A couple of weeks ago, I gave a presentation to the PASS DBA Virtual Chapter on SQL Server Locking & Blocking Made Simple.  The original post had a link to the presentation materials, but I neglected to attach the demo scripts. So, here they are:

• Locking_Query1_2010_03_01
• Locking_Query2_2010_03_01

To review them, click on the link and open the Microsoft Word document. (For some reason, my blog site won’t allow me to post text files.) Copy and paste the contents of each file into a new query window in SQL Server Management Studio and experiment all you wish. You’ll need the AdventureWorks database; it’s available for download on CodePlex.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to post them below in the comments section.

Diversity Is Good

With few exceptions, diversity is widely acknowledged to be a good trait in most cases. Ecosystems with a wide range of plants and animals tend to do better and be more resilient in the long term than large monoculture farms or environments. The same is true for retirement accounts; financial advisors recommend a diversified portfolio because it tends to outperform, on average, an account with just a few stocks or bonds. And in business, a well functioning team composed of people from many different backgrounds usually provides much a greater insight and a broader perspective that produces better results than a very homogeneously composed team. Simply put, diversity is good.

And what’s true for nature, finance, and management teams is true for your consulting business, too. A consulting practice with multiple clients and sources of revenue tends to weather economic storms better than those businesses whose sole focus is one client or one type of revenue.

Diversity Doesn’t Just Happen

Diversity usually doesn’t just happen. It’s not something that tends to naturally occur in businesses. Diversity must be planned. It must be intentional. And it must be nurtured.

Left alone, businesses naturally tend to gravitate toward those one or two things where success is found. It’s the path of least resistance. But as renowned management consultant and author Tom Peters once quipped “Success begets failure.” His point is that when we succeed in one area, we tend to stop innovating and begin to try to reproduce that success over and over again.

I think the same can be said for consulting. When we find a niche that works, we tend stay in that niche and ignore other opportunities. And I think we do this at great risk to the longevity of our business. But what happens when that niche is no longer a safe and sure bet? There are plenty of examples; all you have to do is look for them.

A Risky Business

Think back a few years when technical training companies were thriving. There were scores of them in every major market in the U.S. They were offering training to IT Professionals and to Career Changers. It was a great time to be a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT). MCT’s were in high demand. Basic economics teaches us that high demand plus low supply equals high prices. Many consultants became MCTs and focused their business exclusively on the highly profitable training business.

Unfortunately, the economic phenomenon known as the dot-com bubble burst. Many training companies went belly up as the demand for training evaporated. And those MCTs that were bringing in the big bucks all of a sudden found themselves to be a commodity as their colleagues where willing to take less and less for their services.

A similar story can be told about all of the COBAL programmers in the lead up to the Y2K. And there are other examples.

So this begs the question, “How can I, being a sole practitioner, add diversity to my consulting practice?”

How Can I Diversify?

Fortunately, diversifying your consulting practice can be done without taking a huge departure from your core business. Diversifying involves looking at your core business from different perspectives and identifying areas where you can implement relatively minor changes to your approach or offerings to broaden your surface area. That way if any one aspect of your business is adversely affected for whatever reason, there are other areas already in place to help you absorb the impact.

Consider some of the following ways to diversify your consulting practice.

• Work with Multiple Clients. Many consultants work with one client at a time. And that’s fine. However, juggling multiple clients simultaneously provides you with a buffer should any one client default on their invoices, unexpectedly cancel your agreement, or otherwise give you the old heave-ho with little advanced notice.
• Vary the Types of Projects. Establishing good and long term relationships with a handful of clients and mixing in a string of new, shorter term projects or engagements from new or former clients allows you to maintain a good mix of projects. Some may want you to come in and diagnose a performance problem, others may want you to provide ongoing support and/or maintenance of their systems, while still others may have a long list of things for you to do when you have the time.
• Offer Complementary Services. Consider broadening your offerings to include technical training, development, mentoring, and technical auditing. These give clients different ways to leverage your core competencies.

Now it’s your turn.

