Going to Seattle for More SQLSkills!

Last April I experienced the most amazing training event I have participated in so far in my life (yet).

I actually got to go to a SQLskills Immersion Event - IE1 in Chicago.  I went with one of my House of Brick colleagues David Klee (blog/@kleegeek) and our minds melted for five unbelievable days.

At the end of the very first day of class I talked to Klee and we agreed that we had to get the company to send us to the remaining immersion events in the series - at least to IE2-IE4 (and maybe the BI events too). I called home to the office and they reminded me that I was already registered for the PASS Summit for 2012, and that another week of training wasn't going to happen this year (in their defense, I already had two weeks booked in one year which is better than a lot of companies do, right?)

I pondered in deep thought for about half a second and offered to skip PASS if I could register for IE2 in Seattle in the late summer.

Realize that I haven't been to the PASS Summit for several years (as I described here) and I had really been looking forward to it.  The Summit is a crazy-good cross-section of the SQL Server universe and is not to be missed if you can make it happen.

...except for this.

The Powers-That-Be briefly considered and then approved my suggestion, and Klee and I registered that same day for IE2 in Seattle in August.

...and now it's August.

To top all of that, since then SQLskills has hired two more amazing employees Glenn Berry and Erin Stellato, and they will both be in the class with us next week, as will several other well known SQL Server personalities.

To borrow a well-known phrase, SQUEEEE!

SQLSaturday 159 - KC Can Sure Throw a SQL Saturday!

This past weekend was SQLSaturday159 - Kansas City.  I drove down with my wife and our sons (2 years old and 11 months old) and spent the first day sightseeing (Union Station & Crown Center) and scaring the wits out of our 2-year-old (T-Rex Cafe - he loves dinosaurs except when they are 15 feet tall and roaring at him!)

Friday night was the speaker dinner at Screenland Crossroads (a working movie theater although we were not actually in a theater).  I met up there with my House of Brick Technologies colleagues David Klee (blog/@kleegeek) and Jon Shields and we were greeted by one of the organizers of the event Bill Fellows (blog/@billinkc).  Bill presented us with one of the most unique parts of the dinner, the speaker gift bag.  Rather than giving out a polo shirt or t-shirt, the KC SQL Saturday team compiled the following collection of Kansas City-related or produced products:

• A jazz CD
• A package of special blend coffee with the SQL Saturday 159 logo from the Roasterie (pictured)
• A bottle of BBQ sauce from Gates Bar-B-Q
• A bumper sticker from this year's MLB All-Star Game (hosted in KC)
• A jar of mustard from Boulevard Brewery (non-alcoholic {-:)
• Velvet Creme popcorn
• Russell Stover Chocolates
• A Springbok puzzle (pictured - it's not a Coke can, it's a 3-D puzzle!)
• Last but not least, a Hallmark card

It was a very creative and well-executed idea.

 At dinner I met several people that I had interacted with online (mostly Twitter) but had never previously met in person, including Dave Valentine (blog/@IngeniousSQL), Rick Krueger (blog/@DataOgre), Chris Shaw (blog/@SQLShaw), Andre Dubois (@MtnDBA), and Jason Kassay (@JasonKassay).  We had "heavy hors d'oeuvres" for dinner and chatted for quite a while.

After a long night of our two little boys not wanting to go to sleep (or stay asleep) in the hotel, I rose far too early on Saturday morning looking forward to giving two presentations and participating in several others.  We arrived at the Cerner Corporation Riverport Campus (actually an old riverboat casino dock building - very cool!) and immediately found that there were issues with the Guidebook application scheduling the sessions (changes weren't synchornizing properly).  Bill and the team jumped in and quickly produced printed schedules and everything went off without a hitch.

First up was 10 Things That Every DBA Should Know! from fellow Omahan John Morehouse (blog/@sqlrus). 

John did an excellent job of playing to his audience in a large room (actually the former sports bar) and conveying some good tips - thumbs up.

The next session was the one I was most excited for, mainly due to the two presenters giving the session - Karen Lopez (blog/@DataChick) and Thomas LaRock (blog/@SQLRockstar).  The session, Database Design Throwdown, was a Point-Counterpoint-style debate on a variety of subjects (NULL's - yes or no?) between Karen - the architect - and Tom - the DBA.

Karen & Tom prepping for the session

At the end of each topic, Karen and Tom polled the audience for input, and it was fun and informative for all.  They are scheduled for the PASS Summit with the same concept so I would definitely recommend the session.

Next up was another collaborative session - Choose Your Own Adventure: Performance Tuning - given by LaRock and Jason Strate (blog/@stratesql).  Tom and Jason started with a broken process and then polled the audience as to what steps to take tried to resolve the issue in 60 minutes or less. ("The server has been down for 10 minutes - we've lost $10 million dollars!)  I won't give away the ultimate solution here - if you get a chance go see the session at a future SQL Saturday or at the PASS Summit and find out for yourself.

Lunch was Kansas City BBQ from Oklahoma Joe's (don't ask me why there is a Kansas City BBQ joint named "Oklahoma" Joe's) - it was definitely tasty.

After lunch was my first session, and it was a new session I have just created - Maintain Your DBs with Help from Ola Hallengren.  I highly recommend the Ola Hallengren Maintenance Solution for backups/reindexing/CHECKDB and it just made sense to me that it could be a good topic for a presentation.  I knew that Ola occasionally presents on the topic himself, so I wanted to verify that he was OK with my creating such a presentation.  To my amazement, he was incredibly responsive, agreeing that I could create the presentation as long as I didn't submit it to this year's Summit (since he was going to submit himself).  He also offered to review my slide deck once I completed it and in the weeks that followed sent me several unsolicited suggestions and notes on new features as suggestions to include in the presentation.

