They’ve got SQL smarts and the certification to prove it. But do they have what it takes to be the next Microsoft employee?Watch the challenges unfold on our website beginning July 24, 2012: http://aka.ms/bethenext
Hey folks – sorry I missed posting last week, I was a bit indisposed trying to land a project.
Well, let’s talk about this week’s challenge, the location, and the outcome…
As others have discussed, the challenge took place on one of Washington States finest ferries, and it was indeed a timed exercise – Seattle to Bainbridge Island and back… the ferry over to Bainbridge was used by the film crew to set up, assess how sound and video would be affected by engine and wind noises and how the sun and water would affect lighting etc. It allowed the judges, Buck, Dandy and I to discuss the challenge, what we were looking for from the contestants and decide on some alternatives should Alex, Mike, Chris or Stacy solve the challenge in short order. The return trip as noted by the contestants as well as Buck and Dandy was fully allocated for the challenge…
With the setup complete and film crew, judges and contestants in place… the Ferry horn sounded and the challenge began and as noted by others… solved in 30 seconds… oh wait… not quite. As it so happens, Alex did solve it in less than a minute, than Chris and then I think Alex did again… but they were looking so hard for the answer they missed the easy answer and they weren’t really listening to each other. It was amusing in the beginning and then it just became difficult and disappointing to watch.
After the judges ended the review session and it came time to present their answer/solution, the decision on who would present came down to a rock, paper, scissors contest. As Chris described in his blog, we were less than thrilled with that decision making process and we let them know. If I remember correctly, what you saw on the episode was only a small piece of the feedback they received as a team on not only the quality of the presentation but their decision to use R,P,S and then the actual lack of clarity and agreement in the answer that was actually presented to the judges.
Certainly, expectations from the judges was a lot higher than the outcome we received, however…. each of the previous three challenges had messed with them in some form or another, so it was quite logical to expect that this challenge would be no different and I guess technically we continue the trend. Buck and Dandy had set the challenge up to be a lot more difficult than it really was, and the setup and the setting added to the difficulty.
At the end of the day, the judges were able to spend a few quick minutes de-briefing from the day and that’s when Buck let me know he was going to give the Mike, Chris, Stacy and Alex the last challenge over dinner. At first I thought it was a good idea…give them all an opportunity to start thinking about the last challenge and how they’d present their solution. But then Buck let me know, that they were going to be presenting their solutions first thing in the morning and they’d have to be ready to go at 8:00 AM. This meant they’d have to be up all night prepping for their presentations…. My next reaction was hoping they’d taken the feedback that we’d been providing to them all week… especially the advice to collaborate.
We’ll find out soon enough.
For this week’s challenge we took a beautiful ferry ride across the Seattle harbor to Bainbridge Island. The views were great - the Olympic range on one side and the Cascades on the other. Rainer stood off in the distance like a lone sentinel. Seattle is awesome! The ride over was easily the best part of the day because the challenge was an epic fail in the eyes of the judges. And, to quote a classic, The Pokey Little Puppy, they were “very displeased.”
The ferry ride was the ‘clock’ for the challenge. Just a 33-minute ride, so we had to work fast. The challenge was an error statement submitted to MS by a customer. The whole team immediately jumped in. It was chaos. I can’t read well when people are going nuts like that. I find it to be very distracting. I asked Stacy to read the entire challenge and be the lone voice. After she finished, the discussion erupted. Evidently, Alex pointed out the issue fairly quickly, but none of the rest of us heard him. I feel bad for my part in that. I distinctly remember telling the group that I had seen this issue before. In explaining what I thought was the issue; I evidently restated what Alex had already brought up. The judges told us afterwards that the correct technical solution was brought up FOUR separate times, but the group never came to an agreement on it. I really can’t understand why that is. What was wrong with our dynamic that we couldn’t get the correct answer to stick when there were FOUR separate conversations about it? We were flawed as a team when it came to communication everyone contributed to the failure. None of us were blameless. The Judges were NOT happy. So much so that they didn’t award a collaboration winner, only a technical award to Alex for being the first to state the issue.
I feel like my biggest part in the failure came when I “let” Stacy present. The judges were super-pissed (especially Buck!) about the roshambo (rocks-paper-scissors) to determine the presenter. I was pretty well taken aback when Stacy REALLY wanted to do it. I thought I was a good choice for presenter, but I didn’t want to offend her. Instead, I took an easy way out and left it to “chance.” In hind sight, I could have dropped a ‘Spock’ on her Sheldon Cooper style, a la Big Bang Theory; to ensure a win, but what I really should have done is be more insistent.
Congrats to Alex for the technical win this week. He has very good technical skills and was able to show them off this week. We pretty much all apologized to Alex afterwards for not listening better. Our team got the message loud and clear, though. It’s awesome to be a superstar, but it’s even more awesome to be on a team of Superstars! We’ll grow and bounce back from this. #BeTheNext.
Here are a few pics I snapped of the ferry ride for your enjoyment.
Want more? Judges tell all. The good, the bad and the (sometimes) ugly. >>
What an awesome day, and what a beautiful part of our Country. We went for a trip on the ferry! I think it was the Bainbridge Ferry. The weather was simply amazing. If you have ever spent a summer in Texas, then you know what the heat is like. The fact that I actually got cold during the month of July is an accomplishment in and of itself. And the Olympic mountains are a breathtaking sight when one is used to flat land all around. We don't even have proper hills where I live.
We had a challenge on the ferry and I presented our findings to the judges. We were supposed to have thirty minutes, but it ended up being more like fifteen, to determine as a team the root of the problem. Only upon beginning the presentation to the judges did I realize that we had discussed a number of possibilities, but we never formed a consensus on what the issue was…Doh! Too late now. Oh, man, it was so bad. If it wasn’t bad enough to be embarrassed in front of the judges, all of my colleagues, friends and family get to witness my failure when the show airs. Niiiiice.
I couldn't wait to get back to the house. We had a lovely dinner and looked forward to a nice, quiet evening, but before we could even start desert, guess who let himself in and proceeded to ruin our evening?
Yes, Mr. Buck Woody himself.
