SQLServerCentral.com, along with Red Gate Software, are glad to announce that nominations for the fourth annual Exceptional DBA Awards are now open. Four years ago, the award was established to help bring about more awareness regarding the importance of the DBA role among the IT community. So far, three DBAs have won the award, and you or a co-worker could be the winner this year if you enter.

If you would like to nominate a DBA, or yourself, for the 2011 Exceptional DBA Award, please visit the www.exceptionaldba.com website and complete the nomination form. Nominations close on June 30, 2011.

The winner of the award will receive a trophy; a SQL DBA Bundle license with 36 months support and upgrades; a full conference pass for the 2011 PASS Community Summit; plus four nights hotel accommodations and $300 towards travel expenses to attend the Summit. The award ceremony will take place at the 2011 PASS Summit in Seattle in October.

Once all of the nominations are made, a list of five finalists will be selected by a panel of judges, which include Brad McGehee, Director of DBA Education for Red Gate Software; Steve Jones, Editor of SQLServerCentral.com; Rodney Landrum, DBA and author; and Brent Ozar, Microsoft Certified Master and SQL Server MVP. Once five finalists are selected by the judges, then the winner will be selected by a combination of popular votes from members of SQLServerCentral.com, and the judges.

As a judge for the past three years, I have seen all the nominations that have been submitted. Based on these nominations, the best piece of advice I can give you if you nominate yourself, or another DBA, is to include as much detail as you can when you answer each question. I would also suggest that you first write out your answers to the questions in Word, taking the time to ensure that your responses are complete, and that your writing is up to snuff. Once you are happy with the responses, then cut and paste your answers into the nomination form. If you follow this advice, it will put you ahead of the majority of the nominees.

So take some time to visit the www.exceptionaldba.com website and check out how the nomination and award process works. Then if you feel you are an Exceptional DBA, or know of an Exceptional DBA you would like to nominate, please do so before the June 30th, 2011 deadline.

Past winners of the Exceptional DBA Awards include: Tracy Hamlin (2010), Josef Richberg (2009), and Dan McClain (2008).

• Stairway to Database Design by Joe Celko
• Stairway to Integration Services by Andy Leonard
• Stairway to MDX by Bill Pearson
• Stairway to Server-Side Tracing by Dan Guzman
• Stairway to SQL Server Agent by Richard Waymire
• Stairway to SQL Server Indexes by David Durant
• Stairway to SQL Server Replication by Sebastian Meine
• Stairway to SQL Server Reporting Services by Jessica Moss
• Stairway to StreamInsight by Johan Ahlen

Each Stairway Tutorial is a series of articles that help you build the necessary skills you need to be an exceptional DBA. This is an on-going project, and expect to see additional Stairway Tutorials in the near future.

Tracy Hamlin, selected as the 2010 DBA of the Year, will be awarded her trophy at this year’s SQLServerCentral.com PASS opening night party. If you are attending PASS, and the party, be sure to attend the short awards ceremony, which starts at 9:00PM. The ceremony will be hosted by myself and SQL Server MVP Rodney Landrum.

Topics covered in the webinar include:

• Learn how SQL Virtual Restore works under the hood
• Retrieve data: Reporting, auditing, and object level recovery with SQL Virtual Restore
• Take care of your data: Maintaining dev/test/QA environments, DBCC CHECKDB backup verification, and performance tuning with SQL Virtual Restore

To find out more about this webinar, and to sign up, click here.

If you can’t make the webinar, or you want to do some background reading on SQL Virtual Restore before attending the webinar, then check out my article on SQL Virtual Restore.

Tracy receives a trophy, full conference registration for the PASS Community Summit 2010 in Seattle, four nights’ accommodations, and $300 in travel expenses. Along with this year’s other finalists – John Burnette of Fidelity Information Services, Jonathan Kehayias of Tampa General Hospital, Ted Krueger of Pharmedium Services, Kevan Riley of Destinology, and Jorge Segarra of University Community Hospital – she receives a copy of Red Gate’s SQL Toolbelt.

Tracy, based in Birmingham, Alabama, has more than 20 years of experience in database administration and architecture. She started her most recent position five years ago as a lone DBA with one 200-GB database and managed explosive growth to 75 SQL Server databases housing 100 terabytes of data. Along the way, she continually improved database performance and implemented automated procedures that made developers’ jobs easier.

Find out more about the award at www.exceptionaldba.com. And read an interview with Tracy at SQLServerCentral.com.

For those of you who are not familiar with SQL Response, it is a web-based SQL Server monitoring and alerting tool that can help reduce much of the drudgery of routine DBA tasks. Here are a few examples of what it can do.

• Monitor your SQL Server’s health and performance locally from your desk, or remotely from most any computer with a web browser, including many mobile devices.
• Your SQL Server instance’s health can be monitored at a global level (all instances at once), at the individual instance level, or on a per database level.
• Monitoring screens not only provide a real-time overview of SQL Server’s health, it collects historical data so you can go back into time and check out a server’s health at any point in time. This feature is great when you are trying to track down problems and need historical diagnostic data to help you better troubleshoot problems.
• Although SQL Response has the ability for real-time monitoring, you probably won’t be spending a lot of time watching the monitoring screens. Instead, you will be working on other projects. So if a problem should occur on a SQL Server instance, and you are busy doing something else, SQL Response can send you alerts vie e-mail so you always know if there are any problems with your servers, allowing you to be a proactive DBA.

This is just a few of the things that SQL Response does, and I don’t want to waste your time describing the product in detail. If any of the above features have grabbed your attention, then download the EAP and see for yourself how the application works.

As you might imagine, the SQL Response v2 EAP is not feature complete, nor is it bug-free. If you decide to try out the software, be sure that you install in on a test SQL Server box. On the other hand, you can use the EAP to monitor production servers, without risk, because SQL Response doesn’t install any software on the SQL Servers being monitored. Instead, it polls the servers remotely, which greatly reduces the overhead of collecting monitoring and alerting data.

To download the SQL Response v2 EAP, visit this webpage and sign-up. Once you sign up, you will receive an email with a link to download the software, in addition to other links you can use to provide feedback on the release. In fact, if you provide lots of feedback on the EAP, you may even be able to win some prizes, which are described in the email you will receive. So check out the EAP today and see how you can contribute to its success.