Boris Hristov

Founder of 356labs

Founder of 356labs
and PowerPoint MVP.
Speaker, Trainer & Author.
A guy that loves to do sports, have fun and enjoy life. Gallery / Blog / Contact

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Mission 2012

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Let’s start with a huge Happy New Year to all of you! Wish you all to be healthy, very successful and let there be more reasons for smiles all the way during the whole year of 2012!

Now, 2011 was huge for me! Hope it was huge for you too! However, I strongly, strongly believe that 2012 will be even more insanely great! Last year I wrote a post with my goals for 2011(yeap, in Bulgarian and if you ask me why I am writing this in English my answer for you is – I don’t know. Really. I just feel that I have to do it this way!) and I have gone waaay beyond what I have set as goals for the last 12 months! Way beyond! This year – I will not post anything similar. Why? Cause I don’t feel like I want to and If you know me well, you know that I do not do things that I don’t want to do! I just can’t spend my time this way…

And even though I will not post anything related to my career/personal development I can say that you can expect and will see dramatic changes in both my personal and career during this year. Just the thought that I am graduating from my university(and I have had the chance to study in the best one(my opinion only!), thanks to my family) is freaking me out, because I will have so much time for other things that interest me, that … I just can’t even imagine how amazing this will be!(I will miss this place badly though!)! Combining that with the fact that I really know what I have to learn, what I have to develop as skills to get better at what I do and that I have already done some of the arrangements for that – I believe that there are quite a lot trainings to be led, certifications to be taken, technologies to be learned and trips to be made during this year! … oh yeap – forgot to tell – and I can’t wait! 🙂

So, all, wish you an amazing year! Be healthy, do what you love to do, work hard, but remember – as Steve Jobs said: “stay foolish, stay hungry”! The only thing I wish for myself is to be healthy during the whole 2012(please, wish me that too), because I have everything else! I have everything else and thinking of this just puts an amazing smile on my face!

End. Beatiful end! 🙂

My first huge mistake as a DBA

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It is my 3rd month as a SQL Server DBA at HP and boy what a months just! I am learning a whole bunch of new things, I am surrounded by people who talk 24×7 for SQL Server and finally I can do all the things I know in the real world and see what is the difference between practicing at home and doing the same things, but for a Fortune 500 company.

Back on the subject! 2 or 3 weeks ago, I did my first huge mistake as a DBA(or at least, I consider it as huge). The customer I did it for – believe me – you don’t waNNa know. However, even if you want, I can’t tell you. Let’s just say that losing any data for this customer can be crucial, so it is, let’s say, not even recommended to think about making any mistakes in their environment!

The scenario

Very, very simple – we received a ticket for failed SQL Server Agent Job(for those of you interested in my failure, but without any knowledge for SQL Server, SQL Server Agent job is, simply said, a set of steps, where every step execute specific set of commands and the whole job can be scheduled i.e. to execute every Monday at 6 p.m. for example). That’s it. Not a big deal!

What I did

I found why the job has failed, fixed it(SQL Geeks – it was the job owner…) and restarted it, hoping that this time it will complete successfully, as it happened by the way.

The problem?

Most of our customers have specific instructions or rules or … a must DOs and DON’Ts, let’s call them that way! The one the ticket was for has a MUST DON’T rule, that says that an application job (every SQL Server Agent job, which is not related to backups/restores/maintenance in some way) MUST NOT BE RESTARTED! Why? Cause there’s a “little chance” for data loss! Cool, isn’t it?

What happened next?

When I said to my colleague about the case(without any reason), she(yes, there are women DBAs!) was quite, hm… (searching for the word), amazed by what I have done. She didn’t spend time and told me a story. Here it is, short and simple – once upon a time there was a DBA (men, this time) and he done exactly what I have done – job failure, fix, restart. For the same customer. Some hours later, someone from customer’s side calls our team and says something like the follwoing: “HP, huge thanks for your enthusiasm to work! Because of it, we just lost 6 hours of data…”!
Please, tell me, is this not Funny with capital F?
My answer – NO! I went back home thinking and thinking and shaking from time to time and thinking again what could have happened, what will happen if what I have done lead to the same results as those mentioned just sentances above and so on.

At the end

Because I wrote to our Database Delivery Lead for this customer after the moment the story was told to me, I expected that if there was indeed a data loss, we can do something about it as soon as possible. Fortunately, there is a happy end! There was neither data loss, nor something else bad happened to our customer’s environment!

The lession

Be extremly careful every time when you have to do something in a production environment and be twice as careful if you know that this “thing” you have to do can cause a data loss! No matter what time of the day/night it is(in my case it was 4am when i’ve restarted the job), be careful. Ask if you are not sure about what has to be done, have a backout plan. Ensure yourself!

My learned lesson

I will never restart an application job for this customer again(because I do not want to be escalated, I don’t want to meet my boss for that reason, I want to sleep when I get back home after night shift and hundreds of hundreds of more reasons)! Nor will I do it for any other customer, because it’s not in my scope. Our team does not support the application jobs for any of our customers and what they get when a job fails is a simple e-mail – notification.

That’s it, folks! Hope you loved my failure! I now feel completely free to type my favourie last word.

End.

