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• Survey: which newsletters do you subscribe to? read?

  - by Alexander Kuznetsov

  Just curious who reads what. Maybe I am missing something... Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!...(read more)

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• Applying Interactive Sorting to Multiple Columns in Reporting Services

  - by smisner

  A nice feature that appeared first in SQL Server 2008 is the ability to allow the user to click a column header to sort that column. It defaults to an ascending sort first, but you can click the column again to switch to a descending sort. You can learn more about interactive sorts in general at the Adding Interactive Sort to a Data Region in Books Online. Not mentioned in the article is how to apply interactive sorting to multiple columns, hence the reason for this post! Let’s say that I have a simple table like this: To enable interactive sorting, I open the Text Box properties for each of the column headers – the ones in the top row. Here’s an example of how I set up basic interactive sorting: Now when I preview the report, I see icons appear in each text box on the header row to indicate that interactive sorting is enabled. The initial sort order that displays when you preview the report depends on how you design the report. In this case, the report sorts by Sales Territory Group first, and then by Calendar Year. Interactive sorting overrides the report design. So let’s say that I want to sort first by Calendar Year, and then by Sales Territory Group. To do this, I click the arrow to the right of Calendar Year, and then, while pressing the Shift key, I click the arrow to the right of Sales Territory Group twice (once for ascending order and then a second time for descending order). Now my report looks like this: This technique only seems to work when you have a minimum of three columns configured with interactive sorting. If I remove the property from one of the columns in the above example, and try to use the interactive sorting on the remaining two columns, I can sort only the first column. The sort on the second column gets ignored. I don’t know if that’s by design or a bug, but I do know that’s what I’m experiencing when I try it out!

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 2012-10-11

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Whiteboards, not red carpets. OTN Architect Day Los Angeles. Oct 25. Free event. Yes, it's TinselTown, but the stars at this event are experts in the use of Oracle technologies in today's architectures. This free event includes a full slate of technical sessions and peer interaction covering cloud computing, SOA, and engineered systems—and lunch is on us. Register now. Thursday October 25, 2012, 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Sofitel Los Angeles, 8555 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90048 JDeveloper extensions where? | Peter Paul van de Beek "Where does the downloaded stuff go after you installed JDeveloper extensions, like SOA Composite Editor, Oracle BPM Studio, or AIA Service Constructor?" Peter Paul van de Beek has the answer. Using Apache Derby Database with WebLogic (the express way) | Frank Munz Another technical how-to video from Dr. Frank Munz. Compensation Hello World | Ronald van Luttikhuizen Oracle ACE Director Ronald van Luttikhuizen's post addresses several question that came up during the "Effective Fault Handling in SOA Suite 11g" session that he and fellow Oracle ACE Guido Schmutz presented at Oracle OpenWorld. Oracle Fusion Middleware Security: OAM and OIM 11g Academies Looking for technical how-to content covering Oracle Access Manager and Oracle Identity Manager? The people behind the Oracle Middleware Security blog have indexed relevant blog posts into what they call "Academies." "These indexes," the blog explains, "contain the articles we've written that we believe provide long lasting guidance on OAM and OIM. Posts covered in these series include articles on key aspects of OAM and OIM 11g, best practice architectural guidance, integrations, and customizations." Maximum Availability Whitepaper for IDM 11gR2 | Oracle Fusion Middleware Security The Oracle Fusion Middelware A-Team shares an overview of and a link to a new white paper: "Identity Management 11.1.2 Enterprise Deployment Blueprint." Thought for the Day "The trouble with the world is that the stupid are sure and the intelligent are full of doubt." — Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872 – February 2, 1970) Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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• Windows in StreamInsight: Hopping vs. Snapshot

