward an e-mail to my evernote account and keep it there for a record or for an action item.

The Trunk

They recently launched an “app store” like feature called “The Trunk” where I can download apps that are designed to integrate with Evernote. There are some promsing applications out there and some neat ideas like scanning receipts/etc. into Evernote. One idea I had was to put all of my junk drawer (alright we have two junk drawers and a junk closet) paperwork into one of two places: Evernote and then the trash, or straight to the trash. I may still do this but not with as many items as I had wanted, as I don’t know how secure my PII would be on their servers. I may still scan them onto some app within my home network though. Using this tool has put me on a declutter kick and I think I’m liking the clean desk (STILL!) at work.

Blow Up These Problems!

Since I am talking a lot about a product (that, again, I am not receiving compensation from… In fact I approached them about giving away the premium license and they never got back to me…) I might as well talk about some of the frustrations/concerns:

• The Interwebs – One of the greatest features is one of the potential faults. What happens if World Cup fans all around the world want to take notes about tactics used in the games the next time? Services go down, in fact Evernote had some down time (not horribly long but they experienced it) just this week, after the first 3 posts were scheduled to go live and I had to make sure to add this. I will still have my notes but I can’t sync and can’t get all features (like the OCR on the mac. has to sync to server then back – seconds – to be searchable)
• Security - There is SSL for the data to go to the server. I can even encrypt selected text and receive my own pass phrase for decrypt. It is still all managed at the server and they don’t tell you a whole lot about the security. To get SSL encryption I had to upgrade to premium. I won’t be putting passwords and sensitive client/employer data in here that could cause issues if stolen. I also don’t know about their corporate security. What are their policies at their data center? Within their databases? It is a cloud based service that I don’t know a whole lot about.
• Backup - I perform exports on occasion of my notes to HTML for a local backup. The devices all receive all notebooks so I actually have copies in 3 places plus a backup. Plus whatever they do on their servers. Maybe it’s overkill, but I’m a DBA.
• Private Clouds – They don’t. What if I wanted to host my own evernote service for myself behind a firewall on my own equipment. I can’t. I don’t need their servers for this (save for the OCR perhaps)
• No great way to “Draw” on the mac. I can use a third party app like Skitch to do so but I wish I could easily and quickly drag shapes in when at a whiteboard session. I can take a picture but with the drawing, I can draw the “motion” of the whiteboard.

Series Summary

That’s it. I’ll answer questions you have about more specifics. Basically the important takeaway from this series, in my mind is, you can get organized. You can manage tasks. Even if you are borderline ADD. You need discipline and a system that works for you. The important system here for me is what I described in part 2 about collecting, organizing and prioritizing and then what I described in part 3 about getting the tasks done and enforcing discipline upon yourself. The tool you use matters not. Actually it does matter but only so far as you can answer this question with a yes, “Does the tool you use to manage your tasks appeal to you? Is it easy for you to use and do you stick with it?” If so, then great. If not, maybe it’s time to revisit it and get out of the “Oh crud! I forgot to do something, I’ll be home late tonight!!!” rut that I sometimes have been in.

As always, I welcome comments and discussion points. If it isn’t 7/24/10 (EDT) yet, go ahead and check out the first post and add a comment if you want to win the free premium license.

Getting Organized Series Outline

• Introduction and License Giveaway
• A Task’s Life
• The Death of a Task, Man
• 451 Degrees – Good For Notebooks

A Confession

The last post in this series didn’t help you, did it? I mean, sure, I gave you some priority ideas. I suggested you think about your multiple personas and assign stuff to them to do. All that is great but did it really help you? Here comes the confession – they didn’t help me. Those ideas don’t work for me…

Does your Task Management software include this? If so, let me know!

At least not alone. I can have all the features in a task management tool that I want or think I want and unless one feature is there – a killer robot that will be unleashed should I fail to do a task or get distracted – it just isn’t enough alone. Alas, even then after not being killed a few times it would lose its impact. So I have to create a system I want to follow.

Let’s get started and talk about some of the “soft skills” I am trying to employ to stay on track and kill tasks. And fix a problem that you could accuse me of:

You Lack Discipline

So I’m trying to gain some. I work for a company that really values thrift, productivity and getting it done while at work, more so than many places I’ve worked. I want to honor that and these ideas or mindsets seem to be working or at least seem promising.

Two Kinds Of Tasks = Two Types of Times for Tasks

I’m setting up “Focus Times” – I am blocking off time on my calendar, shutting down communication methods (save for phone – I’m a DBA) and putting my headphones on (actually helps me) and I work on the “Due Today” tasks in the Work notebook that require focus. I have even added (“FOCUS”) after some tasks in Evernote to help sort them out ahead of time. If a task is simple and requires less detail, I just do it when I can and e-mail interruptions are fine.

Send Me An E-Mail

If I get an action item packed e-mail that I need to be tickled about later, I forward it to the e-mail address Evernote sets up for my account. Poof. I have a new note in my inbox notebook to categorize, classify and prioritize as we discussed yesterday. I can also e-mail myself and I am going to give that e-mail address to my wife (for some reason the “World’s are colliding, Jerry!” episode of Seinfeld comes to mind) for those times when I “yes, dear” her but fail to remember to do it or if she wants to send a quick shopping list for me on my commute home.

Just Say No!

It isn’t an evil word. Not when said nicely anyway. If you don’t have the time required to perform a task with the right degree of focus, why say yes? You’ll stress yourself out trying to do it, perhaps end up rushing or at least end up sacrificing sleep to do it. It isn’t worth it. Just say no. Unless it is not a request or extra and then you might want to say yes or “I understand you wish me to work on x, but I also have y and z on my plate with tight due dates. Can you help me prioritize these tasks, dear leader?”

Check Yo’self!

