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This isn’t your grand-mothers bingo game (#sqlbingo)

This year at the PASS Summit there will be a daily bingo game.  This isn’t the standard sit in a room while someone calls out numbers.  No you have to find the people who’s names and faces (for the most part) are on the bingo cards. Continued »

#EMCWorld 2009 is starting tomorrow, and I’m on my way

Well tomorrow begins my annual trek to EMC World.  This year I’m headed back to Orlando as EMC World is being held at the Orange County Convention Center.  As I’ve done the last couple of years I’ll post as often as I can during the conference both on here on my blog, as well as on Twitter.

This years EMC World event should be a blast and very educational.  They’ve got tons of sessions on VMware, and one that I’m really looking forward to on setting up Exchange under VMware using a CLARiiON for the storage.  This is something that I was hoping to get done before EMC World, but when I saw that session on the schedule I decided to hold off on our Exchange Migration until afterwords so that I could get some additional best practices first.

I’m also looking forward to the sessions that I’ve found about SQL Server on the CLARiiON.  I haven’t found all that many of these up there, something that I’ll be sure to mention in my eval this year as I would assume tha the bulk of data stored on SANs is database data, and contrary to popular believe database servers are not file servers and should not be treated as such.

If you will be at EMC World come on over and say hi.  I’ll be on twitter so shoot me a message or a DM or find me in the Web 2 lounge or the EMC returning attendees lounge, or the exhibit hall somewhere.

Don’t forget to check back here for photo’s of the event.  I can’t upload in real time as my phone doesn’t have a camera, so I have to wait until I get back to the hotel or the convention center to upload them.

Denny

Me and Twitter

Personally I don’t get most of the social networking sites / products / whatever you want to call them. Continued »

Things You Know Now…

It’s my turn for the Things You Know Now post thanks to Colin Stasiuk.  The basic question asked at the beginning of the thread of posts is “What do you wish you knew when you started?”.  Here are my answers.

1. People don’t like being shown up.

This was an issue for me mostly at the first IT job when I worked at Earthlink.  While I had an IT job, and an IT function I didn’t work for the IT or MIS departments, I actually worked for the Customer Support department.  This gave me some advantages and some disadvantages.  The biggest advantage to getting things done for my customers was that I didn’t work in IT, so I didn’t have to follow the strict IT guidelines for getting stuff done.  The downside was that I didn’t have the support or respect of pretty much anyone in the IT department for the company.  On more than one occasion my customers would follow proper procedures and ask the IT group to build something, and they would get a crazy long time line like 12-18 months.  Then they would come to my group and we’d give them a time line of 3 weeks, and we would deliver on that date.  Needless to say the IT development teams didn’t like this very much at all, and in the long run it didn’t help me out very much when it came time for layoffs.

2. Knowing everything isn’t the key

When working in IT, knowing everything about every topic isn’t the most important thing.  When I started in IT I tried to learn everything, and I mean everything.  And while knowing at lot is important, knowing everything isn’t.  The only time that you have to work in a vacuum is when you are at a job interview, other than that you have access to Google, Books, MSDN, etc and you can easily look information up if you don’t know it.  I feel that while knowing a lot is important, knowing how to find the information is just as important.

3.  User Groups are a great place to get information, and meet other admins

When I first started in IT (and for several years after that) I didn’t know about user groups.  I wish that I had, because I haven’t known a whole lot of DBAs over my carrier until recently.  I think it would have been great to know more DBAs earlier in my carrier, as well as get more information first hand from local senior level people.  Recently I’ve been speaking at a lot of user groups and I’ve met a lot of great people at the meetings.

I’ll pass the fun onto a few friends (which as far as I know haven’t been tagged yet).

Denis Gobo (@DenisGobo on Twitter)
Michael Deputy (@MichaelDep on Twitter)

Denny

#SoCalCodeCamp was a blast

This weekends SoCal Code Camp was great. Continued »

SoCal Code Camp This Weekend

Don’t forget that the SoCal Code Camp is this weekend on the Cal State Fullerton Campus.

The Code Camp is a free training session with about 100 sessions being held by local IT Professionals for local IT Professionals (or anyone else who wants to come and listen).

If you are looking for database sessions, last time I looked there were 9 SQL Server sessions being presented.

See you at the code camp.

Denny

Phishers Are Going After Twitter

Apparently Twitter has officially gone mainstream.

Why do I say officially when they are been around for years and have over a Billion tweets?  Because phishers are now going after Twitter accounts.

So far they appear to be only getting your twitter account info and sending more messages to other people.  I would imaging in a short amount of time these attacks will become more nafarous.

Denny

I was bouncing around the net, and found Wordle.net

Wordle.net creates word maps of all the words on a website.  So I fed it my blog and came up with this.

I thought it was kind of cool, so I posted it up here.  Try out our site and see what it does.

In the true spirit of twitter I’ll pick on a couple of people to generate there own and post them (as soon as twitter comes back up, it’s DOA at the moment).

Denis Gobo, and Michelle Ufford you’ve been tagged

Denny

I’ve finely started using Twitter

We’ll I’ve finely broken down and started using Twitter.

I decided to go all out.

I’ve got TweetDeck for my PCs, and TinyTwitter for my BlackBerry.  I tried TwitterBerry but didn’t like it very much.  TinyTwitter has much more functionally.  I also signed up for BrightKite to track my location.

My username on Twitter is mrdenny.

Denny