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  • Did You Know? I'm doing 3 more online seminars with SSWUG!

    - by Kalen Delaney
    As I told you in April , I recorded two more seminars with Stephen Wynkoop, on aspects of Query Processing. The first one will be broadcast on June 30 and the second on August 27. In between, we'll broadcast my Index Internals seminar, on July 23. Workshops can be replayed for up to a week after the broadcast, and you can even buy a DVD of the workshop. You can get more details by clicking on the workshop name, below, or check out the announcement on the SSWUG site at http://www.sswug.org/editorials/default.aspx?id=1948...(read more)

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  • SSIS Denali CTP1 Source Assistant

    - by andyleonard
    I like the new Data Flow Source Assistant in SSIS Denali. The default view is shown above, with the "Show installed only" checkbox checked. When not checked, the list of Source types changes: In previous versions of SSIS, I rarely created connections in the Connection Managers pane - I usually hit a New button in either a Source or Destination Adapter, or in a task. It was just easier letting the task or adapter pick the proper Connection Manager editor. This is handy and a time-saver. :{>...(read more)

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  • PASS Summit Location Redux

    - by andyleonard
    Introduction To quote Ronald Reagan, " There you go again ." The Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) is considering locations for future PASS Summits. The apparent answer is: You Can Have The Summit Anywhere You Want... ... as long as it's in Seattle. PASS conducted a survey on this about a year ago, and I commented on the results and PASS' (mis-)interpretation of said results in a post entitled On PASS Summit Locations, Time Will Tell . "It's About Community" I think every member of the...(read more)

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  • Parallel Data Warehouse

    - by jchang
    The Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse diagram was somewhat difficult to understand in terms of the functionality of each subsystem in relation to the configuration of its components. So now that HP has provided a detailed list of the PDW components , the diagram below shows the PDW subsystems with component configuration (InfiniBand, FC, and network connections not shown). Observe that there are three different ProLiant server models, the DL360 G7, DL370 G6 and the DL380 G7, in five different configurations...(read more)

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  • When a problem is resolved

    - by Rob Farley
    This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Jen McCown, and she’s picked the topic of Resolutions. It’s a new year, and she’s thinking about what people have resolved to do this year. Unfortunately, I’ve never really done resolutions like that. I see too many people resolve to quit smoking, or lose weight, or whatever, and fail miserably. I’m not saying I don’t set goals, but it’s not a thing for New Year. The obvious joke is “1920x1080” as a resolution, but I’m not going there. I think Resolving is a strange word. It makes it sound like I’m having to solve a problem a second time, when actually, it’s more along the lines of solving a problem well enough for it to count as finished. If something has been resolved, a solution has been provided. There is a resolution, through the provision of a solution. It’s a strangeness of English. When I look up the word resolution at dictionary.com, it has 12 options, including “settling of a problem”. There’s a finality about resolution. If you resolve to do something, you’re saying “Yes. This is a done thing. I’m resolving to do it, which means that it may as well be complete already.” I like to think I resolve problems, rather than just solving them. I want my solving to be final and complete. If I tune a query, I don’t want to find that I’m back in there, re-tuning it at some point. Strangely, if I re-solve a problem, that implies that I didn’t resolve it in the first place. I only solved it. Temporarily. We “data-folk” live in a world where the most common answer is “It depends.” Frustratingly, the thing an answer depends on may still be changing in the system in question. That probably means that any solution that is put in place may need reinvestigating at some point later. So do I resolve things? Yes. Am I Chuck Norris, and solve things so well the world would break first? No. Do these two claims happily sit beside each other? No, unfortunately not. But I happily take responsibility for things, and let my clients depend on me to see it through. As far as they are concerned, it is resolved. And so I resolve to keep resolving, right through 2011.

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  • Presenting Loading Data Warehouse Partitions with SSIS 2012 at SQL Saturday DC!

    - by andyleonard
    Join Darryll Petrancuri and me as we present Loading Data Warehouse Partitions with SSIS 2012 Saturday 8 Dec 2012 at SQL Saturday 173 in DC ! SQL Server 2012 table partitions offer powerful Big Data solutions to the Data Warehouse ETL Developer. In this presentation, Darryll Petrancuri and Andy Leonard demonstrate one approach to loading partitioned tables and managing the partitions using SSIS 2012, and reporting partition metrics using SSRS 2012. Objectives A practical solution for loading Big...(read more)

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  • Why Hekaton In-Memory OLTP Truly is Revolutionary

    - by merrillaldrich
    I just returned from the PASS Summit in Charlotte, NC – which was excellent, among the best I have attended – and I have had Dr. David DeWitt’s talk rolling around in my head since he gave it on Thursday. (Dr. DeWitt starts at 27:00 at that link.) I probably cannot do it justice, but I wanted to recap why Hekaton really is revolutionary, and not just a marketing buzzword. I am normally skeptical of product announcements, and I find too often that real technical innovation can be overwhelmed by the...(read more)

