If you aren’t going to be attending the event which you’ve been picked as a speaker for, you probably know that you aren’t going to be attending at least a few days in advance, at least the day before as that’s probably when your flight would have been.  You owe it to the event team and to the attendees to tell the event team that you aren’t going to be able to make it and that they should fill your spot with another speaker.

If you don’t tell the event team that you aren’t going to be there, you look like a putz.

In the last year there have been a lot of instances of speakers just not showing up for SQL Saturday events.  It has gotten bad enough that some of these speakers are starting to get a reputation as being people that won’t show up to present their session.  That means that these speakers have skipped their sessions several times, at least.  Just because a SQL Saturday is a free conference doesn’t mean that you can skip on your sessions.  Yes as a speaker you aren’t getting paid to attend, and it’s probably costing you money out of your pocket for airfare, hotel, rental car, etc.  But you knew that this was the case before you submitted, so just because it turned out to be more than you were expecting you need to either figure something out, or give the team as much notice as possible that you can’t make it.

If you have found yourself in this situation I implore you to stop submitting to the SQL Saturday’s unless you are 100% sure that you’ll be able to attend.  It isn’t fair to the event team that’s putting together the event to have to stress out over you not being there.  It isn’t fair to the event team that has to deal with upset attendees that the session that they wanted to attend isn’t happening (if you think that people don’t complain when a session at a free event doesn’t happen as scheduled you are very wrong).  And most importantly it isn’t fair to the session attendees who expected to see a session but aren’t able to because you didn’t show up.

If the event team knows in advance, even a day in advance that you aren’t going to be there they can find a replacement.  The speakers who are there will have all their other slide decks with them.  Odds are there’s another speaker there who can fill in.  If the session that you are scheduled to present doesn’t get presented then you are letting down the people who have cleared a day from their schedule to see you present that session.  You are letting down the event team who have trusted you to give the presentation.  If the event team didn’t trust you they would have given the spot to someone else.

A perfect example happened at SQL Saturday Nashville in 2012.  One of the speakers had to back out at the last minute due to a family emergency.  They told the organizers, and then organizers were able to find another speaker who had a session they could present on a similar topic.  The schedule didn’t need to be changed, the attendees weren’t upset.  Just instead of a woman presenting they got a man.  But they still got the information that they were looking for, and after all that is the most important thing when it comes to these events.

Sadly there isn’t really a great way to fix this, except for speakers to ensure that they present the sessions that they have committed to present.  As speakers if we don’t shape up about this the event organizers are going to start tracking this (I know that some events already do) which means that those speakers that don’t make it to their sessions aren’t going to get picked and it’ll probably end up being impossible to get off that list.  Which will lead to not being accepted for larger and bigger conferences.  As speakers if we don’t police ourselves and ensure that this doesn’t happen the people that run these events that we like speaking at will find a way to police us.  And I’m sure that it won’t be very fun.

Denny

Deleting the data from the database is the easy part, a simple delete loop will handle that nicely.  The problem is when you delete rows from a table which contains LOB data the LOB pages aren’t cleared when they are deallocated.  We can see this by running the following code.

CREATE DATABASE Lobtest
GO
use Lobtest
GO
CREATE TABLE t1 (c1 int IDENTITY(1,1) PRIMARY KEY, c2 ntext)
GO
INSERT INTO T1 (c2) VALUES (replicate('a', 20000))
GO
DBCC IND ('LobTest', 't1', 1)
GO
DBCC TRACEON(5201, -1)
GO
DELETE FROM t1
GO
DBCC IND ('LobTest', 't1', 1)
GO
DECLARE @dbid as int = db_id('Lobtest')
DBCC PAGE (@dbid, 1, 231, 3)
GO

You can see that page 231 is a LOB page which is allocated to the table t1. When you look at the actual page using DBCC PAGE after the row has been deleted we can see that there is data in the page, and that the page header shows that the page is still allocated to the table t1. This can be seen by looking in the header of the page for the header value labeled “Metadata: ObjectId = 245575913″.

When you go to shrink the database the SQL Server engine will get to the LOB pages and it will need to figure out if the LOB row is a part of a row which still exists or not. In order to do this SQL Server will need to scan through the pages which make up the table looking for any rows which reference the page it is trying to delete.

When doing shrinks after deleing large amounts of LOB data SQL Server will generate large amounts of IO while figuring this out and the shrink operation will take an extremely long time. (Paul Randle talks more about it here.)

So the question that this person at SQL Saturday had was, how can I reclaim the space from my database within a reasonable time.

The solution that we came up with was actually pretty simple. Do the database deletion as normal. Then backup and restore the database. Then do the shrink, followed by rebuilding the clustered indexes in order to fix the fragmentation issue which the shrink will introduce.

This works for a pretty simple reason, because the PFS page shows that the LOB page isn’t allocated even though the page is full of data (you can verify this by looking at page 1 in file 1 in the sample database created by the script above). When the database engine backups up the database the database engine looks at the PFS pages to figure out which pages to back up. Because the PFS pages show that the pages are empty the database engine doesn’t bother to backup the pages, so when the pages are restored they are restored as blank pages. This means that after the restore the shrink operation can run without an issue.

In the case of this application there was a maintenance window which could be taken advantage of which would allow the backup and the restore to happen.

