(Yes, I love Bullwinkle and the double titles)

So here on the eve of my surgery, I just wanted to take a minute and write a little about the reason you probably know about that surgery (and other bits of my life). Social media. When I got into social media, I promised myself that I would always try to do it right. Blog about technical stuff, don’t blog negative things about individuals, just about situations, and blog enough about personal life that I become a human to the readers, but…don’t bore them with too many details.  So I try to keep my blogs 80-90% about SQL, and my tweets, in the 50-50 range.

Thing is, using social media, including newsgroups, I have formed a lot of very strong friendships with a lot of people around the world. These friendships are very much like ones you might have in person, except for one major thing: These are people with whom I who share common interests that I spend tons of time with. Unlike all of the people I know in real life, online friends revolve around SQL and SQL Server. This is something that I don’t have an outlet for, even at work. I don’t have peers in this arena right now, other than online (and since I telecommute a good part of the time, well, it isn’t that different).  This is not to say that I don’t have non-social media friends, just that I rarely have that much in common with them (well, except during college football season possibly. Go Vols!)

So these friends, 1/3 of which are on twitter, and another 1/3 that possibly follow this blog, I like to hear tidbits about their lives, movies, food, whatever, mostly because I learn from their ideas and use them myself.  Mmm, that sounds good for dinner. Hey, if ______, SQL Server MVP likes that movie, it can’t be all bad… Etc.  When people lose jobs, or get jobs, it is cool to help or just to lend an empathetic ear, well, eyeball :)

Obviously you don’t want to hear people just whining all of the time about their lives, but the big stuff is interesting, along with the little fun stuff. Unfortunately, sometimes you come to the turn in the road where you just can’t help but share big personal stuff.  In the last year it has been kind crazy.  First: Birth of Grandchild: Isn’t life strange…, Second, daughter’s marriage: Well, in one day and 19 hours, I will have a son-in-law, and now my surgery. Keeping an open life means that I share a little bit, but this has been wearing on my brain for months. Tomorrow is the big day.  It has been constantly on my mind for months, and it is all I am thinking about.  Having online friends to “talk” to is very useful and cathartic.

Now I know that most people couldn’t care less, so I won’t bore you with too much more of this stuff.  To share the details, I will be posting in several ways.  By twitter I will be sharing the basics, going in, coming out, things are good, and a few funny bits or whatever from the hospital.  My wife (@ValDavidson on twitter) will also share a few details.   Once the entire thing is over, I will blog about it again as I get back to work. Hopefully I will be back at the old Precision M4400 this weekend, at least to say howdy, though I have been warned that the pain relievers might make me a little too “whoo hoo” to do anything without the aid of an editor or at least a reread after I am back down to earth.  So who knows what I will be able to do.

Also, as one of my goals in life is to be created, I set up a twitter account where my hip is blogging the entire process. (http://twitter.com/hip_of_drsql). Clearly it is probably not actually my hip, but whatever it is will be blogging about the process as it sees it during my surgery, and perhaps after (truthfully I am not sure if he really is the hip or the femur…he does seem a bit boneheaded… and no, I do rather expect the quality of his writing to be better than that…)

So in the end, whether you care or not I am going to talk about it a bit. If you care, fine, if you don’t that is fine too.  At most it will be a handful of tweets.  Of course, if you wouldn’t mind praying for me, I certainly wouldn’t hate it.

Note: this is my personal blog, My primary SQL blog is at www.sqlblog.com/blogs/louis_davidson. I don’t want to offend you with my beliefs, but I am also not ashamed of them and sometimes want to share them, particularly on our most important holiday.

Easter is a very odd time for me as a Christian.  Forgetting the whole egg business and fertility rituals that were meshed with Easter in the early times.  I mean, I love the fun side of Easter too, who doesn’t love the Easter Beagle:

And I have to say that those Cadbury Mini Eggs are the greatest form of candy known in this planet as far as I am concerned. No the odd part is the Easter story itself.  Chris Rice said it best in his song “Love Like Crazy”.  It starts:

“I heard a rumor that love will make you crazy
Well is it true?
Well that’s no rumor, look at the crazy things that love made Jesus do
The friends he chose were thought to be outrageous
And you could even find him touching the contagious
And the craziest is how he chose to save us
He gave his life away
Then he had to go and say
"Gotta love the same way that I love you!" “

The manner of his death were particularly horrifying. If you ever watch the “Passion of the Christ”, you will know exactly what I mean.  I will probably only ever watch that movie once due to just how etched it is in my mind (there are other movies that I cannot watch again,) but this one is the only one that portrays a real occurrence.  And even if you don’t believe it was true for Jesus, the practice of scourging and crucifying was very real.

