I’ve been to a number of conferences and have always found it difficult to walk up to people that I don’t know and introduce myself.  It’s just not something that comes natural to me.  And I’ve found that this typically isn’t a strength of other people in the IT community.

When we were planning our recent event, a full day event similar to SQL Saturday but on a Friday, I wanted to add something that got people to meet people that they didn’t know and start some networking.

Lara Rubbelke (@SQLGal) suggested that we try doing a bingo card.  It had been used for a recent event she had attended and it seemed like a good idea. And fit the concept I was thinking of – getting lots of people to talk to strangers and get to know people outside their typical bubble.

The Game

To set this up, we put together a word document that looked like a Bingo card with 12 squares.  The purpose was for each attendee to find someone that matched a square and get their initials.  We used the following items on our card.

• Attended DBA Track Session
• Attended Developer Track Session
• Attended BI Track Session
• SQL Server 2008 in production
• SQL Server version prior to 2005 in production
• Presented PASSMN SQL Summit Session
• 1+ TB database in production
• Passed SQL Server 2005/2008 Certification
• Service Broker in Production
• Blogs on SQL Server
• PASSMN LinkedIn Member
• Microsoft Employee
• Twitters
• SQL Server MVP   
• Used SQL Server 4.1  Yes, this guys was at our event.

The Payoff

Instead of just using survey’s for giveaways at the end of the event, we opted to use the Networking Bingo card to drive people to try to complete the card.  This turned out to be huge.  People were chatting and networking and some people managed to care all of the squares on the bingo card before the first break.

The real payoff was the amount of networking that we had between the sessions.  Instead of sitting at the tables waiting for the next session, most people were up and about meeting and talking to people.  Some people came up and mentioned how much they enjoyed a reason to network for a change.

It was awesome!

I’ve attached our bingo card, so feel free to use it for your own event.

PASSMN SQL Summit Networking Bingo.docx

In less than a month SSWUG will be hosting the Ultimate Virtual Conference on October 21-24.  This is an excellent opportunity to get the benefits of heading to a conference full of Rock Star speakers while be able to view the content from the comforts of home or your desk.

Reasons to Attend

Some of the details of the event are:

• More than 75 technical sessions
• New! Live sessions track – all live sessions, with speaker Q&A/interviews at the end of the day
• On-Demand access to sessions for 45 days – miss a session? No problem.
• Chat, Twitter Integration, SKYPE integration for Q&A
• Experience-based learning – find out what you need to know from people that are using the technology every day
• These are NOT sales presentations.
• 6-Month SSWUG.ORG Membership (or membership extension), included!
• ALL-ACCESS Pass: SQL Server and Business Intelligence with related SharePoint and .NET technologies – all included, one low price
• Great vendor hall – learn about the best tools, technologies, publications and partners out there for your shop

If that doesn’t jazz you up, then maybe know that one of the best SQL Server humor threads started at the last SSWUG Virtual Conference.

StrateSQL Sessions

I’ll be presenting four sessions at the SSWUG Ultimate Virtual Conference.  My sessions will be:

Solving Business Pains with SQL Server Integration Services

SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) offers a wide range of features and functionality that can be used to solve business pains within Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) processes. These pains can be caused by the performance of current ETL process, the maintainability of ETL processes or represent a new pain that SSIS features can resolve. This presentation will provide a demonstration of real world scenarios where features of SSIS were used to solve business pains through modification of existing SSIS packages or through the creation of new SSIS packages. The session will also discuss current best practices in SSIS package design.

Necessarily Evils, Building Optimized CRUD Procedures

Every developer loves them and a lot of DBAs hate them. But there are many and valid reasons for creating generic SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE procedures. In this session, we’ll go through designing CRUD procedures that utilize new and existing SQL features to create CRUD procedures that are optimized for performance.

Improving Daily Imports with Partitioned Tables

At some point, everyone struggles with loading data to OLTP systems. The business needs the data loaded so that users can work through the data. But the users can’t afford the downtime to get the data into the production tables. In this session we’ll review this problem and how to use partitioning to alleviate this issue.

Are You Following Your Own Best Practices?

Everyone has their own best practices that they try to follow. But often times we aren’t sure how well we are following our own or industry best practices. In this session we’ll go into monitoring and managing best practices throughout your environment. The session will look at how to create a solution using policy based management and other tools to report on your compliance to best practices.

One More Reason

For those budget conscious in the current economy, I can even offer a discount code to help nudge those that haven’t quite given in to joining the conference.  With these nine letters you can received a $10 discount off your registration… SPJSUVC09

The Final Pitch

I lied about the one more reason, I’ve got to give one more pitch.

It’s not often that conferences give us the ability to attend all of the sessions that we want when we want to.  With the stellar lineup of presenters and the deep content that is flexible to each persons schedule I highly recommend attending this conference.