  - by Roman Schindlauer

  Three weeks ago, we explained the basic concept of windows in StreamInsight: defining sets of events that serve as arguments for set-based operations, like aggregations. Today, we want to discuss the so-called Hopping Windows and compare them with Snapshot Windows. We will compare these two, because they can serve similar purposes with different behaviors; we will discuss the remaining window type, Count Windows, another time. Hopping (and its syntactic-sugar-sister Tumbling) windows are probably the most straightforward windowing concept in StreamInsight. A hopping window is defined by its length, and the offset from one window to the next. They are aligned with some absolute point on the timeline (which can also be given as a parameter to the window) and create sets of events. The diagram below shows an example of a hopping window with length of 1h and hop size (the offset) of 15 minutes, hence creating overlapping windows:   Two aspects in this diagram are important: Since this window is overlapping, an event can fall into more than one windows. If an (interval) event spans a window boundary, its lifetime will be clipped to the window, before it is passed to the set-based operation. That’s the default and currently only available window input policy. (This should only concern you if you are using a time-sensitive user-defined aggregate or operator.) The set-based operation will be applied to each of these sets, yielding a result. This result is: A single scalar value in case of built-in or user-defined aggregates. A subset of the input payloads, in case of the TopK operator. Arbitrary events, when using a user-defined operator. The timestamps of the result are almost always the ones of the windows. Only the user-defined  operator can create new events with timestamps. (However, even these event lifetimes are subject to the window’s output policy, which is currently always to clip to the window end.) Let’s assume we were calculating the sum over some payload field: var result = from window in source.HoppingWindow( TimeSpan.FromHours(1), TimeSpan.FromMinutes(15), HoppingWindowOutputPolicy.ClipToWindowEnd) select new { avg = window.Avg(e => e.Value) }; Now each window is reflected by one result event:   As you can see, the window definition defines the output frequency. No matter how many or few events we got from the input, this hopping window will produce one result every 15 minutes – except for those windows that do not contain any events at all, because StreamInsight window operations are empty-preserving (more about that another time). The “forced” output for every window can become a performance issue if you have a real-time query with many events in a wide group & apply – let me explain: imagine you have a lot of events that you group by and then aggregate within each group – classical streaming pattern. The hopping window produces a result in each group at exactly the same point in time for all groups, since the window boundaries are aligned with the timeline, not with the event timestamps. This means that the query output will become very bursty, delivering the results of all the groups at the same point in time. This becomes especially obvious if the events are long-lasting, spanning multiple windows each, so that the produced result events do not change their value very often. In such a case, a snapshot window can remedy. Snapshot windows are more difficult to explain than hopping windows: they represent those periods in time, when no event changes occur. In other words, if you mark all event start and and times on your timeline, then you are looking at all snapshot window boundaries:   If your events are never overlapping, the snapshot window will not make much sense. It is commonly used together with timestamp modification, which make it a very powerful tool. Or as Allan Mitchell expressed in in a recent tweet: “I used to look at SnapshotWindow() with disdain. Now she is my mistress, the one I turn to in times of trouble and need”. Let’s look at a simple example: I want to compute the average of some value in my events over the last minute. I don’t want this output be produced at fixed intervals, but at soon as it changes (that’s the true event-driven spirit!). The snapshot window will include all currently active event at each point in time, hence we need to extend our original events’ lifetimes into the future: Applying the Snapshot window on these events, it will appear to be “looking back into the past”: If you look at the result produced in this diagram, you can easily prove that, at each point in time, the current event value represents the average of all original input event within the last minute. Here is the LINQ representation of that query, applying the lifetime extension before the snapshot window: var result = from window in source .AlterEventDuration(e => TimeSpan.FromMinutes(1)) .SnapshotWindow(SnapshotWindowOutputPolicy.Clip) select new { avg = window.Avg(e => e.Value) }; With more complex modifications of the event lifetimes you can achieve many more query patterns. For instance “running totals” by keeping the event start times, but snapping their end times to some fixed time, like the end of the day. Each snapshot then “sees” all events that have happened in the respective time period so far. Regards, The StreamInsight Team

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• Conducting Effective Web Meetings

