Thomas Kejser's Database Blog

Happy new year everyone. First of all, thanks for staying in touch and reading my site. According to Google Analytics, I have over 27K unique page hits and there is a steady traffic of over 50 hits/day of “not search engine crawler and not spam” traffic. Considering that I have done very little to expand my reach (with the exception of picking the inevitable fight with Dan Lindstedt in the Kimball forums) I think that is pretty nice. Peak traffic is now 500 page views in a single day for the most popular post (“Boosting INSERT speed Generating Scalable Keys” in case you were wondering)

The structure of my writing is beginning to converge on a well defined set of categories. One may even argue that I am becoming a grumpy old man with set opinions. Because of this, I have updated the taxonomy of the site to make it easier for you to track the stuff you are interested in.

Basically, it works like this (and I will keep it “insert only” after this – promise)

• Engines: Advise and observations specific to one database engines (and I use that term broadly).
• Grade of the Steel: My performance testing experiments and crazy tuning, where I try to squeeze out the max throughput of large systems.
• Modeling: Everything related to modeling, sub grouped by the type of modeling. There will be engine specific things in here too, but I will strive for it to be stuff everyone can benefit from reading. Readers who are only interested in my data warehouse series should RSS subscribe here.
• Musings: My personal views on the world, where I get to practice my writing and exhibit my freedom of speech. If you like my content, but hate my guts (or if you just are easily offended) you may want to skip past these posts.
• Utilities: Small utilities I sometimes create (under GPL) and a bag of tricks that did not fit in anywhere else.

Note that there is a many-to-many relation between posts and categories: posts can appear in more than one category at a time. Of course, you can still subscribe to the “master level” directly at blog.kejser.org/feed where all posts will appear to track it all.

The tag cloud will evolve over time and helps the search engines categorize what is going on here. It also has the narcissistic effect of showing me a “mental map” of what I am most interested in.

I will be going OOF until end of January. After this, the plan is to pick up the Data Warehouse series again.

Again, thanks to everyone who is reading and commenting. Here’s a toast to yet another year of arguments and strong opinions…

Cheers!

Thomas

Very soon, it is conference time again, at SQLBits. As our team is preparing for this big event, I took a hard look at the slides we are using and the design we apply. While you may argue that spending time on slide design is a waste. I beg to differ. Using slides that are easily readable, beautiful and speak with clarity is important: No matter how great your content is, my experience shows that the audience will also judge you on the quality of the slide material you use. I will also assert that that most people are visual learners, so you owe it to your audience to use well designed slides. But even if you still disagree and if you don’t believe good slides help visual learners, consider this simple observation: if your slides look sloppy, it reflects on your character.

Case Study

To illustrate the process I went through, I will use an example slide. The slide below is for a great Microsoft presentation on column stores:

The first observation is that this slide makes some quite profound points (which I will delve into during SQLBits). The content is good. But the design is quite poor.

Some observations:

• The background colour looks murky
• The font used throughput (Segoe) is rather boring. Unfortunately, PowerPoint is quite fond of it (pun intended)
• There are at least 5 different font sizes in use on the slide. It looks messy
• Contrast is poor, the white text on yellow background is almost unreadable.
• The entire slide looks cramped – especially the illustration. Viewed from the back rows of the venue, the text will likely be unreadable
• Considering that this is from the SQL Server product group, the branding is non existent
• Headers and bullets are scattered almost randomly around the slide
• The compare between the two sides on left and right is not clear

Let’s try to improve this.

 

Improving Layout Contrast

First of all, let me apply a bright background and increase the contrast to make it more readable. Let me also clean up the inconsistent use of bullets and align the headers of each side of the slide. I will also use a colour scheme with much more contrast.

This is the first iteration:

I made some minor corrections in the header too – title casing and removing the load balancing (which is a very overloaded term).

 

Improving Content Contrast

The slide compares two different situations with each other – a before/after picture. This is a very powerful presentation method, and the creator of the slide has a great point here that I want to highlight. But, the contrast of the two sides is not clear from the layout. I want to make this contrast stand out.

In this second iteration of the slide, I increased the size of the two sub-headers (“Row Mode” and “Batch Mode”) to direct the reader’s attention to the fact that we are dealing with two different concepts. The two text lines below each illustration are also important points and I boldfaced them to make them stand out more.

In the slide, the differences in “probe input” and “build input” are also important. But the slide does not make the best use of this information. First of all, the left side uses the term: “Probe Input” while the right side uses the term “Probe Side” – even though they are the same concept. Second, the probe build/side text is located at the bottom of the illustration on the left side, and at the top on the right side. I moved them to the same location, the bottom of the slide, and made use the same text on both sides.

The slide now looks like this:

The contrast between the two sides is much clearer now don’t you think?

Notice that I did something which is typical of my slides: adding a footer with information. But as I was doing this, it made me reconsider this technique. Why is footer needed? If you are sitting in the room, chances are you probably KNOW which conference you are in – and knowing today’s date is not of much use. Putting information like that in the slide is just distraction for the precious attention of the audience, and a waste of slide space.

Having slide numbers is debatable. In favour of them, they make references to printed material easier. But it is a double edged sword, if you change your slides last minute (as I like to do) those references will be off.

 

Uncluttering and Cleaning up

The usage of fonts is far from optimal in the slide. Even after improving contrast, I doubt the slide will look good from a distance. And we want to reach those people hiding all the way at the back of the room too. Removing the footer also gives me more air on the slide to play with – allowing me to use bigger fonts.

