I was able to have sessions on all three days, doing my “Storage and Virtualization for the DBA” pre-con on Thursday, a session on AlwaysOn on Friday and a session on Virtualization on Saturday.  Stacia Misner (blog | @StaciaMisner) and I also had a joint session on Satuday which was part 1 of an all day session which we did at pass which explores the BI side of the SQL Server workload and how those BI processes impact the OLTP database and the EDW/ODS/Reporting databases as data is loaded into them, reports are run and OLAP cubes are updated. (We briefly slowed a link at the end of the slide deck, which points to this page for some additional reading.)  Hopefully Stacia and I will be invited back to give the rest of this presentation at the next SQL Bits session (thankfully we were able to end at a pretty good place this year).

A few of us made our way to London a few days early (as well as other cities) in order to try and make it as easy as possible to kill the jet lag before the conference started (I don’t think there is anything worse than trying to give an all day presentation when you are 8 hours off of your normal timezone).  Kris (my wife) and I spent a few days before SQL Bits doing a little sight seeing with Stacia, Erika Bakse (blog | @BakseDoesBI) and Adam Machanic (blog | @AdamMachanic).  We were able to see some of the great parts of London like the very old Tower of London parts of which date back to the 1200s or so as well as Westminster Abbey and we walked around by the Parliament building.

On of the very cool things that we did was on Wednesday when Stacic, Erika, Kris and I met up with Buck Woody, Jen Stirrup, Lara Rubbelke and a couple of others (I just can’t remember who else was there, I know that Jen and Stacia took pictures of the group) met for lunch in London at “Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese” which was the pub frequented by Charles Dickens while we wrote many of the works for which he is famous for.  It was a great lunch with great friends in a pub which has been around for hundreds of years (except for when it burnt down in the great London fire).  According to WikiPedia there has been a pub in that location since 1538 and it was last rebuilt (according to WikiPedia and the sign at the pub also shown on WikiPedia) in 1667.

One thing that SQL Bits did, which they did for the first time was invite the speakers and sponsors spouses/guests/etc. out for the afternoon on Saturday so that they wouldn’t be stuck sitting around the hotel for the day.  The outing, which Kris attended, was lunch followed by a matinee showing of a London play.  Kris said that she had a great time and she made some new friends (hopefully she remembered to collect email addresses).  This was SQL Bits way of showing some thanks to the speakers partners for loaning them out for the weekend (and giving them some incentive to want to come to the conference and see what it is that we all do at these events as most of the time our partners want to avoid the conferences like the plague).

Something that I thought was really interesting about London was the mixture of the very old buildings mixed in with the ultra modern looking all Glass buildings.  As an example I was standing on the wall of the Tower of London looking over the river Thames looking at the gate where prisoners were brought through, and right across the river were several brand new all glass sky scrapers looking down on us.  You can see this a little in the below picture (click to view full size) which shows the entire front side of the Tower as well as some new buildings at both the left and right edges.  (Just before leaving for London I picked up a new Android Nexus cell phone, running Android 4 and it’s got a kick ass panoramic photo mode built in which is what I used to take this picture.)

After hours during the conference there were of course some fun activities as well as the sigh seeing around London, which I hadn’t been to since I was a little kid.  There were some pretty rare sights to be found…

For example here we myself and Bill Graziano (site | @billgraziano) having a little to much fun probably.

We also find Chris Testa-O’Neill, Erika Baksi and Carmel Gunn (site | @CarmelGunn) a woman who’s name totally escapes me at the moment doing some impromptu signing at the hotel lobby bar…

Surrounded by some of the other attendees and speakers.

Now I’m not going to say that it was a little late when these pictures were taken, because it wasn’t.  It was actually pretty early … in the morning.  This all happened about 3am and we were still going strong and most importantly we were all there the next day right when we needed to be so that the conference could continue on without a hitch.

Below are a few random pictures from our sigh seeing that I wanted to share with everyone.

The statue in front of Buckingham Palace.

The front of Buckingham Palace.

Some chocolates that I know for a fact that Paul Randal would love to have.

In closing, thanks again to the SQL Bits team and all the attendees.  I had a great time, and I hope to be able to attend the event next time.

