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• SSIS code smell – Unused columns in the dataflow

  - by jamiet

  A code smell is defined on Wikipedia as being a “symptom in the source code of a program that possibly indicates a deeper problem”. It’s a term commonly used by our code-writing brethren to describe sub-optimal code but I think the term can be applied equally well to SSIS packages too as I shall now explain One of my pet hates about SSIS development is packages that throw warnings of the form: The output column "ColumnName" (1358) on output "OLE DB Source Output" (1289) and component "OLE_SRC Name" (1279) is not subsequently used in the Data Flow task. Removing this unused output column can increase Data Flow task performance.  The warning is fairly self-explanatory – any column that appears in the data flow but doesn’t get used will throw this warning when the data flow is executed. Its not the negligible performance degradation that they cause that bothers me though, it’s the clutter that they cause in your log file/table. Take a look at the following screenshot if you don’t believe me: There are 231409 such warnings in the system that I took this screenshot from, that is 231409 log records that should not be there. The most infuriating thing about this warning is that it is so easily avoidable; eliminating such columns is a very quick and easy thing to do in the SSIS Designer. The only problem I see is that the warnings don’t occur until you execute the package – it would be preferable for the designer to have an unobtrusive way of informing you of them as well. Anyway, I digress… I consider such warnings to be a code smell because, to me, they’re symptomatic of a lack of due care and attention; a lack of developer discipline if you will. What other code smells can you think of when building SSIS packages? If I get a good list in the comments maybe I’ll compile them into a later blog post. @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• SQLBeat Podcast – Episode 5 – Kevin Kline Talks With Me About SQL, Professional Development and Book Writin’

  - by SQLBeat

  I thought I would be a ball of intimated nerves when Kevin gladly agreed to speak with me on the podcast this past weekend.  After all, he is Kevin Kline of SQL in a Nutshell fame! As it turned out,  we had a comfortable and enlightening conversation on Apple MacBooks (is that what they are called?), our beginnings in the indistry, the Deep South, health care intiatives and 286′s. I almost pulled the plug when Kevin started down the Oracle path though, and for a moment he looked at me as if I was serious. As always on this podcast, it is all in good fun. The picture is of Kevin and I ( my shirt is mauve not pink by the way) at the after party for SQL Saturday 151 in Orlando, FL where he also did a Pre-Con to a sold out crowd of enthusiastic DBAs. I know they were enthusiastic even though I was not there because one of the attendees was a friend of mine who went on and on and on about the content, kind of like I am doing here.  So I will just stop that and let you proceed to listen. As always, I hope you enjoy and any feedback on this or future episodes is always welcome. Download the MP3

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• LLBLGen Pro v3.0 has been released!

  - by FransBouma

  After two years of hard work we released v3.0 of LLBLGen Pro today! V3.0 comes with a completely new designer which has been developed from the ground up for .NET 3.5 and higher. Below I'll briefly mention some highlights of this new release: Entity Framework (v1 & v4) support NHibernate support (hbm.xml mappings & FluentNHibernate mappings) Linq to SQL support Allows both Model first and Database first development, or a mixture of both .NET 4.0 support Model views Grouping of project elements Linq-based project search Value Type (DDD) support Multiple Database types in single project XML based project file Integrated template editor Relational Model Data management Flexible attribute declaration for code generation, no more buddy classes needed Fine-grained project validation Update / Create DDL SQL scripts Fast Text-DSL based Quick mode Powerful text-DSL based Quick Model functionality Per target framework extensible settings framework much much more... Of course we still support our own O/R mapper framework: LLBLGen Pro v3.0 Runtime framework as well, which was updated with some minor features and was upgraded to use the DbProviderFactory system. Please watch the videos of the designer (more to come very soon!) to see some aspects of the new designer in action. The full version comes with Algorithmia in sourcecode as well. Algorithmia is an algorithm library written for .NET 3.5 which powers the heart of the designer with a fine-grained undo/redo command framework, graph classes and much more. I'd like to thank all beta-testers, our support team and others who have helped us with this massive release. :)

