Allen Kinsel - SQL DBA

SQL Server, PASS, and other data mishaps

PASS Processes and Results posted

By Allen Kinsel, 6 months and 15 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...

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Happy Holidays, Tis the Season in review!

By Allen Kinsel, 7 months and 8 days ago

Whats your favorite time of the year?

People often ask why I enjoy this time of year so much.  For me its very simple, the time frame from about Oct15-Jan1 is easily the busiest time of the year for me which I guess means that I thrive under pressure!!

It all usually starts around the 15th of Oct when the last minute tweakings of the PASS summit are starting to fall into place, then usually the first week of Nov the annual PASS Summit happens and we get to see all of the hard work the dedicated PASS volunteers and speakers put in come together in a great display of SQL community and quite possibly the best quality SQL Server education opportunity anywhere! 

In years past I have almost 100% dropped PASS work until the following January/February to give plenty of time to recharge before embarking on another marathon ordeal of working on the various committee's and such.  This year I have attempted to start working on PASS stuff almost immediately after the summit.  I'm not convinced yet that this is the right thing to do as the risk of burnout runs high when you have no «down» time.  We'll see how this works for this year and if it doesnt seem to effect anything, Ill continue down this road.

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A call to arms, SQLPASS arms that is

By Allen Kinsel, 8 months and 6 days ago

I need help

 

No not the mental kind, but the volunteer labor kind.

 

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SQL Karaoke, Volunteering and SQLPASS

By Allen Kinsel, 8 months and 10 days ago

Why do I volunteer for PASS?

 

Ive been asked more times than I can count why I spend so many hours working for an organization that doesnt pay anything other than thanks and smiles. 

I work for a large company, and have a very small team of people.  As such, it is often very helpful to have a sounding board outside of your sphere of influence to talk to people about ideas, issues and bacon, mostly bacon.  Sure there has always been newsgroups and forums and they certainly have their place for this type of information exchange.  However, when you know someone and have shared a dinner, a beer, a session, or even just a 5 minute hall discussion, they are more vested in you're outcome than some random stranger on an internet forum.   The overall quality of the conversations and of the information that is exchanged in these groups is higher than the average internet sql community, if only by a little bit.  

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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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