When he opened the door, I could hear a song playing far off in the distance. Only a snippet of lyrics followed him into the house “…been around for a long, long year stole many a man’s soul and faith…” before he shut the door behind him. (Didn’t he say his mother’s name was Rosemary?) This was in no way good for us. He gave us the final challenge, and my, my, it is a good one: Global company, web app, pii data, 300 databases geographically dispersed running a different rdbms needs a data warehouse solution. Present to the business executives in the a.m.
Remember when your English teacher taught you that two negatives create a positive? “I couldn’t not look at the tangled mess” means you looked at it, right? So, with that same train of thought in mind, can you think of a time when two positives create a negative? Don’t worry. I’ll wait.
Can’t think of one? Well, how about this? When Buck told us to not stay up all night working on the challenge, I thought to myself, “Yeah, right.”
I’ve always been a big fan of challenges and competition, in the years that led up to becoming a Microsoft Employee, I worked together with several consultants in a strong competitive database world. It’s with that intake that I gladly agreed to be a guest judge on Be the Next Microsoft Employee.
When working for Microsoft, one of the key strengths is the diversity of a team, different personalities, different opinions on how a solution should be built, or a project should be executed upon.
Be the Next Microsoft Employee reflected that, and we had our competitors working together as a team, encouraging the kind of team work that is so critical, while maximizing each individual team member’s talent.
And certainly there was a lot of talent on the team, but unfortunately on the team challenge: NO WINNER, since they lost as a team.
I was impressed with all candidates, but in the T-SQL debugging challenge for which we had the Washington State Ferry as the ‘timeclock’, there was one candidate that impressed me the most. The “SQL Hulk” Alex, did lead the team to the correct solution eventually, but was unfortunately overruled by “Captain Zimm” Stacy and “Turbo” Mike.
Now the interesting thing is, had Alex voiced his opinion more strongly, they most likely could have resolved this SQL Puzzle in less than 10 minutes, and would have set the judges for a tough selection and had "The Buckster" worried.
Because that didn’t happen, … the team of judges felt that we had no clear winner, since they lost the entire challenge. It’s that simple: you win as a team, you lose as a team.
Because Alex truly impressed me with his knowledge on the task leading towards the solution, I did feel that he had the strongest T-SQL knowledge, a value that I truly appreciate as a Microsoft Certified Master. When I shared that feedback with my peer judges we decided to award Alex the technical prize.
One of the lowlights was the un-preparedness to suggest and present their solution to the judges.As Track Owner for the Database Track at major events, I certainly value preparedness when it comes to presenting on any topic, despite the fact that you might have had lack of preparation, or even a solution to present.Rock – paper – scissors is not the right strategy to determine on who is going to present, and even more, you need to know and agree on the answer prior to delivering a presentation.
In each of the candidates, I discovered what I was looking for in the next MSFT employee—a diamond in the rough. With the right coaching, each of those candidates has the great potential to succeed and exceed in the day to day job working for one of the largest IT organizations in the world.
While we had a joyful ride on the ferry under nice Seattle sun (incredible but true), it did feel great to be a judge, having gone through the tension on how close they actually were to the actual solution was a key highlight.The error occurred in this challenge is certainly one that people make when writing triggers, which truly comes down to understanding on how triggers work and deal with the inserted / deleted tables as part of the trigger action.As guidance you should review http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms191300.aspx and clearly understand those concepts. When a trigger fires, it necessarily does not produce a single record in the inserted, deleted table, which truly relates to the error message occurred.Still can't believe they were so close, but yet so far out.
Now what was up with “Which takes longer: making coffee or installing SQL Server”?
In my presentation at TechED North America , I showcased that SQL Server deploys incredibly fast on a Windows Server Core platform, by performing command-line based installations, also called “unattended installations”. The entire session was recorded and posted on the Channel 9 TechED North America page here.
As a SQL Server DBA, you probably want to explore many more of our SQL Server Hands-on coolness, which you can do on our online hosted lab platform: www.microsoft.com/sqlserverlabs.
Happy SQL Server everyone – and good luck to our contestants getting ready for their final episodes..
Dandy Weyn
@ilikesql
I am very happy that I was able to contribute to the team and give the solution that the judges were looking for. The whole team was very focused on today’s collaboration challenge and we all had fun on the ferry sharing ideas on how to do things in SQL Server. I am enjoying every minute of the show and learning SQL Server tips from Buck and Dandy. Tim DiMarco also gave us some useful tips when it comes to presenting in front of many people. Stacy, Mike, and Chris had some very good ideas to solve the challenge and they could have easily won the challenge and although I won the individual challenge I know that we did it as a team and in my mind we all won today.
The fourth challenge is live! Watch it here: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/bethenext.aspx Read on to find out more about the technical side of the challenge, and how you can enter to win free books and be entered to win a new laptop!
This week I was joined this week by Dandy Weyn, aka “The Belgian” Sr. Technical Product Marketing Manager here at Microsoft. We were fortunate to have him along on this ride… this challenge was full of drama. And it shouldn’t have been – read on to find out more…
I was actually afraid of the simplicity of this challenge. Here’s the text of what we gave the contestants:
Challenge:
We got an e-mail from a developer today. We need you to solve it - but this time, as a group. It reads:
"I'm using SQL Azure Data Sync to keep two tables in sync. I have to sync only one table, and the table on SQL Azure has a trigger, but the table on my local SQL Server doesn't have this trigger (because apart from the shared one table, the two databases have nothing in common).
When I try to sync it fails with this error:
----------------------------------------------
Sync failed with the exception "GetStatus failed with exception:
Sync worker failed, checked by GetStatus method.
Failure details:
An unexpected error occurred when applying batch file C:\Resources\directory\61e9d741c80a47b4ae195f8.NTierSyncServiceWorkerRole.LS1\DSS_syncjobmxdkfaopaery\a0e8b11a-a08.batch.
See the inner exception for more details.
Inner exception:
Failed to execute the command 'BulkInsertCommand' for table 'dbo.tblUser';
the transaction was rolled back. Ensure that the command syntax is correct.
SqlException Error Code: -2146232060 - SqlError Number:512,
Message: Subquery returned more than 1 value.
This is not permitted when the subquery follows =, !=, <, <= , >, >=
or when the subquery is used as an expression.