1. Do you agree with the premise of diversifying your consulting practice?
2. In what ways have you mitigated some of the risks associated with consulting?
3. How have you broadened the offerings of your consulting practice?

If you’ve used SQL Server 2008 Management Studio (SSMS 2008), you may have noticed that Microsoft added a pretty neat little feature when looking at Execution Plans, the Missing Index message. This subtle message may appear when you’re looking at either the Actual or Estimated Query Execution Plan in graphical mode. It can be seen written in green just below the query text.

The message tells you that the optimizer would have been able to resolve the query faster if only it had another index. It’s even tells you what that index should be. I’ve heeded its advice on more than one occasion with very good results.

But I’m Running SQL Server 2005

Unfortunately, not everyone has access to SSMS 2008. And Management Studio in SQL Server 2005 (SSMS 2005) doesn’t provide this kind of information – at least not in an automatic and graphical. The image below shows the same query as run in SSMS 2005.

You can, however, retrieve the missing index information for a query another way – viewing the Execution Plan as XML.

Viewing the Execution Plan as XML

To view the Execution Plan in XML, open a query window in SSMS 2005 and use the SHOWPLAN_XML option as shown below.

SET SHOWPLAN_XML ON;

Execute the statement to set the option. Setting the SHOWPLAN_XML option causes SQL Server to return the estimated execution plan in XML for subsequent queries on this connection instead of actually executing the queries. For more information about the SET SHOWPLAN_XML statement, visit Books Online.

Once the SHOWPLAN_XML option has been set, “execute” the query whose execution plan you wish analyze. You’ll see something similar to the follow image. Note the SHOWPLAN_XML works best when the output is set to “Result to Grid.”

Double click the XML hyperlink to open the execution plan. Scroll down until you see (or search for) the MissingIndexes node. In the example below, there’s a single missing index identified, an index on the phone number. In this case, the optimizer is suggesting that simple, nonclustered index would improve performance. The impact attribute estimates the improvement that adding the index would have. The optimizer may also recommend nonclustered indexes with included columns and composite indexes.

Use Your Head

The Missing Index feature in Management Studio can be really nice. It’s another tool available to us as database professionals to help us do our job. However, as helpful as it sometimes can be, it’s no substitute for using your own skills and knowledge when considering which indexes to create, or not create.

Consider what the message recommends in a broader context. What effect will the new index have on inserts and updates? On maintenance plans? Then decide if the index is worthwhile.

Additional Information

To learn more about the Missing Index feature, visit some of these site.

• About the Missing Indexes Feature
• Using Missing Index Information to Write CREATE INDEX Statements

Have you used this feature? Have you found it useful? I’d like to hear you experiences.

Next week, I’ll be “in the cloud” as I give a presentation for the PASS DBA Virtual Chapter. The topic is SQL Server Locking & Blocking Made Simple. You can download the presentation materials here.

Join me from the comforts of your own home or office on February 24th, 2010, at noon EST.

I hope to talk with you then.

Business Intelligence Developers Studio for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services, BIDS for short, makes creating engaging and dynamic reports nearly trivial in many respects. You can easily create drill-down reports that allow users to initially see a high-level overview of the information they need and then drill down into specific areas of interest with just a few clicks of the mouse. You can also create drill-through reports that allows users to seamlessly navigate from one report to another.

One dynamic feature that many users find very useful is known as Interactive Sorting. With Interactive Sorting, users can click on column headings in the Tablix data region and have the report automatically sort by that column. Let’s walk through a graphical example to demonstrate.

Sample Customer Report

Here’s an example of a contact phone list report created in BIDS. It lists contacts from the sample Adventureworks database using a Tablix data region.

Right now, the report shows the list of customers in no particular order. Let’s provide a way for our users to sort the list as they wish. In the Layout view, click the Tablix header cell for the Last Name column to select it, right click, and then choose Text Box Properties from the context menu.

A new window will open. Click on the Interactive Sort link on the left hand side of the window.

To allow users to dynamically sort the report, check the Enable interactive sort on this text box check box. For this simple example, we’ll sort on the Detail Row by the LastName column.

