Running Support

Real quick post, great things happening in the SQL Community around folks supporting each other. It is such a great feeling to conquer anything and Steve is coming up on a major milestone.

Read more on Jes Borlad’s blog linked below and help support Steve Jones as he hits a major milestone, everyone is welcome to join in.

I have committed to 3 myself.

http://jesborland.wordpress.com/

Maybe Next Time

No Nashville for Me

Back on Jan I wrote about recapping my 2010 goals and set forth some new items for 2011. Well the first quarter of the year has come and gone and time to reflect a bit on where I’m at.

First off I had signed up to run the Nashville 1/2 marathon for the 3rd straight year. I’m sad to say that is not going to happen. I did train for it and am ready to run it but a few things have led up to me NOT heading down to run this year. I do plan on a long run this weekend in honor of this and plan on finding a 1/2 more local to get involved with over the summer. I am getting a new master bathroom unexpectedly however and that works starts this week so all is not lost.

I did win my weight loss goal/contest and actually have dropped 15 lbs this year. Feels great and just need to stay focused and keep the weight off at this time.

My involvement in the football program is going well. I’m currently on the board and contributing via helping with maintaining the website, setting up FaceBook, and twitter accounts. I’m also helping out in various other fun projects including merchandising and planning for a great game day experience. Here is a picture of one of my projects that I ran. I’m so excited to get the tunnel out there on opening day and watch the players run out onto the field.

Can't wait for opening day!

Spending time with the family is always a something that I want to continue to work on. I feel my focus on this and writing it down has allowed me to do so. I find that I’m able to pull myself away from the computer more often than I did last year.  The bills can wait, so there are weeds in the yard, and work is not down that can wait also.. As my kids get older they seem to need me less but I’m still finding things to do with each of them.

• My youngest Emma (5)  just learned how to ride a bike with no training wells and loves when I watch her. She is really into soccer and baseball this year so that has become our bond.
• Caleigh (7) still loves her crafts and reading is her big thing. I find myself letting her read to me for 15-20 minutes and not cutting it off at 5 like I used to because Quicken was not update with this months checks.
• Finally the eldest Matt (10) is quite the gamer on his new PS3. We have had some good battles in Madden but most of all it’s the ability to play catch in the yard that I think we cherish the most.

Can’t forget the wife either. She is the glue keeping us all together and her ability to be in 4 places at once and still remember to pack snacks is amazing. She deserves an entire blog series as her ability to do what she does is mind blowing.

Continuing On

At this point i’m in maintenance mode. Need to keep things moving and identify what’s next but most of all it’s about enjoying the time as it passes and focus less on the end result.

Meme Monday – Backup Fun

Thomas LaRock (blog|twitter) has started Meme Monday and challenged folks to write a blog post in 11 words or less.

Daved Howard (blog|twitter) has tagged me so here it goes.

“SQL Backup you’re killing me, please stop failing, just work please”

Bottom line is I have been working along with the team on getting backups great. Not sure there is such a thing. One of the first things every DBA should be doing but seems to be the hardest to get right. Been working on this quiet a bit lately so it seemed appropriate for this fun blogging tag game.

Tagging:
Dave Levy has been quiet so I’m tagging him.

Enjoy!

Be a Hero

Giving Again

Last year around this time I wrote a post about my daughter who cut off her hair to donate it make wigs for cancer patients. The disease has hit my family and friends pretty hard as it has to many people. It’s very interesting to see my kids grasp the concept of service as it relates to helping those that are suffering. My wife and I keep open conversation about tough subjects with our children in hopes that that they grow up to help the community and others as we like to do.

Matt's going to jump for Heart!

Well this year my 10 year old son is taking his service to the next level. He will be raising money and jumping rope in the American Heart Associations Jump for Heart program.

Below are the Details

I’m joining millions of other kids to help save lives with the American Heart Association’s Jump Rope For Heart Program!  Will you help me?

