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SQL PASS Summit Day 2 Keynote

Here are today’s announcements.

After 5 years in Seattle, PASS Summit is traveling to Charlotte, NC, in 2013 to bring the world’s largest SQL Server and business intelligence conference closer to database pros who may not have been able to attend in the past.

PASS Summit 2013 will be held at the Charlotte Convention Center, in the heart of the Queen City, Oct. 15-18, 2013, with two days of Pre-Conference Sessions beginning Oct. 14. Early registration opened today with a 3-day Full Summit rate of $1,095 and a special $100 alumni discount, both good until Jan. 4, 2013.

“We’re excited about bringing the PASS Summit experience closer to DBAs, developers, BI architects, and IT pros who haven’t been able to travel to Seattle,” noted PASS Vice President, Marketing, Thomas LaRock. “And we’re also excited to experience the beautiful city of Charlotte in what will be a jam-packed week of learning and connecting with community members from around the world.”

To learn more about PASS Summit 2013 and to register, see www.sqlpass.org/summit/2013.

24 Hours of PASS In addition, PASS is rounding out 2012 with two 24 Hours of PASS virtual events, extending its reach to the Portuguese and Spanish SQL Server communities. Both events will feature 24 free, live, back-to-back technical webcasts. The Portuguese event takes place Nov. 26-27, with the Spanish edition on Dec. 5-6. For details, see http://www.sqlpass.org/Events/24HoursofPASS.aspx.

PASS Business Analytics Conference

Yesterday, PASS also announced the PASS Business Analytics (BA) Conference, a new event supporting business intelligence and analytics professionals using Microsoft Office, Microsoft SharePoint, SQL Server, and Windows Azure.

Over 1,200 business analysts, data scientists, line-of-business managers, and IT pros are expected to take part in the inaugural PASS BA Conference at the Chicago Hotel and Towers, April 10-12, 2013, for real-world insights, prescriptive guidance, best practices, and strategic vision for analyzing, managing, and sharing business information and insights through Microsoft’s collaborative BA platform.

Registration for the PASS BA Conference is also open now, with the $1,095 early-bird rate available until December 7, 2012. For more information and to register, visit http://www.passbaconference.com.

The Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) today presented its most prestigious award to volunteer Jen Stirrup during the PASSion Awards ceremony at PASS Summit 2012in Seattle.

The PASSion Award is presented annually to a volunteer who demonstrates exemplary service and commitment to the PASS organization by inspiring the community to collaborate, learn, and grow through knowledge sharing and peer-based learning. PASSion award recipients are nominated by their fellow PASS members and selected by the Board of Directors.

 

Jen (blog | twitter) has worked diligently over the past 2 years with various groups in Europe to promote support for Women in Technology. A SQL Server MVP, she is a frequent speaker at such events as PASS Summit, SQLBits, SQLRally, SQLSaturday, 24 Hours of PASS, and local user groups and has been an active volunteer with European SQLSaturday events. At PASS Summit 2012, she is part of the panel discussing “Women in Technology: Where Have We Been and Where Are We Going” at the 10th anniversary WIT Luncheon.

 

In nominating her for the PASSion Award, fellow volunteers shared the following:

  • “She has gone above and beyond making contacts with people at Microsoft Europe and user group leaders to bring together a fledgling community of WIT support and build it into a more recognized, if not more accepted, group of PASSionate people.”
  • “Jen continues to support the PASS community at large as a recognized MVP and frequent speaker. She always is eager to share her positive experiences with this organization to encourage others to join in.”

In addition, PASS named Amy Lewis and Jesus Gil Velasco as 2012 PASSion Award Honorable Mentions for their contributions over the past year:

  • Amy (LinkedIn | twitter) is Co-Chair of the PASS DW/BI Virtual Chapter, Co-Manager of the PASS Summit 2012 Program Committee, event coordinator for this year’s Phoenix SQLSaturday and next year’s event, and new coordinator of the Arizona SQL Server User Group.
  • Jesus (twitter) is founder of the Mexico City PASS Chapter, PASS Regional Mentor for LATAM, and organizer of the LATAM 24 Hours of PASS virtual event.

PASS also recognized Ryan Adams, Mark Broadbent, Andrey Korshikov, and Sarah Strate as Outstanding Volunteers.

Congratulations to all our honorees, and thank you for your service to PASS and the SQL Server community! For more information about PASS and the PASSion Awards, see www.sqlpass.org.

