I attended Ignite NM 11 last night, and was very disappointed in myself that I managed to miss the first 10 events.  That’s right.  I missed 10 other opportunities over the last 3 years to participate in my community, and watch other people talk about their passions.  For those of you that are unfamiliar with Ignite talks they are 5 minute presentations similar to the Lightning Talks at PASS Summit (speaking of, go submit now you have until August 17, 2011) with a few differences.  At an Ignite talk you have 5 minutes, 20 slides, 15 seconds a slide.  Speakers submit abstracts and the community votes on their favorites.  The result is truly an evening full of diverse presentations by folks with differing levels of public speaking skills.  Last night I was introduced to organizations ranging from The Metropolitan Homelessness Project to the Challenger Learning Centers   and in the same evening learned a little bit about alternate plant sources for the paper industry, what it is like to live in a dune shack for 3 weeks, and how to publish a ‘zine.   All of that, and I missed at least 3 Sparks while I took a phone call outside.  The event ran just over 2 hours, included ample networking time before hand, during an intermission, and after the last spark and was a great way to reconnect with old and dear friends as well as meet a few new people that I otherwise would never run into.

The evening started as a way for me to get out of the house, avoid yet another night of talking to the dog and cats about SQL server and things happening at work, and wound up being just like a first date.  I left feeling energized about the community I live in.  I left with sparks of my own floating in my head.  I left with a long list of things and groups to research, a desire to help out with Quelab, and a reminder that there are folks out there that are passionate about the things they know in my local community.

That reminder is important to me for a couple of reasons.  I find myself energized when I surround myself with passionate people.  I thrive in situations that allow me to tap into someone else’s enthusiasm to recharge my own batteries.  Generally I get my recharge by attending PASS Summit, SQL Saturdays and even ABQSQL meetings.  To find yet another venue that is close to home to charge myself up is a fantastic thing.  To find another venue that introduces me to even more places to find passionate people is better than fantastic… fantabulous maybe?

So, what are my next steps?  Fortunately I have SQLSaturday #95 booked in September, PASS Summit in October and SQLinTheCity in late October so I can get my DBA fix, and in the time between those events I plan on meeting up with the gang at Quelab to see what I might contribute to their efforts, and I might just develop a spark of my own for IgniteNM 12.

You should do the same…

I’ve got a long list of reasons excuses I could share, but I think for now I will just leave you with a promise that I will be back in action next week with a long post on how to be an effective IT admin without encroaching on others.

Do what you agree to do.

Those have to be some of the simplest words in the English language to understand.  It certainly seems like a basic enough statement to me, however I’ve come to realize that this statement, like many others, is easier said than done.   There are all sorts of reasons why someone can’t, won’t or didn’t do what they agreed to do yet the end result is always the same.  Someone feels disappointed, a business goal is missed, a personal goal is missed, or confidence and trust is broken.

So, what does this simple statement mean to me as an admin?  It means that I have to think very carefully about what I agree to do at any given point in time.   Any time a request is made of me I go through a quick checklist in my head:

1. Do I fully understand the scope of the request?
2. Do both the requester and I have the same understanding of the desired end result?
3. Do I have the time and capacity to fulfill the request at this time?
4. Do I have the expertise and/or tools needed to fulfill the request?
5. Am I the best resource to complete this request?
6. Does this meet a business need  (critical or otherwise)?

If I can’t give an honest answer of ‘Yes’ to all of these questions I will continue the conversation with the person making the request of me and strive to either turn any of those no answers into a yes, or to find a more appropriate resource for the task.

It took me a long time to develop this list of questions, and honestly, prior to having them I often bit off more than I could effectively chew both in expertise and capacity.  I also found myself spinning my wheels trying to accomplish a task that didn’t meet a business need.   It’s not a great place to be as an admin (DBA or otherwise).   You wind up working late nights and weekends, loosing out on social events, family time, sleep, and personal time only to have your efforts fall flat because you provided functionality that wasn’t needed or wanted by the business.  Or, worse yet, someone in a leadership role notices that you’ve spent the time on a project or task that was essentially a waste of time and wants an explanation.