The Minnesota SQL Server user group (PASSMN) meeting is tonight at the Microsoft offices.  Come check us out to network and mingle with your peers and also for the opportunity to learn some new things.

Tonight’s topics are:

• SQL Server and Partition Alignment
• Wait-Time Based Performance Management

If you have questions or need more information on the meeting, feel free to contact me on twitter at@StrateSQL or though email at jstrate@digineer.com.

Just one week until the next PASSMN meeting.  As I mentioned last week, this month we’ll be focusing a  bit on performance.    And yeah, guys with lights coming out of his body means performance… or it might be just a great party.  Come out and join the discussion with a snack and some great presentations.

SQL Server and Partition Alignment & Wait-Time Based Performance Management

September 15th
2:30 PM Networking & Social
3:00 PM Announcements
3:15 PM – 5:15 PM Presentations
8300 Norman Center Drive
9th Floor
Bloomington, MN  55437

If that wasn’t enough to make you want to want to show up, here are the presentation details…

SQL Server and Partition Alignment

Speaker: Jimmy May, Microsoft
Now that SQL Server wait stats are formally documented & DMVs are available, disk partition alignment may be the best kept secret related to database performance optimization. In combination with stripe unit size & file allocation unit size, learn how you can increase I/O throughput by 10%, 30%, & under some circumstances even more. Many customers are unaware of partition alignment. Even experienced disk administrators may be unfamiliar with it. Explanations are often initially met with disbelief. Engineers familiar with the topic may underestimate its importance. For example, some customers think it is useful only for Microsoft Exchange Server. In fact, partition alignment is important for all servers from which high performance is expected, especially SQL Server. Each month I encounter customers with unaligned storage. Until existing misaligned partitions created using Windows Server 2003 or Windows 2000 Server are rebuilt properly, disk partition alignment will remain a relevant technology.

Jimmy May  is a Principal Performance Engineer for Microsoft’s Assessment, Consulting, & Engineering (A.C.E.) Services & works for Team Lee. He is the Founder & Visionary-in-Chief of SQL Server Pros & was formerly the Senior Database Architect for one of the world’s largest OLTP DBs. He is a founder & on the executive committees of both the Indiana Windows User Group & Indianapolis Professional Association for SQL Server . Jimmy lives in Indianapolis, Indiana with his lovely bride, Phyllis, & Fannie May the Wonder Dog. Subscribe to & read his blog at msdn.blogs.com/jimmymay. Contact him at jimmymay@microsoft.com or aspiringgeek@live.com.

Wait-Time Based Performance Management

Speaker: Janis Griffin, Confio
Using Wait Time Analysis and Wait Types is a newer method for tuning SQL Server instances. As a result, there is often confusion on exactly what the data means. The issue typically centers around the fact the wait time data is analyzed at the wrong level or the collected wait time data is not detailed enough. This presentation will focus on these problems and review several real-life case studies of using SQL Server Wait Type data coupled with Wait-Time based performance analysis to solve the most difficult performance related issues.

Janis Griffin has over 20 years of DBA experience including design, development and implementation of many critical database applications. Before coming to Confio, Janis held DBA positions primarily in the Telecom Industry (15 yrs), working with both real-time network routing databases and OLTP business to business applications.

While working on some questions for a project I am working on, I ran into an issue with Report Manager today.  I haven’t had the pleasure of running into this issue in a while and thought I would share the issue and the resolution because it affects both Windows 7 and Vista.

Between this time and the previous few times I’ve dealt with this, I’ve spent more than time that I should on it and it does telegraph well into a second issue that I’ll talk about at the end.  And the easiest way for me to remember things is to write them down.

Your First Time

When going into Report Manager for the first time after installing it on my laptop I got the following screen:

Not a very exciting screen.  Reporting Services is nice and secure because, as a user, I couldn’t do anything.  But since doing something was what was needed, figuring this out was required.

I started by going out and checking the Reporting Services configuration.  When the configuration tool is opened in Windows 7 and Vista it asks the user if they want to allow the program to make changes to the computer.

Ah-ha! Security?!

I never setup any security for Reporting Services after the installation.  By default, Reporting Services makes the BUILTIN\Administrators account an administrator to Reporting Services.  I was running Internet Explorer but I wasn’t running it as a user, not as an administrator.  So while I was using

Setting Up The First User

To get started, start up Internet Explorer as an administrator.  To do this right-click on Internet Explorer in the menu and select “Run as administrator”.  BTW, you should check out Live Mesh if you haven’t it’s great for synchronizing folders.

Next go to Site Settings and select the Security tab.  You’ll notice that only the BUILTIN\Administrators have access after the installation.  This was the problem initially because Internet Explorer from regular launch didn’t acknowledge these permissions.