Typographical rules dictate that one should reduce the number of fonts and font sizes in a work of graphical design. I decided to use Helvetica as my slide font and Calibri as the header.

Helvetica is the font of champions, it looks amazing both in print and on the screen. Arial is a discount version of Helvetica, don’t settle for it if you have Helvetica. For the slide text, I used only 16pt and 18pt sized font,  big enough to read from a distance. It will be clear soon why I chose Calibri for the header font, but for now, suffice to say that it is good that the header stands out in a different font than the main text.

The slide now looks like this:

Note how much larger the text is and how uncluttered it has become.

Trick: There is a little trick you can use when drawing images containing oval shapes. Notice how I managed to put a big, 16pt Helvetica “Thread" into the oval shape on the right? The default behavior of PowerPoint is to try and squeeze the text into a box that fits inside the shape. Like this:

This is probably NOT what you want. Instead, try disabling text wrapping like this in the Format Shape menu:

This gives you much more space inside the shape to fit in a larger font:

More readable text in the same space.

Branding

The slide is much more readable now, but it is not really clear that this slide comes from the SQL Server product group.

It would be tempting to slap a big Microsoft logo in there. But I think this leads to clutter. If you observe Apple’s branding , you will see that they use a very understated look. Yet, when you hold an Apple product in your hand, you are not in doubt who made it. I think we can use a similar principle of "cool minimalism" for the slides.

We need to give it that SQL Server feel, while maintaining a clean look. Let me take a look at some of the themes of SQL server. First of all, Microsoft uses the "wavy  logo" as seen to the right. I think that is rather cool and it looks high tech – the look I am after. But instead of slapping it directly on the slide, let us make it subtle, in the background image. Gray scaling the logo and putting it on a white background makes it discreet, without interrupting the contrast of the slide. Please don’t use high contrast background pictures, they really annoy the eyes.

Another thing to note is that the SQL Server logo is typically written like this:

I tried identifying the font, and I think it is Calibri in bold (The big “Q” gives it away). Changing the headers to this font gives it that familiar look we are after, without doing the obvious thing of adding a logo directly.

With a new, discreet background and a matching header font, I can create this minimalist branding:

 

Notice that I  also added arrows to show the important transition between the row and batch side of the comparison. It gives the slide some “movement” (and I will animate it). The additional space at the bottom made available by the redesign really highlight the important parts of the slide.

Summary

In this blog I have walked you through some simple design improvements of a single slide. I spend 2-3 hours doing this, but I think the result is well worth the time. Let us compare the before/after picture:

Even at a scale fitted to this blog, the readability improvements should be obvious.

The new layout have been saved as a template that we can use in the team to get a consistent look. Hopefully, SQLBits will have our prettiest slides yet, as well as our best content.

The winter solstice peace has finally settled and I am heading up North, Scotland, to indulge in good food, good company and great amounts of Whiskey.

In the little spare time I had the last month, I have had a chance to play Skyrim. Some people may call me a sad character, but I apply tuning to all aspects of my life – including the computer games I play.

Here follows my guide to the optimal Skyrim Character Build. If you do not play Skyrim, this article will be lost on you, but I hope to post more interesting things during this vacation.

Target Character

I like to tune things by first knowing the engine I am tuning for, and then looking for the optimal hill to stand on in the landscape of design points.

I both want the leveling experience to be smooth at lower levels (making me enjoy the process), while at same time not sacrificing ultimate power at later levels. Also, I don’t want (like it was often the case in older Elder Scrolls games) to spend stupid amounts of time on leveling some irrelevant skills.

Here is what we are aiming for:

Level: 81 (The max achievable in the game)

Skills: All at 100

Magic Resistance: >75%

Fire/Frost Resist: >50%

Melee Damage Output: One Handed Weapons 300+ DMG/hit

Ranged Weapon Output: Unlimited cast destruction spells, either fire or shock

Equipment:

Item Slot	Item	Enchant 1	Enchant 2
Head	Dragon/Deadric Plate	Fortify Destruction	Fortify One-Handed
Body (Option 1)	Dragon/Deadric Plate	Fortify Destruction	Fortify Destruction +  Regenerate Magicka
Body (Option 2)	Ebony Mail (Daedric Artefact)	Muffle	Area Effect Damage
Arms	Dragon/Deadric Plate	Fortify Destruction	Fortify One-Handed
Legs	Dragon/Deadric Plate	Resist Fire/Frost	Muffle if you don’t use Ebony Mail, if not: Fire/Frost
Neck	Any	Resist Magic 25%	Resist Magic 25%
Ring	Any	Resist Magic 25%	Resist Fire/Frost
Weapon	Legendary Deadric Sword / Dagger	Shock Damage	Fire Damage

This character is capable of sneaking silently in Heavy Armour (due to Muffle enchant). In dungeons, you can sneak up on pretty much any enemy and one hit them with a backstab.

But you are not safe, sometimes you do not have time to hide or people see through your sneak. The combination of legendary deadric weapons with shock damage enchant (which stacks with the Destruction perk) will make short work of any enemies that take you by surprise.Because your destruction skill is fortified to 100% with enchants, you will not spend charges on the item either.

Having 100% fortified destruction also means you can take down pesky ranged attack enemies (ex: dragons, vampires and necromancers) with either shock or fire (I prefer shock, it just looks cooler). You can do this while having your sword equipped, or you can dual wield spells. This takes away all the hassle of managing items.

