Categories
Life

2012

Not huge on “year end” or “goal” posts.. or is that goalposts? but last year I did a 2011 and Beyond post, so I figured I would do one this year. Of course it is 2 days late, as I was on the road and kind of disconnected from Dec 23rd until Jan 1st. But here goes.

First…How did I do from last year .. I did some of the things, tried to do some of the things, and failed at some of things, expected.

This year? Well..

  • Spend more time with Emily and Ella
  • Lose weight! Failed at this. I used Fitbit (that is another post) and I want to try to do 10k steps a day this year
  • Brew at least 1 batch of beer a month (And try a Secondary, and our own recipe)
  • Utilize social networks and sites more.
  • Learn to cook (tried last year but the class was cancelled?!?)
  • Complete a few awesome projects at work
  • Hit 1000 blog posts (should be easy, I’m at 991 right now)
  • Hit 3+ conferences and network like crazy
  • Keep adding value to MADPASS
  • Get home to Pierz and Chisholm 3+ times
  • Buy a house
  • Get rid of Windows in my house

And there is so much more. So much to do, it never ends. But we can try, and still have fun. To everyone, have a great year and do things you want to do and have fun doing it!

Categories
Business Intelligence SQLServerPedia Syndication

Selling Management on SQL 2012

2012 is going to be a big year in the SQL world. No, the world isn’t going to end. SQL 2012 should get released by Microsoft, hopefully in the first half (cross your fingers for the first quarter!) of the year. Great! But many out there are now on SQL 2005, or 2008, or 2008 R2, some even on SQL 2000 (SP4 – still get support?) but you want to get to SQL 2012. What can you do to make that transition easier? You need to sell the features and benefits, just like anything else.

Clustering

If you have any kind of clustering environment, or mirroring, or are even thinking about doing clustering, then SQL 2012 is going to be what you want to do. With AlwaysOn, it makes it dead simple to create and manage clusters. If you look back over the versions of SQL, and think clustering, you might shutter. With 2012, things become much easier and management has to see this benefit, as with anything, to make your systems more available with the new AlwaysOn

Master Data Services and Data Quality Services

Microsoft came out with their first round of Master Data Services (MDS) in SQL 2008 R2, but it was lackluster. The interface is clunky, weird, and hard to use. Most “end users” of MDS aren’t going to be that technical. You need something simple, like SharePoint, or Excel. MDS is neither (even though its a weird version of SharePoint). With 2012, MDS is vastly improved and actually something viable where an Enterprise could use it for a Master Data Management (MDM) solution. Couple that with Data Quality Services (DQS) and you get tons of bang for your buck. with MDS and the excel add on, this will be just what the doctor ordered for MDM groups in businesses.

Business Intelligence

Near and dear to my heart of course, is Business Intelligence. What a huge release for BI folks in 2012. First off, a whole new analysis services type, Tabular. Columnar Vertipaq type cubes. Reverse engineer PowerPivots right into SSAS Tabular and then tweak to release out to the Enterprise.

Then the enhanced SSIS stuff, better IDE, better management of packages, and more. Of course the integration with the Visual Studio 2010 IDE is a welcome feature, especially for those of us that also need to work on C# and .NET 4.0 stuff!

But don’t forget the potential biggest thing yet out of the BI tools for 2012 – Power View (yes the space is intentional, not sure why.. but now we have PowerPoint, PowerPivot and Power View). Naming aside, Power View could be a HUGE analytics tool to get more BI out to the people in an Enterprise. First off, they plan on making it work on iOS! Power View works on tabular cubes, so you see the tie in there. The one big thing with Power View, is it just works inside of SharePoint. No stand alone editor. You better have SharePoint 2010 and a pretty good SharePoint admin along side your BI team to get all this stuff working. Some of the enhanced end user alerting in SSRS integrated mode looks nice as well. But once again, you need SharePoint! DON’T for get the SharePoint!

There is much more in SQL 2012 that will make DBA’s lives easier, and BI pros development streamlined. Too much to outline in just one post. But if you are trying to sell SQL 2012 upgrade to management, the “big three” things I outlined above are a good starting point. One thing to be aware of though is that the licensing model has changed in SQL 2012 to core based, so you would want to read up on that.

I’m excited for SQL 2012 bits to hit and I hope you are too!

Categories
Agile

Agile: Dealing with Your Bug Backlog

Previously I wrote about the types of bugs that might come up during a sprint and dealing with them. This post is more on the backlog of bugs your project may “acquire”.

