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The Story of Jeff

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Jeff level enthusiasm, Image by zoegammon from Pixabay

Jeff (b|t) and I have been friends since sometime in 2003. He was the worship leader at my church at the time. Most recently Jeff and his wife have been running a graphics design firm. Websites, book covers, textbook layout, WordPress development, etc.

Earlier this year when the graphics biz was slumping he asked if I needed any help at Dallas DBAs. After some discussion I offered him a 3 month apprenticeship – full time at offensively low hourly rates. I would be teaching him and letting him self-teach through whatever means he could get his hands on.

Inside that 3 months he was already getting on customer servers and doing daily checks (with my guidance of course).  We have a process for this.

He currently has primary DBA responsibility for 5 hourly clients and one Pocket DBA™ client, escalating to me as necessary.

As of this month, Jeff’s efforts are driving enough billable hours that he is COVERING HIS ENTIRE SALARY!  SQL Dork (b|t), the other Junior DBA here has been self-covering for a long time due to only working part-time.

I would like to tell you all of the steps Jeff took along the way…but he already blogged the whole trip.

For your reading pleasure:

The Ironic DBA Files

Thanks for reading!

Kevin3NF

PASS Summit 2019 thoughts and wrapup

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Holy smokes my brain hurts!  And at the same time it is feeling the joy of learning things I can actually use!

If you are a Dallas DBAs client…you will soon very likely be reaping the benefits of my trip to Seattle for the 2019 PASS Summit.

Its rare, but when I’m really excited I pop for the in-flight WiFi, which is where I sit now typing this up. If you look to my right you can see…clouds.

Stream of consciousness in near chronological order, accompanied by notes where possible:

Day 1

What’s new in SQL Server Tools – Vicky Harp (t) and Udeesha Gautam

Most of this was Azure Data Studio (watch me embarrass myself here), which was clear in the abstract. Very cool tool mostly for devs, but the Notebooks aspect has lots of ways I can send something useful to my clients to review, in one format.  Has a little One Note with code and results feel to it.  Great demo. SSMS is not going away!

Improving Availability with Accelerated Data recovery and Resumable Operations – Pam Lahoud (b|t)

Ever tried to roll back a runaway query that took 4 hours to notice? Reboot the server trying to kill it and that didn’t help?

This is the fix to that nonsense! Off by default, rewrite of the SQL Server Recovery process.  Bang…instant recovery.  Of course there’s some overhead. SQL 2019 and Azure only feature.

Also, “Resumable Index Operations” are now a thing. A cool thing.

After the KeyNote and these 2 sessions, I managed to score a massive headache so no more sessions.

Game night! – sponsored by PASS (Thanks Joe!)

Day 2

DBA Tools – Jack Corbett (b|t)

I’ve already thanked Jack in person twice and online at least that much for this class. If I can only tell you one thing from 3 days of classes its this: “YOU DONT NEED TO KNOW POWERSHELL TO USE THE DBATOOLS COMMAND!!!”  I paid extra for the caps and 2 bonus exclamation points, just for you. That sentence alone has never sunk in to my head.  A whole lot of goodness will flow from that to you.  Thanks Jack!

If you are a junior DBA, you still need to learn the concepts and how to do things in the SSMS GUI/T-SQL, but these tools are a great step for some of the more complex tasks.  Best session of the week for me.

SQL Server in Containers – Grant Fritchey (b|t) – Red Gate vendor session

Awesome – Grant told us early and often that the 1st 2/3 of the session would be vendor agnostic, then move to RG tools.  Many thanks for that clarity!

I tried out Docker 2 years ago in test/dev and had no use case for it. Now I do and saw that some things have gotten easier. I spin up Azure VMs to play with stuff all the time. Now I can accomplish the tasks locally and faster and cheaper! I also learned the difference between images, layers, containers and VMs,  Greatness in a confusing tech stack.

Azure DR strategy – John Morehouse (b|t), with Denny Cherry in the back for additional flavor when needed.

I’ve known conceptually about much of what John presented for a while…but now I have a lot more clarity and insight from a true pro. Plus, some of what I learned at a DeepPockets™ client 2 years ago is out of date or enhanced in Azure

Exhibitor Hall and Beanbag sessions. I got to meet one of my freelancers for lunch so that was cool. Thanks Brendan.

