Allen Kinsel - SQL DBA

SQL Server, PASS, and other data mishaps

Happy Holidays, Tis the Season in review!

By Allen Kinsel, 7 months and 8 days ago

Whats your favorite time of the year?

People often ask why I enjoy this time of year so much.  For me its very simple, the time frame from about Oct15-Jan1 is easily the busiest time of the year for me which I guess means that I thrive under pressure!!

It all usually starts around the 15th of Oct when the last minute tweakings of the PASS summit are starting to fall into place, then usually the first week of Nov the annual PASS Summit happens and we get to see all of the hard work the dedicated PASS volunteers and speakers put in come together in a great display of SQL community and quite possibly the best quality SQL Server education opportunity anywhere! 

In years past I have almost 100% dropped PASS work until the following January/February to give plenty of time to recharge before embarking on another marathon ordeal of working on the various committee's and such.  This year I have attempted to start working on PASS stuff almost immediately after the summit.  I'm not convinced yet that this is the right thing to do as the risk of burnout runs high when you have no «down» time.  We'll see how this works for this year and if it doesnt seem to effect anything, Ill continue down this road.

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More PASS Summit SQLKaraoke & Networking

By Allen Kinsel, 8 months and 7 days ago

What does Karaoke have to do with PASS?

 

Luckily, having a moral opposition to karaoke does not preclude you from attending the summit of from volunteering to help SQLPASS grow.  We'll take anyone who wants to help anytime you're willing (more on that tomorrow). 

 

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SQL Karaoke, Volunteering and SQLPASS

By Allen Kinsel, 8 months and 10 days ago

Why do I volunteer for PASS?

 

Ive been asked more times than I can count why I spend so many hours working for an organization that doesnt pay anything other than thanks and smiles. 

I work for a large company, and have a very small team of people.  As such, it is often very helpful to have a sounding board outside of your sphere of influence to talk to people about ideas, issues and bacon, mostly bacon.  Sure there has always been newsgroups and forums and they certainly have their place for this type of information exchange.  However, when you know someone and have shared a dinner, a beer, a session, or even just a 5 minute hall discussion, they are more vested in you're outcome than some random stranger on an internet forum.   The overall quality of the conversations and of the information that is exchanged in these groups is higher than the average internet sql community, if only by a little bit.  

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  • Community Choice Sessions at the PASS Summit 2010:
    • Allen Kinsel: Thanks, We hope that this will be a good test of community selections, and hope to expand it a bit in the future
    • robert cook: glad you decided to keep blogging and gracias to you and your amigos for giving an opportunity to the sql community for direct involvement with session choices
  • Sql Server and SSPI handshake failed error hell:
    • Robert L Davis: I agree about the reboot. That's why I check SPN's before DC/Kerberos errors. An SPN can be fixed without rebooting, but if the issue is DC connection and no one can log in to the SQL Server, you're down anyway so a reboot shouldn't be out of the question. The problem with having a...
    • Allen Kinsel: I guess should have worded that a little differently, in my experience in a lot of environments kerberos isnt used since its not configured, so it always falls back to NTLM, with only NTLM and no Kerberos in the result list, its usually safe to say that SPN's arent the issue. I...
    • NULLgarity: This post should win an award. These SSPI errors have cause me all sorts of trouble over the years and are EXTREMELY difficult to troubleshoot. In my experience, they often went away before I even had a chance to look into them. Thanks for the post!
    • Shawn Melton: It's been a while since I have done SA duties with AD but I would be curious too. I actually have a User Group meeting tonight (06/17/10) with an MCT that teaches AD and will ask him if he can explain that authentication mess.
    • Robert L Davis: sys.dm_exec_connections does not tell you what protocol they used to attempt their connection. It tells you which protocol suceeded. Kerberos is ALWAYS tried first and NTLM is used as a failback. So if they show as using NTLM, it's not because they didn't attempt to use Kerberos, its because Kerberos wasn't successful. In my...
  • SQL Saturday 35 Recap:
    • Jen McCown: Cookout, eh? Maybe we'll have the next after party at chez McCown :)

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