So this day is very humbling to us Christians. To believe that this occurred is horrible, and makes us feel terrible that it had to happen.  But on Easter, he comes back and fulfills prophesy, cleansing us of our sins.

C. S. Lewis had a theory (which I cannot find written down right now on any website,) that one of the many reasons to believe that the story is real is that it is seemingly too far fetched to be made up. The Bible is a very complex set of writings, validated to have been written by many people over many years.  Jesus’ experiences during Easter were somewhat foretold by prophesy written many many years earlier.  But still, it just seems like a very confusing way to save us from our sins.  And that incredible oddness lends an air of truth to it as well.

To use an actual C. S. Lewis quote from my favorite Christian book, Mere Christianity (1952):

“We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He has disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ's death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and, if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself.”

So enjoy your Easter eggs, the baskets, the church service, and the big old honkin’ dinner followed by a ton of chocolate and celebrate the day.  I know I will be.

I had to remove comments for the blog, but if you want to send me comments (good, bad, otherwise) please send them to: louis@drsql.org.

12:48 PM Daniel: I recommend you to contact our online store
12:48 PM Daniel: same number but option 4
12:48 PM Louis Davidson: Via phone?
12:49 PM Louis Davidson: I can do that.  Seems a shame there is no online way to do this
12:49 PM Daniel: No
12:49 PM Louis Davidson: he he, online
12:49 PM Louis Davidson: URL?
12:50 PM Daniel: sorry?
12:50 PM Louis Davidson: What is the URL for the online store?
12:51 PM Daniel: There is no online store site
12:51 PM Louis Davidson: Ok, so what is it I need to do?
12:52 PM Daniel: NNN-NNN-NNNN option 4
12:52 PM Louis Davidson: Will do, thanks
12:52 PM Daniel: Sure
12:52 PM Daniel: Is there something else that I can do for you?
12:53 PM Louis Davidson: Nope, thanks
12:53 PM Daniel: Thank you for contacting XXXXX XXXXX Technical Support. I wish you have a wonderful day.
12:53 PM Daniel has ended the session.

Even worse, all I was looking for was a new code for a mobile app. A new code. I hate codes. I don’t mind an app only letting one unique device ID come through every month, but having to “contact the online store”…which actually meant calling the technical support telephone number, is annoying.  But even more annoying is the fact that the person didn’t just GIVE ME THE NUMBER! 

And yeah, I love it when a drone who was unable to help me in a painful way says: “Is there something else that I can do for you?” Else? Did you actually do something for me?

Look, I don’t blame the person, I blame the script writer. Freaking think of these things so these people can at least LOOK like they care. As an example (and I will skip over the “contact our online store” which is just weirdly wrong.

Instead of:

12:50 PM Louis Davidson: What is the URL for the online store?
12:51 PM Daniel: There is no online store site

How about:

12:50 PM Louis Davidson: What is the URL for the online store?
12:51 PM Daniel: Sorry for the confusion. There is no online store site, this is the general XXXXX XXXXX Sales and Technical Support line.  Dial NNN-NNN-NNNN and choose option 4.  I apologize that I didn’t just say this initially, instead of giving you false hope that you could do this without spending 30 minutes on the phone listening to horrible cheesy overly repetitive barely jazz on our hold line”

Would that be too much to ask? Apparently so. It took me 10 minutes to get the person on the other end of the phone to get him to understand what I wanted. And then I got transferred to another site. How hard can this be?

I got this email a few minutes ago. 

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Subject: You are nominated for the MBA‏
From: Saul Bruce (cheesecakecrb447@greatshoppig.com)
Sent: Thu 3/19/09 3:03 PM
To: louis@drsql.org

WHAT A GREAT IDEA!
We provide a concept that will allow anyone with sufficient work experience to obtain a fully verifiable University Degree.
Bachelors, Masters or even a Doctorate.
For US: 1.845.709.8044
Outside US: +1.845.709.8044
"Just leave your NAME & PHONE NO. (with CountryCode)" in the voicemail.
Our staff will get back to you in next few days!

