With CLUE as (Select * from Random_Thought ORDER BY Common_Sense DESC)

Character

Geoff N. Hiten — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 18:02:44 GMT

Last night I had the privilege of sitting at Kevin Kline’s dinner table with some of my fellow community leaders for a serious discussion. Note that I am not talking about Board members or Nom-Com members (although one of each was there), I mean “in the trenches” local community leaders. Given the current furor over the PASS Board of Directors nominating process and outcome, you can guess what we were talking about. Discussion is the operative word here. We were all professionals who respect each other and acted that way. We talked and we listened. We challenged assumptions and defended positions. We worked on the problem and all walked away better for the experience. Ultimately, that is how people of good character resolve conflicts. The public arena with blogs, forums, and Twitter is a great place to raise awareness, but I don’t see us resolving anything out there.

Here a few personal opinions about the process and the outcome.

We (the community) obviously don’t have a clear agreement on what constitutes “qualified”. This is an area we need to work on as a community. Last year, there wasn’t even a public baseline to compare to. This year, the nom-com published the criteria and a lot of the work product. Whether or not you agree with the criteria, having structure and transparency is an improvement.

The Nom-Com did exactly what they believed was right. They were given a task and a process and executed it. I am perfectly willing to discuss changes to the process, but I will not accept any personal attacks on the members. They cared about getting it right. “Right” being defined by the process. The board had the ability to call “reset” and override the process but they chose not to. Andy Warren has discussed that in depth. I don’t feel the need to comment further on that.

This one is tough and a lot of you are going to disagree. I support the decisions of the Nom-Com and the Board as they stand. (But Geoff, of COURSE you support the decision, you are on the slate). I will let you in on a secret. I am fine with not getting elected. Winning or losing this election will define HOW I contribute the community over the two years, not WHETHER I will contribute. I will be honored if you choose me to represent you. I think I can effectively help lead this organization and this community.

I am a firm believer in process over outcome. Long term, PASS will survive this election slate and the controversy surrounding it. I believe it is more important for PASS to develop a good nominating process that it is to have any particular individual as a candidate or on the Board this year. Do we need to make adjustments to the process? You bet. Will we? Absolutely. How are we going to fix it? People of good character who are passionate about the community will sit around table and come up with version 2 of the process. We have all dealt with software that needed another version or two to get right. We stuck with it because we saw the potential. I think PASS deserves the same consideration.

Finally, I suppose I should put my two cents worth in about what I think is important in a board member. PASS is a representative organization. We will do well as a community and as a formal organization as long as we choose leaders of good character who are passionate about the community. Starting with those elements, provided we can find a kitchen table somewhere, we can fix problems and provide excellent service to the community. Given that, I would be fine with any of the original nine candidates as Board members.

Why?

Geoff N. Hiten — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 19:57:18 GMT

Why?

No technical content on this one, sorry.

A couple of weeks ago, I signed up as a candidate for the Board of Directors for SQLPASS. Many of the other candidates have posted on why they chose to run. I suppose I should do likewise so here I am. First a little background so you know where I come from and why the SQL community is important to me.

Back in 1992 I was living in Tuscaloosa, AL. I started my SQL career by implementing a project using SQL 4.2. (before that it was Dbase and Clipper). BOL was just Book (singular and offline), and it wasn’t very thick. Nobody close by was using this product, at least nobody close enough to meet and talk with. Help came from the broader community, specifically NNTP newsgroups. I had to actually build a news server to connect to the groups, but that was just part of the challenge. I would never have survived that project without community assistance, especially from the MVPs. Pretty much all of my involvement with the SQL community stems from that experience.

Eventually I started answering some basic questions, mainly as a way to take load off the “real experts”. I figured if I could answer some simple questions, maybe they would have more time to answer my hard questions. That is when I really started learning SQL. Teaching, like writing, imposes a whole new level of discipline on learning. You have to learn a subject completely, not just enough to solve your immediate problem. I was hooked.

After moving to Atlanta in 2000, I became aware and active in the local SQL Users Group (AtlantaMDF). In 2003 I was awarded MVP for the first time. Again, I owed my success to my participation and involvement with the community. In 2005 I joined the leadership team for the Users Group and in 2008 I took over responsibility for speakers and sponsors. I also emcee the meetings when I am in town. For me, community involvement parallels and enables my career success.