  - by BuckWoody

  There are several forms of corporate communication. From immediate, rich communications like phones and IM messaging to historical transactions like e-mail, there are a lot of ways to get information to one or more people. From time to time, it's even useful to have a meeting. (This is where a witty picture of a guy sleeping in a meeting goes. I won't bother actually putting one here; you're already envisioning it in your mind) Most meetings are pointless, and a complete waste of time. This is the fault, completely and solely, of the organizer. It's because he or she hasn't thought things through enough to think about alternate forms of information passing. Here's the criteria for a good meeting - whether in-person or over the web: 100% of the content of a meeting should require the participation of 100% of the attendees for 100% of the time It doesn't get any simpler than that. If it doesn't meet that criteria, then don't invite that person to that meeting. If you're just conveying information and no one has the need for immediate interaction with that information (like telling you something that modifies the message), then send an e-mail. If you're a manager, and you need to get status from lots of people, pick up the phone.If you need a quick answer, use IM. I once had a high-level manager that called frequent meetings. His real need was status updates on various processes, so 50 of us would sit in a room while he asked each one of us questions. He believed this larger meeting helped us "cross pollinate ideas". In fact, it was a complete waste of time for most everyone, except in the one or two moments that they interacted with him. So I wrote some code for a Palm Pilot (which was a kind of SmartPhone but with no phone and no real graphics, but this was in the days when we had just discovered fire and the wheel, although the order of those things is still in debate) that took an average of the salaries of the people in the room (I guessed at it) and ran a timer which multiplied the number of people against the salaries. I left that running in plain sight for him, and when he asked about it, I explained how much the meetings were really costing the company. We had far fewer meetings after. Meetings are now web-enabled. I believe that's largely a good thing, since it saves on travel time and allows more people to participate, but I think the rule above still holds. And in fact, there are some other rules that you should follow to have a great meeting - and fewer of them. Be Clear About the Goal This is important in any meeting, but all of us have probably gotten an invite with a web link and an ambiguous title. Then you get to the meeting, and it's a 500-level deep-dive on something everyone expects you to know. This is unfair to the "expert" and to the participants. I always tell people that invite me to a meeting that I will be as detailed as I can - but the more detail they can tell me about the questions, the more detailed I can be in my responses. Granted, there are times when you don't know what you don't know, but the more you can say about the topic the better. There's another point here - and it's that you should have a clearly defined "win" for the meeting. When the meeting is over, and everyone goes back to work, what were you expecting them to do with the information? Have that clearly defined in your head, and in the meeting invite. Understand the Technology There are several web-meeting clients out there. I use them all, since I meet with clients all over the world. They all work differently - so I take a few moments and read up on the different clients and find out how I can use the tools properly. I do this with the technology I use for everything else, and it's important to understand it if the meeting is to be a success. If you're running the meeting, know the tools. I don't care if you like the tools or not, learn them anyway. Don't waste everyone else's time just because you're too bitter/snarky/lazy to spend a few minutes reading. Check your phone or mic. Check your video size. Install (and learn to use)  ZoomIT (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897434.aspx). Format your slides or screen or output correctly. Learn to use the voting features of the meeting software, and especially it's whiteboard features. Figure out how multiple monitors work. Try a quick meeting with someone to test all this. Do this *before* you invite lots of other people to your meeting.   Use a WebCam I'm not a pretty man. I have a face fit for radio. But after attending a meeting with clients where one Microsoft person used a webcam and another did not, I'm convinced that people pay more attention when a face is involved. There are tons of studies around this, or you can take my word for it, but toss a shirt on over those pajamas and turn the webcam on. Set Up Early Whether you're attending or leading the meeting, don't wait to sign on to the meeting at the time when it starts. I can almost plan that a 10:00 meeting will actually start at 10:10 because the participants/leader is just now installing the web client for the meeting at 10:00. Sign on early, go on mute, and then wait for everyone to arrive. Mute When Not Talking No one wants to hear your screaming offspring / yappy dog / other cubicle conversations / car wind noise (are you driving in a desert storm or something?) while the person leading the meeting is trying to talk. I use the Lync software from Microsoft for my meetings, and I mute everyone by default, and then tell them to un-mute to talk to the group. Share Collateral If you have a PowerPoint deck, mail it out in case you have a tech failure. If you have a document, share it as an attachment to the meeting. Don't make people ask you for the information - that's why you're there to begin with. Even better, send it out early. "But", you say, "then no one will come to the meeting if they have the deck first!" Uhm, then don't have a meeting. Send out the deck and a quick e-mail and let everyone get on with their productive day. Set Actions At the Meeting A meeting should have some sort of outcome (see point one). That means there are actions to take, a follow up, or some deliverable. Otherwise, it's an e-mail. At the meeting, decide who will do what, when things are needed, and so on. And avoid, if at all possible, setting up another meeting, unless absolutely necessary. So there you have it. Whether it's on-premises or on the web, meetings are a necessary evil, and should be treated that way. Like politicians, you should have as few of them as are necessary to keep the roads paved and public libraries open.

