I was browsing through the new titles that are on Safari and saw some planning guides around Windows Server 2008 (Active Directory Services, File Services, etc.). Of course, all of these are published as solution accelerators, because they are designed to assist IT professionals understand, plan, and implement solutions quicker (hence the term, solution accelerator). Some of these documents have been around for a while, but the Solution Accelerators section groups them all into one place. If you've not run across them before, you can find them here:

Microsoft TechNet : Microsoft Solution Accelerators

Among them are the Infrastructure Planning and Design Guides. There's guidance on Windows Server 2008, virtualization, and even IIS. But unfortunately, none out there yet for SQL Server. If you're looking on the security side, there are the OS security guides from Windows XP on up, including for Vista and 2008. Sorry, no Windows 7 yet.

Speaker: Paul Shearer

Midlands PASS Chapter - December 4, 2008 Meeting

The Midlands PASS chapter will hold our normally scheduled meeting on Thursday, December 4, 2008. Paul Shearer will be giving a presentation entitled "Virtualization Everything" in which he'll cover virtualizing SQL Server for large scale apps using Hyper-V technology. This is definitely one you'll want to attend and invite your system administrators to as well!

The meeting will once again be held at Training Concepts off of Berryhill Road. We will begin our meet and greet time at 6:15 PM as usual and start the at 6:45 PM. Please feel free to forward this to anyone who you think would be interested in attending. If you haven’t already done so and plan on attending, please RSVP (kbriankelley {at} acm {dot} org) as soon as possible so. If you have time to help with setup, please email me and we’ll plug you in!

 

Speaker: Paul Shearer

Midlands PASS Chapter - December 4, 2008 Meeting

The Midlands PASS chapter will hold our normally scheduled meeting on Thursday, December 4, 2008. Paul Shearer will be giving a presentation entitled "Virtualization Everything" in which he'll cover virtualizing SQL Server for large scale apps using Hyper-V technology. This is definitely one you'll want to attend and invite your system administrators to as well!

The meeting will once again be held at Training Concepts off of Berryhill Road. We will begin our meet and greet time at 6:15 PM as usual and start the at 6:45 PM. Please feel free to forward this to anyone who you think would be interested in attending. If you haven’t already done so and plan on attending, please RSVP (kbriankelley {at} acm {dot} org) as soon as possible so we can ensure we have enough space and food. If you have time to help with setup, please email me and we’ll plug you in!

I'll send out an agenda, contact phone numbers, and the building code the week of the meeting.

This is a follow-up to part I from last week. You've considered what you want to do, you've looked at your soft skills, and you still want to be a DBA. How then do you get started?

The first thing to do is decide which platform you're going to focus on. Each "flavor" has its own proprietary tools and commands. While all share a basic SQL language foundation, DBCC CHECKDB() doesn't run on MySQL and DESCRIBE doesn't get you anything SQL Server. Likewise, SQL Server Management Objects (SMO) don't help you with Oracle and if you're looking for "TNS" in SQL server, you're out of luck. Some of these are proprietary extensions to the SQL language, others are differences in architecture and/or tools. What platform to start with should be based on your opportunities, your knowledge of the various platforms, or both. Try and focus only on one because each platform has a lot to know in order to become truly proficient. Expert or "guru" status in a particular database product takes even more time and effort.

For instance, one of the reasons I started learning SQL Server so heavily as opposed to Oracle or DB2 was I had a stronger foundation in SQL Server due to being in "Microsoft shops" where SQL Server was used. SQL Server was the platform of choice partially because of the focus on Microsoft technologies but also because SQL Server came in the MSDN subscriptions and could be used at no additional charge in the development environment. Another reason is that most of the opportunities I was finding in my area centered around SQL Server. Therefore, SQL Server was my first choice and I put my energy into learning it better.

After you've decided which platform to pursue, you should get it installed and actively work with it. When I was learning SQL server I had SQL Server 6.5 installed on a server and SQL Server 7.0 installed on my workstation. When SQL Server 2000 came along, I installed it, and the same was true with SQL Server 2005. I ensured that my installs included the components I was interested in working with. Where can you find the products? In most cases the vendors have provided downloads of either evaluation or full-blown versions for people to learn on. Here are the links as of this blog post for some of the most popular platforms:

• DB2
• Microsoft SQL Server
• MySQL (5.0 is the current release with 5.1 in release candidate)
• Oracle
• Sybase

In some cases you may want to run virtual machines on server software such as Windows server 2003 but your workstation is running Windows XP or Vista. I realize that the statement I made is Windows-only but that's because I won't pretend to be knowledgeable on virtualization on the Linux side (and I won't even try and touch Mac). However, virtualization solutions such as Xen do exist. Back to the Microsoft side of the house, not only is there Xen, but there are more traditional names of VMware and Microsoft.

• Microsoft VirtualPC
• VMware Player (free, but requires a pre-built virtual machine)
• VMware Workstation (pay version, but you can build your own virtual machines from scratch)

Don't just stop at installing the software (and don't just install it once, either). Learn the features centered around what you're most interested in. Work with the SQL and proprietary commands. Learn the tools. Get to where they are second nature to you. After all, the better you know the technology, the more efficient you become with it. The more efficient you are and the more knowledge you have with your chosen platform, the better an asset you are for the organization that picks you up. While knowing the technology cold may not guarantee a successful technical interview (that requires work on those soft skills), not knowing the technology well pretty much ensures a poor technical interview.

If you're thinking, "What tools are available to help me become more proficient?" there are quite a few. However, this post is getting long in the tooth; therefore, I'll focus on those resources, including discussing training and certification, next week.


Technorati Tags: DBA | Life | Work | Career Development

First saw this at Blade Watch. VMWare has released a white paper on using SANs with VMWare ESX Server 3.0. You can get the whitepaper here:

  http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_san_design_deploy.pdf

It's a hefty document at well over 200 pages. This will be something I'll be delving into over the next week, so I don't have highlights as of yet, but hopefully by Friday I'll post something more about the contents.



Technorati Tags: Architecture | VMWare | ESX Server | Virtual Machines | Virtualization | SAN | Storage Area Network | Storage