Selecting Race and Attributes

Your first choice in the game is your race. I recommend one or these three:

• Nord: 50% frost resist
• Dunmer (Dark Elf): 50% Fire resist
• Breton: 25% Magic Resist

All the other races have abilities which are either useless (ex: Imperial Voice of the Emperor), can be easily replaced with potions (ex: Argonian Water Breathing, Wood elf Disease Resist) or matched with a few extra levels (ex: Altmer Magicka Bonus)

However, the resistances of the Nord, Dumer and Breton are very useful. Since you are limited to 12 apparel enchantments, any amount of additional resistance is good news. I started the game as Imperial because I liked the money perk – but later discovered that money is abundant later in the game. Looking back, I should have picked Nord.

My one other consideration would be the Orc, getting double damage output from berserk could make for some spectacular videos for YouTube and for powerful boss takedowns.

With regards to attributes, I recommend you don’t go higher than about 300 in Magicka. As your character progresses, you will gradually eliminate the need for this attribute through enchantments. You just need enough of it to cast the highest level spells once. Stamina is somewhat useful for carrying lots of loot and doing power attacks. A ratio of 3:2 between health and stamina is probably around right.

Building Craft Skills – The City Routine

Craft skills forms a very important part of Skyrim. My optimized character relies heavily on them for these reasons:

• They allow you to gradually improve the gear instead of relying in “big finds”
• They give you the OPTIMAL final gear in the game
• They are a great source of making gold
• They provide free levels, without combat, early in the game

In order to gain the benefits of crafting early, when money is scarce, you need to gradually train both Alchemy, Enchanting and Smithing.

Follow the routine below whenever you visit one of the major cities to restock. I like to use Whiterun as my base, because it has an enchanting table next to the alchemist lab in the castle and all stores conveniently located near the spawn point. Also, Whiterun has a home you can buy right next to the blacksmith

1) Visit the blacksmith.

• Buy all of his/her:
  • Iron Ore
  • Silver Ore
  • Iron Ingots
  • Leather Strips
  • Leather
• Turn the leather into leather bracers
• Turn the iron ingots into iron daggers

Be on the lookout for Armour that has the muffle enchant. If you see it, buy it.

While you are walking around town, cast transmute to turn iron/silver ore into gold ore.

2) Visit the Alchemy Store

• Buy all ingredient that cost less than 100 gold (you will soon make this money back).
• Sell all potions you have acquired or created that are NOT Magicka or Heath potions.

3) Visit General Store, Tailor and Local Mage

• Buy all common, lesser and petty soul gems. Including the ones that already have souls in them.
• If you can afford it, buy great and grand soul gems too
• Buy any lock picks you see, you will need them
• If you do not already have them, buy unenchanted arm, head and body cloth armour
• Sell misc. stuff you have picked up on your travels to get the money you just spend back from the merchant.
• Sell old version of your gear that you no longer use (mages will buy rings/necklaces from you, general stores buy most items)

3) Visit an enchanting table

• Disenchant any gear you have picked up that has unknown enchantments
• Enchant all the iron daggers you have created with Fortify Stamina or Turn Undead. This levels up enchanting and makes you money later
• (Optional): Quaff a Fortify Enchantment potion
• Enchant Clothing, Rings and Necklaces with Fortify Alchemy. Four items take this enchant
• Enchant Clothing, Rings and Necklaces with Fortify Smithing. Four items take this enchant. (If you have the Extra Effect perk, you can combine this with step above)
• If you have a newly crafted weapon, enchant it with Shock or Fire Damage (or both, if you have Extra Effect perk)

4) Visit the Alchemist table

• Put on your best Fortify Alchemy gear
• If you have ingredients, create the one of each of the following:
  • Fortify Enchanting (Blisterworth, Glowing Mushroom, Sabre Cat Tooth, Spriggan Sap)
  • Fortify Smithing (Blue Butterfly Wing, Hagraven Claw, Snowberries, Spriggan Sap)
• Create all the Health and Magicka Potions you have ingredients for
• Use up the rest of the ingredients on the most expensive potions you can create, leveling skill. Good potions to level up with are:
  • Slow (Deathbell, Large Antlers, River Betty, Salt Pile)
  • Paralyze (Briar Heart, Canis Root, Human Flesh, Imp Stool, Swamp Fungal Pod)
  • Invisibility (Chaurus Egg, Nirnroot, Ice Wraith Teeth, Luna Moth Wing, Crimson Nirnroot, Vampire Dust)
  • Ravage Magicka (Many ingredients, experiment to discover)
  • Any potion with multiple effects

5) Visit the Blacksmith again

• Sell the enchanted daggers you created. This should earn you back your money
• If you do not already have one of the proper material, create the highest level dagger or sword you can (buy ore/ingots if needed)
• Wear the best Fortify Smithing Gear you have created in Step 3
• Quaff your best Fortify Smithing potion
• Improve your weapon using a grindstone
• Improve your armour using the workbench
• Craft all your gold ingots into and equal number of necklaces and rings

Don’t spend gold on anything else than the above routine – just don’t buy anything else from vendors. After a few iterations, you will at least break even. Also, while this may seem complicated at first, it takes only a minute or two once you have done it a few times. I go through this iteration once per visit to a city, and every time your crafting gear gets a little better – until you get gear that boosts your Alchemy and Smithing skill with +150% or more. You will also be able to creating Fortify Enchanting Potions that add +32% to your skill, which adds a significant boost to your late game gear.