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• Write DAX queries in Report Builder #ssrs #dax #ssas #tabular

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  If you use Report Builder with Reporting Services, you can use DAX queries even if the editor for Analysis Services provider does not support DAX syntax. In fact, the DMX editor that you can use in Visual Studio editor of Reporting Services (see a previous post on that), is not available in Report Builder. However, as Sagar Salvi commented in this Microsoft Connect entry, you can use the DAX query text in the query of a Dataset by using the OLE DB provider instead of the Analysis Services one. I think it’s a good idea to show the steps required. First, create a DataSet using the OLE DB connection type, and provide the connection string the provider (Provider), the server name (Data Source) and the database name (Initial Catalog), such as: Provider=MSOLAP;Data Source=SERVERNAME\\TABULAR;Initial Catalog=AdventureWorks Tabular Model SQL 2012 Then, create a Dataset using the data source previously defined, select the Text query type, and write the DAX code in the Query pane: You can also use the Query Designer window, that doesn’t provide any particular help in writing the DAX query, but at least can show a preview of the result of the query execution. I hope DAX will get better editors in the future… in the meantime, remember you can use DAX Studio to write and test your DAX queries, and DAX Formatter to improve their readability!If you want to learn the DAX Query Language, I suggest you watching my video Data Analysis Expressions as a Query Language on Project Botticelli!

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• MicroTraining: Executing SSIS 2012 Packages 22 May 10:00 AM EDT (Free!)

  - by andyleonard

  I am pleased to announce the latest (free!) Linchpin People microtraining event will be held Tuesday 22 May 2012 at 10:00 AM EDT. The topic will be Executing SSIS 2012 Packages. In this presentation, I will be demonstrating several ways to execute SSIS 2012 packages. Register here ! Interested in learning about more microtraining from Linchpin People – before anyone else? Sign up for our newsletter ! :{>...(read more)

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• Distinct Count of Customers in a SCD Type 2 in #DAX

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  If you have a Slowly Changing Dimension (SCD) Type 2 for your customer and you want to calculate the number of distinct customers that bought a product, you cannot use the simple formula: Customers := DISTINCTCOUNT( FactTable[Customer Id] ) ) because it would return the number of distinct versions of customers. What you really want to do is to calculate the number of distinct application keys of the customers, that could be a lower number than the number you’ve got with the previous formula. Assuming that a Customer Code column in the Customers dimension contains the application key, you should use the following DAX formula: Customers := COUNTROWS( SUMMARIZE( FactTable, Customers[Customer Code] ) ) Be careful: only the version above is really fast, because it is solved by xVelocity (formerly known as VertiPaq) engine. Other formulas involving nested calculations might be more complex and move computation to the formula engine, resulting in slower query. This is absolutely an interesting pattern and I have to say it’s a killer feature. Try to do the same in Multidimensional…

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• SSIS Denali as part of “Enterprise Information Management”

  - by jorg

  When watching the SQL PASS session “What’s Coming Next in SSIS?” of Steve Swartz, the Group Program Manager for the SSIS team, an interesting question came up: Why is SSIS thought of to be BI, when we use it so frequently for other sorts of data problems? The answer of Steve was that he breaks the world of data work into three parts: Process of inputs BI   Enterprise Information Management All the work you have to do when you have a lot of data to make it useful and clean and get it to the right place. This covers master data management, data quality work, data integration and lineage analysis to keep track of where the data came from. All of these are part of Enterprise Information Management. Next, Steve told Microsoft is developing SSIS as part of a large push in all of these areas in the next release of SQL. So SSIS will be, next to a BI tool, part of Enterprise Information Management in the next release of SQL Server. I'm interested in the different ways people use SSIS, I've basically used it for ETL, data migrations and processing inputs. In which ways did you use SSIS?

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• Disaster, or Migration?

