Allen Kinsel - SQL DBA

SQL Server, PASS, and other data mishaps

Program committee task--Speaker terms revisited

By Allen Kinsel, 6 months and 1 day ago

This one has been sitting on my to do list for a very very long time, actually its been on my list since nearly the day after the 2009 SQLPASS Summit closed.

Admittedly Im not a PASS «Chapter leader», nor do I attend the meetings in person more than a few times a year (its 3 hrs roundtrip to the local group during lunch) but, Im always looking for ways we can improve processes at PASS and Ive heard too many times to count over the years that we dont do a good job of helping chapters connect with speakers, or even providing a way for the chapters to contact potential speakers.

The other day I contacted Andy Warren about an idea I had for getting a simple speaker bureau off the ground reasonably quick since I know he's had that on his mind lately.  I'd like to think that his post on that subject was  part of the fruits of that brainstorming session but, Ill never know.  In order to make some of the things we want to do for the community «easier» we need to rework (in a small way) the speaker terms and conditions to allow for it.

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PASS Program Committee--Defined

By Allen Kinsel, 6 months and 2 days ago

I get asked quite frequently about the different PASS committee's and how a person goes about volunteering for them.  I thought I'd take a little time and explain what the program committee does and a little about how they do it.

The program committee

The current program committee could easily be renamed «The Summit Committee».  This group of community volunteers are responsible for most pieces of education at the annual SQLPASS Summit.

Committee Members

Every year PASS sends out a call for volunteers for the program committee (usually in Jan-Feb).  This call is actually quite formal with a few questions asked in an online survey.  The answers to these questions are used to match volunteers to tasks within the committee

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How did I get here?

By Allen Kinsel, 6 months and 2 days ago

There's a meme going around that I thought I'd take my turn at answering.

Better late than never I suppose, Work always seems to have a way of getting in the way of posts like this!

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How do you do Disaster Recovery

By Allen Kinsel, 6 months and 3 days ago

Going through the process of a large scale multi-location disaster recovery made me stop and think about all the different incarnations that can be used to recover database servers. 

Living with a datacenter in Hurricane alley, We've been doing disaster preparedness(recovery) on a small scale for many years but this year we've been working towards recovering all of our assets to an offsite colocation.  That part of the decision is easy, the actual method used to do these recoveries is definitely up in the air and I fully expect our processes to change for the better, every time we redo our disaster testing (many times a year going forward).

In exploring the recovery process we quickly realized that our «hardware failure» recovery documents weren't going to work effectively in a datacenter failure situation.  So, it was time to design a new set of criteria for success.  I thought Id share our thought process and how we plan on tackling this always fun experience.  Its worth mentioning in a side note that no SQL replication is wanted/allowed for in our case.

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Using Aliases with SQL Server

By Allen Kinsel, 6 months and 9 days ago

Even an old dog can learn new tricks

Where Can I get a dog like this?
I had an Aha! moment recently.  For my entire career as a DBA I have generally considered aliases for connections a workaround for bad behaving applications.  Whenever someone said «alias» my mind immediately heads to SQL Server client configuration aliases which I try to avoid if at all possible (since they are configured on each client)  It never snapped to me until recently that DNS aliases may be a good solution to a few problems  we're currently experiencing.

For disaster recovery reasons, as well as for manageability reasons we have decided to start using DNS aliases for every application connection to database servers.  This should allow us to have the luxury of moving databases from server to server without having to reconfigure multiple applications which would normally be a whole process in itself since the code was already migrated to production which is locked.

Using DNS aliases should also allow us to swap highly important applications over individually to a remote datacenter, which could have less computing power, without having to switch every application and thus kill the performance of that standby server.


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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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