So you’ve decided that your new web application needs to record some page load time metrics so you can keep tabs on performance. Terrific!  You set up a couple page load/complete functions to write to a logging table when a page request comes in, and then update the record when it finishes loading.

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INSERT INTO PageLogs (
  RequestTime
  ,ResponseTime
  ,RemoteIP
  ,UserName
  ,PageId
  ,Parameters
  ,SessionId
)
VALUES (
  GETDATE()
  ,NULL
  ,127.0.0.1
  ,'Dave'
  ,'Home'
  ,'Pd=2015Q2'
  ,'883666b1-99be-48c8-bf59-5a5739bc7d1d'
);

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UPDATE PageLogs
  SET ResponseTime = GETDATE()
  WHERE
    SessionId = '883666b1-99be-48c8-bf59-5a5739bc7d1d';

You set up an hourly job to delete any logs older than 2 weeks (just to prevent information overload) and you call it a day. Each morning, you run a report to look at the previous day’s performance, watch the trends over the past week or so, and you’re pretty happy with things. Pages are loading in a fraction of a second, according to the logs. People find the application useful, word spreads around the office, and adoption takes off. The project is a success!

Consider this the outtakes from my previous post about speaking at SQL Saturday.

It took a while for me to build up the courage to finally get up in the front of a room at SQL Saturday. As I mentioned in my prior post, I did quite a bit of studying of other peoples’ sessions, read peoples’ studies of other peoples’ sessions (Grant Fritchey’s “Speaker of the Month” series) and talked to a few people at the speakers’ dinner. Here are a few of the key things I learned which put me more at ease.

That is the first and last Katy Perry reference you will find on this blog or anywhere else in my life.

Last weekend I spoke at the 4th edition of my “home” SQL Saturday, SQL Saturday #383. This was the end of a path that started four years ago, and the beginning of an exciting new one.

About four years ago, I was introduced to PASS. It didn’t take long for people to start talking to me about public speaking. I went to my first-ever SQL Saturday, and kept thinking to myself “I could never do that.” Then I was given the opportunity to attend PASS Summit 2012 and was hooked on the PASS community - SQL Family. I stepped onto the floor at the convention center and felt comfortable immediately. I think my exact words when I called home that evening were “I’m home. I found my people.” Mid-Summit, in a 10-minute conversation with a chapter leader, I was told “you should speak at one of my user group meetings.”

Slides & demos from my SQL Saturday Rochester presentation “Easing into Scripting with Windows PowerShell” have been posted on the SQL Saturday site.

Thank you to everyone who came out for my session and all of SQL Saturday!

I’ll be presenting my session Easing into Scripting with Windows PowerShell this Saturday, May 16th at SQL Saturday Rochester.

SQL Saturday is a free, all-day event for learning about SQL Server and related technologies, and networking with like-minded professionals in the region.

In addition to speaking, I’ll be tweeting out live updates all day long and posting pictures to both Instagram and Twitter. Watch for the hashtag #sqlsatroc (links to searches on both services).

This week marks the end of Ed Leighton-Dick’s New Blogger Challenge. It’s terrific seeing everyone sticking with the challenge all month and I’m looking forward to catching up with all the posts. Great job, everyone! Keep going!

We hear the common refrain among DBAs all the time. Back up your data! Test your restores! If you can’t restore the backup, it’s worthless. And yes, absolutely, you have to back up your databases - your job, and the company, depend upon it.

But are you backing everything up?

Saturday night was an ordinary night. It was getting late, and I was about to put my computer to sleep so I could do likewise. Suddenly, everything on my screen was replaced with a very nice message telling me that something had gone wrong and my computer needed to be restarted.

Here are the posts collected from week three of the SQL New Blogger Challenge. It’s been compiled the same way previous weeks’ posts were. Everyone’s doing a great job keeping up with the challenge!

Fixed-position data formats will seemingly be with us forever. Despite the relative ease of parsing CSV (or other delimited formats), or even XML, many data exchanges require a fixed-position input. Characters 1-10 are X, characters 11-15 are Y and if the source data is fewer than 5 characters, we have to left-pad with a filler character, etc. When you’re accustomed to working with data that says what it means and means what it says, having to add “extra fluff” like left-padding your integers with a half-dozen zeroes can be a hassle.

I didn’t intend for last week’s digest to also be my post for week two of the challenge, but life got in the way and I wasn’t able to complete the post that I really wanted in time. So, that post will be written much earlier in week three and completed well ahead of the deadline.

Here are the posts collected from week two of the SQL New Blogger Challenge. It’s been compiled the same way last week’s was.