Kimberly Tripp NOT at Convergence 2007

Update: Kimberly Tripp sent me an email. She has a conflict and WILL NOT be at Convergence 2007. Apparently there is a mixup on the Convergence schedule.
Yes, I was disappointed too, but we're trying to work out the schedule to do a podcast.

---

Last year I blogged that I'd love to see Kim Tripp at Convergence talking SQL Server. Well, this year, she's doing a Chalk & Talk at 1 pm on Tuesday, March 13th.
I have yet to see a bad speaker in the SQL Server track at Convergence.  MS always seems to bring out their best, perhaps because they want to be able to deal with the hard questions the SQL people in the room tend to throw at them.
BUT. Kim Tripp is one of the best SQL Server speakers I've ever heard. She goes really, really fast so you'll want the Conference DVD later to slow her down to a manageable level. I'm looking forward to seeing her in person.
For those who don't know, Kim is the one who was doing demos  during the SQL Server 2005 launch with a raid drive made out of USB keys. With this she could demonstrate SQL Server 2005 failover behavior with a very portable setup.
The SQL sessions are always crammed so I'll guess I'll have to skip lunch to make sure I get into this one. Don't say I didn't warn you!
Maybe I can get her to be a guest on the podcast!

Kim Tripp's Compilation of SQL Whitepapers

For the GP DBA's and Pseudo DBA's out there, Kim Tripp is compiling links to high quality SQL whitepapers so if you want to add to your SQL knowledge take a look at http://www.sqlskills.com/whitepapers.asp.

TechNet Radio: Paul Randall, Kim Tripp SQL Server 2008

If you can't get enough SQL Server 2008 news, check out TechNet Radio's newest episode featuring SQL guru's Paul Randall and Kimberly Tripp.

They are always fun to listen too even if I struggle to keep up some days.

Kimberly Tripp, DotNetRocks and SQL Server 2005 SP1

For the DBA's out there supporting GP or the psuedo DBA's just working to keep it running, the DotNetRocks show this week has Kimberly Tripp talking about SQL Server 2005 SP1 and the updates included.

Kim really is a trip (pun intended) and listening to her blows my mind. You can get the show here. Hey Microsoft, give us a session with Kim at the next Convergence!

SQL Server Virtualization

Kim Tripp has a great post with resource links related to SQL Server hardware virtualization. If you are considering virtualizing your SQL Server you owe it to yourself to take a look at this post.

Dynamics GP Accidental Administrators

With a flattering nod to Paul Randall and Kim Tripp for the idea from their Involuntary DBA posts and presentations, my new post on what to do if you suddenly find yourself an Accidental Dynamics GP administrator is up at MSDynamicsWorld.com. We frequently run into controllers, DBA's and IT professionals who have been suddenly thrust into the GP administrator role when someone leaves or the organization changes. I wanted to build a short resource to help folks get started on the right path and this is what I came up. I would love to hear other people's thoughts as well. Feel free to comment here or on MSDynamicsWorld.

SQL Resources

Paul Randall and Kim Tripp are currently presenting a session called "The Accidental DBA" at various conferences. I know we have some DBA's who become accidental GP administrators but we also have a number of accountants who become accidental DBA's.

Paul and Kim have posted a huge list of resources for the accidental DBA at SQLSkills.com. Make sure you take a look.

And since you're looking at SQL resources, don't forget about SQL Saturday in Jacksonville. It's this coming Saturday, May 3 and it will cost you all of nothing. It's a great resource to build your SQL Skills.

Convergence 2007 Picks and Pans

It's Wednesday at Convergence 2007. We know what's good and bad now so here's my list.

Compliments:

• The venue is fabulous. Much less walking than Dallas and well laid out. Everything was pretty efficient from check in to bus transportation to meals.
• Most of the sessions had large enough rooms (an Office 2007 session is the only exception I've heard about.)
• More of the concurrent sessions speakers were senior folks (program manager types) who could really understand a question and answer it.
• There were lots of MS folks around from Redmond and Fargo to answer questions. If you couldn't get an answer you weren't trying hard enough.

Criticisms:

• As with previous Convergence conference, the SQL sessions I attended were too generic. They focused on generic SQL tuning (normalize your tables) without taking into consideration that DBA's at this conference a supporting pre-built applications. (I can't normalize the GP tables guys!)
• The PowerPoint police need to enforce some best practices. Yes the screens are HUGE but that's not a license to fill them up!
• Not enough of the Fabulous Matt G. (no Matt's not paying me to say this) We saw him at the opening Keynote and I'm sure we'll see him with Balmer's keynote later but that's it.
• Give us some exciting speakers. Again, the SQL stuff I saw today I could have gotten from a book at home. One more time. Give us Kim Tripp in the the SQL track and you'll pack the sessions. I'll lead the cheerleading. There were a few and they were hits but excitement and humor were in short supply.
• The last two Convergences have focused on upcoming products (9.0 was just out in 2006 and 10.0 is due in a few months after 2007). Give us some focus on how to leverage our existing products. We'll have 9.0 barely broken in and we'll be looking at how to train for 10.0.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with Convergence 2007. The last day feels like I've been here a little too long, but ending yesterday would have made it seem short. Balmer's keynote is the last big thing and then I'm off to LA tomorrow for work. We had Bill G. last year, Balmer today, will we see Ray Ozzie next year? Does Ray know that there's a Dynamics line of products?