SqlError Number:3621,
Message: The statement has been terminated.
For more information, provide tracing id ‘bb8e3787-27c1-4b7e-9a26-6db2ff6724d3’ to customer support.
---------------------------------------------------
When I disable my trigger, the sync works!
My trigger:
CREATE TRIGGER [dbo].[UpdateUsersTable]
ON [dbo].[tblUser]
AFTER INSERT AS BEGIN SET NOCOUNT ON;
INSERT INTO [dbo].[Users] ([userID], [PartnerOrganizationId])
VALUES ((select [userID] from inserted), (select [country] from inserted))
END
What do you think is happening?"
Did you see it? (Post the answer as a comment if you think you do – and post the fix as well) Actually, the answer is right there in the question. But the twist was this – we had the contestants work on the challenge as a team. Interesting things happen when more than one person works on a problem….
The contestants have “day jobs” where they have real-live responsibilities. One of the contestants had a production issue to take care of and had worked late into the evening and even the morning of this challenge – and came out to the challenge as well. This is a really talented, dedicated group of folks. I’ve heard from lots of you who have told me “I can’t imagine the stress of an interview like this, with cameras rolling and multiple people picking apart my solution.” I agree – I designed these challenges, and I can tell you that they aren’t easy. They may not look to have rhyme or reason at first, but I hope in these explanations you find that we really thought them through to learn more about the candidates.
And it’s not just a technical challenge – we have a Human Resources judge (Tim) who’s been watching carefully to see how the contestants interacted. In the last challenge the contestants worked as a team even when we didn’t ask them to – which was a great breakthrough for them. Although they ended up designing their solutions individually, they were informed by the work they did as a group prior.
Today was different. We asked the team to work on the challenge together. I didn’t tell them what that meant – and they just jumped right in (mistake number 1). They should have decided who would do what, and how. Who knew the answer. Who *thought* they knew the answer. Who wasn’t sure at all. And….who was the best presenter. They had been presenting individually until now…they didn’t consider who would speak for the group (mistake number 2). The best presenter had won the previous challenge – but groupthink got in the way. More on that in a moment.
My fear was that the answer to this puzzle was so obvious it would be solved in seconds. In fact, we had another challenge ready for them to work on so we wouldn’t have a boring challenge!
But that concern wasn’t necessary. Although it isn’t shown in the clip, one of the contestants got the answer in under 30 seconds. But the group didn’t listen (mistake 3) and just kept going in different directions, even thinking that SQL Azure doesn’t support Triggers (it does, just fine). The person with the right answer kept trying to get his point across – a little – but when he couldn’t make headway, he joined in the group and allowed his answer to be ignored (mistake 4).
Time ran out. No answer was clear. I asked for a leader to speak for the group (who hadn’t even decided a single answer – mistake 5) and the team used – get ready for it – “Rock, Paper Scissors” to decide! Big number 6! Bad Team! Bad! :)
And then they got the wrong answer (did you find the right answer yet?), presented it poorly, and didn’t even agree in the end on the solution. Fail, fail, fail. The other judges and I were NOT happy. Did that come through on the video? :)
Working in groups is a part of life here at Microsoft, and it's very important to me. You have to be able to do things on your own, of course, but the products and solutions we have span multiple versions, countries, laws, regulations, industries and so on. We need teams to make sure we do these things right. You have to be able to negotiate an idea – never attacking a person, but always attacking the logic of a decision.
So…
In the end, we failed the entire team. There was no winner, since they got it wrong, debated it wrong and presented it wrong. We did award a technical winner to one contestant, since he got the right answer, but I faulted him still for not being able to get his ideas across.
In life, and especially here at Microsoft, you run into people in groups who may not want to hear your answer. But if you’re right – and you *know* you’re right – you have to find a way. Argue, be nice, show, tell, dance, do something. You’ve got to be able to get yourself heard – in fact, the more convinced you are that you are right, the harder you have to try. Our customers deserve it.
Agree? Disagree? It’s your turn to have a say. Design a challenge that has a group of people create a solution for something. Don’t make it too vague, and don’t make it too easy – after all, we want to see the group form together, come up with ideas, and pick a winner. Describe how your challenge would do that. Describe possible stress points, and remember, there doesn’t have to be a single “right” answer like we had in this challenge. We had only 30 minutes for them, so we had to give them a way to “win” in that time.
Last week’s winners: Joseph Hagan, Martin Cox and Ryan Roper - Congratulations! Just one more submission, and you - along with anyone else that submits - are well on your way to that laptop…
You may know him as Dandy Weyn, or ‘The Belgian’, or as @ilikesql. Or perhaps as a Sr. Technical Product Marketing Manager for SQL Product Marketing and that he writes the blog, I Like SQL. For any of you who have attended TechED or PASS Summit, he’s the guy behind the content for those events.
But did you know that…
Dandy has somewhat of a love/hate relationship with coffee. His inner techie was initially unleashed when an IT guy spilled coffee on the backup tape after formatting the wrong hard disk. Enter ‘The Belgian’, who was able save the corporate data using some pc tools he had sitting on his 386 desktop at home.
This is the guy contestants need to impress on Episode #4 of Be the Next as he’s this week’s guest judge! Would you be nervous? (Did we mention this episode takes place on a ferry?)
This is what I call a “Woulda, shoulda, coulda.” I was close, so very, very close! I woulda used the colored markers if there were a couple of more colors. I shoulda not have mentioned my solution was in production somewhere. Yes, I know one cannot use solutions like cookie cutters. My proposed solution contained the changes I felt were necessary to fit the situation. I coulda won if I had stated that. Woulda, shoulda, coulda…
Note to self: color = good, no color = bad. If there aren’t enough colors, use them anyway.
I must remember to point out the changes made in a solution to customize it to the situation or else appropriateness will be suspect. Got it. I will not make that mistake again.
