I love helping people, I love to teach and I really love hearing about success stories from people in my past whom I've interacted with, had the chance to help out through eith a course, tutorial or just a few helpful hints to get them started in the SQL space.

I've been a lot of places and very recently was awarded MVP for SQL Server, and it looks like this is re-igniting some very old friendships and contacts, which to me is as valuable as if not more that the recent awards.

Interestingly, people have asked me why I teach, especially when I do it through PASS's volunteer efforts (non-paid) or as 1:1 training to colleagues or Technical Enthusiasts (also for free). The most honest reason I've received for people asking this is "It seems strange that in such a closed technical community you're giving away such valueable information.". That's true, and yes from that perspective, I can understnd that it would seem strange.

The reason I do this is because of a few things:

1. I come from a very community based background (Church based) which was extremely selfless. It was through living and serving in this community that I truly understood and lived the idea of everybody gives, everybody wins.
2. I love challenging mainstream selfish thinking :o)
3. I believe that the one way to really open yourself up to being the best you can be is to give of yourself always.
4. When you're in front of a large crowd presenting or doing a focussed 1:1 technical upskill, you need to make sure you're prepared. With my memory, any excuse to revise is a gift.

So now I present and teach when I can, serve clients like I'm doing it for church, grow communities when they're needed, and try to help anyone who asks genuinely if I have the skills or experience to do so.

PASS Germany look to me to follow some of thee principles as well, and they've recognised that its harder than expected to break into the technology space of SQL Server than most believe. They've been running an organised bootcamp-style syllabus yearly for a number of years now. SQL Server's extremely broad and deep, and they're running 3 focus areas during their 3 day hands on "PASS Camp" in January 2010.

• DBA: Branded "DBA 101 to 401 - From Spring Board to Deep Wreck Dives" which I have the honour of preparing and delivering this time round;
• BI Middle and Back-End: Branded "Advanced BI Concepts based on the MS BI stack" delivered by the dynamic duo Oliver Engels & Markus Fischer, and;
• BI Front-End: Branded "BI FrontEnd: Self-Service BI" delivered by the renouned Rushabh Mehta.

If you're new to the game or a professional looking to cross skill or add depth to your repetoire then I'd strongly suggest going to this. Its generally sold out very quickly and its held in a beautiful location which looks to me to be a citadel rather than a conference centre.

It'll be one of the many places I'll be teaching and presenting at over the next months, but you'll rarely be able to get me in 1 placed focussed on 1 track for 3 days straight. I'm going to really enjoy it, and I'm sure you'll leave far better off than when you came in.

See you there, or contact me for help or an event listing ;o) but don't shy away from learning or giving when it comes to your skills and experience.

Well, it was great, I attended around 12 of the 24 Hours of PASS Virtual event sessions yesterday and the quality of the content, the preparedness of the speakers and overall lack of issues was incredible!

Hats off to Rick Heiges, Blythe Morrow, Chuck Heinzelman and PASS management as a whole for getting it together and gluing all of these moving parts into one well oiled and tuned virtual event.

They coordinated speakers from the up coming US PASS Summit happening in November as topic presenters, and Chapter Leaders as moderators of 24 back to back webinar style presentations which drew hundreds of attendees hour on hour from all around the world. I was honoured to have moderated Hour 16 of the 24 Hours which was Don Vilen's (pronounced Vuh-leen) session on "Database Compatibility Settings, What they Really Do ... and Don't do".

The session and the event as a whole was truly fun and the questions that the attendees sent through were good also, our one regret was that we only had the hour to do the intro, content, Q&A and wrap up!

Great work guys, and looking forward to the Summit and any other Virtual events that come up in the near future!

There are many SQL Server Saturday type events happening in the US, but this is the first we've attempted to host here. Its been a "handfull" to organise to say the least, but enjoyable nonetheless.

Its taking place on the 19th of September 2009 at Digicomp Academy, and all you need do to attend is register on the Event's Website: www.sqlsaturday.ch.

We've got 3 tracks, BI, App Development and Database Administration 5 sessions per track and a good balance between English and German Language sessions, which allows attendees to attend most sessions but also break out and hear something in another track that they generally wouldn't havegone to or catch up or be introduced to colleagues in their field who are at the event.

We've got great speakers too! here they are in Alphabetical (surname) order:

• Roger Breu - Microsoft (Switzerland)
• Gill Cleeren - Ordina (Belgium)
• Markus Erlacher - Microsoft (Switzerland)
• Charley Hanania - QS2 (Switzerland)
• Sascha Lorenz - PSG (Germany)
• Allan Mitchell - Konesans (UK)
• Dieter Rüetschi - Digicomp (Switzerland)
• Michael Saß - Quest Software (Germany)
• Chris Webb - CrossJoin Consulting (UK)

Once registered, links to each session you registered for should appear in your Outlook calendar. If you are missing the links, you can find them on the 24 Hours of PASS Sessions page when the event starts. Sessions open 30 minutes before start time. 

