Random Word Tip (#1?)

By Airborne Geek on April 17, 2012

I’m full of random bits like this, but I’m not really good at pulling details out of things I do which others might not know, so they don’t come out very often. If I were better at that, I’d have more things to write about!

I admit that I’m a crazy Word Pedant™, and will lots of times go overboard on making sure things are done the “right” way. All that said though, there are still new things to discover in it. This is one of those things. With the benefit of hindsight, this is a pretty basic piece of functionality that I probably should have already had a handle on. I do like these settings, and for the type of documentation that I’m doing now, it has a real benefit.

Table Properties

Long story short, we’re after these two checkboxes in the Table Properties dialog:

Row Options shown in the Table Properties Dialog

(The Table Properties dialog is an option on the context menu if you right-click anywhere in a Table, or also the Table Tools | Layout tab of the Ribbon.)

These two options do just what they say they do:

Allow rows to break across pages. This setting is similar to the “don’t let a single sentence of a paragraph sit on a page by itself” setting (which I can’t currently find in Word 2010, so maybe you can’t control that anymore). It comes into play if there’s multiple lines of text in a table cell (or every cell in a row). It will force the whole row to break down to the next page instead of splitting the row contents across a page break.

This is good for the ETL documentation I’m working on these days, because some of the source-to-target mappings that are being documented have some pretty long descriptions and/or script bits to handle conversions & such. In a four or five column table on a portrait Letter page, some of these rows wind up pretty tall. It’s really confusing to read if these long snippets wind up broken across pages. This situation is made worse because all of the other columns’ data is back on the last page, and half of the mapping description is hanging out by itself on page two. It does mean there’s sometimes half a page left blank because of a tall row, but that’s the lesser of evils, in my opinion.

Repeat as header row at the top of each page. (Just to note, this option is also available as a button on the Table Tools | Layout tab of the Ribbon. That part of the Ribbon will show up with the cursor in a table, and this particular option is greyed out unless the cursor is in the first row of a table. That right there is a good illustration of both the blessings and the curse of the Ribbon, but I digress.) This option can be set for one or more rows at the top of the table. When set, these rows will repeat, as they are, at the top of the table as it spans from page to page. This setting is useful for obvious reasons with big tables that span multiple pages.

Example

Making up a table in Word to mimic an ETL source-to-destination mapping document will make a useful example to show what these options will do.

With a table that spans across a page break, the default behavior in Word will yield a table that looks like this:

Default Table formattingThere are a couple problems with this.The first one is how there’s a row split across pages, leaving the back half of the mapping script sitting by itself on the second page. Obviously if this is printed, the rest of it is on the page you just turned over, so it’s not that far away. If it’s on-screen, it’s even closer—just a quick scroll up. Even so, I think it’s simply better form, if you can, to keep whole rows together to make consumption of the data easier.

Likewise, if looking at just the second page, the column headings aren’t visible. Perhaps not as big of a deal with a small table, or a document where the same general table is repeated throughout, but if the table is large, or perhaps one that spans multiple pages (I’ve had some of those going on recently), it’s very convenient to be able to see the headers on each page. Think of how nice it is to Freeze Panes in Excel.

Enabling the two options discussed above on the same table will result in this table:

Word table formatted with discussed options

Now both problems have been solved. The penultimate row is no longer broken across pages—it now is forced down to the second page in its entirety, easing comprehension of its contents. Additionally, the column headers now repeated on the second page save one’s sanity for obvious reasons.

The repeated header rows are kind of “virtual” rows—you can’t even put your cursor in it. They update in real-time when the actual header row is changed, so they are always correct.

There you have it. Go forth and format tables!

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Right, I Installed Windows 8 CP

By Airborne Geek on April 3, 2012

I know, all of my friends have been busy playing with the Gold bits of SQL 2012, and that’s all well and good. I should be doing that, too, really really. Except…Well… I don’t exactly need to worry about that at this point, unfortunately. Different story. Instead, I’m playing with the Beta Consumer Preview release of Windows 8, because I like Windows (news flash).