Your tasks, that is. Setup times throughout the day to do this. If you use the system I described in part 2, it’s easy. I select my work notebook and then just click on each priority to see what is “Due Today”, “Ongoing”, “Due Soon” or “Due Someday” for my “employee persona” Things I’m looking for?

• Due Today Tasks are being planned and worked on. If not, do I intend to? If not? Why is it due today? Fix it!
• Due Soon Tasks are known and can I squeeze one in today? Any real quick ones that can be done in the next 5 minutes and give myself one less thing to do tomorrow? (If you read my post of lessons from planting garlic, you’ll remember that I believe in paying now where possible)
• Due Someday Tasks really are still tasks and can I do them or move them up? I’m liberal with waht I do with these as far as the circular file goes. (I’ll normally just do this in the AM)

Make It Feel Good

This is a bit cheesy, sure Admit it, though, it feels good to mark something as done.  If I want to stick with my approach to better task management I have to keep it motivating and receive a sense of accomplishment. Some ways I do this:

Not enough focus time that day, I guess.

Check Mark!

One of the things I missed about the paper lists was the ability to check off or scribble out a task. In Evernote, I can create a check mark widget and I use these for two purposes. One, while in a meeting if I am getting a task in the meeting note, I insert a check mark to remind me and create an action item later at the end of the meeting, or just tag the meeting note with the proper priority. More importantly, though, I can see what I’ve done and the more check marks I see, the happier I am.

Delete Notes

I miss that feeling of scrunching up the paper but it works. If I had a one off task that I don’t think I’ll need to show an accomplishment or reference notes from doing it. I enjoy putting a note into the trash can.

Sweat The Small Stuff

Now I know I said earlier in this series that if a task takes more time to manage, just do it and don’t mess with the system. I have another confession for you. Sometimes I’ll create a task and checkbox for a smaller task. Why? See Check! above. I like checking a task as complete.

Daily Task Note – Multiple Tasks

I have found that one way of tracking work for the day and planning the next task is to create one note and put the planned tasks due today in it. Sometimes I’ll even be inefficient and spend a minute or two grabbing tasks off of other notes that I want due today and putting them on that one note for the day. I’ll remove the “Due Today” tags from those notes I steal from. Now I can just keep checking that one task note as I work. I’ll also add notes about the tasks as I do them if there are things I want to reference later since my notebooks are fully searchable.

If you want to win the free premium upgrade for Evernote, don’t forget to leave a comment on the first post, by the way. We need at least 10 people to comment and it has to be done before midnight on Friday 7/23.

Upcoming Posts in the Getting Organized Series, subscribe to my feed to receive the next posts as they publish.

451 Degrees – Good For Notebooks – I talked about the main reason I came to a tool like Evernote is to replace my horrible notebooks that I can’t read or search. I’ll go into a little more details here, talk about some apps I’ve found useful alongside it and then I’ll talk about a few features I wish existed and some concerns about backing up notes, etc.

As Always – I look forward to hearing from you about what I’m missing or what makes sense (more of the former though, I like learning new ways)

Getting Organized Series Outline

• Introduction and License Giveaway
• A Task’s Life
• The Death of a Task, Man
• 451 Degrees – Good For Notebooks

The Life of A Task

The system I am using has a few stages. The stages all happen quickly as they are easy to manage. Let’s go through the lifecycle of a task in the hybrid system I’ve created for myself in my Evernote account.

• Conception – I created an “inbox” notebook (think of a notebook as a folder for lack of a better term) in Evernote and set it as my default.
  

  A notebook for each Mike

  If I am receiving a task,idea, project or something similar (all called “Task” from here) I create a note in this inbox and a task is conceived.

• Classification - This is usually done along side conceiving a task but can happen later if just creating a quick note on the fly.  Here, I  organize my notes into  a small set of categories I created based on the question “Which Mike?” This classification makes sense to me since the answer implies a different venue, train of thought or degree of focus.
  • Employee – All notes having to do with work are tagged by the employer name.
  • At Home Mike -  Husband, Father, Fix it man, chicken farmer & vegetable gardener. These notes get tagged “home”.
  • Consultant – I consult a little on the side. These tasks get tagged “StraightPath”.
  • Blogger – Blog ideas go to the “Blog Fodder” tag.
  • PASS Volunteer/User Group Leader – The combination take enough time that it deserved a tag, “PASS/UserGroup”
  • Allow myself to introduce Myself - My faith, health, goals, lifetime learning, etc. I tag these, “Sharpen The Saw” (From a Franklin Covey Time Management Course)

• Prioritization – Now I have a full inbox categorized to one of my multiple personalities. I need to prioritize the tasks and empty that inbox. Both happen here. Each tag mentioned at classification has a notebook. When I assign priority, I move the task to the proper notebook or just do it it is quicker or a missed task overdue. I don’t prioritize constantly. I always add tasks but I try to do this stage 3-4 times a day. This way I spend more time completing tasks and less time
  

  Numbered for easy selecting, my priorities

  assigning them. The priorities:

  • Due Today – This is a task that really has to be done today. If I can just push it off to tomorrow, it shouldn’t have been here (Under normal conditions, obviously production issues happen that take time).  If it is the end of the day, I may assign a task here “ahead of time” for the next day.
  • Due Soon – I know what soon means to me so I know what I am trying to convey here. If there were no tasks on me due today, these should be done. If it is Monday, they should be done by Weds or Thurs for work related tasks at the latest.
  • Due Someday/Later – I am sure GTD and Time Management gurus are ripping off their shirts and putting on sackcloth and ash now, “Someday! What is that!?!” To me, this is a nice to have, really should do that I intend on whittling off. If it doesn’t get done the world won’t be as good as it could have been but it won’t implode (unless it was to “recheck Large Hadron Collider and verify no black hole created”). I used to use the “Later” type task priority as a pre-trash-trash bin. I will try to kill that.
  • Reference – I know, not a “priority”. If I am in a meeting I may have a “Due Today” task with “Questions for Storage Meeting” as the start of the meeting note. As I get my answers and the meeting is wrapping up, I delete the Due Today priority and replace it with “reference”. Still searchable, not stressing me out as a “to do”.
  • Waiting On - It may be an important task (and if it is, it will be in the “Due Today” or “Due Soon” category at the same time as this one) but this reminds me that I am waiting on someone else. Comes in handy when reviewing open tasks.
  • What Note? Evernote has a trash barrel. If I don’t need a done task or idea for reference, I’ll delete it. The grocery list my wife gave me today is a great example.