This routine also makes sure your gear levels with you, and it positions you to create the super powerful dragon/deadric plate armour and deadric dagger late in the game. Lets talk about how you get there.

Spoiler Warning: The following will contain spoilers

Your first 30 Levels

The focus of the first level is to build some basic survivability, while ensuring a strong setup for the later levels. The game is quite gentle on your in the beginning, so you get some space for error.

After escaping the dragon and visiting the standing stones, choose the mage stone. You will be doing a lot of spell casting soon.

After getting to Whiterun, your first task should be to join the companions and pursue their quest line till the very end of it. This gives you two advantages: 1) You get the ability to transform into a werewolf which is very useful for boss encounters. 2) You get access to free warrior training (more about this later).

The first 20 or so levels, your basic combat strategy is:

• Cast Conjured Sword in one hand, and attack enemies that get up close
• Cast shock or fire Attacks with the other hand
• Cast Heal spells whenever you are hurt  (and gain skill in Restoration)
• Try to sneak up on enemies for backstabs
• Use alteration spells like Oakflesh and Lesser Ward to protect yourself
• Wear cloth armour for best speed and silent sneaking

This strategy levels up Destruction, Alteration, Sneak, Restoration and One-Handed, giving you that edge you need during combat. You will be wearing cloth armour, since the early game alteration spells are better than what you can craft (and it adds skill points too). Cloth also improves your chances of sneaking successfully.

Whenever you return to cities to sell loot, follow the city routine

Perks:
Pick perks in this order (if you do not yet qualify, skip to next one down the list, don’t save them up)

1. Destruction: Novice Destruction – gets you started
2. Destruction: Augmented Shock or Flames (x2) – Significant boost in damage output 
3. Destruction: Dual Casting – Unlocks more damage
4. Destruction: Impact – stun while casting
5. Smithing: Steel Smithing
6. Smithing Dwarven Smithing – Easy to find in Dwemer ruins 
7. Stealth (x5)
8. Stealth: Muffled Movement – needed to sneak in heavy armour
9. Stealth: Backstab – Makes backstabbing worth it
10.   Smithing: Orcish Smithing – useless, but prerequisite
11.   Smithing: Ebony Smithing – Your run of the mill armour, until you get
12.   Smithing: Deadric Smithing
13.   Enchanting: Enchanter (x5)
14.   One-Handed: Armsman (x5) – boost output 
15.   Heavy Armour: Juggernaut (one level only for now)
16.   Heavy Armour: Fists of Steel – prerequisite
17.   Heavy Armour: Cushioned – prerequisite, unlocks power!

“Wait a minute”, you may say: “How can I level up Heavy Armour when I am not using it?”. Glad you asked: This is why you should be joining the companions. Once you have reached a high enough status in the guild, you can recruit their members as followers. One of the followers (Vilkas, I think) will train you in Heavy Armour. At the first given opportunity, start doing this right after EVERY level up (you can only pay to train 5 skill points each level). The beauty of having Vilkas as a follower is you can trade with him and get back the gold you spend on training. Free training.

At level 30, you should have nearly 100 skill in heavy armour. A fair amount of skill in Destruction and Sneak and some basic skill in One-handed and Alteration. As you hit level 31, you can take the Heavy Armour: Conditioning perk and you can now move around unencumbered, muffled (if you found the enchantment) and with high speed, in the best armour you can craft. Don’t worry if you cannot craft Deadric or even Ebony yet, you will soon get there.

Other Tips:

• Equally balance Magicka, Stamina and Health when leveling up to 30.
• When you are in draugr ruins, always try to backstab the inactive draugr. Even with a low sneak skills, they are easy to sneak up on
• Enchant a blade with Soul Trap and use it in your off-hand to finish off any enemies whose soul you want.
• Obtain the Alteration: Transmute spell early so you can make gold necklaces and rings
• When cornered, switch to werewolf form. This is also useful for taking down bosses you cannot sneak up on
• Obtain the Muffle spell from the illusion school early, and cast it frequently in dungeons. This levels up Illusion skills and makes you much less likely to be detected
• If you still find at hard to sneak up on people, join the Dark Brotherhood or Thieves Guild to get their special armour. But if you do, don’t level up your light armour skill
• In Riften, you will find a quest (Unfathomable Depths) that takes you to some dwarven ruins to deliver a lexicon. Do this quest early, to obtain a powerful ability that makes you level faster in blacksmithing and gives you an armour bonus when wearing Dwarven
• Go to Solitude to work on becoming the thane there. You may have to do the Bard College quests first. The thane quest starts in the jarl’s castle in Solitude.
• It is a good idea to stick to the roads at early levels, and stay away from mountains. Trolls and necromancers can make short work of you while you are still weak.
• Travel with the coaches you find at stables to get to large cities, don’t try to walk there.

Rounding off the Character – Getting to around level 60

When you hit level 31, you have established a basic fighting technique and is now able to wear heavy armour while dual casting deadly destruction spells that knock enemies back. Likely, you will be wearing dwarven armour (with the nice 25% bonus if you took my advise) at this point.

It is time to bolster your defenses against spell casters, dragons and range attackers, all of which will be common now. At this point, it is probably a good idea to switch to the Lover’s Stone, since your skill leveling will be more varied.

