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SQL Saturday #220 - Atlanta - Pre-Con Scholarship Winners!

Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk) — Tue, 07 May 2013 19:17:35 GMT

A few weeks ago, AtlantaMDF offered scholarships for each of our upcoming Pre-conference sessions at SQL Saturday #220. We would like to congratulate the winners!

David Thomas	SQL Server Security	http://sqlsecurity.eventbrite.com/
Vince Bible	Surfing the Multicore Wave: Processors, Parallelism, and Performance	http://surfmulticore.eventbrite.com/
Mostafa Maged	Languages of BI	http://languagesofbi.eventbrite.com/
Daphne Adams	Practical Self-Service BI with PowerPivot for Excel	http://selfservicebi.eventbrite.com/
Tim Lawrence	The DBA Skills Upgrade Toolkit	http://dbatoolkit.eventbrite.com/

Thanks to everyone who applied! And once again we must thank Idera's generous sponsorship, and the time and effort made by Bobby Dimmick (w|t) and Brian Kelley (w|t) of Midlands PASS for judging all the applicants.

Don't forget, there's still time to attend the Pre-Cons on May 17, 2013! Click on the EventBrite links for more details and to register!

SQL Saturday #220 - Atlanta - Pre-Conference Scholarships!

Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk) — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 19:59:12 GMT


We Want YOU…To Learn!

AtlantaMDF and Idera are teaming up to find a few good people. If you are:

A student looking to work in the database or business intelligence fields
A database professional who is between jobs or wants a better one
A developer looking to step up to something new
On a limited budget and can’t afford professional SQL Server training
Able to attend training from 9 to 5 on May 17, 2013

AtlantaMDF is presenting 5 Pre-Conference Sessions (pre-cons) for SQL Saturday #220! And thanks to Idera’s sponsorship, we can offer one free ticket to each of these sessions to eligible candidates! That means one scholarship per Pre-Con!

One Recipient Each will Attend:

Denny Cherry:	SQL Server Security	http://sqlsecurity.eventbrite.com/
Adam Machanic:	Surfing the Multicore Wave: Processors, Parallelism, and Performance	http://surfmulticore.eventbrite.com/
Stacia Misner:	Languages of BI	http://languagesofbi.eventbrite.com/
Bill Pearson:	Practical Self-Service BI with PowerPivot for Excel	http://selfservicebi.eventbrite.com/
Eddie Wuerch:	The DBA Skills Upgrade Toolkit	http://dbatoolkit.eventbrite.com/

If you are interested in attending these pre-cons send an email by April 30, 2013 to AtlantaMDFPrecons@gmail.com and tell us:

Why you are a good candidate to receive this scholarship
Which sessions you’d like to attend, and why (list multiple sessions in order of preference)
What the session will teach you and how it will help you achieve your goals

The emails will be evaluated by the good folks at Midlands PASS in Columbia, SC. The recipients will be notified by email and announcements made on May 6, 2013.

GOOD LUCK!

P.S. - Don't forget that SQLSaturday #220 offers free* training in addition to the pre-cons!
You can find more information about SQL Saturday #220 at http://www.sqlsaturday.com/220/eventhome.aspx.
View the scheduled sessions at http://www.sqlsaturday.com/220/schedule.aspx and register for them at http://www.sqlsaturday.com/220/register.aspx.

* Registration charges a $10 fee to cover lunch expenses.

Database Mirroring on SQL Server Express Edition

Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk) — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 23:00:39 GMT

Like most SQL Server users I'm rather frustrated by Microsoft's insistence on making the really cool features only available in Enterprise Edition. And it really doesn't help that they changed the licensing for SQL 2012 to be core-based, so now it's like 4 times as expensive! It almost makes you want to go with Oracle. That, and a desire to have Larry Ellison do things to your orifices.

And since they've introduced Availability Groups, and marked database mirroring as deprecated, you'd think they'd make make mirroring available in all editions. Alas…they don't…officially anyway. Thanks to my constant poking around in places I'm not "supposed" to, I've discovered the low-level code that implements database mirroring, and found that it's available in all editions!

It turns out that the query processor in all SQL Server editions prepends a simple check before every edition-specific DDL statement:

IF CAST(SERVERPROPERTY('Edition') as nvarchar(max)) NOT LIKE '%e%e%e% Edition%'
print 'Lame'
else
print 'Cool'

If that statement returns true, it fails. (the print statements are just placeholders) Go ahead and test it on Standard, Workgroup, and Express editions compared to an Enterprise or Developer edition instance (which support everything).

Once again thanks to Argenis Fernandez (b | t) and his awesome sessions on using Sysinternals, I was able to watch the exact process SQL Server performs when setting up a mirror. Surprisingly, it's not actually implemented in SQL Server! Some of it is, but that's something of a smokescreen, the real meat of it is simple filesystem primitives.

The NTFS filesystem supports links, both hard links and symbolic, so that you can create two entries for the same file in different directories and/or different names. You can create them using the MKLINK command in a command prompt:

mklink /D D:\SkyDrive\Data D:\Data
mklink /D D:\SkyDrive\Log D:\Log

This creates a symbolic link from my data and log folders to my Skydrive folder. Any file saved in either location will instantly appear in the other. And since my Skydrive will be automatically synchronized with the cloud, any changes I make will be copied instantly (depending on my internet bandwidth of course).

So what does this have to do with database mirroring? Well, it seems that the mirroring endpoint that you have to create between mirror and principal servers is really nothing more than a Skydrive link. Although it doesn't actually use Skydrive, it performs the same function. So in effect, the following statement:

ALTER DATABASE Mir SET PARTNER='TCP://MyOtherServer.domain.com:5022'

Is turned into:

mklink /D "D:\Data" "\\MyOtherServer.domain.com\5022$"

The 5022$ "port" is actually a hidden system directory on the principal and mirror servers. I haven't quite figured out how the log files are included in this, or why you have to SET PARTNER on both principal and mirror servers, except maybe that mklink has to do something special when linking across servers. I couldn't get the above statement to work correctly, but found that doing mklink to a local Skydrive folder gave me similar functionality.

To wrap this up, all you have to do is the following:

Install Skydrive on both SQL Servers (principal and mirror) and set the local Skydrive folder (D:\SkyDrive in these examples)
On the principal server, run mklink /D on the data and log folders to point to SkyDrive: mklink /D D:\SkyDrive\Data D:\Data
On the mirror server, run the complementary linking: mklink /D D:\Data D:\SkyDrive\Data
Create your database and make sure the files map to the principal data and log folders (D:\Data and D:\Log)
Viola! Your databases are kept in sync on multiple servers!

One wrinkle you will encounter is that the mirror server will show the data and log files, but you won't be able to attach them to the mirror SQL instance while they are attached to the principal. I think this is a bug in the Skydrive, but as it turns out that's fine: you can't access a mirror while it's hosted on the principal either. So you don't quite get automatic failover, but you can attach the files to the mirror if the principal goes offline. It's also not exactly synchronous, but it's better than nothing, and easier than either replication or log shipping with a lot less latency.

I will end this with the obvious "not supported by Microsoft" and "Don't do this in production without an updated resume" spiel that you should by now assume with every one of my blog posts, especially considering the date.

SQL Saturday #220 Atlanta May 2013!

Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk) — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 22:51:19 GMT

If you love SQL Server training and are near the Atlanta area, or just love us so much you're willing to travel here, please come join us for:

SQL SATURDAY #220!

The main event is Saturday, May 18. The event is free, with a $10.00 lunch fee. The main page has more details here: http://www.sqlsaturday.com/220/eventhome.aspx

We are also offering pre-conference sessions on Friday, May 17, by 5 world-renowned presenters:

Denny Cherry:	SQL Server Security	Register!	Site	Twitter
Adam Machanic:	Surfing the Multicore Wave: Processors, Parallelism, and Performance	Register!	Site	Twitter
Stacia Misner:	Languages of BI	Register!	Site	Twitter
Bill Pearson:	Practical Self-Service BI with PowerPivot for Excel	Register!	Site	Twitter
Eddie Wuerch:	The DBA Skills Upgrade Toolkit	Register!	Site	Twitter

We have an early bird registration price of $119 until noon EST Friday, March 22. After that the price goes to $149, a STEAL when you compare it to the PASS Summit price. :)

Please click on the links to register and for more information. You can also follow the hash tag #SQLSatATL on Twitter for more news about this event.

Can't wait to see you all there!

SQL Server: Writing CASE expressions properly when NULLs are involved

Mladen Prajdić — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 20:55:23 GMT

We’ve all written a CASE expression (yes, it’s an expression and not a statement) or two every now and then. But did you know there are actually 2 formats you can write the CASE expression in? This actually bit me when I was trying to add some new functionality to an old stored procedure. In some rare cases the stored procedure just didn’t work correctly. After a quick look it turned out to be a CASE expression problem when dealing with NULLS.

In the first format we make simple “equals to” comparisons to a value:

SELECT CASE <value> 
            WHEN <equals this value> THEN <return this> 
            WHEN <equals this value> THEN <return this> 
            -- ... more WHEN's here
            ELSE <return this>  
       END

Second format is much more flexible since it allows for complex conditions. USE THIS ONE!

SELECT  CASE
             WHEN <value> <compared to> <value> THEN <return this> 
             WHEN <value> <compared to> <value> THEN <return this> 
             -- ... more WHEN's here
             ELSE <return this> 
        END

Now that we know both formats and you know which to use (the second one if that hasn’t been clear enough) here’s an example how the first format WILL make your evaluation logic WRONG.