The Blog Fodder Notebook, open to this series' idea note

• Separate Notebooks – Each of my “Which Mike” categories has a notebook. This is typically where a note will go once I’ve assigned a priority. It clears the inbox and allows me to search within a folder as a limiter. I also have a  couple other folders like Contacts (for paperless business cards, more in a later post) or Reference folders for reference items (blog posts clipped from web, kb articles, white papers, diagrams, etc.)

• Complete – Once a task has been completed I remove the priority tag and leave it in the proper “Which Mike?” notebook. I have an archive category and folder in case I want to start archiving by quarter, month or year in the future. For now it works.

That’s It?

Really, yeah. This is the easy part. The tough part is discipline. This isn’t some revolutionary system. It really has pieces that the “GTD people” seem to follow and some aspects of a time management program. It also contains good old fashioned task management 101 principles. I like it and it works for me, though. Why? I can think of a few reasons -

• One System - No notebook sprawl. No Post-It’s on monitors.
• Crisp and Clean – My desk doesn’t is clean(former colleagues know what I mean and you can share with the readers about my paperwork mountains)
• Better Steward – No matter where you stand on the political spectrum, it makes sense to be a better steward of our environment. It’s also nice to be a better steward of company resources – saving some paper helps a little.
• I KEEP USING IT! – This is the easiest system I have used so far because I like it and I keep up with it. Maybe that is because I have it with me everywhere and on all these fun to use devices. Maybe it is because I created my own notebook, categories, tags and I control the flow.

If you want to win the free premium upgrade for Evernote, don’t forget to leave a comment on the first post, by the way. We need at least 10 people to comment and it has to be done before midnight on Friday 7/23.

Upcoming Posts in the Getting Organized Series, subscribe to my feed to receive the next posts as they publish.

The Death of a Task, Man – I’ll discuss some of the soft skills I am employing or hope to employ in my quest to kill tasks. I’ll also talk about how I do “task checks” and search for tasks and a few more technical helps but those will be from the soft skill perspective.

451 Degrees – Good For Notebooks – I talked about the main reason I came to a tool like Evernote is to replace my horrible notebooks that I can’t read or search. I’ll go into a little more details here, talk about some apps I’ve found useful alongside it and then I’ll talk about a few features I wish existed.

I’d love to hear your approach! If you want to share your approach or what bugs you see in my current approach, I’d love to hear about it. You can comment here on this post or, if you want to be entered into the license giveaway, you can leave your comment on the first post. Now, it’s off to check off a few tasks.

Getting Organized Series Outline

• Introduction and License Giveaway
• A Task’s Life
• The Death of a Task, Man
• 451 Degrees – Good For Notebooks

Do you struggle with organization? Note taking? Note Finding? I do and I could have found the fix for me. Leave a comment for the contest at the bottom and I’ll give you a one year premium account to the tool I’m using. Details are at the bottom.

Maybe this blog post is too early. “They” say it takes 3 months of doing something for it to become a habit. Well, I am writing after experiencing something new that is still new to me and being tweaked but it is really helping.

A mockup of a real notebook (even with the doodle)

The Problem Statement

“They” also say a picture is worth 1,000 words. In this case the picture probably represents hundreds of thousands of written words. The picture to the right is an example of what one of my (many) notebooks would look like. Chicken scratch writing, doodles from being on long calls and lost Action Items.

The Problem Statement here could be “I am wasting time writing notes I can’t find or use later, what should I do?”

I normally have a few notebooks in circulation at a time. Some for personal notes, some for blog ideas, some for client work. I have a general idea of where something is but sometimes I start a new one if it isn’t handy. I can’t understand the context sometimes. Maybe that was alright because my note taking used to be more just about writing it once to get it into memory and that worked most of the time. I still did a lot of mental gymnastics trying to recall what a note meant. I also lacked the discipline to go back through all the “Action Item” tags to bring them onto a list. I’ve used many systems (Outlook Tasks, Franklin Covey, Typed To Do Lists, etc.)

Another problem statement? I’m getting sick and tired of paper. I am finding myself hating paper’s clutter a little more each year. (In case my wife is reading – only a little more, that’s why I still have so much but I am getting to where you are, quickly)

Other problems: The notebooks aren’t searchable and aren’t always there; the kids like to cut and draw when they find paper; I look like a fool fumbling through the notebooks; Can you read my writing? I can’t always either; It’s a pain to link thoughts and track them over time… I could keep going.

The inspiration to get organized

An Answer?

No, it isn’t the Mac but the picture shows the simplicity of the solution. It doesn’t require a notebook at all. At work I show up with my Mac Book and phone. At a client I bring the home windows laptop (That over sized, noisy, ugly laptop ) and phone. I always have the windows mobile phone (does that make up for the mac?). If I ever don’t have a device, I probably can get to the internet somehow.

All of these tools allow me to use a new tool in my arsenal: Evernote. They describe their product:

Use Evernote to save your ideas, things you see, and things you like. Then find them all on any computer, phone or device you use. For free.