I truly am glad Chris won today. Don’t get me wrong, I wish I would have won, but since I didn’t, I’m glad it was Chris. He is a really sharp guy and he deserved it. He just better not win another one…just kidding! (no I’m not)
This challenge was fun to do and I focused on learning from previous challenges to do better each time. My strategy was to show my knowledge of BI and this challenge was perfect for it. I really thought I had a good plan because I expanded on the different phases of a data warehouse implementation. One of my strengths is being detail oriented and I quickly expanded on the different phases of a BI solution but unfortunately the judges were not looking at the detail level and instead the focus was on the higher level design. Chris’ solution included a nice flow of the data and the technologies used and he did a great job using visuals that were easy to read and follow. He deserved to win the challenge and is someone who people can learn from when it comes to presentation and knowledge about this subject.
Stacy and Mike were also very close and we all were happy to see Chris win because he is a great person and SQL Server enthusiast. We decided to take a break and go get some coffee and I took a picture of him after his big win:
Phew! This week’s challenge went well…I didn’t win, but I also didn’t make any glaring mistakes. Congratulations to Chris for the win! He got a sweet prize which I’m totally jealous about – a new Xbox with Kinect.
The challenge itself was really fun but hard. There were actually 2 components involved…1) They wanted to see the 4 of us contestants collaborate in a brainstorming session, and 2) Come up with a high level solution diagram for a fairly complicated ETL/BI problem. I’ve had experience with working on ETL solutions, but not at the design/overview level. I really want the folks from my job at QSP to look over the challenge when they post it. I think they’ll get a kick out of it.
I was a little frustrated with myself today though…once we started brainstorming I started to diagram out all of the components of the challenge out on paper but I should have been working on the giant whiteboard they provided us. Stacy did that though thankfully and the 4 of us were able to hammer out the details of the challenge together. If she hadn’t I don’t think any of our presentations would have been as successful.
One thing I’m very thankful for is that all of us contestants have a great group chemistry. No one is acting like they have a big ego or causing difficulties amongst us. It makes dealing with this whole situation a lot better. Last night (after the challenge which shall not be named) we went out to grab groceries for a huge steak dinner we all cooked up back at the house.
Tonight we got tickets to go see a Seattle Sounders game which was great! The crowd was insane…there was an entire section of the crowd which was going nuts the entire game, like you see at European soccer games. I snapped a pic of the section...you can tell by all the giant flags they waved about.
Our next challenge involves something on the Seattle ferry…I’m not entirely sure what to expect but I imagine it will be harder than today…seems to be the trend.
Watch my personal video response to this challenge -
It was an awesome honor to be asked to be a guest judge for Be The Next Microsoft Employee. As noted in previous blogs on Be The Next, this is a great way to show the type of questions and problems we regularly face as Microsoft employees. For more information, check out the show’s website or on Twitter #BeTheNext.
By Day 3, everyone was getting into their groove though everyone was getting a bit tired too - a perfect time to throw in an ETL/BI solution. The key thing to remember about ETL / BI problems is that it’s not just about the coding or technical issues. It’s about the ability to understand both the business and technical problems together, adapt to an ever-changing set of requirements, and the ability to communicate and describe both the problem and your proposed solution (and defend it).
The day we kicked off Episode 3 of Be the Next started off pretty much like any other day for me – debating with Buck Woody. But this time, it was a lot more animated because of instead of emails and tweets – we actually got to debate face-to-face.
As you can tell, we’re a bunch of data nerds – so even the storage and distribution capacity of tacos and pizzas are fair game for debate. It’s sort of like the Blackboard debates on “The Finder” between Sherman and Leo – but dorkier.
Source: http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/the-finder?before=1336272841
So after the needless distraction, it was time to get to work on judging all the contestants. For starters, I wanted to call out that all the contestants did a great job. Stacy was the catalyst for new ideas by drawing out and explaining an existing ETL/BI design. Alex dove deep and provided the lower level details of how the processing would work. Mike – being his “Turbo” self—did a great job explaining his solution and defending it. But as noted above, ETL/BI solutions require all three facets of technical, business, and the ability to communicate it.
And Chris (appropriately named “SQL-Nova”) had ultimately won the day’s competition because he was able to do all three. Crucially, he was able to communicate his solution through the use of color-coded block diagrams that allowed him to:
Even if there were problems with any individual component, the solution itself was never in question.
The collaborative effort of all four contestants was great to see because no matter how good a person is, it’s important to remember that the best solutions are often collaborative efforts. But Chris excelled because he was able to tackle all three facets (business, technical, and communication) that is prototypical of a great employee and anyone who is fighting daily SQL battles.
This was so apparent that all three of us judges quickly agreed which each other on who won today’s competition. Even with Buck and my tendency to debate with each over … anything… there was very little debate on who won the day!
I finally broke through and won a challenge! And let me just say, ‘WOW!’ It feels really good to finally win. This was BY FAR the most difficult challenge in terms of requirements. Two full pages worth. And somehow there was still plenty of vagary and room for interpretation. The Judges were kind enough to let us collaborate so that we could use some good synergy to get enough traction to get this thing moving. It was a big, hairy, nasty, mess of a challenge. Impossible to do by yourself in 1 hour. IMPOSSIBLE!
But working together, we were able to get pretty far along before we had to switch to individual work mode. I knew there were flaws in our initial brainstorm, but there was some brilliance, too. The judges gave Stacy props for starting with a data flow diagram. I certainly would have done that type of design, too. Alex is the only one of us that is so detailed-oriented that he’d use mostly words. The thing she did that I thought was so good and that I wouldn’t have done was that she set up an ‘Issues’ area so that we could track the problems we were hoping to solve. The “parking lot” was a good way to organize them initially during the brainstorm. I have to give a shout-out to my buddy Alex. His design was SOO detailed. I’m not sure I’d ever come up with that level in a week, let alone one hour. Great job to him, it was truly a thing of beauty – just not what the judges were looking for.
Luckily, my design was what they were looking for! It was a good balance between technical and non-technical. I was very happy for the win and to finally escape one, Buck Woody. To celebrate, we went to a Seattle Sounders game. It was AWESOME. Great atmosphere and energy in that place. Highly recommended. They tied, 1-1. Let’s hope I can keep it rolling at the next challenge. I know Alex needs/wants a win, but I aim to make him earn it.
Here's my video blog and a pic from the soccer match for your viewing enjoyment...
The third challenge is live! Watch it here: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/bethenext.aspx Read on to find out more about the technical side of the challenge, and how you can enter to win free books and possibly even a brand-new laptop!
