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  • Challenge: Learn One New Thing Today

    - by BuckWoody
    Most of us know that there's a lot to learn. I'm teaching a class this morning, and even on the subject where I'm the "expert" (that word always makes me nervous!) I still have a lot to learn. To learn, sometimes I take a class, read a book, or carve out a large chunk of time so that I can fully grasp the subject. But since I've been working, I really don't have a lot of opportunities to do that. Like you, I'm really busy. So what I've been able to learn is to take just a few moments each day and learn something new about SQL Server. I thought I would share that process here. First, I started with an outline of the product. You can use Books Online, a college class syllabus, a training class outline, or a comprehensive book table of contents. Then I checked off the things I felt I knew a little about. Sure, I'll come back around to those, but I want to be as efficient as I can. I then trolled various checklists to see what I needed to know about the subjects I didn't have checked off. From there (I'm doing all this in a notepad, and then later in OneNote when that came out) I developed a block of text for that subject. Every time I ran across a book, article, web site or recording on that topic I wrote that reference down. Later I went back and quickly looked over those resources and tried to figure out how I could parcel it out - 10 minutes for this one, a free seminar (like the one I'm teaching today - ironic) takes 4 hours, a web site takes an hour to grok, that sort of thing.  Then all I did was figure out how much time each day I'll give to training. Sure, it literally may be ten minutes, but it adds up. One final thing - as I used something I learned, I came back and made notes in that topic. You learn to play the piano not just from a book, but by playing the piano, after all. If you don't use what you learn, you'll lose it. So if you're interested in getting better at SQL Server, and you're willing to do a little work, try out this method. Leave a note here for others to encourage them.  Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • Has the SQL Community Lost its Focus?

    - by Jonathan Kehayias
    Yesterday, Thomas LaRock’s blog post, WMI Code Creator , was brought to my attention by a member of the SQL Community.  I subscribe to Tom’s blog in my blog reader so eventually I’d like to think that his post would have come to my attention, but to be perfectly honest, I have been to busy with other obligations lately that have made reading blog posts almost impossible.  When I looked at Tom’s post, I was kind of put off when I did a copy paste of the Code from it and got the following:...(read more)

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  • SQL Server XML Schemas

    - by Dave Ballantyne
    Ever been curious about the schema of , say an SSRS rdl file ?  How about the execution plan ? Not only should you already have the .XSD files , check out the folder ‘Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Binn\schemas\sqlserver’ , but they are also available online here. 

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  • Outstanding SQL Saturday

    - by merrillaldrich
    I had the privilege to attend the SQL Saturday held in Redmond today, and it was really outstanding. Among the many sessions, I especially enjoyed and took a lot of useful information away from Greg Larsen’s Dynamic Management Views session, Kalen Delaney’s Compression Session – I am planning to implement 2008 Enterprise compression on my company’s data warehouse later this year – and Remus Rusanu’s session on Service Broker to process NAP data. I want to send out heartfelt thanks to the generous...(read more)

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  • Outstanding SQL Saturday

    - by merrillaldrich
    I had the privilege to attend the SQL Saturday held in Redmond today, and it was really outstanding. Among the many sessions, I especially enjoyed and took a lot of useful information away from Greg Larsen’s Dynamic Management Views session, Kalen Delaney’s Compression Session – I am planning to implement 2008 Enterprise compression on my company’s data warehouse later this year – Remus Rusanu’s session on Service Broker to process NAP data, and Matt Masson’s presentation on high performance SSIS...(read more)

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  • Book Review: Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services Unleashed

    - by Greg Low
    Yet another book that I started re-reading last week (but haven't finished again yet as it's so large) is Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services Unleashed by Irina Gorbach, Alexander Berger and Edward Melomed. This book has always left me with mixed feelings. The authors clearly offer expert level knowledge on the topics (as they were part of the development team for the product) but I struggle with the "readability" of this book. As an example, each time a concept is introduced, it is done...(read more)

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  • SQL Server 2014 – delayed transaction durability

    - by Michael Zilberstein
    As I’m downloading SQL Server 2014 CTP2 at this very moment, I’ve noticed new fascinating feature that hadn’t been announced in CTP1 : delayed transaction durability . It means that if your system is heavy on writes and on another hand you can tolerate data loss on some rare occasions – you can consider declaring transaction as DELAYED_DURABILITY = ON . In this case transaction would be committed when log is written to some buffer in memory – not to disk as usual. This way transactions can become...(read more)

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  • Fetching Latitude and Longitude Co-ordinates for Addresses using PowerShell