Back in college, I would use my laptop as the test-bed for new stuff. I carried it to classes, so I got a lot of keyboard time with it (and a lot of show & tell, too). New Office & Windows versions were the most-used victims, as I took notes in Word—these were the days before OneNote. After my freshman year, I had a desktop, too, so I always had a more stable place to get work done if I had problems with anything. I would have used my current laptop for this, but it’s an old boat anchor (a Latitude 120L), and has too old/crappy of a video card to run the display at its full res in 8. Tried it with Dev Preview & the best I could get was 800×600. I fiddled with the disk subsystem in my ESXi server & installed 8 directly on that hardware to test a couple of applications that I wanted to make sure worked before I got to…

Blowing Up the Main Desktop

It was a perfectly healthy, couple year old install of 7, but it was on a semi-decent machine (Presler core P4) with a good video card, so it had to die (you know, for science).

Windows Experience Index for test machine. Overall Score 4.5

CPU bound... just the way I like it

The usual first step of this process is copying the ISO contents to a USB stick for install. Since I don’t do this very often, I always have to look up the steps to make sure I don’t forget something while fumbling around in diskpart. For whatever reason, this time I stumbled upon a link to the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool. This is a neat little thing that automates the task of transferring an ISO of Windows Install media to a bootable USB disk (don’t let the “Windwos 7” in the name fool you). I doubt it’s faster than XCOPY, but it’s a little easier.

The install itself went pretty quickly after a couple false starts. Can’t really compare it to anything, but it did seem fast. On its first boot, it offers to let you attach a/your Live account to it, like Windows phones do (and Google accounts on Android and AppleID on the iPhone). On my first test machine I went ahead and tied it to my Live account just to see what it did. The answer: other than grabbing your account’s picture and making it fairly ticklish to figure out how to auth when RDPing to the machine, I’m not really sure what it did. It may not be fair to say that since I spent a total of about 20 minutes on that install, but that’s how not-obvious it was.

On my “real” test install, I put the machine in our test domain, did my usual early system settings changes, & worked through the high points of my application install list. No real hiccups there, so I was able to get on with…

Actually Using the Thing

This all happened a month or so ago now, but I’ve still only gotten a fistfull of good usage hours with it. In that time, I’ve gotten a few things to talk about and/or show. None of these are really earth-shattering; just the things that stick out for me. For a more general overview of it, check out some of PeterB’s DrPizza’s Peter Bright’s articles related to the topic.

Obviously the biggest change and the elephant in the room is the introduction of the Metro UI to Desktop Windows. One of the side-effects of this is the Start Menu goes away. This is a pretty big shock, and it still catches me off-guard when I hit the Windows Key and the main monitor (I’ve got two on this machine) flips over to the Start Screen. Gone is the ability to organize things via folders. Instead, if an app wants to put shortcuts on the Start Menu, they just wind up on the Start Screen. They get arranged into blocks of icons by default, and you can arrange/delete them further if you like. Near as I can tell, that is the extent of the organization options one has. The problem that I found is if you install something like Server Admin Tools (there’s already a pre-release version for Windows 8, which is fantastic) that adds a lot of shortcuts all at once: the default behavior is apparently for these icons to simply be barfed all over the Start Screen.

Start Screen showing icons all over the place

Organization is Overrated in 2012

I don’t think this is a good thing, but in this architecture, I’m not sure what else can be done. If one’s interested in keeping the Start Screen tidy, there’s going to be a lot of micromanagement to do. On the other hand, back in Vista, a search bar was added to the bottom of the Start Menu. Handily, that text box had focus when the Start Menu was raised, so one could mash Flag (“Flag” is how I usually refer to the “Windows Logo Key”, primarily because “Windows Logo Key” is way too damn many syllables) and start typing to bring up whatever shortcut they’re going for. Judging by commentary I’ve read about that particular feature (OK, it’s mostly Ars readers), it seems a decent chunk of people use that as their primary app starting/finding vector for things that aren’t pinned to the Taskbar. In Windows 8, even though there isn’t a visual cue for it, this functionality is still there. Hit Flag, and start typing. A search screen will come up showing results for Applications, Settings (Control Panel Applets), and Documents; these are all the same categories of things that the Search bar in the old Start Menu will return. Not being one who uses this search to find things very often, I’m going to need to get used to it if I don’t want to spend more time than I do now managing what the Start Screen looks like.