That’s it. That’s what it does. So far I have used the tool to manage notes, whiteboard images, business cards and it has been enjoyable, usable and makes me want to keep using it. Some tasks I’ve performed:

• Save notes from meetings
• Create Action Items with priority and category (Where are they from? Which “Mike” has to worry about them?)
• Track my spending and eating (why not, I need to be better at both)
• Remember ideas for blog posts (like this series you are reading)
• Do things at home that I normally would have “yes’d” and forgotten about (until gently reminded)
• Started to store links and captures from websites of useful information about a topic of interest
• Search for previous notes and quickly find them
• Upload images (White Boards, Business Cards) and search them with decent  (for OCR) results
• Solve world peace and middle east hunger (Were you paying attention?)

How Have I Done This?

With some tags, folders and typing in Evernote. I keep saying that word, I’m not getting paid to talk about their tool, I just really like it so far. I’ve used the features available in the Mac Client (which is lacking a few things, in my opinion… We’ll get to that in part 2 or 3) during the day. I’ve even downloaded and used the features on the phone, like taking an audio note when I was in need of duct tape and a knife in my truck (it’s not what you think.. I didn’t need a cooler). Evernote is definitely not a task management tool by default and I started using it for searchable notes in “one” place that I won’t clutter my house with. Using the note capabilities, It is working out alright for task management.

I’ll go into more details in the next post where I give you the lowdown on the techniques I am using and some more details.  The plan I have for the next posts:

Part 2 – My Evernote Technique - How I use the product, the tags/folders I use and method. Works for me, maybe can help you design your own. Also how I plan on using it to both make my life more search-able and reduce the paper clutter.

Part 3 – Evernote Wish List – Evernote just unveiled a neat “trunk” of apps and there are a few apps I’d still like to see created with a few features I’d love to see in the Mac client. So a small wishlist.

A Contest

Evernote is free and the free features are probably fine for most casual uses, even serious uses in the free version. With a premium account you can get rid of the advertisements, get some neat features (ability to search PDFs, quicker OCR on the Mac client, import more file types, import more data to name a handful) and feel good about supporting a well done piece of software.

So… I want you to have a free upgrade to premium. I will select a name (based on some method I choose, inspire me with your story, I guess) if two conditions have happened: the comment is made before midnight EST on Friday, 7/23 and I have at least 10 comments by that time. Just tell me about your current system in the comments. How do you keep track of this all? How could a tool like Evernote help you? What is your biggest frustration with time and task management? Would you hire someone who essentially starts out a blog post with “I need to be better at time management, note taking and organization?”

Subscribe to this blog’s feed to see the next posts and the contest winner when announced.

How Do you Learn? How Do you Teach? YES

Robert asked those two questions (along with some others) to help inspire ideas for the topic. If you combine the question as one, I think yes is the perfect answer. There is a, sort of, continuum of education. First you learn. Then you do. Then you teach. And each one of those steps is still a learning exercise. I think if you ask anyone at any level who blogs about SQL Server or presents about SQL Server (yes, even a Paul, Kimberly or Kalen) you’ll find that they are constantly learning a ton through teaching.

Get Your Teach On

I mean it. After this run on sentence, stop reading for a few moments and really think about what you know – wherever your current skill set is – contemplate the knowledge you have and what you’ve learned in however long your career has been……. Ok, back? Great. So perhaps you just had a Janice Lee moment and realized you’ve been further than you thought you have. Maybe you haven’t but either way, you know something about SQL Server (or whatever skillset you are involved in, this is a SQL blog post primarily, work with me here!). Can you think of anyone who maybe doesn’t know it?  Well there you go. Get your teach on. Find a medium (Blogging – I wrote a series with an interview with Brent Ozar and tips for starting a blog -, speaking, answering forum questions with an eye to help teach or just instructing someone on your team) and prepare to teach.

How Is That Learning?

If you are like most people, you are going to want to know angles about whatever lesson it is you are preparing that you aren’t familiar with. You are going to want to be prepared for some  questions (you can’t prepare for them all but if you answer honestly with an “I’m not sure, let me get back to you” you just gave yourself a learning homework assignment) and you will soon know more about your topic. Then, when you are writing out that blog post or giving that presentation you’ll be further cementing your knowledge. You’ll be showing other people how to do it, you’ll see the questions they come up with and think about the topic in ways you haven’t before.

If I ever go on a cruise – I want this captain.

Teaching not only helps you learn but it is a leadership trait. It means you are swallowing pride and desiring to bring others up to your level. You can look at that in two ways -

1. If I share the knowledge and bring them up to speed, then I won’t be the know it all in that area. They’ll get to take some of the glory and do parts of my job, oh no!
2. Hey, cool. This person wants to learn about the role. I can mentor them and develop their technical skills while developing my mentoring skills. We’ll grow better as a team and I won’t have to worry when I’m on vacation, cool!

Raise your hands if you’ve ever had an inkling of position number 1 – I won’t look. Alright, I didn’t look but if you didn’t raise your hand you are either lying or you started out better than I did Once I started growing a bit in my early career my first inkling was to take road number 1. It was working with an HR person as part of an interview team that the scales were mostly removed. She talked about a tendency for folks to not go after A players because of pride, a fear of being shown up, etc. It was a good talk and her point was – Surround yourself with A players and you will always be learning, working well as a team and growing. If you are striving to grow, “getting it” and improving there will always be people further ahead of you and behind you. So what. Worry about you and hire the A player. The same goes with teaching someone else to get to where you are.

I blogged about the great learning experience I got from Andy Kelly, an early manager. I truly believe that if it weren’t for his desire to learn through teaching, I wouldn’t have the passion for SQL Server that I have today. Andy learned through teaching me and he was able to help me grow in the process. I never threatened his standing at the company. Instead, they recognized what a great leader and mentor he was. Traits that made him valuable to the company.

Back to the captain and the quote -

Being a geek, I enjoy gadgets and I stumbled across a link to wired magazine with some neat cockpit displays while deciding on a blog topic. The linked image caught my eye. What I really liked, though, was the quote from the skipper. Check it out yourself – he is talking about where the “steering” joysticks are. They aren’t on his seat but on the seats of other officers. His thoughts on this?