I’m doing Jump Rope For Heart at my school and learning about kids with special hearts. I’m also learning about my own heart, and how to take care of it. And I’m getting active and jumping rope!

Some kids have special hearts – and need our help!  I’m raising money to help kids like them. The money I raise will help pay for education and for new medicines and treatments to be discovered.  It could help cure heart disease – for everybody!

You can help too!  Will you make a donation?  It’s fast and easy to do on my personal Web page! Just use the link below.
My Personal Page

Thank you for helping me save lives and be a Heart Hero!

Matt

Vista boot Stuck on a black screen with a mouse cursor

I’m not your help desk

Ok so a totally crazy name for a post. Here is the deal. I tend to be the tech support for much of my friends and family. My most recent conquest was one that was very challenging. I figured if it took me a few nights to figure it out and searching on the above got me the answer. It took a lot of reading comments in forums to get the right answer in my case. So I wanted to write a quick post with how I solved it and hopefully help someone out in the future.

So friend calls up and says, Geek Squad wants 130 bucks to upgrade my laptop to Windows 7. Can you do it? As usual I tell them to go to Geek Squad or use this other friendly company I know that does this on a regular basis. Essentially I don’t want to become their IT support for life. But an hour later he calls back and says, now this laptop won’t even boot. It just comes to a black screen with the mouse after I log in to the Vista login screen. Well I had some time that night so I said said drop it off I’ll take a quick look.

The Battle

So I tried the basics you will find if you search “Vista Black Screen Mouse Only” you will get long forums like this with various solutions and things to try. Mostly just people complaining about Microsoft. In any case this particular friend is not very technical so he would never have been able to figure this out.

I finally stumbled upon this thread which led me to the answer. It’s a long read and has lots of different answers but let me summarize.

1) Get to a command prompt using many of the ways described on the net. Pressing F8 on boot, or if you have to power off and on the hard way it should bring up the startup menu with command prompt as an option.

2) Get to C:\Windows\System32 and run MSCONFIG.EXE like shown below.

Here is what to type in

3) This should pop the GUI which you can choose the selective startup options as shown below.

Change to what's highlighted here!

4) Choose Ok and then restart.

Next Steps

At this point I was able to login and get the desktop back. I still assumed other things were wrong so I started cleaning the system with the typical spyware and virus tools. In this case the problem continued to exits so I used the Windows Easy Transfer tool described here to backup all his data. I then installed Windows 7 and recovered his data from the backup.

At this point the response is that his laptop has never worked better.

Hope this helps someone.

Powershell Baby Steps

First timer for T-SQL Tuesday so not even sure if I’m doing this right. I was going to write this post at some point but kept putting off. However reading all the great posts today and my passion for automation have driven me to share.

Old Backups
The way we have our SQL backups setup we have a few servers with numerous shares on them. So each servers backups are mapped to a specific share on the backup server(s). Our backup jobs are set to remove backups over x hours old when a new one is created so we should never have bak files over x hours on the backups servers.

In a perfect world we would never have old files but the world is not perfect. The problem starts to occur when servers are decomissioned or files are put in folders for a restore and forgotten. Essentially overtime we end up with 100′s of GB’s worth of old BAK files out on our backups servers. Eventually they get noticed and cleaned up when we get low disk space alerts on our servers or someone stumbles upon an old file. Not a huge problem but there is no reason to have these old files out there so why waste the space.

So one day I was frustrated by the amount of old files out there as I was arguing with someone over needing more disk space for another project. I was having an angry day and started looking through the folders manually one at a time. I decided that was a colossal waste of time so I did some windows searches on files *.BAK that were older than 60 days, etc. After asking Dave Levy (blog | twitter) how to copy out my Windows Explorer search results to excel to share with the team he challenged me to just write a Powershell script to dump to a CSV file.