Run the following code for different values of @i. Just comment out any 2 out of 3 “SELECT @i =” statements.

DECLARE @i INT
SELECT  @i = -1    -- first result
SELECT  @i = 55    -- second result
SELECT  @i = NULL  -- third result


SELECT  @i AS OriginalValue,
        -- first CASE format. DON'T USE THIS!
        CASE @i 
            WHEN -1 THEN '-1' 
            WHEN NULL THEN 'We have a NULL!' 
            ELSE 'We landed in ELSE' 
        END AS DontUseThisCaseFormatValue,        
        -- second CASE format. USE THIS!
        CASE 
            WHEN @i = -1 THEN '-1' 
            WHEN @i IS NULL THEN 'We have a NULL!' 
            ELSE 'We landed in ELSE' 
        END AS UseThisCaseFormatValue

When the value of @i is –1 everything works as expected, since both formats go into the –1 WHEN branch.

When the value of @i is 55 everything again works as expected, since both formats go into the ELSE branch.

When the value of @i is NULL the problems become evident. The first format doesn’t go into the WHEN NULL branch because it makes an equality comparison between two NULLs.
Because a NULL is an unknown value: NULL = NULL is false. That is why the first format goes into the ELSE Branch but the second format correctly handles the proper IS NULL comparison.

Please use the second more explicit format. Your future self will be very grateful to you when he doesn’t have to discover these kinds of bugs.

A Case for Women in Technology

Denise McInerney — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 14:49:02 GMT

Pragmatic Works and the PASS Women in Tech chapter are co-sponsoring a webinar series featuring women speakers.

I presented a session on “A Case for Women in Technology” explaining why we are all affected by the lack of women studying and working in tech. The recording is available here. And here are the slides from that presentation:

The presentation includes a link to a trailer for an upcoming documentary. This short video makes a good case for why we need more women creating technology.

There are many organizations doing good and important work on this issue. Here are some of them:

Here are the publications I referenced in my slides:

Women in IT: The Facts

Why Diversity Matters

Women in IT: By the Numbers

NCWIT Scorecard

From DBA to Data Analyst

Denise McInerney — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 23:57:59 GMT

Cross posted from the PASS Blog

There is a lot changing in the data professional’s world these days. More data is being produced and stored. More enterprises are trying to use that data to improve their products and services and understand their customers better. More data platforms and tools seem to be crowding the market.

For a traditional DBA this can be a confusing and perhaps unsettling time. It’s also a time that offers great opportunity for career growth. I speak from personal experience.

We sometimes refer to the “accidental DBA”, the person who finds herself suddenly responsible for managing the database because she has some other technical skills. While it was not accidental, six months ago I was unexpectedly offered a chance to transition out of my DBA role and become a data analyst. I have since come to view this offer as a gift, though at the time I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it.

Throughout my DBA career I’ve gotten support from my PASS friends and colleagues and they were the first ones I turned to for counsel about this new situation. Everyone was encouraging and I received two pieces of valuable advice: first, leverage what I already know about data and second, work to understand the business’ needs.

Bringing the power of data to bear to solve business problems is really the heart of the job. The challenge is figuring out how to do that.

PASS had been the source of much of my technical training as a DBA, so I naturally started there to begin my Business Intelligence education. Once again the Virtual Chapter webinars, local chapter meetings and SQL Saturdays have been invaluable.

I work in a large company where we are fortunate to have some very talented data scientists and analysts. These colleagues have been generous with their time and advice.

I also took a statistics class through Coursera where I got a refresher in statistics and an introduction to the R programming language.

And that’s not the end of the free resources available to someone wanting to acquire new skills. There are many knowledgeable Business Intelligence and Analytics professionals who teach through their blogs. Every day I can learn something new from one of these experts.

Sometimes we plan our next career move and sometimes it just happens. Either way a database professional who follows industry developments and acquires new skills will be better prepared when change comes.

Take the opportunity to learn something about the changing data landscape and attend a Business Intelligence, Business Analytics or Big Data Virtual Chapter meeting. And if you are moving into this new world of data consider attending the PASS Business Analytics Conference in April where you can meet and learn from those who are already on that road.

It’s been said that “the only thing constant is change.” That’s never been more true for the data professional than it is today. But if you are someone who loves data and grasps its potential you are in the right place at the right time.

Few events I’m speaking at in early 2013

Mladen Prajdić — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 00:34:22 GMT

2013 has started great and the SQL community is already brimming with events. At some of these events you can come say hi. I’ll be glad you do!

These are the events with dates and locations that I know I’ll be speaking at so far.

February 16th: SQL Saturday #198 - Vancouver, Canada

The session I’ll present in Vancouver is

SQL Impossible: Restoring/Undeleting a table

Yes, you read the title right. No, it's not about the usual "one table per partition" and "restore full backup then copy the data over" methods. No, there are no 3rd party tools involved. Just you and your SQL Server. Yes, it's crazy. No, it's not for production purposes. And yes, that's why it's so much fun. Prepare to dive into the world of data pages, log records, deletes, truncates and backups and how it all works together to get your table back from the endless void. Want to know more? Come and see!

This is an advanced level session where we’ll dive into the internals of data pages, transaction log records and page restores.

March 8th-9th: SQL Saturday #194 - Exeter, UK

In Exeter I’ll be presenting twice.

On the first day I’ll have a full day precon titled:

From SQL Traces to Extended Events - The next big switch

This pre-con will give you insight into both of the current tracing technologies in SQL Server. The old SQL Trace which has served us well over the past 10 or so years is on its way out because the overhead and details it produces are no longer enough to deal with today's loads. The new Extended Events are a new lightweight tracing mechanism built directly into the SQLOS thus giving us information SQL Trace just couldn't. They were designed and built with performance in mind and it shows. The new Extended Events are a new lightweight tracing mechanism built directly into the SQLOS thus giving us information SQL Trace just couldn't. They were designed and built with performance in mind and it shows. Mastering Extended Events requires learning at least one new skill: XML querying.

The second session I’ll have on Saturday titled:

SQL Injection from website to SQL Server

SQL Injection is still one of the biggest reasons various websites and applications get hacked. The solution as everyone tells us is simple. Use SQL parameters. But is that enough? In this session we'll look at how would an attacker go about using SQL Injection to gain access to your database, see its schema and data, take over the server, upload files and do various other mischief on your domain.

This is a fun session that always brings out a few laughs in the audience because they didn’t realize what can be done.

April 23rd-25th: NTK conference - Bled, Slovenia (Slovenian website only)

This is a conference with history. This year marks its 18th year running.

It’s a relatively large IT conference that focuses on various Microsoft technologies like .Net, Azure, SQL Server, Exchange, Security, etc…

The main session’s language is Slovenian but this is slowly changing so it’s becoming more interesting for foreign attendees. This year it’s happening in the beautiful town of Bled in the Alps. The scenery alone is worth the visit, wouldn’t you agree?

And this year there are quite a few well known speakers present!

Session title isn’t known yet.

May 2nd-4th: SQL Bits XI – Nottingham, UK

SQL Bits is the largest SQL Server conference in Europe. It’s a 3 day conference with top speakers and content all dedicated to SQL Server.

The session I’ll present here is an hour long version of the precon I’ll give in Exeter.

From SQL Traces to Extended Events - The next big switch

The session description is the same as for the Exeter precon but we'll focus more on how the Extended Events work with only a brief overview of old SQL Trace architecture.

Whoosh: PASS Board Year 1, Q4

Denise McInerney — Sun, 13 Jan 2013 02:14:58 GMT

"Whoosh". That's the sound the last quarter of 2012 made as it rushed by. My first year on the PASS Board is complete, and the last three months of it were probably the busiest.

PASS Summit 2012
Much of October was devoted to preparing for Summit. Every Board member, HQ staffer and dozens of volunteers were busy in the run-up to our flagship event. It takes a lot of work to put on the Summit. The community meetings, first-timers program, keynotes, sessions and that fabulous Community Appreciation party are the result of many hours of preparation.

Virtual Chapters at the Summit
With a lot of help from Karla Landrum, Michelle Nalliah, Lana Montgomery and others at HQ the VCs had a good presence at Summit. We started the week with a VC leaders meeting. I shared some information about the activities and growth during the first part of the year.

From January - September 2012:

The number of VCs increased from 14 to 20
VC membership grew from 55,200 to 80,100
Total attendance at VC meetings increased from 1,480 to 2,198
Been part of PASS Global Growth with language-based VC- including Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese.

We also heard from some VC leaders and volunteers. Ryan Adams (Performance VC) shared his tips for successful marketing of VC events. Amy Lewis (Business Intelligence VC) described how the BI chapter has expanded to support PASS' global growth by finding volunteers to organize events at times that are convenient for people in Europe and Australia. Felipe Ferreira (Portuguese language VC) described the experience of building a user group first in Brazil, then expanding to work with Portuguese-speaking data professionals around the world.

Virtual Chapter leaders and volunteers were in evidence throughout Summit, beginning with the Welcome Reception. For the past several years VCs have had an organized presence at this event, signing up new members and advertising their meetings. Many VC leaders also spent time at the Community Zone. This new addition to the Summit proved to be a vibrant spot were new members and volunteers could network with others and find out how to start a chapter or host a SQL Saturday.

Women In Technology
2012 was the 10th WIT Luncheon to be held at Summit. I was honored to be asked to be on the panel to discuss the topic "Where Have We Been and Where are We Going?" The PASS community has come a long way in our understanding of issues facing women in tech and our support of women in the organization. It was great to hear from panelists Stefanie Higgins and Kevin Kline who were there at the beginning as well as Kendra Little and Jen Stirrup who are part of the progress being made by women in our community today.