    - by Rob Farley
    Regular readers of my blog (at sqlblog.com – please let me know if you’re reading this elsewhere) may be aware that I’ve been doing more and more with spatial data recently. With the now-available SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services including maps, it’s a topic that interests many people. Interestingly though, although many people have plenty of addresses in their various databases (whether they be CRM systems, HR systems or whatever), my experience shows that many people do not store the latitude...(read more)

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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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  • Understanding the SQL Server 2012 BI Semantic Model (BISM)

    SQL Server 2012 introduced an unified BI Semantic Model (BISM) which is based on some of the existing as well as some new technologies. This model is intended to serve as one model for all end user experiences for reporting, analytics, scorecards, dashboards, etc. In this tip, I will talk in detail about the new BISM, how it differs from earlier the earlier Unified Dimensional Model (UDM) and how BISM lays down a foundation for future.

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  • The Case of the Missing Date/Time Stamp: Reporting Services 2008 R2 Snapshots

    - by smisner
    This week I stumbled upon an undocumented “feature” in SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services as I was preparing a demonstration on how to set up and use report snapshots. If you’re familiar with the main changes in this latest release of Reporting Services, you probably already know that Report Manager got a facelift this time around. Although this facelift was generally a good thing, one of the casualties – in my opinion – is the loss of the snapshot label that served two purposes… First, it flagged the report as a snapshot. Second, it let you know when that snapshot was created. As part of my standard operating procedure when demonstrating report snapshots, I point out this label, so I was rather taken aback when I didn’t see it in the demonstration I was preparing. It sort of upset my routine, and I’m rather partial to my routines. I thought perhaps I wasn’t looking in the right place and changed Report Manager from Tile View to Detail View, but no – that label was still missing. In the grand scheme of life, it’s not an earth-shattering change, but you’ll have to look at the Modified Date in Details View to know when the snapshot was run. Or hope that the report developer included a textbox to show the execution time in the report. (Hint: this is a good time to add this to your list of report development best practices, whether a report gets set up as a report snapshot or not!) A snapshot from the past In case you don’t remember how a snapshot appeared in Report Manager back in the old days (of SQL Server 2008 and earlier), here’s an image I snagged from my Reporting Services 2008 Step by Step manuscript: A snapshot in the present A report server running in SharePoint integrated mode had no such label. There you had to rely on the Report Modified date-time stamp to know the snapshot execution time. So I guess all platforms are now consistent. Here’s a screenshot of Report Manager in the 2008 R2 version. One of these is a snapshot and the rest execute on demand. Can you tell which is the snapshot? Consider descriptions as an alternative So my report snapshot demonstration has one less step, and I’ll need to edit the Denali version of the Step by Step book. Things are simpler this way, but I sure wish we had an easier way to identify the execution methods of the reports. Consider using the description field to alert users that the report is a snapshot. It might save you a few questions about why the data isn’t up-to-date if the users know that something changed in the source of the report. Notice that the full description doesn’t display in Tile View, so keep it short and sweet or instruct users to open Details View to see the entire description.

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  • SQL Rally Relational Database Design Pre-Con Preview

    - by drsql
    On May 9, 2012, I will be presenting a pre-con session at the SQL Rally in Dallas, TX on relational database design. The fact is, database design is a topic that demands more than a simple one hour session to really do it right. So in my Relational Database Design Workshop, we will have seven times the amount of time in the typical session, giving us time to cover our topics in a bit more detail, look at a lot more designs/code, and even get some time to do some design as a group. Our topics will...(read more)

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  • Happy Birthday, SQLPeople!

    - by andyleonard
    One year ago today, I began sending out batches of SQLPeople interview emails to friends in the SQL Server Community. Since then, Brian Moran ( Blog | @briancmoran ) and Matt Velic ( Blog | @mvelic | SQLPeople ) have joined the effort, we have published dozens of interviews, and there have been two events! You can join in the fun. If you haven’t already, visit the interview page and answer the seven questions. You can also join us on LinkedIn and Facebook . And you can follow us on Twitter ( @SQLPeople...(read more)

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  • SQL Server v.Next (Denali) : Changes to performance counters

    - by AaronBertrand
    In a previous post about changed system objects in Denali , I talked about the changes to memory-related DMVs due to underlying changes in the memory manager. The SQLOS team has posted a great introduction to these changes , and they plan to post more details in future posts. In the meantime, and due to a question yesterday from Tom LaRock ( blog | twitter ): ...I thought I would tell you about some performance counters that have changed between SQL Server 2008 R2 and Denali - most of which involve...(read more)

