Paul Randall & Kimberley Tripp SQL Master Class

Yesterday I was lucky enough to attend Paul (@PaulRandall) and Kimberley’s (@KimberlyLTripp) SQL Master Class, I’m almost tempted not to write anything as I don’t want to give anything away and make you feel like you don’t need to attend – you do!. If you have anything to do with SQL Server “YOU MUST ATTEND THIS SEMINAR”. I love attending SQL events being able to immerse yourself in nothing but SQL Server is absolutely fantastic and I have to say that these guys are the best presenters that I have ever had the good fortune to see, the knowledge that these guys have and the feeling of openness and friendliness really shines through.

Thanks go to @DatabaseJase an old colleague who I haven’t seen for six years who took and allowed me to reproduce this picture:

The agenda for the day was as follows:

Keynote: Bridging the gap between development and production

This session was all about the communication that needs to occur between the two camps Development and DBA’s. There was some interesting stuff in here and I’m sure it hit a chord with most people in the room.

SQL Server MythBusters

This session was as a result of Paul’s recent series of blog on SQL Myths where he blogged about one or more different myths every day in April. You can find the start of the series here: SQL Myths

Platinum Partner presentations

Two good presentations here by Idera who were talking about their Virtual Database product and BakBone’s Fast Recover which both encompass similar technology that allows you to interrogate a backup as if it were an actual database. Very cool and definitely worth trialling if you ever get the chance.

Database recovery techniques Demo-Fest

As the title suggests, lots of demo’s here including how to access the hidden system tables. You really do need to attend this event so as a little appetiser I’ll let you in on one of the tricks that they used. To simulate a disk failure use a USB hub with flash devices on, create some extra files and filegroups on a test database, populate some data and then remove one of the drives. This will simulate a dive failure and see how you can recover from it.

GUIDS: Use, Abuse, and How to Move Forward

Absolutely awesome session. Everyone knows that these things are bad, but this was a real eye opener. If you want to know more about this then Kimberley wrote an article on this in June’s SQL Server Magazine, as well as an article on her blog at SQLSkills.com.

Essential Database Management

This session saw Paul and Kimberley present what they consider the top 10 areas that require maintenance. There was a nice tip by Paul about error 825, this error is informational only and so you won’t be alerted if you have set your alerts for the high severity levels. He recommended that as soon as we returned to the office we added this on our servers. I did this earlier and thought people may appreciate a script to apply it on theirs:

USE [msdb]
GO
--Create a DBA operator if it doesn't already exist
--Remember to change the email address
IF NOT EXISTS (SELECT name FROM msdb.dbo.sysoperators WHERE name = N'DBA')
EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_add_operator @name=N'DBA',
		@enabled=1,
		@weekday_pager_start_time=00000,
		@weekday_pager_end_time=235959,
		@saturday_pager_start_time=00000,
		@saturday_pager_end_time=235959,
		@sunday_pager_start_time=00000,
		@sunday_pager_end_time=235959,
		@pager_days=0,
		@email_address=N'DBA@YourCompany.com';

--Create the alert.
EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_add_alert @name=N'SSEA - 825 Read Retry Error',
		@message_id=825,
		@severity=0,
		@enabled=1,
		@delay_between_responses=0,
		@include_event_description_in=1,
		@notification_message=N'ms-help://MS.SQLCC.v10/MS.SQLSVR.v10.en/s10de_5techref/html/f69f8214-5af1-4769-878b-117ad6eaff52.htm',
		@job_id=N'00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000';

EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_add_notification @alert_name=N'SSEA - 825 Read Retry Error', @operator_name=N'DBA', @notification_method = 1;
GO

 

If you’re lucky enough to meet Paul then ask him to tell you the story about the Midwest bank it’s scary and funny at the same time!