Tag Archives: dennycherry

Holy Blocking Chains, Batman – I’m Speaking at PASS Summit!

For the first time ever I will doing a general session at PASS Summit this year.

Waiting for an email with news one way or the other last week was angst ridden, to say the least. After receiving no notification with the first wave on Tuesday, I got even more anxious and tried to occupy myself with work and other things. I didn’t want to get excited over something that wasn’t even a thing yet.

Then late Friday – acceptance.

Yeah, that’s right. ME!

It didn’t sink in right away. I had myself so convinced I wasn’t going to get selected. Maybe my head and heart were still bracing for the disappointment that was not to happen. Why would I be thinking this way? This is the third time I have submitted and the first time I have had a general session accepted. I did have the opportunity of doing a lightning talk last year. I also got to compete in Speaker Idol, which was an amazing and valuable experience that is only available to those that have not done a general session before. More on this later.

The first year I submitted I had been writing abstracts the same way I normally did for SQL Saturday events, not knowing there was more involved for a PASS Summit abstract. I logged in and was about to fill out everything for each of my sessions when I saw all these fields to fill out that I didn’t know about. I quickly got things written for them, along with my main abstracts, and submitted.

But I didn’t get selected.

The next year PASS offered a program for feedback on Summit abstracts. I thought “Yes, this is great! I will write my abstracts, get feedback, and I will be speaking at Summit this year!”

But I didn’t get selected for a general session.

Both times I was disappointed. Both times I did a fair amount of sulking and grumbling, but I am only human. In these cases, my best was beat out by others that were better. Kind of a hard pill to swallow, but I think these challenges are what make us who we are – IT professionals that are constantly striving to improve our own skills while creating content that will convey knowledge and better the SQL Server community.

Last year however, I was selected for a lightning talk and I finally got to participate in Speaker Idol. Doing my lightning talk on How to Keep Your DBA from KILLING YOU was fun and a great experience.

Speaker Idol? Wow…how do I put this? If you are a new speaker, and have not spoken at PASS Summit before (general session or better), throw your name in the hat for this! If selected, you will have the opportunity to get up and present something in five minutes, and get immediate feedback from a panel of judges, who also happen to be well known and experienced speakers in the SQL community. When this was first done in 2014, I heard about the brutality of the first round, so I made sure I was there for the subsequent rounds. Your audience for this? Mostly speakers or aspiring speakers. Don’t be surprised if the final round is standing room only. Or if there are acrobatics (lookin’ at you, Rob).

Moving on to 2017…

Earlier this year it was announced that the Summit selection process was changing yet again. There would be no feedback to speakers and you were also limited to submitting three sessions. There was also a list of topics, with some marked as “hot topics” or topics that PASS really wanted content on. It was also stated that they wanted new content. That session you had been peddling to every SQL Saturday that would have you? Not new content.

I took all this info and combined it with a ramped-up abstract writing and review process. What is ramped-up? Reading the sessions that were selected last year, and having a reviewer that is a seasoned PASS Summit speaker. It also helped that my reviewer was super critical. Once it was announced that submissions were being accepted I logged in and grabbed all the sections that I would need to fill out and got started on my abstracts, outlining details before writing anything. There was even one session I outlined while on a plane, that I looked at later to write up and decided it was COMPLETE GARBAGE…AND WHAT WAS I THINKING???

What did I learn from the PASS Summit submission and selection process this year?

  • Review, review, review. Write them early, review, come back later and review again. Have other experienced PASS Summit speakers review your abstracts. Don’t like their feedback or think they are being mean? Ummmm….they are trying to help you get your abstract to a level that is worthy of PASS Summit. LISTEN TO THEM!!! And buy them a beer.
  • Nothing is guaranteed. In a previous blog post I told y’all how to pull all the submitted session into a table and even gave you some PowerShell code to do it. I was able to compare that to the list of speakers selected and there were some amazing people that have spoken and PASS Summit before that didn’t make the cut this year. Sessions are reviewed and selected by human beings. This is a gamble, and regardless of how good of an abstract you have, you are at the mercy of the session review committee and what they feel is good enough for Summit. This is a monumental task, but they hunker down and get it done so that all of us can have an amazing selection of sessions to pick from.