About PASS PASS is an independent, not-for-profit association dedicated to supporting, educating, and promoting the global Microsoft SQL Server and Business Intelligence community. From local user groups and virtual chapters to webcasts and the annual PASS Summit, PASS enables knowledge sharing, in-depth learning, access to the Microsoft SQL Server team, and the ability to influence the direction of SQL Server technologies. For more information, visit the PASS Web site at http://www.sqlpass.org.

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SQL PASS Summit Day 1 Keynote

* Announcing the PASS Business Analytics conference in Chicago, Il on April 10-12 2013.

* Announcing SP1 for SQL Server 2012.

We arrived sunday for PASS 2012 and immediately met up with some friends and had a great time.

Following that we were both in precons yesterday.  I was in Private Clouds with Allan Hirt and Ben DeBow, and Jen was in t-sql with Itzik Ben-Gan.  If you’ve never been to a precon before I recommend you give it a try.  It’s an endurance trial though.  8hrs of concentrated training on a topic isn’t easy to get through, but if you throw a little water in your face you’ll get through it.

* Announcing Hekaton,  a new in-memory technology that will ship in the next major version of SQL Server. In-memory computing is a core element of Microsoft’s strategy to deliver a data platform that enables customers to analyze all types of data while also accelerating time to insight. Currently in private preview, “Hekaton” will complete Microsoft’s portfolio of in-memory capabilities across analytics and transactional scenarios, offering customers performance gains of up to 50 times. Because Microsoft’s in-memory capabilities are built into SQL Server, customers don’t need to buy specialized hardware or software and can easily migrate existing applications to benefit from the dramatic performance gains.  The live demo showed a 9x perf increase in a workload by using Hekaton to pin the table into memory.  They then optimized a stored procedure with Hekaton and got a 28x performance increase.

Also, a preview of the next version of SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW), Microsoft’s enterprise-class appliance, available in the first half of 2013. SQL Server 2012 PDW will include a new data processing engine called PolyBase, which will enable queries across relational data and non-relational Hadoop data to drastically reduce time to insight.

* CTP Microsoft HDInsight Server is now available.  HDInsight Server is the name given to the next iteration of Hadoop capabilities.

PolyBase was also demoed.  PolyBase is a new query construct that allows  you to query multiple data sources easily and merge them together.  So tsql and hadoop for example, are well within reach now in a single query.

*PowerView and PowerPivot are now fully integrated into Excel2013.

The integration is being billed as something that’s extremely easy for end users to setup.  I tried the same demo he did on stage with a very simple data set I created in excel on the spot and I was able to recreate his demo very easily on the spot without ever having played with it before.  This is the first time MS has billed something as being easy in the BI platform and I’ve actually been able to duplicate what they’ve done.

Great job guys.

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#InapproPASS Party 2012 – Seattle

Many of you know about our annual event for charity, where we present sessions and make jokes that aren’t fit for polite society. There’s a lot of swearing and lewd jokes, and it’s all in very good fun.  If you like deeply inappropriate language, and will be in Seattle on November 6, read on!

Summary for the impatient:

  • What’s commonly referred to as “InapproPASS” is our vulgar event for charity (benefiting the Shriners Hospitals for Children).
  • It will be Tuesday, November 6 from 8:30-midnight ish, in Seattle.
  • We’re sponsored by Trainsignal!
  • Pay your $20 entry fee and email our attendance coordinator (Nic at SirSQL.net) with your favorite swear (consider it your password).

And a note for our sponsor: Check out TrainSignal’s SQL Training vids
or find out how to become a SQL instructor.

If you want the wordier version of this blog, go check it out on our Groupies’ site. But if you’re sold, register today!

Buy your tickets here (1 ticket, $20) – but please, don’t register if very strong language and adult humor offends you:

MidnightDBA News

Webcast: The Art and Science of Handling Recruiters

This is a repost from Jen’s blog.

Edit: This event has passed, but the “Handling Recruiters” recording is up! Enjoy.

Guys! We’re totally hosting our first DBARoadmap-sponsored webcast this week! Here are your details (updated to use LiveMeeting):

Who: Sean and Jen McCown, the MidnightDBAs (and you)

What: The Art and Science of Handling Recruiters, webcast complete with lecture, slides, FAQ, and pretty pretty pictures. At least 3 of those 4 guaranteed.

When: Thursday, August 23 at 11:30pm Central

Where:

Attend using Microsoft Office Live Meeting: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/mvp/join?id=2PPTZ3&role=attend&pw=nh%28%22%244%28%7BB

Add to my Outlook Calendar: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/mvp/meetingICS?id=2PPTZ3&role=attend&pw=nh%28%22%244%28%7BB&i=i.ics

Why:

Recruiters have the inside track on the majority of full time positions out there, but they come with a certain set of issues. You will find the occasional gold level recruiter who really knows his or her business, but most recruiters require a certain level of handling.