As I mentioned, in each challenge we’re trying to ensure we capture not just a technical solution, but how a contestant thinks and works – and as our HR judge, Tim stated on the first day, how they make the technical understandable. Nothing shows off a mix of these attributes better than a project design. A project design that we’ve asked the contestants to create, and then explain in both written and oral format.
My friend Denny Lee (http://borntolearn.mslearn.net/btl/b/bethenext/archive/2012/08/03/what-do-big-data-amp-speeding-tix-have-in-common-guest-judge-denny-lee.aspx) joined me as the guest judge today. I can tell you this – I would be nervous indeed if he were checking out my work. Oh, wait…he HAS checked out my work. I have this one scar….
We presented each of the contestants with a series of requirements for an Extract, Transform and Load system, with the ultimate end-goal of understanding where the data comes from and where it goes, and of course the technology associated with that process - we printed this on paper for them:
BUSINESS SCENARIO
Adventure Works uses various software applications to manage different aspects of the business, and each application has its own data store. Specifically:
Some business partners, such as the marketing agency that Adventure Works uses to conduct marketing campaigns, provide data to Adventure Works through cloud-based data stores.
This distribution of data has made it difficult for business users to answer key questions about the overall performance of the business.
Additional requirements include:
THE CHALLENGE
“Using the whiteboard/flipchart, your challenge is to study the business scenario and requirements, and then design an ETL solution to help Adventure Works build an enterprise data warehouse. ”
But there are some things we’re checking for that we didn’t exactly call out in the requirements – that’s pretty common in real-life work situations as well. A data professional should probably ask for the reasons the data needs to move – and if that’s not possible, they should account for multiple purposes in their design.
The challenge also involves knowing the Microsoft stack of data products. Yes, that’s vendor-specific, but after all, they *are* coming to work at Microsoft. I would expect other vendors to also hire people that are knowledgeable about their stack of products. J Don’t worry – we included other products as well.
You’ll also notice that there is an external data requirement. A data professional is aware that there are services that offer data, and where they fit the bill, these should be included in any design.
I decided that since this was a big challenge that would obviously require a little research first (this is not the kind of thing you should do on what’s in your head – in a contest or in real-life!) that I would allow the contestants to have the challenge early. I gave it to them as we were setting up the filming.
Side-note – setting up, filming, editing and re-filming all of these challenges took all day, and sometimes even longer to do. You might see only 15 minutes or so of video, but having dozens of people involved in this production, moving to locations, working with all of the technology that is required to film a show is really demanding. Hours and hours of work go into each challenge, to say nothing of the preparation work from the team, the film crew, and the contestants. You’re seeing only a VERY small part of the work everyone put in.
Back to the challenge. I was sitting in the make-up room (don’t judge me) and one of the other judges came in and said “I know you gave them the challenge early, but I think they are actually trying to solve it as a group, now. What do you want to do?” I wanted to stop them – this is an individual challenge, after all, but Tim from HR said “Let’s see where this goes.” We actually (without their knowledge) watched what they did.
After about 30 minutes, I came over and brought them to the whiteboards (actually writable glass panes we have at the Microsoft Offices) and “officially” gave them the challenge. And then, just because I wanted to, I took their notes that they had created as a group. My concern was that they would simply group-think the process and all the solutions would be the same. Was I ever wrong about that – they actually approached it from different angles entirely.
It was interesting to watch the progression. Adding to the pressure of this challenge was each of us judges walking in and questioning their design while they were creating them. I don’t know about you, but I can’t stand that. Just leave me alone and when I’m done I’ll explain it. Nope, we walked around constantly, interrupting, questioning, wasting their time.
When the challenge was done, we had each person present their solution. One contestant re-used a design they had seen before – which is OK, but then said “once you’ve seen one of these they are all pretty much the same.” Uhm, no.
Another contestant approached the design well but ignored technologies (like Data Quality Services) that replaced an entire function in their design. They didn’t know that SQL Server has these kinds of things built right in. Another contestant wasn’t familiar with the reporting systems required in the design – something they should have looked up.
In the end, our winner had a very componentized design that was flexible but included the features we requested. He had actually never designed a system this large, but kept it detailed enough to be usable, but general enough to handle changes.
And he explained it well. That’s key. You can have the best design in the world, but if you can’t explain it, you might not ever get it implemented. The presentation was clear, concise, and complete, as was the design. Win.
So, now it’s your turn. Design a challenge that encompasses the following attributes:
Remember, be complete – a few sentences doesn’t win the prize. Tell me how you would judge someone on a “win”. What are you looking for? How does your challenge show off those bullet points?
Last week’s winners were: Martin Cox, with Ryan Roper and Joseph Hagan! Congratulations! We'll be in touch - and don't forget to submit for this week....
So, this week’s challenge sucked. I totally screwed up. It was all about managing security in SQL which I haven’t had much experience with. I really could have gotten the solution too…I let myself focus on aspects of the challenge which were not important at all, and didn’t leave enough time to figure out the actually important parts of it. Not going to let that happen again…It’s really strange too because I told myself going into all of this that I needed to focus on providing the judges with the solution that they are looking for FIRST, and then work on doing the little extras if I have time. This week, I did it backwards and it cost me.
I don’t think I can stress enough just how strange it is being under these situations…If you’ve ever seen any of those reality TV shows where you think to yourself “Why would they ever do that?” I can now honestly say I know why. It really is the strangest sensation to look back at some of the things I did and say, “What the hell?”
Just to prove it to myself though I came home and did the challenge without looking at the solution, albeit with a lot of the information I got from having gone through the challenge already. I needed to make sure I actually could do it. One thing that I’m REALLY liking about doing this competition is the review we contestants do at home. The other folks here are SO knowledgeable, and I feel like a sponge soaking up an ocean. Chris in particular has been so helpful, answering the myriad of questions I have.
I want to congratulate Stacy for the win…it was a difficult challenge and she nailed it. The prize she won is pretty sweet. I would have definitely put the keyboard she got to good use…the camera and mouse were cool too.
Heading to bed early (12:30) to try and recharge…Check out my video blog in the meantime.
PS – Here we are at the house putting together a BBQ dinner after the challenge...was a real pick-me-up.