You may also want to work on losing your werewolf blood to get well rested bonuses again (you cannot gain well rested while you have werewolf blood)

Keep doing the city routine until you have the best gear in the game

Perks:
Since you already have a strong build, it is now less important which order you take perks in – enjoy the smooth sailing. However, it IS important WHICH perks you take and I recommend you focus on this priority list:

• Enchanting: Insightful Enchanter – this makes your one-handed enchants much stronger, boosting damage output
• Enchanting: Corpus Enchanter – useless, prerequisite
• Enchanting: Extra Effect –this makes your gear ridiculously powerful, you can start experimenting with prototypes of the gear I introduced in the beginning
• Alchemy: Alchemist (x5) – a this will greatly boost your smithing skills, making your weapons and armour even more powerful, at this point, you should be using Ebony
• Alchemy: Physician – useless, unlocks next skill
• Alchemy: Benefactor – more skill points in your potions, this is your final skill in the Alchemy sign
• Heavy Armour – Finish off the sign. Perhaps with exception of Matching Set, if you plan to wear the Ebony Mail
• Illusion: Novice Illusion – Prerequisite
• Illusion: Animage – Useless, but prerequisite
• Illusion: Kindred Mage – as above
• Illusion: Quiet Casting –the only skill we really want from this school, hours of fun
• Sneak: Finish off the sign, the last skill is particularly useful. Take Deadly Aim/Assasins Blade only if you want to dual wield daggers.

With fully leveled up sneak and Quiet Casting, you can play a lot of interesting tricks on your enemies. Should they get close, you can finish them off quickly with enchanted, One-hand weapons.

Other tips:

• When you get access to Deadric armor, don’t enchant it until you have peaked out on both alchemy and enchanting skills as above. At this point, you should be able to create the ultimate gear as described in the introduction
• Stop adding Magicka during level up when you hit about 300. Destruction spells will be free soon.
• If you have trouble finding money to buy ebony, take the Dragon Smithing perk. Dragon scales and bones are abundant and you can experiment with different enchants until you have maxed out Alchemy and Enchanting.
• As your Destruction skill gets around 75, you need to work on the College of Winterhold quests. They will give you higher level spells.
• Do the Azura Star quest and get the Black Star. This gives you an unlimited amount of Grand Souls.
• When entering a room with many enemies, set traps for them using lightning runes. This levels up Destruction fast 
• Do the question Boethia’s Calling to obtain the Ebony Mail. This rounds off your sneak abilities very nicely, especially if you have not found the Muffle enchant yet.
• Continue the trick used to level up Heavy Armour. The companions will supply you with free training in Archery, Block and Two-Handed. While you will not be using these skills – you should still train them 5 points every level. They contribute to your total levels and perks.
• If you have joined the thieves guild, you can use the same trick to level up Lock Picking and Pickpocket. While you will level up Lock Picking, it is annoying to level up, and so is Pickpocket
• Disenchant the Shield of Solitude (obtained by becoming thane of Solitude). It contains an enchantment that can be stacked with the regular Resist Magic on the same item. This allows you to reach the cap of 85% Resist Magic by enchanting a necklace and a ring.
• If you are Nord, enchant your boots with Resist Fire.
• If you are Dunmer, enchant your boost with Resist Frost
• If you are Breton, you can skip on enchant on the necklace slot and get both Resist Frost and Resist Fire.
• With the proper combination of resistance enchants (as per first section) you can stand in the middle of a dragons breath and take very little damage.

Boasting – getting to level 81

When you have reached the build above, most enemies will fall fast to either your spells or your blade. Enemies will still level up with you, so prepare for some interesting fights.

From here, there are a few paths you can take that will make your character even stronger, and more fun to play.

• Level up Alteration to get another 30% magic resist. This frees up an enchant slot (because Resist Magic caps at 85%) and allows you to boost one-handed damage even further. With the proper Fortify One-handed enchants, you can one-hit most enemies.
• Level up one-handed and specialize in axes, sword or maces to create fun effects while fighting people (heads will literally roll)
• Dual wield daedric swords.  Combine with dual wield perks and fortify one-handed enchant for massive melee damage output (who needs a shield and magic anyway?)
• Level up Pickpocket and kill people by placing poisons (which you can make very strong now) in their inventory. Plunder entire cities, steal people’s weapons and armour and watch them helplessly try to fight you.
• Level up Conjuration (you already have a high skills, you used Conjured Sword, remember?) and summon an army of minions to do the dirty work for you.
• Level up Archery and destroy enemies from afar while comfortably hidden with Sneak.

Getting the Last Levels and skill points:
To get all the way to level 81, you have to get most of your skills to 100. All your craft skills (Alchemy/Enchanting/Smithing), Sneak, One-handed, Heavy Armour and Destruction should already be close and easy to finish off. If you used the trainers like I advised, you also have a good skill in Two-handed, Block, Archery, Pickpocket and Lock Picking. Here are some tips to finish it all off:

• First: Use your super powered enchanting skill to create items that boost the skill you want to level up.
• To level up two-handed and archery: Take you newly crafted, legendary great sword and deadric bow to a dragon or giant fight. Use items to boost damage output. Leave your companions at home.
• To level up Block and Light Armour, take your big shield and dragon scale armour to a giant fight. Heal with one hand and hold the shield with the other (this also levels up restoration)
• To level up Illusion, create gear to provide 100% Fortify Illusion, then cast Muffle non-stop while sneaking in town
• Buy as much skill training in Light Armour as you can (5 points each level)
• To level up Pickpocket, quaff potions or use skill items and plunder a city
• To level up alteration, hold up wards against dragons and other big creates

Tank Style Variant

As I played the game this far, I realized there is an interesting variant of this strategy. Overall, I think the cloth wearing technique for the first 30 levels is pretty solid. But it could be argued that you could instead use a shield and either destruction or a one-handed weapons for survivability (instead of sneak) until you reach get sufficient skill to make heavy armour weightless and fast (I find that moving in heavy armour is simply too slow, so I defer until I get the proper perk).