--------------------------------------------------------------------

I mean come on, really, how dumb? How many clues do you need before your evil detectors kick in?

1. Email domain “greatshoppig.com”
2. Email Name includes cheesecake? (mmm…cheesecake, but I think the goal is sheepskin, not a wonderfully amazing food made of cake and cheese.)
3. “fully verifiable Univsity Degree”  If there is a question of needing verify the degree, that might be a problem. The term you would look for is “accredited”
4. A Doctorate? From work experience? There is a good idea.
5. Voicemail? Leave my name and phone number on voice mail? Um, so you can add my name to the gullible idiot list?  AND use this as evidence against me when I try to prosecute you for Do Not Call List violations.  Excellent.
6. What a great idea!  For who? Clearly you, not so much anyone else.

Just more evidence that it is a good thing that the largest number of evil people are also not exactly the brightest.

Sorry I missed blogging the last two meetings (I spoke two meetings ago, so what was I going to say, man that guy was super cool!

On February 20th, the Nashville SQL Server User’s Group had a meeting where Brian Knight came in and spoke with our group. To start off with, we had the usual tasty pizza (though for some reason we had way too many cheese pizzas!)

Brian gave us a great presentation, which was something that I became concerned about when I heard that his topic: “Migrating DTS Packages to Integration Services”, was something that his company (http://pragmaticworks.com/) was involved in creating (it was in the description of the presentation.) Too many “vendor” presentations are all about the product, and not about the problem.

Brian’s presentation was the perfect mix of technical information about SQL Server, and a demonstration of the product.

What actually made it very good was that he showed the "normal” way, the problems, and covered some of how the tool would make it better.  Even the demonstrations of the tool was an education in how SSIS works, and it was definitely worth it to a person like myself who doesn’t even have any legacy DTS packages to convert.  One particularly interesting thing he mentioned was how the DTS conversion programs that are built into SQL Server often don’t convert parts of the package to SSIS, they just call the DTS package.  I have seen this when other people had tried to convert packages and I really would have thought that they were doing it wrong…

Once his presentation was over, his company gave away several books, and some training, and the group itself gave away several excellent things, like some SQL Server shirts (I have several that I will bring in April as giveaways when I do the “tip of the month”,) some SQLServerBible.com stickers, and even a copy of Windows Server 2003!

Definitely a good presentation…hope to see you next time.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear _______________,

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“adapter laptop PCGA-AC19V3 samsung 19V 4.74A 90w 5.5mm*3.0mm adapter laptop sharp 22V 2.04A 45w 3.4mm*1.35mm adapter laptop... “

“battery hp n6000 battery hp n6100 battery hp f2019 battery hp f2019a battery hp f2019b battery...”

Only to have your computer infested by a virus that required you to not only change computers but to move to a different zip code, I have a deal for you.  For only 100 dollars, I will send you your very own diploma from the IBDM Academy*.  This framed diploma will allow you to show off to your friends that while it may have cost you 200,000 dollars to move and erase your memories of the arrest and jail shower activity, it was all worth it.

To get your diploma, just send me your credit card number, name address, phone number, social security number, and shoe size via email.

Hurry, don’t think about this request, just act NOW!

Sincerely,

Stanley Spammer
CEO of the IBDM Academy

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Seriously, I have deleted 100s of spam comments from this blog over the last few days, and they were all just freaking stupid. Can that really be worth it to people to spend their time screwing with my website that gets a few hundred hits a day?  And let’s be honest, if you read most of the blogs that are hit the worst, you are not going to be stupid enough to click on a link that has the word battery repeated ad nauseum

Of course, if it will make you feel better, if you send me 100 bucks I will get a diploma…of course it would be the size of a business card, but at least I am warning you, right?

*for the humor challenged, say IBDM fast, and you will get the joke

1. Make this blog my semi personal location for information.  I included the link on my business cards I had printed up, so I won’t get too personal, and after this last year, frankly I intend to go back to a less personal format as I hope nothing that huge goes on again.