Calling All Involuntary DBA's

Apparently it's podcast week here at DynamicAccounting.net. First we had Technet Radio on Tuesday with performance improvements in Analysis Services 2008. Then on Wednesday we had DotNetRocks looking at Reporting Services 2008. Let's go a head and wrap up the week with RunAsRadio, Paul Randall and Kim Tripp talking about the Involuntary DBA.

If you got dropped into the DBA role as part of a GP implementation this is a show for you. Kim and Paul are about as smart as you can get when it comes to SQL Server and the hosts, Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes are no slouches either.

If nothing else, you can't say that we didn't work to ease your commute this week.

I Travel Too Much

I spent 200 nights last year in Hilton hotels.Now Dilbert has called me out. Thank goodness I don’t travel as much as Paul Randall and Kim Tripp!

SQL Server 2005 SP2 is Now Available!

With a nod to Kim Tripp who pointed this out to me first, SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 is now available. The list of new stuff and improvements is waaaayyy too long for me to cover so you'll need to read it for yourself.
Also don't forget to download the Books Online Update as well. It's not updated by default when you install SP2.
I guess it's time to stop waiting and upgrade our main GP install to SQL Server 2005.

SQL 2008 Podcast

Run as radio has a nice interview with two monster heavyweights in the SQL Server space, Paul Randal and Kimberly Tripp. They spend a 1/2 hour talking about new features and cool stuff in SQL Server 2008. I was ho hum on SQL 2008, after all 2005 is pretty nice. Now I want 2008. Now, not later, now!

Microsoft please, please, please pony up a little dough and get these two at Convergence 2008. I want a session on optimizing SQL for prebuilt apps. It doesn't even have to be GP specific (but that would be nice!). I want Superman and Wonder Woman to tackle the issues we face when we can't make changes to table structures, can't do some of the standard optimization things because we didn't build the db. How about it MS?

Pleading isn't working? How about guilt? You owe us this much if you want us to use all your fancy BI stuff. We need good solid SQL Servers to make all this work and who better to help with that than Paul and Kimberly?!

RAID 0+1 and RAID 1+0

This is from an article by Kim Tripp from Saturday, May 13th. I'm reprinting part of it here for all of our SQL DBA's.

RAID 0+1 and RAID 1+0
"There was a question that came up on this and the question basically asked - which is better. Well, this is a hard question to answer because they both have pro's and con's BUT before I get to the pro's/con's there's also another [more important] issue; these two get confused and swapped all the time. In fact, many vendors USED to refer to these interchangeably and even just lumped them together as RAID 10. Today, most people don't do this and most people also try to refer to the underlying technlogy instead of the numbers. Having said all of that, RAID 1+0 is Striped Mirrors and is my general recommendation because it tends to be more reliable than 0+1 and can tolerate more drive failures than 0+1. RAID 0+1 is Mirrored Stripes - which generally outperforms RAID 1+0 but cannot tolerate the loss of more than one drive and because of that it's more vulnerable. In the end, I'd suggest a simple "educational" site here (it's on a commercial site but it has a nice - and short - description of the different types of RAID arrays). "

The whole thing is here and you can find Kim's blog here along with SQL tips and webcasts. Kim's my favorite SQL trainer. She's full of energy and really bright so spend some time on her sight. (I apologize for that last line but I couldn't resist.)

Convergence Quick Takes

After this I'm off to the airport and home to sunny Orlando. Here are my rapid fire quick takes:

• Great focus on community. Doug's closing session brought it all together.
• If you blog it, they will come. I can't tell you how many people said they saw me on the screen, or subscribed to the blog, or hunted me down to say hi. So what are you doing to get listened to?
• Make the sessions shorter. 1 1/2 hours is too long. Focus them to 45 min. with 15 minutes of Q&A. An hour is just about right and the questions are always great.
• I want Kimberly Tripp for the SQL stuff next year. Nobody does SQL tuning and tips like she does. But you'll need a big room. She's a great speaker. Bring her in and I'll pick up one of her meal tabs.
• Why isn't Dwight Specht an MVP? He's forgotten more about GP than I ever knew, and at one time, I thought I knew a lot. How do I nominate him?
• Robert Scoble needs to have the Fabulous Matt G on Channel 9. I sent Scoble an email and he's up for it. How do I get these two guys together? Satya? Doug? Bill? Somebody fly Robert to Fargo.
• The instructor led sessions were a hit. Long lines, tickets, sold out performance. I did check and as of yesterday, there were no reports of scalping. Maybe thats how I can pay for Convergence next year, hmm...

What I heard from people:

• San Diego, Orlando and Vegas are the top 3 suggestions for the future of Convergence
• The speakers in the sessions were of all over the map in terms of quality - focus hard on that.
• The busing between hotels worked, but it's really convenient if you can come down from your room and straight to a session. Yeah I know, that's easier with a 100 or a 1,000 people.
• Everyone was impressed with the size of Convergence this year.

I'll probably have a few more thoughts on the plane and post-convergence wrap up, but all this blogging is wearing me out. I'll be back to a more reasonable once or twice a week when I get home. Please don't take any of these comments as negatives. This was very good Convergence, we just always want more because that's what customers do!