In Recovery... | Interviews

SQL PASS interview with Jen and Sean McCown

(Reposting from Kimberly's blog)

At PASS we hung out with Sean McCown and Jen McCown (of MidnightDBA) and chatted... and, despite our better judgement, agreed to do an interview. These aren't overly technical but they are fun!

And, our favorite "travel tip" from the video is to know your plane and check your seat on http://www.seatguru.com/ - we use it religiously when planning our travel.

Enjoy!

Categories:
Conferences | Interviews

10-minute TV interview with me and Kimberly, plus a big announcement

While we were at Connections in Orlando in April, we sat down with our good friend Carl Franklin to discuss the conference, life, and a big announcement. Check it out at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Tb0V-e0dCk.

Enjoy!

Categories:
Interviews

Paul on .NET Rocks! again

A couple of weeks ago while Kimberly was in Mountain View at the same client I'm at, our good friend Richard Campbell sent me email saying 'Bored? How about doing a .NET Rocks!?'. I haven't been on the show since the infamous 'coming out' episode in 2007 where we hijacked Kimberly and mercilessly taunted her about us being together (Carl: So... when was the last time you made... 'whoopie'? Me: Is that some kind of Jello?). See show #217 for that one.

Anyway, in this show we talk about what developers need to know about how SQL Server behaves and for once we actually focus on the content (GUIDs, LOB storage, SharePoint, performance tuning, backups, and of course Lego) and don't devolve into madness and crudity (well, except maybe for a little bit at the end).

Check it out - show #455. Enjoy!

Categories:
Interviews

New interview of me

We're onsite with a great client down here in (very hot) Houston and Kimberly's lecturing right now so I'm digging around finding some info on problems they're seeing. Saw that Tom (aka. SQLRockstar) had posted the email interview we recently did and wanted to get it out there. If nothing else, checkout the photo link in his first paragraph (I only did that once!) and the about-Paul questions at the end.

Great fun to do - and the first about-me interview I've done for three years.

Thanks to Tom for doing the interview - check it out at http://www.thomaslarock.com/2009/06/interview-with-paul-randal/.

Enjoy!

Categories:
Interviews

TechNet Radio interview on partitioning (Kimberly)

Kimberly also did an interview with TechNet Radio back in December - this time about partitioning.

The links for the interview are:

Enjoy!

Categories:
Interviews | Partitioning

TechNet Radio interview on database corruption

Well, we're back from vacation finally (only for 10 days and then off to India and Thailand for 3 weeks... phew) and I've got a bunch of blogs posts to catch up on. First up - I did an interview with TechNet Radio in mid-December where I talked about database corruption and things to do to recover from it - similar to the conference sessions I've done but a little higher level.

The links for the interview are:

Enjoy!

Paul and Kimberly TechNet Radio interview from PASS

While we were at PASS we hooked up with Eric Ostrowski from TechNet Radio to do an interview. Eric's compiled a bunch of interviews from PASS into a 36 minute broadcast which is now live. Our section starts about 26 minutes in and runs to the end (but if you have time its worth listening to the whole broadcast). We don't touch on anything technical but topics covered include:

Kimberly's sheep and Highland cow fetish from our Scotland trip
The SQL Server 2008 Internals book
The "MVP book" that's coming up
Our new partner company in Australia
My famous "Naked Tour" of Australia in 2007 (which leaves Eric speechless )

We're both going to be recording more in-depth interviews with Eric over the next month or so too.

The links for this interview are:

Enjoy!

Categories:
Conferences | Interviews

Life on SQL Server 2008 - PASS interview with a large-scale user

During the PASS Community Summit, Rick Heiges did an interview with Thomas Grohser, the Senior Database Engineer at the bwin Interactive Entertainment AG, the world's largest online gambling company. This is the private client Kimberly and I were onsite with for a week last month in Vienna before heading to Barcelona for TechEd. In the interview, Thomas reveals some of the cool throughput statistics of their workload and his early impressions of SQL Server 2008.

Check it out on the PASS site (you'll need to register to view it) here.

(And here are my previous posts about their backup timings, and my wanderings around Vienna (long with lots of pictures))

Categories:
Interviews | SQL Server 2008

RunAs Radio interview on indexes (and future projects...)

For the first time in ages, Kimberly sneaked in an interview without me! I was teaching a class on Database Maintenance for some Microsoft DBAs and Kimberly recorded a RunAs Radio interview on her favorite subject - indexes. I love listening to her talk about indexes - or maybe I just like the sound of her voice :-)

Check it out at http://www.runasradio.com/default.aspx?showNum=76.

Enjoy!

PS She also drops some hints about an upcoming project of ours...

Categories:
Indexes From Every Angle | Interviews

RunAs Radio interview on FILESTREAM

This is the second of the two sessions I recently recorded with Richard and Greg on RunAs Radio (the first one on being an "involuntary DBA" is here). I've just finished the final edited version of a whitepaper for Microsoft on the FILESTREAM feature of SQL Server 2008 and this session goes into details of why you'd want to use it and how to setup a system for optimal FILESTREAM performance. The whitepaper should be available before PASS in November, in the meantime, checkout the show!