Get in there quick now as there's not much time left to register and places are pretty much full!

Go to: http://24hours.sqlpass.org/ to register now... I'll be there and am Moderating one of the sessions, definitely looking forward to this and the coffee!

OK, first things first...

I have SQL Server 2008 installed locally (developer edition) on Vista, which I believe installs Powershell for you as a component... I'm using V1.0.

The easiest way to see if its installed it to use the "run" command and type powershell...

If its not installed, read this article How to Download Windows PowerShell 1.0.

Once that's done, you need to set up your environment.

I would encourage you to install Marc's "Tab Completion" Tool for Powershell, which does exactly what you would expect...

You may get an error as I did when running the cmd file, and what I had to do to fix this was:

1. Run Powershell
2. From the Powershell Prompt type: Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted

Then you can run the setup cmd file again and walk through the set up steps...

Next step is to load the SQL Server libraries so that Powershell can use them...

From Powershell Prompt type:

add-PSSnapin SqlServerProviderSnapin100
add-PSSnapin SqlServerCmdletSnapin100

To see what's loaded:

get-PSSnapin 

Now this will be forgotten when the powershell session closes, so add those 2 lines to the default profile:

ii $PROFILE

(ii instansiates an object - like typing start [program name] from cmd prompt)

If you type $PROFILE on its own, it tells the path and name of the profile file.

If the add-snapin command errors, then you may need to install the SQL Server Powershell Providers from the Feature Pack and retry.

Next step... querying your SQL Server...

Most DBA's have a hard time coming to terms with programming languages, and although I've used close to 10 in my history I've always defaulted back to my tried and trusted T-SQL to cater for my data-focussed needs...

A while back now though, the hype increased on LINQ for example and now for Powershell, and although I never saw LINQ take off Powershell is another matter in deed...

Powershell leverages many components to bring a powerful scripting interface that surpasses the old WMI and VBScripting, making use of the .NET framework and other rich programming interfaces and libraries to leap over the boundaries that each of the general MS applications and components encounter. For example, theoretically, I should be able to run a script that checks for space on my server, determine what is installed on it, what "space-hogs" exist for the installed applications and decide [intelligently] what should be removed and how to remove them cleanly... If this is a server that hosts SQL Server, Exchange etc, then we could build within the scripting interface complex enough logic to clean these up without impacting their use nor their availability.

With that said, I've tried to get into it as I have previously with other scripting languages and found myself a mere data focussed guy, lost... even after attending great sessions and reading several blogs and articles...

Powershell MVP Marc van Orsouw has moved to Switzerland from the Netherlands, and apart from attending and supporting the PASS Chapter and Usergroup meetings has gone one step further to teaching this old dog a new trick. He took the time today to walk me through some of the basics, and I'll be sharing some of his insights and tips with you in a series of blog posts focussed on Powershell for SQL Server. As I learn and come to terms with it I hope that it will help other "victims" get over the initial hurdles of breaking in a new-ish technology to truly enhance your DBA time and experience. I've got a lot of ideas on what we can do with it, and am looking forward to putting these out there for one and all to leverage.

Stay tuned...

The Microsoft Developer and Platform Evangelism Team has put together a training Kit on SQL Server 2008 Covering the following:

• Date and Time Types
• Filestream
• Grouping Sets
• Reporting Services
• Row Constructors
• Spatial Data
• SQL CLR
• Table-Valued Parameters
• T-SQL Merge Statement

Within the download is a series of Presentations, Demos and Hands-On Labs that are free and definitely worth the time to look into it.

Enjoy!

We've got the information for next month's User Group Meeting, Channelled through SwissITPro this month. 

Theme:Virtualization - What's New (VMware / Microsoft)
Language:  Deutsch

Tuesday / Dienstag - 7 July / Juli 2009

17:45 - 21:00 Uhr   (Kleiner Apéro 17:45 - 18:15 Uhr)

Where / Wo?
Digicomp Academy AG  (Zürich)
Limmatstrasse 50
CH-8005 Zürich
Tel. +41 44 447 21 21

Nutzen Sie die Gelegenheit, Ihren Kollege und die Kern Swiss IT Pro User Group Freiwillige kennenzulernen.

Session #1: Hyper-V v2.0 - Was ist Neu?

Der Hyper-V V 2.0 in Windows Server 2008 R2 beinhaltet viele Neuerungen für die
Virtualisierung. Mittels Live Migration, also dem Verschieben von Virtuellen Maschinen
auf andere Hosts im laufenden Betrieb und ohne Unterbrechung, wird der Hyper-V
nun in der Lage sein weitere neue Data Center Szenarien zu unterstützen. Mehr ...