I hope I get to see everyone at PASS Summit this year, whether or not they are speaking. Out of the conferences that I have been to over the years, I have found PASS Summit to not only be the best of them, but it was where I discovered that the #SQLFamily thing is real. If you are open to it, you can get hooked into groups that will welcome you and include you all because you are there for the same reason they are – to expand your knowledge and career in the area of SQL Server.

See y’all in October!

My First Time Submitting to SQL PASS Summit – Part 1

I have now officially submitted to SQL PASS Summit 2015. Five sessions. All me (well, and a few others on the panel I submitted). The hard part is over…but how did this all happen?

My story starts back in the year 2013. My first time to attend a SQL PASS Summit. It was in Charlotte, NC. I didn’t know these were normally in Seattle. It didn’t really seem to matter too much either. I was a first timer. And they labeled me as such.

first_timer_2013

I didn’t mind. I knew I was a newb. I embraced it. I signed up for and watched the webinar for first timers put on by Denny Cherry. I also got a first timer buddy (aka Someone I can follow around like a puppy until I am comfortable enough and have found other suitable, like minded, people that will welcome me and allow me to accompany them to places that sell beer).

I met so many new people while at Summit that year and out of all the conferences I had been to in the past, this was by far the best experience I had ever had. One this that happened numerous times when talking to people was hearing the words “Have you thought about presenting?” I’m all “Wow…these people are nice…and encouraging…wait…presenting? Say what?”

Did they need fresh meat? A new crop of willing yet unsuspecting folks to throw their hat in the ring, to hopefully be selected, and dive head first off that cliff into something that might become an obsession that would challenge them in ways they had never thought of before? Maybe. Maybe they did. Maybe it was a little cultish. Well, pass the kool-aid.

I came home and gave it some thought. I really wanted to do this but did not know where to start. I felt like I had stuff to say. Stories to tell. Experiences to share. But where to start? I decided I would do a panel. I rounded up some experienced speakers for a particular SQL Saturday, created my session and submitted it. That was the easy part. I then decided we would have weekly internet video chats so that everyone could get acquainted, and I could get their take on how they saw the panel going. They were also able to provide me much needed guidance with my slide deck (something else I had never done before) and how the session needed structure. I took all this in and did my slides accordingly.

The time finally came for the SQL Saturday event and my panel session. I made the trip out there and met up with everyone. I attended my very first speaker dinner. I could not believe I was there and in the same room with some of the brightest and well known minds in the SQL community. This was it – my first taste of what would consume that entire year.

The panel went well. My fellow panelists and other patted me on the back for a job well done. Feedback was good. I was elated. I was hooked. I thought I was ready to handle what was up next – my first solo session. Just me and my slides. Another SQL Saturday. Another city.

To be continued…

Optimizing SQL Server Performance in a Virtual Environment with Denny Cherry

T-SQL performance tuning – no differences between virtual and physical

Check host and GPU numbers – look outside of the VM at the host.

Remote Perfmon users – group you can be added to for viewing performance monitor information for the server; you can be added to this group on the server where your VM is hosted.

ESX Top – task manager for UNIX; command line utility. Check for CPU thrashing – looking for percent used.

Check host and guest for disk IO latency.

Balloon memory driver – should be enabled; used by host os to request memory back from the guest os; if this is turned off – prevents host os from paging physical memory to the hosts swap file; paging will occur and you will have random slowness that will be difficult to diagnose.

Reserved memory setting – How much memory you want and how much memory you really need to have (reserved).

Memory deduplication – looking for and stripping out duplicate instances of processes in memory; great for OS memory. Doesn’t work for all SQL Server – unless multiple SQL Servers have the same pages in cache.

Storage configuration options – IO is the same if the disks are physical or virtual; automatic tier adjusting technology if possible. Storage slow? Get faster storage ($$$). Keep OS, data, logs tempdb on separate disks if possible.

Storage deduplication – can greatly improve overall performance; deduplicating the OS virtual disks = save much less data to the array.

VMWare Paravirtualization Driver – optional driver for vSphere Virtual Machines; recommended for high IO workloads; config via VM Properties – select SCSI controller, change type.

Monitoring – look at more levels of the environment; SQL Server, guest OS, hypervisor, etc.

Counters –
reads/writes per sec – correlated counter at the host level
seconds / reads and writes
disk queue
page life expectancy
system processor queue
VM Disk
VM Memory

Timer inside the VM lies – ugly rumor and nothing more.