Next .NETDA EVENT

Date: Monday 5/12/2008

Event: General Meeting

Location: Microsoft Building 40, Steptoe Room #1450

Meeting Leader: Walt Ritscher

Time:  7:00 PM

Topic: Essential Database Maintenance

Speaker: Kimberly L. Tripp and Paul S. Randall

In this session, Paul and Kimberly will run you through their top-ten database maintenance recommendations, with a lot of tips and tricks along the way. These are distilled from almost 30 years combined experience working with SQL Server customers and are geared towards making your databases more performant, more available, and more easily managed (to save you time!). Everything in this session will be practical and applicable to a wide variety of databases. Topics covered and myths debunked include: backups, shrinks, fragmentation, statistics, and much more! Focus will be on 2005 but we'll explain some of the key differences for 2000 and 2008 as well. What's really important is that even developers need to consider maintenance because if they don't - their long term database performance and scalability (and recoverabillity) may be seriously (and negatively) impacted. Kimberly L. Tripp is a SQL Server MVP and a Microsoft Regional Director and has worked with computers since 1985. Her career with database technologies began with IBM in 1988 and with Microsoft SQL Server™ in 1990. Since 1995, Kimberly has worked as a Speaker, Writer, Trainer and Consultant for her own company SYSolutions, Inc. (aka SQLskills.com). Kimberly is a writer/editor for SQL Server Magazine; was a founding writer for T-SQL Solutions magazine; was a technical contributor for the SQL Server 2000 Resource Kit; and co-authored the MSPress title SQL Server 2000 High Availability Kimberly has presented lectures and seminars at Microsoft Tech*Ed and other SQL Server-related events since 1996 and is consistently top-rated both on quality of technical content and presentation style. Kimberly regularly consults with customers to help them tackle their availability and performance issues as well as works with Microsoft to provide new and interesting technical resources including the SQL Server 2000 High Availability DVD. The HA DVD was a great experience where Microsoft funded the recording, production and duplication for a DVD with roughly 9.5 hours of content covering SQL Server 2000 High Availability technology such as Log Shipping, Backup/Restore, Clustering and Administration. This DVD is available from your Microsoft contact; the part number is 098-96661. Currently, Kimberly is working to help create SQL Server 2005 (code-named "Yukon") content including whitepapers, course materials, and labs. Prior to starting SYSolutions, Inc. in 1995, Kimberly held positions at Microsoft including Subject Matter Expert/Trainer for Microsoft University and Technical Writer for the SQL Server Development Team. You can contact Kimberly at Kimberly@SQLskills.com. Paul S. Randal is the Managing Director of SQLskills.com, which he runs with his wife Kimberly L. Tripp. Paul started in the industry in 1994 working for DEC on the VMS file system and its check/repair tools (the equivalent of chkdsk for NTFS. In 1999 he moved to Microsoft to work on SQL Server, specifically on DBCC. For SQL Server 2000, he concentrated on index fragmentation - well, removing it! - writing both DBCC INDEXDEFRAG and DBCC SHOWCONTIG, plus various algorithms in DBCC CHECKDB to support it being able to run online. Paul then spent the first 3 years of SQL Server 2005 development rewriting the DBCC CHECKDB and repair code-base, gaining extensive insight into disaster recovery scenarios and problems through close partnership with the SQL Server PSS (Product Support) group. Paul spent the remaining two years of SQL Server 2005 development leading/managing a 9-person development team in the Core Storage Engine. His team was responsible for data access and storage (DBCC, space allocation, indexes & heaps, pages & records, text/LOB storage, snapshot isolation, bulk load etc). For SQL Server 2008, Paul decided to put his customer passion to better use and switch to a Program Management role within the Storage Engine team - first with responsibility for the entire Storage Engine for a year, and then with a narrower, more hands-on focus on the Core Storage Engine. This involved both feature set definition plus customer and partner engagements. It was during this phase of Paul's career that he first started public speaking, with his first session being on DBCC Internals at TechEd US 2006. This was also where he met Kimberly, and they were subsequently married July 29th 2007. In 2007, after 8.5 years on the SQL Server team, Paul left Microsoft to join Kimberly running SQLskills.com and pursuing his new-found passion for presenting and consulting. Paul regularly presents at conferences and user groups around the world on high-availability, disaster recovery, database maintenance, and Storage Engine internals. His popular blog is at http://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/paul/ and he can be reached at paul@sqlskills.com.