It’s Bingo Time!

We're only a few days away from the PASS Summit now, and you need to make sure to print out some bingo cards so you can have a little extra fun, have a chance to win some prizes, and meet a lot of new people.
A few weeks ago the idea started going around about a Twitter bingo game and thanks to some hard work from a few people in the SQL Community, it looks like the game’s on. You can read the official rules on the SQLServerPedia website, but here are a few things you should keep in mind.

1. Make sure to print out three cards (one for each day).
2. Make sure to refresh the page between printing to get a new card.
3. Make sure to print a copy of the rules, because they change each day.

When you track down a person on the square, they will give you a code word you need to write on their space. I am one of the people you need to track down so I will be tweeting my whereabouts throughout the day using the official twitter bingo hash tag #sqlbingo. You don’t have to use twitter to be eligible, but it will give you an advantage when trying to find the people on your card.
You can find out who all has signed up to be a square as well as some other good information on Stuart Ainsworth’s blog. You may even have a slight advantage if you start following everyone ahead of time.

New Whitepaper on Consolidation Using SQL Server 2008

I just finished reading a new whitepaper by Allan Hirt on Consolidation Using SQL Server 2008. It's 60 pages, so it is long enough to include some good detail, but not so long that you can't sit down and read it all at once. I have a special interest in consolidation and I would recommend that anyone starting or already going through a consolidation project take a few minutes to read this whitepaper.
A few of the highlights from the whitepaper that I really liked are...

• A good sample list of the guiding principals that will govern the consolidation project
  
• What kind of information you need to gather about servers during a consolidation project as well as why you need to collect it (even a detailed list of performance counters)
  
• The different types of consolidation along with the considerations you need to be aware of for each one

The whitepaper is full of other great advice as well such as the options you have for moving your databases and considerations for administering a consolidated environment once the process is complete.

Birds Of A Feather Lunch At PASS

PASS has organized a Birds of a Feather lunch for the Summit on Tuesday November 3rd and I was given the opportunity to host a table. Each table is going to be talking about a specific topic during lunch, so I suggest you find something that interests you and try to find a seat at that particular table. I am going to be discussing Central Management Servers in SQL Server 2008. This is not going to be a presentation or lecture; it’s just going to be a bunch of people sitting at a table eating lunch and talking about SQL.

Apress also contacted me and wanted to know if I could use any books to give away at PASS, so I will be handing out a few copies of Pro SQL Server 2008 Administration and Pro SQL Server 2008 Mirroring during lunch. I have also heard that some other authors may be giving away a few books as well. Here is the list of topics that will be discussed.

32Bit/64Bit - What's the difference?	Jonathan	Kehayias
Agile Development in BI	John	Welch
App Dev Smackdown	Adam	Machanic
Change Data Capture	Pinal	Dave
Chow down on corruption	Paul	Randal
Common T-SQL Programming Mistakes	Plamen	Ratchev
Data Mining	Dejan	Sarka
Data Warehousing Concepts	James	Rowland-Jones
Database Mirroring	Glenn	Berry
DBA Best Practices	Satya	Jayanty
DBA Dashboards	Greg	Larsen
DBA/Developer Team Development	Grant	Fritchey
Don't be afraid of XML!	Jacob	Sebastian
Dynamic Management Views	Jason	Strate
Erland on Error Handling and Dynamic SQL	Erland	Sommarskog
Full Text Search and File Stream	Robert	Cain
Gemini's impact on SSAS/Data Warehouse projects	Vidas	Matelis
Getting Started with T-SQL	Kathi	Kellenberger
Got Query Plan Reuse? Is it good?	Andrew	Kelly
Failover Clustering	Christian	Bolton
High Availability with Log Shipping	Edwin	Sarmiento
High Availability in Virtualized Environments	Allan	Hirt
High Availability in Virtualized Environments	Ross	Mistry
Is Business Intelligence an Oxymoron?	Jessica	Moss
IT Consulting - Notes from the field	Joe	Webb
Key Performance Indicators -Monitoring Your Business	Andrew	Karcher
Kimberly Tripp Covers Indexes (and lunch)	Kimberly	Tripp
Location Based BI With SQL Server 2008	Deepak	Puri
Moving from Technologist to Manager	Kevin	Kline
Multi Server Management	Chuck	Heinzelman
Multiply Yourself with Central Management Servers	Ken	Simmons
Performance Analysis/Tuning	Kevin	Boles
Performance Tuning Analysis Services	Chris	Webb
Policy-Based Management	Geoff	Hiten
Powershell in SQL Server	Sean	McCown
What Is Professional Development for a SQL Professional?	Arnie	Rowland
Relational Database Design	Louis	Davidson
Security	Kenneth	Kelley
Social Networking: Geek DBA to Butterfly	Jason	Massie
SQL Azure	Eduardo	Castro
SQL Server Compact - The little database that could	Erik	Jensen
SQL Server Consolidation	Peter	Ward
SQL Server Reporting Services	Andrea	Benedetti
SQL Server Reporting Services on Analysis Services	Grant	Paisley
SSAS Calculation Measure Groups at Different Grains	Greg	Galloway
SSIS Scripts & Custom Objects	Todd	McDermid
Starting up your own MicroISV business	Paul	Nielsen
Storage Best Practices	Denny	Cherry
Table Partitioning	Dan	Guzman
Thinking in MDX	Tomislav	Piasevoli
Troubleshooting SSIS (even the oddball issues)	Andy	Leonard
Understanding Execution Plans	Gail	Shaw
Virtualization (cohosted)	John Paul	Cook
Virtualization (cohosted)	Charley	Hanania
Visual Studio Database edition & TFS: How are you using it?	Rafael	Salas
Why and How to Participate in the SQL Server Community	Andy	Warren

I have found myself wanting to be at multiple places at once when planning my itinerary for the PASS Summit, and this is another one of those times. I think this is great idea and Mike Walsh (even though he has said multiple times that this was not his idea) deserves a special thanks for helping organize this.