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  • SQL Saturday 27 (Portland, Oregon)

    - by BuckWoody
    I’m sitting in the Seattle airport, waiting for my flight to Silicon Valley California for the SQL Server 2008 R2 Launch Event. By some quirk of nature, they are asking me to Emcee the event – but that’s another post entirely.   I’m reflecting on the SQL Saturday 27 event that was just held in Portland, Oregon this last Saturday. These are not Microsoft-sponsored events – it’s truly the community at work. Think of a big user-group meeting – I mean REALLY big – held in a central location, like at a college (as ours was) or some larger, inexpensive venue like that. Everyone there is volunteering – it’s my own money and time to drive several hours to a hotel for the night, feed myself and present. It’s their own time and money for the folks that organize the event – unless a vendor or two steps in to help. It’s their own time and money for the attendees to drive a long way, spend the night and their Saturday to listen to the speakers. Why do all this?   Because everybody benefits. Every speaker learns something new, meets new people, and reaches a new audience. Every volunteer does the same. And the attendees? Well, it’s pretty obvious what they get. A 7Am to 10PM extravaganza of knowledge from every corner of the product. In fact, this year the Portland group hooked up with the CodeCamp folks and held a combined event. We had over 850 people, and I had everyone from data professionals to developers in my sessions.   So I’ll take this opportunity to do two things: to say “thank you” to all of the folks who attended, from those who spoke to those who worked and those who came to listen, and to challenge you to attend the next SQL Saturday anywhere near you. You can find the list here: http://www.sqlsaturday.com/. Don’t see anything in your area? Start one! The PASS folks have a package that will show you how. Sure, it’s a big job, but the key is to get as many people helping you as possible. Even if you have only a few dozen folks show up the first time, no worries. The first events I presented at had about 20 in the room. But not this week.   See you at the Launch Event if you’re near the San Francisco area tomorrow, and see you at the Redmond SQL Saturday and TechEd if not.   Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • Optimize Many-to-Many with SUMMARIZE and Other Techniques

    - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)
    We are still in the early days of DAX and even if I have been using it since 2 years ago, there is still a lot to learn on that. One of the topics that historically interests me (and many of the readers here, probably) is the many-to-many relationships between dimensions in a dimensional data model. When I and Alberto wrote the The Many to Many Revolution 2.0 we discovered the SUMMARIZE based pattern very late in the whitepaper writing. It is very important for performance optimization and it should be always used. In the last month, Gerhard Brueckl also presented an approach based on cross table filtering behavior that simplify the syntax involved, even if it’s harder to explain how it works internally. I published a short article titled Optimize Many-to-Many Calculation in DAX with SUMMARIZE and Cross Table Filtering on SQLBI website just to provide a quick reference to the three patterns available. A further study is still required to compare performance between SUMMARIZE and Cross Table Filtering patterns. Up to now, I haven’t observed big differences between them, even if their execution plans might be not identical and this suggest me that depending on other conditions you might favor one over the other.

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  • Make a Geeky Lego Key Holder for Your Home [Quick DIY Project]

    - by Asian Angel
    LEGOs are terrific fun to work with whether you are in a playful mood or working on a personal geeky project. With that in mind the Mini-eco blog has an quick and easy tutorial for making an awesome LEGO key holder for your home or office. The best part about this project is the amount of personalization in colors and/or themes (i.e. Star Wars, Indiana Jones, etc.) that you can bring to it. To get started just visit the blog post linked below… DIY Lego Key Holder [via BoingBoing] How To Use USB Drives With the Nexus 7 and Other Android Devices Why Does 64-Bit Windows Need a Separate “Program Files (x86)” Folder? Why Your Android Phone Isn’t Getting Operating System Updates and What You Can Do About It

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  • Columnstore Case Study #1: MSIT SONAR Aggregations