Denny Lee works with some of the largest enterprise BI/Big Data systems, including Yahoo!'s 24TB cubes. He also built the first ever Analysis Services cube. He’s been building websites for as long as websites have been built. His big data chops garnered him the nickname, Big Data Daddy.
You’d think a guy like this would be cautious. Careful. Meticulous. Not so much when he gets behind the wheel. He managed to get $1200 worth of speeding tickets when he was in Taiwan for 4 short months. (Slow down, Big Data Daddy!)
(Maybe fellow guest judge Tobias Ternström, aka The Racer, will let him whiz around the track in his race car one of these days.)
Our Be the Next contestants are going to need to keep their wits about them if they’re going to impress Denny Lee!
This challenge was very familiar to me because I always follow the principal of least privilege as Best Practices recommend so I was very confident about this challenge and getting a win. I started off well and made progress and this time around I was going take all the time given to me to ensure that my solution was solid but time was not on my side. At 75% done, I was quickly running out of time and in some way this is what happens in the real world where you are asked for permissions and sometimes you are cornered to give more permissions than what you would have liked. I was not going to give more permission just to finish quickly so I pushed ahead and got most of the permissions configured but one and this one cost me the challenge. Congratulations Stacy for the win.
It was nice to meet boB Taylor and he was very good at answering questions about MCSM and MCA and it was awesome for me to meet the man who is in charge of these certifications because I am currently in the process of getting certified. We had a blast before and after the challenge and got a chance to show our pool skills as we waited in the lobby. Here I took a picture of Mike and Stacy:
I’m pretty steamed about this challenge… The first challenge I can chalk up to me being a goofball – you got me good, Buck – my bad. This challenge is something entirely different. Let me state very clearly for the record – I KNOW, UNDERSTAND, and IMPLEMENT SQL Server Security with well-known best practices. I take that very seriously. I believe that the biggest reason for me not winning this challenge had to do with the intentionally vague requirements and not my inability to do these tasks. The lack of info here is a bit of a hard sell for me…If security is SOOO important, then a conversation or two might be in order. Just sayin'.
After the challenge, the judges gave us the grading script. I absolutely dissected that thing and I must say that I disagree with some of what the "code" was grading. The script was looking for certain names, hard-coded items and didn’t take my approach into account. 1) I used different names for roles (not specifiied in requirements) than the script was looking for, 2) I granted permissions to roles not users (a SQL Server best practice), and 3) I navigated the tables from the ERD, just not as "completely" as the script was looking for. I'll take the hit on that one and I’m pretty sure this is where Stacy got me – why she won and I, again, got second! She granted permissions to the key ID fields AND other ancillary fields that would better constitute a "sale" in the business sense. In trying to keep the security tight, I didn’t make all those assumptions. I guess I should have. I feel like I nailed this challenge except for assumptions of the business definitions.
Unlike the first challenge, I did feel like I "finished", albeit right as time expired. I was proud of what I had done. Of course, I would normally handle these kinds of permissions using Stored Procedures and Views – never direct access to tables – because that’s another Security best practice. I just didn’t have time. During the challenge, I basically concocted a script to document my work so that the judges could follow me. I think that helped in my presentation to them and think that they are seeing something worthwhile in my ability. I garnered kudos for using roles and they were very complimentary of my use of the AdventureWorks 2005 ERD to understand the complicated relationships necessary to solve the challenge.
It’s abundantly clear that their tactic is to give us a 'simple' task in a VERY uncomfortable way. Well played, Buck Woody, creator of all these crazy challenges. I'm adapting and getting more comfortable with you. I need a win! I know I'll get one. I’ve been very close two challenges in a row now and it's getting OLD!
Buck Woody and I set out to provide our contestants with a challenging, real world security scenario. With security being foremost on everyone’s mind these days, we felt that this was a very key scenario for which our contestants needed to demonstrate mastery not only of the basics, but some more advanced topics as well.
With that background, it didn’t come as a surprise that no one successfully navigated the challenge we put before them. However, it was obvious that while some contestants were more developer-focused (see the results of the first week) others were more DBA-focused. That showed this week as Stacy Luciani got the best grade on our security challenge. She implemented nearly all the requirements, but we tripped her up with a few curveballs. The other contestants had varying degrees of success, with most implementing some of the requirements correctly.
As a potential member of MSIT, each contestant has to prove that they can operate effectively in the ‘heat of battle’. Each of the contestants showed that they do have what it takes – let’s see as the weeks go on who jumps out to the lead.
As the Next Microsoft Employee, the candidates must prove that they have breadth as well as depth in all areas of the product. The judges were all in agreement on the grading and we emphasized some security best practices to each contestant as we gave them their results.
The chance to meet with up and coming SQL Server experts and to hang with all of the crew was awesome. Being a performer myself, the whole on camera experience was amazing!
To those of you looking to be the Next Microsoft Employee, I can only recommend learning the Best Practices for as many aspects of the SQL Server engine as you can and maybe consider the Microsoft Certified Solution Master program! I also encourage you to join other SQL pros as they Play Along @ Home—you could win an HP Folio 13 Ultrabook.
After the first challenge I must admit I was a little apprehensive about this SQL Security challenge but determined to do my best. As luck would have it, none of my fellow contestants had very much experience with pure SQL Security. It felt so good to redeem myself from the beating I took in the first challenge, and to hear the encouraging words from the judges. As you all know by now, I’ve wanted to work at Microsoft since I visited the North Carolina campus six years ago, and I am praying my experience will pull me through again for the next challenge. Look out boys, I’ve got this job in my sights, and I’m walking on sunshine!
The second challenge is live! Mike won the first one, and Stacy, Alex and Chris have weighed in on what they did wrong. Let’s see if they learned from their mistakes this week: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/bethenext.aspx
You know, this thing might just take off. KOMO 4 news interviewed us on this challenge (http://www.komonews.com/news/local/Microsoft-reality-show-puts-job-candidates-on-the-hot-seat-164218586.html), and the chatter is building!
I’ve received lots of entries for the “Play@Home” contest, and I’ll announce today’s winner….
