Ian Kirk - SQL DBA

Like most people returning to the office from the PASS conference, the first hours of my day were spent deciding which emails just went straight to the trash can, and which emails required direct attention. Luckily, the second bucket was considerably smaller than the first. Once I got through the emails, I took a short side trip down Twitter-lane, and installed TweetDeck.

I think I chose TweetDeck over the others for its simple black theme. I also think it’s notification system is becoming a giant distraction to me. I’ve seen countless times that I should turn off my Outlook notifications, but now that I have two message notification systems, I’m really beginning to notice the productivity drain.

Once I got through that, I dove into a stored procedure that Michelle Ufford (@SQLFool) had written and posted recently. Like I had said on her blog, it was almost exactly what I had envisioned while I was sitting in the replication troubleshooting session in Seattle. I worked with the code and exchanged a few emails with Michelle through the day.

This exchange may never have happened if it hadn’t before the PASS conference and the use of Twitter. Michelle followed me on Twitter, I found her blog, and then I found a solution to a problem. Soon I’ll have fantastic replication latency information that will help me understand my environment, and do it through an automated manner.

Beyond the replication latency procedure, I wrote a list of ideas for things I want to see me and the team complete. Things like creating policies and automating their evaluation via PowerShell. (Check that out - three big items all in one sentence, huh?) Getting in-person knowledge directly from people like Lara Rubbelke and Buck Woody make this an even more attainable task. The list didn’t end there, though - transactional replication base lining with the PerfMon counters, digging further into DMVs, and Centralized Management Server, just to name a few, ended up somewhere in the list, not to mention just trying to communicate everything we can to the rest of our team.

Today the team ran into a database mirroring problem, and I thought almost immediately to throw it out to the folks I’ve met on Twitter. No one has jumped on it, so we’ve headed to Microsoft. However, now I’m in a position for us to help the community - when we dig out of this particular mess, we’ll have people to tell and an avenue to do it.

We’re three days outside of PASS and yet I cannot wait to be at next year’s.