  - by Rob Farley

  This post is in two parts – technical and personal. And I should point out that it’s prompted in part by this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, hosted by Allen Kinsel. First, the technical: I’ve had a few conversations with people recently about migration – moving a SQL Server database from one box to another (sometimes, but not primarily, involving an upgrade). One question that tends to come up is that of downtime. Obviously there will be some period of time between the old server being available and the new one. The way that most people seem to think of migration is this: Build a new server. Stop people from using the old server. Take a backup of the old server Restore it on the new server. Reconfigure the client applications (or alternatively, configure the new server to use the same address as the old) Make the new server online. There are other things involved, such as testing, of course. But this is essentially the process that people tell me they’re planning to follow. The bit that I want to look at today (as you’ve probably guessed from my title) is the “backup and restore” section. If a SQL database is using the Simple Recovery Model, then the only restore option is the last database backup. This backup could be full or differential. The transaction log never gets backed up in the Simple Recovery Model. Instead, it truncates regularly to stay small. One that’s using the Full Recovery Model (or Bulk-Logged) won’t truncate its log – the log must be backed up regularly. This provides the benefit of having a lot more option available for restores. It’s a requirement for most systems of High Availability, because if you’re making sure that a spare box is up-and-running, ready to take over, then you have to be interested in the logs that are happening on the current box, rather than truncating them all the time. A High Availability system such as Mirroring, Replication or Log Shipping will initialise the spare machine by restoring a full database backup (and maybe a differential backup if available), and then any subsequent log backups. Once the secondary copy is close, transactions can be applied to keep the two in sync. The main aspect of any High Availability system is to have a redundant system that is ready to take over. So the similarity for migration should be obvious. If you need to move a database from one box to another, then introducing a High Availability mechanism can help. By turning on the Full Recovery Model and then taking a backup (so that the now-interesting logs have some context), logs start being kept, and are therefore available for getting the new box ready (even if it’s an upgraded version). When the migration is ready to occur, a failover can be done, letting the new server take over the responsibility of the old, just as if a disaster had happened. Except that this is a planned failover, not a disaster at all. There’s a fine line between a disaster and a migration. Failovers can be useful in patching, upgrading, maintenance, and more. Hopefully, even an unexpected disaster can be seen as just another failover, and there can be an opportunity there – perhaps to get some work done on the principal server to increase robustness. And if I’ve just set up a High Availability system for even the simplest of databases, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. :) So now the personal: It’s been an interesting time recently... June has been somewhat odd. A court case with which I was involved got resolved (through mediation). I can’t go into details, but my lawyers tell me that I’m allowed to say how I feel about it. The answer is ‘lousy’. I don’t regret pursuing it as long as I did – but in the end I had to make a decision regarding the commerciality of letting it continue, and I’m going to look forward to the days when the kind of money I spent on my lawyers is small change. Mind you, if I had a similar situation with an employer, I’d do the same again, but that doesn’t really stop me feeling frustrated about it. The following day I had to fly to country Victoria to see my grandmother, who wasn’t expected to last the weekend. She’s still around a week later as I write this, but her 92-year-old body has basically given up on her. She’s been a Christian all her life, and is looking forward to eternity. We’ll all miss her though, and it’s hard to see my family grieving. Then on Tuesday, I was driving back to the airport with my family to come home, when something really bizarre happened. We were travelling down the freeway, just pulled out to go past a truck (farm-truck sized, not a semi-trailer), when a car-sized mass of metal fell off it. It was something like an industrial air-conditioner, but from where I was sitting, it was just a mass of spinning metal, like something out of a movie (one friend described it as “holidays by Michael Bay”). Somehow, and I’m really don’t know how, the part of it nearest us bounced high enough to clear the car, and there wasn’t even a scratch. We pulled over the check, and I was just thanking God that we’d changed lanes when we had, and that we remained unharmed. I had all kinds of thoughts about what could’ve happened if we’d had something that size land on the windscreen... All this has drilled home that while I feel that I haven’t provided as well for the family as I could’ve done (like by pursuing an expensive legal case), I shouldn’t even consider that I have proper control over things. I get to live life, and make decisions based on what I feel is right at the time. But I’m not going to get everything right, and there will be things that feel like disasters, some which could’ve been in my control and some which are very much beyond my control. The case feels like something I could’ve pursued differently, a disaster that could’ve been avoided in some way. Gran dying is lousy of course. An accident on the freeway would have been awful. I need to recognise that the worst disasters are ones that I can’t affect, and that I need to look at things in context – perhaps seeing everything that happens as a migration instead. Life is never the same from one day to the next. Every event has a before and an after – sometimes it’s clearly positive, sometimes it’s not. I remember good events in my life (such as my wedding), and bad (such as the loss of my father when I was ten, or the back injury I had eight years ago). I’m not suggesting that I know how to view everything from the “God works all things for good” perspective, but I am trying to look at last week as a migration of sorts. Those things are behind me now, and the future is in God’s hands. Hopefully I’ve learned things, and will be able to live accordingly. I’ve come through this time now, and even though I’ll miss Gran, I’ll see her again one day, and the future is bright.