Start Menu screenshot showing the "Recent" list of files

This feature leads the list of ones I didn't get at first, but now will miss the most

One thing I can say for certain: I’m going to miss is the “recent” list that shows up for some applications in the old Start Menu. This is the list of docs that will cascade out from the app’s shortcut when an app is pinned or otherwise lands on the main part of the Start Menu. I admit that I don’t use this feature all that often, but there are a few things, Remote Desktop being one, where I use the recent list almost exclusively when calling the application. It does work the best when a small set of files are used all the time (like, say, shortcuts to the ETL servers), but it’s really useful for that sort of thing. I haven’t found a way to mirror this functionality in 8, and that’s a bummer.

Once over the initial hurdle of getting past the Start Screen (hint: click on the “Desktop” button), in what I would consider normal use, I don’t feel like I’m using anything other than Windows 7 (or Vista, for that matter). My normal usage pattern on this machine resembles what most people would consider “work”—Office apps, web browsing/research, Quicken, Twitter (old TweetDeck!), and Live Writer for blogging. I would say photo editing/management, but that barely gets done anymore. Non-“work” stuff involves Windows Media Center, and not much else; don’t have time for gaming anymore, either. All of these things are non-Metro (“classic”) Desktop apps, and as such, operate on the desktop. Using this kind of application and launching them either using pinned Taskbar icons or opening documents straight from the file system means that I hardly ever see any Metro UI elements.

That’s pretty much a good thing, until a bunch of time goes by and one forgets what they’re doing. Then, for example, a random app is needed from the Start Menu. Hit Flag, and get smacked in the face by the full-screen Metro Start Screen. This has happened to me more than a few times since I’ve been using 8. I also haven’t put Acrobat Reader on the machine yet, so when I open a PDF, the built-in reader app launches, which is a Metro app. Smacked in the face again. This one is of course my own fault, as I’ve delayed putting Acrobat on to at least try the built-in reader for a while to see what I think about it. It’s very jarring when this happens. It’s also disruptive at the moment, because it’s so different and still new.

Speaking of these full-screen Metro apps, they have two major drawbacks to me. One is the fact that they’re full-screen. On a machine with a nice high resolution, I hardly ever maximize windows/applications to use them, so this is a little annoying. There is the fixed two-app display thing available, but it’s still a little wonky when it involves one Metro app and the Desktop. Since the Desktop behaves as a single application in this situation, if it’s the app on the small side of the split-screen, then the windows running on the Desktop become the same little thumbnails that pop up when you mouseover window buttons on the Taskbar. As a result, it’s likely that you can’t read what’s going on and you definitely can’t interact with them. This arrangement isn’t overly useful.

The second major drawback is something that got in my way early on: The only arrangement choice with Metro apps is on the main monitor. What if I want to put that application on the smaller of the two monitors I have (which isn’t the main one)? Turns out, that can be done. Among the list of keyboard shortcuts outlined in this Windows Team Blog entry is Flag – PgUp/PgDn, which “Move[s] Start screen to Left/Right Monitor.” That command does exactly what it says it does, but also moves full-screen Metro apps with it (plus the “primary” Taskbar). It appears to be the same functionality as the “Use this monitor as my main monitor” checkbox on the Display Options dialog, just in handy keyboard shortcut form. The operation itself is smooth and fast, even on my less-than-optimal hardware, and technically it does address what I was trying to do. As part of moving the whole Metro…environment, for lack of a better term, it takes the built-in split-screen functionality with it. I guess that makes sense, but all of these “features” just continue to make the whole thing feel contrived.

While using this, a couple specific items stuck out at me, and I’ll go through those next.

File Copy Status

From the “it’s the details that count” category, we have the File Copy Status Dialog. (If this thing has an actual name, I obviously don’t know what it is.) Couple new things here which, as a completely crazy person who likes to watch numbers change, are welcome additions.