HA/DR – Too many choices – Mike Walsh (b|t)

I go to sessions I know nothing about and sessions I do…this one I knew, and I still learned stuff. Sometimes I go just to see friends speak.  This was that as well as learning. Mike is a great guy running a great company. If you need SQL help, call me first.  If Dallas DBAs isn’t the right fit, Straight Path is.

Game night again!

Day 3 – Friday

Batch Execution Mode on Rowstore – Niko Neugebauer (b|t)

Learned a ton, saw great demos, super fun slides and WOW! Niko is a brilliant and highly entertaining presenter. If you present, go find something he’s done and watch his style.  Its crazy fun.  And the technical content is very solid.

Best Practices for Branching Database Code in Git – Kendra Little and the Corgi Crew (b|t)

I don’t do much in the Git/OSS world and was hoping this would help me pick some of that up along the way, even though this was not a “learn Git” presentation.  It did, and I now feel good about bringing some DallasDBAs internal scripts into a Git/GitHub type repository so the whole team can contribute to them. Maybe then I’ll start contributing to other open source projects.

Great lunch with a good friend I only see at conferences. We solved a few world problems.  Again.

More bean bag time.

Upgrading SQL Server – Mike Walsh again!

I’ve done more than a few upgrades, but I knew Mike and team at StraightPath have a more formal and streamlined process, so I wanted to steal info from a competitor. Is it stealing if he’s up front giving it away and I’m hiding in the front row?

Tap house for dinner, then back to the Sheraton to pack and chill.

I’m over Colorado now✈ .  If this was readable and no spelling errors, that happened at my desk in Dallas.

Look out clients…your stuff is going to get better.  And YES, YOU NEED TO MOVE TO AZURE OR SQL SERVER 2019. There, I said it.  “Mr. Wait and See” is pushing a product 6 days into formal release!

Thanks for reading!

Kevin3NF

The Value of Training- Summit 2019

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I sit here writing this on a Sunday morning with coffee nearby, eagerly anticipating this week’s annual PASS Summit. This is my 5th Summit, and 4th in a row. And yes, I pay my own way happily to this conference every year, to the tune about $4000. That’s for everything – conference fee, travel, lodging, food, airport parking. And yes, I bump for better seats on the plane, to avoid being cramped and miserable for 4 hours each way.

But why do I do this? As a self-employed DBA, that’s a lot of money!

Because training.

I’m 50+ (just added the “+” last month) years old. Things in the SQL world are changing faster than ever. In 1999 with SQL 7 there was no cloud. There was a 5 year gap between SQL 2000 and 2005 releases. And to be quite honest, I never had a mentor guiding me. My entire workday was reactive to whatever ticket came along and Yahoo (before Google) or Books Online to figure things out.

That all changed when I got laid off from Verizon Managed Hosting (Now IBM) in 2015. I re-entered the job market with 15 years of DBA history, but severely lacking current skills, and under developed in other areas. RDX confirmed this by not hiring me after some interview rounds.

I had a conversation with myself and decided I needed to get a LOT more structured, develop a plan to get back on track and be as current as I can. I had been on Twitter, MSDN Forums, and other sites long enough to know who some of the more accomplished folks on the DBA side of the world are – specifically I chose to look at what Brent Ozar (b|t), Paul Randal (b|t) and Pinal Dave (b|t) were doing. I had already met (very briefly) the first two and now call Pinal a friend.

I had always shied away from the deeper performance tuning issues, aside from throwing indexes at things and maybe running sp_updatestats (which worked more often than not). Slow performance is one of the most common problems SQL Server customers have. And Availability Groups. I knew nothing about them at the time. So I took a position as a team lead with a small project team in a deep pockets type company and started learning. I read a lot of things. I watched a few webinars. I went to a performance tuning class from Brent that changed everything (I do best in-person, no distractions) for me.

All of this created a new habit in me – seeking out new knowledge and going deeper than the surface level “just get it back online and close the ticket” work I had been doing for years.

Training is critical!

If the folks you report to aren’t allowing you to get training on the job, I submit that either they are desperately starved for cash, or they just really don’t care about your future nearly as much as they should. So, its up to you to train yourself. Read blogs. Help out on forums. Set up a test box in Azure so you can break things and fix them. If you have a local user group go to it, regardless of the topic. Attend a SQL Saturday. Become a member (for free) of PASS to take advantage of webinars and tons of free video content! If you have a few dollars a month, get a Pluralsight subscription. Take charge of your training and your career!