Session #2: Update VMware vSphere 4

Manage Virtualized Services (Cloud): Wie überwache ich die Performance und
Verfügbarkeit von Applikationen in der virtuellen Infrastruktur und wie flexibel kann
ich auf sich ändernde Bedürfnisse reagieren? Mehr ...

IMPORTANT REGISTRATION INFO
Event registration (it's free) and detailed session information can be found here.

Der Event wird auch durch Live Meeting übertragen. Anmeldung an info[a.t]swissitpro.ch mit Ihren Vor- und Nach- Name und Firma ist obligatorisch.

This Event will also be broadcasted via Live Meeting. Register for this by sending an email to info[a.t]swissitpro.ch with your firstname, lastname and company (required.)

For those of you who have enlisted or who are still to enlist for my help to get you through the SQL Server exams on SQL Server 2005/2008, look at this poast as it could get you an exam voucher to give you even more motivation to get through all the study and practice! :)

from:  http://blogs.technet.com/mslcommunity/archive/2009/06/17/this-rss-is-dead-but-the-new-one-could-win-you-a-free-exam.aspx

I attended a talk the other day and the speaker was showing SQL Server Potentials and Professionals alike on how easy it was to manage SQL Server from Management Studio.

One of the areas emarrasingly was creating Database Snapshots. The presenter looked all over Management Studio for it but couldn't find it... Do you know where it is???

Well look here for it, as its an add in tool written by Sean Price in 2007 :o)

http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/seanprice/archive/2007/07/15/sql-management-studio-snapshot-add-in.aspx 

But don't forget that "Real DBA's write code command line" (Quoted from an ORACLE DBA I worked with)

We've been discussing this for so long and warning Sys Admins about making sure our servers are in proper good nic before handing over to us for the SQL install and config.

So rather than just talking about it, we can point them to a whitepaper on it... simplifies the list of blog entry links that we generally have to search for and email them ;o)

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd758814.aspx

all good :)

I've been working on a whitepaper for Quest (for a while) which focusses on Sharepoint Recoverability from a DBA's perspective.

As you proably know Sharepoint uses SQL Server to store its data, and although the data structures and usage within the SQL Server databases isn't what a DBA would call "optimal" its heavy use of tables etc brings things such as Performance Tuning, Capacity Planning and Disaster Recovery into the realms of the DBA as a relatively "complex" database application.

I've spoken to some MS folks and MVP's on some of the current gaps we've got for a method or two I've been trying to code and document for the paper, mainly around binding the various databases LSN's ([Transaction] Log Sequence Numbers) to time as a base in order to create restore paths that cater for the control type databases and the other content and component type databases.

The latest info I got from Mike Epprect from MS Switzerland (thanks Mike!) is that although the info isn't available to the DBA from the internal data structures, DMV's and Backup tables, MS's Data Protection Manager (DPM) handles this and the out of SQL Components as well such as the various files that need to be in synch for recoverability.

I'll be looking in to it and doing some tests around it to work out how well it handles all of this and also so see if we can bring it closer to the DBA neutral perspective of looking after database recoverability for Sharepoint, Biztalk et al as normal DB Applications.

Let me know if you've done this before or if you've got any gotchas that will same me what little time I have these days.

Virtualisation and Failover Clustering wasn't one of the options you had for SQL Server previously, but Bob Ward has just updated a KB with details on the change of stance and why its now supported :)

In reading my blog, you'll know that I'm not the biggest fan of Virtualisation... You'll also know that its not virtualisationper se that is the issue in my view it's how the term has been percievably made into the be all and end all of issues in IT. It is still immature in my eyes as a technology to take over all other strategies in enterprise environments and people should also remember that SQL Server in itself "virtualises" on a number of different levels in its own product space namely through effective use of SQL Server instances and databases within an instance...

Take a look at the blog post in any case. Bob's posts are always great, and support of this is definitely a step in the right direction [when used for the right reasons ;) ]

http://blogs.msdn.com/psssql/archive/2009/05/19/sql-server-support-policy-for-failover-clustering-and-virtualization-gets-an-update.aspx

The brief was to create a logo for the Chapter that represented Swissness as well as being part of PASS. Something subtle, yet effective.

 We had 29 respondants submit 49 entries over the course of 7 days and there were some really good entries in there as well! The winner was awarded $150 USD, so both them and we are happy :o)

In the end I chose the image below, and I hope you like it too.

To see it context of the website, just go to www.sqlpass.ch

Let me know what you think, I'd be very interested in your feedback!

You may have read my post on the next version of SQL Server coming out called SQL Server 2008 R2, which is expected to launch Q2 next year (2010).

Well the CTP will be made available soon for people to play with, but as Simon Sabine has mentioned in his post spaces will be limited, so register soon if you want to get in!

 http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/r2.aspx