By working through this checklist each time I am asked to accomplish something I am able to ensure that the work I take on is meaningful, and is also something that can be accomplished.  It also gives me a little bit of extra credibility with the people I work with.  By asking these questions I am forced to evaluate my current workload on a daily basis in order to answer question number 3.  By knowing what I have on my plate at any given time, and by fully understanding what each task will take to accomplish I am able to set reasonable expectations with my co-workers.  I don’t have to guess about how many days or weeks it will be before I can get a new development instance stood up because I know how many other tasks and projects I’ve already committed to and approximately how long each one will take.  By setting expectations and being able to tell a requester that I will be able to complete their request, and that it will take a week because of the requests ahead of theirs we are able to either talk to the folks ahead of them in my queue to either re-prioritize, or worst case a reasonable deadline has been set and no one has to wonder when something will be done.

I will caution you that this type of scheduling and setting of expectations takes experience and time – give yourself some pad time if you’re not used to working this way.

The end result of all of this is that I ultimately meet more deadlines than I miss, my co-workers are happy with my performance, and I don’t feel stressed by deadlines most of the time.  Also, after a length of time working like this I found that I didn’t get nearly as much push back when I wasn’t able to commit to a request, or I suggested a different resource.  My co-workers had come to learn that if I was truly able to accomplish something I would do so, and otherwise I would let them know up front.

Now, I know, at least one of you out there is saying under your breath that this all sounds well and good, but we work in IT, and our workflow is not always within our control – and you’re absolutely correct.  Seemingly unpredictable things happen in IT, particularly on the Operations side of the house.  Machines experience failures of one type or another, partners don’t deliver code on time, or as expected, our customers (users) can have unexpected impacts on our systems.  All of that is absolutely true, and also absolutely manageable when it comes to adjusting expectations.  Communication is key here.  If you have issues arise that put one or more of your deadlines in jeopardy it impetus is on you to advise the folks depending on you of that.   It takes far less time to jot off a quick email letting someone know that their request is going to take a day, or week longer than expected because of a situation outside of your control than it does to deal with the consequences of missing that deadline to begin with.   And hopefully, you have padded your deadlines just enough that you might still be able to hit your original deadline – it’s a WIN\WIN situation if that happens.

Some side effects of working by this principle

There are some (for me) unexpected side effects of striving to work by this principle.  The first one is that I find myself asking a similar set of questions before taking on tasks in my personal life as well.  This causes me to evaluate what is important for me to accomplish at home and with my friends, and that’s a good thing in my opinion.  I know what I am capable of, and what is going to leave me feeling stressed so I feel like I have better balance in life.

I also am finding myself assuming that every one places as much importance on this principle as I do, and when others don’t meet their commitments to me it leaves me feeling more disappointed than I did earlier in life.  I find this side effect less okay than the first, because my confidence and trust in others seems to be more fragile than it reasonably should be.  I go into each interaction I have with other people expecting them to do what they agree to, and like it or not, many people just don’t – for many reasons.  I’m still figuring out how to moderate my reaction when other people miss deadlines, or just plain don’t do what they agreed to.  If you have any sage advise on ways to handle that please leave it in the comments – I’m all ears!

Related posts: It’s Confession Time

I have my reasons.

The first thing I want to share with you is that the company I work for and I have shared values.

No, really, we do.

I place a high value on family, friends, and local communities that I exist in.  So does the company I work for.  It is a privately held corporation that has been run by the same family since the beginning in 1944.  The sons and daughters of the founder sit on the board of directors with the addition of a few close, long-term friends.  I know that for some the idea of a medium sized corporation being run by brothers and sisters is a bit scary, but trust me – it works in our case.   The company I work for participates in both the local community via charitable donations to local groups and allowing and encouraging employees to take part in local efforts like Junior Achievement.  It also participates in the community we serve with our business by donating to groups like Jewelers for Children, assisting with sponsorships to events like The Santa Fe Symposium, and processing scrap precious metals for efforts like Jewelers for Japan.

The company I work for and I both place a high value on our impact to the environment.  I am able to recycle at work almost more easily than I can at home, there are efforts to reduce energy usage, reduce waste, and in general be good citizens of this planet that happen on a constant basis at work.  I know that these things all make good economic sense in the long run, but they do take effort to coordinate and maintain and that time and effort can all but eliminate any cost savings you might see as a corporation, yet the company I work for still does it.