Click the Ok button to save the changes and close the window. Repeat the process for each column you would like to have sortable. In this example, we’ll enable it for every column in the report.

When we preview the report again, you’ll notice that each column now has a couple of arrows in the header.

By clicking on one of the column header arrows, the sort order of the rows will dynamically change.

And there you have it. With only a few mouse clicks, we’ve enriched the experience our users have while viewing this report. Of course, this technique only works when the report is rendered in formats that support interactivity. When being viewed as a TIFF, for example, the user will not be able alter its presentation.

You see before I went virtual, I would load the latest and greatest version of a tool or application on my laptop. Sometimes I would keep a couple of revisions back, too. And as storage space became an issue, I would uninstall the oldest version to make room. However this technique effectively made it very difficult for me to support clients that still used older versions.

Enter Virtual Machines

So, I decided to move my entire development, administration, and presentation environment to virtual machines. This would allow me to have self-contained and dedicated environments that I could copy off to cheap external storage as drive space dictated.

I started with VirtualPC, but that proved to be lacking in many ways so I quickly moved to VMWare Workstation. It was good. I liked it. It met my needs.

With all of my SQL and development stuff in virtual machines, I soon realized that the only activities that I used my host operating system for was email, browsing the web, and blogging. And I could do that in most any operating system I wanted. I was no longer tied to Windows as my only choice.

I had had some previous experience with Linux and found it to be pretty user friendly, as stable as Windows, and faster than Windows on a given set of hardware. So I made the switch. Linux became my operating system of choice. That was four years ago; I’ve since blogged about the virtualization setup here.

Think Different

Using Linux has been a good experience. It’s fast, free, and I haven’t had to worry about viruses, trojans, and the like. Those who have the knowledge to write those kinds of destructive programs typically use their skills to make Linux better not tear it down.

But Linux is no nirvana; there have been some bumps along the way. Sometimes a kernel upgrade will cause the sound to stop working or the window manager to freak out and not display anything. The Linux community is great and usually these issues take only a couple of hours to resolve.

Apart from upgrades there are some other relatively minor inconveniences when using Linux. One is that many applications won’t run on Linux. iTunes is a good example of this; there are Mac and Windows versions of the application but Linux users are left out in the cold. (Some have successfully gotten some Windows versions of applications to run in Linux using Wine but that’s a non-trivial ordeal.) Fortunately, there are frequently very good Linux equivalents to these applications. Another annoyance is that there maybe some incompatibility with other software applications. For example OpenOffice does a very poor job with Office 2007 file formats.

These annoyances have relatively minor over the years. And I believe better than running the traditional Windows operating system. However this time when it came time to replace my laptop, I decided to “Think Different”. I bought a MacBook Pro.

I’ve had it a week now and even though I’m a complete newbie, it’s been a very pleasant experience. The learning curve hasn’t been steep. The hardware is solid, the software is intuitive, and the graphics are great.

I’m still getting use to some of the ways that Macs do things. For example, clicking on the X doesn’t actually close the application, only the window. I’m an avid user of keyboard shortcuts and there are some different mappings on the Mac. I’m still getting use to those. My MacBook Pro doesn’t have the Home, End, PageUp and PageDown keys and that is taking quite a bit of getting use to.

I’ll blog more about my virtualization setup in another post. (Thanks to Aaron Bertrand (blog, twitter) for sharing his setup here.)

For now, I’m well on my way to joining the ranks of Brent Ozar (blog, twitter) and Aaron in the SQL/Apple Fanboy club.

And the desire is not limited to Americans, either. No, people from around the world want to join the ranks of the self-employed. It seems to be a common trait in most everyone.

So, what’s stopping us? Why don’t more of us break away from the employee-employer relationship and go to work for ourselves?

Risky Business

As I’ve talked with developers, database administrators, project managers, and others in the IT field, a recurring theme continues to surface when I asked that question: RISK! It may not be expressed so concisely, but that’s what it frequently comes down to. Risk.

Many would-be consultants are concerned that launching a career in consulting would be like setting a course straight into stormy weather. And that understandably gives them cause for concern. There’s just too much on the line in many people’s lives: a mortgage payment to make, mouths to feed, and a certain level of creature comforts to maintain. If a career in consulting doesn’t pan out, we stand to loose much of that. Nobody wants to risk their livelihood.