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  • Thoughts on schemas and schema proliferation

    - by jamiet
    In SQL Server 2005 Microsoft introduced user-schema separation and since then I have seen the use of schemas increase; whereas before I would typically see databases where all objects were in the [dbo] schema I now see databases that have multiple schemas, a database I saw recently had 31 (thirty one) of them. I can’t help but wonder whether this is a good thing or not – clearly 31 is an extreme case but I question whether multiple schemas create more problems than they solve? I have been involved in many discussions that go something like this: Developer #1> “I have a new function to add to the database and I’m not sure which schema to put it in” Developer #2> “What does it do?” Developer #1> “It provides data to a report in Reporting Services” Developer #2> “Ok, so put it in the [reports] schema” Developer #1> “Well I could, but the data will only be used by our Financial reporting folks so shouldn’t I put it in the [financial] schema?” Developer #2> “Maybe, yes” Developer #1> “Mind you, the data is supposed to be used for regulatory reporting to the FSA, should I put it in [regulatory]?” Developer #2> “Err….” You get the idea!!! The more schemas that exist in your database then the more chance that their supposed usages will overlap. I’m left wondering whether the use of schemas is actually necessary. I don’t view really see them as an aid to security because I generally believe that principles should be assigned permissions on objects as-needed on a case-by-case basis (and I have a stock SQL query that deciphers them all for me) so why bother using them at all? I can envisage a use where a database is used to house objects pertaining to many different business functions (which, in itself, is an ambiguous term) and in that circumstance perhaps a schema per business function would be appropriate; hence of late I have been loosely following this edict: If some objects in a database could be moved en masse to another database without the need to remove any foreign key constraints then those objects could legitimately exist in a dedicated schema. I am interested to know what other people’s thoughts are on this. If you would like to share then please do so in the comments. @Jamiet

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  • FIX: A network error occurred during SQL Server Native Client installation

    - by Greg Low
    One of the things that I have been pestering the SQL team to do is to name their updates according to what is contained in them. For example, instead of just: sqlncli.msi What I'd prefer is that the file was called something like: SQLServerNativeClient2k8SP1CU3x64.msi So I normally rename them as soon as I receive them, to avoid confusion in future. However, today I found that doing so caused me a problem. After renaming the file, and installing it, the installation failed with the error: " A network...(read more)

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  • Speaking this week at Richmond SQL Server User Group

    - by drsql
    Thursday night, at 6:00 (or so) I will be speaking in Richmond ( http://richmondsql.org/cs2007/ ), talking about How to Implement a Hierarchy using SQL Server. The abstract is: One of the most common structures you will come across in the real world is a hierarchy (either a single parent "tree" or a multi-parent "graph"). Many systems will implement the obvious examples, such as a corporate managerial structure or a bill of materials. It turns out that almost any many-to-many relationship can be...(read more)

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  • Fetching Latitude and Longitude Co-ordinates for Addresses using PowerShell

    - by Rob Farley
    Regular readers of my blog (at sqlblog.com – please let me know if you’re reading this elsewhere) may be aware that I’ve been doing more and more with spatial data recently. With the now-available SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services including maps, it’s a topic that interests many people. Interestingly though, although many people have plenty of addresses in their various databases (whether they be CRM systems, HR systems or whatever), my experience shows that many people do not store the latitude...(read more)

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  • Sending HTML Newsletters in a Batch Using SQL Server

    Sending a large volume of emails can put a strain on a mail relay server. However many people using SQL Server will need to do just that for things like newsletters, mailing lists, etc. Satnam Singh brings us a way to spread out the load by sending newsletters in multiple batches instead of one large process.

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  • Using SOUNDEX and DIFFERENCE to Standardize Data in SQL Server

    My client wants to standardize address information for existing and future addresses collected for their customers, particularly the street suffixes. The application used to enter and collect address information has the street suffix separated from the address field, but it is a textbox instead of a drop down list therefore things are not standardized. I know there are some options out there to standarize data, but they would like a less expensive alternative. Are there any functions in SQL Server that I can use to standardized data?

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  • Free tools for SQL Server - Automating Execution Plan Analysis

    - by jchang
    Since this topic is being discussed, I will plug my own tools, SQL Exec Stats and (a little dated) documentation the main capability is cross-referencing index usuage with specific execution plans. another feature is generating execution plans for all stored procedures in a database, along with the index usage cross-reference. There are several sources of execution plans or plan handles, this could be a live trace, a previously saved trace, previously saved sqlplan files, from dm_exec_cached_plans,...(read more)

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