DBAs Behaving Badly...in Seattle

SQL Server

When there are 160+ sessions to choose from, the choices are difficult at the PASS Summit 2009 in Seattle. We can attend maybe a keynote speech and 4 other sessions per day. Many times it comes down to the presenter. Sometimes the title plays a factor. Now that we can download the presentations in advance we can do our homework in advance and actually explore the content before we make a choice.

The nice thing about the SQL PASS Itinerary Planner, is that you can search by time, by category, by title, by presenter etc to make your choice up front. http://summit2009.sqlpass.org/

"Exploring Index Internals" may sound like a snooze-fest especially at 4:30pm on Tuesday afternoon but it's presented by Kalen Delaney. She has a way of making these topics quite entertaining and informative with some good demos and undocumented features. I'll be there.

A title that may seem a little vague is "Database Design" on Wednesday at 1:30pm. But this one's presented by Louis Davidson who did a great job in the 24 hours of PASS recently so I'll give it a shot. Another presenter that's sure to be entertaining.

Now here's a title that jumps out: "DBAs Behaving Badly... Worst Practices for Database Administrators" by Rod Colledge from down-under on Wednesday 10:15am. Can't wait for this one. The presentation looks pretty interesting and amusing too. With 42 slides and a few demos I think it could be a challenge to finish in 75 minutes. It contains all those mistakes that we've learnt from experience to avoid. Like not testing restores till it's too late. Or not backing up the transaction log when in Full Recovery model.

These "worst practices" are what one colleague calls "resume generating events". Don't let this happen to you...

cheers
Brian

• Microsoft
• Conference
• PASS
• PASS Summit
• Seattle
• SQL Server
• SQL Server 2008