Archive for December, 2008

Professional New Year’s Resolutions

Tuesday, December 30th, 2008

Well, I’ve been tagged.  SQLBatman has tagged me to post my New Years Resolutions.  I have so much room for professional development I’m not sure where to start.  So I’ll start with some pain points.  So here they are:

1.  Get Certified. I have been in the IT business for over 10 years and have not taken any certification exams since I was a NetWare 4.0 admin.  Since I think I’ll be hanging out in the database world for the foreseeable future, I think I should prove my skills.

2.  Learn to effectively use profiler. I hate how much time I spend setting up a trace because I really don’t know what I’m looking for I also need to increase my experience at reading traces to make correct resolutions to issues faster.

3.  Be able to resolve some of the basic, recuring Oracle issues I get paged with and must pass off to our Oracle DBAs. I share on-call with our Oracle & Sybase DBAs.  I feel so guilty to have to call them for any Oracle log I get.  One has been a DBA for 10 years and the other 30 years (going all the way back to our mainframe days) they can resolve out MSSQL logs most of the time without my assistance, I need to return the favor.

4.  Learn SQL Server Analysis Services. Judging from the keynotes at SQLPass, SSAS will have a much larger footprint during 2009.  I need to know how to troubleshoot and support it.

So it’s my turn to share the love.  I, like SQLBatman, do not know how has been blessed with this task.

You have been tagged:

Neil Watkins

Jimmy May

Susan Delaney

Michelle Ufford

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Getdate() Formatting

Tuesday, December 30th, 2008

I get the occasional question from our Oracle DBAs on how do you do this in MSSQL.  Usually I have little to no idea, so I do what all new DBAs do:  Look it up.  Well, this situation came up today on how can I write a procedure that will query the table and give me all the enteries for today.  The column the date is stored in is varchar in this format 11/14/2008.  I found the answer is select convert(varchar,getdate(),101)  So I thought I’d add the sytle ID numbers for future reference.

Style ID

Style Type
0 or 100 mon dd yyyy hh:miAM (or PM)
101 mm/dd/yyyy
102 yyyy.mm.dd
103 dd/mm/yyyy
104 dd.mm.yyyy
105 dd-mm-yyyy
106 dd mon yyyy
107 Mon dd, yyyy
108 hh:mm:ss
9 or 109 mon dd yyyy hh:mi:ss:mmmAM (or PM)
110 mm-dd-yyyy
111 yyyy/mm/dd
112 yyyymmdd
13 or 113 dd mon yyyy hh:mm:ss:mmm(24h)
114 hh:mi:ss:mmm(24h)
20 or 120 yyyy-mm-dd hh:mi:ss(24h)
21 or 121 yyyy-mm-dd hh:mi:ss.mmm(24h)
126 yyyy-mm-dd Thh:mm:ss.mmm(no spaces)
130 dd mon yyyy hh:mi:ss:mmmAM
131 dd/mm/yyyy hh:mi:ss:mmmAM

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The joys of home ownership

Monday, December 29th, 2008

I was trying to be the good homeowner.  It had been six months it was time to flush the water heater.  The process was going flawlessly until I was starting to re-light the heater.  I noticed a drip, drip, drip.  There is nothing good that can come from that.  I started to investigate.  The shutoff valve to the heater input was dripping.  I guess I was stronger than I though when I shut off the water.  Then I realized I have lived in the house for 10 years and I didn’t know where the main water shutoff was located.  So I had to investigate.  I followed the pipes to quickly find the shutoff.  Once I had the water shut off, I took the broken valve apart and a few inches of telfon tape later, the drip stopped.  The water is heating up and I lived to blog about it.

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Miami Dolphins

Sunday, December 28th, 2008

Dolphins win the AFC East. From last to first in one season!!!!
Congratulations Dolphins.

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16 things about Michael Deputy

Friday, December 26th, 2008

I was reading a post by T.J. Belt where he listed 16 things about him.  It was quite interesting.  He has had quite an interesting life.  So here are my 16

1.  I completed a 100 mile bike ride in Honolulu, HI.

2.  I really struggle with self-confidence.

3.  My favorite NFL team was, is, and will be the Miami Dolphins.

4.  My first apartment had a view of the roller coasters at Great America in Gurnee, Illinois.

5.  I have three aquariums (Only two currently in use)

6. I come from a family of six, and so did my wife.

7. I have a daughter with Down Syndrome who is a cancer survivor.

8. I married my college sweetheart.

9. I love snow.

10. I changed my major from aquatic biology to Accounting in my junior year.

11. My two children were born in different states (Daughter in Illinois, Son in Indiana)

12. I was a founding father of the Ball State chapter of Kappa Delta Rho.

13. I once was almost kicked out of the Indianapolis Museum of Art because I acted on the impulse to find out if the mandolin on display actually worked.

14. My son and I battle each other with Nerf guns.

15. There are two things I looked forward to doing as a kid.  One was scuba diving and the other was motorcycle riding.  I am a certified rescue diver, and I have not learned to ride a motorcycle.

16. Even though my children are taking riding lessons, I have never ridden a horse.

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Wiki

Saturday, December 20th, 2008

A few weeks ago the three DBAs at our company were discussing our lack of decent, usable documentation of all the quirky things we have had to do keep our system running.  We had a few choices on how we would do this, we could use our company knowledge base, we could continue the unorganized mess of our team directory on a file server, we could build a wiki and use full text search to find things.  We ran into some procedural/political issues with using the company knowlege base.  The team directory was a bigger project than anyone wanted tackle.  So I downloaded a MediaWiki virtual appliance and had our VMware admin install it on an ESX server and we were good to go.  Another DBA spent some time building some templates so we can try to keep the knowledge in standardized format.  This will be a very interesting experiment.  I’d be interested to hear how others organize their databse knowledge.

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Dog Stories

Saturday, December 20th, 2008

Along with our two dogs, we are dog sitting for my brother-in-law as his family is out of the state.  Shipley, their German Shepard is a really good dog.  It has been fun watcing the dynamics of the dogs.  My dog Zoe, American Staffordshire Terrior mix, has assumed the role as alpha female.  This gives her the unique opportunity to be left out when the two shepards play.  But since she is fairly lazy, that doesn’t bother her too much.  Right now they are all lying down surrounding me.  It’s pretty peaceful in the house right now.  My shepard/akita mix, Belle, is lying beside me asking for attention.  That does make blogging a bit more difficult.  My wife and kids are watching  “Journey to the Center of the Earth” with Brandon Frazier again.  Yes, you can guess why my wife is watching it.

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Another SQL Server DBA Blog

Sunday, December 14th, 2008

Yep, another SQL Server admin is throwing his words into the ring.  My path to DBAdom did not take the developer to DBA track.  My trail came from the systems side.  I started as a NetWare administrator, then spearheaded the Visine project (Get the ‘red’ out) .  Then I moved into Windows/Citrix administration.  Our Linux administrator moved onto greener pastures and I was asked to take over that administration.  That was a really cool assignment especially when VMware fell under that umbrella.  I architected our virtual environment that took us into the leading edge in virtualization at that time.  After I got that environment a smooth running machine we lost our two MS SQL DBAs.  I was asked to replace these two very talented individuals.  I am currently working on consolidating as many of our databases and well as keeping all the existing servers running smoothly.  I am also working on implementing a wiki for my DBA team to attempt to standardize our documentation.

I will be posting several quick, easy scripts.  Mostly to have my script library where I can get to it easily.  Feel free to use them to gain information about your environment.  Since I am not coming from the development world, I have a lot of learning to do.

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