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• FileNameColumnName property, Flat File Source Adapter : SSIS Nugget

  - by jamiet

  I saw a question on MSDN’s SSIS forum the other day that went something like this: I’m loading data into a table from a flat file but I want to be able to store the name of that file as well. Is there a way of doing that? I don’t want to come across as disrespecting those who took the time to reply but there was a few answers along the lines of “loop over the files using a For Each, store the file name in a variable yadda yadda yadda” when in fact there is a much much simpler way of accomplishing this; it just happens to be a little hidden away as I shall now explain! The Flat File Source Adapter has a property called FileNameColumnName which for some reason it isn’t exposed through the Flat File Source editor, it is however exposed via the Advanced Properties: You’ll see in the screenshot above that I have set FileNameColumnName=“Filename” (it doesn’t matter what name you use, anything except a non-zero string will work). What this will do is create a new column in our dataflow called “Filename” that contains, unsurprisingly, the name of the file from which the row was sourced. All very simple. This is particularly useful if you are extracting data from multiple files using the MultiFlatFile Connection Manager as it allows you to differentiate between data from each of the files as you can see in the following screenshot: So there you have it, the FileNameColumnName property; a little known secret of SSIS. I hope it proves to be useful to someone out there. @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Calculating estimated data loss with Always on

  - by blakmk

  Ever wondered how calculate estimated data loss (time) for always on. The metric in the always on dashboard shows the metric quite nicely but there does seem to be a lack of documentation about where the metrics ---come from. Heres a script that calculates the data loss ( lag ) so you can set up alerts based on your DR SLA's:       WITH DR_CTE ( replica_server_name, database_name, last_commit_time) AS                 (                                 select ar.replica_server_name, database_name, rs.last_commit_time                                 from master.sys.dm_hadr_database_replica_states  rs                                 inner join master.sys.availability_replicas ar on rs.replica_id = ar.replica_id                                 inner join sys.dm_hadr_database_replica_cluster_states dcs on dcs.group_database_id = rs.group_database_id and rs.replica_id = dcs.replica_id                                 where replica_server_name != @@servername                 ) select ar.replica_server_name, dcs.database_name, rs.last_commit_time, DR_CTE.last_commit_time 'DR_commit_time', datediff(ss,  DR_CTE.last_commit_time, rs.last_commit_time) 'lag_in_seconds' from master.sys.dm_hadr_database_replica_states  rs inner join master.sys.availability_replicas ar on rs.replica_id = ar.replica_id inner join sys.dm_hadr_database_replica_cluster_states dcs on dcs.group_database_id = rs.group_database_id and rs.replica_id = dcs.replica_id inner join DR_CTE on DR_CTE.database_name = dcs.database_name where ar.replica_server_name = @@servername order by lag_in_seconds desc

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• Dynamic Unpivot : SSIS Nugget