New File Copy Dialog showing the "More Details" view

Best thing to happen to the File Copy dialog since the File Copy Dialog

First, I almost always hit the “More Details” button to see what kind of throughput I’m getting on a copy/move/delete. Finally, in Windows 8, if you flip it to the More Details version of that little dialog, the setting sticks! Every time a file is copied, the status dialog opens with all of the details showing. Awesome.

Even better is a little throughput histogram which is now shown. This thing pulls triple duty, visually representing both percent complete and current/historical throughput, and also showing the current throughput in text form. Because at the moment I’m not overly enthused with this OS, this dialog is probably my favorite new feature.

New Task Manager

There’s a new Task Manager in 8. It brings some of the functionality of the full-blown Resource Monitor down into the smaller Task Manager package. I find this a bit of a mixed blessing, but in general it’s pretty nice. I usually leave Task Manager run all the time, so am a little worried about the performance impact with the new one—I’ve sometimes seen Resource Monitor peg out a CPU core while displaying disk activity.

That’s all well and good. BUT! With this machine, I got the old task manager! At first, I thought it was just because I decided to put it in the domain for this evaluation. Long story short, I had Task Manager pinned to the Taskbar on this profile, and I had used that shortcut to start it. Turns out, there are now two different Task Managers in Windows—the old one is still taskmgr.exe & the new one is TM.exe. The new one does eat a lot more RAM than the old, so there’s at least that going on between them. I’d guess that the old one will go away at some point, but for right now, we’ve got a choice on which one to run.

Minor Issues

I’ve had a couple non-UX/UI issues so far, both related to specific applications.

The first one is with the “new” TweetDeck (version 1+). I tried to install it, and it went on, but when I tried to sign in to my TweetDeck account on first launch, it couldn’t do it. The password I was using is right, but I couldn’t get anything other than an “unable to log in” error. Since Twitter has changed it so it can’t be used without using a/your TweetDeck account, I wasn’t getting anywhere with that. I put the most recent Air-based version on, and it is running fine.

The other application problem I am having is with Windows Live Writer. It is pretty unstable in general, but it will also crash pretty much all the time when trying to open an in-progress draft post. This makes it slightly ticklish to pick up again on a post if LW wasn’t left running. What I have found out that works is if the in-progress file is opened from the file system. That will start up LW & open the desired file. Better than nothing.

Overall Thoughts at the Moment

My feelings at the moment mirror what a lot of other people are saying: This OS is going to kick some serious ass on a tablet, and I can’t wait to get my hands on some of that. What it doesn’t do as well so far is be a desktop OS. IMO, this situation is most glaring with a multi-monitor setup. I don’t like how Metro apps are basically locked to full-screen and generally don’t feel very flexible. It also bugs me that the “classic” desktop sometimes behaves like a single application (like when it is involved in the Metro split-screen arrangement). I’m stopping short of outright calling the multi-monitor experience broken, but it’s sub-optimal, at least.

It will be interesting to see where all this goes. Since Metro apps are stuck in their box, and do a fairly good job of breaking what I consider the “normal” desktop computer workflow, I wonder if vendors will release multiple versions of applications so both desktop and tablet users will be able to use applications that function in their respective native environments. Not knowing much about software development, I don’t know how much easier (or cheaper) said than done that statement is. There’s been a lot of talk about browsers being released as native Metro apps. Obviously there will have to be some set of applications released as Metro apps, since that finger-friendly interface will definitely be the main one used on Tablets. My hope right now is that vendors (and Microsoft, for that matter) continue to support the Desktop work environment.

Bottom line: Other than minor-to-moderate problems with the UI & UX, it seems to be just as solid of an OS as Windows 7 is. I think it’s possible to use the OS mostly just like Windows 7, too. I want to emphasize that statement, because I feel like there’s a lot of frothing at the mouth about how terrible Metro is on the desktop. Although I don’t like everything about it either, there is plenty of “old” Windows still there. I truly, honestly, don’t believe Metro being in Windows 8 like it is right now is going to be as much of a failure as some on the Intarwebs are saying. Disruptive? Yes, definitely… But so were Windows 95 and Mac OS X.

Time will tell whether or not I change my mind.