So here I sit. Looking forward to Summit and possibly my last visit to Seattle (next year is in Houston).

While retirement is still 10+ years off I owe it myself, my employees, and my clients to be as knowledgeable as I can be. 3 days of full immersion in Database Administration, Azure and SQL 2019 features. 3 days of getting my steps in by noon and scanning the Community Zone for an empty bean bag. 3 days of seeing friends I only see once a year. 3 days of networking, talking to vendors (Come sponsor SQL Saturday Dallas, yo!), and having a good time. 3 days of #SQLFamily.

Worth. Every. Penny.

Thanks for reading!

Kevin3NF

Stop Saying “It Depends”

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Dear fellow DBAs…something popped into my head the other day and its been brewing ever since.

We joke about saying “It Depends” all the time, when people ask us for something:

  • How long will that restore take?
  • Why is the database slow?
  • Do we need more RAM?

All of these are legitimate questions, and NONE of them have enough info. So, we typically reply with “It Depends.”  Now, you probably do the right thing and ask the appropriate questions to move the conversation along to where it needs to be.

But some other DBAs stop right there with a smirk and a smug satisfaction level that comes from blocking someone from the other team.

Don’t be THAT DBA

After all, don’t people do the same to you?:

  • How much to fix my car? (It Depends on what the diagnostics say)
  • How long until the doctor sees me? (It depends on what’s going on with the previous patient)
  • How much to paint my house? (It Depends on how many rooms, paint type and inside or outside)

Instead, I am challenging every DBA to skip right on past the It Depends and move to the probing questions:

  • How big is the database you want restored?
  • Can I reproduce the slow query?
  • Have we done a health check/index analysis on our current memory?

When your first response to a question from a non-DBA is “It Depends”, its a blocker for them and sets up a possible confrontation.

When you ask them a question (which you were going to ask anyway), you come across as interested in helping them achieve their goal.

They very often don’t know what they don’t know…so help them.  If its a recurring request like restores, or installs…give them a checklist/build sheet so they can fill in the blanks.

Everyone will be happier and the DBA team will look fantastic!

Thanks for reading!

Kevin3NF

The Ironic DBA—Don’t Be Afraid of the Climb

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Welcome back to The Ironic DBA Files, a series where the newbie DBA on staff at Dallas DBAs chronicles the ups and downs of fast-tracking a new career as a DBA.

Yes, my blogging pace has slowed somewhat, but I’m back with something to share. Last time I wrote about getting back to basics and reinforcing my knowledge of introductory SQL Server concepts. This week I want to go in the opposite direction and share why I think you should regularly push yourself out of your comfort zone.

The view from the top is worth the climb.

Climbing Sucks

I’ve mentioned before that I love mountain biking—I’m not great at it, but I love getting out on the trails. Unfortunately, I also have very low heat tolerance, and so I was almost completely off my bike for the majority of the Texas summer—about 2.5 months. I did sneak one ride in before the worst heat abated about 3.5 weeks ago, but it didn’t end well.

I’ve been able to get back out and do three or four trail rides a week for the last three weeks. The trail I’ve frequented is one of the closest to my house, though it’s not a favorite. There’s not a lot of elevation at this trail, but after so long off the bike even gentle slopes were tough to climb at first. To make matters worse, I’m overweight, have some significant balance issues, and absolutely suck at climbing.

Fast forward to just last night where I went out and rode a different trail—the same one that hadn’t gone well 3.5 weeks ago. This trail is not the longest or hardest in the area, nor does it have the most climbing, but it’s been my nemesis since the first time I put down tires on its dirt. I have a less than 50% completion record at this particular trail, so I’m determined to conquer it.

Last night’s ride was pretty good. I completed the entire trail for the first time in months, and set some personal records on a few segments along the way. But here’s the coolest thing about the ride. At one point I made it to the top of climb that’s typically pretty tough for me and took a quick water break. I immediately noticed that the climb had felt easier than expected, but I figured that was due to intentionally choosing easier gears than usual. I was pleasantly surprised to look down at my gears and realize that I was 9th gear when I thought I was probably in 6th or 7th. (For those who don’t ride bikes, the lower the gear number the “easier” the gear.)

