As some of you may have heard, I'm starting a new job this month, which means leaving my current job.  It occurred to us that this is a topic rarely (if ever) really covered, so we made a video about leaving jobs, and assorted other topics. Today we just have an overview of the new DBAs @ Midnight video, "Breaking up with your Boss" (in 4 parts). But tomorrow we'll have a blog on companies and relationships, in good time to participate in Adam Machanic's T-SQL Tuesday!

In all fairness, we don't get to the actual topic until 5 minutes intp Part 2, but we have some jolly good fun in all. Your overview:

Breaking up with your Boss, Part 1:

• Worst secret handshake EVAR.
• When Good IPs go Bad: Sean's IP spoiled, and we rant about Time Warner Cable. Surprise ending!
• Next rant: Having to give your info to clerks over and over again.

Breaking up with your Boss, Part 2:

• We envision a brave new world of not filling out forms 3x each.
• We make Star Trek Next Generation Data/SQL puns...
• Around about 4:15 I talk about my new, upcoming job
• 5:30 We get on How To Break Up With Your Boss (6:15 Sean spills tea)
  • Feeling bad for your boss: Bad time to leave? It's never a good time to can you, either.
  • Feeling bad for the company: You are barcode DBA, and an expensive one, at that.
  • Feeling bad for the project: Feelings fade quickly!
• 13:20 So how do you break up, then? [Office Space reference here.]
• For starters, separate yourself!

Breaking up with your Boss, Part 3:

• Why I got nervous the day I quit.
• I mention Mladen Prajdic, a Twitter friend who amused me (and mangle his name, badly)
• I mention The Gift of Fear by Gavin DeBecker, and how quitting is like breaking up, is like safety rules...take away footholds.
• Sean tells a big secret about his past, and we all learn a life lesson.
• We learn THE wording to use when leaving a job.
• We discuss various responses to "Why are you leaving?"
• Sean's Blue Cross story - 3 months, and never logged into a single database. Jen rants. Sean finishes his story...almost.

Breaking up with your Boss, Part 4:

• Conclusion of Blue Cross story.
• Exit interviews.
• Celebrity status, and entering the SQLPass starfield with a guide. "JOE FREAKING CELKO, who is one of the coolest dudes on the planet...".
• Different ways of leaving a job - the nice breakup, and THE BAD ONE (Jen's story).
• Things you can do to mitigate a bad breakup - this is THE #1 MOST IMPORTANT TIP when leaving a job. And a couple of other good tips too.
• We reiterate: Sometimes the answer is no. Sean's story of "fixing" Arcserve backups. "Oobi...backup expert!"
• We finally, finally trail off and say goodnight. Didn't see that coming, did you?

Happy days...

-Jen McCown

http://www.MidnightDBA.com

We have hereby posted our newest DBAs at Midnight: Resumes (in three parts)

In Part 1 of DBAs@Midnight: Resumes:

• We show you MVP award. The joke Sean makes (and glosses over) about "in pieces on the floor" was a reference to me breaking Sean's MVP trophy this year. IT WAS AN ACCIDENT!! There's a little glass clip thing with the year printed on it, and as I was moving the award off my desk, the clip flew off and chipped badly. The powers that be at the MVP program were kind enough to send a replacement, and I don't touch the award any more. :)
• We gave away MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-433) on SQL Server 2008-Database Development to drawing winner Chuck Lathrope (@SQLGuyChuck on Twitter).
• We talk about promoting MidnightDBA, our "vision" for the site, and why Sean started MidnightDBA. "What element of SQL can kill you? Film at 11!"
• Sean shows off his new Blue mic, the Yeti
• We talk blogging and putting YOU in your material. Sounds like a self-help seminar...

In Part 2 of DBAs@Midnight: Resumes:

• "It doesn't make you stupid to make the technology accessible to people...."
• We arrive at our main topic: Resumes! How long should your resume be, should you get it done by a service, etc etc.
  • Thought: "Could you imagine what it would look like if it were customary to have a dating resume?" It would be a lie fest...
  • We (Sean and I) do a coulpe of things with our resumes that aren't necessarily standard, and ignore some standard advice.
  • Here we say bull**** a lot. Oops. And we begin to talk interviewing...

In Part 3 of DBAs@Midnight: Resumes:

• Effective interview tactics from the interviewer's perspective.  "So if you're an EXPERT, then tell me......"
• Shout out to Brent Ozar and the excellent interview material on his blog. Sean smiles, then scowls and shakes his fist.
• Sean talks about how hard he is on interviewees, and I reply, "Fair's fair: If you hire the guy, he's gonna have to work with you..."

Plus somewhere in there we do the drawing for the Lifecam, and also announce a surprise.

Happy days,

-Jen McCown

http://www.MidnightDBA.com

Hey everybody... I've just completed the drawing for the winner of the 70-433 Training Kit from MSPress.

Click here to see if you won.