This time I was joined by boB (he spells his name backwards) “The tool man” Taylor (http://borntolearn.mslearn.net/btl/b/bethenext/archive/2012/07/27/bob-taylor-making-magic-on-be-the-next.aspx) . He’s a Program Lead for the Microsoft Certified Master certification – one of our highest certification programs. He passed 28 certification exams on the first try. Oh, and did you know he’s a magician? Yup. He did some magic for me on the set: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD5747260918AE95C
As you can see in today’s challenge video, we took the contestants to a remote location to work with their laptops on a security challenge. Remember that the contestants have a default installation of SQL Server 2012 with all features, running on a Windows 7 operating system. Their “mini challenge” was to restore the AdventureWorks 2005 database on that system. This week’s challenge is deceptively simple:
"Three people new people have been hired. They need to have various levels of access to the AdventureWorks database. We are using SQL Server Authentication for the server, that's what they need logins for. Only the Adventureworks database is affected. They must have no more permissions than the following:
All of them will use the following password: P@ssword1
Do not make them change it on first use."
Easy, no? Ah, but in that simple set of requirements, many things must be done to complete the challenge.
The settings for SQL Server must be changed to allow Mixed Authentication Mode – the default installation of SQL Server sets the security authentication to Windows Logins only. Server Logins and Database Users need to be created, with the proper password. Settings need to ensure that the user doesn’t have to change their password on first login. And, because SQL Server allows you to enforce Windows policies, you might want to remove that setting or the password policies from Window might conflict with the ones you want from the requirements.
But that’s actually pretty straightforward – anyone with experience with Windows and SQL Server will be able to do this part of the challenge.
Now comes a few more difficult requirements. Jane needs to “find” all of the salespersons, by store. And she must be able to “change” special offer percentages. So it goes with Dave and Jamil – only certain permissions are required on certain objects. And therein lies the real challenge…
What does “find” mean? That’s the way our managers talk to us – they don’t use nice, normal, T-SQL language like regular people – they don’t say SELECT or UPDATE and DELETE but not INSERT, they say “find” and “change”. So the first part of the difficulty is to translate manager-eze into T-SQL. The contestants have to be familiar enough with the GRANT and DENY statements to know what the user needs to have. You need to clarify what rights the users really need, and that means ensuring you know not only technology, but business.
Oh, and don’t forget the effective permissions. Unless it’s a DENY statement, a user has all the rights from the groups they belong to (including public) combined – now, we judges wouldn’t have changed any of that, would we? Better check. Youch, that checking takes time….tick…tick…tick….
And that’s still not the hard part.
The hardest part – and most of what we’re testing for here - is knowing where all the tables are that allow the users to do what they need to do. That’s the actual security challenge – to find the objects themselves. And it’s non-trivial. Without knowing the link I’m about to show you, would you know all the tables, views and stored procedures the users need access to? Would you create a view, a stored procedure, or go straight for the base-tables? Wandering through a schema is hard when you have hundreds of tables and only a few minutes to solve a puzzle….
...unless you remember how specific I was about the database version. Unless you remember I said you could look things up. Unless you remember that AdventureWorks 2005 has a LOT of documentation, including…..the schema, with all of the business cases. Which contain all the tables. A quick search on “AdventureWorks” and “Business Scenarios” would quickly show those objects. (Check it out: http://tinyurl.com/cjsc2og )
If you looked there, you would find all of the tables you needed. You could focus on least-privilege, you could focus on writing code, or using the base-table approach, whatever you wanted to do.
So did the contestants do that, or did they focus on users first, and objects last? Well….
boB ran a script he wrote to test the logins, settings and security in the requirements. He made sure each user could do what they needed to, and no more. Everyone got the security settings right – well, mostly. Some missed the Windows policies. Everyone created the users. And everyone pretty much figured out the translation from “find” to “SELECT” and so on.
But everyone missed a thorough schema exploration. If you try to do this manually, it’s almost impossible to locate all of the tables you need. There were actually only a few, but you wouldn’t know that unless you had some sort of documentation to tell you what the system uses for that information, hence the use of AdventureWorks 2005 and the great documentation it has on the schema and business uses. It’s a lesson we all have to learn about finding out what the “real” challenge is in a situation, and go after the big things first. The schema was the key – not really the users or the GRANT statements.
In the end, none of the contestants got all of the objects covered. It’s actually impressive they got any of them covered without reading the business documentation (one contestant found the link, but missed the tables needed). But the winner got really close – and did a few other things correctly. Things like catching those Windows settings, setting the users to have a default database of AdventureWorks, and paying close attention to each part of the security. In fact, the winner only missed a couple of tables needed to successfully negotiate the challenge.
So, now it’s time for you to play along at home. We had some great submissions from the last challenge – and I’m happy to announce the three winners: Joseph Hagan, Ryan Roper and Garrett Stevens! We’ll be contacting you shortly with your prizes, and all of you have been entered for the grand prize of a brand-new laptop! The current winners – and all of you who submitted – along with everyone else can enter this week’s challenge as well. Remember, there’s a prize each week, and then we’ll take the best of the winners and decide who wins the laptop.
Design a challenge like this one on security. What we’re looking for this week is how well the challenge tests real-world applications of security – tracking down a break-in, using auditing, migrating users – whatever you think fits a data professional’s day in dealing with security. We’ll judge your entry on the following:
One or two sentences isn’t going to cut it. This week’s contestants sent amazing, well thought-out documents with complete challenges. If you want that laptop, you’ve got to put a little time in.
See you next week!
I hadn’t really thought much about the show or the first challenge prior to showing up on campus last week, but when I showed up at the bike shop to meet the contestants for the first time and to connect with Buck and Tobias to discuss the first challenge – I got nervous! This is a picture of the scene that I walked into… and I’m thinking… Lights?… Cameras?… Nerves!
I wasn’t quite sure what the Be the Next Microsoft Employee contest was going to be like, but I can honestly say I didn’t expect to see a real film crew on campus (and not just any film crew, but one with Hollywood and big time reality television credentials). It was pretty awesome to see and more than a little unnerving.
I connected with Buck and Tobias to discuss the first challenge and what we were going to look for in the contestants. Then I got a chance to meet Mike, Stacy, Alex and Chris for the first time – while the crew tried to keep the mood light, the pressure and tension was palpable! They all put on a brave face, but I think the scene in the bike shop was overwhelming for them as well.