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T-SQL Tuesday #28: Jack of All Trades Crew, Checking In

By Airborne Geek on March 13, 2012

T-SQL Tuesday—always a good option for helping to get back on the blogging horse.

TSQL Tuesday #28
T-SQL Tuesday #28

This month is hosted by Argenis Fernandez (blog | @DBArgenis), a SQL Server MCM & a #SQLFamily member that I have yet to meet. His topic of choice is “Jack of All Trades, Master of None?”, which is right up my alley, because for pretty much my entire IT career, that phrase has described me. It still does, right this second, but I’m trying to get over that. More on that coming.

Because I should be able to use them to frame out a good story (and because I’m cheap), I’m going to work with the list of questions Argenis has in his invitation post.

Are you specialized? On something? Or anything at all?

Am I anything at all? No, not really, thanks for asking! 😀

Anyway… it’s not really safe or fair to answer whether or not I’m specialized with anything but a firm “no.” I’ve been this way from day one. I don’t know that it’s been a conscious decision to get to this point more than it just happened as a result of being driven by a desire to know how everything works. Sometimes that leads to depth in weird places, which can come in handy while watching Jeopardy! on TV.

My non-specialization situation at the moment includes the capabilities of a decent SQL Server DBA, being what I’ll call “serviceable” when it comes to data modeling, and could still be a sysadmin if push came to shove, in a day job in which I have become the go-to ETL Developer. It’s a little weird, I admit. But, all of those other things help with the current focus. The ETL job is slow, you say? Well, is the server on the floor? Is the latency over the WAN link 700 ms per round trip? All of my other skills help, and that is what I think is the best part of being a jack-of-all-trades: It’s possible to know just enough to answer a lot of your own questions!

I’ve said it before, but another thing I like about knowing a little bit about a lot is you can make friends/commiserate with almost everyone in the IT department.

Are you the SQL Guy at work? Or the one who does everything?

Due to the size of company that I work for, there are very few “Guys” at work—everyone has a specific job (or sometimes jobs) that they do. Basically…near-insect-grade specialization. There’s not room for a jack-of-all trades at larger organizations, in my experience, with the possible exception of smaller, autonomous groups.

Having spent time in one of those smaller, autonomous groups within a larger organization, I was a little bit of the guy who does everything. My whole team was, actually. We were “Windows System Admins”, who ran just about everything except Exchange and the MSFT monitoring platform du jour, plus Citrix to boot. Although each of us had our strong points, pretty much all of us could get through whatever needed to be done and have things work when we were done. I think that just goes along with being a “sysadmin”—being a jack-of-all-trades is almost a necessity. Need to know hardware? Check. Security theory AND implementation? Yep. IIS (Apache as necessary)? Probably. Networking? You betcha. SQL was just one of the things that I did while there, although I did do a lot of it.

Do you code? And configure wireless routers at work also?

Hell no. I mean… not if I can help it. See, when I started in IT for real, I knew one whole programming language: Visual Basic 6. Two classes in school on it, and that was it. I wrote a little print queue viewer/management app while a student (hey, it was deployed on 2000+ machines!), but no real experience. To this day, VB6 is the only real (“real”) programming language I know. Not having a strong coding background does cause some problems occasionally, especially when talking to Developers who are used to DBAs coming up through those ranks. I definitely don’t know much about software engineering theory, and that’s where it shows up the most.

As part of the afore-mentioned sysadmin gig, I wrote a command-line only VB app as an automated interface between a couple of systems, but I’m not exactly proud of that moment, for a number of reasons. The one that applies here is one of the downfalls of being a jack-of-all-trades: it’s easy to cowboy up and do quick-and-dirty things off to the side, because you can. Perhaps even more dangerous: because no-one else can.What happens as soon as you’re done? Well, if you’re not careful, it winds up in Production, and then it becomes a support nightmare; if not for you, it will be for a coworker or the next guy. Either of which may some day hate you when their phone rings at 0300 because the wrong piece of duct tape fell off your masterpiece. I think being a jack-of-all-trades can be a good thing, as long as one of those trades is holding onto whatever processes and standards are in place…and if there aren’t any of those, hopefully one of said trades is coming up with some good organizational processes and standards!