 Thanks for playing, and we'll do another again soon.

--Sean and Jen.

When I get busy, I tend not to write as much on the technical side.  So to enrich your MidnightDBA blog experience, I hereby present a tip or two before the big announcement.

• First, Paul Randal (@paulrandal on twitter, blog) says, "Don't shrink data files. Don't shrink data files. Don't shrink data files. Don't shrink data files. Don't shrink data files. Clear?"  Yessir!
• Next, yesterday someone requested some tips on performance tuning.  To start, here are the blog posts I've done so far on performance, here is a blog by Greg Larson "The Dos and Don'ts of Database Indexing", and of course there's always BOL. This is a topic I'll be focusing on more in the near future.

 So...Sean finished a big piece he's been working on, and he feels celebratory.  We'll have a drawing today at 5pm CST to win....wait for it....

the MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-433) on SQL Server 2008-Database Development!!

This is what we both used when we were studying for the 70-433. (And yes, we both passed!)

Entry in the drawing requires a little homework, but I bet you can handle it. Just watch the latest DBAs @ Midnight, "Companies Don't Care", and email Jen@JenniferMcCown.com with the answer to this question: Who did Jen say submitted a session to SQL Saturday?

Happy days,

Jen McCown

http://www.MidnightDBA.com

Just a quick note, folks: I've released the MidnightDBA Blogcast 006 (direct link to Blogcast 006 MP3) - I read a short blog from Sean titled "Flatline", prefaced by a couple of notes on the January NTSSUG meeting, and SQL Saturday Dallas.

Also, I haven't published the link on the site yet, but Sean's Ground Zero SSIS class video is now available online! This is the talk from last Thursday's North Texas SQL Server User Group meeting.

Edit: Two more updates. First, the North Texas SQL Server User Group has a new Resources page, with group discounts, training resources, and reference materials!  AND, Sean has made some new renovations to MidnightDBA.com, including a smaller moon (for those of us with normal sized monitors) and a Twitter feed.  Awesomesauce!

Happy days,

Jen McCown

http://www.midnightdba.com

OK, we have a winner for the Windows Internals book.

Watch the drawing vid to see if your name was drawn.

Thanks to everyone who played.  We'll have another one soon.

Sean and Jen.

Edit: So sorry to those who couldn't find the page from the SQLServerPedia syndication!  The video can be found on our front page on MidnightDBA.com.  

A love letter, from Sean to you:

Let's do a quick one-day contest because I'm in a good mood on a Friday. The latest video I posted, "Check if File Exists"...why did i make it? Email Jen your answer and we'll have the drawing at 5pm today for Windows Internals by Mark E. Russinovich and David A. Solomon with Alex Ionescu. 

-Jen and Sean McCown

http://www.MidnightDBA.com

In last week's "Correlating Data in SQL Trace, Part 1", we took a trace to diagnose lock timeouts, and developed a query to correlate lines in the trace: this let us see what code was generating what lock timeouts.

The trick for the query is to use a correlated subquery to find the statement rownumber, thusly (simplified):

A little translation: "WHERE EventClass = 189" gives us all our timeouts.  "statement.rownumber = (subquery)" finds the closest (to the timeout) previous RPC:Starting row with the same spid...in other words, the timeout's associated RPC call.

Another use for this same type of correlation query is to find all "RPC starting" with no associated "RPC:complete" in a given timeframe.  Okay, it's a pretty specific need, but it certainly illustrates that this can be a very versatile query.

Instead of correlating timeouts to queries, we want to correlate RPC start with RPC complete, and then display only those RPC:Starting rows with no associated RPC:Complete.

To achieve this, we have to make some changes to our query.

• For one thing, we need a left outer join; this lets us return rows with NULL matches on the right side (meaning, no RPC:Complete)
• In the rownumber=(subquery), we change the less than to greater than...before, we found timeouts and then went back in time to find their origin. Here, we're finding RPC:Starting and going forward in time to find RPC:Complete.  
• We change the subquery's ORDER BY to ASC for the same reason.
• And of course, change the subquery eventclass = 10, as we're looking to return RPC:Completed.
• Introducing an outer join to the query adds a new element: the possibility of matching up rows that don't actually go together.  SPIDs get reused...if we keep our current criteria - an RPC:Completed with the same SPID and DBID with a greater rownumber - we're very likely to get false matches.  The way to fix this is to match start times in the subquery.

So our final query looks like this:

What have we learned?  That it's always best to tell the truth, little Johnny.  Oh, and with a little careful restructuring, a good query can be recycled for another, equally cool use.

-Jen McCown, who is really posting this at midnight-thirty local time.

http://www.MidnightDBA.com 

Cause we are living in a material world, and you are a material girl!  Free stuff is awesome, and we only have, like, two people who actually read the blog, so odds are good!

