General

I’m taking a break from blogging while I finish off my thesis. With the pile of outstanding things that need doing and the deadlines for them, something has to give, and I figure the blog is the least impact of the lot.

Other than possible 24 Hours of PASS and PASS Summit feedback and some promised SQL University posts, the next blog post here will be a discussion of how not to go about doing a research degree while working full-time, which will be posted sometime after I get the thesis submitted.

While the main reason for my recent trip to the UK was to attend the SQLSkills immersion course, I did have a little time before and after the course to do some sightseeing. (Warning, this post is image-heavy)

London

Jen Stirrup (blog|twitter) took me around some of the major sights of London.

Inside and outside shots of St Paul’s cathedral.

A view down the Thames towards Tower Bridge.

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Poor performance is not uncommon in most SQL Server environments. The data sizes are growing, the hardware isn’t and traditional methods of performance tuning are time-consuming and difficult.

So what’s the solution? Well, throwing hardware at the problem is an old favourite. There are few workloads that a nice 256-processor Itanium with a terabyte or two of memory won’t handle, but servers like that are a little on the expensive side and lots of money spent on expensive hardware means less that can be spent on annual bonuses.

There is another option, a hidden, undocumented option that can improve query performance, maybe a little, maybe substantially.

First thing that you need to do to get this one is to enable the hidden options in sp_configure. This is done much the same way as the advanced options.

exec sp_configure 'show hidden options', 1
RECONFIGURE WITH EXTREME OVERRIDE

Once that’s done, the undocumented option can be enabled.

exec sp_configure 'run queries faster', 101010
 RECONFIGURE WITH EXTREME OVERRIDE

How much improvement this will give depends on the kind of queries being run. OLTP systems usually see a greater improvement than decision-support, unless there’s full text search or spatial queries, in which case there will likely be substantially less of a gain.

Now, there are a few things to consider.

1. This is obviously undocumented and that means unsupported.
2. It may not work on the next version of SQL.
3. If you call support, disable the option first and don’t tell them you were running it!

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Happy April Fools’ day.

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Seriously now, there’s no options that, when enabled, makes SQL run queries faster. There is no silver bullet for performance problems, there is no one-size-fits-all fix.

Fixing performance problems involves finding the current bottleneck and removing it, then repeating that operation until performance is acceptable. It’s a complex area and there’s a lot to it. Simply throwing hardware at the problem may not produce much, if any, performance gain, especially if the hardware wasn’t the bottleneck.

If you have a query performance problem and don’t know where to start, ask on one of the SQL forums (like SQLServerCentral) if it’s not an urgent problem. If it is, or if there are serious problems, consider getting a consultant in to help out. One of the quickest ways to learn is to learn from someone who knows what they are doing.

Another year gone and a new one just starting. Time to take a look back at the the goals that I set for myself, which ones I’ve achieved and which I haven’t.

I did fairly well with the goals that I set back in October. The experiment design for my thesis is not documented and the WPF book is not finished, but the rest is all done and the exam was easily passed. So not too bad there. Better than I managed in the first half of the year.

And now for next year…

The biggest thing is that I’m going to take a near-complete break from the SQL community for at least the first half of the year so that I can focus on my thesis. No writing articles, no contributing to books, no giving or writing presentations. I’ll still blog, though likely only once a month on SQL-related stuff, though there may well be some AI stuff appearing from time to time. I’ll still be around on the SSC forums, though not as much as I currently am. I’ll also still be involved in the local usergroup. I can’t abandon that.

So, with that out of the way, the goals for the next six months:

• Read one SQL book
• Read at least two AI books
• Get the experiment for my thesis designed and coded.
• Write at least two chapters of the thesis
• Get back into computer graphics and get two images done

To add to that, strange as it may seem, I’m going to ensure that I take time to read, relax and exercise away from the computer. This year I’ve spend too much time ‘busy’. I have a stack of books almost a metre high that I’ve bought but not opened. I have a similar stack of movies and games (though not quite as high) and I had a nasty bout of burnout Oct/Nov and I really don’t want  that again.