For such a build you would completely skip the Illusion and Sneak trees and instead focus on boosting melee damage output until you can eventually give up the shield as you acquire strong, enchanted gear. Without sneak, you will get into some much nastier fights, but you can counter this with additional skill in one-handed weapons. The basic gear you will be aiming for is mostly the same. Though you may free up the Muffle enchant slot for more one-handed damage output.

Summary

In this very off topic blog post, i have described some of the strategies I have used to optimize my Skyrim game experience. I am fully aware that not everyone enjoys computer games in this way – but this is the way I like to play it: With max power.

I have created a new category on this site for musing like these. If you are only interested in my technical ramblings, you can simply subscribe to individual categories found on the right side of this page.

This week, I presented at the InsightOut conference in Tokyo, Japan. The experience has been amazing. I met a lot of interesting people from different database platforms. I would like to share some lessons I learned from presenting to an audience that does not speak my language.

The conference was mostly targeted at a Japanese participants, and that meant I had to use synchronous translators. It is only the second time I have done this – and doing it three more presentations like this really taught me something about my own presentation style. Hearing your own words translated, even when you cannot understand them, helps you understand a lot about the pace you speak, and how clear your points are.

Another major learning was my use of slides. As I carefully explained my slides to prepare the translators for the session, I discovered things that would confuse my audience, even the ones that speak my language.

Here are the lessons I took away (and some general observations about presentations)

Text on slides is just a distraction, get rid of it: The translators have to translate BOTH the text and your words. This makes it extremely hard for the audience to keep track of your points.

Furthermore, going over the slide text with the translators before the session made me reflect on that fact that text really is redundant or should be kept to very small sentences. If you have anything to say: say it, don’t write it.

Avoid the use of vendor specific acronyms: I presented to both SQL Server, Oracle and PostgreSQL people. You are not doing yourself any favours by using acronyms like: PDW (Parallel Data Warehouse), RG (Resource Governor) and FT (Fast Track)

This may work for an “in-crowd” – but it will not work for a new audience unfamiliar with your terminology. Hearing the translator say the acronym in English, in the middle of a Japanese sentence, sticks out like a sore thumb.

If you are stuffing your slides with acronyms, you are also making it hard for people to share the slide deck with others.

Always annotate graphs: When people look at a graph, they should be able to immediately understand what the axes represent. Use your spoken words to describe what the MEANING of the data is, not WHAT the data it is. If you say: “What you are looking at here is…” – you already made a mistake. For example, take the illustration below, a real example from my deck. The graphs lacks both horizontal and vertical axis information. These omissions makes decoding the information difficult, and makes the translator’s job harder. It also makes it nearly impossible to share the slides with others.

Pictures REALLY matter: A picture is worth much more than a thousand words to an international audience. No matter where you are from – you can “read” a picture. Since visual input is the preferred learning method for most people, pictures make your points much clearer.

In fact, I think it is well worth the time to replace text with good pictures whenever possible.

Pointing with your finger (or laser pointer) does not require translation: Using pictures instead of text, allowed me to illustrate complex problems with less chance of getting things lost in translation.

Use tables, not text, for data points that cannot be shown in a graph: I tend to put data points in bullet form, in-lined with the text on the slides. This is wrong. Mixing numbers and text makes for a VERY poor translations, and also decreases readability.

Take this poor slide (my own) as an example. This is just wrong:

A much better way to represent the same information is:

By the way, use alternating colours on the table rows – it makes them easier to read.

If it does not look good in gray scale, change the colour scheme: I saw a lot of people carrying printed slides to the session (including my translators). Many printouts where in black and white. For an audience that tries to prepare themselves by reading slide before they show up, you should respect them by making sure the slides look good in gray scale.

Below is a real example of a slide I used, along with how it looks when printed in black and white:

The Original Slide	The printed version

Clearly, important information is lost here!

Write compression rates as 1:X instead of Y%. What does it mean that you get 10% compression? Does it mean that the data shrinks by 10% or that the data is 10% of the original size?

If I write 10:1, it is unambiguous that the data becomes 10 times smaller.

Be consistent in your choice of colours: If you use one colour to illustrate a concept, keep using that colour for the same concept throughout the presentation.

Here is an example: I used this slide to illustrate distributed vs. replicated tables in Parallel Data Warehouse:

The red tables are replicated, the green one is distributed. Five slides later, in the same deck, I used this slide:

Now, the red table is distributed, and the purple table is replicated. Clearly, I am not doing my audience any favours.

Use white backgrounds and high contrast imagines for your slides: Similar argument as the above guidance: printing a black background slide looks horrible. A high contrast colour scheme (black text on white background) makes it easier for people in the back of the room to read your slides.

Here is a real example that I made the mistake of using:

The original slide	A printed, blurred version

Summary

Here are my takeaways to implement in my future presentations. I will:

• Stick to pictures and short sentences in every slide
• Make the slides “pointer friendly”
• Use high contrast, white background and simple slide layouts
• Use consistent colour schemes that look good in gray scale
• Carefully annotate graphs
• Use tables and graphs, instead of text, to illustrate points

Thanks to everyone for a great PASS US – I had a lot of fun at the conference.