Most software, if not all, has some kind of bugs. They crop up over time, causing users pain, maybe throwing errors, logic errors, but just overall just not letting your software do what it is trying to do.

After a while, you end up with a “bug backlog”. That is, of course, you aren’t fixing your bugs at the same or higher rate than they are coming in. If that is the case, then kudos!, but many applications end up having little nuances/bugs everywhere. Your backlog can grow quickly if you don’t do something about it. 100, 500, 1000+ bugs. What do you do?

There are two main things to do with your bugs. First off, prioritize them. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, whatever scale you want. You need to separate the wheat from the chaff so to speak. You want to focus on the highest priority bugs first. Second, you want to make sure you have some kind of category for your bugs. Screen X, Screen Y, Workflow A, Workflow B, etc. That way, you can hone in on different areas of your application and “attack” those bugs. As an addition, you can maybe set the criticality of your bugs as well, but that isn’t completely necessary to start.

To Repeat: Prioritize and Categorize (and optionally Set Severity).

You should probably review new bugs on a weekly basis or some time interval to keep up with the bugs coming into your system. Some bugs are going to come in that are just end users using the system wrong (I always have Steve Jobs in my head saying “You are holding it wrong” here..) Then you have things you just might not care about fixing. You should close both of these bugs. Keep them in your bug system, but close them, and let the end users know what is up.

Other bugs that come through that are valid, should get the priority, category and severity ratings. You should also look at the existing backlog to see if there are existing bugs that are related or possibly duplicate. As an aside, I wish there were some better tools for doing this automatically, I have done some research and there are actually some scholarly papers on the subject. Maybe some systems have this built in, but the ones I have used havent.

You should try to keep your bug backlog down. Keep it groomed. The only way you are going to do that is to close bugs you aren’t going to fix, fix bugs that come in, and make your software more robust to avoid bugs in the first place. The latter is the hardest, but eventually you are going to have to fix some bugs.

There could be different approaches to fixing bugs. You could take one bug and make it one story, this is perfectly fine. You may take many bugs that are related, group them up and make one story, that works too. You may have a “hardening” sprint and just do bugs that sprint, maybe go the gamification route and add bug fixing bounties, there are endless options, but you are going to have to fix them, for a few reasons: to keep your software in tip top shape, and to keep your users happy.

If you end up ignoring your bug backlog for too long, you may just declare bug backlog bankruptcy. But once you start getting bugs in again, it will grow, you can’t keep ignoring it. It is like never taking the garbage out if you ignore it, it will keep piling up.

In the end, the best thing to do is come up with a systematic way to deal with your backlog, and stick with it. Make it a priority for everyone on the team to be conscious of the bugs and backlog and assist when needed in verifying bugs, finding dupes, entering bugs, fixing bugs, etc. Nobody likes buggy software, and software doesn’t like bugs either. It is a win-win.

Categories
Geeky/Programming

iPhone 4S Blue Pixel Line Problem.. Fixed!

Friday as I was leaving work, I noticed a small 1 pixel line vertically directly in the middle of my iPhone 4S that I just activated about 1.5 weeks earlier. WTF? Thought something was on my glasses, rebooted, restored, etc, etc, still was there. Wasn’t a software issue, definitely hardware. Brought it directly to the Apple Store and the took a look and said, yep, we will replace it no questions asked. Something definitely wrong. Not sure what causes it, I saw something about some board inverter deal on some forum, but nothing concrete.

Let’s just hope it doesn’t happen again 🙂

Categories
Uncategorized

My Shared Items

I just blogged about Google Reader changes, and even though I will continue to use Google Reader, I am going to try a different workflow for “sharing” items. I picked up the domain myshareditems.com and pointed at a Posterous space. I can then use send to functionality in Google Reader to “share” items to that url. I might even try to get my previously shared items in there someday from Google Reader (you can export from the settings menu).

Who knows, but myshareditems.com could become a more central service for others to share as well if I was ambitious enough to do something like that, you never know. Anyways, it is an experiment in sharing outside of Google Reader, but not specific to a “service” (twitter, facebook, etc) but yet I don’t want it cloud up my main blog here, etc.. Will see how it works.

Categories
Blogging Product Reviews

Google Reader Changes

As anyone who uses Google Reader knows already. They have changed. They changed for the worse. Design is somewhat horrible, removed features, etc. Sharing is not there anymore. You can +1 and then Share to G+. Ability to share to an RSS feed is gone. After using Google Reader for like 4 years and reading 10k items a month, it is jarring to see things just removed. Not sure what they were thinking.

