As an update to our current round of SQLskills community mentoring (round 4 – see post here), Joe and Erin are now mentoring people they’ve met at Immersion Events here in Chicago.

Joe will be mentoring Riley Logan, who attended IE2 in Chicago last week and IE1 in Bellevue last summer.  In his own words:

I was born and raised in Tuscaloosa, AL, where I also attended the University of Alabama, earning a degree in Management Information Systems. After graduating in 2005, I began working as a programmer at the Walmart Home Office in Bentonville, Arkansas. Though my title was programmer, I was placed on the Open Systems Database Engineering team, where I began working as an Informix, DB2, and SQL Server DBA. Initially, Informix was my primary platform of focus.

However, in 2006, Walmart’s IS Department brought a SQL Server PFE on site on a permanent basis. That PFE, Shep Sheppard, began mentoring me by teaching me the more technical aspects of SQL Server (Thank you, Shep!). Not long after his arrival, our senior SQL Server DBA left the team and, I suppose, the rest is history. I’m currently a SQL Server DBA for Tyson Foods where my primary responsibilities are designing, optimizing, and/or troubleshooting OLTP and data warehouse solutions so that, ultimately, people can eat more chicken.

Outside of spending time with my beautiful and wonderful wife, Amy, I enjoy playing jazz guitar and exercising (while trying to not create the need for another orthopedic surgery). I also enjoy studying the Bible and apologetics, economics (both current and historical), investing, ancient Greek, and some occasional philosophy and logic.

Erin will be mentoring Amy Herndon, who is attending IEDev in Chicago right now and IE2 in Bellevue last summer. In her own words:

I’m currently a database engineering team lead at a global, mid-size, financial firm. My primary role is database development, designing and creating systems that scale, and are secure and stable. I drive and evangelize process improvement, development to delivery, and change in my department to bring firm technology and practices up to current standards.

I graduated from St. Edwards University with an MBA and undergraduate degree in Computer Systems Management. I hold an MCITP in 2008, and am currently studying for MCM. I have worked in information technology for 16 years, 8 of those years as a SQL Server DBA. My previous career experience was serving as a database administrator at the Texas Legislative Council, a support agency for the Texas Legislature and surrounding state agencies.

I have 3 favorite things: SQL Server, computer gaming, and teaching aerobics and weight training classes at the gym.

Twitter tag – but I’m still learning the art of twittering: @AAwesomeAmy

Congratulations to them both!

As a counterpart to my recent survey on what the oldest version of SQL Server you have in production (see the results here), I kicked off a survey last week asking what the newest version of SQL Server is that you have in production.

Here are the results:

I’m not surprised by these results, and they reflect the straw-polls I do at the start of each class we teach. We’re seeing a ton of people putting 2012 into production and there’s a lot of interest in AlwaysOn Availability Groups because of the ability to have multiple copies of the primary, and direct reads on secondaries without having to use clunky database snapshots (like you have to do with database mirroring).

One thing I couldn’t get from the two surveys was the average spread of versions in production. What I can tell you from my class straw-polls is that most of attendees who are using 2012 also have older versions in production too. My impression is that more people are kicking the tires of 2012 by having it in production in some way, rather than having it in a test environment and then doing a comprehensive roll-out.

Anyway, glad to see a strong adoption rate for 2012!

We’ve had a mentoring program here at SQLskills for a couple of years (the brainchild of Jonathan), where each of us can pick someone who’s attended one of our Immersion Events in the past and offer to be their mentor for six months.

It’s time to kick off the fourth mentoring session. You can read about the previous mentees below:

• Session 1 (November 2011, including our reasoning for doing this): SQLskills community mentoring
• Session 2 (May 2012): SQLskills community mentoring – round 2
• Session 3 (November 2012): SQLskills community mentoring – round 3

This time round the team’s taking a break so only I will be mentoring someone (I love helping people, especially with career/growth). I’ll be mentoring Merrill Aldrich (b|t – definitely check out his cool post on telecommuting), who took IE1 in Chicago in 2011. In his own words:

Merrill Aldrich is a database administrator at one of the largest credit unions in the U.S., serving about 850,000 members. His primary role is as a systems/operations DBA, making the organization’s many databases safe, secure, highly available, and fast. He strives to be a change agent, improving systems and processes a little every day, until they are truly outstanding.

Merrill enjoys sharing experience with the SQL Server community online, using social media and his blog, with user groups, and by speaking at events like PASS SQL Saturday.

He is a graduate of the Rice University School of Architecture and designed buildings for many years. He became an expert in three-dimensional modeling and building information modeling (BIM) before retooling and retraining to work directly in IT. He has received a few awards, but his favorite remains the award for “Shortest Answer to a Long CAD Question,” which took the form of a corny purple trophy, given many, many years ago by teammates at his first architecture job.

Congratulations to Merrill – I’m looking forward to working with him over the next six months!

Last week I kicked off a survey asking what is the oldest version of SQL Server you have in production.

Here are the results:

I’m actually quite surprised. While I expected to see a sizable percentage of businesses still with SQL Server 2000 in production, I didn’t expect it to be almost half of all respondents – that’s massive! And 9% of businesses have SQL Servers *older* than SQL Server 2000. Although we’ll do performance troubleshooting on SQL Server 2000 (and it takes more time because of the lack of DMVs), we won’t touch anything older.

Last year I wrote a post You guys still use SQL Server 2000? Really? where I listed some of the reasons why people are stuck on SQL Server 2000 for some systems, with some client examples I knew of. SQL Server 2000 was a really solid release and I think it will be around for some time to come.

Here’s the kicker though, Extended Lifecycle Support ended for SQL Server 2000 on April 9th, 2013 (see here for all the details). And the hardware those SQL Servers are running on have to be out of warranty, or close too it, as well (Edit: unless the instances are virtualized, of course). I’d be getting really twitchy about wanting to upgrade the hardware and SQL Servers for those systems where there’s nothing major holding me back. We’re finding a lot of clients asking for upgrade help from SQL Server 2000 and 2005 due to the licensing gotchas with SQL Server 2012 and the ease of buying over-powered hardware that can’t be used without shelling out even more money for unneeded licenses.

I think that if I re-run this survey in another year, the results will be quite different as businesses realize the risk of running an unsupported version and finally upgrade.