Today, I am heading to Japan. My ticket is an economy ticket, and it is a long flight (around 12h). The price for a business class ticket (two weeks ago) was simply too high – 10K USD. Of course, I am not thrilled about such a journey in cramped conditions. But fortunately that is not what is going to happen: I will be lying down sleeping all of it. Here is how:

First, I asked for a potential upgrade at the check-in counter (hint: always be friendly to the girls there, and never sign up for specialized meals). I am only Silver Member on Star Alliance – but they bumped me up to Economy Plus – 5 more inches of legroom. So far so good…

Second, I asked at the gate itself for an upgrade to business. Because the plane is not full, they sell the final upgrade real cheap: 600 USD for upgrade from Economy Plus to Business.

Result: Trans-Pacific flight for the price of Economy + 600 USD. I will be enjoying my champagne and priority boarding in a few minutes.

Location:SEA

For those of you who would like to hear me throw my usual tantrums at conferences about data modeling, high scale tuning and optimal use of hardware. Here is my speaking schedule for the rest of 2011.

• SQLUG Sweden (14th September, Gothenburg) – Just around the corner from my home. I will be presenting about Data Warehouse tuning there.
• SQLBits – Query across the Mersey (29th September to 1st October, Liverpool) – large SQL Server conference in Europe. I really like going there: it is local, casual atmosphere, focused on tech level 400 and the place to have great discussions over beers at the conference. Last BITS I experimented with a different presentation style – this time I will go back to the old and proven style that has served me well for BITS before. I got access to some crazy hardware, so I may reveal some nasty tricks you can play with big machines.
• PASS Summit 2011 (11-14 October, Seattle) – This event, because if its location in Seattle, makes it easy for you to meet the developers of SQL Server. There will be tons of sessions. Go catch your favourite developer on the hallways after their session.
• PASS SQLRally Nordic (8-9 November, Aronsborg, Near Stockholm) – The big Nordic PASS conference. This is a new initiative hosted by the Nordic MVP and SQL community. I look  much forward to this event.

I am unfortunately locked down fully for speaking arrangements, but hopefully, I can get much more speaking done in 2012.

I have recently switched to iPad as my primary device for media viewing, music, book reading, email and to some extend blogging (though I still find Live Writer superior and even run VMware Fusion on my home Mac for that purpose alone). Because I no longer need a big screen on my phone, it is therefore time to go back to the old days.

Remember when phones would last two weeks on a single charge? Back when, thanks to the T9 dictionary, you could type almost as fast with one hand as a ten finger typist on a keyboard, and certainly faster than on iPad. Yes, tactile feedback rules – the brain latency of vision is too high. Remember when we were convinced that the next evolutionary step for mankind would be smaller thumbs, to type even faster? We didn’t have twitter back then, so we were forced to type real sentences that reflected full thought patterns – these things took many characters and long words.

So, I went searching for a phone to replace my legacy devices (I own both HTC Mozart and iPhone 3G). Feeling like a dinosaur stampeding into a crowd of intelligent design proponents – I walked bravely into the Nokia store in Heathrow. I clearly remember this wonderful brand for its legendary 6310i, I thought they should get the first stab at taking a sizable piece of my budget.

The friendly girl lit up immediately when I asked for "a phone that can make calls and send SMS, nothing else". It turns out that I am not the first customer to make that request. A sigh of relief for me. As much as I like to be bleeding edge in my job, I prefer technology in my personal space to be tested and sound – hassle free if you like. It turns out that Nokia is catering to the dinosaur market – with the C3-01 model. It can be yours for the meager price of 120 GBP – unlocked and subscription free.

Eagerly, I set out to try before I buy. Demo models were available in black and silver. The silver looks bling bling, the black one has a cool, carbon fiber feel to it. The phone still has a T9 dictionary and it only took my nervous system a few seconds to reacquaint itself with this phenomenal design. It has a fast address book too, navigated with the same T9 functionality. It syncs with Google contacts – which you will not get on a the 6310i. Sure, it does Facebook and Twitter too, but I can forgive it for those bugs. The screen is nice but a bit big. It is laid out nicely and easy to read, but why it is in colour and so large defeats me. Perhaps it is related to the 5M pixel camera, but who cares about that? As may be clear from my gravatar, I look just as horrible on pictures as in reality. It charges from micro-USB, no Apple vendor lock-in there – big plus. Bluetooth? Unfortunately yes, but it also has a jack for a wired headset to workaround THAT bug. The girl claims it can do 6 hours of non-stop talking and will last 3-4 days on a charge if receiving the occasional call. Not impressive, but i guess some battery has to fuel that damn colour display. You can install apps too, but I hope you don’t have to. As all true love affairs, you learn to love the small flaws in your partner, even a colour display and low stamina when fully charged. At this point, I was reaching for my credit card.

So why am I still dragging my makeshift, 20 USD, parallel imported, no-name, hacker unlocked device around? Why do I have 120 GBP too much on my bank account that are not contributing to saving our economy? Because I decided to try a few more things while waiting for my plane – and thank goodness it was late. I scouted for the settings on the phone; just to check if Nokia still does those cool profiles that allow you to customize how the phone behaves in a meeting room. It was at this point I discovered the deal breaker! The phone has a touch screen… Why? One of the points of an old fashioned phone is that you can operate it with one hand, and stuff your face with hamburgers using the other. But it doesn’t end there, the scrolling functionality of the menus…well… Let me put it nicely first: it leaves something to be desired. One might ask, why even scroll in the first place, mainframes did fine without it, and i dare say they do quite a lot more than a mobile phone. At this point I was acutely aware of my dinosaur opinions, so I asked the nice girl: "sorry, am I missing something here or did they f*** up the scrolling?". Our mutual smirk made it clear that this was another sentence she had heard before.