Take A Minute To Help The PASS Virtulization Virtual Chapter

 

The PASS Virtualization Virtual Chapter is holding a breakfast session  at the PASS Summit to answer all of your virtualization questions, but first we would like you to answer a few of ours. Please take a few minutes to fill out a survey with the following questions.

• Have you virtualized dev, production, DR, large database servers?
• If you’ve virtualized SQL Server, what’s been the biggest benefit?
• If you haven’t, what’s the biggest barrier?
• What information do you need to confidently virtualize SQL Server?
• What significant problems do virtualization vendors still have to solve?
• Have you got any databases you’d like to virtualize, but the 3rd-party-vendor won’t support it?
• What webcast topics would you like to see covered?

In case you missed the link to the survey above, here is a really long hyperlink for you.

After you fill out the survey, make sure to go sign up for the breakfast session if you are going to the the PASS Summit and want to learn more about virtualization.

Query To Make Sure Data Purity Checks Will Be Performed

When you upgrade a database from 2000 to 2005 or 2008 one of the things you need to do is run the DBCC CHECKDB command with the DATA_PURITY option at least one time to set a flag in the boot page of the database and from that point forward, every DBCC CHECKDB operation will perform the data purity checks.
I have been looking for a way to programmatically check to see if the flag was set and never really found anything. The other day, I read a blog post by Paul Randal on how to tell if the flag was set.
CHECKDB From Every Angle: How to tell if data purity checks will be run?
I found this very interesting, because I have been wondering about what flag this was for a while. However, this was still too manual for me to do. It’s just easier to run the command against all of your databases if you are not sure if the flag is set.
Then I read Sankar Reddy's blog post today, and then it clicked. I can use the same logic to check for the data purity flag.
Database Internal version; Create Version and Current Version
Note: If you read the preceding blog posts, the following code will make more sense.
I created a query based on the logic in Paul’s blog and the code in Sankar’s blog to come up with the following script.

DBCC TRACEON (3604);
GO 

CREATE TABLE #DBCC ( 
      ParentObject VARCHAR(255),
      [Object] VARCHAR(255),
      Field VARCHAR(255),
      [Value] VARCHAR(255) 
) 

CREATE TABLE #DBCC2 ( 
     DatabaseName VARCHAR(255),
     ParentObject VARCHAR(255),
     [Object] VARCHAR(255),
     Field VARCHAR(255),
     [Value] VARCHAR(255) 
)


EXEC master.dbo.sp_MSFOREACHDB 
'USE ? INSERT INTO #DBCC EXECUTE (''DBCC DBINFO WITH TABLERESULTS'');
INSERT INTO #DBCC2 SELECT ''?'', * FROM #DBCC;
DELETE FROM #DBCC' 

SELECT * FROM #DBCC2
WHERE Field = 'dbi_DBCCFlags' AND 
      Value = 0 AND
      DatabaseName NOT IN ('master','model') 

DROP TABLE #DBCC
DROP TABLE #DBCC2 
GO 

Next, I took a backup of a 2000 database and restored it to my 2008 instance just to make sure I had a database that fit the criteria. After running the script, you see the following results.

As you can see, I have several databases on my 2008 instance and the only one without the data purity flag set is the CMS database I restored from the 2000 instance. I thought this was really cool and maybe a few of you will find this useful as well.

A Simple Active/Passive Configuration Change To Reduce Downtime

Okay. It’s not what you think. By “Active/Passive”, I am talking about voice, and by “Downtime” I am talking about sleeping.

The Problem

When I started writing for Apress, one of the editors told me I needed to watch out for writing in the passive voice. He said that writing in the passive voice tends to put readers to sleep. My first thought was… “Great. I’m not an English Major. Now I have to worry about writing all this material and whether or not I am using the passive voice. Oh yeah, and how am I even going to know if I am writing in the passive voice anyway?” I am not going to get into the difference between the active and passive voice, but there is a good article here if you are interested.

The Solution

Now it’s time to get into the “Configuration Change” part of the title. Luckily, there is a setting in Word you can change that will put that nice little squiggly green line under any text that is written (oops that’s passive) you write in the passive voice.

Here is how you make the change in Word 2007.

Here is how you make the change in earlier versions.

Once you make the change, you can right-click on the underlined text and get a nice little suggestion just like you would with misspelled words.

In the above picture you can see that it recommended a completely new sentence for the first sentence. The phrase “has been known” makes the second sentence passive and you can rewrite the second sentence with the third sentence to remove the error.

I know this isn’t necessarily about SQL, but it is something that has helped me out a lot this year and wanted to share it.

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

I did a presentation at couple of SQLSaturdays (one in Birmingham and one in Pensacola) called SQL Server Preproduction Tasks and quickly found out that there was too much information for me to cover in a single session. After thinking a little more about the topic, I figured many times servers are not performing well because they were either not configured properly or they have not been properly maintained. That being said, I broke the presentation into two sessions; SQL Server Configuration and Automating Routine Maintenance. I plan to start presenting them as a two-part series.

I will be presenting Automating Routine Maintenance at the Columbus GA SQL Server Users Group on September 23 and at SQLSaturday #21 (which looks like it is going to be awesome btw) on October 17. I know everyone has there own way of doing things, but I would like to cover as much of the basics as I can and let people adjust based on their own judgment. If anyone wants to preview the scripts or the presentation, just ping me and I will send them to you.