Where?

Quest Connect is an online series of webcasts on various topics. Some are pre-recorded (like the session that I did.. more on that later…). They have web casts on a variety of topics, not just SQL. You can look at the on demand topic listing here to see all the chats that will be available on demand. There will also be several live web casts with Q&A, etc. You can see those here.

What?

Live SQL Webcast Monday 10/@10:00AM EDT

There is one Live Webcast with Q&A on SQL Server (“A Sysadmins guide to SQL Server“) at 10:00AM EDT. The hosts will be such experts as Brent Ozar (Blog/Twitter), Thomas LaRock (Blog/Twitter) and Tim Ford (Blog/Twitter). This will be great for those reluctant DBAs (you know, you’re a server admin or windows admin, you help out on the SAN, you have to manage SQL.. you do it all but you are scared every second).

Pre-recorded sessions (including one with me)

These will be available from 4AM on 10/21 –> 4AM on 10/22 (times are in EDT)

You can see the full catalog of sessions for all subject areas here. The ones specific to SQL Server are:

• “Top 10 SQL Server Administration Mistakes” – I’ll talk in more depth about this one below.
• “Understanding Execution Plans” – With Grant Frtichey (Blog/Twitter) They aren’t that scary. Watch a scary DBA walk you through how easy they can be if you just know what to look for!
• “The top 5 things you can do with Litespeed for SQL Server to be a backup and recovery hero” – A title after my own heart: it’s long…  Quest puts these things on for us for free so it’s only natural to have some talks about how their products can help. Litespeed is a great tool (not paid to say it, don’t use it currently but have in other environments). Learn about this great backup tool and I am sure that Brent will give some good backup/recovery advice at the same time. Brent Ozar and Jason Hall will present this one.

Why did they ask me to help?

I guess I’ve blogged about a few worst practices (Shrinking anyone?, Shoot From the hip much anyone?) so I was asked to help participate in the “Top 10 SQL Server Administration Mistakes” chat. This was a fun recording and is a great conversation with a few folks much smarter than me – Kevin Kline (Blog/Twitter), Colin Stasiuk (Blog/Twitter) and Jason Strate (Blog/Twitter) and myself about mistakes we have done, seen and had to help fix in our careers.

We’ll walk through a PowerPoint of 10 mistakes that DBAs often make when working with SQL Server. They range from issues like considering disk options based on space needs only, shoddy troubleshooting, not embracing change control (maybe embrace is too strong a word 🙂 ) to bad thinking with backup and recovery.

It was an informative talk, I learned a few things on the talk myself and you’ll even hear an epiphany moment where three of us picked up a great tip around change control/rollback steps. A real “Why didn’t I think of that…” moment.

I hope you register for Quest Connect and check out all of the videos and I hope you check out the conversation that Kevin, Colin, Jason and myself had around DBA “stuff”, might help you out, might start a conversation.

Resources for the presentation I was a part of:

First of all: Comments. If you have any questions on the parts of the conversation I was in, you can hit me up on twitter but I don’t get there much on most weekdays. Leave a comment on this post if it is a question that others might benefit from or add insight into. Send me an e-mail if you want to talk out of the comment thread instead.

I hope you check out the blogs of all of those who participated, I gave links above. You can also go to SQLServerPedia where all of our blogs are syndicated and search blogs and SQL wiki articles on a topic you want to know more on.

If I remember correctly, I mentioned the SQL Server 2000 I/O Best Practices document. It is not 100% applicable to 2005/2008 but the basic concepts largely remain true and this is a good resource.But instead of linking you there, check out this document from Microsoft which is more recent and it references that SQL 2000 document as a resource at the bottom.

I also suggest visiting the SQLCAT team website with their best practices, great resource. If you don’t own the Inside SQL Server 2005 series, you should. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Internals is also a great resource. These books go into a lot more depth on a lot of the areas we talked about.

There are also some blog topics on my blog that are related to what we talked about:

• Advice to beginning DBAs wondering, “Where do I start?!?!”
• Shrinking – several posts on the topic.
• Troubleshooting Methodology Woes (I also wrote an article for SQL Server Central on this topic)
• Empirical Evidence
• Documentation (or how I learned to stop procrastinating and love tolerate a chore necessary task)
• A little Paranoia and Control Freak attitude can help a DBA
• Checklists, Recipes and Algorithms – Learning about these great tools from other professions (Pilots, Chefs and Doctors) 
• How do I find all of my SQL Servers? – Maybe after listening to us you’ll want to spend more time with the instances at your network. Check this link out to learn about a tool that I use to find all the SQL Servers in my network.
• Questions to ask a software vendor – Working with a new vendor with their own database? Here are some questions I ask them.

Thanks for listening, thanks for stopping by to check out the blog. I hope you visit the other guy’s sites also. Lots of information and like I said, SQLServerPedia is a great place to find info. There are a lot of great bloggers there. I also have a lot of bloggers I read in my blogroll.