The port and starboard command chairs have built-in joysticks for controlling the ship,” Wright says. But those are typically operated by other officers. “Captains should be mentoring and teaching.”

It’s worth repeating – Captains should be mentoring and teaching. That’s good stuff.

In fact, Captain Wright could probably write a book about leadership and call it, “Captains Should Be Mentoring and Teaching.”. He isn’t worried about a mutiny if those junior officers grow. He knows there are a lot of ships in the sea (some may even hold celebrities like Brent Ozar or Tim Ford) and they need excellent Captains. He knows that comes through experience and training.

So  – What are you going to do?

Are you going to start teaching more? Great. Do you currently blog? I’d love to read your thoughts on your blog, pretty easy to start doing it. All you have to do to teach is remember what you know, find opportunities to bring someone up to that point and improve your own knowledge in the periphery of the topic while teaching. That’s it. You can’t go wrong because you and your student are growing, even if you stink at it.

(ps. Apparently Dead Poet’s society was brought out by my memory banks from typing captain so many times. I hadn’t read Walt Whitman’s poem before the movie and I am happy that I was able to type the entire post, the few “Captains” and all without saying “O Captain my Captain!” But I felt daring, so I had to work it in here someplace. I also changed the title of this blog post because I really like Captain Wright’s simple quote.

Captains should be mentoring and teaching…

Some Related Posts

• Planning To Fail (part 2) –> Helping others learn from their mistakes is a way to teach.
• Made to Stick –> A great book I read that gives some usable tips for making your lessons last.
• Everyone Grows or Everyone Fails –> My contribution to the professional development week at SQL University, reminder to share knowledge (AKA – Teach)
• One Man’s Trash… –> I learned a lesson at the dump. It helps to have the right attitude when trying to teach something lasting.

For the July meeting…

I’ll Be Speaking

I know. I booked myself, is that wrong? It made it easier than finding a speaker during July and with the new baby in the house, etc. So I am excited to be speaking on a topic I enjoy speaking about. I’m giving a presentation I have given a few times now (SQL Saturday Boston, SQL Saturday in Charlotte and to the Southern New England SQL Server Users Group). This is a fun one to give and it brings it back to basics a little.

It is my “As a DBA, Where Do I Start?!?” presentation, you can read a bit about it and see an earlier slide deck from it on my blog here. The main point is still the same but I am ever tweaking the delivery and slides to make them work a bit better.

So, if you are interested in the thought process around being a DBA, interested in where to prioritize the tasks as a DBA or just want to throw rotten fruit at me, check out the Seacoast SQL site and send an RSVP e-mail.

Special thanks to SQL Sentry for sponsoring this month’s meeting. I make it no secret that I enjoy working with their products so I’m excited to have them be the sponsor the same month I’m speaking!

It was a good day. We had finally migrated onto brand new hardware (and saw a 250% improvement in run times of most warehouse jobs). I had finally cleaned up the “interesting” security I had inherited (Linked Servers using SQL authenticated accounts with every Fixed Server Role and DB role granted, including SA overriding all the other attempts at access). Initial testing looked great. I couldn’t axe the Linked Servers but I fixed the permission to give them read on just the necessary objects, Least Privilege, Baby!

But then again… This is my blog and I don’t post too much about success stories now, do I? It hit, the next day I got the call -

“Hey Mike, the new SQL Server is really slow”

No way. Everything was running so much faster it was pathetic that it ever ran so slow. I debated in my head and even briefly on the phone but said I’ll take a look. Sure Enough! The plan was odd for their linked server query. On the older server the estimates were dead on. On the newer server (Same version of SQL, same everything, just older hardware and wide open permissions) the estimates were off and a sub optimal plan was selected. Really Suboptimal. Scans where I expected seeks, a seek where I expected a scan (on a large, for that database, table), an “interesting” join order chosen. I was banging my head on my desk contemplating what else could have changed when I gave the wide open permissions a quick shot to test. Sure enough, quick query, good plan. Did I mention I hate Linked Servers?

So I knew something was off with statistics somehow and I had realized that I was incorrect in assuming (I forgot to follow my own advice there) that statistics wouldn’t even come into play since it is a linked server query. Nope.. It was a Linked Server query between two SQL Servers and statistics do come into play. Distribution Statistics. Apparently, they can come into play with any OLE DB provider that takes advantage of them.

Alright. So Statistics Were At Play – But Why?

Well. Apparently, the (did I mention that I hate Linked Servers?) database engine will only provide those statistics if the calling user has the same permissions as required to run a DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS…. Ok, that sounds easy enough, I just have to look for that granular permission. Yeah. Right. Check out this excellent blog post by Linchi Shea to see what I found out when researching this issue. His post goes through the reason behind the issue and the permissions required to be able to see those statistics. Since his post helped me, I won’t give the final tidbit myself. Suffice it to say, however, that I had to grant more permissions that I wanted to fix the immediate issue.

Silver Linings – Because I try to be an optimist every so often, the good news from this is it at least gave me more ammo to try and convince folks to move away from Linked Servers. Only time and they will know how that pans out, though.

What’s that? You want the DBA stamp of approval?

I write this blog to help folks so I’ll pretend I’m not at work in a meeting railing on about how your product has no indexes or has way too permissive security or doesn’t think to recommend index maintenance. That’s right… I’ll help you. Why? Because I want you to succeed. I want to like working with you. I want you to be “DBA-Approved”

A History

You don’t have to look to hard to find blog posts of DBAs annoyed with vendor gaffes. There are some great vendors who really understand their destination database environment. They go out of their way to make sure their client properly backs up and maintains the environment. They performance test and look at best practices. There are a lot who don’t.

