In this session, learn about SQL Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2012 performance tuning and optimization. Industry Experts Thomas LaRock and Denny Cherry guide you through tools and best practices for tuning queries and improving performance within Microsoft SQL Server. This session details real-life performance problems which have been gathered and tuned using industry standard best practices and real-world skills.

You can sign up for North America here, or Europe here.

I’ll see you in Orlando or Amsterdam,
Denny

Feel free to join us via GoTo Meeting at 11am Pacific / 2pm Eastern and check out the excitement.

Denny

I to have had my share of shoestring budget projects that I’ve had to deal with putting together.  The one that I’m probably the most proud of was when I worked at EarthLink.  We had a rather large call center, at the time it was a single office, but over time it grew to 7 offices and 3 outsourced call centers, but I’m skipping ahead here.

On the things which our call center supervisors were supposed to do was grab the call center queue stats every 4 hours and email them to management’s pagers.  Needless to say this seemed like a rather big waste of time to actually have a person sum up these numbers in Excel and then send out an email.

So I built a quick VB app which would log into the PBX, gather the required numbers and send out the email.  This was cool and all, and took about a day to put together.  After this I decided to put the data out on a web server so that everyone else that didn’t have access to the rather expensive Lucent PBX software could see the data.  So once everyone thought that was awesome, we look it to the next logical step and started exporting all the call center data and created web pages which would allow anyone to see the data.

Now these weren’t fancy dynamic pages.  They were just static HTML files that refreshed themselves every few seconds and were rewritten by the app I wrote every few seconds.  Now on the server side of things the PBX server that I had to connect to was a closed system meaning that my only option to connect to it was via the management tool.  At the time there was no scripting support in the app, so I had to write an app which would send keystrokes to the client app and export the data to flat files, then process the files into the needed html files.

This lasted for a couple of weeks until we started adding more groups into this mix.  It would end up taking several minutes to process everything.  I then started loading the data into an Access database and using classic ASP to allow the users to select the data that they wanted to see.  After a couple of weeks of loading data into Access every few seconds Access blew up so we upgraded to SQL Server.

After some time we added more and more call centers to the company we added more and more computers doing processing.  Now when all this started we were running on old P2 400Mhz workstations all running like 128 Megs of RAM for each machine.  By the time we were done with this we had a view computers all these crappy workstation class machines except for one rack mount server (see the picture of my desk below).

By the time I left EarthLink (more specifically I was tossed out kicking and screaming as all our jobs were off-shored) we had equipment in 5 offices in additional to all the machines running under my desk.  There were somewhere around 4000 internal users accessing the web app and we were actually feeding hold time information to the customer facing website so that customers could see what the wait time would be in real time.  By the time everything was said and done we had saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in Lucent/Avaya licensing fees as each new Lucent PBX we brought only the server and only needed the default 5-10 licenses that came with the PBX system.

Needless to say this was probably the biggest spit and chewing gum project that I’ve ever worked on.  The total cost to the company was only a few thousand dollars (the rack mount server).  Our SQL License was covered under our Enterprise Agreement, and all the workstations were older machines which weren’t in use any more by Tech Support (they liked it when we stole the old machines, it gave them an excuse to order new ones).

Now, as for the people that I’m going to tag I’m going to go with some people that don’t always get pulled into these.

Jessica Moss (@jessicammoss)

Geoff Hiten (@SQLCraftsman)

Tom LaRock (@SQLRockStar)

Jessica and Goeff haven’t been going a lot of blogging recently.  Hopefully this will help them start writing more often.  Tom blogs like crazy, and one more just isn’t going to hurt him.  I picked these three because I’m curious to see what these folks have had to band-aid together with duct-tape over their careers.

Denny

I’m pretty sure that I’m going to get banned from the WIT luncheon by proxy on this one.

Denny

Upgrade our production systems to SQL Server 2008
I’ve been speaking about SQL Server 2008 since before it was released.  It would probably be nice if I actually upgraded our production systems at the office.  It’s just a matter of time to actually get it done.

Get started writing a SQL book of my own
In 2008 I wrote a few chapters for a couple of books for other people.  In 2009 I’ll attempt to write my own.

I’ll tag Jason Massie and Tom Larock.

Denny

I found this question rather tough to answer (as I have when I’ve been asked similar questions during interviews), but here goes.

1:  Dealing with some of the developers that I’ve had to work with in the past.

Most of the people that I’ve worked with in the past have been great.  But there are a few out there (who will rename nameless since the IT field is a pretty small group) that were just a major pain.  Never open to anyone’s ideas but their own.  No project is important unless it is their project.  Unfortunately at the time this was the CEO’s favorite employee since he was the one that had gotten the company that far.  It didn’t matter that a new group of people had been brought in to help get the company to the next level.

As far as dealing with the problem, we eventually went to our boss and basically told her that someone needed to bring him back down to earth.  There were other good ideas that deserved consideration and as the infrastructure team we should be listened to at least once in a while since we might know what we are doing.

2: Same company, a year later having to work with (and for) people that didn’t understand half the stuff coming out of my mouth.

After butting my head against statements like “a Table and a worksheet mean the same thing” I took the easy way out.  I just had to, I gave notice and left.  It took me several months of biting my tongue and explaining myself over and over before I had finely had enough.  I ended up moving on to another company which ended up laying me off after 6-8 weeks because they ran out of money.  But all in all it was a good choice.

(I’ll put up a third answer, but only because I’m cheating and stealing Brent’s second answer.)

3: Learning when to tell people “No”.

I love telling people yes.  Sure I can add that functionally.  Stay late and get that done; no problem.  Eventually people start taking advantage of you and planning on you being able to be taken advantage of.  My wife (Kris) helped a lot on helping me fix this one (I still have a hard time telling her no, but that’s something else to work on) and I thank her for that.

Brent Ozar  (brento on Twitter) tagged me for this one.

I’m tagging:

Denis Gobo (DenisGobo on twitter)

Tom Larock (sqlbatman on twitter)

Denny

The keynote showed some interesting uses of SQL, SharePoint, and Performance Point querying a 1+ TB data SSAS database in a second or two.

Bob Ward gave his usual excellent presentation on debugging the memory of SQL Server. I was a bit late to the session, and I had to leave a little before he finished, but he did go way over the time allotted, with so much information to present it’s not much of a suprise.

Hugo Kornelis gave a very interesting presentation on Cursors or Set based processing. Hugo gave an excellent solution to Dennis Gobo’s prime number challenge from a while ago, along with the classic box packing problem.

I got some pictures to share from the SQL Server Hero’s party tonight (click to enlarge).

They were giving away some painted on Tattoos.

Won’t Tom’s wife be proud. He has informed us that the “tramp-stamp” made him feel more powerful.

Brent has some posted as well on his flicker page.

I just had to post the images of Tom. I couldn’t help my self. (He was warned ahead of time.)

Denny

If you are at PASS please go to the voting kiosks to cast your vote.

Congrats to them for being nominated, and hopefully we’ll be seeing them on the board next year.

I was reminded of this by Brent Ozar, so thanks Brent.

Denny