Your odds are good this month on winning a Microsoft LifeCam Show! Just email jen@jennifermccown.com with an answer to: What does Sean say about moving schema, and why? There's no minimum wordcount, and I'll even let you know if your answer is off the mark.  How nice am I?  So, so totally nice.

Edit: I should have made clearer that this is a drawing. A drawing!  To make it up to the people who don't get picked out of the hat for their very clever and very good-looking entries, I will have to devise some sort of reward. How about, your choice: a customized MidnighDBA cheat sheet wallpaper, or a feature segment on the MidnightDBA blogcast?  Those are the new consolation prizes that I've just made up, just now.

Speaking of free and awesome, we have two new podcasts in the MidnightDBA Blogcast this week:

• MidnightDBA Blogcast 004 - ORMs: Panacea or Polio Braces?
  In our first guest-blogged blogcast, I read excerpts from Jeremiah Peschka's latest greatest work. His blog can be found at http://www.facility9.com Thanks @peschkaj!
  
• Blogcast 003 - The Server-Side Trace
  Today we read my SQLServerPedia article, 'The Server-Side Trace: What, Why, and How'. Check out http://www.SQLServerPedia.com, especially the blogroll!

Happy days and free stuff,

Jen McCown

http://www.MidnightDBA.com

This review was written by Sean McCown.

• Author: Joydip Kanjilal

• Pages:  256 pages

• Publisher: Packt Publishing (December 31, 2007)  

This is one of those books that I wish I could use without reading.  What I mean by that is there is absolutely no personality in it at all.  It explains the technology, but doesn’t attempt to be entertaining in the least.  That said, it’s an excellent reference book.  I’ve worked with ASP.NET quite a bit and I’ve even worked with these controls quite a bit and I learned plenty from this book.  So while it’s for those who are beginners with these controls, it’s actually written for experienced programmers.  It never bothers to explain basic programming constructs.  So don’t get this thinking you’ll get to learn how to program.   This book stays on topic as it methodically works its way through each of the controls.  It not only goes through all of the controls, it goes from the basics to relatively advanced applications.  That’s actually one of the things I like best about this title.  For each controls it gives you several applications so it not only teaches you about the different uses of the controls themselves, it also shows you different coding methods you need to make each one of them happen. 

I wouldn’t want to sit down and just read this book from cover to cover.  It is a really good reference though and if I had to get up to speed on any of the ASP.NET controls, this is the book I’d want to have on my shelf.  In fact, I didn’t really know much about a couple of the controls discussed and after going through those chapters I think I’m ready to give them a shot.  This book even covers quite a bit of the material better than MSDN.  I have to qualify that though.  I’m sure MSDN actually covers some of the material just as well if not better, but it can be so hard to sift through everything on the MSDN site that it may as well not be documented at all.  So this is a really good reference that will stay on my shelf, but I won’t be taking it on the plane with me.

Ch.1  Introduction to Data Binding in ASP.NET

As the title says, here you’re going to talk about data binding.  You’ll learn what it is and what it means to you.  It even shows you in simple coding terms what it takes to data bind to a control.  Frankly, it’s a lot easier than I thought.  It also defines the different types of data binding and then shows you how to use the data binding expressions.  There’s extensive source code to show you exactly how and what you need to do.  It then goes into the new data source controls in ASP.NET 2.0 and discusses them each.  There are even full-color pictures to walk you through the process of working with these controls.

Ch. 2  Working with List Controls in ASP.NET

Of course you have to start by defining a list control.  After that it jumps right into working with each of them.  ListBox, DropDownList, CheckBoxList, BulletedList, RadioButtonList are all discussed.  And again, there’s no shortage of code or full-color pictures.  This is a very large chapter though.

Ch. 3  Working with the Repeater Control

Of course this chapter is all about the repeater.  Personally I love this control so I love this chapter.  I’m not going to give a blow by blow of this chapter though.  Instead I’m going to say that I recently had to use a repeater control and couldn’t figure out how to do something I needed to do and after reading through this chapter I was able to do what I needed.  This chapter is full of code and examples that there’s just no way to avoid knowing how to work with a repeater after reading it.  It’s good stuff.  And again, this chapter is pretty big.

Ch. 4  Working with the DataList Control

There just doesn’t seem to be a need for me to give details of all the chapters anymore.  This one is clearly about the DataList and it has all the same features as the other ones:  lots of code samples and pictures.

Ch. 5  Working with the DataGrid Control in ASP.NET

Same as above, right.

Ch. 6  Displaying Views of Data (Part 1)

Ok, so this one isn’t nearly as self-explanatory as the others have been.  Here we’re talking about all things GridView.  It shows you how to do tons of things with the GridView as well as exporting data to Excel or Word.

Ch. 7 Displaying Views of Data (Part 2)

Here you talk about the DetailsView, FormView, and TreeView. 

Ch. 8  Working with LINQ

LINQ basics are covered.  Everything from architecture to data binding, to using it with different controls can be learned.  If you don’t know anything about LINQ then this is where you need to start.