Allen Kinsel - SQL DBA

SQL Server, PASS, and other data mishaps

PASS Program Committee--Defined

By Allen Kinsel, 7 months and 13 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

Keep reading →

Related posts

Share this post

How did I get here?

By Allen Kinsel, 7 months and 13 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!

Keep reading →

Related posts

Share this post

How do you do Disaster Recovery

By Allen Kinsel, 7 months and 14 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.

Keep reading →

Related posts

Share this post

Using Aliases with SQL Server

By Allen Kinsel, 7 months and 20 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.


Keep reading →

Related posts

Share this post

PASS Processes and Results posted

By Allen Kinsel, 7 months and 26 days ago

How a Bacon Explosion is Made

Openness

Ive been encouraged to blog openly about the Volunteer work that I do for PASS and the processes we use to get the work done.  This blog is the first in what I hope to be a long series that will outline the different things that have to be done to bring a >somewhat< seemless experience to the SQL community

Pass Processes --what you (dont) want to know 

The final PASS Summit session evaluation results have finally been emailed out to the speakers.  This brings an interesting month and a half of PASS to a close for me.  Back on the 24th of november I asked for some help to get the Session evaluations together and generate some results.  As it turns out I had a huge outpouring of support from everyone wanting to help (Thanks again) In the end though, I wound up working with 2 volunteers: Tim Mitchell and Christina Leo, as well as Elena Sebastiano from PASS HQ to make this work...

Keep reading →

Related posts

Share this post

← Previous 01 ... 06 07 08 09 10 Next →

Follow Me


Tags

Allen Kinsel on Twitter

  • Sitting back with a bucket of popcorn, this has now crossed into pure hilarity, what id give to be in the exchange admin room right abut now 12 hrs ago
  • every one who gets hit by this infection should have their mouse taken away for a month 13 hrs ago
  • Full on spam virus hitting our global address book! are people really that stupid to click an unknown link? #HumanityFAIL 13 hrs ago
  • .@jadionne nothing wrong xcpt u recompile it to change arch log directories. can you imagine #sqlserver needing a recompile to change dir's? 13 hrs ago
  • the db2 community is second only to the oracle community at being rude to their peers...If I see RTFM 1 more time today... sheesh! 14 hrs ago
  • More updates...

Categories

Most Recent Posts

Subscribe

Archives

Next Posts

Latest comments

  • Allowing effective developer access to SQL Server:
    • Karen Lopez: Another approach I use: Be generous in granting privileges in the DEV database (but still lock down the server environment), but don't let Devs promote any DDL to the next environment. Only the DBAs can deliver/apply DDL to the next (usually QA) environment. So if the devs modify their tables/columns without the architect...
  • PASS Summit Community Choice Session results revealed:
    • Andy Warren: Allen, nice job on this. Great to see the community get a chance to participate in building the program and share in the excitement of the upcoming Summit. Andy
  • 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...

Most commented posts