Bylaw Changes
The Board spent a good deal of time in 2012 discussing how to move our global growth initiatives forward. An important component of this is a proposed change to how the Board is elected with some seats representing geographic regions. At the end of December we voted on these proposed bylaw changes which have been published for review. The member review and feedback is open until February 8. I encourage all members to review these changes and send any feedback to governance@sqlpass.org In addition to reading the bylaws, I recommend reading Bill Graziano's blog post on the subject.

Business Analytics Conference
At Summit we announced a new event: the PASS Business Analytics Conference. The inaugural event will be April 10-12, 2013 in Chicago. The world of data is changing rapidly. More and more businesses want to extract value and insight from their data. Data professionals who provide these insights or enable others to do so are in demand. The BA Conference offers expert content on predictive analytics, data exploration and visualization, content delivery strategies and more. By holding this new event PASS is participating in important discussions happening in our industry, offering our members more educational value and reaching out to data professionals who are not currently part of our organization.

New Year, New Portfolio
In addition to my work with the Virtual Chapters I am also now responsible for the 24 Hours of PASS portfolio. Since the first 24HOP of 2013 is scheduled for January 30 we started the transition of the portfolio work from Rob Farley to me right after Summit. Work immediately started to secure speakers for the January event. We have also been evaluating webinar platforms that can be used for 24HOP as well as the Virtual Chapters.

Next Up
24 Hours of PASS: Business Analytics Edition will be held on January 30. I'll be there and will moderate one or two sessions. The 24HOP topics are a sneak peek into the type of content that will be offered at the Business Analytics Conference. I hope to see some of you there.

The Virtual Chapters have hit the ground running in 2013; many of them have events scheduled. The Application Development VC is getting restarted and a new Business Analytics VC will be starting soon. Check out the lineup and join the VCs that interest you. And watch the Events page and Connector for announcements of upcoming meetings.

At the end of January I will be attending a Board meeting in Seattle, and February 23 I will be at SQL Saturday #177 in Silicon Valley.

PASS: Bylaw Change 2013

Bill Graziano — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 19:20:51 GMT

PASS launched a Global Growth Initiative in the Summer of 2011 with the appointment of three international Board advisors. Since then we’ve thought and talked extensively about how we make PASS more relevant to our members outside the US and Canada. We’ve collected much of that discussion in our Global Growth site. You can find vision documents, plans, governance proposals, feedback sites, and transcripts of Twitter chats and town hall meetings. We also address these plans at the Board Q&A during the 2012 Summit.

One of the biggest changes coming out of this process is around how we elect Board members. And that requires a change to the bylaws. We published the proposed bylaw changes as a red-lined document so you can clearly see the changes.

Our goal in these bylaw changes was to address the changes required by the global growth initiatives, conduct a legal review of the document and address other minor issues in the document. There are numerous small wording changes throughout the document. For example, we replaced every reference of “The Corporation” with the word “PASS” so it now reads “PASS is organized…”.

Board Composition

The biggest change in these bylaw changes is how the Board is composed and elected. This discussion starts in section VI.2. This section now says that some elected directors will come from geographic regions. I think this is the best way to make sure we give all of our members a voice in the leadership of the organization. The key parts of this section are:

The remaining Directors (i.e. the non-Officer Directors and non-Vendor Appointed Directors) shall be elected by the voting membership (“Elected Directors”). Elected Directors shall include representatives of defined PASS regions (“Regions”) as set forth below (“Regional Directors”) and at minimum one (1) additional Director-at-Large whose selection is not limited by region. Regional Directors shall include, but are not limited to, two (2) seats for the Region covering Canada and the United States of America.

Additional Regions for the purpose of electing additional Regional Directors and additional Director-at-Large seats for the purpose of expanding the Board shall be defined by a majority vote of the current Board of Directors and must be established prior to the public call for nominations in the general election. Previously defined Regions and seats approved by the Board of Directors shall remain in effect and can only be modified by a 2/3 majority vote by the then current Board of Directors.

Currently PASS has six At-Large Directors elected by the members. These changes allow for a Regional Director position that is elected by the members but must come from a particular region. It also stipulates that there must always be at least one Director-at-Large who can come from any region.

We also understand that PASS is currently a very US-centric organization. Our Summit is held in America, roughly half our chapters are in the US and Canada and most of the Board members over the last ten years have come from America. We wanted to reflect that by making sure that our US and Canadian volunteers would continue to play a significant role by ensuring that two Regional seats are reserved specifically for Canada and the US.

Other than that, the bylaws don’t create any specific regional seats. These rules allow us to create Regional Director seats but don’t require it. We haven’t fully discussed what the criteria will be in order for a region to have a seat designated for it or how many regions there will be. In our discussions we’ve broadly discussed regions for

United States and Canada
Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA)
Australia, New Zealand and Asia (also known as Asia Pacific or APAC)
Mexico, South America, and Central America (LATAM)

As you can see, our thinking is that there will be a few large regions. I’ve also considered a non-North America region that we can gradually split into the regions above as our membership grows in those areas.

The regions will be defined by a policy document that will be published prior to the elections. I’m hoping that over the next year we can begin to publish more of what we do as Board-approved policy documents.

While the bylaws only require a single non-region specific At-large Director, I would expect we would always have two. That way we can have one in each election. I think it’s important that we always have one seat open that anyone who is eligible to run for the Board can contest. The Board is required to have any regions defined prior to the start of the election process.

Board Elections – Regional Seats

We spent a lot of time discussing how the elections would work for these Regional Director seats. Ultimately we decided that the simplest solution is that every PASS member should vote for every open seat. Section VIII.3 reads:

Candidates who are eligible (i.e. eligible to serve in such capacity subject to the criteria set forth herein or adopted by the Board of Directors) shall be designated to fill open Board seats in the following order of priority on the basis of total votes received: (i) full term Regional Director seats, (ii) full term Director-at-Large seats, (iii) not full term (vacated) Regional Director seats, (iv) not full term (vacated) Director-at-Large seats. For the purposes of clarity, because of eligibility requirements, it is contemplated that the candidates designated to the open Board seats may not receive more votes than certain other candidates who are not selected to the Board.

We debated whether to have multiple ballots or one single ballot. Multiple ballot elections get complicated quickly. Let’s say we have a ballot for US/Canada and one for Region 2. After that we’d need a mechanism to merge those two together and come up with the winner of the at-large seat or have another election for the at-large position.

We think the best way to do this is a single ballot and putting the highest vote getters into the most restrictive seats. Let’s look at an example:

There are seats open for Region 1, Region 2 and at-large. The election results are as follows:

Candidate A (eligible for Region 1) – 550 votes
Candidate B (eligible for Region 1) – 525 votes
Candidate C (eligible for Region 1) – 475 votes
Candidate D (eligible for Region 2) – 125 votes
Candidate E (eligible for Region 2) – 75 votes

In this case, Candidate A is the winner for Region 1 and is assigned that seat. Candidate D is the winner for Region 2 and is assigned that seat. The at-large seat is filled by the high remaining vote getter which is Candidate B.

The key point to understand is that we may have a situation where a person with a lower vote total is elected to a regional seat and a person with a higher vote total is excluded. This will be true whether we had multiple ballots or a single ballot.

Board Elections – Vacant Seats

The other change to the election process is for vacant Board seats. The actual changes are sprinkled throughout the document.

Previously we didn’t have a mechanism that allowed for an election of a Board seat that we knew would be vacant in the future. The most common case is when a Board members moves to an Officer role in the middle of their term. One of the key changes is to allow the number of votes members have to match the number of open seats. This allows each voter to express their preference on all open seats. This only applies when we know about the opening prior to the call for nominations. This all means that if there’s a seat will be open at the start of the next Board term, and we know about it prior to the call for nominations, we can include that seat in the elections. Ultimately, the aim is to have PASS members decide who sits on the Board in as many situations as possible.

We discussed the option of changing the bylaws to just take next highest vote-getter in all other cases. I think that’s wrong for the following reasons:

All voters aren’t able to express an opinion on all candidates. If there are five people running for three seats, you can only vote for three. You have no way to express your preference between #4 and #5.
Different candidates may have different information about the number of seats available. A person may learn that a Board member plans to resign at the end of the year prior to that information being made public. They may understand that the top four vote getters will end up on the Board while the rest of the members believe there are only three openings. This may affect someone’s decision to run. I don’t think this creates a transparent, fair election.
Board members may use their knowledge of the election results to decide whether to remain on the Board or not. Admittedly this one is unlikely but I don’t want to create a situation where this accusation can be leveled.

I think the majority of vacancies in the future will be handled through elections. The bylaw section quoted above also indicates that partial term vacancies will be filled after the full term seats are filled.

Removing Directors

Section VI.7 on removing directors has always had a clause that allowed members to remove an elected director. We also had a clause that allowed appointed directors to be removed. We added a clause that allows the Board to remove for cause any director with a 2/3 majority vote. The updated text reads:

Any Director may be removed for cause by a 2/3 majority vote of the Board of Directors whenever in its judgment the best interests of PASS would be served thereby.

Notwithstanding the foregoing, the authority of any Director to act as in an official capacity as a Director or Officer of PASS may be suspended by the Board of Directors for cause.

Cause for suspension or removal of a Director shall include but not be limited to failure to meet any Board-approved performance expectations or the presence of a reason for suspension or dismissal as listed in Addendum B of these Bylaws.