Still, I blog about personal stuff because most of you who read are my friends, any others are likely potential friends.  I realize that possible employers may read my stuff, and frankly I don’t mind. First off I don’t have big intentions of changing jobs, and second off I use this blog as my way of letting you get to know me.  I want the readers of my books to have a way to understand me:

Professionally: http//drsql.org, http://sqlblog.com/blogs/louis_davidson

Personally: http://drsql.spaces.live.com/

I won’t lie or be pushy about who I am, or what I believe, but I won’t hide it either. I also don’t bash people, coworkers, or even past work experiences either (I even try to be nice to managers, but it isn’t always easy.)

2. Move all of my SQL content to my SQL blog or website.  This is going to be my fun page, mostly talking gadgets/vacations/etc.

3. Lose 70 pounds. Hey, everyone needs to have a weight related goal in their resolutions.  Without them it wouldn’t be resolutions now would it.

4. Post a few times a week with some tidbit or gadget or something.

5. Do something creative this year. Write a short story, a comic, or something.  Writing technical stuff is fun, but sometimes I just want to work on a TV show as a writer.  Sometimes I get the feeling that TV writers don’t watch TV.  Kind of like most textbook writers don’t do the thing that they write about anymore.  Hence there is a disconnect with the the reader.  This is what I like about trade books like I write (and most of the books you probably read are).  We write from a far less technically accurate place than the typical academic, but we base our writing on what we have done, or at least want to do and have planned how to do it (this being the hard part of writing to software that hasn’t yet been released!)

6. Get in bed at a reasonable hour. I am getting kind of tired of going to bed at 1 or 2 just because I can’t get up from the keyboard. Actually this needs to be the most important of all of my resolutions!

Hey, unlike my SQL Resolutions, these seem quite reasonable, well, except for number 6.

Another year has come and gone, and I say yay!  Ready for next year to get going am I. I have lost a company (Compass Technology Management, though the website still exists..http://www.compass.net), a father-in-law, and added a grandchild and son-in-law this year, and also published a book on database design.  Some good, some sad, all tiring.

All I hope for in the coming year is just a simple, clean, great year. So let’s get out there and just keep it simple this year for a change.  In the next day or so I will put out my resolutions for the year, and this year I might even follow them :)  I am going to do two sets this year, a business oriented set on sqlblog and a more personal set on this blog.  Part of my strategy this year is to take all of my interesting posts from this spaces blog and repost them in updated fashion on the sqlblog blog.  But enough for today, have a great new year!

If you have been following my personal insanity (click here if you want the back story) you know this has been a crazy year. This weekend is no different, except in one way…it should be the final crazy bit to the story. The future should simply be about living life in the not quite fast lane again. Of course I will post a picture from the wedding in my next post, but then I will be back to just nerdy stuff, I promise.  I still have a load of stuff to review, including the little device that has changed my entertainment patterns tremendously over the past year (Zune) and one of the coolest things I have seen in a long time (Netflix streaming on Tivo).

Tomorrow is the rehearsal, and I have multiple people staying at my house.  Yip to pee, I say… Wish me luck?  No, actually just pray that this thing goes well and doesn’t ever end.

Tagged from StatisticsIO’s blog (Jason Massie)

My career challenges are going to likely be different than a lot of peoples, in that most of my major challenges are internal.  Sure, I could write a small book about my challenges with managers and programmers, but I have been at the same company for 11 years now, and frankly I am pretty happy there from MOST standpoints (technically we have ebbs and flows, but the organization is quite wonderful to work for. Click the link if you want to know who it is.) Not mentioning all of the major issues and any organizational issues is a good way to stay there.. Even the other companies I have worked for have been great, with again just a dose of management troubles. A lot of this was due to the fact that the desire to make money outstripped the desire to make a great product, leading to sales people that kinda looked like:

For me my career challenges are more problems keeping myself growing and on task, especially when it comes to doing things I don’t want to do. And there are lots of things I don’t want to do. Most of these revolve around implementing software in a substandard manner.  I know it is a cliché answer to an interview question, but I am crippled by my desire to work hard in a correct way.  I will work many hours of overtime to avoid doing something dumb…But here are my actual issues:

I am shy

If you have met me, you probably know that either I gained a few pounds after high school or I had a challenging time in grade school. Both are technically true, and have made me wary of opening up to people.  Once I get to know a person a little bit I actually get kind of boisterous, which is another defense mechanism.