  - by jamiet

  A question on the SSIS forum earlier today asked: I need to dynamically unpivot some set of columns in my source file. Every month there is one new column and its set of Values. I want to unpivot it without editing my SSIS packages that is deployed Let’s be clear about what we mean by Unpivot. It is a normalisation technique that basically converts columns into rows. By way of example it converts something like this: AccountCode Jan Feb Mar AC1 100.00 150.00 125.00 AC2 45.00 75.50 90.00 into something like this: AccountCode Month Amount AC1 Jan 100.00 AC1 Feb 150.00 AC1 Mar 125.00 AC2 Jan 45.00 AC2 Feb 75.50 AC2 Mar 90.00 The Unpivot transformation in SSIS is perfectly capable of carrying out the operation defined in this example however in the case outlined in the aforementioned forum thread the problem was a little bit different. I interpreted it to mean that the number of columns could change and in that scenario the Unpivot transformation (and indeed the SSIS dataflow in general) is rendered useless because it expects that the number of columns will not change from what is specified at design-time. There is a workaround however. Assuming all of the columns that CAN exist will appear at the end of the rows, we can (1) import all of the columns in the file as just a single column, (2) use a script component to loop over all the values in that “column” and (3) output each one as a column all of its own. Let’s go over that in a bit more detail.   I’ve prepared a data file that shows some data that we want to unpivot which shows some customers and their mythical shopping lists (it has column names in the first row): We use a Flat File Connection Manager to specify the format of our data file to SSIS: and a Flat File Source Adapter to put it into the dataflow (no need a for a screenshot of that one – its very basic). Notice that the values that we want to unpivot all exist in a column called [Groceries]. Now onto the script component where the real work goes on, although the code is pretty simple: Here I show a screenshot of this executing along with some data viewers. As you can see we have successfully pulled out all of the values into a row all of their own thus accomplishing the Dynamic Unpivot that the forum poster was after. If you want to run the demo for yourself then I have uploaded the demo package and source file up to my SkyDrive: http://cid-550f681dad532637.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/BlogShare/20100529/Dynamic%20Unpivot.zip Simply extract the two files into a folder, make sure the Connection Manager is pointing to the file, and execute! Hope this is useful. @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Faceted search with Solr on Windows

  - by Dr.NETjes

  With over 10 million hits a day, funda.nl is probably the largest ASP.NET website which uses Solr on a Windows platform. While all our data (i.e. real estate properties) is stored in SQL Server, we're using Solr 1.4.1 to return the faceted search results as fast as we can.And yes, Solr is very fast. We did do some heavy stress testing on our Solr service, which allowed us to do over 1,000 req/sec on a single 64-bits Solr instance; and that's including converting search-url's to Solr http-queries and deserializing Solr's result-XML back to .NET objects! Let me tell you about faceted search and how to integrate Solr in a .NET/Windows environment. I'll bet it's easier than you think :-) What is faceted search? Faceted search is the clustering of search results into categories, allowing users to drill into search results. By showing the number of hits for each facet category, users can easily see how many results match that category. If you're still a bit confused, this example from CNET explains it all: The SQL solution for faceted search Our ("pre-Solr") solution for faceted search was done by adding a lot of redundant columns to our SQL tables and doing a COUNT(...) for each of those columns:   So if a user was searching for real estate properties in the city 'Amsterdam', our facet-query would be something like: SELECT COUNT(hasGarden), COUNT(has2Bathrooms), COUNT(has3Bathrooms), COUNT(etc...) FROM Houses WHERE city = 'Amsterdam' While this solution worked fine for a couple of years, it wasn't very easy for developers to add new facets. And also, performing COUNT's on all matched rows only performs well if you have a limited amount of rows in a table (i.e. less than a million). Enter Solr "Solr is an open source enterprise search server based on the Lucene Java search library, with XML/HTTP and JSON APIs, hit highlighting, faceted search, caching, replication, and a web administration interface." (quoted from Wikipedia's page on Solr) Solr isn't a database, it's more like a big index. Every time you upload data to Solr, it will analyze the data and create an inverted index from it (like the index-pages of a book). This way Solr can lookup data very quickly. To explain the inner workings of Solr is beyond the scope of this post, but if you want to learn more, please visit the Solr Wiki pages. Getting faceted search results from Solr is very easy; first let me show you how to send a http-query to Solr:    http://localhost:8983/solr/select?q=city:Amsterdam This will return an XML document containing the search results (in this example only three houses in the city of Amsterdam):    <response>     <result name="response" numFound="3" start="0">         <doc>            <long name="id">3203</long>            <str name="city">Amsterdam</str>            <str name="steet">Keizersgracht</str>            <int name="numberOfBathrooms">2</int>        </doc>         <doc>             <long name="id">3205</long>             <str name="city">Amsterdam</str>             <str name="steet">Vondelstraat</str>             <int name="numberOfBathrooms">3</int>          </doc>          <doc>             <long name="id">4293</long>             <str name="city">Amsterdam</str>             <str name="steet">Wibautstraat</str>             <int name="numberOfBathrooms">2</int>          </doc>       </result>   </response> By adding a facet-querypart for the field "numberOfBathrooms", Solr will return the facets for this particular field. We will see that there's one house in Amsterdam with three bathrooms and two houses with two bathrooms.    http://localhost:8983/solr/select?q=city:Amsterdam&facet=true&facet.field=numberOfBathrooms The complete XML response from Solr now looks like:    <response>      <result name="response" numFound="3" start="0">         <doc>            <long name="id">3203</long>            <str name="city">Amsterdam</str>            <str name="steet">Keizersgracht</str>            <int name="numberOfBathrooms">2</int>         </doc>         <doc>            <long name="id">3205</long>            <str name="city">Amsterdam</str>            <str name="steet">Vondelstraat</str>            <int name="numberOfBathrooms">3</int>         </doc>         <doc>            <long name="id">4293</long>            <str name="city">Amsterdam</str>            <str name="steet">Wibautstraat</str>            <int name="numberOfBathrooms">2</int>         </doc>      </result>      <lst name="facet_fields">         <lst name="numberOfBathrooms">            <int name="2">2</int>            <int name="3">1</int>         </lst>      </lst>   </response> Trying Solr for yourself To run Solr on your local machine and experiment with it, you should read the Solr tutorial. This tutorial really only takes 1 hour, in which you install Solr, upload sample data and get some query results. And yes, it works on Windows without a problem. Note that in the Solr tutorial, you're using Jetty as a Java Servlet Container (that's why you must start it using "java -jar start.jar"). In our environment we prefer to use Apache Tomcat to host Solr, which installs like a Windows service and works more like .NET developers expect. See the SolrTomcat page.Some best practices for running Solr on Windows: Use the 64-bits version of Tomcat. In our tests, this doubled the req/sec we were able to handle!Use a .NET XmlReader to convert Solr's XML output-stream to .NET objects. Don't use XPath; it won't scale well.Use filter queries ("fq" parameter) instead of the normal "q" parameter where possible. Filter queries are cached by Solr and will speed up Solr's response time (see FilterQueryGuidance)In my next post I’ll talk about how to keep Solr's indexed data in sync with the data in your SQL tables. Timestamps / rowversions will help you out here!