The company I work for takes a principle-based approach to guiding behavior rather than being bound by rules that have no flex or give.  This is a big one for me.  Nothing makes me more frustrated than a rule that doesn’t apply to the situation, yet must be enforced because it is the rule.  By allowing principles to guide the behavior and our decision making process we are able to be more agile, make quicker decisions, and adapt to situations more quickly than a business that is bound by a rule book full of policy and procedure, and that suites me just fine.  As my family and friends can attest I stopped seeing the world in black and white a long time ago, and working in a company that recognizes the multiple shades of gray, while maintaining ethics and remaining law abiding is just about perfect for me.

Speaking of Principles

While I’m mentioning our principle-based approach, it may be helpful for you to see them in print.  It will give you a basis for where I come from in both my writing and my presenting.

1. Do what you agree to do.
2. Do not encroach on other people or their property.
3. Create an environment of trust.
4. Be open and honest.
5. Treat everyone with dignity and respect.
6. Express and value all feelings, concerns, and ideas equally.
7. Exchange your best effort for the best effort of others.
8. Develop long-term relationships of mutual benefit (WIN\WIN)
9. Have fun.
10. Passionately develop and pursue shared and individual purposes and goals.
11. Strive to maintain a positive attitude at all times.
12. Maintain your power to succeed by choosing not to believe you are a victim.
13. Take responsibility for your part in each live experience and learn from it.
14. Be successful by helping others to be successful and accepting that help for yourself.
15. Lead by influence (using reason, benefits, and inspiration) rather than by coercion (using force, fear, and innuendo).

So there you have it, the 15 principles that guide the way the company I work for treats it’s stakeholders, and in this case it’s stakeholders are the owners, employees, customers, vendors, and any other partner you can think of.

Go ahead, read that list again.

I think it’s pretty impressive, and quite a lofty goal to get more than 300 people from all different walks of life to not only try to meet those principles, but to actually follow them day in and day out.  I’m happy to report that the company I work for is mostly successful at doing just that, and it makes for a quite happy workplace.  I do have to confess that it’s not easy to follow every principle every single day, and as a DBA and Sys Admin it would be a lot easier to use the ‘because I said so’ reason to explain many of the decisions I make about systems.  What I can tell you is that by following most of the principles above, especially when explaining to someone why they can’t have DBO rights to a database, or why they can’t be added to the Domain Admin role to simplify their access to files on the network there are far fewer hurt feelings, significantly less push back when I have to make drastic changes to permissions or systems, and honestly it takes less effort and time to treat people with respect and show reasons and benefits to changes than it does to have an argument about it.

Next up I will talk a bit about each of the principles and how they apply to IT.

Lesson # 1:  Presenting for cameras is hard work!

Seriously, I’ve done a few SQLSaturdays where I’ve presented more than one session and those were tiring, but filming all day is something else.  Without an audience in front of you the impetus is all on you to keep the energy up.  I’m worried that I wasn’t able to do that towards the end of the day.  I had no idea it would be so exhausting.  It was fun though.  The folks at SSWUG took great care of me, and were fun to be around.

Lesson #2:  A 60 minute session in front of people != 60 minutes in front of a camera!

I knew that my sessions would go a bit more quickly with no interaction, but I had no idea how much more quickly..  I had done full run-thrus at home and the time was short – but I figured it was just because I was doing them at home.  I wound up having to create new demo’s and add even more info on site to meet my time obligations.  And that was after adding more slides prior to leaving Albuquerque.

Lesson #3:  Tucson is HOT in June!

I’ve spent time in Tucson previously.  In fact, up until last year I was in Tucson every February for at least a week if not two.  I’m not sure why it didn’t register with me that June would be significantly warmer than February, but it didn’t.  If you travel there in the summer be prepared for hot weather, and don’t forget the sunscreen.  The sun seems stronger in the desert, and I managed to deepen my tan on the little short walks I took while I was there.

Lesson #4:  Rent a car while in Tucson.

I opted not to rent a car for this trip and I wish I had.  Because of the way flights worked out I had quite a bit of down time even after working some long hours from the hotel.  There is a mall within walking distance, and there are restaurants close by, but I would have had more fun if I had been able to head down to 4th street for some live music, or even been able to drive around the mountains a bit.  The other thing I realized is that I prefer to be able to hit a grocery store while I travel.  I’m used to having fresh veggies, fruit, and greek yogurt every day and I just don’t feel the same eating out for every meal.  If\when I go back I will be sure to rent at least a small car so I can get to where I want to go when I want to go.

