Automating SQL Server Daily Health Checks with PowerShell

Last night I presented this PowerPoint presentation and Powershell script Demo to fwPASS members.

Automating sql server daily health checks from Dean Willson

Introduction to Powershell presentation

Powershell is a powerful scripting shell to do any number of administrative tasks. Below is the introductory level presentation I gave to fwPASS, the Fort Wayne chapter of the Professional Association for SQL Server on 10/23/2012.

Intro to Powershell from Dean Willson

10 Reasons to Join a PASS or .Net User Group

I am a member and leader at multiple chapters of technology-based international professional associations, like PASS (Professional Association for SQL Server) and INETA. Through that affiliation, I have experienced many, many benefits that such a small percentage of our industry takes advantage of.

1. Great people – Attendees, speakers, organizers, volunteers, sponsors, and venue hosts. Attend regularly and I promise you will make life long friends.
2. A place to talk shop with peers, learn about other organizations and practices, scope out job opportunities, help others with their challenges, and mentor people new to the field.
3. Great content – free training, new technology previews, and deep dives into specific topics.
4. Access to experts – speakers almost always provide their contact info and give you permission to ask questions outside of the presentation. Get help on your challenges from other attendees during the social networking time. Sometimes you even get to meet Industry celebrities and national conference presenters, such as Brent Ozar, Brad McGehee, and Scott Guthrie.
5. Food and beverage
6. Free swag – books, software (Development software, Operating Systems, 3rd party tools, Xbox games, and more), hardware (keyboards, mice, web cams, etc.), training vouchers, discount coupons, quirky and unusual items (such as Bucky Balls),  travel mugs, tote bags, back packs, and the list goes on.
7. News and announcements about other events and happenings in the industry – training conferences like the PASS Summit and SQL Cruise, all day training opportunities, such as Day of .Net, Codemash, SQL Saturday, virtual training events, contests, free eBooks promotions, Job opportunities.
8. Save money travelling to regional training or events by carpooling with your fellow user group friends.
9. Opportunities to present – show off your own proficiency in your craft, get experience to prepare you to speak on regional or national level, establish credibility as a teacher/communicator.
10. Opportunities to be a board member or volunteer to hone your leadership and logistical skills enhances your career marketability. Also, volunteering or leading a local chapter or regional event is great way to prepare you to become a board member on a national scale, if that is of interest to you.

Really there are few reasons not to attend, join, volunteer, or lead a professional organization. If you’re interested in professional organizations in general, read my popular post about 10 reasons to join a professional association.

What have I missed?

Do You Have Control of Your Database?

I prepared the following talking points to facilitate a round table discussion on Database Source Control titled “Do you have [source] control of your database” with a local chapter of Professional Association for SQL Server.

Most software developers use some form of source control for their software code, but it seems less common to take the same precautions with their databases.

Database Source Control

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SQL Saturday #67 Chicago

Most of the sessions I attended involved improving performance. Whether it was proactive (design for performance) or reactive (troubleshooting), most sessions included some coverage of indexes. Surprisingly there very little duplication of content by the different speakers. Because of the quality and relevance of the all sessions offered, it was difficult to decide which sessions to attend. Below is a brief recap of the ones I chose.

Sessions

Performance Tuning Made Easy with Thomas LaRock

Being a certified Six Sigma Black Belt, I appreciated the way Tom (blog|twitter) described a simple systematic process for performance tuning based on the Six Sigma DMAIC (Design, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) approach.

The Optimizer, Statistics, and Indexes with Grant Fritchey

Grant (blog|twitter) gave a great primer to the internals of the Relational Engine, the components of which have really cool names like Query Parser, Algebrizer, and Optimizer. He also spent more time discussing the Statistics histogram, which appeals to my six sigma senses, than I generally see in an hour long presentation.

WIT (Women in Technology) Panel: Energizing the Next Generation

This session seemed to have a balanced number of men and women in attendance. It was nice to hear the perspective of multiple women with different backgrounds sharing their experiences in the field. I’m really happy that most of their experiences sounded positive even in the face of adversity.