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• C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism

  - by Daniel Moth

  At AMD's Fusion conference Herb Sutter announced in his keynote session a technology that our team has been working on that we call C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism (C++ AMP) and during the keynote I showed a brief demo of an app built with our technology. After the keynote, I go deeper into the technology in my breakout session. If you read both those abstracts, you'll get some information about what C++ AMP is, without being too explicit since we published the abstracts before the technology was announced. You can find the official online announcement at Soma's blog post. Here, I just wanted to capture the key points about C++ AMP that can serve as an introduction and an FAQ. So, in no particular order… C++ AMP lowers the barrier to entry for heterogeneous hardware programmability and brings performance to the mainstream, without sacrificing developer productivity or solution portability. is designed not only to help you address today's massively parallel hardware (i.e. GPUs and APUs), but it also future proofs your code investments with a forward looking design. is part of Visual C++. You don't need to use a different compiler or learn different syntax. is modern C++. Not C or some other derivative. is integrated and supported fully in Visual Studio vNext. Editing, building, debugging, profiling and all the other goodness of Visual Studio work well with C++ AMP. provides an STL-like library as part of the existing concurrency namespace and delivered in the new amp.h header file. makes it extremely easy to work with large multi-dimensional data on heterogeneous hardware; in a manner that exposes parallelization. introduces only one core C++ language extension. builds on DirectX (and DirectCompute in particular) which offers a great hardware abstraction layer that is ubiquitous and reliable. The architecture is such, that this point can be thought of as an implementation detail that does not surface to the API layer. Stay tuned on my blog for more over the coming months where I will switch from just talking about C++ AMP to showing you how to use the API with code examples… Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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• What makes a great place to work

  - by Rob Farley

  Co-incidentally, I’ve been looking for office space for LobsterPot Solutions during the same few days that Luke Hayler ( @lukehayler ) has asked for my thoughts (okay, he ‘tagged’ me) on what makes a great place to work . He lists People and Environment, and I’m inclined to agree, but with a couple of other things too. I have three children. Two of them (both boys) are in school, but my daughter is only two. For the boys’ schools, we quickly realised that what they need most is a feeling of safety...(read more)

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• SQL Down Under Show 51 - Guest Conor Cunningham - Now online

  - by Greg Low

  Late last night I got to record an interview with Conor Cunningham.Most people that know Conor have come across him as the product team wizard that knows so much about query processing and optimization in SQL Server. Conor is currently spending quite a lot of time working on Windows Azure SQL Database, which we used to know as SQL Azure. I'm still trying to think of a good way to say "WASD". I suppose I'll pronounce it like "wassid". Windows Azure SQL Reporting is easier. I think it just needs to be pronounced like "wazza" with a very Australian accent.In the show, we've spent time on the current state of the platform, on dispelling a number of common misbeliefs about the product, and hopefully on answering most of the common questions that seem to get asked about it. We then ventured into Federations, Data Sync, and Reporting.You'll find the show (and previous shows) here: http://www.sqldownunder.com/Resources/Podcast.aspxEnjoy!PS: For those that like transcripts, we've got the process for producing them much improved now and the transcript should also be up within a few days.

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• What's the best platform for blogging about coding ?

  - by timday

  I'm toying with starting an occasional blog for posting odd bits of coding related stuff (mainly C++, probably). Are there any platforms which can be recommended as providing exceptionally good support (e.g syntax highlighting) for posting snippets of code ? (Or any to avoid because posting mono-spaced font blocks of text is a pain). Outcome: I accepted Josh K's answer because what I actually ended up doing was realizing I was more interested in articles than a blog style, getting back into LaTeX (after almost 20 years away from it), using the "listings" package for code, and pushing the HTML/PDF results to my ISP's static-hosting pages. (HTML generated using tex4ht). Kudos to the answers mentioning Wordpress, Tumblr and Jekyll; I spent some time looking into all of them.