I’ve worked as a consultant for a vendor who wanted to do a better job in helping their customers handle the SQL Server environment they ship their app on. I’ve worked full time for a vendor who didn’t. I can tell you that my experience with the latter was early on in my career as a tech support engineer and I got a lot of painful calls from customers up a creek. Customers who maybe would have been better off with some prescriptive guidance…

But We Don’t Own Their Environment!

I know. But you didn’t tell the client that they really needed a DBA to look over their SQL Server environment did you? You might have even marketed it as “so easy! A few clicks and our installation is complete!”. I’m not saying you should own their environment. I’m not saying you should coddle each customer and play the role of DBA. I am saying that you should….

Care Enough To Do It Right

That’s right. I’m appealing to your heart. Though, if you do a great job it becomes marketing and word of mouth advertising. You’ll also be able to receive less “basic” support calls or deal with upset customers who got in trouble because of database issues. What about the lost business because of clients talking to other potential clients? Or IT staff commiserating with IT staff at user group meetings? Now I’m appealing to your bottom line, I hope?

Some Thoughts on Doing It Right

I’m not asking for much. This list is a good start. We might revisit this post in the future with more but starting with some basics, you’ll be on your way to being a “DBA-Approved” software vendor:

• Cheat – If you are looking to have your software sold and installed at a company that I work at, consult for or have worked at. Be prepared to answer these questions. Maybe all don’t apply, maybe some look like gibberish. Learn about the terms and understand why a DBA would ask. Send me an e-mail or leave a comment if you are confused about why I ask a question
• Learn and Know SQL Server – What kind of SQL Server expertise do you have on staff? You probably have some great developers but do you have someone with a DBA interest and skill set? Do you have someone who stays involved in the SQL Server community? Check out sites like SQLSkills, SQLBlog, SQL Server Central, SQLServerPedia and the SQLPASS organization.
  
• Speaking of PASS – PASS is the Professional Association for SQL Server users. It is a great organization with a lot of resources for us in the SQL Server space. They have a huge annual Summit with a lot of great technical content. Send someone to the conference and have them sit in the sessions. Have them talk to DBAs (we aren’t shy…)
• Documentation? Do you provide anything to your clients (especially those smaller shops that may not have a dedicated DBA, even if I think they should) around recommended best practices for database maintenance, backups, troubleshooting, etc.? You should.
• Best Practice Review – From some of the communities/blogs mentioned above you can find a lot of intelligent and experienced DBAs who can help you review your application from a database performance and best practices point of view. I would hazard to say that even just 12-24 hours of billable time can gain you a lot of customer good will. I know I’ve helped folks out with this in the past and as a DBA on the receiving end, it makes a difference working with a vendor who has Database best practices in mind.
• Security! Please. Don’t. Ask. For. Sysadmin (SA). Rights!!! Please don’t even ask for DBO, if you can avoid it. You should be using role based security with least privilege. It would be nice if you used Active Directory security and integrated with our AD but I’ll even let you use SQL authenticated if you stop asking for SA rights! Let me review your deploys and see the scripts that get run. Do your deploys with the least privilege necessary or heck, let me do it for you… I’m not being a jerk, I’m trying to do my job as a DBA.
• Backup/Restore – It goes with the database maintenance documentation above. I wanted to call it out here separately. Work with your clients on best practices for backup and recovery. Learn about them yourselves first. Don’t just install someplace and expect it all to be fine. Ask your support teams if they’ve dealt with a client who lost more data than they were willing. Ask them how that call went.
• Don’t Go With Defaults – There have been lots of blog posts about this that you should read to get an idea of what I mean -My thoughts, Paul Randal, Aaron Bertrand and plenty of others linked from those  – Back? Alright, learn about how to install SQL Server and include that in the documentation. Talk about recovery models so you don’t end up with huge transaction logs and bad advice being given to your customer’s IT support team from Google and forums.

Was That So Horrible?

I don’t think anything on there is going to make you freeze your code, hire a lot of developers or Project Managers. Sure if you don’t have the expertise on staff, you might engage a consultant and spend $5,000 or less on reviewing your docs and plans but how much will it cost you in lost opportunity to not do that?

Thanks for listening and I really hope you think about some of the points above or some of the points mentioned in my DBA Questions for Vendors list referenced earlier. I want your product to be a success and I want to see us DBAs start writing positive vendor rants (well.. Asking a DBA, a pessimist by trade, to be positive is a bit much. Maybe we can at least stop with the negative rants if you take some steps with us).

My offer stands – shoot me an e-mail or leave a comment below and I’ll help you out with a quick question as time allows, I might be busy consulting for a client of yours having headaches with their SQL Server environment

Samuel -

Around 30 minutes old

Our second boy and third child, Samuel was born this week. He decided to show up 9 days “late” according to our timing but I know he was right on time in God’s schedule. I told my wife she’d be a great Project Manager, though – over budget and over schedule. No scope creep (unknown twin hiding in there), though.

We have been blessed (and I really do mean blessed) with two great children already. Healthy, loving, fun kids. They’ll make great big brothers and sisters (though our daughter, the oldest, will certainly be the big boss of the three) to our Sam.

My wife and I really just like the name Sam or Samuel but the meaning of the name in Hebrew and the part that Samuel played

Meeting his brother and sister

in the Bible are definitely neat stories. It can mean Name of God; asked of God; or heard by God, and like all of our children we certainly asked God for Him. Samuel‘s life was an interesting one. It began before he was born with a praying mother and a father with a servants heart; and ended with God, through him giving the clamoring people of Israel what they asked for – a kingdom like other nations. A life worth looking into with lessons and warnings through the people he dealt with and interacted with.

My Samuel is a beautiful (I can say that now, he may not like that I said it in 13 years but I said it) child. You can see for yourself over there on the right somewhere. Welcome to the world! What an amazing blessing.

A Newwwwwww Job!

