Allen Kinsel - SQL DBA

SQL Server, PASS, and other data mishaps

Of Procrastination and Voting

By Allen Kinsel, 16 hours and 49 minutes ago

If you are reading this, you probably haven't decided on who to vote for in the PASS Board of Directors election.  You're not alone!  Here's a secret [Shhh: don’t tell]  I haven't decided who I'm going to vote for either.  Have no fear though, for the first year in the history of PASS, there is a literal plethora of information on the PASS Elections Site about the candidates and their stances on «the issues»

So, consider this to be my personal invitation to you to follow my lead and stop procrastinating!!  Go now to the PASS elections site, read about the candidates.  If you want to know something about us, use the forums, and ask.  I know at least 1 candidate that will answer your question.  Once you've done all that come back here, Ill still be waiting.  Now, do what I'm going to do:  I'll be finding the PASS BOD email ballot, then Ill be selecting the link and clicking on «Allen Kinsel» & 2 other candidates then hitting submit!

I've never been known to be the subtle type, so I figure no sense in starting now.  If you need a little more subtlety about why I think you should vote for me, look here.  The #1 thing though, is you, PASS Member, you need to vote.  It matters a great deal to our SQL Server community, even if you must vote for someone other than me [I disagree but, understand]..

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Its PASS V Day… you know what that means!

By Allen Kinsel, 9 days ago

According to the official timeline today is the big day.  No, it's not Valentines Day, but rather an even more important day.  Today is the day when we, the PASS community, get to vote for and elect our new leaders.  Today is the opening day of the PASS Board of Directors Election.  This is our communities chance to have a say in the direction of the PASS organization. 

Hopefully if you're taking the time to read this you are in the process of deciding which of the 5 candidates for the PASS Board of Directors you'd like to vote for.  I want to thank you for being an educated PASS member and taking your valuable time to vet the candidates on their stances with relation to PASS.  To hopefully help make that process easier, I'm going to aggregate all of my views about the PASS election at the bottom of this post.

I had hoped to come up with some terrific tagline that would convey what I bring to the table in this election but, I just couldn't make anything fit without it become 4 paragraphs so I decided to instead leave this picture since it does a better job.

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5 things I want to change while on the PASS Board

By Allen Kinsel, 10 days ago

I've been doing a lot of thinking over the last 3 or 4 months about «why» I wanted to run for the PASS Board.  I think I have finally come to the point where I can distill it down into a list of 5 specific things that I will work to make happen while on the PASS Board

5. Pass Summit location.  I believe that we can reach more of our membership by moving the location of the annual summit.  I like the idea of a 3 year rotation in Seattle.

4. Transparency.  I plan to continue the push for as much release of information as the community wants.  Particular things I'd like to see: full disclosure of individual BOD votes, more exposure of the Executive Committee «election process»

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What I'm doing to evolve the Program Committee next

By Allen Kinsel, 14 days ago

Since I wrote about how we've been evolving the Program Committee in the past, I thought Id write about some of the ways we're trying to change the Program Committee in the future.

But first, I want to clarify something that someone else pointed out to me.  When I write about the Program Committee, I always say «We».  When working on something as complex as the program for the summit, it is necessary to work as a very cohesive team.  This leadership team I am a part of is who makes all of the tactical decisions about the way we manage the education at the Summit.  I always refer to «us» as «we» because I cannot (and will not) take all of the credit for putting the Summit education together.  Without the team, the committee wouldn't be half of what it is.  While I have been the overarching member of this team (the 1 they cant seem to run off) , the others are always there when we have work to do.  Well, except Jeremiah, He's got this new gig where he's a turtle hunter or something....

We've been working hard over the last 2 years to bring some exciting (well, exciting to me anyway) changes to the program committee.   A couple of these changes you should start seeing official announcements about any day now but, I decided to be a tease...

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The long evolution of the PASS Program Committee

By Allen Kinsel, 18 days ago

It all had to begin somewhere

I joined the Program Committee in late 2006; I spent the first 2 years working on the DBA track teams selecting abstracts.  I have spent a good deal of time working on the technology (vendors) of the Summit (the software we use to manage speakers, room assignments, itinerary planner, etc.).  After going through several demo's and actually attempting to use two different software packages, I started pushing for PASS to build our own software.  We are paying a (small) fortune for what we use now, the only reason I can figure is that its much more robust than what we need for PASS.  Last year I worked with PASSHQ to put together a project plan for PASS to build a new technology platform to manage the Summit.  This year David with PASS HQ has started delivering on parts of the software.  Once this is in place and we're not changing software every year/other year, we should be able to focus more on the process, and less on the new software. 

Prior to last year, Pre/post conference sessions (AKA precons) and Spotlight sessions were 100% invite only, and the guidelines for who was allowed to present these sessions was never published outside of the committee.  Beginning with last year, we worked to publish guidelines for who was eligible to present precon sessions.  In publishing the requirements list for who could present an all day precon session we opened up the call for precons to include anyone who met the requirements.   At the same time we opened up spotlight invitations to competition, where we invited more speakers than we had slots for in hopes of raising the caliber of these sessions.  We also began using an easy to understand formula for who gets invited to present spotlight sessions. 

In this same time frame we reached out to many experts and asked for help developing a speaker resource page.  Prior to this there was no real information on PASS's website documenting what it takes to write good abstracts, or get selected as a speaker.  We have pulled together quite a few resources to help develop speakers, including webcasts and sample abstracts, etc. 

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  • 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...

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