Here we’ll talk about some of the more common issues with technology recruiters, strategies for dealing with them, and some of the best advice you’ll never hear anywhere else.

Sponsored by www.DBARoadmap.com – attendees will receive a discount code, and one lucky attendee will get a free copy of the Roadmap!

Last of all, here’s the Google Calendar link with all the same information, for your convenience:

MidnightDBA News

SQL Cruise! SQL Saturdays! Summit! SQL-SQL-SQL!

This is a repost from Jen’s blog.

We’re drawing to the end of our third season of DBAs@Midnight (our weekly webshow by DBAs, for DBAs), and to the middle of the summer. What on earth shall we do for the next few months? We considered taking a break from all things SQL*, then thought…naaaah. So far we’ve lined up, three SQL Saturdays, the PASS Summit, and a January SQL Cruise!

August-October – SQL Saturdays

We’ll  be tooling on down to sultry Red Stick** for the August 4 SQLSaturday #150 – Baton Rouge 2012. I’ll present Beginning T-SQL and T-SQL Brush-up:The Best Things You Forgot You Knew, and Sean has Beginning Powershell for DBAs 1.0 and The Backup Tune-up (this was stunningly popular at SQLRally this year).

And we’ll head up to OKC for the August 25 – SQLSaturday #125 – Oklahoma City 2012 (schedule not yet announced).

On October 12, the day before SQLSaturday #163 – Dallas – BI Edition 2012, Sean has a precon slated! Check out the details for his “Become an Enterprise DBA” precon at EventBrite, and register!

November 6-9 – PASS Summit 2012

We’ll be rocking the PASS Summit again this year in our usual fashion. Sean has two sessions: the excellent Blazing Fast Backups, and our very popular Mouth Wide Shut: Coherent Interviewing.

January 2013 – SQLCruise!

January 26 through February 2, 2013 we will go on our first ever SQL Cruise!!  We’ll float down from Miami through the Eastern Caribbean, drinks in hand, learning away, doing all the cruise-y things that cruisers do…I CAN’T WAIT! Oh yeah, and Sean and the other trainers will be teaching awesome stuff, too.

Register before September 1 for the earlybird discount, and hurry!

Big big days ahead of us, good times…

 

 

Admin, MidnightDBA News, Powershell, Videos

Powershell till you drop

Ok, well I’ve been very busy again and released 3 new PS vids today. 

There’s one on dropping tables.  I use regex to make this happen, so even if you’re not interested in dropping tables, you can come learn how to do a simple regex.

http://midnightdba.itbookworm.com/VidPages/PowershellDropTables/PowershellDropTables.aspx
http://midnightdba.itbookworm.com/VidPages/PowershellDropTables/PowershellDropTables.wmv

 

The next one is on truncating tables.  Here I just limit it by a specific schema.

http://midnightdba.itbookworm.com/VidPages/PowershellTruncateTables/PowershellTruncateTables.aspx
http://midnightdba.itbookworm.com/VidPages/PowershellTruncateTables/PowershellTruncateTables.wmv

And the last one is just damn good.  I show you how to get sp_configure functionality in PS.  There’s a trick to it so don’t discard it cause you think you can figure it out on your own. 

http://midnightdba.itbookworm.com/VidPages/PowershellServerConfigSettings/PowershellServerConfigSettings.aspx
http://midnightdba.itbookworm.com/VidPages/PowershellServerConfigSettings/PowershellServerConfigSettings.wmv

 

Admin, MidnightDBA News, Powershell, Videos

Get IP and DNS in Powershell

Hey guys, I posted a new video last night on how to get IP and DNS info from your servers.  I know there are more ways to do it so if you guys have a way you like better send it to me and I’ll make another vid.

http://midnightdba.itbookworm.com/VidPages/PowershellGetIPandDNS/PowershellGetIPandDNS.aspxhttp://midnightdba.itbookworm.com/VidPages/PowershellGetIPandDNS/PowershellGetIPandDNS.aspx

 

Admin, MidnightDBA News, Powershell, Time-savers, Videos

Hey, how about some new Powershell vids?

I’ve been a busy little guy this week.  I’ve posted 4 new videos.

The first one is on cycling the SQL error log from Powershell.  Well, not really, you’re really deploying the solution to other boxes using Powershell.
You can see it here:
http://midnightdba.itbookworm.com/VidPages/PowershellCycleErrorLog/PowershellCycleErrorLog.aspx

The next one is about reading the SQL error log from Powershell.