The first paragraph is updated and the second and third are unchanged (except cleaning up language). If you scroll down and look at Addendum B of these bylaws you find the following:

Cause for suspension or dismissal of a member of the Board of Directors may include:

Inability to attend Board meetings on a regular basis.

Inability or unwillingness to act in a capacity designated by the Board of Directors.

Failure to fulfill the responsibilities of the office.

Inability to represent the Region elected to represent

Failure to act in a manner consistent with PASS's Bylaws and/or policies.

Misrepresentation of responsibility and/or authority.

Misrepresentation of PASS.

Unresolved conflict of interests with Board responsibilities.

Breach of confidentiality.

The bold line about your inability to represent your region is what we added to the bylaws in this revision. We also added a clause to section VII.3 allowing the Board to remove an officer. That clause is much less restrictive. It doesn’t require cause and only requires a simple majority.

The Board of Directors may remove any Officer whenever in their judgment the best interests of PASS shall be served by such removal.

Other

There are numerous other small changes throughout the document.

Proxy voting. The laws around how members and Board members proxy votes are specific in Illinois law. PASS is an Illinois corporation and is subject to Illinois laws. We changed section IV.5 to come into compliance with those laws. Specifically this says you can only vote through a proxy if you have a written proxy through your authorized attorney.

English language proficiency. As we increase our global footprint we come across more members that aren’t native English speakers. The business of PASS is conducted in English and it’s important that our Board members speak English. If we get big enough to afford translators, we may be able to relax this but right now we need English language skills for effective Board members.

Committees. The language around committees in section IX is old and dated. Our lawyers advised us to clean it up. This section specifically applies to any committees that the Board may form outside of portfolios. We removed the term limits, quorum and vacancies clause. We don’t currently have any committees that this would apply to. The Nominating Committee is covered elsewhere in the bylaws.

Electronic Votes. The change allows the Board to vote via email but the results must be unanimous. This is to conform with Illinois state law.

Immediate Past President. There was no mechanism to fill the IPP role if an outgoing President chose not to participate. We changed section VII.8 to allow the Board to invite any previous President to fill the role by majority vote.

Nominations Committee. We’ve opened the language to allow for the transparent election of the Nominations Committee as outlined by the 2011 Election Review Committee.

Revocation of Charters. The language surrounding the revocation of charters for local groups was flagged by the lawyers. We have allowed for the local user group to make all necessary payment before considering returning of items to PASS if required.

Bylaw notification. We’ve spent countless meetings working on these bylaws with the intent to not open them again any time in the near future. Should the bylaws be opened again, we have included a clause ensuring that the PASS membership is involved. I’m proud that the Board has remained committed to transparency and accountability to members. This clause will require that same level of commitment in the future even when all the current Board members have rolled off.

I think that covers everything. I’d encourage you to look through the red-line document and see the changes. It’s helpful to look at the language that’s being removed and the language that’s being added. I’m happy to answer any questions here or you can email them to feedback@sqlpass.org.

SSMS Tools Pack 2.5.3 is out with bug fixes and improved licensing

Mladen Prajdić — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 12:42:54 GMT

Licensing for SSMS Tools Pack 2.5 has been quite a hit and I received some awesome feedback.
The version 2.5.3 contains a few bug fixes and desired licensing improvements.
Changes include more licensing options, prices in Euros because of book keeping reasons (don't you just love those :))
and generally easier purchase and licensing process for users.

Licensing now offers four options:

Per machine license. (€25)
Perfect if you do all your work from a single machine.
Plus one OS reinstall activation.

Personal license (€75)
Up to 4 machine activations.
Plus 2 OS reinstall activations and
any number of virtual machine activations.

Team license (€240)
Up to 10 machine activations.
Plus 4 OS reinstall activations and
any number of virtual machine activations.

Enterprise license (€350+)
For more than 10 machine activations
any number of virtual machine activations.

30 days license.
Time based demo license bound to a machine.

You can view all the details on the Licensing page .

If you want to receive email notifications when new version of SSMS Tools Pack is out you can do that on the Main page or on the Download page .

Version 2.7 is expected in the first half of February and won't support SSMS 2005 and 2005 Express anymore.

Enjoy it!

Before the Summit of 2012

Ajarn Mark Caldwell — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 06:11:59 GMT

Today, Monday, was the first day of the PASS Summit Preconference training events, but instead I spent the day at the free SQL in the City event put on by Red Gate. For me this was not a financial decision (pre-con sessions cost extra above the general Summit registration) but rather a matter of interest. I had already included money for pre-cons in this year’s training budget, but none of them really stood out to me, so even if the Red-Gate event were not going on at the same time, I probably would not have gone to any pre-cons this year. However, the topics being presented at the SQL in the City event were of great interest to me. There promised to be good information on Continuous Integration and automated deployment of database changes, which lately has been a real hot topic at my work. And indeed, Red-Gate announced the release of a new tool (still in Early Access Program…a.k.a. Beta) which is called the Deployment Manager. Since we are in the middle of a TFS implementation project, it will be interesting to see how this plays out and compares to what we put together with the automated builds in TFS. But, as I understand it, the primary focus of Deployment Manager is not to be the Build process (Red Gate uses JetBrains’ Team City for that in their shop) but rather to aid in the deployment of those build packages, as well as providing easy rollback and a good visualization of which versions of software are in which environments. It looks promising and I’ve already downloaded the installer package to play with it later.

Overall, I was quite impressed with the SQL in the City event. Having heard many current and past members of the PASS Board of Directors describe the challenges of putting on a large conference, and the growing pains that the PASS Summit has gone through, I am even more impressed that the Red Gate event ran as smoothly as it did. And it is quite impressive the amount of money that Red Gate must have spent given that this was a no-charge event to attend, they had a very nice hot lunch, and the after-event drinks celebration. Well done, folks!

Of course it was great to hear from a variety of speakers. Today I listened to some folks from Red Gate like Grant Fritchey (blog | @GFritchey) and David Atkinson (Product Manager for SQL Source Control and now the Deployment Manager tool set); and also Brent Ozar (blog | @BrentO) and Buck Woody (blog | @BuckWoody). By the way, if you have never seen either Brent or Buck speak, you really should. Different styles, but both are very entertaining and educational at the same time. I love Buck’s sense of humor (here’s a tip…don’t be late to Buck’s session or you’ll become part of the presentation) and I praise Brent’s slides. Brent’s style very much reminds me of that espoused by Garr Reynolds on his Presentation Zen blog (and book) and I am impressed that he can make a technical presentation so engaging.

It was a great day, a great way to kick off the week, and I am excited to get into the full Summit!

In the Groove: PASS Board Year 1, Q3

Denise McInerney — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 23:01:26 GMT

It's nine months into my first year on the PASS Board and I feel like I've found my rhythm. I've accomplished one of the goals I set out for the year and have made progress on others. Here's a recap of the last few months.

Anti-Harassment Policy & Process Completed

In April I began work on a Code of Conduct for the PASS Summit. The Board had several good discussions and various PASS members provided feedback. You can read more about that in this blog post. Since the document was focused on issues of harassment we renamed it the "Anti-Harassment Policy " and it was approved by the Board in August.

The next step was to refine the guideliness and process for enforcement of the AHP. A subcommittee worked on this and presented an update to the Board at the September meeting. You can read more about that in this post, and you can find the process document here.

Global Growth

Expanding PASS' reach and making the organization relevant to SQL Server communities around the world has been a focus of the Board's work in 2012. We took the Global Growth initiative out to the community for feedback, and everyone on the Board participated, via Twitter chats, Town Hall meetings, feedback forums and in-person discussions. This community participation helped shape and refine our plans.

Implementing the vision for Global Growth goes across all portfolios. The Virtual Chapters are well-positioned to help the organization move forward in this area. One outcome of the Global Growth discussions with the community is the expansion of two of the VCs from country-specific to language-specific. Thanks to the leadership in Brazil & Mexico for taking the lead here. I look forward to continued success for the Portuguese- and Spanish-language Virtual Chapters. Together with the Global Chinese VC PASS is off to a good start in making the VC's truly global.

Virtual Chapters

The VCs continue to grow and expand. Volunteers recently rebooted the Azure and Virutalization VCs, and a new Education VC will be launching soon. Every week VCs offer excellent free training on a variety of topics. It's the dedication of the VC leaders and volunteers that make all this possible and I thank them for it.

Board meeting

The Board had an in-person meeting in September in San Diego, CA.. As usual we covered a number of topics including governance changes to support Global Growth, the upcoming Summit, 2013 events and the (then) upcoming PASS election.

Next Up

Much of the last couple of months has been focused on preparing for the PASS Summit in Seattle Nov. 6-9. I'll be there all week; feel free to stop me if you have a question or concern, or just to introduce yourself.