As for the wireless router configuration bit—I try to keep that at home. Pretty sure the network guys wouldn’t like me messing around with those things. Just because I [used to] know Cisco IOS, doesn’t mean I should use it. That brings us to another good specific skill that a jack-of-all-trades should have: Knowing when to sit quietly. This goes for both wireless routers and writing anything in VB6 that has a prayer of ever seeing real, actual production use.

If you had to pick one thing to specialize on, what would it be?

Yeah, about that… All the above said, I actually am going to try to specialize on something. Of course, it isn’t enough to say I’m going to specialize on SQL Server. There’s too much in the product now. I’m going back to the thing that got me truly interested in the prospects of becoming a Data Pro in the first place: Business Intelligence. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s safe to make that a goal, either. Just the BI side of the SQL Server platform is becoming too broad and too feature-rich to come to grips with. I’m going to have to be content with possibly not knowing anything at all about Reporting Services to focus on what I really want to do: Analysis Services. I actually want to be able to do most of the architecture work surrounding big BI projects, from start to finish (except for SSRS!), but I’m afraid that even just SSAS, including all of its new related technologies, could turn out to be too much.

That, though, is a journey that I hope we can all share in. Because I’m nice like that.

Other Thoughts

Being mechanically wired more than anything, it’s not quite as easy for me to tear down a piece of T-SQL as it is, say, the battery operated toys I used to take apart…Or a carburetor. But thanks to the Internet, it’s easy for me to read about and learn from someone who is more adept at doing that sort of thing. This shows two more helpful skills for a jack-of-all-trades: Being able to read and learn is a really important one, and being able (and willing) to share back out is another good one. You never what kind of DBA trying to configure Exchange you’re going to help out.

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PASS Summit 2012 To-Do

By Airborne Geek on March 5, 2012

Diners Drive-ins and Dives was on the TV just now (it was the first episode I’ve seen of the day, so I hadn’t gotten to the point of stabbing myself in the eyes yet), and Guy was at a place in Seattle that we want to put on a list of things to do this year. Tammy said we should start a list in a folder somewhere, and I thought why not mumble to the world about it.

So, here’s a random list of things that we’re going to try to do when we’re out in Seattle this year, along with a stab at when we might be doing it. Obviously these can all be #SQLFamily events, unless otherwise noted.

Oh, and of course, if anyone knows anything about these places and it would actually be a bad idea to do/visit any of them, please feel free to let us know!

  • Slim’s Last Chance Chili Shack & Watering Hole (1st Ave South, ~Georgetown); Probably hit this place on the way into town due to its location
  • “The spice place”; That’s all I’ve got about it. I seem to recall hearing about this once before, but this is all I’ve got right now

Will add to this as time goes on…

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SQL PASS Summit Recap Part 2 & Lessons Learned

By Airborne Geek on February 28, 2012

I really don’t know where November and December went. Or January. Oh crap, it’s the end of February already. Sigh. I’m doing good to not go to the office on a Saturday or start cleaning the house on a Tuesday morning. So, now, I’m finally going to finish what was a little series (err.. OK, two posts don’t a series make) about PASS Summit with this post, which will cover some boring personal stuff, along with some lessons learned back in October.

The Weekend

We were in Seattle until the Monday after the conference, so we had the weekend to do some sightseeing. We planned that since we had never been to Seattle before and we also have a habit of tacking on some vacation around conferences like this for higher quantities of bang-for-buck. We would have rather done this scheduling a little differently, but more on that in a bit.

Alaska King Salmon

Mmmmm

We reserved a rental car on Friday morning, so we could get around outside of downtown. We of course went to the Pike Place Market, which was great. Saw some fish flying through the air, as expected. Went by the original Starbucks, bought some cheese, even some flowers. We actually came back here on Monday morning on our way to the airport to pick up a couple of fish to take home with us. There’s now an Alaskan King Salmon in the freezer in the basement, which I think is pretty awesome. I suppose it’s one’s duty to go to the Space Needle their first time in Seattle, so we did that, too.