(said like Rod Roddy talking about new cars)

That’s right. I am leaving “A global insurance company” that has renamed nameless to protect the innocent (or not so innocent?). I don’t know why I haven’t shared their name, I think I am allowed to but I wanted to play it safe and I don’t get a lot of “community involvement” support. Not that I should necessarily, I am there to be a Database Administrator not give to the SQL community.

Why?

A neat company that has solid growth contacted me about a fun sounding opportunity. I hemmed and hawed (spell check didn’t yell at me for the word hawed, didn’t realize it was a word, it is. ) about the opportunity for a couple months and decided the chance was too great to pass up.

What?

The title is simple, “Database Administrator” but the role sounds like fun from the interviews and discussions. It is basically a Sr. DBA role on an IT Engineering team. I’ll still get to get my hands held to the fire helping out the operational teams but I’ll hopefully be focusing more on patterns, practices and architectures. I’ll be on the team that helps bring the new architectures and ideas to fruition and helps get the operational teams ready to support them (while still backing them up as needed). On call is currently shared by all of IT so it will be awhile before I have to have my week to have the after hours buzzing. I’ll also get the opportunity to work across a lot of teams in the best practices and performance tuning areas. I’ll definitely be moving from a tactical role on a tactical team at a tactical company towards a more strategic and “architecturey” role.

I’ll be working with some great folks who asked some good questions in the interviews. It sounds like I’ll have plenty of opportunity to learn new things as well as teach and mentor folks on what I’ve learned along the way.

Where?

I won’t say yet. No… I’m not going to make you play a guessing game like our @SQLRockstar friend, Tom LaRock was doing. I just don’t know where they stand on blogging and all that. I know they were at least interested in the fact that I am starting to speak more and I think they’ll want to encourage that. They see the benefit of community involvement and “recognition” for their employees (not that speaking here and there makes me an expert, I’ve never claimed that status I likely won’t). Seems like a neat company with a good story, lots of A players and good growth.

I think this role should allow me to really use my skills, really engage in mentoring and teaching (which I enjoy as much as getting my hands dirty with the technology) and give me more weekend and night free time with my family. At the end of the day it was a no-brainer.

Sabbatical

I didn’t have any blog entries in the hopper and with the upcoming birth I didn’t have time to prepare any the past week or so. I have some blog post ideas, had a few inspirations while here at the hospital so I’ll have some soon.

I’m glad you asked, I can think of a few reasons…

DBAs Are Mean Care About Your Data

Your developers hopefully care about the data. Your vendors care about their bottom line may even care about your

I'm sure they are great at their intended process but do you hire your developers from them? You might need a DBA

data as well.  Your system administrators like things to run smoothly also; no one likes a failure.  Your database administrators, however, have a vested interest in keeping your data clean and healthy. A good DBA will say “no” quite often (or, more accurately, “not yet”; “not deployed like that” or “no until security is cleaned up”) if something is being done without concern for security or performance best practices in mind.

Sure we can come across as tough sometimes but when you stop and ask why, it is usually because we care about the data. Maybe it’s not so altruistic and we just don’t like being woken up after hours. Either way, we are going to do all we can to fight silliness at every stage of a database’s life.

Sometimes it is appreciated and understood. A development manager at one point in my career sent me a note around review time that included this statement, “Our developers are very appreciative that, while you can be one tough and principled SOB, you are usually right in the end!!” That isn’t to gloat, it’s to say that a DBA who cares to do the job right and wants things right the first time can make a difference in the long run.

So Reason 1: A DBA cares about the database. It’s a myopic concern. Yes we care about the other facets of an application but it all stems from our desire to make the databases be all they can be. The other roles? They have their primary focus on something else (as they should!)

DBAs Like Best Practices

I’m talking about experienced and effective DBAs here. What I mean by the heading is that a database administrator knows what is beneath the set-it-and-forget-it installation options and deployment steps. We read books like Professional SQL Server 2008: Internals And Troubleshooting (some of us even read them on personal time!). We study up on the database engine we support. We want to first understand why a best practice exists and then implement the ones that make sense for our organization. We aren’t going to accept defaults, we aren’t going to ignore empirical evidence and try the first thing that a search engine shows us in production (hopefully). We may not just accept a hand me down server for that huge production ERP deployment. We might discuss SAN optimization with the storage team. When we look at a backup solution for the enterprise we will ask questions that are relevant to SQL Server and the recovery needs we support. We won’t let a vendor do something dumb without a lot of whining and attempts to correct.

Reason 2: A DBA cares to do the right job the first time. Again, you can even let it boil down to the self serving desire to not let the database be the cause for blame of a production outage. I don’t care, I’m still going to make sure that the database environment I support is running as well as it should and that we aren’t sacrificing best practices and performance (at least not always!) for the sake of “We’ll fix it later…”

DBAs Can Make Users Happy

How well are your systems running? Performance complaints? Do you have a DBA? If you don’t and the systems have a database back end it is incredibly likely that you are suffering from a lack of database TLC. I don’t know how many times I have been asked to consult on an engagement to “just make it faster!” or inherited horrible performing environments that were easily fixed with DBA 101 stuff (updating statistics, rebuilding indexes, the right settings, etc.). I know that because I do some consulting on the side, I might be eating into some billable time here but that’s fine, I have a busy life with the family, church and full time work. As a DBA, I usually know where to start looking for database performance problems. As a DBA, I usually know what planned maintenance to do on the database server and databases to keep things running smoothly. If you had a DBA, you would have less performance related fires; you wouldn’t have to pay an invoice to a consultant to come in and save the day. Your Sys Admin could help figure out an issue but, if they don’t have a lot of hands on – and academic – knowledge of database performance tuning and troubleshooting, it is going to take longer and could potentially include painful results if guesses/blind stabs are made. They specialize in a different skill set.

Reason 3: Database Administrators can prevent (or more easily resolve) performance issues or troubleshooting situations.

Oh No!!! Everything is down!

