Author Archives: OZ

My SQLPass Schedule [Training]

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This is my SQL Pass Summit schedule. I am double booked in some cases as I have not decided which one should I attend yet. Other than that, I just need to figure out to which parties should I make it 🙂

Schedule for Oscar Zamora

Sunday, November 7

6:00 PM

PASS Booth Open

Registration

Monday, November 8

7:15 AM

Internet Pavilion

Registration

7:30 AM

Continental Breakfast

8:00 AM

Microsoft Labs

12:00 PM

Pre-Conference Lunch

Tuesday, November 9

6:30 AM

Internet Pavilion

Registration

7:00 AM

Continental Breakfast

7:15 AM

Speaker Ready Room

8:00 AM

Microsoft Labs

8:15 AM

Keynote Speaker Day 1 – Ted Kummert

10:00 AM

SQL Server Clinic

10:15 AM

Consulting – Should I Consider It?

SQLCAT: HA DR Customer Panel — Architectures & Lessons Learned (90 mins)

11:00 AM

Community Learning Center

Exhibit Hall

11:15 AM

SQLCAT: Customer Learning of using FileStream and Remote Blob Store (RBS) for a Large Scale Deployment

11:30 AM

Lunch – Birds of a Feather with MVP’s

12:00 PM

Energizing the Next Generation: Encouraging and Inspiring Young Women to Choose Tech Careers

12:30 PM

PASS Summit Book Signing

1:00 PM

PASS Summit Book Signing

1:30 PM

Advanced SQL Server Deployment Techniques for Virtualization (DBA-313)

3:00 PM

Demystifying MDX in Reporting Services (BID-218)

Zero to Cube: Fast Track to Analysis Services Development (BIA-202)

4:30 PM

Inside DAX

6:15 PM

Introduction to the Entity Framework

7:00 PM

Speaking at PASS – How to Write An Abstract

Wednesday, November 10

6:45 AM

Sponsor-Hosted Breakfast (Microsoft)

7:00 AM

Continental Breakfast

Sponsor-Hosted Breakfast (VMware)

7:15 AM

Internet Pavilion

Registration

Speaker Ready Room

8:00 AM

Microsoft Labs

8:15 AM

Keynote Speaker Day 2 – Quentin Clark

10:00 AM

SQL Server Clinic

10:15 AM

Business Intelligence and the Cloud (90 mins) (90R1)

Don’t Wait Consolidate (DBA-245)

11:00 AM

Community Learning Center

Exhibit Hall

11:30 AM

Lunch

Women in Technology Luncheon (Sponsored by GoDaddy.com)

1:30 PM

50 surprising features of SQL Server Business Intelligence

Building a Comprehensive Professional Development Plan (PD-468)

3:00 PM

Building NextGen Scalable & Highly Available Architectures with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 (DBA-461)

Cooking with SSRS: Advanced Report Design Recipes (BID-234)

4:30 PM

Managing system performance with the Data Collector and Management Data Warehouse with Reporting Services

Master Data Services: Fixing Data before ETL (BIA-204)

Thursday, November 11

6:45 AM

Registration

Sponsor-Hosted Breakfast (Quest Software)

7:00 AM

Continental Breakfast

7:15 AM

Internet Pavilion

Speaker Ready Room

8:00 AM

Microsoft Labs

8:15 AM

Keynote Speaker Day 3 – David Dewitt

10:00 AM

SQL Server Clinic

10:15 AM

Hardware 201: Selecting and Sizing Database Hardware for OLTP Performance (DBA-242)

SQL Azure Data Sync – Integrating On-Premises Data with the Cloud

11:30 AM

Boxed Lunch

12:00 PM

Chapters Lunch

PASS Summit Book Signing

12:30 PM

PASS Summit Book Signing

1:00 PM

Real World Analysis Services Stored Procedures (BIA-206)

2:30 PM

Automating SQL Buildouts with Hyper-V and SQL Server 2008 R2 (DBA-249)

Monitor Your Business with PerformancePoint Services Monitoring and Analytics (BID-217)

4:00 PM

Optimizing Large-Scale OLTP Workloads

Friday, November 12

7:00 AM

Internet Pavilion

7:15 AM

Registration

7:30 AM

Continental Breakfast

8:30 AM

SharePoint for the DBA

12:00 PM

Post-Conference Lunch

Incorrect Bios Settings Can Reduce Database Performance [SQL Server]

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Sam Saffron commented on my blog post asking me if I could share my thoughts on an issue he was experiencing. This was on a newly migrated SQL Server 2008 R2 database solution running on Nehalem Processor based CPUs. I went ahead and shared what I experienced in my environment.

It turned out that the issue was not Hyper Threading related, but a Bios misconfiguration instead. This is an excerpt of his blog post:

In the process of asking the question and researching it ourselves, we discovered the answer. These Dell servers were inexplicably shipped with BIOS settings that …

  • did not allow the host operating system to control the CPU power settings
  • did not set the machine to high performance mode
  • did not scale CPU speed under load properly

… kind of the worst of all worlds. But Kyle quickly flipped a few BIOS settings so that the machine was set to “hyperspeed mode”, and performance suddenly got a lot better. How much better?

A conclusion of this experience, check for Bios Configurations. Dell needs to tell their customers which settings can be beneficial for certain applications, like SQL Server.

SD Card unexpectedly removed [Android]

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Today while I was trying to take a picture of my son wearing his costume with my new HTC G2, got the error message “SD Card unexpectedly removed”. I asked myself: how is that possible if the card is inside and even behind the battery.

Before I continued trying, decided to turn off the phone, extract the card, clean the contacts and try again. Everything went well until 20 minutes later; I got the same error again.

I performed the process again, this time thoroughly cleaning the pins on both the G2 and the SD card. I was able to record my son’s parade and even upload to YouTube, but yet again the error message came up once more.

Searched on Google, called a friend and even called T-Mobile to see if there was any known issue. Didn’t get too much help so I went ahead and performed a CheckDisk with repairs (while plugged in to the USB port of my PC). I thought it was fixed after it, but minutes later, again the issue reoccurred.

I decided to use a MicroSD adapter, plugged into my computer, tried to save whatever I could from the latest pictures and videos I took (luckily it was just 2 weeks worth) and formatted it like 3 times. I did not choose a quick format option just to ensure that all blocks get touched.

All good? No. Seems that the card is bad. Called T-Mobile, called, HTC, there are no replacement cards for the HTC G2 yet. What? It is a universal card! But no, HTC says that I need to call when they get stock parts for the HTC G2.

I guess I am out of luck on this one. I will need to buy another card.

Luckily, all the previous contents were safely backed up to the cloud.

Editing a Profile in MSDN Social Forums returns “Sorry, we were unable to service your request. Please try again later.” [MSDN]

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I was unable to post a question, reply or even edit my profile for over a month. Microsoft support took that long to send me this workaround.

After following this process, I was able to gain access to the forums.

This is an exact copy of what Microsoft Support sent me:

1. Open http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff361664.aspx

2. Sign In (with the account which is giving problem)

3. Select preferences from on masthead

4. Select classic version, save, takes back to previous page

5. Scroll down to community content section

6. Your display name shows up on below community content section, looks like below

7. Click your display name, takes to edit page. Edit display name and save, looks like below

8. Re-login from Forums application (if still seeing the issue, wait for couple of hours and retry again).