Allen Kinsel - SQL DBA

SQL Server, PASS, and other data mishaps

PASS Summit Call for Speakers Now Open or “enter now for your chance to win!”

By Allen Kinsel, 2 months and 16 days ago

Hey, I bet you've heard by now that the PASS Call for speakers is now open.

No matter what your skill level as a public speaker, I would encourage you to submit an abstract.  Even if you think you're not good enough or don't have enough speaking experience, go ahead and submit an abstract.  It may be your lucky day and your abstract will be selected, at worst it will be practice in the art of composing a good abstract.

Why will this be good experience?  After looking through thousands of abstract submissions for years I've decided that composing a good abstract is an art.  It requires equal parts black magic and pixie dust to make a good abstract, and even when you have that it takes a bit of luck to get it accepted at a national conference.

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Allowing effective developer access to SQL Server

By Allen Kinsel, 3 months and 1 day ago

When creating a new application, after going through the entire business analysis & requirements gathering process, normally you wind up with a datamodel that includes many tables and relationships.  By this time, depending on the size of the datamodel/system there has been considerable amounts of time invested on all sides.  We need a way of preserving this investment of time while still allowing developers to do their thing!

Deploy

Most shops have policies in place for what level of access developers can have in each environment.  In many places I've seen, developers are allowed DBO access in development, and some lesser access in the higher environments (read only usually).

After you've deployed the datamodel to the physical database in a development environment, before you grant the developer group dbo access consider all of the time/effort that has been spent making the datamodel what it is.  In order to allow the developers to do their jobs but not allow them to modify the actual table/schema layout you can grant a combinations of privileges.

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PASS Program Update #3

By Allen Kinsel, 3 months and 8 days ago

Its been a while since I wrote an update about whats been happening in the PASS Program Committee.  I just havent had time to write about it with all of the work thats going on in addition to my regular day job.  Hopefully Ill have time now to do a better job at this!

The annual content survey was sent out and the results are in, I'd like to go on record now and say, Im not a BI user/admin/developer.  We took the BI questions from last year's survey (which were obviously from 2008).  Unfortunately, while going through them and updating the questions I didnt reach out to a BI person and get a gut check for the BI questions.  So we wound up with some out of date info in that section.  I swear we like BI @ PASS, I just goofed, there's not some secret conspiracy, and YES to the 1 of you who asked, I do read all of the comments .  The good news, for those that asked, the survey results will be released as soon as we can get them collated and readable (any day now)  **UPDATE** The survey responses are here there are definitely some very interesting tidbits to be mined from this.

We are making progress in working on several projects, from redoing the speaker resources, to developing a new system to house the speaker evaluation data.  As with all things volunteer driven, these tasks are taking time but thats not unexpected.It has to be better than this

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Runaway System Cache Increase Kills SQL

By Allen Kinsel, 3 months and 9 days ago

Ran into this a while back, and we finally found a root cause so, I thought Id put it out here in hopes that it saves at least 1 person the amount of head bashing I had with it

Environment

Windows 2003 Enterprise R2 SP2 w/32GB RAM

SQL Server 2005 standard ed SP3 64bit active/passive cluster

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April Houston SQL Server Users group meeting

By Allen Kinsel, 3 months and 17 days ago

In Houston?  Hungry for lunch?  Want to learn SQL Server from an expert?  Head over to the Microsoft office and learn the top SQL mistakes and how to avoid them from Kevin Kline

Not in Houston?  or hungry?  there's always the live meeting option!

Here are the details from the HASSUG Site:

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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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