Refactoring SQL with Jeremiah Peschka

Jeremiah (blog|twitter) really highlighted the importance of using consistent naming conventions and common alias names. He touched on SQL unit testing and some open source test frameworks. He also showed refactoring examples such as, re-writing where clauses to move functions from the left side of the operator to the right side for performance gains.

Database Design Contentious Issues with Karen Lopez

This was one of my favorite sessions. It was interactive as the participants had to walk to the front of the room and anonymously vote (via post-it note) on a scale of 1 to 5 on our opinion/view of two issues which people often passionately argue about, such as, surrogate keys vs. natural keys. People that admitted to voting on the extremes (one or five) were asked to explain why they voted the way they did and open the topic for group discussion. Karen liberally made effective use of Canadian SWAG (like ketchup flavored Pringles) to persuade the edge-case voters to plead their case in the face of possible peer criticism. Karen (blog|twitter) expertly moderated the discussion and provided great pro/con examples on both sides even where it conflicted with her own views. It was both fun and educational.

Index Internals for Mere Mortals with Michelle Ufford

At a lightning quick pace, Michelle (blog|twitter) brought a great deal of insight to index internals. She showed actual representations of index pages and pointed out key elements of it, including the “uniqueifier”. She covered a great deal of information in the short one hour, but it was very clear, understandable, and educational.

Lunch

The lunch was provided by Meaty Balls. It was plenty of tasty meat and mushrooms for the price.

Check-in

The organizers offered a “Speed Pass” option where I printed my name tag, lunch ticket, and raffle tickets off in advance which meant I could sleep in a little before heading to Chicago.

Venue

The conference was hosted at the DeVry University Addison Campus which had great classroom spaces. There were ample power outlets available on the table tops for each attendee to plug in, if desired. I wish I had remembered to bring the AC adapter for my GPS for the trip home since my car lighter adapter stopped working before the trip.

Networking

I was within a SWAG keychain throw of several SQL Celebrities like Kevin Kline (blog | twitter) and Brent Ozar (blog|twitter). Brent was sitting behind me in three out of five sessions I attended - and no, I’m not a SQL Stalker.

I finally got to meet Wendy Pastrick face-to-face after several email and twitter conversations over the last year.

Credit-worthy

I’ve been running the fwPASS User Group for a few years and to do just an average job takes a surprising amount of time and effort. See my case study on continuous improvement in a professional association for more information. The organizers did an exceptional job that deserves more thanks than I can provide. I’m not sure if this is inclusive of all the organizers (which I copied from Doug Lane’s blog), but THANK YOU:

Wendy Pastrick (blog|twitter)
Ted Kruger (blog|twitter)
Norman Kelm (blog|twitter)
Jes Borland (blog|twitter)
Bob Pusateri (blog|twitter)
Aaron Lowe (blog|twitter)
Bill Lescher (twitter)
Rich Rousseau (twitter)

Introduction to MSSQL Management Data Warehouse (MDW) presentation

Last night I presented an intro to SQL Server 2008’s MDW to the fwPASS Professional Association. The subject is primarily of interest to DBA’s rather than Developers since it is best leveraged by monitoring and managing an environment of multiple SQL Servers.

Introduction to SQL Server 2008 Management Data Warehouse (MDW)

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Case Study on Continuous Improvement in a Professional Association

I wrote this case study as an effort in process journalism so other current and potential future group leaders would have a process improvement reference. Download the Case Study on Continuous Improvement Running a Non-Profit Professional Association chapter.

You might also be interested in my popular post about 10 Reasons to Join a Professional Organization.

Introduction to SSRS Report Builder

I made a short 30 minute presentation to fwPASS yesterday on the topic of Report Builder after Mark Dalman presented an Introduction to BizTalk. The intention was to present on Report Builder 3.0 (SQL Server 2008R2 version), but unfortunately I had SQL Server installation issues that prevented it. I presented using SQL Server 2005 Report Builder instead, but I highlighted some of the new features found in Version 3.0.

The first three slides are just tidbits of fwPASS information followed by the presentation.