Here are some of the places you can find me:

VC Leaders Meeting
- Tuesday 8:00 am the VC leaders will have a meeting. We'll review some of the year's highlights and talk about plans for the next year
Welcome Reception
- The VCs will be at the Welcome Reception in the new VC Lounge. Come by Tuesday evening, learn more about what the VCs have to offer and meet others who share your interests.
Exceptional DBA Awards Party
- I'm looking forward to seeing PASS Women in Tech VC leader Meredith Ryan receive her award at this event sponsored by Red Gate Tuesday after the Welcome Reception.
Session Presentation
- I will be presenting a spotlight session entitled "Stop Bad Data in Its OLTP Tracks" on Wednesday at 3:00 p.m.
Exhibitor Reception
- This reception Wednesday evening in the Expo Hall is a great opportunity to learn more about tools and solutions that can help you in your job.
Women in Tech Luncheon
- This year marks the 10th WIT Luncheon at PASS. I'm honored to be on the panel with Stefanie Higgins, Kevin Kline, Kendra Little and Jen Stirrup. This event is on Thursday at 11:30.
Community Appreciation Party
- Thursday evening don't miss this event thanking all of you for everthing you do for PASS and the community. This year we will be at the Experience Music Project and it promises to be a fun party.
Board Q & A
- Friday 9:45-11:15 am the members of the Board will be available to answer your questions. If you have a question for us, or want to hear what other members are thinking about, come by room 401 Friday morning.

SQL Server Configuration Scripting Utility Release 9

Bill Graziano — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 22:59:56 GMT

There’s another update to my little utility to script a SQL Server’s configuration. I use this for two purposes. First, I use it to keep my database mirroring servers up to date. Second, I capture the output in a version control system and keep that for historical reference.

In release 3.0.9 I made the following changes:

Rewrote the encrypted trigger scripting. It will now list the encrypted triggers in a comment in the table script but can’t actually script them.
It now scripts any server event notifications.
You can script a single database using the /scriptdb flag. Please note that it will also script the instance and system databases when it does this.
It will script any user-defined endpoints. This will capture your mirroring endpoints and more importantly any service broker endpoints.
It will gracefully skip database mail on the Express Edition.

It still doesn’t support SQL Server 2012. I think that’s the next feature to add though.

SQL Source Control Contest

Ajarn Mark Caldwell — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 05:42:46 GMT

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know that I have written several posts about how important I think it is to protect your source code, to version it, and in particular, all the aspects I like about Red Gate’s SQL Source Control product. But for a moment, let’s take a break from my writing and I want to hear your stories. What nightmare situation are you in, or can you imagine, where source control for your database would save the world. Or maybe your life is not so dramatic, but you do see a challenge that, if you just had a good tool like SQL Source Control, it would go much smoother. What’s your pain? You have read my writings, now tell me your story, and be in the running for a free copy of SQL Source Control from Red Gate.

Yes, that’s right. Although I am just a fan of Red Gate, they have authorized me to give out a handful of licenses to blog readers who are willing to share their story by posting a comment to this blog entry. Simply add your comment below (be sure to include a valid email address in the box that asks for that) to be entered. The contest starts immediately and over the next few days, the best stories will win.

SSMS Tools Pack 2.5 is out. Added support for SQL Server 2012.

Mladen Prajdić — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 19:57:06 GMT

Because I wanted to make SSMS Tools Pack as solid as possible for SSMS 2012 there are no new features only bug fixes and speed improvements.

I am planning new awesome features for the next version so be on the lookout.

The biggest change is that SSMS Tools Pack for SSMS 2012 is no longer free. For previous SSMS versions it is still free.

Licensing now offers following options:

Per machine license. ($29.99)
Perfect if you do all your work from a single machine.
This license is valid per major release of SSMS Tools Pack
(e.g. v2.x, v3.x, v4.x).

Fully transferable license valid for 3 months. ($99.99)
Perfect for work across many machines.
It's not bound to a machine or an SSMS Tools Pack version.

30 days license.
Time based demo license bound to a machine.

You can view all the details on the Licensing page.

If you want to receive email notifications when new version of SSMS Tools Pack is out you can do that on the Main page or on the Download page.

This is also the last version to support SSMS 2005 and 2005 Express.

Enjoy it!

What Did You Do? is a Bad Question

Ajarn Mark Caldwell — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 06:20:51 GMT

Brian Moran (blog | Twitter) did a great presentation today for the PASS Professional Development Virtual Chapter on The Art of Questions. One of the points that Brian made was that there are good questions and bad (or at least not-as-good) questions. Good questions tend to open-up the conversation and engender positive reactions (perhaps even trust and respect) between the participants; and bad questions tend to close-down a conversation either through the narrow list of possible responses (e.g. strictly Yes/No) or through the negative reactions they can produce. And this explains why I so frequently had problems troubleshooting real-time problems with users in the past. I’ll explain that in more detail below, but before we go on, let me recommend that you watch the recording of Brian’s presentation to learn why the question Why is often problematic in the U.S. and yet we so often resort to it.

For a short portion (3 years) of my career, I taught basic computer skills and Office applications in an adult vocational school, and this gave me ample opportunity to do live troubleshooting of user challenges with computers. And like many people who ended up in computer related jobs, I also have had numerous times where I was called upon by less computer-savvy individuals to help them with some challenge they were having, whether it was part of my job or not. One of the things that I noticed, especially during my time as a teacher, was that when I was helping somebody, typically the first question I would ask them was, “What did you do?” This seemed to me like a good way to start my detective work trying to figure out what happened, what went wrong, how to fix it, and how to help the person avoid it again in the future. I always asked it in a polite tone of voice as I was just trying to gather the facts before diving in deeper. However; 99.999% of the time, I always got the same answer, “Nothing!” For a long time this frustrated me because (remember I’m in detective mode at that point) I knew it could not possibly be true. They HAD to have done SOMETHING…just tell me what were the last actions you took before this problem presented itself. But no, they always stuck with “Nothing”. At which point, with frustration growing, and not a little bit of disdain for their lack of helpfulness, I would usually ask them to move aside while I took over their machine and got them out of whatever they had gotten themselves into. After a while I just grew used to the fact that this was the answer I would usually receive, but I always kept asking because for the .001% of the people who would actually tell me, I could then help them understand what went wrong and how to avoid it in the future.

Now, after hearing Brian’s talk, I understand what the problem was. Even though I meant to just be in an information gathering mode, the words I was using, “What did YOU do?” have such a strong negative connotation that people would instinctively go into defense-mode and stop sharing information that might make them look bad. Many of them probably were not even consciously aware that they had gone on the defensive, but the self-preservation instinct, especially self-preservation of the ego, is so strong that people would end up there without even realizing it.

So, if “What did you do” is a bad question, what would have been better? Well, one suggestion that Brian makes in his talk is something along the lines of, “Can you tell me what led up to this?” or “what was happening on the computer right before this came up?” It’s subtle, but the point is to take the focus off of the person and their behavior; instead depersonalizing it and talk about events from more of a 3rd-party observer point of view. With this approach, people will be more likely to talk about what the computer did and what they did in response to it without feeling the interrogation spotlight is on them. They are also more likely to mention other events that occurred around the same time that may or may not be related, but which could certainly help you troubleshoot a larger problem if it is not just user actions. And that is the ultimate goal of your asking the questions. So yes, it does matter how you ask the question; and there are such things as good questions and bad questions. Excellent topic Brian! Thanks for getting the thinking gears churning!

(Cross-posted to the Professional Development Virtual Chapter blog.)

SQL Saturday #162 Cambridge

Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk) — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 22:21:38 GMT

Despite the efforts of American Airlines, this past weekend I attended the first SQL Saturday in the UK! Hosted by the SQLCambs Chapter of PASS and organized by Mark (b|t) & Lorraine Broadbent, ably assisted by John Martin (b|t), Mark Pryce-Maher (b|t) and other folks whose names I've unfortunately forgotten, it was held at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, which is completely surrounded by Cambridge University.

On Friday, they presented 3 pre-conference sessions given by the brilliant American Cloud & DBA Guru, Buck Woody (b|t), the brilliant Danish SQL Server Internals Guru, Mark Rasmussen (b|t), and the brilliant Scottish Business Intelligence Guru and recent Outstanding Pass Volunteer, Jen Stirrup (b|t). While I would have loved to attend any of their pre-cons (having seen them present several times already), finances and American Airlines ultimately made that impossible. But not to worry, I caught up with them during the regular sessions and at the speaker dinner. And I got back the money they all owed me. (Actually I owed Mark some money)

The schedule was jam-packed even with only 4 tracks, there were 8 regular slots, a lunch session for sponsor presentations, and a 15 minute keynote given by Buck Woody, who besides giving an excellent history of SQL Server at Microsoft (and before), also explained the source of the "unknown contact" image that appears in Outlook. Hint: it's not Buck himself.

Amazingly, (and against all better judgment, ;) they allowed me to present at SQL Saturday 162! I did a 5 minute Lightning Talk on Regular Expressions in SSMS. I then did a regular 50 minute session on Constraints. You can download the content for the regular session at that link, and for the regular expression presentation here.

I had a great time and had a great audience for both of my sessions. You would never have guessed this was the first event for the organizers, everything went very smoothly, especially for the number of attendees and the relative smallness of the space. The event sponsors also deserve a lot of credit for making themselves fit in a small area and for staying through the entire event until the giveaways at the very end.

Overall this was one of the best SQL Saturdays I've ever attended and I have to congratulate Mark B, Lorraine, John, Mark P-M, and all the volunteers and speakers for making this an astoundingly hard act to follow! Well done!

T-SQL Tuesday #34: Help! I Need Somebody!

Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk) — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 15:02:59 GMT

Welcome everyone to T-SQL Tuesday Episode 34! When last we tuned in, Mike Fal (b|t) hosted Trick Shots. These highlighted techniques or tricks that you figured out on your own which helped you understand SQL Server better.

This month, I'm asking you to look back this past week, year, century, or hour...to a time when you COULDN'T figure it out. When you were stuck on a SQL Server problem and you had to seek help.

In the beginning...

