Joe will be mentoring Riley Logan, who attended IE2 in Chicago last week and IE1 in Bellevue last summer.  In his own words:

I was born and raised in Tuscaloosa, AL, where I also attended the University of Alabama, earning a degree in Management Information Systems. After graduating in 2005, I began working as a programmer at the Walmart Home Office in Bentonville, Arkansas. Though my title was programmer, I was placed on the Open Systems Database Engineering team, where I began working as an Informix, DB2, and SQL Server DBA. Initially, Informix was my primary platform of focus.

However, in 2006, Walmart’s IS Department brought a SQL Server PFE on site on a permanent basis. That PFE, Shep Sheppard, began mentoring me by teaching me the more technical aspects of SQL Server (Thank you, Shep!). Not long after his arrival, our senior SQL Server DBA left the team and, I suppose, the rest is history. I’m currently a SQL Server DBA for Tyson Foods where my primary responsibilities are designing, optimizing, and/or troubleshooting OLTP and data warehouse solutions so that, ultimately, people can eat more chicken.

Outside of spending time with my beautiful and wonderful wife, Amy, I enjoy playing jazz guitar and exercising (while trying to not create the need for another orthopedic surgery). I also enjoy studying the Bible and apologetics, economics (both current and historical), investing, ancient Greek, and some occasional philosophy and logic.

Erin will be mentoring Amy Herndon, who is attending IEDev in Chicago right now and IE2 in Bellevue last summer. In her own words:

I’m currently a database engineering team lead at a global, mid-size, financial firm. My primary role is database development, designing and creating systems that scale, and are secure and stable. I drive and evangelize process improvement, development to delivery, and change in my department to bring firm technology and practices up to current standards.

I graduated from St. Edwards University with an MBA and undergraduate degree in Computer Systems Management. I hold an MCITP in 2008, and am currently studying for MCM. I have worked in information technology for 16 years, 8 of those years as a SQL Server DBA. My previous career experience was serving as a database administrator at the Texas Legislative Council, a support agency for the Texas Legislature and surrounding state agencies.

I have 3 favorite things: SQL Server, computer gaming, and teaching aerobics and weight training classes at the gym.

Twitter tag – but I’m still learning the art of twittering: @AAwesomeAmy

Congratulations to them both!

The post More SQLskills community mentoring appeared first on Paul S. Randal.

We’re seeing more people traveling from Europe to our US classes and we want to hit some of the other international locations we’ve been asked to do. There are only so many places we can travel to given our crazy schedule, and we don’t want to compromise on quality, but still want to hit at least one international location.

It’s highly likely we’ll head down to Australia in 2014 (and maybe New Zealand) and deliver at least IE1-IE2-IE3 there. Locations and dates are still TBD and we’re really excited to be heading back to Australia.

Given all of this, we’ve decided that we will not be teaching Immersion Events in the UK in 2014 (and maybe not 2015 either). We’ve enjoyed our time there but we need to branch out to other locations!

We hope to see you in London this year, and down under next year!

The post Last call for London classes until 2015 or 2016 appeared first on Paul S. Randal.

Please run the following code (with example output):

SELECT
    COUNT (*) AS [DataFiles],
    COUNT (DISTINCT data_space_id) AS [Filegroups],
    SUM (size) AS [Size]
FROM sys.master_files
WHERE [type_desc] = N'ROWS' -- filter out log files/data_space_id 0
    AND [database_id] > 4  -- filter out system databases
    AND [FILE_ID] != 65537 -- filter out FILESTREAM
GROUP BY [database_id];
GO

DataFiles   Filegroups  Size
----------- ----------- -----------
1           1           288
1           1           288
3           2           25600

And send me the results for as many servers as you want. You can either email me plaintext or a spreadsheet or append the results as a comment to this post. Please do not add any more info to the results (like server name, version etc.) as it’s not relevant for this survey and adds a bunch of time to the results processing.

Note that the script will only work on 2005 onward.

I’ll editorialize the results in a week or two.

Thanks!

The post Survey: data files and filegroups per database (code to run) appeared first on Paul S. Randal.

Here are the results:

I’m not surprised by these results, and they reflect the straw-polls I do at the start of each class we teach. We’re seeing a ton of people putting 2012 into production and there’s a lot of interest in AlwaysOn Availability Groups because of the ability to have multiple copies of the primary, and direct reads on secondaries without having to use clunky database snapshots (like you have to do with database mirroring).

One thing I couldn’t get from the two surveys was the average spread of versions in production. What I can tell you from my class straw-polls is that most of attendees who are using 2012 also have older versions in production too. My impression is that more people are kicking the tires of 2012 by having it in production in some way, rather than having it in a test environment and then doing a comprehensive roll-out.

Anyway, glad to see a strong adoption rate for 2012!

The post More businesses than you think are on the cutting edge appeared first on Paul S. Randal.

It’s time to kick off the fourth mentoring session. You can read about the previous mentees below:

• Session 1 (November 2011, including our reasoning for doing this): SQLskills community mentoring
• Session 2 (May 2012): SQLskills community mentoring – round 2
• Session 3 (November 2012): SQLskills community mentoring – round 3

This time round the team’s taking a break so only I will be mentoring someone (I love helping people, especially with career/growth). I’ll be mentoring Merrill Aldrich (b|t – definitely check out his cool post on telecommuting), who took IE1 in Chicago in 2011. In his own words:

Merrill Aldrich is a database administrator at one of the largest credit unions in the U.S., serving about 850,000 members. His primary role is as a systems/operations DBA, making the organization’s many databases safe, secure, highly available, and fast. He strives to be a change agent, improving systems and processes a little every day, until they are truly outstanding.