Denny

Speaking by it self isn’t all that easy for a lot of people (oddly not me, but I’m kind of an attention whore) but when that demo blows up, and it will at some point, how you handle that is where you really show that you know the product.  Since it is a little hard to tell a good story in 140 characters, I decided that a blog post would be a good way to give my story.

Windows just won’t cluster

So my first mega fail was actually not in front of a live audience (unless you count the recording engineer).  The first time I did a recording for the SSWUG conference (I think it was the first, I’m going to record by third or fourth set of sessions soon) one of the sessions that I did was on SQL Clustering.  During the session I walked through the Windows 2008 clustering process and got the SQL Installation started.  I would jump back to it through out the session so the demo was throughout the session because sitting there watching the wizard running which I do nothing isn’t very exciting.

So I tested everything before I left home and everything was working perfectly.  I decided to test everything from the hotel the night before (I always fly in the night before when I do the recordings) and when I ran through the clustering validation wizard it took 3 or 4 times for me to get a successful validation.  At this point it was late, so I called it a night.  When we did the recording the next day, wouldn’t you know it the damn validation wizard just wouldn’t work.  Which means that SQL Server wouldn’t install on the cluster as SQL won’t install on a cluster that hasn’t passed validation.  So I just had to wing it, and explain that this is what you should be seeing on this screen, etc.

Needless to say the session went great, and was a pretty good length (I think I went really close to the one hour limit on it) and the reviews were great.  I even got some positive reviews for leaving in the problem demo and not refilming it to make it look correct.

OK, who’s set of the fire alarm?

My second story is more recent, and was in person.  At the 2010 SQL PASS Summit I was doing a quick 45 minute storage session during Buck Woody’s post-con on Sharepoint.  During my talk the fire alarm for the building started going off.  It wasn’t so loud that you couldn’t here me, but it was a bit annoying to listen to (I suppose that is the point).  Someone come in to tell us that we didn’t need to leave, which was good since I was still talking, with occasional pauses to yell at the building, but we worked right through it.

What’s happened to you when you present?

So what sort of fun would this telling of the nightmares be if I didn’t open it up for you to tell us about what sort of problems you’ve had with your demo’s or sessions (hopefully Buck Woody (Blog | Twitter) will post something, he’s got some great stories).  If you aren’t syndicated on SQLServerPedia.com or SSC please link back to me, so I can compile a master list later.

Thanks,

Denny

SQL Server experts Kevin Kline, Brent Ozar and Microsoft insider Buck Woody, will give you tips and tricks to take the pain out of tuning performance for your databases. You’ll walk away with mad skills and unique insight that will make your job easier than you ever imagined.

Event: Virtual Training for SQL Server – Performance Monitor and Wait Events
Date: Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Time: 7:45 a.m. Eastern (4:45 a.m. Pacific/ 12:45 p.m. United Kingdom/ 1:45 p.m. Central Europe)
Duration: Eight sessions to choose from, each 45-60 minutes
Cost: FREE

Can’t make it to the live training day? Be sure to register and you’ll be eligible to view the sessions on-demand for 30 days.

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Denny

P.S. If you can’t make it to the actual event, the conference will be available on demand until August 21.

“But Denny, you swear like a sailor, there’s no way they want your foul mouth showing up on TechNet.”  And you are correct, the idea that godforsaken thing coming out of my mouth showing up on TechNet would be highly amusing for probably 5 minutes until someone from Microsoft management noticed it and had it pulled down faster that an Apple employee would run screaming from one of Buck Woody‘s presentations.

You can click through to the page with my info on it (and Arnie Rowland‘s as well) or just go to TechNet, click on SQL Server on the left, then find the “Connect with SQL Server featured MVPs…” at the bottom of the nav menu on the right.

All that is up there for the moment is a couple of test tweets that we did to get the filtering correct (click the screen shot).

Let this be a warning to you, if you see me tweet something which the #tnSqlDC hash tag and you reply with the hash tag, it’ll probably show up there as well as a click-able link and it’ll go straight back to you.

Let the warning end here, and the mayhem begin.

Denny