And there’s nothing inherently wrong with risk aversion. We all, at some level, want to minimize our exposure to risk. That’s why we buy insurance, to help protect us from uncertainty. We invest in a diverse portfolio to help protect us from a volatile free market. (Although both of those are probably not the best examples given what’s happened in the world’s economy of the past couple of years.)

We all have different tolerance levels for the amount of risk we find acceptable. And for many of us, that line is drawn before what we reach the self-employment point.

The Risk of Staying Employed

But to be fair, let’s consider the alternative; it’s not risk-free either.

The employer-employee relationship has been described by some as a sort of marriage where there is a bit of give and take on both sides for the good of the overall relationship. It’s full of compromise and trust. The employer trusts that you’ll work hard and you trust that they’ll pay you for working there.

But employment really isn’t like a marriage at all. There’s no commitment. There’s no loyalty. There’s not a “till death do us part” clause in an employment contact. When you receive an offer to go work for another company, you can. If the organization believes they can outsource your job and save money, they will. The employer’s priority is maximizing returns for its shareholders. The employee’s priority is making a good living for himself. If anything, it’s more of a marriage of convenience than a life long commitment.

I don’t mean to sound cynical about employment. I’m not really. There are a lot of really good companies out there to work for, a lot of good managers to have as a boss. And finding one can mean many years of contentment in the workplace.

However, you must realize that employment is not a safe harbor from risk. On the contrary, I’d even say in some ways it’s even more risky than consulting.

No matter how hard we work, no matter how well we do our jobs, we are only one downsize, one merger or acquisition away from the unemployment lines. And it really doesn’t have anything to do with us as employees. It’s completely out of our hands. If a decision is made to sell off our division, to close this factory, to off-shore our department, we’re out of a job. Even though we were best in our job, we’ve lost it because of something that had nothing to do with us as employees.

You Have the Power

On the contrary, in consulting our success depends solely on our performance. Our jobs cannot be out-sourced or taken off shore. We cannot be downsized or re-organized out of a job. Our livelihood depends solely on how well we perform our role as a consultant.

Oh sure, some of our clients will no longer need our services. But if we’re actively engaging multiple clients at one time or we have other clients in the pipeline, our livelihood is not affected. We simply move from helping one client to assisting another client with little disruption to our streams of income. And I’ve found that if I do a good job for a client that generally leads to either more work from them or glowing recommendations to others.

It’s No Cake Walk

But consulting does require effort, not just in areas where we consider ourselves strong either. To be successful, we must nurture our client relationships; we must arrange to have another engagement lined up after this one winds down; and we must be willing to talk about money and negotiate agreements.

In short, consulting requires that we expand our skill set beyond our technical abilities. We must learn to become project managers, bookkeepers, salespeople, executives, and janitors. Our success in consulting relies not only on our technical prowess, but on the skills that will get us to a point where we can exercise our technical skills to help clients.

And can be a scary proposition. One that we should not enter into lightly. But more about that in another post.

Now it’s your turn

I’d like to hear your thoughts.

1. What lessons have you learned about employment? About consulting?
2. Do you want to start consulting? What’s holding you back?
3. Is consulting really as risky as it sounds? Why?
4. How can remove some of the risk associated with consulting? Employment?

And finally, I’m thinking of doing a series of blog postings on consulting. Interested?

For almost a year now, I’ve exchanged emails with the leaders of the Memphis SQL Server User Group, trying to find a time when our schedules would align themselves and I’d be able to join them for a meeting. After many attempts and several near misses, we’ve finally set a date!

This Thursday, February 11, 2010, I will be speaking on a SQL Server Locking & Blocking. I’ll talk about:

• Why databases lock resources
• The consequences of blocking
• How SQL Server manages locks
• Techniques for influencing locking behavior
• Using Transaction Isolation Levels

You can download the presentation materials here.

During my presentation, I’ll demonstrate how to analyze locks that SQL Server is holding using the sys.dm_tran_locks Dynamic Management View (DMV) as shown below.