And this brings me to the point reflected in the title of this blog: when it comes to simple, personal devices with well understood requirements – there is NO EXCUSE to f*** up anything. When the poor scrolling of the Nokia touch screen makes me annoyed, when I wait until the next ice age for a Samsung Galaxy Pad to move to the next app pane – I have ask myself: if the engineers are this sloppy, or under this much time pressure, what else did they miss that is going to come back to haunt me? This is why Apple is worth more than the US, and why Linux is growing like crazy at Amazon Cloud Services – even though you have to manage it from a black and white SSH session. It is not just about passing the user and integration test. It is about engineering for excellence up front: do less, but do it well. It is about not accepting to ship things that are obviously wrong! Engineers are generally good people that want to do the right things. If only companies would let them work, and if us buyers would stop asking for all those checkbox features that we will never use: like big colour touch screens and the ability to run apps

I will go on eBay to hunt for a repurposed Nokia 6310I now, so I can stop being angry and get back to blogging about databases. Thanks for listening.

PS: incidentally, you can now track updates to my blog on twitter. If you are too impatient to wait for the RSS feed or too busy waiting for your Android screen to scroll, my username is thomaskejser. But please, please use email or my blog comments to communicate with me – I don’t have the patience to acquire a smartphone.

It seems all of Britain is watching TV and the Internet this Sunday, catching up in the news on a downgraded US and waiting for the opening of a stock market that has once again fallen apart. I am on vacation, but I decided to go for a bit of market research myself. This took  me to Spitalfields Market in London, on the periphery the banking district.

As I stand at the entrance to this chaotic place, I take a moment to reflect on where we are in the world today. Our politicians have failed us, driven by greed and voted in by the champions of the politically correct, the religiously mad – or both. Market risk mechanics go for regular, chaotic walks – with their corporate lapdogs on leash. In order to make money in a society obsessed with the service industries, our best talent is sucked into investment banking to come up with new algorithms to predict the next big move, with about as much certainty as we predict the weather – which is not very certain at all.

I step into the hall of the market, with its Brunel-like steel pillars, holding up what looks like a makeshift roof. Underneath this roof, hundreds of vendors make their living, peddling their wares. The noise hits you like a wall, but this is not the noise of phones ringing, keyboards typing or air conditioning trying to cool the latest generation of CPU cores and suit clad armpits. It is the noise of humans selling the goods they produced themselves, in unbranded stalls decorated for the day. One skill is traded for another: I have something you want or know something you don’t. We can do the transaction right here in my 4 m² booth. You walk home with something new – we both win. This is the oldest form of business: the bazaar. But today, it is fuelled by technology: If you want more goods (perhaps to resell?) you can contact me on my homepage or follow me on Facebook. You can pay me with credit card, using a WIFI or 3G connected POS device. I can even hack technology for you on demand (phone unlock anyone?). Soon, I can create something for you almost instantly that lives in the cloud. My profit and loss statement is simple. I save up money, I invest it in materials, I sell my skill – I have cash flow. The bazaar has high availability and scale built in. Like the cloud, it remains in business even when several of the self sufficient units fail. There are very few rules and regulations here in the bazaar – common sense does a good job at keeping the peace and stability.

Society enables this modern, super powered bazaar through the infrastructure it provides: Phone lines, WIFI networks, money printing (soon to be extinct if this keeps going!), safe streets, roofs, heating, electricity, education, healthcare, roads etc. Once basic civilisation and technology is available – the human race sorts the rest out. Soon, computing power itself will be part of that infrastructure. Some basic policing of the rules is required – but if we don’t go to bed hungry or cold, or worry about he health of our children, it is amazing what we can achieve when powered by a morality that is not driven by greed. In this market, I can buy goods that are hand made, creating jobs, at a price that is highly competitive to the high street shops. I can have a chat with the vendor who may not be trained in the art of selling – but who is proud of the goods he has created or the skills he exhibit. The air feels fresh here in Spitalfields. These people are empowered in a way that no MBA motivational rant comes close to mimicking.

I realize that I may come across as communistic to some US readers. Though I see no need to defend myself against a failed system, you may want to consider that I am FOR private property and AGAINST stupid, government spending, I am not in favour of the nanny state. But, I am beginning to wonder if capitalism, in the big corporate form it has mutated into, distracts us from what it truly means to be human: to flourish in life, interact with each other, and to feel the correlation between your labour and the happiness it creates in others. It seems to me that the “crisis” we are experiencing is not one of liquidity. Instead, it is the unexpressed frustration of loosing our true priorities – and becoming slaves to market mechanics that were meant to power the bazaar and serve the people, but today answer to only one master: the balance sheet.

You can now access my blog at http://blog.kejser.org. Please point permalinks to that domain.

As some of you may know, I need my coffee strong, good and made by people who are passionate about what they do. Airports are unfortunately often deserted by such people, which leads to even more grumpy behavior.

But today, I found the exception: V Bar in Heathrow T5. While not the epitome of coffee you will find in Italy or Brazil, the place is run by Italians who obviously know a thing or two about the relationship between the man and the machine. A surprising piece of quality in such a place.

Recommended for the frequent traveler; V Bar is located near the A20 gate, just next to the the escalator to the BA lounges.