The time I’ve been spending getting back to trail riding regularly is already beginning to pay off. I’m back to feeling comfortable on the bike, my fitness level is increasing again, and my ability to ride harder, longer, steeper trails is gradually improving.

Climbing is Awesome

Tim Chapman presenting “Troubleshoot SQL Server Like a Microsoft Engineer”

“That’s great,” you say. “Good for you. But what does this have to do with SQL Server stuff?” I’m glad you asked!

I recently attended a fantastic one-day workshop that was made possible by my local PASS group, the North Texas SQL Server User Group. After the huge success of this year’s SQL Saturday Dallas, and in particular the response attendees had from Brent Ozar’s (b|t) performance tuning pre-con, the group decided to bring in Tim Chapman (t) in for a one-day workshop entitled “Troubleshoot SQL Server Like a Microsoft Engineer.”

I was looking forward to attending even though I knew the vast majority of the class was probably going to be over my head. I’ve advanced fairly rapidly in my SQL Server knowledge since beginning this journey a little over four months ago, but the reality is I’ve only got four months of experience. That’s actually far too little time and experience to make the most of a class at this level. So why bother attending?

Learning is a climb, sometimes a very arduous climb. Just like some of my trail rides, there are moments when I can’t reach my learning goals and have to take a step back and start over. Some days the learning is smooth and the climbing is easy, boosting my confidence and my progress. Some days, the climb is hard, but not as hard as expected due to the work I’ve put in previously.

It’s for this very reason that I wanted to attend this workshop, and the same reason I’m currently working my way through Brent Ozar’s Senior DBA Class. Both are way over my head and deal with issues I won’t have to worry about being directly responsible for any time soon. But the classes make me climb and reach for a goal. Such classes make me dig deep and recall everything I’ve learned so far and apply it as best I can. Such classes expose holes in my current knowledge set and help flesh out a trail map for what I need to learn moving forward to become the best DBA I can be.

Sometimes the climb sucks, but getting to the top is awesome. Onward to the next peak!

Troubleshoot SQL Server Like a Microsoft Engineer—A Review

As for Tim Chapman’s class itself, let me give you a quick review and share my thoughts and takeaways from the day.

First up, I didn’t know what to expect walking into the class. Still being somewhat new to all this, I sort of expected the class to rapidly accelerate to light speed and beyond to leave me grasping for whatever small tidbits I could glean. That never happened.

Tim is an excellent presenter, but beyond that he’s an excellent teacher. So many technical people who are very smart, know their stuff, and have years of experience often don’t realize just how far beyond the average newbie they really are. But not once did I feel like the class was moving too fast for me to keep up, and a great deal of this is due to how Tim broke everything down logically, built concepts upon one another, and didn’t make assumptions that everyone in the room knew more than they really did.

Having said that, there definitely was a certain level of foundational knowledge required in order to make the most of the class, and thankfully my studies thus far proved to be enough. There were a few concepts and pieces in SQL Server that I’d never heard of before (namely triggers and forced query plans), but by and large I was familiar enough with SQL Server, relational databases, nomenclature, and SSMS to never get completely lost.

In a nutshell, here’s what Tim covered in roughly seven-hours-worth of sessions:

  • An Overview of Troubleshooting
  • Queries and Waits
  • Extended Events
  • Query Store
  • Most Common Problems

One of the most encouraging things Tim shared as a new DBA was this concept: “Often, there are 5 or fewer things to look at for a server to solve problems. Like the Pareto Principal: 20% causes 80% of the issues. Today’s Goal: Identify and master the 20%.”

This is why so much of the class was understandable and relate-able. The truth is, to know how you fix the other 80% of problems possible in SQL Server means you’ve either gained years and years of experience, know how to ask Google and StackOverflow the right questions, or both. Stay in the DBA field long enough and you’re sure to run into something rare, an edge-case that very few people have seen. But beyond those edge cases, the vast majority of the problems we see are repeated regularly. Getting a grasp on these underlying issues that regularly rear their head will help me be a solid DBA while giving me the foundation to troubleshoot those rare issues.