Quite simply, I think running for a PASS Directorship is the next thing I can do for the SQL community. Last year I was vocal in protesting the small quantity of candidates for the board. If nothing else, I am helping make the eventual winners become more of a choice and less of a default. Much like real life, just having some competition makes the winners better. Imagine SQL if Oracle didn’t exist or vice versa.

I also think I can improve PASS’s role within the SQL community. This means making PASS relevant to the career development of every SQL professional. The community has plenty of technical resources to solve problems, we also have great training resources, what we don’t have is comprehensive career development guidance. Many of us started as “accidental DBAs”. There is no reason we have to stay that way and PASS should be the vehicle to change that.

Note that I am not locked in to any specific methodology for making this happen. I think of these as goals, not plans. Quite frankly, I don’t know enough about the inner workings of PASS to see how to connect my goals and Pass’s capabilities. That is something I will have to learn on the job. Documentation and knowledge dissemination on how PASS works is something else I will champion as a Director so maybe it will be easier for the next person.

I admit I have some selfish reasons for running too. I am sure a stint on the board will strengthen my leadership and management skills. The title certainly won’t hurt my career development. Perhaps the experience will even grow my patience, not that I need any more. J

Clustering for Mere Mortals (Pt 3)

Geoff N. Hiten — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 02:42:49 GMT

The Controller

Now we get to the meat of the matter. You want a virtual cluster, the first thing you have to do is create your own portable domain. Start with a plain vanilla install of Windows 2003 R2 Standard on a semi-default VM. (1 GB RAM, 2 cores, 2 NICs, 128GB dynamically expanding VHD file). I chose this because it had the smallest disk and memory footprint of any current supported Microsoft Server product. I created the VM with a single dynamically expanding VHD, one fixed 16 GB VHD, and two NICs. One NIC is connected to the outside world and the other one is part of an internal-only network. The first NIC is set up as a DHCP client. We will get to the other one later.

I actually tried this with Windows 2008 R2, but it failed miserably. Not sure whether it was 2008 R2 or the fact I tried to use cloned VMs in the cluster. Clustering is one place where NewSID would really come in handy. Too bad Microsoft bought and buried it.

Load and Patch the OS (hence the need for the outside connection).This is a good time to go get dinner. Maybe a movie too. There are close to a hundred patches that need to be downloaded and applied. Avoiding that mess was why I put so much time into trying to get the 2008 R2 version working. Maybe next time. Don’t forget to add the extensions for VMLite (or whatever virtualization product you prefer).

Set a fixed IP address on the internal-only NIC. Do not give it a gateway. Put the same IP address for the NIC and for the DNS Server. This IP should be in a range that is never available on your public network. You will need all the addresses in the range available. See the previous post for the exact settings I used.

I chose 10.97.230.1 as the server. The rest of the 10.97.230 range is what I will use later. For the curious, those numbers are based on elements of my home address. Not truly random, but good enough for this project.

Do not bridge the network connections. I never allowed the cluster nodes direct access to any public network.

Format the fixed VHD and leave it alone for now.

Promote the VM to a Domain Controller. If you have never done this, don’t worry. The only meaningful decision is what to call the new domain. I prefer a bogus name that does not correspond to a real Top-Level Domain (TLD). .com, .biz., .net, .org are all TLDs that we know and love. I chose .test as the TLD since it is descriptive AND it does not exist in the real world. The domain is called MicroAD. This gives me MicroAD.Test as my domain.

During the promotion process, you will be prompted to install DNS as part of the Domain creation process. You want to accept this option. The installer will automatically assign this DNS server as the authoritative owner of the MicroAD.test DNS domain (not to be confused with the MicroAD.test Active Directory domain.)

For the rest of the DCPROMO process, just accept the defaults.

Now let’s make our IP address management easy. Add the DHCP Role to the server. Add the server (10.97.230.1 in this case) as the default gateway to assign to DHCP clients. Here is where you have to be VERY careful and bind it ONLY to the Internal NIC. Trust me, your network admin will NOT like an extra DHCP server “helping” out on her network. Go ahead and create a range of 10-20 IP Addresses in your scope. You might find other uses for a pocket domain controller <cough> Mirroring </cough> than just for building a cluster. And Clustering in SQL 2008 and Windows 2008 R2 fully supports DHCP addresses.

Now we have three of the five key roles ready. Two more to go.

Next comes file sharing. Since your cluster node VMs will not have access to any outside, you have to have some way to get files into these VMs. I simply go to the root of C: and create a “Shared” folder. I then share it out and grant full control to “Everyone” to both the share and to the underlying NTFS folder. This will be immensely useful for Service Packs, demo databases, and any other software that isn’t packaged as an ISO that we can mount to the VM.

