Paul Randal is one of the gods of the SQL Server business. I'm not saying that to butter him up - I'm saying it to acknowledge a fact. If the word "guru" is better than "god" - hey, whatever word you prefer :-). He posted an offer: http://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/paul/want-mentored/. Explain, in a blog post, why he should mentor you.
I didn't have a blog. What to do?
Well - I'd always wanted to be one of the well-known experts in SQL Server - one of those "someday... maybe... if all goes well!" dreams. And I'd kept putting off starting the blog because I have my chronic fatigue issues - I'm always too-damn-tired!
So, this kicked me into starting my SQL blog. So if you think my blog is horrible, you get to blame... me. No one else. But you can still glare at Mr. Randal for inspiring my appearance!
What reasons would I give to be mentored?
I've learned the basics of the way SQL works, from the inside. And I want to share them. And I want to talk about them, with others, in a way that I hope will help people draw connections and see patterns and understand the tools and workings that much better. If you think my other posts are interesting and amusing, great - if you think they're awful, oh well.
Okay, but there's a lot a person can't really learn about just puttering around, and I've surpassed that point a long time ago; I need someone who can help me formulate and ask, then answer, the right questions.
Such as? Well - query plans. "What? There's tons of information about query plans out there!" Sure - but there's not very much that I've seen that explains how to parse them, if you need to dig in to just that one particular detail about what's being found, and how it's being pulled, or how it's being manipulated afterward.
Or XEvent captures: Profiler is going away - XEvents are taking its place. How do they work? Well, events fire, and you can gather information when they do - but how do you know what information you can gather for which event firing? And what are some neat tricks you can use, so you soon find yourself glad, yes, glad that clunky old Profiler's going bye-bye? There's a lot of different bits about XEvents out there, but if there's a good intro for newbies I haven't found it - and I wouldn't mind changing that, and writing the durn thing if I have to!
I've seen a deadlocked scheduler warning on what seemed to be parallelism - but I only counted 300 parallel threads out of 545 threads in the dump - did I miss something else making SQL feel thread-starved? Or was that enough? If 300 was enough, why? 450 threads out of 545 is probably enough to put up a thread-shortage, but 300 seems not-quite-enough (no jokes about Sparta, please!). And again: help me understand, it won't just be me learning - I'm going to try to share it with the world.
Saw a fascinating case where read latch waits were causing massive contention - not locking, shared latches! We puzzled out trying Read Committed Snapshot - I believe that it worked, and I believe it should have worked - the only latches that might occur should be when building the initial version store - and after that, updates (new values in the version store) should occur as a transaction commits - as the lock gets released, without any risk of latch contention, since no other query "sees" the new value existing yet. But I couldn't be sure, because I didn't know the mechanism. Do you? I'd love to learn these kinds of thing!
Hekaton manages to avoid all locking and latching - I see this, I know this, but I haven't the foggiest how they pull that beauty off. I'd love to learn how that happens, if it's public facing (just awfully crunchy) knowledge.
And I'd like to try to link these things to other things, and try to build up a flow, a sense, a song, a spirit... of SQL. And share that with the world.
If you were bored, and checked out my other two, yes, *two!* substantive blog posts, you might decide you'd like to help me share what I learn with the world. Or you might decide to mentor me *in spite* of my crimes against the SQL blogging community :-). Regardless - that's why I'd like to learn more, from one of the people who can definitely point me toward learning more. So I can expand my own knowledge, and share it, in my own, uh, interesting, way.
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