Merrill enjoys sharing experience with the SQL Server community online, using social media and his blog, with user groups, and by speaking at events like PASS SQL Saturday.

He is a graduate of the Rice University School of Architecture and designed buildings for many years. He became an expert in three-dimensional modeling and building information modeling (BIM) before retooling and retraining to work directly in IT. He has received a few awards, but his favorite remains the award for “Shortest Answer to a Long CAD Question,” which took the form of a corny purple trophy, given many, many years ago by teammates at his first architecture job.

Congratulations to Merrill – I’m looking forward to working with him over the next six months!

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I’ll report on the results next week.

Thanks!

The post Survey: what’s the newest version of SQL Server that you have in production appeared first on Paul S. Randal.

Here are the results:

I’m actually quite surprised. While I expected to see a sizable percentage of businesses still with SQL Server 2000 in production, I didn’t expect it to be almost half of all respondents – that’s massive! And 9% of businesses have SQL Servers *older* than SQL Server 2000. Although we’ll do performance troubleshooting on SQL Server 2000 (and it takes more time because of the lack of DMVs), we won’t touch anything older.

Last year I wrote a post You guys still use SQL Server 2000? Really? where I listed some of the reasons why people are stuck on SQL Server 2000 for some systems, with some client examples I knew of. SQL Server 2000 was a really solid release and I think it will be around for some time to come.

Here’s the kicker though, Extended Lifecycle Support ended for SQL Server 2000 on April 9th, 2013 (see here for all the details). And the hardware those SQL Servers are running on have to be out of warranty, or close too it, as well (Edit: unless the instances are virtualized, of course). I’d be getting really twitchy about wanting to upgrade the hardware and SQL Servers for those systems where there’s nothing major holding me back. We’re finding a lot of clients asking for upgrade help from SQL Server 2000 and 2005 due to the licensing gotchas with SQL Server 2012 and the ease of buying over-powered hardware that can’t be used without shelling out even more money for unneeded licenses.

I think that if I re-run this survey in another year, the results will be quite different as businesses realize the risk of running an unsupported version and finally upgrade.

The post More businesses than you think are still using SQL Server 2000 appeared first on Paul S. Randal.

I’ll report on the results next week.

Thanks!

The post Survey: what’s the oldest version of SQL Server you have in production? appeared first on Paul S. Randal.

The reason for this post is to remind those of you who are planning to come to one of our London classes in June that they’re all more than half full already and we expect them to sell out in the next 2-3 weeks. We had multiple people wait too long to register for Chicago and we were able to add extra IE1 and IEBI classes to cope with demand, but we can’t do that in London.

Don’t forget that the early-bird price for IE1 in London expires Friday 19th!

Check out the London classes here - hope to see you there!

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Here are the results:

The “Other” responses were:

• 7 x “A combination of maintenance plans generated from SSMS wizard and a home-grown index maintenance script”
• 5 x “Combo of own and modified scripts of Michelle Ufford”
• 2 x “Home-grown scripts for main databases and SSMS wizard in some simple cases”
• 1 x “A combination of enterprise backup agent and AdaptiveIndexDefrag“
• 1 x “A combination of home-grown scripts and Ola’s scripts (for Indexing and Statistics)”
• 1 x “Combination of Ola’s scripts (indexes/stats) and homegrown (DBCC and backups)”

The main purpose of this survey is to show people that there are freely-available and comprehensive scripts that you can download to help run your regular database maintenance, and that many, many people use them in production.

I don’t like to recommend using the SSMS Maintenance Plan Wizard. It has quite limited options, has had a number of high profile bugs in the past, and to this day, even in SQL Server 2012, it still allows you to perform regular shrink operations without any warning as to the side-effects.

Home grown scripts  are OK, but time after time when I’m reviewing client maintenance scripts I see coding errors, lack of logging of what happened, and lack of useful error handling. An example of a common error is in code to figure out which indexes are fragmented, where the results from sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats are not filtered by alloc_unit_type_desc, so there are false positives from LOB_DATA and ROW_OVERFLOW_DATA allocation units. In one client, many of their large clustered indexes had no logical fragmentation but were being rebuilt every night needlessly because of benign LOB_DATA fragmentation, generating a ton of extra transaction log that had to be backed up.

More than 40% of the almost 500 respondents use some or all of Ola Hallengren’s Maintenance Solution, and I always recommend our clients download and play around with Ola’s scripts before asking us to write customized code for them, or at least let us use Ola’s code where possible to save them consulting time. Ola’s Maintenance Solution has won multiple awards and is very widely used in the SQL Server community. There are also some popular scripts for performing index maintenance from SQL Server MVPs Michelle Ufford and Tara Kizer, but Ola’s are the gold standard and allow you to do backups, index and statistics maintenance, and consistency checks.

One of the cool things about using Ola’s scripts is that they’re tested constantly by thousands of installations around the world and they’re very robust. If you’ve never seen them, or want to upgrade your database maintenance, check them out!

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