Another option which we came up with which would require less downtime involved using database mirroring. By configuring database mirroring (which is initialized via a backup and restore process giving us the same basic approach) and then failing over to the mirror we would end up in the same position. We could then shrink the database without issue (probably pausing database mirroring so that we didn’t have to wait for the second server to process the shrink in real time) and then fail back the database to the original server.

As geeky as it was, Mladen, Andre and I had a great time figuring this out, and the attendee had a great time watching us go through all the possible options as we excluded them one by one. And most importantly she got her problem solved.

So if you end up in this situation here’s a solution that will help you shrink the database so that you can reclaim the space that the LOB data pages are taking up without having to wait forever.

Denny

I gave one presentation this year, and it was a session of table partitioning.  The slide deck has been uploaded to the SQL Saturday site as has the sample code.  You can download it from the session page for my session.

I hope that everyone liked the session, and I hope to see everyone at a future SQL Saturday.

Denny

The session which I presented at SQL Saturday was titled “SQL Server Indexing for the .NET Developer” where I talk to a group of mostly application developers about SQL Server indexes, what they do, and some of the overall best practices for SQL Server indexes.

You can download the slide deck from my site.

If you attended the SQL Saturday I hope that you had as great a time as I did, and if not hopefully I’ll see you at the next SQL Saturday.

Denny

Denny Cherry – SQL Server Security

Dave Ballantyne and Dave Morrison – TSQL and internals

Mladen Prajdić – From SQL Traces to Extended Events – The next big switch.

André Kamman – Powershell 3.0 for SQL Server Administrators and Developers

Christian Bolton and Gavin Payne – Mission critical data platforms on Windows Server 2012

I hope that you’ll select to attend one of these great pre-cons (mine is right there at the top of the list) as well as the full day of training provided on Saturday for free.

Denny

During this full day precon we will review a variety of ways to secure your SQL Server databases and data from attach.  In this session we will review proper network designs, recommended firewall configurations, and physical security options.  We will also review our data encryption options, password protection options, using contained databases, and AlwaysOn Availability Groups security.  There will also be discussions about additional measures which should be taken when working with Internet facing applications.

From there we will move to the most dangerous attack vector SQL Injection including all the ways that attackers can use SQL Injection to get into your system and how to protect against it.  The security options for database backups is the next topic on the list followed by proper SAN security designs.  We will then finish up by reviewing the auditing options which are available and how they can be used to monitor everything else which we’ve just talked about during the course of the day.

If you are interested in attending the precon check out the precon page on the SQL South West website which has the registration link.  I look forward to seeing you there.

Denny

I presented two sessions at this years SQL Saturday San Diego, and you can find the slide decks and the sample code for those two sessions below (including the slides which I didn’t get to).

SQL Server Partitioning From The Group Up

Table indexing for the .NET Developer

Even though the weather wasn’t quite what we were expecting (it’s supposed to be 80 this time of year, not 105) I still had a great time with everyone and I can’t wait to see everyone at the SQL PASS Summit in just a few short weeks.

Denny

I gave 3 sessions that weekend.

Table indexing for the .NET Developer

Reading the SQL Server Execution Plan

Where should I be encrypting my data

If you attended one of my sessions and you wanted a copy of the slide deck, here you go.

Denny

Update 9/10/2012 11:43am (Pacific Time): It appears that GoDaddy is under attack by Anonymous which has taken many sites offline (including my mrdenny.com site which is where those links above point to).  So for now those links won’t be working.  Once GoDaddy gets this all fixed (or I get fed up and move my site to another hosting provider) the links will start working again.

This session will be a two part session in which we will be focusing on two of the biggest topics in the DBA field.  How to properly design your SAN storage solution and how to properly design your virtualization solution.

The storage portion of this session will focus on SAN storage, but most of the material will apply to direct attached storage as well.

In the first half of the session we’ll be focusing on the storage array.  Storage can be one of the biggest bottlenecks when it comes to database performance.  It’s also one of the hardest places to troubleshoot performance issues because storage engineers and database administrators often do not speak the same language.  In this session, we’ll be looking at storage from both the database and storage perspectives.   We’ll be digging into LUNs, HBAs, the fabric, as well as the storage configuration.

After going over the components we’ll dig into some advanced storage configurations.  This includes RAID groups, multi-pathing software, and proper redundant storage network design.  We will also be digging into some advanced storage array backup techniques including taking storage level clones and snapshots.  After going over these advanced techniques we will dig into how these can best be used to backup the SQL Server environment to provide maximum redundancy with no recurring tape costs.

In the second half of the day we’ll be looking into the pros and cons of moving SQL Servers into a virtual server environment.  Specifically we’ll be looking into when it’s a good idea and when it’s probably not a good idea.  Like everything in the database world there are no hard set answers as to if virtualization is a good idea or not, but there are some times when virtualizing a SQL Server is a good idea, and can save you some money.  There are some other times when you will be shooting yourself in the foot and virtualization isn’t a good idea.  We’ll be focusing on when how to make this decision, and how to gather the metrics that you need in order to come to this decision.

We’ll look into how tie the virtual platforms to the storage array so that you can maximize the storage performance for your SQL Servers and the virtual environment.

The session is priced at $129.95, but through the end of August you can sign up for just $99.95.

I hope to see you there,

Denny

The cost for this pre-con is $95 (US) plus an additional $6.22 (US) in fees to Event Bright for a total of $101.22.

I urge you to sign up for this great all day pre-con session today as seating for this session is limited.

Denny

P.S. Don’t forget this session will be held in English.