As you’ve no doubt heard or read, the call for nominations for the PASS Board of Directors is open until September 3.  If you’re active in the community, have leadership skills, and are committed to growing the SQL Server community, a position on the board may be right for you.  Terms are 2 years in length and do require some travel, mostly to Seattle.  It does require commitment, but you’d have the opportunity to shape the future of the PASS organization and the SQL Server communities that are a part of PASS.  If you’re up for the challenge, I’d encourage you to submit your name for consideration.

I’ve spent some time talking to Andy Warren, a current board member, and he’s encouraged me to run for the board.  I am very excited about the possibility of being a part of the PASS leadership, and do plan to make a run for the board – just not this year.  I’ve got a lot of irons in the fire right now, on the home front (a baby due in October and a possible move to a new home) and in my profession (job uncertainly due to my company being bought out).  I’m certain that I could make a worthwhile contribution as a PASS board member, but as this is a huge responsibility, I have to insure that other goings-on in my life will not keep me from giving 100% to that effort.  I don’t think this is the year for that.  (I know, excuses, excuses…)

I’m looking forward to seeing who is selected by the nominating committee.  Those who I would like to see have either already self-nominated, have said they aren’t interested this year, or recently went to work for Microsoft (I won’t mention any names on that last one).

[Cross-posted from SQL Server Central]

Well, perhaps not a whole new identity, just a consolidation of multiple facets of my online persona.  For several years now, I’ve maintained a personal website (www.timmitchell.net) and a professional website (www.bucketofbits.com).  The personal site, an old Community Server install, consisted of a neglected personal blog and a few family pictures, but sadly had been untouched for nearly a year.  On the BucketOfBits.com website, I had published links to my recent blog posts and downloads from my presentations.

So, to simplify administration and to consolidate my online footprint, I’ve decided to merge both sites under the TimMitchell.net domain.  This site will be a (mostly) professional site: I’ve imported the professional content and links from BucketOfBits, and I’m cross-posting my SQLServerCentral blog there as well.  For the content that is purely personal, including pictures of the kids and some random thoughts that have nothing to do with SQL Server/technology/career, I’ll maintain my “personal” identity on Facebook, which I’ve found is better suited for that purpose. 

I reviewed several different platforms, including the Mojo Portal, DotNetNuke, and WordPress for this consolidation project, and decided to roll out BlogEngine.net, a C#/SQL Server blogging platform.  It was easy to deploy, is relatively simple to configure or re-engineer, and supports multiple themes for when I get tired of the same old layout.  It supports cross posting of blogs, and the setup to cross post my SSC blog over to this new site was very easy.  Thanks to fellow Dallas-area SQL guy Lee Everest for giving me some pointers on this platform.  The visual layout is as plain-vanilla as it gets, so I may spice it up with a new theme once the dust has settled. 

As always, feedback is welcome.  Let me know if you find any problems or have suggestions.

I wrote last month about purchasing a new Toshiba netbook to supplement my mobile computing arsenal.  Forty days later, I’m still quite happy with the purchase, and have gotten as much out of this unit as I had hoped.

My biggest surprise was battery life.  It was rated at 9 hours of runtime, which I assumed was a theoretical spec and not accurate in everyday use.  I haven’t run it straight through from a full charge to full discharge, but my testing indicates that my battery life is at least 9 hours of runtime.

The performance is more than adequate, and apart from some occasional heavy disk I/O, I haven’t run into any problems.  I had installed the SQL Server management tools on it immediately, but didn’t install the SQL Server engine until earlier today.  I ran the install, which took about 45 minutes, and even with SQL Server and Integration Services running, I’ve found no performance problems so far.

I have changed my mobile habits since buying this device.  I used to carry my big laptop only where I thought I might need it, and left it at home for casual trips.  These days I’ve almost always got the netbook in tow; it’s easy to carry and handy to have for when I find myself with some unexpected downtime while out and about.  Even a trip to the doctor or a haircut offers 20 or 30 minutes of waiting, and I can now use my netbook to turn the downtime into productive time.

If you’re a mobile professional, I highly recommend that you consider purchasing a netbook.  At this rate, mine will have literally paid for itself in billable time by the end of the year, not to mention the immeasurable convenience it offers.

Baton Rouge SQL Server group leader and recent SQL Saturday host Patrick LeBlanc is putting together a new learning series.  Starting in September, the SQL Lunch series will commence, providing brief (30 minutes or so) online presentations on various SQL Server-related topics. 

I am currently scheduled to present at the SQL Lunch on October 12th.  I’ll be discussing ways to provide end-user reporting capability using SQL Server Report Builder 2.0 and SQL Server Reporting Services 2008. 

More details, including the full schedule and connection information, will be forthcoming shortly.

[Cross-posted from SQL Server Central]

I ran into a situation this week that brought to light a subtle syntactical error I’d made in creating an SSIS package.  I’ve got a client that has given me access to their development server to create some complex extraction queries, which will eventually be rolled into SSIS packages.  Since I’m working with read-only access and cannot create stored procedures during the development phase, I’m running these queries in an ad-hoc manner.

So, the queries are built and returning a reasonable set of data.  I copy the entire text of the queries into a series of OleDB Data Sources in SSIS, and run my newly created package.  The execution takes only seconds, which, considering the volume of data I’m moving, tells me something has gone wrong.  The package had completed successfully, but the destination files were all empty.  I tested the queries in SSMS again and confirmed the results, but the same query returns no results in SSIS.

The cause of this was a simple but subtle oversight.  When I copied the query text into the command window in the OleDB Data Source, I had inadvertently also copied the USE [DATABASE_NAME] declaration included in each query.  The inclusion of the USE [DATABASE_NAME] statement caused each data source to fire without error, but returned no rows from the source.

It is important to note that this *should* be a rare problem, since stored procedures are preferable to maintaining complex queries outside the database.  If you have the appropriate permissions and organizational authority to wrap your logic into SPROCs, by all means do so.

So the takeaway is that if you find yourself copying an SQL statement directly into the query window of a data source, make sure you remove any USE [DATABASE_NAME] directives.  Failing to do so can create a bug in your package that is easily overlooked.

[Edited to add SPROC disclaimer 8/23]