Plagiarism: A Community Destroyed

Personal Thoughts

Just to be clear, I don't expect everyone to have my same thoughts. I personally fully support SQLServerCentral and how the help a great community exist. They host tons of articles and moderate a forum well enough to build a rather strong following of people that are highly involved. 

Then we have these articles... Plagiarism Apology notes, Stealing whole books, and many other things... just search Plagiarism and see what all pops up. I try my best to note every author, provide extra links, and overall just take any efforts to give the proper author his due credit.

This is a short post. Just something that spurred from today's events.

Come see me in Baton Rouge Aug 2nd!

I've been accepted for SQL Saturday Baton Rouge!

Yes, I am a little excited. I've wanted to become a speaker for some time. I'm excited to be speaking at my second SQL Saturday. My first session was at SQL Saturday Houston. I'll be honest, I chose the less used topic of fill factor. I honestly didn't expect it to be a session picked very often. So far I'm 2/2 on submissions. I'll be speaking at the last spot of the day,enough about that for now.

There are many other great speakers coming to SQL Saturday Baton Rouge! It's really hard to beat a free event with tons of free training and contacts you can make going forward. I honestly thing SQL Saturdays are what will keep MS SQL Server ahead in the game. I've not seen any other DB Software offer so much training and support for free or have near as strong of a community. Honestly, if you know of one... I'd love to know about it. 

Free Training?!

I've talked about a few free training sources before. SQL Saturdays, User Groups, website links I personally like, ideas on what I did as a junior DBA, Lists of many other resources and I even post scripts I find useful. You might even be able to talk your boss into a free lunch while getting some free training! 

What I'd like to see is some of you post something you've learned. I don't mean just here, I mean anywhere. What have you been learning recently? What are some subjects you wish you knew more about? Is there something you've been working with that you didn't find much information about? These can all lead to good presentations! Have you thought about speaking at your User Group? They don't bite... It's a great place to get started. 

Thank You!

Honestly, thank you all. I've been writing since November. From the people who've posted on my site, the e-mails I've received, and just the number of people who've visited the site... Thank you. This was a big motivation to start trying to present and I'm even working on a second presentation now. I encourage anyone who wants to speak to do so. 

Documentation: What Can We Document?

          I think I'd like to do a small short series on documentation. I personally love documentation. I honestly think most of us like documentation, we just hate writing it. There are quite a few excuses I've heard against writing it.

1. I don't have time to document as I code.
2. Changes need to be in place now, I can't waste time documenting.
3. This isn't my code.
4. There's too much to document now.
5. We plan on deprecating this system in the next year or two.
6. Everyone's already familiar with this system.

It doesn't honestly take much time to add some documentation. We don't need everything to have the letterhead, pretty backgrounds, screenshots and instructions for every single line. Here are a few examples of fast commenting.

-- in T-SQL adding two dashes allows your comment to sit right next to or under your code. This is great for explaining a bit toggle or what options exist in a SP.

/*

In T-SQL, adding the /* at the start of a comment will comment anything out until you end with the */, no matter how many lines deep it is. Great for revisions, modification explanations, author credit, date created and many more uses.

*/

in SSIS you can right click the open area and insert an annotation. you can set signs such as, "Don't run this step without running the previous step." and many other variations. 

You can even create your documentation in Excel or Word for larger projects or even to document what tables and SP's a certain job needs. 

The one thing I'd want documented more than any of these other things would be changes. A change log for the network, Domain Controllers, Server, SQL instance, tables, stored procedures, just about anything. A simple file share with folders for each group would be useful for a change log. Share Point may be a better target if you have that in your environment. File names could be as simple as Servername.doc. 

/**************************************************************

Admin: John Doe

Change: Modified Max RAM to 177152.

Reason: Leaving 10% to the OS and other functions.

Date: 6/9/2014

**************************************************************/

/**************************************************************

Admin: Jane Doe

Change: Modified Remote Admin Connections to 1

Reason: Ability to remote the DAC when the server is having issues. Temporary change while troubleshooting Database issues related to Ticket #0003425552

Date: 4/21/2014

**************************************************************/

A year later we may see a setting, wonder why or who changed it and now we have a searchable document to answer these questions.

Busy Busy Weeks, Finally Some Good News! SQL 2008 / 2008 R2 Will Get Their Final Service Pack!

We will actually be getting our final Service Pack! 

The information can be found here. You may still want extended support if you just simply cannot upgrade... but at least you're going out with one final update. This is a copy and paste from the link listed above, "We are planning to ship one last Service Pack for both SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2. Because of the maturity of SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2, these Service Pack(s) will be an exception in terms of timing and will ship after mainstream support of these releases ends on July 8th 2014."

This is awesome! Of course, but why is this awesome!?

Obviously we will love having one final Service Pack, that much is given. What I personally thing is so fantastic about this is that the community requested that they give us one more Service Pack. Glen Berry requested one through connect and got almost 900 votes here. Christoph Muthmann put in the same request specific to SQL Server 2008 R2 here. Brent Ozar even did a post asking just the simple question, "Did Microsoft stop releasing SQL Server Service Packs?"

I guess it means we won, but what did we win?

Ok, yes it's more about them just finishing off their products life cycle with one final update to close the door with a happier feeling all around... but it's more than that. Here's where I'll step off the ledge and just give an opinion. It's felt like Microsoft hasn't been listening to anyone who actually buys their product... Look at the numbers of people that just wanted a start menu option that has hurt windows 8 so bad. Yes, I know it's there now... that's not the point. Well, I guess it is the point? If they're finally listening to us, now is the perfect time to start asking for things back like the MCM, some sort of higher level training or cert, or just various requests that would help out the community as a whole.

A bit far fetched, I know...

That doesn't mean we shouldn't try. It appears someone is listening now. Let's take advantage while the ears are open. The one thing I'd like to see is either the return of the MCM or at least open up the MCM testing and labs so we can at least see these famed tests. (I hope this link works... it was giving me fits today)