Community

Speaking at SQLSaturday Pensacola

I’m proud to announce that I will be speaking at SQLSaturday Pensacola on June 4th 2016! This will be my second SQLSaturday event and I’m really excited that I get to do it as a speaker. I look forward to seeing you there!

If you don’t know what SQL Saturday is, it’s a whole day of free SQL Server training available to you at no cost!

If you haven’t been to a SQL Saturday, what are you waiting for! Sign up now!

Friend of Redgate 2016

I’m excited to announce that I have been named a Friend of Redgate for 2016. The program targets influential people in their respective technical communities such as SQL,.NET and ALM and enables us to participate in the conversation around product and community development.

Last year was my first year in the program and the value that it provides to the community is immeasurable. I got to see first hand the dedication Redgate has to the SQL community and to making great software. I met a ton of really cool, very dedicated people along the way. Thanks for the recognition and I look forward to another great year!

Speaking at SQLSaturday Chicago

I’m proud to announce that I will be speaking at SQLSaturday Chicago on March 5th 2016! This will be my first SQLSaturday event and I’m really excited that I get to do it as a speaker. I look forward to seeing you there!

My presentation is “Performance Monitoring AlwaysOn Availability Groups”

Here’s the abstract for the talk

Have you deployed Availability Groups in your data center? Are you monitoring your Availability Groups to ensure you can meet your recovery objectives? If you haven’t this is the session for you. We will discuss the importance of monitoring and trending Availability Group Replication, how AGs move data between replicas and the impact replication latency can have on the availability of your systems. We’ll also give you the tools and techniques to go back to the office and get started monitoring and trending right away!

Public Speaking – The First Time

Update for T-SQL Tuesday #84

Well, this year I was challenged with the goal of speaking publicly three times, well I blew that out of the water and have spoken 8 times (one of which was a major IT conference) this year with one more on deck for Friday at the Albuquerque SQL Server User Group. I never thought it would have gone this far, but it certainly is fun and exciting. I encourage you to set a goal, even if it’s speaking only one time…set the goal and do it! You’ll be surprised where it takes you, the great people you meet along the way and the support those same folks give you!

Thanks Paul!

What I’ve noticed this year is that there’s really not another group of people like the SQL Community.  Earlier this year Paul Randal ( b | t ), in the name of community, offered his services to mentor to a small group of people. Check it out here. Crazy as it may sound he went ahead and offered mentoring to everyone that submitted here and I was on that list. Here’s my blog post submission

Designing for offloaded log backups in AlwaysOn Availability Groups – Part 2 – Monitoring

AlwaysOn Availability Groups have made a big splash in the SQL world and are quickly becoming the HA and DR technology of choice for many SQL Server environments. Crucial to their success is the ability to move data between the replicas in the Availability Group quickly and efficiently. In the previous [post][1] we discussed design concepts for offloaded backups in AlwaysOn Availability Groups, specifically we focused on how data is moved between AGs and the potential impact on backups and recovery. It is important to measure and trend replication health and this article introduces techniques and queries that you can use in your environment to measure and trend replication health and some of the nuances of the data reported in DMVs. ### Measuring Availability Group Replication Latency Central to measuring replication health is the [sys.dm_hadr_database_replica_states][2] DMV. On the primary replica this DMV returns rows representing the current state for each database and it’s replicas participating in AvailabilityGroups.  The key fields we’re going to focus on for our monitoring are: * log_send_queue_size – the amount of log records not sent to a secondary * redo_queue_size – the amount of log records not yet redone on the secondary * last_commit_time – the time of the last committed log record on a replica * last_redo_time – the time of the last log record was redone on a replica

Friend of Redgate 2015

FoRG

Today I am excited to announce that I have been accepted into the Friends of Redgate program for 2015. The program targets influential people in their respective technical communities such as SQL,.NET and ALM and enables us to participate in the conversation around product and community development. In the short time I’ve been a part of this, I can already see the value of the program! Did I mention how excited I am:)

Book Review – SQL Server Internals: In-Memory OLTP

In-Memory OLTP – a potential game changing technology

Every once in a while a technology comes out that has the potential to change things dramatically. In-Memory OLTP (Hekaton) is one of them. The design team set out with a goal of reaching an order of magnitude improvement over existing technologies and techniques. To do so they had to rethink key facets of the relational database system, latching, locking, logging and statement compilation. When a technology as potentially disruptive as this comes along it gets everyone’s attention. When an opportunity to review a book based on this technology came along it certainly is worth the effort. I spent a ton of time with this book (maybe a little too much), reading and re-reading chapters but it was worth every minute.

Book Review – SQL Server Internals: In-Memory OLTP – Detailed Notes

Here are my unedited chapter notes:

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

  • Collation – current version requires BIN2 on character index columns. Best to do so at the column level. Supports only sorting, comparison and grouping. Will remove the need for case sensitive code on tables and columns but not data.
  • Collate database_default to handle tempdb collation of temp objects. Research more.
  • Interpreted SQL via interop useful for ad hoc or migration of code.  Doesn’t perform as well as compiled.
  • Key point restrictions really show that the Hk tables need to be isolated bc of the interface between the engines. P 46

Chapter 3

Reflections as a consultant

Let’s just start with the last three years have been fantastic! This blog post is a slight deviation from the technical content on my blog. We’re going to focus on career and professional development for a minute.

In 2011 I was thrust into the world of consulting…accidentally. Accidentally you ask, how can that happen? Well, at the time I worked remotely for a large health care practice doing system design and software development on the Microsoft stack. Fun and innovative stuff, with great leadership in fun environment. Learned a lot! Well, they were acquired by a much larger organization and the new corporate policy didn’t allow for remote workers. So rather than terminate me they asked if I would like to be a consultant. Well, who wouldn’t right? I had dabbled in consulting for years in the off hours, and always wanted to make the jump. This was the push that I needed. That left me with one huge question…