The show is 35 minutes long and you can download it at http://www.runasradio.com/default.aspx?showNum=74.

Enjoy!

Categories:
FILESTREAM | Interviews | SQL Server 2008

RunAs Radio interview on being an "involuntary DBA"

On Tuesday I recorded a couple of sessions with Richard and Greg on RunAs Radio. It's been a while since either Kimberly or I have been on the show - last November at TechEd in Barcelona. In the first session we discussed what it is to be an "involuntary DBA" - someone who's thrown into the DBA role with no training. This goes along nicely with the TechNet Magazine article I wrote for the August 2008 issue on Effective Database Maintenance (for the involuntary DBA). Kimberly also pops in from time to time when she's not coughing, we make fun of her, and I describe one of my favorite Calvin and Hobbes cartoons around collecting spit in a jar - all the usual silliness.

The show is 35 minutes long and you can download it at http://www.runasradio.com/default.aspx?showNum=72.

Enjoy!

Categories:
Database Maintenance | Interviews | Jokes | Involuntary DBA

TechEd Online Panel Video: Building a Solid High-Availability Strategy

While we were at TechEd in June, Kimberly and I participated in an hour-long discussion panel (Leveraging SQL Server Technologies to Build a Solid High-Availability Strategy) that was video-taped by the TechEd Online folks. It's now been edited and is available for download/viewing. We cover everything from requirements analysis to technology details in SQL Server 2008. The other panel members were Satya Jayanty, Allan Hirt, Kevin Farlee, and Amit Bansal.

You can browse the various online videos at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/events/teched/cc561184.aspx or go straight to the panel discussion video here.

Enjoy!

Categories:
Conferences | High Availability | Interviews | SQL Server 2008

TechNet Radio interview with Paul and Kimberly on SQL Server 2008 - Part 2

The second part of our radio interview with TechNet has been released (see here for part 1). In this installment we discuss troubleshooting and manageability in SQL Server 2008. You can get to it by going to the March 11^th 2008 show here.

Enjoy!

TechNet Radio interview with Paul and Kimberly on SQL Server 2008 - Part 1

Wow - almost 10 days without a blog post - that must be a record for me! :-) Never fear - I'll be posting more over the next couple of weeks. Kimberly flew off to India yesterday to teach some Microsoft classes and unfortunately I couldn't join her this time as I'm teaching 3 classes myself:

an internal Microsoft class on Designing for High Availability
another internal Microsoft class on SQL Server 2008 for DBAs (similar to the JumpStart class I posted about here)
3 days of content for the new Microsoft Certified Architect: Database qualification - see the Microsoft Learning site here for details

Anyway - the subject of this post is to let you know that last week, Kimberly and I did two interviews for TechNet Radio on SQL Server 2008 technologies. Part 1 has just been released where we discuss security and availability features. You can get to it by going to the March 4th 2008 show here. Tune in and find out how I lull myself to sleep when Kimberly's out of town...

Enjoy!

Paul and Kimberly interview on RunAs Radio - What's New in SQL Server 2008?

While we were in Barcelona we sat down with Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes from RunAs Radio to record a 1/2 hour interview on SQL Server 2008. We touch on a ton of different features (look at the number of Categories I've tagged this with!) and have a bunch of laughs along the way - check it out here.

PS There's been a ton of interest in the slide deck idea I had so we'll be going ahead with that. Look for an announcement sometime in the first few months of next year about how to get them. Thanks to everyone that replied!

Kimberly & Paul interview with SSWUG TV

On the last day of SQL Connections a couple of weeks back we did a 20 minute TV interview with Steve Wynkoop of SSWUG. Apart from the mandatory mention of our favorite game Blokus, we discussed a bunch of new features coming in SQL Server 2008 while I struggled not to say 'we' instead of 'they' to describe the SQL team. I'm still in recovery I guess...

Check it out at http://www.sswug.org/sswugtv/seeshow.asp?sid=P227.

Categories:
Conferences | Interviews | SQL Server 2008

Kimberly & Paul interview from TechEd IT Forum

(Oops - deleted this by accident - re-entering it.)

Day 1 for us here in Barcelona was pretty tiring. After flying in from Seattle on Monday, and waking up with jet-lag on Tuesday at 2am, we did 4 sessions during the day, with 8 more to go by Friday. By the time we got back to the speaker hotel we were both totally beat but we rallied for a nice dinner with our good friend (and last week's top-scoring TechEd speaker - congratulations!) Rafal Lukawiecki. All our sessions were well attended with lots of excellent questions.

In the afternoon gap between sessions 3 and 4 we sat down with the TechEd TV crew for a short interview on a very comfy couch - check it out (and others from the conference) here.

Categories:
Conferences | Interviews