Lastly, the reason I was asked to film in the first place is for the upcoming SQL Server Disaster Prevention and Recovery event on June 17th.  I am presenting on Backup Basics, and I am planning on being available in the chat room for any questions.  See you then!

If you’ve got Word setup to use the default proofing options, and you always type DBCC CHECKALLOC in all caps you probably never would notice an issue.  But, what happens if you type DBCC CHECKALLOK instead?  Nothing, a big fat nothing.  Why?  Because by default Word doesn’t spell check words that are in all CAPS.  You can change that behavior, but if you do, typing things like dbcc or checkalloc will bring those awesome squiggly lines right back, but Word will have no suggestions for you.

To fix that, and get my custom dictionary a little bit closer to complete I’ve provided a dictionary file that includes all of the DOCUMENTED reserved t-sql words in Books on Line.  I know that there are many more undocumented reserved words in SQL Server, but I’ve not found a great way to expose them all.  If anyone has any ideas for how to expose the undocumented reserved words I would love to hear them.

So, to use the  tsql dictionary you need to rename it the same way you did with the first dictionary file I posted, then open Word and make a few changes.  First up, you need to tell Word to check UPPERCASE WORDs, by deselecting the check box below:

Next step is to import the file by clicking on the Custom Dictionaries button and begin writting.

Enjoy!

This week I am working off site supporting the 25th annual Santa Fe Symposium along with several co-workers.  SFS is an event we support every year, and generally it runs like a well oiled machine.   This year we decided to step it up a bit from a technology standpoint and made the jump to a high res, high lumen, rear projection setup and after some shenanigans Saturday night getting presentation mode to work with both a Windows laptop and the MacBook Pro, and spending an exorbitant amount of money on CL2 HDMI cables we were very pleased with our choice…  color was fantastic and  the screen image was brighter than we had ever been able to pull off with our older equipment.

After a very long day we powered down all of our equipment, carefully stashed it all in a secured room at the venue and found our ways home for a few hours of sleep before the Symposium kicked off bright and early Sunday morning confident that we were in good shape for our speakers to hit the ground running.

Unfortunately that good luck didn’t last long for us.  I got a call Sunday morning at 5:55am letting me know that both our brand new HP Envy and the super-duper, high res, high lumen projector had been turned in to vessels for some of the hardest water west of the Mississippi.   Yep – our perfect setup had been ruined less than 3 hours before the first presentation was scheduled to start by a faulty air conditioning unit in our store room…

Houston, We have a problem

Now, both of us that are here to support the presenters are from an Operations team, so we don’t make a plan to do anything without a backup; but in this case our backup plan was less than ideal.  Our backup projector was going to take us from 4000 lumen to 2500 lumen, and from 1080p to 1024×768 (and our screen is 16:9, so really we were stuck with 1024x 576, or stretching our image to fit the screen), and our backup plan for  the laptop was to load Office 2011 on the MacBook, as well as to have a dual boot partition with Windows 7 waiting in the wings.

So, we finished getting ready in record time and raced our way to the venue to assess the damage to the laptop and projector (they both appear to be total losses) and to put our recovery plan in place.

Turns out that taking a presentation that was written in Office 2010 on a Windows box, and then trying to run it in Office 2011 on a Mac works sometimes – as long as its a pretty simple presentation.  Once you add video, animations, or audio it’s no longer quite as simple. Also, neither one of us remembered to make a backup copy of the final presentations we had gathered forSunday’s speakers before we left Saturday night (d’oh!  I’m a DBA – always, always, always take a backup!) so we had to find our speakers for the day and get copies again before we could test much of anything.   Then to top it off, we couldn’t get a good image out of the Windows install on the MacBook.

We were able to get our backup projector up and configured, with a reasonable picture (although dim) before our scheduled start time,  and fortunately our first presentation of the day was straightforward and lacking animations or video, but we spent all day hopping fixing up presentations to run in Power Poing 2011, swapping out laptops for the few that just wouldn’t work on the Mac, and  swapping out our dim backup projector for a new high res, high lumen projector during a break, double and triple checking animations and video in presentations.

This is definitely not my preferred work mode.

So, my lesson for you is one that you’ve heard over and over again from other bloggers and speakers.  It’s not good enough to have a backup or a recovery plan… you have to test each and every aspect of that plan – including the equipment and facilities you might be forced to use.