I don’t get to code much these days in my role so I took the challenge. Well actually Dave sent me a script and I made  2 small changes to it and ran it. Magic! I had a file in seconds that I could send out to the team so they can go clean up the files. I’m sure you POSH experts are saying Duh that’s a no brainer. Keep this in mind, I turned in my coding badge years ago and struggle at times to grasp new coding concepts.

My Script

Get-ChildItem -Path \\YOURBACKUPSERVERNAME\d$\ -recurse -include *.bak | Where-Object {$_.lastwritetime -le ’1/1/2011′} | Export-Csv OldBackupReport.csv

Within 1 day we re-gained 1TB on our backup server drive and no need to buy more disk!

Can you guess what day I sent out the report?

Look at all that disk we saved!

Conclusion
This could be an automation stretch as I’m pretty much dumping out info to a file to have people go manually delete the files. I could have the script delete them I’m sure but I wanted to make sure we were not removing files that may be in process for a restore. I also considered scheduling this to run monthly and email the team which is something I might do in the future and post about at a later date.

SQLShare Progress

In December I shared a post about how I was going to use SQLShare to do some continuous learning.It’s so cool to get an email every morning showing how well I’m tracking to my goal. As you can see below I have been tracking pretty good in January. I did adjust my goal down a bit to 60 minutes per month and as of today I’m at 35 minutes out of 60. Another neat thing is that I’m starting to see some videos done by folks I follow on Twitter it’s nice to hear a voice to go along with the profile pics and tweets.

Check it out can’t hurt to give it a try.

More than half way to my goal!

2010 Recap

It’s the start of a new year. Time to reflect on what I did accomplish last year and think about what this year will hold. Last January I documented my goals for 2010. I felt that by writing them out and posting them my likelihood of success would be greater. For the most part this worked so I’m doing it again.

Looking Back

Blog once a month – I was able to do this, started off the year strong and struggled in Q4 to keep going. Topics are still a bit all over the board but I feel good about writing 24 posts in 2010.

Beat my 1/2 Marathon time by 5 minutes – I actually beat it by 9 minutes for a time of 2:21:51 as I wrote about in April.

SQL Community involvement – Started off the year great and tapered in the fall and winter. Still keeping involved loosely but other priorities took over such as my football coaching.

Looking back I feel good about all these things. As expected things changed mid year and I had to re-focus some of my attention to other things. This is natural when looking out a year ahead. I have read a lot of posts lately around people in the SQL community changing jobs and deciding to focus on different technologies. Things change and in my mind the only way to fail is to not plan for it or expect it.

Looking Forward

So with it being a new year I need some new goals. Not feeling as inspired as I was this time last year it’s been a bit more difficult. Here is what I’m going with.

I signed up for the 1/2 Marathon in Nashville for April again and I’m currently in a friendly weigh loss contest. So my first goal is to shave off another 5 minutes from my 1/2 time. To that end I have set a goal to run/workout 3 times a week.

Another thing I’m planning on doing is getting more involved in the youth football program I coached last year. I’m looking to get myself more integrated into the organization and help out more from a volunteer standpoint above just the coaching I have been doing.

This last one is hard to measure but its something I really want to focus on. I am looking for ways to play more with my kids and enjoy more family time. It’s scary how fast they are growing up and as they do they seem to need me less and less. I want to make sure that I stay involved with each of my 3 kids and can relate to what’s happening in their lives.

Nothing earth shattering here but documenting and posting this out there will hopefully keep me focused.

Learn Something Every Day

Something I’m always trying to drive others towards is continuing to learn. I’m all about career development and taking control of my future via continued learning. To a fault it’s sort of a passion of mine. There are so many ways to do this it’s mind boggling. Reading books, blogs, online training, classroom training, #sqlhelp on twitter, etc. It makes me wonder why some folks don’t do anything at all.

I was in a meeting the other day and was told by someone that they simply don’t have time to learn anything new or time to get better at what they do today, they are simply too busy. This totally shocked me and I really tried to reach out and help guide this person to look inward and focus on themselves. One of my points was how will you ever get more time unless you optimize how you are working today. Sure, the we need more help argument, is always there but that is not in your control most of the time. So how can you get more time, well how about learning how to do something better.