Finally we need to create a block-level multi-connect storage device. The kind folks at Starwinds Software (http://www.starwindsoftware.com/) graciously gave me a non-expiring demo license for expressly this purpose. Their iSCSI SAN software lets you create an iSCSI target from nearly any storage medium. Refreshingly, their product does exactly what they say it does. Thanks.

Remember that 16 GB VHD file? That is where we are going to carve into our LUNs. I created an iSCSI folder off the root, just so I can keep everything organized. I then carved 5 ea. 2 GB iSCSI targets from that folder. I chose a fixed VHD for performance. I tried this earlier with a dynamically expanding VHD, but too many layers of abstraction and sparseness combined to make it unusable even for a demo. Stick with a fixed VHD so there is a one-to-one mapping between abstract and physical storage. If you read the previous post, you know what I named these iSCSI LUNs and why.

Yes, I do have some left over space. Always leave yourself room for future growth or options.

This gets us up to where we can actually build the nodes and install SQL. As with most clusters, the real work happens long before the individual nodes get installed and configured. At least it does if you want the cluster to be a true high-availability platform.

SQLSaturday 33 Observations

Geoff N. Hiten — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:59:22 GMT

Along with a lot of my colleagues, I went to SQLSaturday #33 in Charlotte this last weekend. Overall a really good event, especially for a first-time organizer. There is some controversy over certain events where my name got mentioned so I thought I would clear the air.

Before I get to the core controversy, let's get the details out of the way.

The Microsoft Offices in Charlotte were an excellent venue for this event. I really appreciated the Microsoft employees that helped out by letting us in and out of normally secure areas. This is definitely above and beyond on their part.

Thanks to the organizers (especially Greg and Peter) for the great hospitality they showed to the speakers.

Now for the specifics. Like most events of this type, there was a raffle at the end for some cool swag. As a speaker I got raffle tickets just like any other attendee. The raffle was clearly promoted as "must be present to win". The problem is that for various reasons, the raffle kicked off immediately after the last speaker finished in the largest room. That room was across the parking lot from all the other rooms for the event. I happened to have one of the last sessions of the day, and not in the main room. I also ran long since the audience was very interactive and there were a lot of follow-up questions. (BTW, thanks to everyone who came and stayed for my session. Sorry it cost you the chance to win too.). My name was drawn for an very nice piece of swag (iPod Touch if you insist). Since I wasn't there, I didn't win. Several folks mentioned I was still speaking and was "here" (as in at the event) just not "here in the room".

Yes, I was mad when I found out about it. I think that was handled poorly. I personally lost out as did my audience (dunno if anyone specific lost anything, but it is the idea that counts). It was a mistake.

Mistakes happen. Nobody acted maliciously. Heck, the guys running the event who made the decision are my friends and remain so. I got over my mad. We talked about this privately and we are all OK with what happened. I am not going to let a gadget get in the way of a couple of good friendships.

I think the mistake was mostly due to a lack of unity between the venue buildings Pam Shaw had a similar challenge in Tampa a few weeks ago, including a speaker who ran long on the last session (not me that time). She had a couple of teenage volunteers to act as gofers/runners. They counted heads in sessions, pointed people to last-minute room and session changes, and generally helped connect the organizers to what was actually happening. Note that this was not Pam's first SQLSaturday event. She knew but the knowledge had not been institutionalized. We (The SQL community in general and SQLSaturday organizers in particular) now know how essential gofers are to success.

I know I spent most of this post focusing on the controversy, but I wanted to clear everything up. I don't want to let a minor mistake, made in good faith, overshadow what was a tremendously good event for the community.

As for the iPod Touch, someone in the SQL community is enjoying it, so it is not a total loss. And if losing out on it is the price I pay so we can learn this, then that is what a community leader does. Consider it a gift. Besides, I really wanted a Zune 120 :)

MacGyver Moments

Geoff N. Hiten — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 02:50:34 GMT

Denny Cherry tagged me to write about my best MacGyver Moment. Usually I ignore blogosphere fluff and just use this space to write what I think is important. However, #MVP10 just ended and I have a stronger sense of community. Besides, where else would I mention my second best Macgyver moment was making a BIOS jumper out of a soda can. Aluminum is conductive and I didn't have any real jumpers lying around.

My best moment is probably my entire home computer network.