You can see it here:  http://midnightdba.itbookworm.com/VidPages/PowershellReadErrorLogs/PowershellReadErrorLogs.aspx

The next 2 are a short series on changing DB permissions in Powershell.
You can see them here:

http://midnightdba.itbookworm.com/VidPages/PowershellChangeSQLPermissions/PowershellChangeSQLPermissions.aspx
http://midnightdba.itbookworm.com/VidPages/PowershellChangeSQLPermissions2/PowershellChangeSQLPermissions2.aspx

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Losing your job Sucks

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I’ve blogged about this before, but some things are worth repeating from time to time.

Losing your job really sucks. And it doesn’t matter if you find out about it ahead of time by 2mos, 2wks, or not until they walk you out the door, you’re going to feel like a complete failure.  And I don’t know, maybe you should, maybe you shouldn’t, but if you don’t get a handle on it and soon you’re going to find yourself in the middle of a depression that’s hard to get out of.  And once you’re there you’ll be useless for finding a job until you get out of it because everyone can see you’re depressed and nobody wants to hire someone who’s a major downer.  You can take some steps to avoid it though, and here’s what I do.

The first thing I do is learn something new.  I pick a single topic of something I really want to learn and I do it.  It’s important that you only pick a single topic though.  The reason is because if you’re already feeling like a failure, choosing to bone-up on SQL in general is only going to make you more depressed because it’s going to remind you how small you really are compared to the product.  There’s just too much to do.  So you pick one small thing and do that.  You can tackle a single feature much easier.  Maybe it’s not even a SQL topic you’re interested in.  Maybe you’ve always wanted to get started with ASP.NET, or HTML, or JavaScript, or Powershell, etc.  Pick one of those instead.  Now, you certainly won’t learn any of those overnight either, but at least it’s a solid topic you can practice and get better at.  This is very important because it shows you that you’re not a loser and you are capable of doing something.  It also gives you new confidence because you’ve added something significant that you like to your skillset.  And if something in IT isn’t what you’re dying to do, then take this time to learn French cooking, or the harmonica, or whatever.

The 2nd thing I do is I start working out.  This too is essential.  There are a couple reasons for this.  First, it’s something tangible.  Unless you’re just completely paralyzed it’s impossible to not see improvement.  You jog to the end of the street and you’re completely winded.  Then the next day (or later that day) you jog to the end of the street and go and extra 10ft.  The next time you go even farther… and so on and so on.  Or you lift weights and see some improvement there.  Do something physical.  Do it every day and do it to exhaustion.  Why exhaustion?  Well, that’s the 2nd reason.

Physical activity works out mental frustration.  It’s hard to be stressed when you’re too tired to walk.  So by working out really hard every day you go a long way to relieve your stress.  And if you’re the type to hold things in, you’re more likely to open up and talk when you’re tired.  This is why parents who know this, make their kids get on a treadmill or do some good exercise when they come home really upset and refuse to talk.  After a good workout they start talking.  This is also more or less how truth serums work.  They relax you to the point where you don’t have the energy to lie.  Lying takes energy and effort and if you’re really relaxed, you tend to not be able to exert that kind of effort.

All of this should help you achieve the ultimate goal that I’ll state now.  Your ultimate goal is to shift your self-worth from your job to something else.  If you place all your worth on your job and you just lost your job, then where does that leave you?  Completely worthless, that’s where.  But if your job is just something else you do and you’re succeeding at plenty of other things, well then you’re not worthless.  You just don’t currently have a job.  The point is that your job shouldn’t define who you are.  Instead, focus on your career.  Whether or not you have a job currently, you’re still a DBA.  Individual jobs come and go, but your career stays constant.

I’ve lost jobs before.  I think almost everyone has.  It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re an idiot or you suck at what you do.  It may simply be that you weren’t right for that gig for whatever reason.  I’ve found that there are some shops that are so dysfunctional no sane person will ever be successful there.  Sometimes it’s a single person being enabled by the entire company, and sometimes it’s actually the entire company dynamic.  For whatever reason, you’re just not suited to that gig.  Ok, try to define what it is you can’t work with there and try to avoid that the next time.

So it may not be you who sucks at all.  Of course, it very well may be, and if that’s the case then improving your skills will be your 2nd priority.  Your first priority of course is to do what I said above and keep yourself out of the funk.  Because if you can’t do that then you’re not going anywhere.

Instead of working, I blog.