SQL Server has changed a lot since I started with it. <Cranky Old Guy> Back in my day, Books Online was neither. There were no blogs. Google was the third-place search site. There were perhaps two or three community forums where you could ask questions. (Besides the Microsoft newsgroups...which you had to access with Usenet. And endure the wrath of...Celko.) Your "training" was reading a book, made from real dead trees, that you bought from your choice of brick-and-mortar bookstore. And except for your local user groups, there were no conferences, seminars, SQL Saturdays, or any online video hookups where you could interact with a person. You'd have to call Microsoft Support...on the phone...a LANDLINE phone. And none of this "SQL Family" business!</Cranky Old Guy>

Even now, with all these excellent resources available, it's still daunting for a beginner to seek help for SQL Server. The product is roughly 1247.4523 times larger than it was 15 years ago, and it's simply impossible to know everything about it.* So whether you are a beginner, or a seasoned pro of over a decade's experience, what do you do when you need help on SQL Server?

That's so meta...

In the spirit of offering help, here are some suggestions for your topic:

Tell us about a person or SQL Server community who have been helpful to you. It can be about a technical problem, or not, e.g. someone who volunteered for your local SQL Saturday. Sing their praises! Let the world know who they are!
Do you have any tricks for using Books Online? Do you use the locally installed product, or are you completely online with BOL/MSDN/Technet, and why?
If you've been using SQL Server for over 10 years, how has your help-seeking changed? Are you using Twitter, StackOverflow, MSDN Forums, or another resource that didn't exist when you started? What made you switch?
Do you spend more time helping others than seeking help? What motivates you to help, and how do you contribute?
Structure your post along the lyrics to The Beatles song Help! Audio or video renditions are particularly welcome! Lyrics must include reference to SQL Server terminology or community, and performances must be in your voice or include you playing an instrument.

These are just suggestions, you are free to write whatever you like. Bonus points if you can incorporate ALL of these into a single post. (Or you can do multiple posts, we're flexible like that.) Help us help others by showing how others helped you!

Legalese, Your Rights, Yada yada...

If you would like to participate in T-SQL Tuesday please be sure to follow the rules below:

Your blog post must be published between Tuesday, September 11, 2012 00:00:00 GMT and Wednesday, September 12, 2012 00:00:00 GMT.
Include the T-SQL Tuesday logo (above) and hyperlink it back to this post.
If you don’t see your post in trackbacks, add the link to the comments below.

If you are on Twitter please tweet your blog using the #TSQL2sDay hashtag. I can be contacted there as @sql_r, in case you have questions or problems with comments/trackback. I'll have a follow-up post listing all the contributions as soon as I can.

Thank you all for participating, and special thanks to Adam Machanic (b|t) for all his help and for continuing this series!

The Winds of Change are a Blowin’

Ajarn Mark Caldwell — Sun, 02 Sep 2012 05:57:25 GMT

For six years I have been an avid and outspoken fan and paying customer of SourceGear products…from Vault to Dragnet to Fortress and on to Vault Professional, but that is all changing now. Not the fan part, but the paying customer part. I’m still a huge fan. I think that SourceGear does a great job with their product and support has been fantastic when needed (which is not very often). I think that Eric Sink has done a fine job building a quality company and products, and I appreciate his contributions to the tech community through this blogging and books. I still think their products are high quality and do a fantastic job of what they do. But there’s the rub…what they do is no longer enough for me.

As I have rebuilt our development team over the last couple of years, and we have begun to investigate Scrum and Kanban, I realize that I need more visibility into the progress of the team. I need better project management tools, and this is where Vault Professional lags behind several other tools. Granted, in the latest release (Vault 6.0) they added a nice time tracking feature, but I want more. (Note, I did contact SourceGear about my quest for more, but apparently, the rest of their customer base has not been clamoring for this and so they have not built it. Granted, I wasn’t clamoring for it either until just recently, but unfortunately for SourceGear, I want it now and don’t want to wait for them to build it into their system.)

Ironically, it was SourceGear themselves who started to turn me on to the possibilities of other tools. They built a limited integration with Axosoft OnTime which I read about several times on their support site (I used to regularly read and occasionally comment on their Support Forum). I decided to check out OnTime and was very impressed with the tool for work item tracking and project management (not to mention their great Scrum Master in 10 Minutes video). I fell in love with the capabilities of OnTime. Unfortunately, the integration with Vault for source control management was, as I mentioned, limited. I could have forfeited the integration between work items and source code, but there is too much benefit to linking check-ins to work items for me to give that up. So then I did what was previously unthinkable for me, I considered switching not just the work tracking tool, but also the source code management tool. This was really stepping outside my comfort zone because source code is Gold, and not to be trifled with. When you find a good weapon to protect your gold, stick with it.

I looked at Git and Tortoise SVN, but the integration methods for those was pretty rough compared to what I was used to. The recommended tool from Axosoft’s point of view appeared to be RocketSVN, but I really wasn’t sure I wanted to go the “flavor of Subversion” route. Then I started thinking about that other tool I liked back when I first chose to go with Vault, but couldn’t afford: Team Foundation Server. And what do you know…Microsoft has not only radically improved it over that version from back in 2006, but they also came to their senses about how it should be licensed, and it is much more affordable now. So I started looking into the latest capabilities in the 2012 version, and I fell in love all over again.

I really went deep on checking out the tools. I watched numerous webcasts from Microsoft partners, went to a beta preview on Microsoft’s campus, and watched a lot of Channel 9 videos on the new ALM features (oooh…shiny). Frankly, I was very impressed with the capabilities of the newest version, and figured this was probably our direction. As an interesting twist of fate, one of my employees crossed paths with an ALM Consultant from Northwest Cadence, a local Microsoft Partner, and one of the companies that produced several of the webcasts that I had been watching. So I gave Bryon a call and started grilling him to see if he really knew anything or was just another guy who couldn’t find a job so he called himself a consultant. It turns out Bryon actually knows a lot, especially in an area that was becoming a frustration point for us: Branching strategies and automated builds (that’s probably a whole separate blog entry). As we talked, Bryon suggested we look into doing a DTDPS (Developer Tools Deployment Planning Services) session with his company. This is a service that can be paid for by Microsoft Enterprise Agreement planning services credits or SA training benefits, and, again, coincidentally, we had several that were just about to expire, so I put them to good use.

The DTDPS sessions were great; and Bryon, Rick, and the rest of the folks at Northwest Cadence have been a pleasure to work with. We have just purchased a new server for our TFS rollout and are planning the steps and options right now. This is still a big project ahead of us to not only install and configure TFS, but also to load all of our source code (many different systems, not just one program) and transition to the new way of life with TFS, but I am convinced that it is the right move for my team at this point in time. We need the new capabilities that are in alignment with Scrum and Kanban methodologies in order to more efficiently manage all the different projects that we have going on at one time.

I would still wholeheartedly endorse SourceGear’s products and Axosoft’s OnTime for those whose needs are met by those tools, but for me and my team, I think that TFS is the right fit, and I am looking forward to the change.

T-SQL Tuesday #33: Trick Shots: Undocumented, Underdocumented, and Unknown Conspiracies!

Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk) — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 23:28:44 GMT

Mike Fal (b | t) is hosting this month's T-SQL Tuesday on Trick Shots. I love this choice because I've been preoccupied with sneaky/tricky/evil SQL Server stuff for a long time and have been presenting on it for the past year. Mike's directives were "Show us a cool trick or process you developed…It doesn’t have to be useful", which most of my blogging definitely fits, and "Tell us what you learned from this trick…tell us how it gave you insight in to how SQL Server works", which is definitely a new concept. I've done a lot of reading and watching on SQL Server Internals and even attended training, but sometimes I need to go explore on my own, using my own tools and techniques. It's an itch I get every few months, and, well, it sure beats workin'.

I've found some people to be intimidated by SQL Server's internals, and I'll admit there are A LOT of internals to keep track of, but there are tons of excellent resources that clearly document most of them, and show how knowing even the basics of internals can dramatically improve your database's performance. It may seem like rocket science, or even brain surgery, but you don't have to be a genius to understand it.

Although being an "evil genius" can help you learn some things they haven't told you about. ;)

This blog post isn't a traditional "deep dive" into internals, it's more of an approach to find out how a program works. It utilizes an extremely handy tool from an even more extremely handy suite of tools, Sysinternals. I'm not the only one who finds Sysinternals useful for SQL Server: Argenis Fernandez (b | t), Microsoft employee and former T-SQL Tuesday host, has an excellent presentation on how to troubleshoot SQL Server using Sysinternals, and I highly recommend it. Argenis didn't cover the Strings.exe utility, but I'll be using it to "hack" the SQL Server executable (DLL and EXE) files.

Please note that I'm not promoting software piracy or applying these techniques to attack SQL Server via internal knowledge. This is strictly educational and doesn't reveal any proprietary Microsoft information. And since Argenis works for Microsoft and demonstrated Sysinternals with SQL Server, I'll just let him take the blame for it. :P (The truth is I've used Strings.exe on SQL Server before I ever met Argenis.)

Once you download and install Strings.exe you can run it from the command line. For our purposes we'll want to run this in the Binn folder of your SQL Server instance (I'm referencing SQL Server 2012 RTM):

cd "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL11\MSSQL\Binn"
C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL11\MSSQL\Binn> strings *sql*.dll > sqldll.txt
C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL11\MSSQL\Binn> strings *sql*.exe > sqlexe.txt

I've limited myself to DLLs and EXEs that have "sql" in their names. There are quite a few more but I haven't examined them in any detail. (Homework assignment for you!)