Every system but one is hand-built, usually cobbled together out of spare parts and 'adapted' from its original purpose.

My Primary Domain Controller is a Dell 2300. The Service Tag indicates it was shipped to the original owner in 1999. Box has a PERC/1 RAID controller. I acquired this from a previous employer for $50. It runs Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition. Does DNS, DHCP, and RADIUS services as a bonus. RADIUS authentication is used for VPN and Wireless access. It is nice to sign in once and be done with it.

The Secondary Domain Controller is an old desktop. Dual P-III 933 with some extra drives.

My VPN box is a P-II 250 with 384MB of RAM and a 21 GB hard drive. I did a P-to-V to my Hyper-V box a year or so ago and retired the hardware again. Dynamic DNS lets me connect no matter how often Comcast shuffles my IP.

The Hyper-V box is a desktop system with 8GB RAM and an AMD Athlon 5000+ processor. Cost me less than $500 to put together nearly two years ago. I reasoned that if Vista and Windows 2008 were the same code then Vista 64-bit certified meant the drivers for Vista would load into Windows 2008. Turns out I was right.

Later I added three 1TB drives but wasn't too happy with how that turned out. I recovered two of the drives yesterday and am building an iSCSI storage unit. (Much thanks to Starwind. Great product). I am using an old AMD 1.1GhZ box with 1.5 GB RAM (cobbled together from three old PCs) as my storave server.

The Hyper-V box is slated for an OS rebuild to 2008 R2 once I get the storage system worked out. maybe in a week or two.

A couple of DLink Gigabit switches ties everything together.

Add in the Vonage box, the three PCs, the Wireless-N Access Point, the two notebooks and the XBox and you have gone from MacGyver to darn near Rube Goldberg.

The only thing I really spend money on is power supplies and fans. I buy top-of-the-line for both.

I even pull and crimp my own cables.

Oh, and if my kids hose up a PC, I have all of their data on a server elsewhere. Every PC and laptop is pretty much interchangable for email and basic workstation tasks. That helps a lot too.

Of course I will tag SQLVariant.

Clustering for Mere Mortals (Pt2)

Geoff N. Hiten — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 21:27:48 GMT

Planning.

I could stop there and let that be the entirety post #2 in this series. Planning is the single most important element in building a cluster and the Laptop Demo Cluster is no exception. One of the more awkward parts of actually creating a cluster is coordinating information between Windows Clustering and SQL Clustering. The dialog boxes show up hours apart, but still have to have matching and consistent information.

Excel seems to be a good tool for tracking these settings. My workbook has four pages: Systems, Storage, Network, and Service Accounts. The systems page looks like this:

Name	Role	Software	Location
East	Physical Cluster Node 1	Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise	Laptop VM
West	Physical Cluster Node 2	Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise	Laptop VM
North	Physical Cluster Node 3 (Future Reserved)	Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise	Laptop VM
MicroCluster	Cluster Management Interface	N/A	Laptop VM
SQL01	High-Performance High-Security Instance	SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition x64 SP1	Laptop VM
SQL02	High-Performance Standard-Security Instance	SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition x64 SP1	Laptop VM
SQL03	Standard-Performance High-Security Instance	SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition x64 SP1	Laptop VM

Note that everything that has a computer name is listed here, whether physical or virtual.

Storage looks like this:

Storage Name	Instance	Purpose	Volume	Path	Size (GB)	LUN ID	Speed
Quorum	MicroCluster	Cluster Quorum	Quorum	Q:	2
SQL01Anchor	SQL01	Instance Anchor	SQL01Anchor	L:	2
SQL02Anchor	SQL02	Instance Anchor	SQL02Anchor	M:	2
SQL01Data1	SQL01	SQL Data	SQL01Data1	L:\MountPoints\SQL01Data1	2
SQL02Data1	SQL02	SQL Data	SQL02Data1	M:\MountPoints\SQL02Data1

Starting at the left is the name used in the storage array. It is important to rename resources at each level, whether it is Storage, LUN, Volume, or disk folder. Otherwise, troubleshooting things gets complex and difficult. You want to be able to glance at a resource at any level and see where it comes from and what it is connected to.