 

With the touristy stuff out of the way, Tammy and I met up with Denny (blog | @MrDenny) & wife Kris and set out to see our favorite off-the-beaten-trail thing: dams! Although more lock system than dam, we went to the Hiram M. Chittenden (aka “Ballard”) Locks. Denny & Kris made fun of us a little bit for being “oooo, boats!”, but hey, we’re from Indiana and live in Tennessee now—we don’t exactly get to see water all that often. The complex has a fish ladder where adult salmon can make it upstream past the dam complex to spawn in the freshwater Lake Washington. There’s a viewing area down along the ladder where you can see into the water through windows. October isn’t exactly heavy salmon migratory season, but there was one lone fish in there bumming around. This would be pretty sweet to see when it’s busy.

Negative, Ghostrider, the pattern is full

Negative, Ghostrider, the pattern is full

Somewhat ironically, immediately after this, we went and ate sushi. I can’t drive chopsticks, but that’s a different story.

The rest of the weekend involved closing down the Tap House another time or two, shopping, me piecing out and almost hitting my face on some asphalt in a park, annnnnd sleep. We got back on a 737 for the return trip to KBNA on Monday, and that was that.

Our pics from the trip are on Flickr here. Well, Tammy’s are. Mine haven’t been sorted through & uploaded.

Summit Recap

This conference is crazy. If it had eyes, you wouldn’t talk to it in a bar; you would walk swiftly the other way.

Now, of course, if you’re that guy, it probably isn’t as bad. You come to Seattle, you get your learnin’ on, maybe spend some time with the crew at an Expert Pod to talk through a nasty intermittent deadlocking problem you’ve got, grab some supper, and then head back to your room to catch up on some work or otherwise. I used to be that guy at conferences, so I understand. However, this is the SQL community, which means if you want to take your chances with the crazy, there’s plenty of opportunity.

Obviously, there’s the conference itself. With the schedule full of world-class speakers, small-group interactions with leading experts, and the Birds of a Feather lunch, it is truly amazing the amount of knowledge and experience available for attendees. If you have a question about SQL Server, there is someone here who can answer it (and if there isn’t, then the question is probably unanswerable 🙂 ). I really do enjoy this “learning” part of events. I also love being able to take advantage of the expertise available when I have big nagging problems that I haven’t been able to work out. Fortunately or unfortunately, I didn’t have any such things going on last fall that I was able to pick brains about. For a number of reasons, I hope that is different this year.

Along these lines, something did happen at the conference last year which I haven’t really had happen before: during a few different sessions, I had the realization that I actually knew what was going on. It wasn’t exactly that I felt I was learning for the fist time, it was more the feeling about “getting” such a big chunk of this “working with data” thing that I do. Obviously I don’t really get everything there is to get, as there’s way more to “working with data” than I have my brain wrapped around at this point, but the speakers and the content are just that good—they make you feel smarter than you actually are! I never got this feeling back when I was a sysadmin, doing sysadmin-y things, and I don’t know if it’s because my heart is so much more in what I’m doing now or something else. 

Oh hai!

There are plenty of networking opportunities during the conference day, up to and including ones that I didn’t even know were coming. Case in point: When I would think about it, I would Tweet what session I was sitting down in; or, RT someone else who beat me to it. In one session, I saw a tweet of someone sitting in the same session I was. Into the session, I happened to notice the guy next to me would flip over to TweetDeck on his laptop every so often. I checked out the avatar of the guy who said he was in the same session and I then realized that I was sitting right next to him. It was @DataOnWheels. We talked for a bit & exchanged cards at the end of the session. It was a pretty cool happening.

Some people will say to not feel obligated to go to a session in every slot—that’s what ordering the DVDs of all of the sessions are for. Instead, use the time at the conference to do things that you can’t get for later. Things like hanging out and talking to other people who do the same things that you do that you met at lunch (of which there are plenty of…even I found some!). I can at least partially agree with this advice. However, I’ve been to a fair handful of conferences over the years where, due to one reason or another, the sessions (the learning) were the main reason I was there. As a result, it is going to take me a little while to get over the “sessions are Priority 1” thing. Also, watching the DVDs afterwards just isn’t quite the same as being in the session in all cases. I know as I start to get to know more people (or maybe as more people get to know me), I will be more inclined/have more opportunity to spend part of an afternoon talking about where Microsoft is going with Vertipaq or whatever. This time, I went to a session in every slot except one or two at most, and I’m glad I did that.

