SQL Server, PASS, and other data mishaps
Allen Kinsel
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Homepage: http://allenkinsel.com
Posts by Allen Kinsel
SQL Azure track at the PASS summit
Feb 11th
Is the cloud real or hype?
With SQL Azure (& the cloud in general) becoming more and more mainstream, I’m seriously considering creating a new Azure track for the 2011 Summit. I’m still pulling the attendance & session evaluation scores together from 2009 and 2010 azure sessions to try and determine if its truly a good idea or not.
There’s always a tradeoff: we have a limited amount of sessions available, so creating a track would mean shifting allocations from the other tracks to cover the sessions given but, considering the future it seems to be the right move.
Just thought id throw this quick post out looking for thoughts & feedback
This is the first minor change I’m considering for the 2011 Summit
PASS Program Committee Management Transparency
Feb 10th
I occasionally get into trouble for thinking that no one cares what I’m (we’re) doing for PASS. Frankly much of what I work on is BORING to a casual observer. Im still not convinced anyone really cares about the minutiae that we have to deal with week in and week out on the Program Committee but, I don’t know if that’s just myself becoming desensitized to the amount & importance of what I (we) do.
My friend Andy Warren (Blog|Twitter) mentioned something the other day about their being minutes posted on the PASS site (somewhere) from the meetings that are held in relation to the SQL Rally. In the Program Committee we’ve produced minutes for the meetings that we have for quite a long time (2+ years) and they were simply emailed about and stored on PASS’s intranet site, they’re mainly used for keeping track of deliverables.
Change
Starting with our last meeting (first substantial meeting of 2011) Ive asked that we publish a copy of the minutes to the Program Committee webpage on the PASS site. http://www.sqlpass.org/Community/SpeakerResource.aspx Look near the bottom left of the page for the first meeting minutes. At some point, we may have to look at separating the Program committee info from the actual speaker info on that page but, for now this was easy and took basically no extra work from HQ or anyone on the team.
Useful?
So, the question is (and I rarely get answers to questions in a blog post): Other than to be able to say, yes we publish those minutes, does anyone even care? Will anyone read them with any regularity? Ive personally never looked at the Rally minutes, so I’m thinking its not going to be that valuable.. I agree that in general transparency is a good thing but, to a point like this I wonder if anyone out there cares.
Information overload
We will meet bi-weekly for the next 6 or so weeks but from that point on we usually meet weekly, and often a few times a week when crunch time hits. As you can imagine, that creates a huge amount of minutes. I hope that we dont wind up burying good information people might want to see simply because we meet so often.
PASS needs you
Feb 9th
Help wanted Needed!!
This year my portfolio within the PASS board is “Summit program and speaker management” Ive been involved with this portfolio for at least the last 4 years. This year, I’m going to be transitioning into yet a different roll within the committee. Ill still be heavily involved but, I’m turning the majority of the day to day decision making over to Lori Edwards (Blog|Twitter) She was hugely involved last year, and I have no doubt she will work her magic again this year!
Program Committee Changes
This year, there are going to be some changes to the processes in the program committee, Ill detail some of those in a later set of blog posts. For now, Ive decided to split up the groups of volunteers in the program committee to hopefully enable some of the future process changes.
Help Wanted
For this year we’re going to need help in many areas
Abstract Review Teams (led by Lori Edwards)
- DBA/Cloud/BI/AD/PD
Speaker Review Team (led by Tim Ford)
- This group will review speakers independently of their abstracts
Speaker Enhancement team (Wes Brown & Grant Fritchey)
- This will probably stay a small group and work on updating sample abstracts, selection info, generating info for new speakers etc.
PPT/Abstract Editing review/approval (Led by Tim Martin)
- This group will be working on sessions after they are accepted (lots of new ideas here)
Special Projects (Led by AJ Mendo & Lance Harra)
- This group will be working on finishing the Speaker Evaluation tool, coordinating changes to the Summit online tool as well as a few other projects that are envisioned.
Cutting edge
Its been said that what we do in the Program committee is on the bleeding edge of what PASS does in organizing groups of volunteers at the national level. That is to say, we need lots of help but, sometimes things dont always work out quite how we (I) had expected. I say this only to set expectations that its not always a smooth ride but, rarely is it not interesting.
We developed an online survey to help us capture all of the relevant info about everyone who wants to volunteer. Don’t worry, its not a job app and it shouldn’t be resume quality, we’re primarily looking for general information
http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/WEB22BSJTXJZEA/
Please consider this a personal invitation from me to join us in making the content at the PASS Summit 2011 the best ever!
Database Automagic
Feb 8th
This months TSQL Tuesday is hosted by a good friend Pat right over at SQL Asylum
For this months entry I decided to keep it short and sweet, following in my Bits N Bytes theme.
The Meta Script
In the true sense of the word automation, this really doesn’t fit but, in the terms of quickly getting something done that would otherwise be a mundane repetitive task, this can save a world of time.
Lets say we have a list of objects in the Sales Schema and we have a request to grant Select and Insert access to a user for those objects. There are two approaches, 1 is to grant select and insert to the actual schema like this
GRANT SELECT, INSERT ON SCHEMA::Sales TO BusinessUser
However you might decide that you only want to grant direct SELECT and INSERT on the tables that exist in the DBO Schema today not those tables which may be created in the future (auditors love to make us do this)
A simple way to automate granting these rights is by writing a script that writes a script like so
SELECT
‘GRANT SELECT, INSERT ON ‘ + sch.name + ‘.’ + obj.name + ‘ TO BusinessUser’
FROM sys.all_objects obj JOIN sys.schemas sch
ON obj.schema_id = sch.schema_id
WHERE sch.name = ‘Sales’
and obj.type = ‘U’
and obj.type = ‘U’
This should give you a result set that looks something like the following:
GRANT SELECT, INSERT ON Sales.People TO BusinessUser
GRANT SELECT, INSERT ON Sales.Sales TO BusinessUser
At this point, run the output in a separate command window and viola you’ve automated that grant of permissions
This may not be true “automation” in the sense that Pat was looking for but, perfecting the ability to write scripts that write scripts is a huge timesaver
What’s important in a Summit Location
Feb 7th
I thought after my last post on Summit location that I wouldn’t need to write anymore about it but, I got a couple of responses(questions) wondering what I thought was important in a location for the summit. What I’m guessing these people really want to know is where Ill vote for, not, what I already wrote about which is what I’m essentially voting against.
Well, I’m not going to go so far as to say exactly where I’d like to see the Summit. What I will do is list what I think are the top 3 most important things when looking at where to locate the summit.
- Accessibility – It needs to be as easy as possible to get to, as well as get around once you get there. Both the city as well as the Convention Center should be easily accessibilty
- Cost – The convention center needs to be reasonably priced, the hotels, food, etc should all be (somewhat) affordable
- Local Support – I would prefer a location with a very strong local support structure, whether Microsoft or the local SQL Community.
There are many additional variables that no doubt will be considered but, these are the things that make the top of my list.