    - by aspiringgeek
    Preamble This is the first in a series of posts documenting big wins encountered using columnstore indexes in SQL Server 2012 & 2014.  Many of these can be found in this deck along with details such as internals, best practices, caveats, etc.  The purpose of sharing the case studies in this context is to provide an easy-to-consume quick-reference alternative. Why Columnstore? If we’re looking for a subset of columns from one or a few rows, given the right indexes, SQL Server can do a superlative job of providing an answer. If we’re asking a question which by design needs to hit lots of rows—DW, reporting, aggregations, grouping, scans, etc., SQL Server has never had a good mechanism—until columnstore. Columnstore indexes were introduced in SQL Server 2012. However, they're still largely unknown. Some adoption blockers existed; yet columnstore was nonetheless a game changer for many apps.  In SQL Server 2014, potential blockers have been largely removed & they're going to profoundly change the way we interact with our data.  The purpose of this series is to share the performance benefits of columnstore & documenting columnstore is a compelling reason to upgrade to SQL Server 2014. App: MSIT SONAR Aggregations At MSIT, performance & configuration data is captured by SCOM. We archive much of the data in a partitioned data warehouse table in SQL Server 2012 for reporting via an application called SONAR.  By definition, this is a primary use case for columnstore—report queries requiring aggregation over large numbers of rows.  New data is refreshed each night by an automated table partitioning mechanism—a best practices scenario for columnstore. The Win Compared to performance using classic indexing which resulted in the expected query plan selection including partition elimination vs. SQL Server 2012 nonclustered columnstore, query performance increased significantly.  Logical reads were reduced by over a factor of 50; both CPU & duration improved by factors of 20 or more.  Other than creating the columnstore index, no special modifications or tweaks to the app or databases schema were necessary to achieve the performance improvements.  Existing nonclustered indexes were rendered superfluous & were deleted, thus mitigating maintenance challenges such as defragging as well as conserving disk capacity. Details The table provides the raw data & summarizes the performance deltas. Logical Reads (8K pages) CPU (ms) Durn (ms) Columnstore 160,323 20,360 9,786 Conventional Table & Indexes 9,053,423 549,608 193,903 ? x56 x27 x20 The charts provide additional perspective of this data.  "Conventional vs. Columnstore Metrics" document the raw data.  Note on this linear display the magnitude of the conventional index performance vs. columnstore.  The “Metrics (?)” chart expresses these values as a ratio. Summary For DW, reports, & other BI workloads, columnstore often provides significant performance enhancements relative to conventional indexing.  I have documented here, the first in a series of reports on columnstore implementations, results from an initial implementation at MSIT in which logical reads were reduced by over a factor of 50; both CPU & duration improved by factors of 20 or more.  Subsequent features in this series document performance enhancements that are even more significant. 

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  • Parameterize Charts using Excel Slicers in PowerPivot

    - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)
    One new nice feature of Excel 2010 is the Slicer. Usually, slicers are used to filter data in a PivotTable. But they might be also useful to parameterize an algorithm or a chart! We discussed this technique in our book , but Alberto Ferrari wrote a post that shows how to use this technique to allow the user to select two stocks that should be compared in an Excel Chart – as you might imagine, this will work also when you will publish the workbook on SharePoint! This is the result: Nice to see that...(read more)

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  • Avoiding connection timeouts on first connection to LocalDB edition of SQL Server Express

    - by Greg Low
    When you first make a connection to the new LocalDB edition of SQL Server Express, the system files, etc. that are required for a new version are spun up. (The system files such as the master database files, etc. end up in C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server Local DB\Instances\LocalDBApp1) That can take a while on a slower machine, so this means that the default connection timeout of 30 seconds (in most client libraries) could be exceeded. To avoid this hit on the...(read more)

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  • SSISDB Analysis Script on Gist

    - by Davide Mauri
    I've created two simple, yet very useful, script to extract some useful data to quickly monitor SSIS packages execution in SQL Server 2012 and after.get-ssis-execution-status  get-ssis-data-pumped-rows  I've started to use gist since it comes very handy, for this "quick'n'dirty" scripts and snippets, and you can find the above scripts and others (hopefully the number will increase over time...I plan to use gist to store all the code snippet I used to store in a dedicated folder on my machine) there.Now, back to the aforementioned scripts. The first one ("get-ssis-execution-status") returns a list of all executed and executing packages along with latest successful and running executions (so that on can have an idea of the expected run time)error messageswarning messages related to duplicate rows found in lookupsthe second one ("get-ssis-data-pumped-rows") returns information on DataFlows status. Here there's something interesting, IMHO. Nothing exceptional, let it be clear, but nonetheless useful: the script extract information on destinations and row sent to destinations right from the messages produced by the DataFlow component. This helps to quickly understand how many rows as been sent and where...without having to increase the logging level.Enjoy! PSI haven't tested it with SQL Server 2014, but AFAIK they should work without problems. Of course any feedback on this is welcome. 

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  • Do you know your DNS server?

    - by John Paul Cook
    If you don’t know your DNS server is valid, you need to find out before July 9. The FBI found rogue DNS servers and replaced them with clean, safe DNS servers to protect the public. These safe, clean servers will be turned off on July 9, 2012. If your computer was compromised to use the rogue servers, it will stop resolving DNS queries on July 9 when the clean servers are turned off. The FBI has provided full technical details at http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2011/november/malware_110911/DNS-changer-malware.pdf...(read more)

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  • Meet @marcorus and @ferrarialberto at TechEd Europe 2012 #tee2012

    - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)
    I and Alberto are in Amsterdam this week at TechEd Europe 2012. If you are here at the conference, you can meet us here: Wed, Jun 27 10:15 AM - 11:30 AM – Room G106 DBI319 - BISM: Multidimensional vs. Tabular Wed, Jun 27 02:15 PM – 02:30 PM – Microsoft Press Booth in the TechExpo area PowerPivot for Excel 2010 Book Signing Thu, Jun 28 8:30 AM - 9:45 AM – Room E107 Many-to-Many Relationships in BISM Tabular Fri, Jun 29 1:00 PM - 2:45 PM – Breakthrough Insight at Microsoft SQL Server Booth – TechExpo area Staff and Q&A We’ll try to visit the Microsoft Booth very often and we’ll be in the area Breakthrough Insight of SQL Server zone (see the picture to identify it). And don’t miss the PowerPivot for Excel 2010 book signing event:

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  • T-SQL Tuesday #34: Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, You're My Only Hope!

    - by AllenMWhite
    This T-SQL Tuesday is about a person that helped you understand SQL Server. It's not a stretch to say that it's people that help you get to where you are in life, and Rob Volk ( @sql_r ) is sponsoring this month's T-SQL Tuesday asking who is that person that helped you get there. Over the years, there've been a number of people who've helped me, but one person stands out above the rest, who was patient, kind and always explained the details in a way that just made sense. I first met Don Vilen at...(read more)

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  • Coopertition

    - by andyleonard
    Introduction This post is the thirtieth part of a ramble-rant about the software business. The current posts in this series are: Goodwill, Negative and Positive Visions, Quests, Missions Right, Wrong, and Style Follow Me Balance, Part 1 Balance, Part 2 Definition of a Great Team The 15-Minute Meeting Metaproblems: Drama The Right Question Software is Organic, Part 1 Metaproblem: Terror I Don't Work On My Car A Turning Point Human Doings Everything Changes Getting It Right The First Time One-Time...(read more)

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  • Point-in-time restore of database backup?

    - by TiborKaraszi
    SQL Server 2005 added the STOPAT option for the RESTORE DATABASE command. This sounds great - we can stop at some point in time during the database backup process was running! Or? No, we can't. Here follows some tech stuff why not, and then what the option is really meant for: A database backup includes all used extents and also all log records that were produced while the backup process was running (possibly older as well, to handle open transactions). When you restore such a backup, SQL Server...(read more)

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  • MicroTraining: Managing SSIS Connections–10 Apr 2012 at 10:00 AM EDT!

    - by andyleonard
    I am pleased to announce another free Linchpin People MicroTraining Event! On Tuesday, 10 Apr 2012 at 10:00 AM EDT, I will present Managing SSIS Connections . In this presentation, I will show you several means for managing SSIS connectivity using built-in functionality and a custom trick or two I picked up over the past few years. Want to learn more? It’s free (and no phone number required)! Register today. :{>...(read more)

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  • Free Webinar - Using Enterprise Data Integration Dashboards

    - by andyleonard
    Join Kent Bradshaw and me as we present Using Enterprise Data Integration Dashboards Tuesday 11 Dec 2012 at 10:00 AM ET! If data is the life of the modern organization, data integration is the heart of an enterprise. Data circulation is vital. Data integration dashboards provide enterprise ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) teams near-real-time status supported with historical performance analysis. Join Linchpins Kent Bradshaw and Andy Leonard as they demonstrate and discuss the benefits of data...(read more)

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  • The case against INFORMATION_SCHEMA views

    - by AaronBertrand
    In SQL Server 2000, INFORMATION_SCHEMA was the way I derived all of my metadata information - table names, procedure names, column names and data types, relationships... the list goes on and on. I used the system tables like sysindexes from time to time, but I tried to stay away from them when I could. In SQL Server 2005, this all changed with the introduction of catalog views. For one thing, they're a lot easier to type. sys.tables vs. INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES? Come on; no contest there - even...(read more)

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  • SQLU Professional Development Week: The Difference Between Your Business and Community Presence

    - by andyleonard
    Introduction Proto-earth , dinosaurs , and the days when your personal and business profiles were separate and distinct. What do these things all have in common? They are all in the past. Background Checks Corporate background checks now routinely include a search for social media profiles, forum posts, and blogs. As professionals are learning, the things you say and do in your "off-work hours" can and will be used against you - even after you're hired and have been doing the job awhile . One point?...(read more)

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  • Placeholder images for testing reports

    - by Greg Low
    Lorem Ipsum has long been used to provide placeholder text for testing report and document layouts. Programs such as Microsoft Word have also included options for generating sample text. (For example, type =rand() anywhere in a blank area of a Microsoft Word document and hit enter).Matthew Roche and Donald Farmer both sent me a link the other day to an online service that provides placeholder images. This could be quite useful when testing report layouts in SQL Server Reporting Services.You'll find it here: http://lorempixel.com/Nice! As an example, here's a random sports image. Of course I have no idea what you'll see on this page :-)

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