As for the challenge itself, it sounded amazingly simple, and it should have been in a normal setting, but as the picture above shows, this was anything but normal. They were trying to solve a technical challenge in the middle of the Microsoft equivalent of a mall/food court with very little information and with distraction-overload. There was loud music, tons of people, not to mention the cameras, crew and judges! The contestants did an amazing job of holding their composure through all the distractions; I thought more than one of them would nail this challenge. Boy, was I wrong.
Alex was done first and was looking super confident, then came Mike, Stacy and Chris – all finishing close in time to one another (and at the very end of the hour time limit). Given Alex’s early finish and confidence, I had pretty high expectations and was eagerly awaiting his presentation. Remember, none of the judges had ever seen the contestants before… All we had to go on so far was what we thought we had seen during the first challenge. As for Mike, Stacy and Chris – they had their heads hanging low and none of them looked too self-assured.
I won’t go into the technical details of the challenge (I’ll leave that to Buck and Tobias), but from a presentation perspective, for me, Mike was the clear winner, with Chris a close second. Mike not only got the answer correct, but he was able to articulate his answer clearly and concisely, and present a complex solution in a fairly simple manner. He re-used code that he knew worked and he didn’t try to re-create the wheel during what could easily be classified as a chaotic scene.
I do commend each of the challengers on their efforts. It was a very long day and we (the judges) gave them each some fairly direct feedback. Receiving and incorporating feedback in a setting like this, from people you don’t know is a huge challenge. I’m interested in seeing how each of the contestants react to the guidance and if they will be able to incorporate any of it into the upcoming challenge.
What’s next? Here is a little sneak peak at challenge #2… It should make the first challenge look easy!
Tim
This first challenge was nerve wracking because I did not know what to expect and my first impression was to think that this challenge was going to be very complex and it would involve knowing some feature of SQL Server 2008 but to my surprise it was a TSQL question and I over-thought the solution. I was the first one to finish but unfortunately I did not win the challenge because I used the database already in there instead of the table provided in the thumb drive. This first challenge gave me insight to what to do for the others such as take all the time given to you and pay careful attention to any hints given to you. Congratulations to Mike for the awesome win. He is a tough competitor.
It was exciting to be at a Microsoft building and get to know the environment and what it would be like to be a Microsoft employee and walk around with your backpack or laptop bag in hand. It really looks like a learning environment where ideas are born and people look so focused and yet it's a relaxed environment. Aside from the challenge it was an exciting day because I got to meet Buck, Tim, and Tobias who are great people and fun to be around. Here is a picture where I am waiting in the lobby to get checked in:
It’s tough to succinctly describe this week’s guest judge—he’s a man of way too many talents.
boB “The Toolman” Taylor is a magician, a mentalist, a distance runner, and the brains behind all of the MCSD.NET certification exams. He’s passed 28 certification exams on the first attempt and he can turn $1 dollar bills into Benjamins. (Find out how he does it on July 31 in our behind-the-scenes footage.)
Think the contestants will be able to outwit this guy? Think they’ll be a little intimidated? Wouldn’t you be?! If he doesn’t like their work, he can make it disappear!
boB’s been using SQL Server since 4.2 version. He started with FORTRAN 66 on punch cards, graduated to assembly language programming on a magnetic drum based computer (in Octal) then went through the normal progression – C, C++, C# etc. He’s been using SQL Server since early 90s. (Anyone else remember the V4.2?)
Watch next week when boB “The Toolman” Taylor will join Be the Next Microsoft Employee—not too be missed!
Episode 2 sneak peek:
There is only one good thing I can say about the first challenge: they tapped my weakest area so at least that is out of the way. Mike, my virtual hat is off to you. Well done, my man, well done. I bow before your technical superiority. Good show.
The live band playing loud music didn’t distract me. I can block noise. I have three children.
The camera man placing the lens inches from my face didn’t distract me. I have over 15 years in IT. I can focus on the task at hand.
However, when Alex exclaimed that he was done…that was it for me. How could this young whipper snapper be done? (That’s what we call ‘um down in Texas.) I was going through the motions but my brain was locked up. I tried all my internal mind tricks to get the motor restarted, but there wasn’t a bit of oil left anywhere. I had seized up.
I am humbled. I am thankful this is not the first time. I have been humbled many, many times. It always smarts a bit…a little sting, but one must shake it off and move on. I must keep putting one foot in front of the other. As the oldest contestant, I have more experiences on which I can fall back on and remember, I made it through THAT, I can make it through THIS. Nothing went down. There’s no CEO standing over me, asking me when the system will be back up. This is nothing. I must remember my strengths and remember that should one of the upcoming challenges touch on any of them…my competitors are toast. I am determined. I am better than this. I will do better than this. There is no other option.
Well that sucked out loud!!!…
I had the correct answer staring me in the face but was so flustered by the time element that I didn’t realize it. I really let one slip away. There’s just no other way to say it. In my defense, I was thrown off the trail by one of the books that were given to us. I was thinking they were looking for use of the OVER clause in the solution. The book that they specifically mentioned during the introduction – the one with the forward by guest judge Tobias Ternström – talks exclusively about Windowing in SQL Server and how it can be used to calculate running totals - like the problem we were handed in the challenge to calculate the number of parts supplied by multiple vendors. I was certain that using the OVER clause was the right solution and that I was just following the bread crumbs. Those crumbs were huge and obvious to me. Unfortunately, I was WAY over-complicating things. It was much simpler than that. I’m just a big doofus for not understanding that. I was trying to hit a home run and all I needed to do was put the ball in play. I feel ridiculous. Even so, the judges were very complimentary of my work. They liked my code syntax, stored procedure template/header (I was going to go above and beyond and put the answer in a stored proc), and basically gave me credit for the correct answer, just not in the allotted time. Another thing that I took a ‘ding’ for was that I spent too much time getting the wrapping ready before I had a solution. (Did I mention that they said they were very impressed with my stored proc template. ;-p ) Buck Woody had a comment for me. He said that I “greased the pig before I made the pig” - evidently a Microsoft-ism. Don’t worry, Buck, I won’t make that mistake again.
I also created a video blog about this challenge. You can see it here: