Here is our presentation, minus the notes. Next week I will be updating this page to point to a webcast. We will be re-recording our presentation and turning it into a webcast.

Enjoy!

Updated to remove my ghetto slang.

Tom La Rock’s Meme Monday

Tagged by Kendra Little and Yanni Robel.

Tagging Dev Nambi and Mike Decuir.

Having two of the cruises to compare against, I thought it would be good to provide some tips of things I picked up on after becoming a SQL Cruise veteran.  Here they are in no particular order.

1. Attend SQLBBQ.

SQLBBQ is the perfect time to meet all of the cruisers you are going to be cruising

@GarethSwan is an amazing cook!

with.  It gives you the time to break the ice, talk shop, and enjoy delicious food.  I cannot begin to stress the importance of this event.  Once you get on the cruise ship,

everything starts to happen very quickly.  It is easier when you are able to recognize everyone and start working together as a group.  You will already know everyone and you will be able to get settled quicker.

2.  Copy presentation materials.

The second time I went on the cruise, I just brought my iPad to take notes.  It worked perfectly for note taking.  When we started class though, they passed along a USB key with the presentation material on it.  I had no way of downloading the information.  One of the cruisers kindly downloaded it to my USB key for me, but I did miss out on some of the material when I forgot my USB key the next day.

3. Watch out for time zone changes.

On the first cruise, I took my phone out of roaming to call my husband and the time changed.  I didn’t catch it.  Since I was using my phone as an alarm clock, it means I was the only cruiser to wander into the first session one hour late.  On the second cruise, the cruise told us to change our clocks by one hour and some of the cruisers didn’t get the information.  Finally, I wasn’t the only person to stroll in an hour late.  The title had been passed.  If you don’t want the title to be passed to you, I suggest a watch or just pay close attention to the time.

4. Formal Night

There is always one formal night on the cruise ship.  Some of the cruisers like to join in, some don’t.  I found it to be a lot of fun both times.  If you are going to attend formal night, bring a semi nice outfit along.  Some people on the cruise go all out.  You don’t have too unless you want too.

5. Chatter

You have a great opportunity to get to know the cruisers before you even get close to the day, week, or month of setting sail.  Get on twitter.  Send out emails.  Engage the rest of the group.  Get excited! On the first cruise, I felt like I knew EVERYONE long before it was time for our SQL Cruise.  It really made a difference.  On the second cruise, many weren’t able to attend the SQLBBQ and so introductions happened the day we started to set sail and only after we worked to gather everyone together.

6.  Hotels, etc.

Email the group and ask where they are going to be staying, how they are getting around, etc.  Do it early.  When this happens, many people can try to stay near each other and share advice, recommendations, and meet up more as a group, or even share taxi/car rental expenses, etc.

7.  Arrive at the boat early.

Home Away From Home

The line can get long.  Once you are on the ship, there are things to do.  You can’t go to your cabin right away but it is the perfect time for getting to know the ship.  By the end of the week you’ll be a master but at the beginning of the trip, especially if this is your first cruise, getting used to the layout of the floating city you’re about to experience will make it much easier later when you’re trying to figure out where food is, where your cabin is, where meeting rooms are, etc.  Plus it makes for some great people watching.  Keep an eye out for a good place that the group can gather at after you have set sail and in between training sessions.

8. Internet

Internet can be expensive on the boat.  It can also be really slow.  Be prepared to pay for it or live without it.  Personally, I only paid for it once and that was only for five minutes at .75 cents a minute plus a $3.95 activation fee for the first time log in.  If I wasn’t trying to get a bridesmaid dress shipped from Germany one month before the wedding, I wouldn’t have bothered.

8. Relax

You are going to have a blast.  You are going to get some amazing training, have great conversations about SQL and non SQL things, get a vacation, etc. It will be a trip to remember.  Don’t forget your camera!

@GarrethSwan, myself, @SqlAgentMan, and @BrentO

The Beginning…
In the spirit of Christmas, Brent Ozar (Blog | Twitter) came up with yet another one of those brainy ideas of his. He asked 12 SQL bloggers to each write about their favorite blog post for a 12 Days Of SQL series.

On the 9th Day Of SQL, Kendra Little (Blog | Twitter) brought us a great post about how things are not as simple as they seem. She’s a tough act to follow but I will strive to do my best.

The Post…
I remember hearing advice about deleting a transaction log back when I was working with SQL 2000. It had never occurred to me that you could do this or why you would want to do this and I just accepted it as more crazy stuff to learn in this SQL world. Fast forward years later, while I may not be any smarter I do have more experience and my experience makes me shudder at the thought of deleting the transaction log. A quick search returned some interesting comments regarding the transaction log.

And some interesting answers about what to do…

As a DBA, it is our job to protect the data. I’m not particularly good at updating my resume, so instead I try to remain good at keeping my data and the job that goes with it. Think of being a DBA as the Secret Service of the database world. We are highly trained, highly motivated and nothing is going to come between us and that database. I feel that deleting the transaction log goes against the core values of being a DBA just as shooting the President goes against the core values of the Secret Service. For these reasons, for the 10th day of Christmas and my favorite blog post, I chose:

Deleting The Transaction Log by Gail Shaw (Blog | Twitter).

I love how right away Gail states “The transaction log is not an optional piece of the database.” I couldn’t have said it any better. Gail’s post walks us through the importance of the transaction log and examples of what could happen if you chose to delete the transaction log. I also enjoyed reading the comments of this post as much as I enjoyed reading the post. Gail does a great job of following up and there are important tidbits of wisdom in the comments that are just as important as the details of the post.

Up Next…
Up next is Mike Walsh (Blog | Twitter). I had the great joy of meeting Mike at the PASS summit this year. He shares my love for sushi and SQL and I can’t wait until we run into each other again.

Where we’ve been…

Shamelessly stolen from Kendra’s post with her blessing:

Brent O’s 12 Days of SQL post
Day1: Jeremiah Peschka
Day 2: Grant Fritchey
Day 3: Dave Stein
Day 4: Andy Leonard
Day 5: Erin Stellato
Day 6: Tim Ford
Day 7: Yanni Robel
Day 8: Karen Lopez
Day 9: Kendra Little

Here is what I do know. The Alaska cruise sold out in one day, alumni were notified first and there are currently more men than women in IT. I assume that having only two women on the Alaska cruise is partly due to these points. Yet the Miami SQLCruise still has six spots left. Of the 15 spots, there is currently only one woman signed up. That one woman is me.

I can’t speak for the family aspect, as my husband and I are currently still trying to start a family. I know that this year @YanniRobel (blog) is bringing her family with her. A visit to the cruise website found an entire section related to youth activities and information. In addition to this, training rarely goes past 5pm and we are never in training while in port. I would think this would be a plus to encouraging families to travel with the trainees but I also wonder if it makes it more appealing to women in general.

This year my husband will be a trainee along with me on the Alaska cruise. When we discussed it, the biggest draw for my husband is he did not have to fly to a destination to board the cruise. What about you? Are you going on one of the SQLCruises this year? Did you go on a SQLCruise last year? What influenced your decision and will you bring your family with you?

Don’t forget, there are still spots available on the Miami cruise. Plus, there are still two spots that were picked up by vendors for both Miami and Alaska. I can’t wait to see what the vendors do with those spots this year.

I also signed up for the Miami cruise. And while this may not help me with my long standing addiction to SQL or my newest addiction to cruises, it does further prove just how much I believe in this type of training. It is the ultimate vacation for me. When you go on a vacation, you go to remote destinations to do the things you love. Well SQL Server and photography are two of my passions, and both get plenty of exercise at these events. I also get to unplug and remove myself from work which is hands down the most important part of any training for me. It is also something that I have a hard time doing even when I know how important it is. Luckily, SQL Cruise takes care of that for me.

SQL Cruise, I will see you soon – if I don’t die from the anticipation.

On our servers we have heartbeats in our SQL Agent Jobs. A heartbeat is a start and end step that we put into each of our jobs. If you do use it, do you use the same terminology or do you have a different word for it? If you’re not using one, I highly recommend it.

For example, compare the two screen shots below. The first one shows a job which has one step in it. The job is currently running. What can you tell by looking at the job history?

The second example shows the job with the same scenario, but it has a Heartbeat.Notification and a Heartbeat.Termination step in it.

The job with the heartbeat has a step that has already completed. If I look at the job history, I have information available if I need to troubleshoot problems with the running job. This would have been very helpful when I was once troubleshooting a job that had been running for multiple days, unexpectedly.

That being said, always test changes before making them – no matter how simple they appear to be. I once modified a job to include the heartbeat steps. It turns out that one of the job steps referenced output files from another step in the job. When I changed the steps around, it was referencing the wrong step’s output file.

This is where I was reminded to check the version of SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio) I was using. DOH! Sure enough, when we used the correct version of SSMS, voila! Our settings appeared exactly where we were expecting them. This isn’t the only problem I’ve run into. When I use SSMS for 2005 against one of my 2008 servers to check job history, sometimes I get a lovely error message stating “String or binary data would be truncated”. Since we use a jump box, we have multiple versions of SSMS loaded on the server.

Sometimes it is the really simple things you have to watch out for.