Techfest Vancouver 2009

Well I presented at TechFest Vancouver 2009 at BCIT on Saturday. My presentation was on T-SQL in SQL Server 2008. I was glad to be the first one up because there were a couple of SQL Server MVPs (Greg Larsen and Todd McDermid) following afterwards.

The presentation itself went well and I think the timing went smoothly. Luckily I only had one Americano otherwise I would have been twitchy.

I did contemplate installing SQL Server 2008 R2 on my laptop before the presentation; more or less because I was curious if much has changed in the T-SQL realm when jumping from 2008 to 2008 R2. Of course I didn’t because Presentation Skills 101 says that you shouldn’t mess with your demo environment just before the presentation. Now that the presentation is over I intend to install R2 (Nov CTP) to see what has changed.

For those of you looking for my presentation and demo sample you can find them at http://www.vancouvertechfest.com/Downloads/tabid/450/language/en-US/Default.aspx .

Also, the session was recorded just keep going back to http://www.vancouvertechfest.com to see if it has been uploaded yet.

Case of the Non-Yielding Schedulers in SQL Server 2005

The worst kind of issues are the kind that leave you with almost nothing to go on.  On September  15th, I came upon this issue, with my co-DBA, on a production cluster, SQL Server 2005 x64 Enterprise SP3 and then some, where it would seem at all connections to the server would stop for about 10 minutes and then SQL Server would restart itself and everything would work.  Granted, 10 minutes is not a lot of time, but if it occurs at the wrong time it can be devastating to just about any business.

 Needless to say after going through the logs all that was left was a SQL mini-dump log of this:

A first we thought perhaps it was a fluke, but then it occurred a couple week later.  This is when we opened a call to Microsoft who then told us to put the trace flag -T2330 into the Startup Parameters of the clustered instance.

 Then we thought that is was perhaps a NUMA issue introduced in one of the Cumulative Hotfix Updates.   As it turns out the trace flag actually turns of  tracking if Index Usage stats collection.  In this case an index was being created on a temp table in the tempdb, furthermore this is a known issue in SQL Server 2005, but it said to have been fixed in SQL Server 2008.

 So for anyone seeing mysterious non-yielding scheduler in the error logs try adding -T2330 to the startup parameters or upgrade to SQL Server 2008.

 I did recently notice however that recently this KB article came out on November 2nd, 2009 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/974205 which suggests that CU6 should fix the issue, personally, I’m going to leave that trace flag in until I migrate to SQL Server 2008, because my users notice 10 minutes of outage!!!

 - Rich Baumet

PASS Summit 2009 Reflection

This years’ PASS Summit was from beginning to end filled with information and fun.   Even during tough economic times it seems that PASS seems to thrive!   Ok, so the booze was no longer covered and there was no mass Guitar Hero time, but the community itself thrived!   You could still feel the spirit of the summit as you talked to new people and reunited with the same crew.

This year had a few first’s for me:

                1. Twitter – I try not to bend to the will of popularity but there is some sustenance to this “mini-blog” (quoting someone one this but fail to remember who…) My twitter name is @RichBaumet

                2. Karaoke – Again, I bent to the will of popularity but for good reason.  There are some serious voices in the PASS community (not mine)

                3. Itzik Ben-Gan – I thought I understood most thing about T-SQL until Itzik.  Never been to one of his sessions until pre-con and I may very well see his session every chance I get.

                4. Kimball – This year I tried to go to something different and this is one of those that I will go back to the recordings to watch again. 

                5. Women in Technology Luncheon – Pleasantly surprised by the passion and the turn out.  I think it was important for me to take for I can be oblivious to some issues.

So all in all I learned something new, got answers to some questions I had, met new people,  and reconnected with old friends.  Summit 2009 was the best one yet in terms of content and community, and it didn’t need Guitar Hero to achieve that! 

So what can top that next year?  Tweets suggest a duo presentation of Buck Woody and Paul Randal in kilts!  So if you missed out in 2009, then you better signup for 2010! 

On a final note, hats off to PASS and the entire community that came out because it rocked!  And I apologize for not listing off everyone I met and had fun with for fear of forgetting someone, but I’ll see you all again next year.

 - Rich Baumet