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• SQL Server Maintenance Utilities Update for SQL Server 2008 R2

  - by Greg Low

  Great to see that our friend Ola Hallengren has updated his maintenance utility scripts to deal with SQL Server 2008 R2. These scripts are highly regarded, particularly given the price: free ! You'll find them here: http://ola.hallengren.com/Versions.html Ola noted that the main change from 2008 is that backup compression is now supported in Standard Edition of SQL Server. That in itself is good news. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!...(read more)

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• Have You Heard About the Microsoft TechNet Wiki?

  - by KKline

  Here's another one to add to your list of browser bookmarks! The TechNet Wiki covers Microsoft technologies from writers throughout the community for use by the community. As with all wikis, this grassroots effort needs your help. Microsoft is encouraging everyone to contribute the effort - all you have to do is join. So start a whole new article, add your knowledge or draw from your experience to improve an existing article. You can start small or large... Join in at http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/...(read more)

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• TechEd NorthAmerica 2010 (and MS BI Conference 2010) Sessions

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  I just read the Dave Wickert post about his sessions about PowerPivot from Microsoft at TechEd 2010 in New Orleans (June 7-10, 2010) and there are at least two things I’d like to add. First of all, there is also another conference! In fact, this time the Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference 2010 is co-located with TechEd 2010 and all the BI sessions of TechEd…. are sessions of the MS BI Conference too! The second news is that there are many other sessions about PowerPivot at the conference!...(read more)

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• SQL Community – stronger than ever

  - by Rob Farley

  I posted a few hours ago about a reflection of the Summit, but I wanted to write another one for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, hosted by Chris Yates. In January of this year, Adam Jorgensen and I joked around in a video that was used for the SQL Server 2012 launch. We were asked about SQLFamily, and we said how we were like brothers – how we could drive each other crazy (the look he gave me as I patted his stomach was priceless), but that we’d still look out for each other, just like in a real family. And this is really true. Last week at the PASS Summit, there was a lot going on. I was busy as always, as were many others. People told me their good news, their awful news, and some whinged to me about other people who were driving them crazy. But throughout this, people in the SQL Server community genuinely want the best for each other. I’m sure there are exceptions, but I don’t see much of this. Australians aren’t big on cheering for each other. Neither are the English. I think we see it as an American thing. It could be easy for me to consider that the SQL Community that I see at the PASS Summit is mainly there because it’s a primarily American organisation. But when you speak to people like sponsors, or people involved in several types of communities, you quickly hear that it’s not just about that – that PASS has something special. It goes beyond cheering, it’s a strong desire to see each other succeed. I see MVPs feel disappointed for those people who don’t get awarded. I see Summit speakers concerned for those who missed out on the chance to speak. I see chapter leaders excited about the opportunity to help other chapters. And throughout, I see a gentleness and love for people that you rarely see outside the church (and sadly, many churches don’t have it either). Chris points out that the M-W dictionary defined community as “a unified body of individuals”, and I feel like this is true of the SQL Server community. It goes deeper though. It’s not just unity – and we’re most definitely different to each other – it’s more than that. We all want to see each other grow. We all want to pull ourselves up, to serve each other, and to grow PASS into something more than it is today. In that other post of mine I wrote a bit about Paul White’s experience at his first Summit. His missus wrote to me on Facebook saying that she welled up over it. But that emotion was nothing about what I wrote – it was about the reaction that the SQL Community had had to Paul. Be proud of it, my SQL brothers and sisters, and never lose it.

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• Three Buckets of Knowledge