A note on Ola Hallengren (and most of the other developers of the free tools that we all use) - this is a side effort on top of his regular job.  He develops and maintains this widely recommended piece of code on his own time, and then on top of that was offering to help me with this presentation - I can not thank him enough.

I ended up with a full room (~40 people - I was in one of the smaller rooms)

Picture stolen from a Tweet by @sqlrus - http://bit.ly/OYUd6B

Overall I thought the presentation went well for the first run, but I did end up about ten minutes short.  I am modifying my presentation to add a demo database with fragmented indexes and out-of-date statistics so that I can add some demos for next time.

Next up was smoothies, sponsored by Xtivia - yum!

The last information session of the day was Virtualizing Business Critical SQL Servers.  I give this presentation with my House of Brick colleague David Klee.  He sometimes gives it alone, but it does add an extra layer when we present it together (plus he doesn't have to talk about licensing SQL Server on VMWare when I am there to do it.)

Our room was almost full and we had a very engaged audience.  We have given the talk several times and we get more refined with it each time - some day we'll present it at the PASS Summit...some day.

The final session of the day was the awards and giveaways, and even with some vendors giving out dozens of book and t-shirts, we still didn't win anything (oh well).

Overall the experience was amazing, both as a presenter and as an attendee.  The SQL Saturday phenomenon has exploded in the last couple of years and if there isn't one near you, contact Karla Landrum (blog/@KarlaKay22) and PASS and they will help you set one up - it is definitely worth it!

Next up for me (after SQLSkills Immersion Event 2 in Seattle, but that's a different blog post) - SQL Saturday 154 in St Louis - be there!

Licensing SQL Server Dev/Test Environments

I was recently at a client site and we started talking about SQL Server licensing, specifically for their development and testing (they call it staging) environments.  The client said that they purchased regular licenses for their staging environment but that they had MSDN Professional (“Visual Studio Professional with MSDN”) licenses to cover their developers.  At this point I started to talk to them about SQL Server Developer Edition and how MSDN subscriptions – while they give you a boatload of available installable software – were intended for individual use and not for shared environments.  I dug a little online and could not find anything definitive so I told the client I would call Microsoft.

Before I did that I turned to my primary help resource - #sqlhelp on Twitter.  I referenced a blog post I found (but of course anyone can write a blog) talking about how to set up a lab with MSDN subscriptions and asked the question:

This question brought several responses from what I consider reliable technical sources saying “of course it doesn’t work that way” which is what I expected.

Finally MCM Robert Davis (Blog/@SQLSoldier) directed me down the only path to a true judgment:

I called Microsoft licensing today and to my amazement, the MSDN subscription answer appears to be correct, as long as you are careful to have an MSDN subscription of the appropriate level to include SQL Server (currently Professional or higher as shown here) for each of the developers in your environment.

I asked the Microsoft Licensing rep a couple of key questions and here are his answers:

Q:           “So if a shop of twelve developers has twelve MSDN subscriptions does that mean they can install 50+  Enterprise Edition SQL Servers for development and testing?”

A:            “Yes – as long as all individual developers have subscriptions that include SQL, they can install as  many servers as they want”

Q:          “The MSDN Licensing page (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/cc150618.aspx) says that ‘IT Pros that install a test lab’ need subscriptions as well – so if my hypothetical twelve developers have two DBA’s that install their dev/test SQL Servers for them, I just need fourteen MSDN subscriptions to be covered for as many copies of SQL as I want in dev/test?

A:            “Yes”

Q:           “What about end-users that test the software?  Do I need MSDN subscriptions for all of them too?”

A:            “No – if you look at the Visual Studio 2010 and MSDN licensing white paper you will see a section titled ‘Acceptance Testing’ that describes the following:

Acceptance Testing

At the end of a software development project, end users (or team members such as a business sponsor or product manager acting as proxies for end users, particularly in cases where it’s infeasible or impossible for the actual end users of the program to participate) typically review an application and determine whether it meets the necessary criteria for release—a process often called user acceptance testing or UAT. MSDN software may be accessed by end users who do not have an MSDN subscription for purposes of acceptance testing, provided that the use of the software otherwise complies with all MSDN licensing terms.  It is rare that someone whose primary role is designing, developing, or testing the software would also qualify as an “end user.”

Under MSDN licensing, acceptance testing must not use live production data. If a copy of any live production data is used, then that copy of the data must be discarded after the testing is complete and cannot be incorporated back into the live production data.

As you can see in this blurb, QA staff (whose primary role is to test software) would not qualify as end-users and as such would need MSDN subscriptions as well under this scheme.

This call still blows my mind – for a little shop, MSDN subscriptions (which generally run $1000+ per year at list price) are expensive and make this scheme undoable compared to SQL Server Developer Edition licenses at $40-$50 each, but for a shop of any size, especially one that may already have MSDN subscriptions for their developers as part of doing business, this could save some money (*especially* if you aren’t using SQL Server Developer Edition in dev/test!)

Near the end of my #sqlhelp conversation the other day I had this exchange:

Maybe I finally found something that does work the “beneficial” way in licensing – it must be a trick! ;)