Introduction to SSRS Report Builder

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A side note: Other than slide 8, I created the entire presentation using Microsoft’s PowerPoint WebApp on my Windows Live SkyDrive account. It is a pretty nifty web-based alternative to Google Docs

Data Mining with SQL Server 2005

I presented this topic to fwPASS on January 26. There was a pretty good turnout. The video was edited for brevity.

Data Mining with SQL Server 2005

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If you are interested in the topic, I highly recommend the MSDN Webcast: Applying SQL Server 2005 Data Mining to Enterprise Business Problems which I used in preparation for my presentation. The book I referenced in the presentation is Programming SQL Server 2005, Microsoft Press by Andrew J. Brust and Stephen Forte, specifically Chapter 20.

*The presentation was video taped and the audio was recorded separately with a high quality mic, but somehow the audio file vanished into thin air (read: accidentally deleted) the day after the event so the audio is straight from the camcorder, oh well. The lighting was not good in the video  because the overheads were dimmed for better visibility of the screen.

Smiling and Profiling – Potpourri of Profiler Utility

Last night I presented for the Fort Wayne chapter of PASS (Professional Association for SQL Server). You can download the presentation titled Smiling and Profiling - A Potpourri of Profiler Utility. The meeting was held in downtown Fort Wayne at the Pint and Slice in their spacious upstairs meeting area. It was a small group, but that always promotes great conversation.

Technorati Tags: SQL Server Profiler,Professional Association for SQL Server

Fort Wayne SQL Server Presentation - Performance Monitoring and Baselining

Click here to download my FWPass presentation from November 25, 2008. The meeting was held upstairs at the Pint and Slice in downtown Fort Wayne, Indiana. The meeting format was a little different because someone apparently walked off with their VGA cable for the overhead projector. The backup plan was to use the big flat panel display, but my laptop didn't have S-Video output. In leiu of everyone peering over my shoulder at the laptop display, we just discussed the material. The atmosphere and food were great. It was a small informal group of six or seven, but it was still fun.

IndyTechfest 2008 - Another Great Indy Event

The indytechfest 2008 was again a spectacular event. The logistics were even better this year than last year. The speaker lineup was excellent with an impressive thiry tracks. The organizing team (Brad Jones, Dave Leininger, John Magnabosco, Mark McClellan, and Bob Walker) managed once again to secure enough valuable sponsors to make this a free all-day event for the nearly 500 attendees. I believe over 800 registered in the first week after registration opened. There was even a delicious catered lunch and pletty of Swag and raffle items.

I attended the following events:

• Session 1 - Business Intelligence Track: SQL Server Integration Services 2008 (Arie Jones)
• Session 2 - DBA Track: How to Become a Profiler Master (Brad McGehee)
• Lunch and Learn: Lessons on Event and Error Logging (David Leininger)
• Session 4 - .NET Today: Developing with the Live Platform (Brian Gorbett)
• Session 5 - Web Development with ASP.NET MVC (Aaron Lerch)
  

I look forward to the next indytechfest event... providing I can sign up before registration closes!

IndyTechFest 2007

Last Saturday I attended the Indy TechFest event. The event was well organized and well orchestrated. The team that handled the logistics did a phenomenal job. The keynote was a pleasant surprise with the addition of a presentation by Buck Foley, Motivational Speaker, who did an effective job of waking up the early crowd of programmers and DBA's. He was hilarious! There was a wealth of sponsor giveaways including one of my personal favorites over 150 technical books. They had 5 tracks with 5 sessions each which is a tall order to fill with technical and interesting speakers. They definately pulled it off. There was even a very interesting Lunch and Learn covering getting published by Brad Jones which was well worth skipping the lunch naptime.



I attended:

1. Troubleshooting SQL Server Performance by Brad McGehee
2. Upgrading your DTS packages to SQL Server Integration Services by Tom Pizzato
3. An Overview of Linq by Dave Bost
4. Tips and tricks for a VB developer including VB9 by Bill Steele
5. SQL Server Database Design and T-SQL Best Practices by Arie Jones