Someone went off and started asking people what their greatest weaknesses are, then someone else decided to pass the question my way. Perhaps those someones’ weaknesses are curiosity… Still, since everyone else is revealing their darkest secrets, I’ll give it a go as well.

Mine would have to be two very closely related things. Procrastination and short attention span. (why do you think this post is 4 days late?)

I tend to put stuff off until the absolute last minute (and sometimes beyond then) and then work frantically to get it finished. And because I’m also a bit of a perfectionist, I’m not satisfied with half-done work or a hack job so I’ll be working late into the night (or over a weekend) to get it done properly.

To add to that, unless I’m doing something I really enjoy, my attention span tends not to be very long. 15-20 minutes is good, it’s usually less. After that it’s either fight to stay focused or take a short break. In and of itself, that’s not so bad, the problem is that the breaks are often not so short, if I get caught up in whatever else I’m doing, or distracted by something else (and something else and something else).

So what am I doing about this?

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I should have posted this back in July. I put off writing it then, partially cause I was embarrassed about how little I got done.

Of the goals I set back in January, about the only ones I achieved were getting the articles written (published at Simple Talk), reading the books and listening to podcasts. I’m doing so badly with my university studies that I’m wondering if it’s worth even considering registering next year.

Well, 3 months of the year left, let’s see if I can redeem anything of it. By the end of the year I will

• Finish the WPF book that I’m reading and finish the WFP app that I’ve been dabbling with for months
• Read an AI book, cover-to-cover
• Write 2 articles for SQL Server Central (not hard, one’s half-written, one’s planned out)
• Do the last section of the proof-of-concept for my Master’s experiments and have at least the outline of the design of the actual experiments documented.
• Write one certification exam, probably the MCITP SQL Developer

So, picture the scenario. White sand and palm trees. Tropical sun, warm breeze and crystal clear waters. And a laptop with wifi access to the office.

Hmmm, something doesn’t quite fit there. Though I must admit I really like the idea of telecommuting from a tropical beach. Must speak to the boss about that….

This is probably one of the more creative of the blog memes that go around, this time originally from Tim Ford

“So You’re On A Deserted Island With WiFi and you’re still on the clock at work.  Okay, so not a very good situational exercise here, but let’s roll with it; we’ll call it a virtual deserted island.  Perhaps what I should simply ask is if you had a month without any walk-up work, no projects due, no performance issues that require you to devote time from anything other than a wishlist of items you’ve been wanting to get accomplished at work but keep getting pulled away from I ask this question: what would be the top items that would get your attention?”

Well, actually that’s almost the situation I’ve been in for the last couple months. Except the ‘on-the-clock’ part. And the deserted island part. Also I don’t admin servers so there’s no pile of outstanding backups or standardisation to do.

Ok, so let’s say that I had a month with no projects and that I couldn’t work on any personal or community stuff in that time. What would be sitting on my list of things to do.

Organise documentation

Pretty much anyone who knows me would say that I’m pretty disorganised, and it’s true. I have IT-related documentation, presentations, saved articles, webcasts and podcasts scattered across two computers and several stacks of DVDs. One of the first things on my to-do list would be to start organising it. Not organise everything, that would take far more than a month, but start organising.

I have Sharepoint set up on a server here and the very beginnings of an IT library on it. The first goal would be to get the IT-related articles and saved blog posts into a sharepoint library and categorised.

Learn Sharepoint

To go with the previous step, I would study up on Sharepoint and how it works. I’m not talking about the interface, how to navigate through it, set up libraries or configure sites. I’m talking about learning how it works, how it scales, how the pieces work together, how the security works. The long-term goal here is to be able to make recommendations to clients on planned sharepoint implementations.

Dig deep into clustering

I’ve dabbled in clustering before, but I’ve barely scratched the surface with it. I know just about enough to get into serious trouble with it. I would spend some of my month getting familiar with clustering, both at the OS level, installing and configuring the cluster and at the app level, on SQL’s interaction with clustering.

WPF

Lastly, if there’s any of the month left, I’d play with Windows Presentation Foundation. Just because.

I’m not going to tag anyone, because I think just about everyone’s done this one. I’m slow to get to it. As usual.