One place where we did jump into the social/networking aspect is after-hours. Other than a couple nights where we went back to our hotel and pretty much passed out, we were out quite late. In fact, on the day we flew out to Seattle, I realized later that we had been awake and moving for 23 hours or so. There was SQLKaraoke for one, but for the most part, it was just hanging around at the Tap House talking shop until they kicked us out. Those were some good times. There was the second dinner lots of nights part, which was a little over-the-top. I didn’t really gain much weight that week, and I don’t know how I pulled that off.

Random Bits & Things We Learned for Next Time

Stuff We Should Have Brought More Of. Clothes. The 16 or so hour days that we were running really put an unexpected hurt on our clothes. Tammy noticed about halfway through our trip that one of my pairs of jeans was getting a little… rough (relatively speaking). We got to thinking about it and realized that we were wearing clothes for about twice as long as we usually do in a day, because of how long our days were on this trip. By the time we were heading home, nothing was standing in the corner on its own, but we do know for next time to plan on wearing some things (mostly pants) fewer times than we would normally expect to.

Stuff We Could Have Gone Without. Power Strip. I packed one. It didn’t get used once. I don’t know how it didn’t, and as a result, even though it didn’t get used this time, one will probably come along again next time. This is one of those things that doesn’t take up all that much room, but if it turns out that we actually need it, it’s gold. If we’re tight on room or weight though, this will be one of the first things to go.

Down Time. We found that down time is an important part of the week’s schedule. We cashed out pretty early two nights and it was probably the only way we made it through the week. Basically… we’re not in college anymore. And, likely…you aren’t either. I mean, if you are, that’s cool—we’ll see you a night or two this year at 0300. If you’re like us, though, there will be a few late nights and a couple/few not-so-late nights; and that’s perfectly OK.

Food. Something funny happened in the first part of our week in Seattle last year—we were sick! Long story short, it turns out that we apparently eat better than we thought we did. I mean, yeah, we hardly ever eat fast food, only eat at restaurants a few times a week, and grow a fair amount of the plant-derived food we eat, but I wasn’t expecting to be thrown for a loop by eating nothing but institutional food. This isn’t about any food in particular we had towards the beginning of our trip, it’s just that it turned out to be so different than what we usually eat, it was a shock to our systems. Everything was OK after a few days, but this might be something to keep in mind if you’re a heavy eat-in-type person. At the risk of sounding snooty, we will probably be hitting the Whole Foods that’s in downtown Seattle for some meals at least early in the week to help ease the transition.

Jet Lag. A number of years ago, someone told us of a good way to deal with Westbound jet-lag. See, the problem with going back in time is that you tend to go to bed and get up way early until you get acclimated. The fix is the day you get to your destination, stay up as late as you absolutely possibly can, and only then go to bed. This will make you “sleep in” the next morning as far as your body is concerned, which will hopefully more-or-less land you at the correct time to get up in the new timezone. We’ve done this for a while, and it works really well for us.

The problem is when flying Eastbound. This leads to one staying up and sleeping in way late compared to the prevailing time, which is more of a problem to deal with. This is really bad, because there’s not a good, easy way to deal with it like there is the other way. You just have to go to bed, set your alarm, and hope for the best (and probably be dead for a day or two). On this trip, our first day back in TN, we went to bed at about or normal time, 10:00p Central (8:00p as far as our bodies were concerned). This was only possible because of the craziness from the week before. Turns out this snapped us right back to Central Time in one day! It was by far the easiest jet lag recovery we’ve ever had.

 

That’s it for PASS Summit 2011. I feel bad that it has taken me so long to finish getting this post together. I mean, it’s almost SQL Rally time. I guess one could say the silver lining here is since so much time has gone by, this is a good way to keep the excitement for Summit 2012 alive! We’ve already registered for this year, and we pretty much can’t wait to see our #SQLFamily again.

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