I've gone on SQL Cruise at a similar or slightly lower cost, and that's an audience of 12-15, but that's a legitimate community event and we get a whole lot more exposure from the sponsorship than from my actual presence
If you organize a legitimate SQLPass chapter, and make it an official SQL Saturday event, then there is a whole lot more opportunity for me to attend one of those.
I think anyone in this room could put together a one hour session that at least one other person would learn at least one thing from. We're not here because we're morons. :-)
@AaronBertrand Can you message me a mobile number or some contact details on Linkedin so I can get hold of you when you get to the UK?
@gbn Having never used Qlikview, tableau or Powerpivot, I'd say SSAS is probably the best topic that I can think of. It's one of those things that people usually hit at most once per project. Do some cubes then move on and don't touch anything for a year after that.
@AaronBertrand TBH I'd struggle with that one, unless you want a discourse on the finer elements of Sybase/SQL Server compatibility with extended character sets :D
(re the comment 20 minutes ago about anyone here being able to put a presentation together that everyone here would learn something from)
Just sent it to @AaronBertrand as well in case he needs anything else redacted.
@JackDouglas - @AaronBertrand is staying in Hammersmith. Apparently there's a BITS shindig on Saturday that he thinks he can get some people into, or maybe we could do something on Sunday. I'm back down to Bournemouth on Monday so that's not really a goer for me.
@JackDouglas You should have a list of stuff I picked up on an initial pass.
@MarkStoreySmith OK. I think Richmond is a good location - @AaronBertrand's staying in Hammersmith and could taxi back to his hotel easily. You and I could train home from there, and I think @JackDouglas could get to Ealing or somewhere that he could train home from. Plus, plenty of eateries and watering holes in Richmond. Does that make sense to every one or does someone have a better idea?
@JackDouglas OK. I'll try to arrange a venue for a meal around 7:30 and we can meet up there.@MarkStoreySmith probably won't be there until 9 or so, I imagine. Once he turns up we can hunt around.
@JackDouglas Richmond has lots of eateries and is taxi-able from Hammersmith quite easily. @MarkStoreySmith and I can train to there directly and You could get to a station like Ealing or some such on the Paddington line that goes out through Maidenhead.
@JackDouglas I wend to the Apollo there once, Not the most salubrious part of town, but maybe OK.
@AaronBertrand Hammersmith to Richmond is a few km, so not terribly expensive in a taxi. I picked it because (a) I've been there a few times and it's got lots of pubs and eateries of one sort or another. Also, @MarkStoreySmith and I can get there directly by train and @JackDouglas could get to a fairly short taxi ride by train.
However, I think he plans to be a responsible driver and drive in.
I don't really know Hammersmith either, although it's not the most salubrious part of town. I thought Richmond might be better.
Currently I have in mind something involving eating at a restaurant around 7:30 or 8 and then a few quiet drinkies at one of the local watering holes afterwards.
@AaronBertrand - If you want something to amuse yourself during the day on Sunday you could do the London Dungeon (right next to London Bridge Station - navigating on the trains left as an exercise to the reader) or maybe the Eye (the big ferris wheel thing next to Waterloo Station).
Truckloads of historic buildings if you're into that sort of thing.
You could also do the Borough Market (Also next to London Bridge Stn) in the morning for some expensive, but yummy food, or the Portobello Road market (a few blocks down from Paddington) if you like that sort of thing.
@Shark Want to pop across to London for a few drinks on Sunday night?
@Shark You might have to work cheap for a gig or two but you should be able to pull your rate up into that range. Take a look a the contract jobs on www.jobserve.co.uk. Some of them have rates listed, which should give you some idea of what to expect.
The banks and hedge funds pay the most, but you have to put up with working with merchant bankers.
First page of results for jobs in London off Jobserve for 'SQL Server DBA' contract 340 p/d 350 p/d 300-350 p/d 500-600 p/d 320 p/d 400-450 p/d 350-450 p/d
You might get away with less, but anything more than a hovel costs an arm and a leg to live in London. The standard of accommodation as a function of the living costs in London is pretty dire.
What is the origin of "Concerned of Tunbridge Wells" - a possibly fictitious writer of letters to the editor? Can anyone dig out a definitive etymology for the term, or is it just a conflation of 'Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells'?
@Shark Tunbridge Wells is quite a way out of London - a conservative commuter belt town, mainly associated with retirees and stodgy conservative types.
I used to live in Petts wood, which is about 25 mins from London Bridge on the train. Not too expensive by London standards. You could also look around Orpington, the next station out.
Lewisham is a bit scungier, but cheap-ish and 15 mins on the train to London Bridge. You can also get to Canary Wharf on a light rail system called the DLR. Quite a few banks and suchlike have digs in Canary Wharf.
@swasheck The Picadilly line takes ages to get out to Heathrow. Better off taking the Heathrow Express or Heathrow Connect. The fares are a bit steep but it's quick and much more comfortable.
