Allen Kinsel - SQL DBA

SQL Server, PASS, and other data mishaps

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  So we wound up with some out of date info in that section.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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PASS Program Update #2

By Allen Kinsel, 4 months and 19 days ago

Here comes High Gear

Things have really started to move lately, We've officially started the Program Committee for 2010.Things are changing

We received 53 applications this year from members hoping to help out on the program committee.  That's a huge number for us, When I joined in 2007 I think I was accepted by default because we didn't have enough volunteers.  in 2008 there were approximately 20, last year we had 23.  Obviously we're gaining some attention in the process of making the education program at the annual pass summit the best year after year.

Selecting the abstract review teams

With so many applicants, selecting the teams was quite a chore this year.  Its like interviewing for an open position at your company but instead of having 1 position, you have 17 open and instead of a hand-full of qualified applicants, you get a boatload.  That pretty much sums up the experience every year but, this year it was twice as bad as I remember it being in the past (possibly because of the doubling in applicants).  In the end, the quest to fill these teams took quite a bit of time, unfortunately just like selecting employees for your day job, there is really no best way to make the selections.  I should have probably just used a dartboard for the selections but, I didn't want to disservice those that had taken the time to apply.  After quite a few iterations of making sure everyone was in the team that best leverages their skill sets, the new volunteers were notified.

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PASS TPS #1

By Allen Kinsel, 5 months and 12 days ago

TPS reports, love them or loathe them, they are a necessary thing for most of us working in corporate America.  I firmly reside in the loathe camp, Just ask my boss.

In this case though, I've decided to start putting out regular updates about what Ive been up to for PASS.  I hope the benefit is 2 fold, 1 to allow a greater transparency into what happens behind the scenes and more importantly for me to have a place to reference what we did and when!

Summit 2009 wrapup

We sent out quite a few different surveys during/after the 2009 summit, some of them are listed:

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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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