And that’s what I’m going to share today.

Zero! Better get learning

One learning opportunity that I have been tracking on lately is SQL Share I get an email every day with a 1-5 minute short training video. If the content interests me I watch it, learn something new. If not I just delete the email and move on. What is great is it keeps track for me so every day I get a reminder of how much time I have spent. It’s totaled by month and there is a nice track record on the site for me to review what I have watched. My kids have reading logs at home they need to complete each month for school. They are crazy about beating there total hours one month to the next. Well this is my log. It drives me nuts when I start to lag behind. When I watched less one month to the next it irritates me and I’ll hammer off 3 or 4 in a row and get that number back up. This type of daily learning via short videos really appeals to me and my way of learning.

I’m not a big on reading technical manuals or books. I like blogs but if a blog post get’s too long and detailed I quickly move on to something else. When reading a BOL like Jen McCown is planning to do as described in her blog my eyes to to go blurry after about 2 minutes. That’s just not my style. Everyone has there own way of learning. I am really looking forward to following along as Jen reads BOL and blogs on it as I hope to let her do all the hard work and get what I need from her posts.

In summary I have found something here that works for me and I wanted to share. So if you are interested check it out, let me know if it works for you.

Thanks Andy Warren, Brian Knight, and Steve Jones for yet another great learning opportunity.
About SQL Share

SQL Denali

I have been tuned in to both keynotes this week at the SQLPass Summit really wishing I was there. I just was in Seattle 2 week ago as a Microsoft customer visiting and learning about some neat new things coming, some of which is being discussed in these keynotes. Seattle is a great place and I can’t wait to get back and have more time to explore.

There are a lot of new things being presented as being in the next release of SQL code named Denali. Some of it looks promising on many aspects. Here are the things I am very interested in exploring more over the next 6-12 months.

Columnstore Indexes
This is what I’m most excited about. Mainly because I come from a BI backgrounnd and have spent years trying to make DW queries run faster. It’s almost a passion of mine so I’m exicted to take this for a test drive in a real situation. There is a very nice whitepaper that is linked on Simons SQL Blog that explains this way better than I ever could.

SSIS Integration within SSMS or as it would be Visual Studio
The current way that SSIS is supported in SSMS is clunky. Some questions I have right of the bat are. Can you manage SSIS packages stored on the file system or only within MSDB? Can you manage packages across versions which is a problem now? I have SSIS 2005 running and can’t manage from my SSMS 2008. I will be interested to see how this is all going to work.

SSIS Enhancements
The undo seemed to be what most folks in attendance were excited about the demo I saw. What I’m more interested in is the performance gains if any that this version will bring. I don’t recall hearing that mentioned or at least it was not a focus of the demo. The data cleansing piece seemed promising but I have a feeling that the setup and maintenance of the rules etc will make that a feature not well adopted. Every version of this has been a vast improvement so I’m sure this will just be more solid than the last. SSIS Junkie has some great links to explore more of whats in store.

Visual Studio vs SSMS
I’m excited to see the movement towards integrating the DBA’s and the developers tool sets. However I still struggle with how this will all work and the adoption rate. I still have folks using Query Analyzer, old habits are hard to break and yes we still have SQL 2000 instances running production apps. The big win here for me is source control integration with TFS and working in a common tool set. A rough spot at our shop is moving code from Dev/Test/Prod and hope this will improve that process over what we have today. The new features in the demo seemed pretty good and much of what you would could get with add on tools from major vendors built in which was nice to see. I’ll be going there but not sure how this will change the daily lives of the team. Brent Ozar did a nice write-up on some of the features here.

Let’s Go
So at this point I’m excited to get a system up with this on there and touch and feel for myself. In the meantime I’ll keep reading and learning from everyone out there rapidly blogging and documenting what they are finding. Enjoy and let me know what features interest you the most.