"What You Need To Know About Being a DBA and What You Need To Know That You Don’t Know Yet"

Last night was a big success for the first annual Baton Rouge User Groups Networking Night, an all-user-groups invited event that saw members of the Baton Rouge SQL Server, .NET, Java, IT Pro, SharePoint, Women in IT user groups, plus members of user groups in Hammond, Lafayette and New Orleans (all about one hour away) join for a night of short-format speeches on career and professional development. We also were joined by a bunch of new folks from the public who'd never been to a user group meeting before - they picked a great first meeting to attend!

To the ~60 folks in attendance last night, the other seven speakers who made it a great event, our two Platinum SQL Saturday Baton Rouge sponsors, my all Sparkhound colleagues who joined me to speak, my wife who was volun-told into speaking from an HR perspective, and my friends in the user group community, thanks for being a part of that great event last night!

I was one of the eight community speakers and enjoyed presenting a thrown-together talk with a simple and concise title: "What You Need To Know About Being a DBA and What You Need To Know That You Don’t Know Yet". It was a ton of fun to present and share in the laughter!

It's a short slide deck and I pushed my 10-minute window a little bit, but thankfully our timer and stage-hook-master Jeremy Beckham from BCBS allowed some lenience.

If you are curious to see the "big list" of things you need to know to be a DBA, here's a link to download my PowerPoint slidedeck.

Don't stop that mouse from moving

Awesome.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/168702

Method 2: Move Your Mouse Pointer
If you move your mouse pointer continuously while the data is being returned to Microsoft Excel, the query may not fail. Do not stop moving the mouse until all the data has been returned to Microsoft Excel.

NOTE: Depending on your query, it may take several minutes to return the results of your query to the worksheet.

"Words represent your intellect. The sound, gesture and movement represent your feelings." -Patricia Fripp

Defrag Complications

Former colleague of mine called me up on a Saturday morning. His manager, who spends most of his day staring at a unnamed, 3rd party, leading SQL monitoring software, was really giving him hell about a table in one of their performance databases that was at 90% fragmentation.

Rebuilding the indexes didn't seem to help. So I asked him how large the table was, and it was nine pages.

I feel sorry for my buddy, who now has to try and explain this to his boss. His report of high-fragmentation tables is just not going to be cleared unless he can filter out the tiny tables.

"Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain." -Friedrich von Schiller