I’ve been speaking lately about methodologies and why it’s important to use them. In my presentations I discuss the P.A.C.E acronym, and because I am referencing more and more outside of the presentations, I thought it would be a good idea to throw it up on the blog.
Presenting at Riverside.io
Due to another article with a very similar headline that was just recently posted I have decided to change my presentations for tomorrow. I also felt after reviewing my presentation numerous times that the scientific method is really just an example in the larger message that I am trying to communicate.
Drowning in Do
Becoming good at anything takes practice. Practicing takes time.
Time…is something that adults seem to have very little of. It’s extremely easy to become overwhelmed in the fast paced career of Information Technology. There is always so much to learn, and so little time. At some times, I feel like I am drowning in all the things I need to do in order to stay employable in my field. Here is a methodology that I have used throughout the years, and it has become one of my better methods for keeping my head above water in the sea of do, and doing the things I need and want to do for acquiring gnu skills.
Live @ the IE SQL Group
Just thought I’d drop a completely shameless media blast. I’m speaking at the Inland Empire SQL Server Users Group, March 26th 2014 6pm-9pm
Cache Money
I was reading the Voice of the DBA and it referred to a post by Brent Ozar about caching at the database level. After discussing it with my homey, he thought it sounded a lot like memoization (I like to say it with a 3 stooges voice, mem moy Zay Shun). According to wiki, Memoization is a specific case of optimization, which seems to be what we are doing when we cache the results of a stored procedure.
Workload Simulation With SQL Data Generator
testing is science…
Introduction
In college one of my mentors was a jedi master of simulations and testing. The guy could write a simulation for just about anything you can think of, and with anything you can think of. I’m pretty sure that he once made a neural network for simulating dinosaur procreation rates…using sticks and mud (true story). Simulating workloads can help you thoroughly test ideas and present data to management that will allow them to make informed decisions. IRL, your career will be much happier if you can test your ideas BEFORE deploying them to production. No one is asking you to have good ideas all the time, but the business is depending on you to come up with ideas that will work as intended. The only way to accomplish this responsibly, is to test.
SQL Server Performance Troubleshooting with Ozar Unlimited
career development…
I was lucky enough to attend the SQL Server Performance Troubleshooting in San Diego with the Ozar Unlimited team. I like to review events that I attend and I take some pride in telling people how it is, and how it was, at least from my perspective. With that being said, anything said in this post is my own opinion and not related in any way to any other entity. I’m also going to leave out quite a few of the details since part of the fun was the unknown, and the Ozar Unlimited team did a great job at keeping the training fun. In order to keep this post a reasonable length, I’m only going to be picking my top three modules from each day.
Virtualize Everything
career development…
I began dabbling in virtualization somewhere around 2007. I used VMware sever for creating some virtual labs but nothing too serious. At that time it was a cool technology and I was happy to have a small group of linux servers running on one single physical server.
Later in 2008 I got a taste of virtualizing windows servers in a production environment using VMware and vSphere. This was where I fell in love with the technology. The speed at which I could provision servers was amazing, and having that well designed console that is vSphere…just beautiful, it truly made me feel like a superhero, but it wasn’t until late 2012 that I finally got to try my hand at constructing a fully virtualized infrastructure.
Reverse Engineering using SQL Profiler
The best defense is a strong CHAINSAW SWORD!!!
There may come a time in your career when you are tasked with finding out how a 3rd party application functions because some 3rd parties have completely closed source applications, or better yet, APIs that perform poorly. Microsoft SQL Server Profiler can help you identify what tables are used, procedures and what data is inserted when functions are run.
Trace Flag 3226 – Suppress Log was backed up messages
Your hero for the day!
I’ve been out for the last month adventuring in Bolivia. During this time my inbox stacked up with newsletters and digests galore, mostly from SQL Skills and SQL Server Central. In the 11/25/2013 SQLSkills Insiders email Paul Randall highlights a couple trace flags that should be enabled. First, if you haven’t been to sqlskills.com…you probably aren’t googling right. These are the pros that provide pro information to help other pros become pro…er? I learn so much on a weekly basis by reading articles from the SQL Skills team, so I highly recommend you check it out, and sign up for the emails.