I like to be right before I speak

So being shy is bad enough, but this one is probably the hardest challenge of them all. Joe Cool the dev guy, or Shady Sammy the sales guy come in with their “woo hoo” here is what I can sell you on attitude run over me quite often, as I have a hard time defending my position even when it is something like normalization. As an example, an architect I worked with stated that 5th Normal Form tables couldn’t be modeled on a data model.  Well, I was 90% sure at the time that he was “confused” but I had to be sure of that first, not at that point.  Managers usually listen now, not to the corrections.  Kind of like if you are accused by your local newspaper of being a pedophile only to retract it the next day and say it was Lewis Johnson, not Louis Davidson. You are still going to have the stink of being accused for years to come.

Ok, having the object developer dictate how your do your database code isn’t quite on par with pedophilia…but still.

I am a very slow learner

Yeah…quite slow. I make up for it by spending way too much of my waking time working on stuff, so it balances out, sort of.  The real problem is that things change all of the time. I get good at something and I am not truly happy to change to something else. Once I find something I am happy with I don’t like to change, I like to delve deeper.  This does tend to make me inflexible too.  I am very much brand aware, in that once I am happy with a brand, why change?  So when I got good at Microsoft Brand Database Server, why try that Brand O?

I get distracted by…wait…what were we talking about

I don’t want to get promoted over people, I like to work with people

Probably my biggest career challenge is that I am not motivated to be the overlord of a team of developers. I am a techie at heart, from the day I took my first radio apart, and a techie I hope to die. Taking a position as manager starts to dilute your ability to be a techie because you have to give up the binary truth that computing allows you.  You have to work with people’s “needs” and “wants” and worse of all, you have to do budgets.

Now clearly as nerds we need want all of the latest gadgets. And if there was no budget we would demand every single gadget known to man and we would have monitors that make the ones dreamed of by Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 seem tiny in comparison. So there is some give and take as to what we need and just want.  That equation should be a simple comparison of what we can justify as necessary, right? A little bit.  But it is also greatly predicated on what I find to be the most dreaded of all processes. Politics.

On the other hand.  The one type of control I DO desire is quite hard to come by without also incurring administrative control and that is technical control. 

Most great managers of technologists have at one time in their lives been at least goo, if not great technologists themselves.  The problem is, you can’t spend your time working the political scene (generally defending your team members), keep up with budgets and time entry, recruit new team members and do your old job too.  In fact, the job of manager is more akin to a coach.  Great coaches were great players, but now they herd the players, teach the players, and (save for a very few cases) are not players themselves. Coach is a very important position, but I far prefer the position of player (ok, quarterback that calls his own plays to be exact.) I want to tell the ball what do do and see it done.

When I got my SVT Focus 6 years ago (my warranty just expired) I started keeping tabs on every time I get gas. For fuel economy purposes, warranty, etc. Looking at the graph, you can see that a natural progression of prices going up is present. You can see that even as recent as 10 fillups ago, the price was exactly on the trendline.  But the price I just paid yesterday is lower than all of the amounts since February 2004 (all prices are for premium):

How long will it last?  Probably not long, and really it shouldn’t.  Prices should go up and down in a natural manner, but tending to go up over time (especially true if you are a homeowner.  If goods prices come down too far, it devalues your home because other homes are too cheap, right?  Clearly I am no economics professor, but if trend had been more along the lower set of points it would have been nice and I wouldn’t have spent 8500 dollars in fuel over six years while averaging 26.2 miles per gallon.

And if nothing else, I got to make some use out of my data I have been gathering all of these years.

Edit: He he, this article says some of the same things (http://editorial.autos.msn.com/article.aspx?cp-documentid=763257&topart=pickups) am I a treehugger? Um, no. Tree photographer at times, tree climber many years ago, but not hugging them, that is 100% for sure.

Yesterday was an excellent day. I tried to arrive for the keynote but was stopped 3 times on my way for hallway discussions. I would have liked to have made the keynote, but frankly the conversations were worth missing it. Made a few more friends in the business, several of them from Nashville.