Picture a disaster scenario. System is belly up, drives are burned, whatever. How quickly do you want to be up? Your director, VP or CIO wants it yesterday and they want to know why your people are running around in panic mode looking stuff up on search engines.

A good Database Administrator (again, hopefully) is practicing restores or devising clever ways to sample for restore failure possibilities. They are thinking about disaster scenarios and possible responses to them. They have done restores before and have likely dealt with strange errors, corruption or common failure scenarios. Hopefully they are familiar with forums and know where to help find (and test) information. They can think on their feet about the ramifications of various recovery options or settings changes in a time of crisis.

Reason 4: Even if you stuffed your DBA in a closet on moth balls and only opened the door when danger strikes the time saved in that disaster and the possible data saved during that disaster justifies a DBA role in a lot of companies.

Your Data Is Your Business

How much do you rely on your data? Analysis of trends. Sales Forecasts. Payroll data. Sales data. Customer lists. Partner lists. Inventory. Shipping and Tracking information. You name the piece of your business, it is highly likely that you can’t name 2 or 3 that don’t have data stored in a database. What happens if you lose that? What happens if you can’t get to it fast enough? What happens if you can’t trust it to be accurate?

Reason 5: Your data is pretty important. You might have hired a Microsoft Exchange experienced system administrator because you realize how important e-mail is to your company. How useful is that e-mail system without your core systems described above? How much does your organization spend on various forms of insurance?

How Can I Get a DBA?

I could go on with more reasons. I could give you horror stories. I could tell you about the strange things vendors have requested (and the responses I’ve gotten when questioning those requests… Things like “look.. no one ever complained about that before”). I could go out and find statistics that talk about companies closing their doors because of data loss. I think you get the point though.

If you have database instances and applications running,  the simple truth is that you probably have enough work to keep a DBA busy. Maybe you could start smaller and get someone on retainer. I do that with some companies as an advisor/mentor. There are plenty of other people offering the same types of services, some larger companies dedicated to providing remote DBA or DBA Advisory services. Maybe you can hire someone with a good DBA background who has other interests and could wear a second hat for you.

I would say that in the New England job market, this must be a known fact – It seems like database roles are always being advertised or actively recruited, even in the down economy. So I would say get your DBA search on and fill that role already! Do it quick before the most experienced DBAs are gobbled up.

What do you think? Why do you (or don’t you) have a DBA? Any horror stories from when you’ve been burned by not having that role filled?

In the first post of this two part series, we talked about including failure in our plans and embracing failure as an important individual learning tool. Today we’ll talk about failure as a teaching and corporate learning tool.

Angle #3 – Everybody Fails! (Plan to help others)

Can you think about the last time you made a mistake? I think if you are honest you won’t have to think back too far, I didn’t anyway. Remember when you were learning something? Remember when you were new at the job and you made that mistake. What about the time you got that response when you made an honest and simple mistake? Didn’t feel great, did it?

I’ll give my standard disclaimer here, I’m preaching to myself with this angle (well really all angles but this one especially)… We all make mistakes. If I had to take a stitch of cube fabric down for every mistake I’ve made in life, I’d have a real open concept cubicle.

Keep that in mind when dealing with other people’s mistakes. I think it is perfectly acceptable to expect people to own their mistakes and be honest and up front about them. As long as they are doing that and there wasn’t malicious intent or careless behavior involved why box someone’s ears? The sting of knowing you screwed up is often a powerful motivator and teacher all by itself. Come to that persons side, offer them some help, tell them a story about how you brought down the production cluster once. Sure there may be a teachable moment in there but teaching doesn’t always have to look like tearing into someone skull and popping their eyeballs out… Teach but don’t lecture. Help but don’t strut.

Angle #4 – Cleanup, Aisle 4 (Plan to not be doomed to repeat failures)

We either learn from our mistakes because we embraced our failure like we discussed in Angle #3 and change our course or we make the same failure again and again. I can’t speak for you, but I vote for the former.

As we discussed in part 1, we can learn from our own mistakes. That is a great tool for personal learning but how does your team or company do? I’ve worked at companies that do a great job at this and I’ve worked at companies that don’t.

I’ll give the negative example first… So a mistake happened, production downtime and money spent/lost because of a failure. Meetings are convened to discuss the failure but they start something like this – “Yesterday we had a failure in our system, it wasn’t my fault but I think it was the delivery team’s fault.” Ahhh the blame game, played in countless board rooms and e-mail trails across the world. In fact even as you read this post, somewhere some “team” is playing a round. Blame is assigned, the issue and causative factors are lost in the noise and someday, someway that issue is going to pop up again. Don’t do that. Don’t fall victim to that.

We already said it – We are going to fail, we all make mistakes. So how does an organization deal with that mistake’s aftermath? You may groan when you hear the terms “lessons learned meeting” or “root cause analysis” but those are really great tools. Don’t you want to know why the failure happened and how to prevent it? Put the egos, pointer fingers and pride aside and get together and figure out what happened. Ask why a few times like Thomas LaRock describes in his post on Root Cause Analysis. Thoroughly research and understand the issues before moving on from a serious production outage. Maybe you didn’t follow the first angle and you didn’t account for that failure scenario?

Wrap It Up, Walsh

We all mess up. Either understand, plan, prepare and learn from the times that you do and remember that when others do and end up succeeding in the end or let your failures be your (or your project’s, team’s, or even your company’s) failure. I really think it is that simple.  Before I leave you to go out and better practice what I preach, I’ll leave you with..

A Few Quotes

• “Failure is success if we learn from it.” – Malcolm S. Forbes
  
• “Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.” – C.S. Lewis
  
• “There are no failures – just experiences and your reactions to them.” Tom Krause
  
• “The greatest barrier to success is the fear of failure.” – Sven Goran Eriksson
  
• “Fear of failure must never be a reason not to try something.” – Frederick Smith

Don’t forget to check out the first part of this two part series. Looking forward to reading your thoughts in the comments below.