Seminar: Microsoft Visionary Insight

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Today was a rainy day and you cannot say it was not! As usual I didn’t have an umbrella with me, so I “accidentally” got very wet until I got to the Faculty of Informatics and Mathematics a.k.a FMI, where was about to be held the next seminar from the series of seminars, which are organized by the IT Leaders Academy. So, in this post, you will be reading about what we talked about and what was the whole seminar all about.

Our lecturers were Rob Miles(blog|twitter) and Damien Caro(blog|twitter) who are two of the key speakers in the tomorrow’s starting conference – Microsoft Days 2011. Of course, as usual, there was some serious organizational problem and to be more concrete – it was a technical one. The projector wasn’t working, but happily the problem was fixed!

Mr. Miles was first to step in and he said some really serious things concerning our future as IT experts. What he said was, that the days in which we start our careers as specialists in one technology and finish it working the same thing are GONE. There’s no more such thing! It just doesn’t exist! I can’t really agree more, while I really want to. If I must be honest, recently I read a post, which was stating the same thing, but kill me, I don’t know where I found it and I can’t give you the link right now.

The second topic on which he stressed on was our personal brand. He said that we need to create our personal brand by blogging, for example. He claims that it’s better to do blogging and that way develop our writing skills, because now and in the future the IT experts (or specialists, use whatever word you like) will need not only their IT-specific skills to succeed, but writing ones and even more important – presentational skills. He also mentioned that we should carefully use social media sites like Facebook, because it is getting more and more often when employers are, let’s say, checking it. Of course, they are not checking only Facebook, that’s why it’s good for us, when someone Google/Bing-s us(and believe me, employers do this), to have our personal brand “well developed”(i can’t think of other phrase). Finally, before he showed us his Robot – Oscar and how we can write C# code and control it easily, he recommended us to widen our skills and use SkyDrive! 😀

Before Damien Caro stepped in we talked about the future of the programming languages and both Ray and Damien said that HTML5 and JavaScript(especially) will be there in the future for a very long time! So, if you love JavaScript and you thought something will happen with it and it will go away – don’t be scared any more! 😉

Mr. Caro’s part of the seminar was all about the cloud! He talked about the SkyDrive and the Office Web Apps, made a demo on the PowerPoint web app and explained us about the data centers in which all the cloud magic happens. We saw a picture from, I think, Microsoft’s data center in Dublin and believe me, that thing is HUGE! We talked about how electricity is provided for all the machines there, how are they cooled and how is the replication going(did you know that all the information, which is saved in Dublin’s data center is replicated into Amsterdam’s data center in case of disaster?). Of course, when we talk about Microsoft and The Cloud(capital letters for respect) there’s no way we don’t talk about Windows Azure. By the way, I am amazed how can so few people have heard about Azure, SkyDrive, Office Web Apps and all of the Microsoft’s cloud services and offerings…

At the end of the seminar Rob Miles encouraged everyone interested in C# to find his book on this subject and we all gave them a huge applause, because it was a great one hour spent with them! Now I remember that he even made a photo of us, which will be posted in his blog! Hm, I am looking forward to seeing it… 🙂

Now if you excuse me, I need to take my 6-hour sleep, because I will attend my first Microsoft Days tomorrow!

Dead blog! Living blog! My blog!

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We all know that Internet is not a safe place for many reasons. We all have heard about the “bad guys”, who we call “hackers”(they are not always bad, however, because doing what they do, they can find important security issues and so to improve the security of an app, for example) and what they do. I have always thought and believed that they’re paying more attention to the “bigger things” and a personal blog, especially mine, could not be their aim. Yes, but no! Some days ago I was surprised to find that my blog was hacked! I still can’t find any reason or explanation why I was hacked, but yet, it doesn’t matter at all. “Let bygones be bygones”!

The story:

After writing my latest post about The prodigy coming to Bulgaria, (that was the night before the blog was hacked), I woke up and saw that I have to approve a comment on one of my posts. I did approve it, left an answer to it, had my breakfast and went at the university for my lectures. During one of them, I opened my notebook to check some stuff, but when I tried to load my blog, I saw the nice message saying that something went wrong “503 Service Unavailable”. After checking what could have happened, I noticed that I just don’t have my public_html directory, where my blog WAS, on the server. I was panicky!

After a few tries, I did realize that there’s no way to restore my blog. I did remember, however, that I have a backup, but how sad was I to discover that it was from two months ago, when the blog was not even the same as you are reading from it at the moment. “It doesn’t matter”, I said to myself! It’s something! But when I tried to restore it, everything went totally wrong.

Before backing up I was using 80 Mb of my web space(without even having the blog on the server). And after the back up was finished, I was using 160 Mb with nothing, which seems to work OK! “Superb”, I said!

Desperately, I started calling to the support team of my host provider, but they didn’t answer at first. After trying to contact with them via their on-line chat, where nobody answered me, I felt that “that was it”, I lost my blog!

However, I didn’t stop calling until someone answered me! It took me more than two hours, but it’s worth it. The guy, who was on the other side of the phone, told me that he needs some time to see what have happened. Half an hour after that, he called me and said to me that someone, somehow has given a permission 752 (which means that the “World” has the permission to write) on my public_html folder. Happily, everything works just fine now. What’s more, he restored the blog with backup, which was made at the end of April and so I needed to upload only some pictures again.

I express my thanks to TopHost and especially to their support team, because without their help, I don’t know what I was about to do now.

Huge thanks again, guys!

P.S. I think that it’s about time for me to start making backups more often! What do you think? 🙂