–examine the resources
SELECT
resource_type
,(CASE
WHEN resource_type = ‘OBJECT’ THEN object_name(resource_associated_entity_id)
WHEN resource_type IN (‘DATABASE’, ‘FILE’, ‘METADATA’) THEN ‘N/A’
WHEN resource_type IN (‘KEY’, ‘PAGE’, ‘RID’) THEN (
SELECT
object_name(object_id)
FROM
sys.partitions
WHERE
hobt_id=resource_associated_entity_id)
ELSE
‘Undefined’
END) AS resource_name
,request_mode as lock_type
,resource_description
,request_status
,request_session_id
,request_owner_id AS transaction_id
FROM
sys.dm_tran_locks
WHERE
resource_type <> ‘DATABASE’;

If you live in or near Memphis, I hope you come out and join us for the meeting. I’d love to meet you. For more information, visit mem-pass.org.

Meetings are not free, even if everyone is local and there are no travel costs to consider. The loss in productivity alone can be staggering.

Personal Productivity at the Expense of Team Productivity

I used to just “grin and bear” it as the saying goes. I used to take my laptop to those meetings under the guise of “taking notes”. But what I was really doing was being productive on my own. I was sifting through email in pursuit of InboxZero. Or I remoting into a client’s server to do some “real work” while the meeting languished.

But I’ve learned that although I was being productive as an individual, I was contributing to the ineffectiveness of the team. My mental absence was hindering the team as a whole. My personal productivity was at the expense of the productivity of the team. In essence I was part of the problem, not part of the solution.

I’ve written about some of those experiences and my short-sightedness in a prior post entitled “Closing Your Laptop in Meetings“. If you haven’t read it, I’d encourage you to do so and then take the challenge.

Conducting Effective Meetings

Something had to give. I didn’t want to spend scores of hours each year sitting in meetings that even most of the attendees would say was worthless. So, I did a lot of research and experimenting, looking for ways to make the meetings I conduct and the meetings I attend more effective.

I finally found a few critical points that have helped me immensely in making my meetings more productive. I’ll be the first to admit that these are not rocket science; they are common sense approaches that just seem to work.

I’ve wrapped this into a presentation that I’ve delivered to clients with very good feedback. And now I’m delivering this session in a Microsoft TechNet Thrive! webcast next week. Here’s the information:

Language(s): English
Product(s): Other
Audience(s): IT Generalist
Duration: 60 Minutes
Start Date:Tuesday, February 02, 2010 9:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada)
To Register: Click here

I hope you’ll join me for this session.

Now, your turn. What techniques have you found for making meetings more effective?

On Monday, the first of February, 2010, I will be speaking at the Baltimore SQL Server User Group meeting at 7:00 PM EST. My topic will be SQL Server Locking and Blocking Made Simple. In it, I will discuss:

• The need for locking
• The consequences of blocking
• How SQL Server locks resources
• How blocking affects performance
• Influencing locks with granularity hints
• Setting Transaction Isolation Levels

Here is a sample slide from the presentation. You can download the entire presentation here.

During the presentation, I will regularly use the following script to view the locks being held by SQL Server.

–examine the resources
SELECT
resource_type
,(CASE
WHEN resource_type = ‘OBJECT’ THEN object_name(resource_associated_entity_id)
WHEN resource_type IN (‘DATABASE’, ‘FILE’, ‘METADATA’) THEN ‘N/A’
WHEN resource_type IN (‘KEY’, ‘PAGE’, ‘RID’) THEN (
SELECT
object_name(object_id)
FROM
sys.partitions
WHERE
hobt_id=resource_associated_entity_id)
ELSE
‘Undefined’
END) AS resource_name
,request_mode as lock_type
,resource_description
,request_status
,request_session_id
,request_owner_id AS transaction_id
FROM
sys.dm_tran_locks
WHERE
resource_type <> ‘DATABASE’;

I hope you’ll join me there.

If you’re interested in having me speak at your local user group, please send me an email or direct message me in twitter. I’d love to talk with you.