Networking is the same way:

System	Network	VLAN	IP	Subnet Mask	Gateway	DNS1	DNS2
East	Public	Cluster1	10.97.230.x(DHCP)	255.255.255.0	10.97.230.1	10.97.230.1	10.97.230.1
East	Heartbeat	Cluster2		255.255.255.0
West	Public	Cluster1	10.97.230.x(DHCP)	255.255.255.0	10.97.230.1	10.97.230.1	10.97.230.1
West	Heartbeat	Cluster2		255.255.255.0
North	Public	Cluster1	10.97.230.x(DHCP)	255.255.255.0	10.97.230.1	10.97.230.1	10.97.230.1
North	Heartbeat	Cluster2		255.255.255.0
SQL01	Public	Cluster1	10.97.230.x(DHCP)	255.255.255.0
SQL02	Public	Cluster1	10.97.230.x(DHCP)	255.255.255.0

One hallmark of a poorly planned and implemented cluster is a bunch of "Local Network Connection #n" entries in the network settings page. That lets me know that somebody didn't care about the long-term supportabaility of the cluster. This can be critically important with Hyper-V Clusters and their high NIC counts.

Final page:

Instance	Service Name	Account	Password	Domain	OU
SQL01	SQL Server	SVCSQL01	Baseline22	MicroAD	Service Accounts
SQL01	SQL Agent	SVCSQL01	Baseline22	MicroAD	Service Accounts
SQL02	SQL Server	SVC_SQL02	Baseline22	MicroAD	Service Accounts
SQL02	SQL Agent	SVC_SQL02	Baseline22	MicroAD	Service Accounts
SQL03 (Future)	SQL Server	SVC_SQL03	Baseline22	MicroAD	Service Accounts
SQL03 (Future)	SQL Agent	SVC_SQL03	Baseline22	MicroAD	Service Accounts

Installation Account
administrator

Yes. I write down the account information. I secure the file via NTFS, but I don't want to fumble around looking for passwords when it comes time to rebuild a node.

Always fill out the workbook COMPLETELY before installing anything. The whole point is to have everything you need at your fingertips before you begin. The install experience is so much better and more productive with this information in place.

Clustering for Mere Mortals (Pt1)

Geoff N. Hiten — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 18:33:02 GMT

This past Saturday I enjoyed the hospitality of the Tampa SQLSaturday (#32) team. My presentation was “Clustering for Mere Mortals”. Unlike many clustering presentations, I had demonstration content. This resulted in the most asked question being “Do you have instructions on how you built that?” This is the first part of those instructions.

Here is what the cluster consists of (Virtually):

One Windows 2003 R2 (x64) Server acting as Domain Controller, DNS Server, DHCP Server, File Server and iSCSI Target Server

Two Windows 2008 R2 Servers as cluster Nodes.

All this runs on a Lenovo W500 laptop with an Intel Core 2 Duo T9600 processor, 8 GB RAM and a 320 GB Internal Hard disk running Windows 7 Enterprise (x64). The total disk footprint is slightly under 50 GB for all virtual guests.

One of the toughest decisions was choosing a virtualization platform. I didn’t want to run Windows Server 2008 R2 on my notebook since that took away Hibernation and Sleep modes, plus getting the drivers for WiFi, Bluetooth, etc. working is a real pain. VMWare was out since I wanted this to run Microsoft VHDs I downloaded for training as well as my new demo cluster. Virtual PC was out since I needed 64-bit guest capability to run Windows 2008 R2 as a guest. I found a winning candidate in VMLite. VMLite is a Windows implementation of Sun’s VirtualBox platform. It supports VDI, VMDK and VHD disk formats as well as 64-bit guests. Incidentally, it is also free.

Based on prior experience with the above virtualization products, I chose to create a VM folder off of the root of my C: drive. Below that I created a Machines folder and a HardDrives folder. Set I then these as default locations in VMLite. I also copied the VMLiteGuestAdditions.iso file to this location so it was easy to find later.

Like most Sun products (cough Java cough) it is semi-hostile to Windows users. Still, this was the option with the lowest suck factor so I started building. VMLIte does have a few quirks you have to learn to work around. VMLite uses a UUID to identify virtual disk files to its Virtual Media Manager. Evidently unique file names and paths are not adequate, probably because XML isn’t involved. So if you copy a VHD file it will not allow you to “register” it with the Virtual Media Manager without a “mother may I?” step. Many of the VHDs downloaded from Microsoft also have identical UUIDs, even ones for different training classes. Common base OS image is the most likely explanation. Anyway, to fix this is actually pretty simple

Open a command prompt

Change directories to the VMLite executable folder (C:\Program Files\VMLite\VMLite Workstation on my system). Look for the VBoxManage.exe file.