Are there alternatives? Some readers out there, yes, but most already use Google Reader for the backend. What I am looking at doing is utilizing the “Send To” functionality on a post. You can set up some default Send To’s, or a custom one. Most likely a Posterous link blog/RSS feed type thing.

Otherwise? On the Mac, iPhone, iPad – use Reeder. Not sure what “Share” does at this point in that app. On windows, stick to the browser and utilize “Send To”. You will notice it under Reader Settings, in a Send To tab. The ability to add custom send to’s is what is interesting. As long as they leave that feature in the product as well.

What are your thoughts on the changes?

Categories
SharePoint

#spstc SharePoint Saturday Twin Cities quick recap

Last weekend, the SharePoint admin and I went up to the Twin Cities to hit up SharePoint Saturday. It was a good time (ScarePint the night before) and then 4 sessions and networking. Some good content on caching, silverlight vs HTML5, Performance Point and then Visualizations in SharePoint.

The sessions were OK, the people were nice. I wasn’t 100% engaged as I felt the sessions lacked some advanced content, but it was good overall. Definitely a different experience for me since I usually hit up .NET or SQL events.

Categories
Life

Thoughts

Try to do right thing.

Lead by example.

Show capabilities of what’s out there.

Get people to think different.

Be open and transparent.

Work as a team.

Help and discuss things like a family.

Always keep learning and changing.

Be the best.

Lose mediocrity.

See wide and deep.

Details are more important than major things.

Always be creating, coming up with ideas.

Always be trying to improve.

Have fun.

Categories
Business Intelligence

#sqlpass 2011 Summit Thoughts

Want to get a quick post out before I forget everything cool I have been thinking about the 2011 SQL Pass Summit in Seattle WA.

The conference started out great with a first timer reception (this was my second year), and I knew a few first timers so that would great.

The first day keynote was good, and then the sessions I hit were on a full range of things, new semantic search stuff with file table, and more.

I missed a couple of sessions on day 1 because I was in a Microsoft led focus group on “BI in the cloud” some very cool ideas thrown out and excited to see what is coming up in the future.

More good keynote on day two, a deeper dive into the stuff in SQL Server 2012 (formerly Denali). Went to some good sessions on Data Quality Services (DQS) and Vertipaq vs OLAP, and Power View (remember the space!) SharePoint and Power View integration, etc. Some very cool stuff coming soon with the 2012 release.

Tabular cubes vs Multidimensional cubes. OLAP vs Vertipaq, etc. Big debates and questions here, when to put things in Tabular vs MDX, etc. DAX solves some hard problems we run into with MDX.

Another thing I went to a couple sessions on was StreamInsight. This is some very cool technology for complex event processing, using .NET and LINQ. The StreamInsight guys are crazy smart. Also integrating StreamInsight with Azure, and doing some crazy processing and analysis of tons of data in near real time. I see this technology making a difference somewhere down the road.

Power View was another big winner from the summit. This integrates with SharePoint 2010 as a Silverlight (SL still isn’t dead?) report builder and viewer. Not even sure they are called “reports” anymore, but “views”. You create views and you can interact/edit them in real time. Export to PowerPoint too. These views work off “tabular” vertipaq BISM (BI semantic model) cubes. This technology is going to change how we deliver information to the business.

Being able to take a PowerPivot (no space!) and reverse engineer it into SQL Server Data Tools (formerly BIDS – in VS2010 shell) to create a BISM tabular cube and publish to SSAS Tabular instance looks great. Solving problems like crazy snapshotting and many to many and time analysis using DAX looks very useful.

Of course, GameWorks appreciation night was fun, and I found a Mcmenamins (Six Arms) up the road from the convention center, so I got get a taste of Ruby again. Good conversation and times at the Taphouse and around the Sheraton and Convention center was good too. Seattle is a nice city and the weather was pretty good I thought. Another great summit.

Categories
Geeky/Programming

Office 365 and Windows Live Messenger Not Working? Here's The Fix:

Earlier this summer, I moved from Google Apps to Office 365. I really don’t use Windows Live Messenger for personal IM, but log in every once in a while, also Xbox 360 can login. I noticed on live.com when I hit it, the web messenger continually tried to login. Also my Xbox and WLM on my PC wouldn’t login (error code 8100037b). What gives?

Well, I figured it might have had something to do with Office 365 and Lync Online, and I was right. I had to go into Office 365, Admin, under Lync, General Settings, and disable external communication settings. After 12+ hours I could then log into Windows Live Messenger. Kind of a mess if your org might be using Windows Live for IM and then moving to Office 365. Of course your Lync could federate out to WLM, but still, not being able to log in could be a pain