Select New Role Assignment and add yourself in as a  System Administrator.

Next go to Home and select Properties and go to the Security tab.

  Select New Role Assignment and add yourself in as a  Content Manager.

Now close Internet Explorer and open it back up.  Browse to the Reporting Services site and you should be able to do everything you expected to be able to do before.

Bad Default Behavior?

Now, you might be thinking this is all pointless and definitely a bug.  Truthfully it’s not, Internet Explorer is running under minimum permissions which you really want it to do.  The lower the permissions that you are cruising the internet with, the better.  Unless you like viruses then the worse.

Also, the BUILTIN\Administrators account should be removed as a user and administrator from Reporting Services as soon as the “real” administrators have been added.  No sense leaving a whole in your Reporting Services site for administrators from other systems to get access to reports that they shouldn’t have access to.

Trying to figure out what to do between now and the PASS Summit this fall?  If you are hanging out in the Twin Cities, then your local PASS chapter has some new for you.  Announcing our first local full-day summit coming up at the end of this month.

September 25, 2009
8:30 PM – 3:45 PM
Microsoft Office – 9th Floor
8300 Norman Center Drive
Bloomington, MN
Register Here or visit http://www.mnssug.org/

The day will be choke full of FREE training, networking, food, refreshments and prizes.  We will be having 4 different break-out sessions along 3 different tracks. Expect sessions from MVPs, vendors and everyone in between.

Training for Everyone

There will be 4 session times with a choice of Application Development, Database Administration and Business Intelligence. Below is the schedule of the sessions.  The actual session names and presenters will be available shortly.

PASSMN SQL Summit 2009 Schedule

Special Thanks to PASS and Our Members

Part of the reason this event is possible is because last year we had a large number of members that went to the PASS Summit last year and who registered as member of our user group.  Because of that, PASS provided us with the sponsorship that is being used for our lunch.

Registration is Important

Due to the room sizes for this event we are limited to 120 attendees, be certain to register.

Just two weeks away is the next PASSMN meeting.  This month we’ll be focusing a  bit on performance and to emphasis this point I found a picture of someone moving so fast that light emanates from their body.

SQL Server and Partition Alignment & Wait-Time Based Performance Management

September 15th
2:30 PM Networking & Social
3:00 PM Announcements
3:15 PM – 5:15 PM Presentations
8300 Norman Center Drive
9th Floor
Bloomington, MN  55437

If that wasn’t enough to make you want to want to show up, here are the presentation details…

SQL Server and Partition Alignment

Speaker: Jimmy May, Microsoft
Now that SQL Server wait stats are formally documented & DMVs are available, disk partition alignment may be the best kept secret related to database performance optimization. In combination with stripe unit size & file allocation unit size, learn how you can increase I/O throughput by 10%, 30%, & under some circumstances even more. Many customers are unaware of partition alignment. Even experienced disk administrators may be unfamiliar with it. Explanations are often initially met with disbelief. Engineers familiar with the topic may underestimate its importance. For example, some customers think it is useful only for Microsoft Exchange Server. In fact, partition alignment is important for all servers from which high performance is expected, especially SQL Server. Each month I encounter customers with unaligned storage. Until existing misaligned partitions created using Windows Server 2003 or Windows 2000 Server are rebuilt properly, disk partition alignment will remain a relevant technology.

Jimmy May  is a Principal Performance Engineer for Microsoft’s Assessment, Consulting, & Engineering (A.C.E.) Services & works for Team Lee. He is the Founder & Visionary-in-Chief of SQL Server Pros & was formerly the Senior Database Architect for one of the world’s largest OLTP DBs. He is a founder & on the executive committees of both the Indiana Windows User Group & Indianapolis Professional Association for SQL Server . Jimmy lives in Indianapolis, Indiana with his lovely bride, Phyllis, & Fannie May the Wonder Dog. Subscribe to & read his blog at msdn.blogs.com/jimmymay. Contact him at jimmymay@microsoft.com or aspiringgeek@live.com.

Wait-Time Based Performance Management

Speaker: Janis Griffin, Confio
Using Wait Time Analysis and Wait Types is a newer method for tuning SQL Server instances. As a result, there is often confusion on exactly what the data means. The issue typically centers around the fact the wait time data is analyzed at the wrong level or the collected wait time data is not detailed enough. This presentation will focus on these problems and review several real-life case studies of using SQL Server Wait Type data coupled with Wait-Time based performance analysis to solve the most difficult performance related issues.

Janis Griffin has over 20 years of DBA experience including design, development and implementation of many critical database applications. Before coming to Confio, Janis held DBA positions primarily in the Telecom Industry (15 yrs), working with both real-time network routing databases and OLTP business to business applications.