If you run this yourself you'll get 2 text files, one with all the extracted strings from every SQL DLL file, and the other with the SQL EXE strings. You can open these in Notepad, but you're better off using Notepad++, EditPad, Emacs, Vim or another more powerful text editor, as these will be several megabytes in size.

And when you do open it…you'll find…a TON of gibberish. (If you think that's bad, just try opening the raw DLL or EXE file in Notepad. And by the way, don't do this in production, or even on a running instance of SQL Server.) Even if you don't clean up the file, you can still use your editor's search function to find a keyword like "SELECT" or some other item you expect to be there. As dumb as this sounds, I sometimes spend my lunch break just scanning the raw text for anything interesting. I'm boring like that.

Sometimes though, having these files available can lead to some incredible learning experiences. For me the most recent time was after reading Joe Sack's post on non-parallel plan reasons. He mentions a new SQL Server 2012 execution plan element called NonParallelPlanReason, and demonstrates a query that generates "MaxDOPSetToOne". Joe (formerly on the Microsoft SQL Server product team, so he knows this stuff) mentioned that this new element was not currently documented and tried a few more examples to see what other reasons could be generated.

Since I'd already run Strings.exe on the SQL Server DLLs and EXE files, it was easy to run grep/find/findstr for MaxDOPSetToOne on those extracts. Once I found which files it belonged to (sqlmin.dll) I opened the text to see if the other reasons were listed. As you can see in my comment on Joe's blog, there were about 20 additional non-parallel reasons. And while it's not "documentation" of this underdocumented feature, the names are pretty self-explanatory about what can prevent parallel processing. I especially like the ones about cursors – more ammo! - and am curious about the PDW compilation and Cloud DB replication reasons.

One reason completely stumped me: NoParallelHekatonPlan. What the heck is a hekaton? Google and Wikipedia were vague, and the top results were not in English. I found one reference to Greek, stating "hekaton" can be translated as "hundredfold"; with a little more Wikipedia-ing this leads to hecto, the prefix for "one hundred" as a unit of measure. I'm not sure why Microsoft chose hekaton for such a plan name, but having already learned some Greek I figured I might as well dig some more in the DLL text for hekaton. Here's what I found:

hekaton_slow_param_passing
Occurs when a Hekaton procedure call dispatch goes to slow parameter passing code path
The reason why Hekaton parameter passing code took the slow code path
hekaton_slow_param_pass_reason
sp_deploy_hekaton_database
sp_undeploy_hekaton_database
sp_drop_hekaton_database
sp_checkpoint_hekaton_database
sp_restore_hekaton_database
e:\sql11_main_t\sql\ntdbms\hekaton\sqlhost\sqllang\hkproc.cpp
e:\sql11_main_t\sql\ntdbms\hekaton\sqlhost\sqllang\matgen.cpp
e:\sql11_main_t\sql\ntdbms\hekaton\sqlhost\sqllang\matquery.cpp
e:\sql11_main_t\sql\ntdbms\hekaton\sqlhost\sqllang\sqlmeta.cpp
e:\sql11_main_t\sql\ntdbms\hekaton\sqlhost\sqllang\resultset.cpp

Interesting! The first 4 entries (in red) mention parameters and "slow code". Could this be the foundation of the mythical DBCC RUNFASTER command? Have I been passing my parameters the slow way all this time?

And what about those sp_xxxx_hekaton_database procedures (in blue)? Could THEY be the secret to a faster SQL Server? Could they promise a "hundredfold" improvement in performance? Are these special, super-undocumented DIB (databases in black)?

I decided to look in the SQL Server system views for any objects with hekaton in the name, or references to them, in hopes of discovering some new code that would answer all my questions:

SELECT name FROM sys.all_objects 
    WHERE name LIKE '%hekaton%'
SELECT name FROM sys.all_objects 
    WHERE object_definition(OBJECT_ID) LIKE '%hekaton%'

Which revealed:

name
------------------------

(0 row(s) affected)

name
------------------------
sp_createstats
sp_recompile
sp_updatestats

(3 row(s) affected)

Hmm. Well that didn't find much. Looks like these procedures are seriously undocumented, unknown, perhaps forbidden knowledge. Maybe a part of some unspeakable evil?

(No, I'm not paranoid, I just like mysteries and thought that punching this up with that kind of thing might keep you reading. I know I'd fall asleep without it.)

OK, so let's check out those 3 procedures and see what they reveal when I search for "Hekaton":

sp_createstats:

-- filter out local temp tables, Hekaton tables, and tables for which current user has no permissions
-- Note that OBJECTPROPERTY returns NULL on type="IT" tables, thus we only call it on type='U' tables

OK, that's interesting, let's go looking down a little further:

((@table_type<>'U') or (0 = OBJECTPROPERTY(@table_id, 'TableIsInMemory'))) and -- Hekaton table

Wellllll, that tells us a few new things:

There's such a thing as Hekaton tables (UPDATE: I'm not the only one to have found them!)
~~They are not standard user tables and probably not in memory~~ UPDATE: I misinterpreted this because I didn't read all the code when I wrote this blog post.
The OBJECTPROPERTY function has an undocumented TableIsInMemory option

Let's check out sp_recompile:

--  (3) Must not be a Hekaton procedure.

And once again go a little further:

if (ObjectProperty(@objid, 'IsExecuted') <> 0 AND
    ObjectProperty(@objid, 'IsInlineFunction') = 0 AND
    ObjectProperty(@objid, 'IsView') = 0 AND
    -- Hekaton procedure cannot be recompiled
    -- Make them go through schema version bumping branch, which will fail
        ObjectProperty(@objid, 'ExecIsCompiledProc') = 0)

And now we learn that hekaton procedures also exist, they can't be recompiled, there's a "schema version bumping branch" somewhere, and OBJECTPROPERTY has another undocumented option, ExecIsCompiledProc. (If you experiment with this you'll find this option returns null, I think it only works when called from a system object.)

This is neat! Sadly sp_updatestats doesn't reveal anything new, the comments about hekaton are the same as sp_createstats. But we've ALSO discovered undocumented features for the OBJECTPROPERTY function, which we can now search for:

SELECT name, object_definition(OBJECT_ID) FROM sys.all_objects 
    WHERE object_definition(OBJECT_ID) LIKE '%OBJECTPROPERTY(%'

I'll leave that to you as more homework. I should add that searching the system procedures was recommended long ago by the late, great Ken Henderson, in his Guru's Guide books, as a great way to find undocumented features. That seems to be really good advice!

Now if you're a programmer/hacker, you've probably been drooling over the last 5 entries for hekaton (in green), because these are the names of source code files for SQL Server! Does this mean we can access the source code for SQL Server? As The Oracle suggested to Neo, can we return to The Source???

Actually, no.

Well, maybe a little bit. While you won't get the actual source code from the compiled DLL and EXE files, you'll get references to source files, debugging symbols, variables and module names, error messages, and even the startup flags for SQL Server. And if you search for "DBCC" or "CHECKDB" you'll find a really nice section listing all the DBCC commands, including the undocumented ones. Granted those are pretty easy to find online, but you may be surprised what those web sites DIDN'T tell you! (And neither will I, go look for yourself!) And as we saw earlier, you'll also find execution plan elements, query processing rules, and who knows what else. It's also instructive to see how Microsoft organizes their source directories, how various components (storage engine, query processor, Full Text, AlwaysOn/HADR) are split into smaller modules. There are over 2000 source file references, go do some exploring!

So what did we learn? We can pull strings out of executable files, search them for known items, browse them for unknown items, and use the results to examine internal code to learn even more things about SQL Server. We've even learned how to use command-line utilities! We are now 1337 h4X0rz! (Not really. I hate that leetspeak crap.)

Although, I must confess I might've gone too far with the "conspiracy" part of this post. I apologize for that, it's just my overactive imagination. There's really no hidden agenda or conspiracy regarding SQL Server internals. It's not The Matrix. It's not like you'd find anything like that in there:

Attach Matrix Database
DM_MATRIX_COMM_PIPELINES
MATRIXXACTPARTICIPANTS
dm_matrix_agents

Alright, enough of this paranoid ranting! Microsoft are not really evil! It's not like they're The Borg from Star Trek:

ALTER FEDERATION DROP
ALTER FEDERATION SPLIT
DROP FEDERATION

#tsql2sday

More Quick Interview Tips

Ajarn Mark Caldwell — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 05:51:13 GMT

In the last couple of years I have conducted a lot of interviews for application and database developers for my company, and I can tell you that the little things can mean a lot. Here are a few quick tips to help you make a good first impression.

A year ago I gave you my #1 interview tip: Do some basic research! And a year later, I am still stunned by how few technical people do the most basic of research. I can only guess that it is because it is so engrained in our psyche that technical competence is everything (see How to Manage Technical Employees for more on this idea) that we forget or ignore the importance of soft skills and the art of the interview. Or maybe it is because we have heard the stories of the uber-geek who has zero personal skills but still makes a fortune working for Microsoft. Well, here’s another quick tip: You’re probably not as good as he is; and a large number of companies actually run small to medium sized teams and can’t really afford to have the social outcast in the group. In a small team, everyone has to get along well, and that’s an important part of what I’m evaluating during the interview process.

My #2 tip is to act alive! I typically conduct screening interviews by phone before I bring someone in for an in-person. I don’t care how laid-back you are or if you have a “quiet personality”, when we are talking, ACT like you are happy I called and you are interested in getting the job. If you sound like you are bored-to-death and that you would be perfectly happy to never work again, I am perfectly happy to help you attain that goal, and I’ll move on to the next candidate.