Pretty much all I ended up doing in the morning was preparing for my session with Paul Nielsen.  Paul and I work great together because he is a professional speaker and I am a professional heckler. We have enough differing opinions that things were funny and informing.

After that I went to Hugo Kornelis' presentation on using Set Based Iteration...very good, needed another three or four hours to really get things clear though. I knew what he was talking about, but it will take some time to wrap my mind around it. (Maybe will try to rewrite my sum or two cubes experiment to use set based iteration).

Next up I went to the trade show for the first time, got scanned once, got a portable USB 2.0 hub, and got the Board of Director's call. It is being announced at this moment that I didn't win (how selfishly worded is that,) but 3 others did (not that they told me who there were.)  Was I disappointed? Yes.

But at the same time I was excited, too. I talked to them about all of the exciting ideas I have for using social media for the PASS community (not unlike this blog and the tweet I will send saying I have sent this blog).  One of the big things to me is mobile technology.  I do 80% of my browsing/reading of blogs/tweets on my mobile phone, not the PC.  I develop content on my PC.

Finally, we had a party.  Really good party I must say, with a good band (I think they were Microsofties) and really good American Kobe hamburgers and pulled pork (barbecue is not a Washington thing, but it was serviceable too).  I stayed and gambled with the "money" they gave us and I lost it too fast.  Considering the people I was playing with were terrible too (well, there was one girl who was actually quite good, apparently,) I am pretty sure that I won't be changing professions or even going to Vegas for fun gambling any time soon.

Today I present on Normalization at 4, but don't expect me to be as funny as I was with Paul Nielsen.  I am not even sure who that person was.  Tomorrow I get in the big metal flying bus that is Southwest’s service and head home.  Next week is Thanksgiving, so yay!

Today was volunteer training day, and I was very upbeat about what I heard (other than a board member that will be leaving soon).  Thy have many plans to do a lot of the things that I was very much in desire they do, including along the lines of openness that we have always wanted.

Once we were finished I filmed a short statement about why I wanted to be on the board of directors.  Boy I don’t like being filmed.  I checked the PASS site and it wasn’t up…It will be played tomorrow morning at the keynote (or before it) so I might just have to go to the keynote.  It would break my longstanding tradition of using keynotes for naptime (well, at least naps in a bed!) and since I am taking vacation for this, well, we’ll see. And never forget…a vote for me is a vote for me.

Next I headed off to the Opening reception/Quiz Bowl. The quiz bowl went well enough, but it had a down feeling. Perhaps it was our high expectations for our new format, perhaps it was that the contestants didn’t know who the PASS President is (he had been on stage 10 minutes prior), or possibly it was that it is hard to gauge how much fun people in the audience are having, but we had a good crowd of people watching, so that was cool. More tweaking next year? Of course.

I ran into several people tonight from Nashville and Virginia Beach that I know from user groups and previous employee friends of mine.  Add to that all the other people I met/talked to/saw again and it was a very good day indeed.

Tomorrow I will be participating in a panel that will discuss NULL. So if you have any crazy feelings about NULL come on out and get involved. And if your feelings about NULL are NULL, then you just might learn something.

Well, most of my second day was spent in planes and airports.  My flight was cancelled, but Southwest did a bang up job of getting me to Seattle at the same time as I would have anyhow (though I had to land and deplane one additional time.)

The thing that really amazed me however was just how many people knew about my travel issues.  I use twitter with the user name of drsql, partially as a marketing tool, and to keep up with a community of people that range from SQL friends from PASS, technology friends that I have acquired from the Devlink conference, and others who are completely unrelated to technology at all.

So I twittered about my travel issues (particularly because I was frightened that I would still be sitting in Phoenix right now waiting for a plane. Now lots of people have been asking me about my travel issues. Of course, since Southwest got me where I was going at the same time, it really wasn’t a big deal, but when you see CANCELED alongside the flight you were scheduled to take, well, it gives you pause at the very least.

Once I arrived, we had the Volunteer Party.  Very nice party, good food, good friends, and bad bowling (my best game was a 94).  With my bad hip, I have to admit that bowling was dumb, but fun.  And honestly the bowling wasn’t as bad as the walk home to save 6 bucks on taxi expenses (I took a taxi there…)  Getting lost walking back wasn’t optimal either, I must admit. Seattle is a nice city, but I did walk in a few locations that made we a bit frightened. In the end it was just a few smelly dumpsters…Either way it was a great night and I am looking forward to tomorrow (even if I am posting this during that day, so I am really looking forward to today…I think) and the Quiz Bowl!