@COTW: So, lets say a guy is looking for a contract as a DBA in London. Any advice on how to get the first job (never worked in UK before)? Besides adding "I've been in that great BI conference in Malta last September" :)
@swasheck There are truckloads of galleries and Museums in London - actually @AaronBertrand, the National Gallery or British Museum might be a way to kil some time in London.
@ypercube You probably have to physically turn up first, although you could make some appointments for by phone before you come.
I have plenty to do Sunday during the day already. I've seen many of the sights on previous trips. Boss is running a half marathon, so need to heckle / throw stones.
I spent a bit of time phoning agents before I came, and jacked up some interviews. Just said when I'd be there and made the arrangements.
Then I just did all the interviews I could arrange for a few weeks. I got some so-so offers - at the time I was looking for perm work - but then got a contract job. I haven't looked back since.
I think I was a bit fussy (it was 2004 and the job market was pretty buoyant), so I turned down some that I probably shouldn't have.
The market's a bit tighter now, but I think there's still a skill shortage for DBAs.
At a guess I'd say do some telephoning for a couple of weeks before you come and just send out CVs to anything appropriate you find on Jobserve. Stay in a cheap hotel or B&B and just keep sending out CVs to stuff on Jobserve. Be prepared to take a crap job to start if necessary, but this isn't such a big deal on contract work.
It's mostly a chicken-and-egg problem. Get your first contract gig, and maybe don't be too fussy, and then it becomes easier after that.
Also, apparently SE careers works OK in London, so it might be another avenue.
Beyond that I don't think I have much else in the way of words of wisdom.
Anyway, my data won't monkey itself, so I'd better stop talking shite and actually do some of the work I'm being paid for.
@ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells I've been meaning to remind you that your SE name can have spaces in it, but your name doesn't even fit in the box as it is.
"You missed an edge case, you don't understand the mechanisms involved, I've tried to explain that you have two considerations, and you don't want to follow along, or don't have the experience.
@JackDouglas Yeah, the billing systems I've been involved with in the past have a configurable number of decimal places. I didn't want to confuse the OP
I try to write database code to make sure that it's not subject to race conditions, to make sure that I've locked the correct rows or tables. But I often wonder: Is my code correct? Is it possible to force any existing race conditions to manifest? I want to be sure that if they do happen in a pro...
In session 1, you performed a supposedly atomic unit of work to charge the offending account $1. Instead of the account having $49 at commit time, though, it has $149.
In this case, that doesn't sound so terrible. This is a race condition though, and could cause serious problems, especially if Session 1 does more work based on the assumption that the balance it touched has less than $100.
The REPEATABLE READ or SERIALIZABLE isolation levels would fix this particular issue, by holding the shared locks on the balance until Session 1 commits its transaction.
A race condition or race hazard is a flaw in an electronic system or process whereby the output or result of the process is unexpectedly and critically dependent on the sequence or timing of other events. The term originates with the idea of two signals racing each other to influence the output first.
Race conditions can occur in electronics systems, especially logic circuits, and in computer software, especially multithreaded or distributed programs.
Electronics
A typical example of a race condition may occur in a system of logic gates, where inputs vary. If a particular output depend...
Sure. But how do you know you're using the right isolation levels? Rather, once you've thought about it and chosen the "right" isolation levels, how do you test to make sure they are indeed correct?
Testing for race conditions feels like a higher-order type of testing. Holistic testing, load testing, and concurrency testing are more appropriate for this kind of problem than unit testing.
Of course, if you can capture a concurrency test into a unit test, then yeah you've got something cool.
Yeah, but you need that baked into the code that is doing the work, not a separate tool.
Otherwise you aren't testing your database code, just your client tool.
@jcolebrand @JackDouglas - RE: dba.stackexchange.com/q/12401/2660 I'd check with Joel to make sure he didn't ask for that question to be migrated here himself.
@NickChammas Formally proving concurrent processes can be done with a model called 'communicating sequential processes'. There is a free automated CSP proving tool, although I can't remember the name.
However, you have to implement your model in the tool, and the complexity of formal proofs rises exponentially with the complexity of the system, so formal methods of this sort tend to only be applicable in relatively simple control systems.
Automatically testing all the edge cases in concurrency of even a moderately complex business application is likely to be computationally infeasible.
So, I'll say 'this is a pipe dream' and collect my bounty. Kthxbye ;)
However, as a consolation prize, the sort of situations the OP is worried about are fairly rare, and can usually be handled by using a fairly conservative isolation level on transactions.
@ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells Right. We are looking to catch those rare problems in testing. Also, we'll have more confidence in our chosen isolation levels with such testing.
@NickChammas You might be able to come up with a bunch of heuristics based on certain transaction patterns, but I suspect you would need to be able to codify the transaction semantics into some consistent model - which would imply being able to capture them accurately from the code.