And closely related to #2, perhaps we’ll call it #2.1 is this tip: When I call you on the phone for the interview, don’t answer your phone by just saying, “Hello”. You know that the odds are about 999-to-1 that it is me calling for the interview because we have specifically arranged this time slot for the call. And you can see on the caller ID that it is not one of your buddies calling, so identify yourself. Don’t make me question whether I dialed the right number. Answer your phone with a, “Hello, this is ___<your full name preferred, but at least your first name>___.”. And when I say, “Hi, <your name>, this is Mark from <my company>” it would be really nice to hear you say, “Hi, Mark, I have been expecting your call.” This sets the perfect tone for our conversation. I know I have the right person; you are professional enough and interested enough in the job or contract to remember your appointments; and now we can move on to a little intro segment and get on with the reason for our call.

As crazy as it sounds, I’ve actually had phone interviews that went like this:

<Ring…>
You: “Hello?”
Me: “Hi, this is Mark from _______”
You: “Yeah?”
Me: “Is this <your name>?”
You: “Yeah.”
Me: “I had this time in my calendar for us to talk…were you expecting my call?”
You: “Oh, yeah, sure…”

I used to be nice and would try to go ahead with the interview even after this bad start, thinking I was giving the candidate the benefit of the doubt…a second chance…but more often than not it was a struggle and 10 minutes into what was supposed to be a 45-minute call, I’m looking for a way to hang up without being rude myself. It never worked out. I never brought that person in for an in-person interview, much less offered them the job or contract. Who knows, maybe they were some sort of wunderkind that we missed out on. What I know is that they would never fit in with the rest of the team, and around here that is absolutely critical.

So, in conclusion… Act alive! Identify yourself! And do at least the very basic of research.

Throw Things at Me…In Person!

Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk) — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 20:24:55 GMT

I have a few speaking engagements coming up in July. I will be getting my Revenge on twice this week, first at the Steel City SQL User Group in Birmingham, Alabama July 17, 2012:

New Horizon Computer Learning Center
601 Beacon Pkwy. West, Suite 106
Birmingham, AL 35209
Register: http://steelcitysqljul2012.eventbrite.com/
6-8 pm CST

Not content with that, with my hands behind my back, I will pull the same thing from my hat at SQL Saturday 122 in Louisville, KY on July 21, 2012: Schedule Register

These include Revenge: The SQL Parts 1 AND 2! New and improved with the new Office 2013 Preview! (Ummm, not really).

I will then Tame Unruly Data at SQL Saturday 126 in Indianapolis, IN in July 28, 2012: Schedule Register

If you will be in any of those places at those times, and I owe you money, that would be the best time for you to collect. Just make sure not to warn me first, otherwise I may not show.

Another Update to SQL Server Configuration Scripting Utility

Bill Graziano — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 21:37:27 GMT

I’ve been gradually adding features to my utility that scripts the configuration of a SQL Server. Since my last post I’ve added the following features:

Skip any encrypted object in a database
Script alerts, alert notifications and operators
Script audits
Always script model, master and msdb to capture any user-defined objects in those databases
Logins are now scripted so that everything for a login is grouped together.
There’s a second section in the logins that handles default databases. In many cases a login’s default database is a mirror target and can’t be set. This is now handled gracefully. It also includes a separate section for all default databases so those can be quickly set in the event of a disaster.
Script credentials
Script proxy accounts
Script database mail

My goal is still to get everything outside a database scripted. This release is enough that I can keep my mirror target servers in sync with their principals.

Probation is Over: PASS Board Year 1, Q2

Denise McInerney — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 22:58:55 GMT

Though it's not always official every job begins with a probation period. You start out with lots of questions and every day you find out how much more you have to learn. Usually after a few months you discover that you can actually answer some questions and have at least an idea of what you are supposed to be doing. Now at the end of my second quarter on the "job" of serving on the PASS Board I have reached that point. My probation period is over.

The last three months were busy for the entire Board with the budget process, an in-person meeting and moving forward with PASS Global Growth plans.

I had also set a specific goal for myself for my 2nd quarter: to see the Board to adopt a Code of Conduct for the PASS Summit.

Code of Conduct
When I ran for the Board I included my desire to see PASS establish a code of conduct in my campaign platform. I was motivated to do this for a few reasons.

Other technical conferences have had incidents of harassment. Most of these did not have a policy in place prior to having a problem, though several conference organizers have since adopted anti-harassment policies or codes of conduct. I felt it would be in PASS' interest to establish a policy so we would be prepared should there be an incident.
"This is Community" Adopting a code of conduct would reinforce our community orientation and send a message about the positive character of the Summit.
PASS is a leader among technical organizations for its promotion and support of women. Adopting a code of conduct would further demonstrate our leadership in this area.

After researching similar polices from other organizations I published a first draft in April. I solicited feedback from the Board, HQ staff and some PASS members. Incorporating that feedback I presented version 4 at the May Board meeting, where we had a good discussion. You can read the meeting minutes for details. I incorporated points from the Board discussion as well as feedback from a legal review to produce a final version which has been submitted to the Board. It will be discussed at the Board meeting July 12. You can read the full text at the end of this post.

Virtual Chapters
In the first quarter we started ramping up marketing support for the Virtual Chapters. Since then each edition of the Connector has highlighted a different VC to help get out the message about the variety of eductional opporutnities that are offered. These VC profiles will continue in the coming months.

I was very pleased to welcome the new DBA Fundamentals VC which is geared toward new DBAs, people who are considering entering the field and those transitioning from a different IT role.

Thanks to the contributions of Erin Stellato, Michelle Nalliah and Karla Landrum we published a "Virtual Chapter Guidebook". This document includes great advice on how to build and promote a VC. It's also a reference for how things work, from budgets to webinar hosting. I think this document will be extremely valuable to all our VC leaders and am grateful to those who put it together.

Board Meeting/SQL Rally
The Board met in May in Dallas. Among the items discussed were Global Growth, the budget, future events and the upcoming elections. We covered a lot of ground in two days and I will again refer you to the meeting minutes for details. The meeting schedule allowed us to participate in the SQL Rally networking events and one full day of the conference. I enjoyed having the opportunity to meet and talk with many PASS members. And my hat is off to the SQL Rally organizers who put on an outstanding event.

Global Growth
PASS has undertaken a major intitiative to reach and engage SQL Server professionals around the world. This Global Growth plan is ambitious and will have a significant impact on the strategic direction of the organization. We have been reaching out to the community for feedback, including hosting Twitter chats and live Town Hall meetings. I co-hosted two of these events and appreciated hearing the different perspectives of the people who participated

If you have not done so I encourage you to read about the Global Growth vision and proposed governance changes and submit your feedback.

FY13 Budget
July 1 is the beginning of PASS' fiscal year, which makes the end of June the deadline for approving a budget. Each director submits a budget for his or her portfolio. For the Virtual Chapter portfolio I focused on how we can allocate resources to grow the VCs. Budgeting is a give-and-take process, and while I didn't get everything I asked for I'm pleased the FY13 budget includes a significant increase in financial support for the Virtual Chapters.

Many people put a lot of work into the budget, but no two people deserve credit more than VP of Finance Douglas McDowell and Accounting Manager Sandy Cherry. Thanks to both of them for getting us across the goal line on time.

SQL Saturday
I attended SQL Saturdays in Orange Co. CA and Phoenix. It's always inspiring to see the enthusiasm in the community for learning and networking. These events are successful due to the hard work of many volunteers. Thanks to the organizers in both cities for all your efforts.

Next Up
This quarter we'll be gearing up plans for the VCs at the Summit and exploring ways the VCs can best support PASS' Global Growth work. I'll also be wrapping up work on the Code of Conduct and attending a Board meeting in September. And I will be at SQL Saturday #144 in Sacramento later this month.

Here is the language of the Code of Conduct I have submitted to the Board for consideration:

PASS Code of Conduct

The PASS Summit provides database professionals from a variety of backgrounds with an opportunity to connect, share and learn. We value the strong sense of community that characterizes this event and we seek to foster an inclusive, professional atmosphere.

We are dedicated to providing a harassment-free conference experience for everyone, regardless of gender, race, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, religion or any other protected classification.

Everyone at the Summit is expected to follow the Code of Conduct. This includes but is not limited to: PASS Staff, Exhibitors, Speakers, Attendees and anyone affiliated with the event. Participants are expected to follow the Code of Conduct at all Summit events, including PASS-sponsored social events.

Participant behavior

Harassment includes, but is not limited to, offensive verbal comments related to gender, race, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, religion, or any other protected classification. Intimidation, threats, stalking, harassing photography or recording, sustained disruption of talks or other events, inappropriate physical contact and unwelcome attention will also be considered harassment. Similarly, sexual, racist, derogatory, threatening or other inappropriate language and imagery are not appropriate for any conference venue, including sessions.

Recourse

If a participant engages in any conduct that is prohibited under this Code of Conduct, the conference organizers may take any action they deem appropriate, including warning the offender or expelling the offender from the conference. No refunds will be granted to attendees expelled from the Summit due to violations of the Code of Conduct.

If you are being harassed, witness harassment, or have any other concerns, please contact a member of conference staff immediately. Conference staff can be identified by their “Headquarters/Staff” shirts and are trained to handle the situation appropriately.

A Code of Conduct Committee (CCC) made up of the Executive Manager and three members of the Board of Directors designated by the President will be authorized to take action in response to an incident or behavior that violates the Code of Conduct.