Type: VBoxManage InternalCommands SetUUID <path\Filename to VHD> Note: Do not put quotes around the path and filename.

Using this technique you can now add any VHD file to the Virtual Media Manager tool in VMLite .

Interestingly enough, VMLite will not create a VHD file when you define a new Virtual Machine. It natively will create a VDI (Sun Virtual Device) file. You can use the Windows 7 Disk Management tool to create a VHD file with the correct characteristics and then detach it from the Host OS for use in a VM.

There are some other unexpected behaviors of VMLite (remember I did mention user-hostile?) but no show-stoppers. Finding them will be left as an exercise for the student. J

Start building OS base images and generally working in VMLite to get familiar with it. At this point, you should be able to create new VMs, import existing VHDs, and generally do basic functions and navigation within VMLite. We still have a ways to go to build a cluster, but we have a solid foundation to start on.

SQL 2005 Patching

Geoff N. Hiten — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 16:01:08 GMT

I just got this question from a blog reader:

We have a SQL 2005 cluster active/passive. Under my understanding, it would be neccesary to apply patches into a Testing environment, if working fine, proceed to the production environment... but, is it recommended to patch both nodes the same day? or instead it would be better to patch Node1 (active) and wait some days before patching Node2 (passive)?

I would like to know your opinion on this matter !

Thanks a lot for your support.

The answer is you always must patch all nodes at once using SQL 2005. Rolling upgrades/patches was introduced in SQL 2008 The patch process for SQL 2005 and lower is disruptive in that it takes the entire instance offline on all nodes to apply binary and internal patches. Very risky and a major reason you test this on a practice cluster first. When you apply the patch to the test cluster, you are not only testing the patch itself, but your procedures for applying and removing it if necessary.

Hope this helps.

PASS Summit 2009 Musings

Geoff N. Hiten — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:30:43 GMT

The 2009 PASS community summit was a fantastic week. There is something about Seattle (rain) that makes this conference special(hills). Only the top folks get to present and they bring their best game. Learning here really is a lot like taking a drink from a fire hose, except you always want more.

The best part of the Summit is being in a group of fellow database professionals. Folks who understand a SELECT joke. Let's face it, most of us DBAs work alone or nearly so. Only a few large organizations have more than one or two of us on the payroll. Being surrounded by a couple of thousand geeks with the same technical specialization is very unusual for us. And we like it.

So if you did go, be sure and get the DVD set. If not, then start making plans for next year. If your company won't pay, consider it an investment in yourself. And don't forget the pre- and post-conference sessions. Those are some of the best deep-dive training classes around.

Once you go, you get hooked. Content, networking, and just the experience of the PASS Summit are some of the best parts of this profession. Come on and join us, won't you?

PASS Fail

Geoff N. Hiten — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 20:11:06 GMT

Long time, No see. This space has been a bit quiet and I apologize for that. Seems I have been a bit busy getting out and earning a living. Tough times all over.

Anyway, the 2009 PASS (www.sqlpass.org) board elections just closed. There has been a lot of controversy over this election with a non-SQL professional seeking a board member position. Pro or con, I am not getting into that argument. I see merits on both sides.. I will say that the nominating committee failed the PASS membership badly. The failure was not in allowing this person to run. On the contrary, I think a controversial candidate is great since it lets the members decide exactly where the organization should go.. The failure was in limiting the slate to just four candidates.for three open positions. I do recall from history and civics classes that some political systems have the exact number of candidates as offices, but I don't remember the exact term for such a system. "Democracy" certainly isn't the right term. Community organizations should have leaders chosen by the community. This is not the case with this "election".

Note that I am not criticizing the quality of the candidates selected. Some of them I know personally and consider friends. Others are professional colleagues that I know of and respect. The problem is four people and three positions is a final round of musical chairs, not a board election.

Since I am a problem solver by nature (If you are not, consider a career change from DBA. You won't like it and you won't do well) I will propose a solution:

The nominating committee function should simply be to properly vet the candidates. It should establish that whatever claims for personal and professional achievements a candidate claims are factually correct. It should establish minimum criteria for candidates and publish those qualifications. Those qualifications should be things like being a full-up member of the organization AND a local chapter for at least three years and attended at least two prior PASS summits (European ones count). Maybe some level of volunteer community commitment, but I think that gets us too close to the weeds in measuring just how different volunteer efforts should be compared. Simple, basic, fundamental requirements.

Then let the members decide.

After all, this is a community organization. Isn't it?