While I agree with Pat Wright, another candidate/friend in his blog here that most of these questions are immaterial to the choice of a board member, I figured I would answer in brief answers to his questions since it isn’t a terrible idea to get to know the person. 

• CLR in the database – Assuming you mean CLR objects and not putting the entire CLR in a database, I am for it for functions that don’t access data and where appropriate aggregates.
• Triggers – Like them where useful.  Use as last line of defense and as sparingly as possible.  Blog about this here.
• Autoshrink and Autogrow – Good for low use systems (like express).  Perhaps if it could do grow automatically during off hours, but generally I suggest figuring out how much data you actually need.
• Backup and Restore best practices – I am not a dba per ce, but you should do this to make sure you can meet the needs of your service level agreements or you might end up fired.
• Excel sprawl in the BI realm – Excel is scary in how much cool stuff you can do with it and how quickly it can get out of hand. Too often used as a way to get work done when the data team is too slow to get them the tools they need.
• Cursors, are they truly evil? – Yes for nearly all typical uses.
• Powershell – Not my thing.  Was never a command line guy to start with.

Ok, so the reason I answered was the following three questions.  They directly lead to things that a board member should be aware of.

• SQL Server Cloud and the future of the DBA – The cloud is a great idea, and one day it will be very prevalent for some kinds of apps.  Can’t see it replacing local databases for many uses as we will never have enough bandwidth to service enough users trying to watch questionable videos AND storing data over the web.  Not to mention that encryption will just keep getting broken and will take more power to get done. It may happen, and I won’t be the dinosaur that ignores that it (like COBOL of old), but it is going to be a long time.  Our job as PASS volunteers is make sure that our members have the tools to be prepared for the future and the present and to keep up with trends.
• Social Networking and the DBA – I think that this is a very large part of what PASS must do.  We need to be a hub that allows data professionals (even those of us who are not DBAs but are architects or analysts) to connect with one another and work with each other closely.  There are neat things coming soon, but we have to be careful not to reinvent the wheel.  There are so many social networks that people are involved with, and if we can use/link existing information without needing to reenter information, that would be awesome.  Plus, I follow way more types of people than database professionals on twitter.  I would like to have a twitter like room to chat with just PASS people during PASS, but usually I want to be connected to lots of people so I can find out neat stuff about all kinds of tech, entertainment, and whatever.
• SQL Community – The SQL Community is a large thing, and there are many places to go for SQL information.  PASS should try to be “above” all of the communities and tie them together as much as possible.  Whether or not we should try to be the “one” stop shop that tries to be everything to everyone.  The Summit is the place where we all can meet in person,but it should continue all year round in some manner. The special interest groups we have he been a very slow starter (for years) but we continue to try to improve things and get something going.

So there you have it. If you have questions about my answers, please leave a comment or email me at drsql@hotmail.com.

Leaving tomorrow morning at 6 am, so today I am packing (and watching football, natch).  I tend to pack way too much, and this year is not different.  I have 8 hours of flights tomorrow to get to Seattle (Southwest has a direct flight that takes 4 hours, but it gets in 2 hours later and I needed to get there for a “thing” tomorrow'.  Hence I am packing my stuff and a large quantity of electronics to keep myself entertained on the flight (tons of video on my Zune for starters.)

It is going to be interesting to see how this week goes. As I said yesterday I am running for the Board of Directors of PASS this year, so I will either end up depressed or have lots more work to do. Hmm, not sure which is better :)  Either way it will be memorable for sure. I will twitter (drsql) often and to blog everyday (and post a picture or two.)

And I will be busy this week. Tuesday will be the quizbowl, Wednesday we have a NULL panel discussion (war? maybe :), Thursday Paul Nielsen and I are talking “Smart Database Design,” and I will presenting Friday last session on “Why Normalization Matters.” 

If you are going to the conference, stop by the QuizBowl desk and say howdy, and feel free to vote for me if you want. If you don’t want to, I will be just as happy if you want to buy a copy of my book, that is vote enough for me :)