Big thanks to Tim for helping me put together a more direct path to follow on my self-guided learning. If any of you reading this ever have the chance to take this class from Tim in the future, I highly recommend it. I’d like to sit through it again myself sometime in the future when I’ve got more knowledge and experience in my tool kit.

Also thanks to NTSSUG for investing in your members and bringing Tim in to teach us. I’m looking forward to more opportunities in the future.

That’s all for this post. Join me next time for the next episode in The Ironic DBA Files.

Follow me on Twitter at @SQLandMTB, and if you’re into mountain bikes come over and check out my site NTX Trails.

The Ironic DBA Files



The Ironic DBA—Back to Basics

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Welcome back to The Ironic DBA Files, a series where the newbie DBA on staff at Dallas DBAs chronicles the ups and downs of fast-tracking a new career as a DBA.

It’s been a few weeks since I added anything to this series—though I did contribute my first-ever T-SQL Tuesday post a couple of weeks ago. The reasons for my silence are actually pretty simple. I’ve been busy.

Is Your Isolation Concurrent?

My main daily task since coming on board here at Dallas DBAs has been immersive self-study. I spend the vast majority of my time reading blog posts, books, and watching videos about all things SQL Server. I recently enrolled in Brent Ozar’s training classes and have been learning a great deal. I typically watch one or two videos a day there, and spend a lot of time aftewards doing follow-up reading in an attempt to reinforce what I’ve just consumed.

There’s so much to learn!

Before enrolling in those classes, I spent a few weeks sort of ambling all over the place without any specific step-by-step process as to what I should be studying. I had sort of gotten to the point where I had learned enough that it was getting hard to determine exactly what I should learn next, so my focus was rather fuzzy.

Along the way, I spent a few days going down the rabbit hole of concurrency and isolation levels, which is really useful stuff to know if you’re serious about being a top-notch DBA. It’s good stuff, and I’m glad I read up on it, but 90% of what I had read was cart-before-the-horse type stuff. I needed to keep it simple and go back to basics.

Build that Muscle Memory

I wrote in my last Ironic DBA post about the basics of finding and reading error logs. Nested within that simple write up was a truth I needed to remind myself about and keep coming back to: Keep learning about how navigate and use SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS).

Case in point: I currently have three clients whose servers I review daily, and one client who receives a weekly review. I’ll be picking up one or two more clients in the near future. I’m almost daily presented with an “I’ve never seen this before” moment, which is a learning opportunity. It’s not uncommon for me find a new-to-me error and spend a bunch of time Googling and checking reliable sources in an attempt to figure out what’s going on.

More often than not, my difficulties in figuring out what’s going wrong are equal parts not knowing where to look in SSMS and not knowing about the error itself. I can learn from mentoring or reading what is causing an error, but knowing how to troubleshoot it is largely knowing how to navigate SSMS effectively.

Seriously, I think the best piece of advice I can give my fellow newbie DBAs is do everything you can to learn about using SSMS. Learning how SQL Server works under the hood, how relational databases work, how to write and troubleshoot queries, and things like indexing, statistics, and monitoring are all critical to your career as a DBA. But none of that matters if you don’t get familiar with the tool you will use most often.

SSMS is the tool that will make everything else you learn make more sense because it is where you can see all the magic happen—or not happen in the case of job failures, deadlocks, and other nasty stuff. Let’s be honest, the tool is not intuitive, and in 2019 it feels very long in the tooth—like using legacy software because there’s nothing else better. As a graphic designer and lifelong Mac user I find the software clunky and confusing, and constantly think about ways the GUI could be vastly improved.

The problem with that is it would blow the mind of every long-term DBA out there. Can you imagine how lost the majority of career DBAs would be if Microsoft suddenly released a whole new interface to SQL Server? Even if they created a GUI that was objectively better, many DBAs would feel like they’re starting over and it’s a frustration they just don’t need to deal with to get their jobs done. So, I agree that the best course of action is to identify simple ways to tweak the current GUI to improve the tool without blowing it up and starting from scratch.

So embrace SSMS for what it is and what it does. Despite it’s weaknesses, it’s the most powerful tool in your DBA tool kit.

That’s all for this week. Join me next time for the next episode in The Ironic DBA Files.

Follow me on Twitter at @SQLandMTB, and if you’re into mountain bikes come over and check out my site NTX Trails.

The Ironic DBA Files



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