  - by BuckWoody

  As I learn more and more about SQL Server every day, I divide up my information into three “buckets”: Concepts In the first bucket are the general concepts about the topic. What is it? What does it do (or sometimes, what is is supposed to do?) How does one operation flow to another? For this information I use books, magazine articles and believe it or not – Wikipedia. I don’t always trust that last source, but I do use it to see how others lay out their thoughts around a concept. I really like graphical charts that show me the process flow if I can get it, and this is an ideal place for a good presentation. In fact, this may be the only real use for a presentation – I’ll explain what I mean in a moment. Reference The references for a topic include things like Transact-SQL (T-SQL) syntax, or the screen layout on a panel, things like that. Think Dictionary. The only reference I trust for this information is Books Online – presentations are fine, but we’re talking about a dictionary. Ever go to a movie that just reads through a dictionary? Me neither. But I have gone to presentations where people try to include tons of reference materials in their slides. Even if you give me the presentation material later, it’s not really a searchable, readable medium. How To A how-to for me is an example, or even better, a tutorial about an example. Whatever it is shows me a practical use for the concepts and of course involves the syntax. The important thing here is that you need to be able to separate out the example the person is showing you from the stuff you need to know. I can’t tell you how many times folks have told me, “well, sure, if yours is red then that works. But mine is blue.” And I have to explain, “then use “blue” for the search word here.” You get the idea. No one will do your work for you – the examples are meant as a teaching tool only. I accept that, learn what I can, and then run off to create my own thing. You might think a How To works well in a presentation, and it does, for the most part. For a complex example or tutorial, I still prefer the printed word (electronic if possible) so that I can go over the example multiple times, skip around and so on.   The order here isn’t actually that important. Most of the time I start with a concept, look at an example, and then read the reference material. But sometimes I look up an example, read a little of concepts and then check the reference. The only primary thing I try to enforce is to read something from each of them. It’s dangerous to base your work on any single example, reference or concept.  Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Redirecting a subdomain from Wordpress.com to an external web address

  - by user127236

  I have a question about redirecting a subdomain of a blog hosted on Wordpress.com to an external URL. Given the following: 1) I own a domain name foobar.com purchased from another registrar (not from Wordpress.com). 2) I have purchased the Custom Domain option on Wordpress.com, and have completed the configuration to make foobar.com resolve to foobar.wordpress.com. 3) I will establish an external site for a store, such as store.yahoo.com/foobar. 4) I want to redirect the subdomain store.foobar.com to store.yahoo.com/foobar. How do I set up the Custom DNS records within Wordpress.com to accomplish this subdomain redirection, while leaving foobar.com pointed to my Wordpress blog? I suspect that the CNAME directive is involved, but I cannot figure out the required syntax. Thanks... JGB

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• Auditing database source code changes

  - by John Paul Cook

  Auditing changes to database source code can be easily implemented with a database trigger. Here’s a simple implementation of stored procedure auditing using an audit table and a database trigger. It assumes that a schema named Audit already exists. CREATE TABLE Audit . AuditStoredProcedures ( DatabaseName sysname , ObjectName sysname , LoginName sysname , ChangeDate datetime , EventType sysname , EventDataXml xml ); Notice the EventDataXml column. Using an nvarchar column to store the source text...(read more)

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• The 2013 PASS Summit - Day 2

  - by AllenMWhite

  Good morning! It's Day 2 of the PASS Summit 2013 and it should be a busy one. Douglas McDowell, EVP Finance of PASS opened up the keynote to welcome people and talked about the financial status of the organization. Last year's Business Analytics Conference left the organization $100,000 ahead, and he went on to show the overall financial health, which is very good at this point. Bill Graziano came out to thank Doug, Rob Farley and Rushabh Mehta for their service on the board, as they step down from...(read more)

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• SQL Server v.Next (Denali) : Breaking change to fn_virtualfilestats

  - by AaronBertrand

  Yesterday I posted a general warning about changes to Denali that will potentially break your existing code base, with a strong suggestion to grab the summer CTP as soon as it is available and start testing. I posted an example of a breaking change that will not be documented since it affects a commonly-used but undocumented DBCC command (DBCC LOGINFO), and also mentioned a couple of other changes in passing (). Today it occurred to me that it may be more useful if, when I come across a potential...(read more)

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• When the obvious answer is obviously wrong

  - by John Paul Cook

  This post is about how simple math in T-SQL can produce undesirable results, but first we begin with a math quiz. Answer the following as quickly as possible: You just read pages 100-300 of a book. How many pages did you read? QUICKLY NOW! For those of you who answered 200 pages, I have a new question: Which page did you not read? There were 201 pages to read. If you read 200 pages, you skipped a page! What your answer be if I asked you how many pages did you read if you read pages 1-3? Three pages!...(read more)

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• SQLbits London 2012 - Demos

  - by Adam Machanic

  Thanks to everyone who attended my sessions last Friday and Saturday at SQLbits! It was great to meet many new people, not to mention spending some time exploring one of my favorite cities, London. Attached are the demos for each of the two talks I delivered: Query Tuning Mastery: The Art of and Science of Manhandling Parallelism As a database developer, your job boils down to one word: performance. And in today's multi-core-driven world, query performance is very much determined by how well you're...(read more)

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