We certainly won’t do another one of these without testing each and every presentation on all possible laptops we might bring, and we will be sure that we have an equivalent projector to use in case of emergency, and I see a few more long nights in our immediate future testing the remaining 18 presentations on the MacBook.

The point of reference:

I’m attending a SQL Skills immersion event this week in Chicago, and like any other training event or conference I think that much of the value in attending comes from the conversations and networking that happens afterhours.  Last night there were a group of us sitting in the hotel bar after dinner telling the stories that DBAs and admins in general tend to tell when socializing..

You know, the stupid things we’ve all done with our systems, the stupid things predecessors did with our systems that we inherited, and on and on.

As the evening progressed we started doing some brainstorming to help each other (and this is where you get your monies worth) solve either business problems or technical problems.

The situation:

Imagine that you are an Enterprise Admin in a small IT shop for a financial institute in Europe.  You have auditing requirements, but being in Europe, no legal requirement to have auditors on staff.   The dilemma is this.  How do you, as the Enterprise Admin over the AD forest audit yourself?  You have the ability to remove security audit logs so essentially could cover tracks if you were a nefarious EA, and aside from that, you are in a position of risk.  If the audits are brought into question, you are ultimately responsible.  You want to protect yourself in this situation.

So, this is essentially the situation that was brought up last night over beer and peanuts.   The seven of us present, with all of our different points of reference, experience levels, and knowledge of AD put our collective minds together and decided that the approach below is where to start.

Our Solution:

So, here you go, with no vetting, no technical research I present the output of social time with peers.

The first thing you want to do is get your CFO, CEO, CIO – whichever TLA is appropriate in your situation on board to be the account holder for your Enterprise Admin account.  The EA shouldn’t be his/her normal every day, get email, do work account – but they need to hold the password for this to work.  Once your TLA is willing to hold the credentials, setup that new EA account in AD, login as the new EA and remove that level of permissions from your own account.

Secondly, setup a second domain in your forest, with a one way trust.  Inside that domain you will need at least two machines – they could be workstations running server in all honesty.   No reason that they need to be server class machines.  They do need to be physical machines and not virtual though.

Those two machines will be your DCs and they will hold a distributed file share that you will be sending your security audit logs to.

Build your machines, setup your audit log shipping and have your TLA change the password on the EA account.  You could even do a two key type of solution, where each of you have half of the password – truly ensuring that your TLA won’t be tempted to just fix those pesky file permissions on their own, and you have assurance that there is always a second set of eyes on the work you are doing.

This scenario is likely full of holes, and certainly not tested, but I think it does show perfectly well the power of the whole brain you have access to at training and community events.

If you are a blogger or speaker you probably cringe a little bit every time you have to reference a system object in your post or presentation and you see that little red squiggle under a system object name that you know is spelled correctly.. I know I did, and after the tweet below I knew that others were doing the same thing.

So, I stepped up to the challenge.

And the mssql.dic custom dictionary for Office was born. 

At this time the dictionary contains qualified and non-qualified names of system objects only (and only those that exist in sys.all_objects).  I’m sure that there’s a ton of other words that would be great to have in a dictionary, but hey – this is the first rev and I’m a busy DBA .  This has been tested on both Office 2007 and Office 2010, and the object names were pulled from SQL Server 2008 R2.

This is easily extended to create custom dictionaries for your environment – use the following query to pull object names for your specific databases:

SELECT  sys.schemas.name AS schemaname ,

        sys.all_objects.name AS objname

INTO    dba.dbo.dictionary

FROM    sys.all_objects

        JOIN sys.schemas ON sys.all_objects.schema_id = sys.schemas.schema_id

You can either then save the results as text or insert them into a table in your management database (this is what I did).

Feel free to download the file and use it for all of your documentation and presentation needs – did I mention that this works in Power Point as well?

Anyways, the file is here: mssql  Once you have the file downloaded save it as a unicode text file called mssql.dic in the following path:

 …\appdata\Roaming\Microsoft\UProof\  (same place as CUSTOM.DIC and your ExcludeDictionaryxxxxxx.lex files for office)

the instructions to import it into Office are here (use method 2).

Enjoy, and please leave any feedback or suggestions in the comments – I will continue adding to this dictionary and releasing it as needed.