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• Kill your temp tables using keyboard shortcuts : SSMS

  - by jamiet

  Here’s a nifty little SSMS trick that my colleague Tom Hunter educated me on the other day and I thought it was worth sharing. If you’re a keyboard shortcut junkie then you’ll love it. How often when working with code in SSMS that contains temp tables do you see the following message: Msg 2714, Level 16, State 6, Line 78 There is already an object named '#table' in the database. Quite often I would imagine, it happens to me all the time! Usually I write a bit of code at the top of the query window that goes and drops the table if it exists but there’s a much easier way of dealing with it. Remember that temp tables disappear as soon as your sessions ends hence wouldn’t it be nice if there were a quick way of recycling (i.e. stopping and restarting) your session? Well turns out there is and all it takes is a sequence of 4 keystrokes: Bring up the context menu using that mythically-named button that usually sits 3 to the right of the space bar ‘C’ for “Connection” ‘H’ for “Change Connection…” ‘Enter’ to select the same connection you had open last time (screenshots below) Once you’ve done it a few times you’ll probably have the whole sequence down to less than a second. Such a simple little trick, I’m annoyed with myself for it not occurring to me before! The only caveat is that you’ll need a “USE <database>” directive at the top of your query window but I don’t think that’s much of a bind! That is all other than to say if you like little SSMS titbits like this then Lee Everest’s blog is a good one to keep an eye on! @jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• How to list column headers of a SQL Server table using sp_help perhaps?

  - by Hamish Grubijan

  Hi, I have a few tables with 70-80 columns in them. I would like to populate them with somewhat random data, unless I will not be able to do so due to key violation, etc. The first step would be simply to get the list of all headers. There seem to be two ways: A) Run select * from table_of_interest; in MSFT SQL Server Management Studio 2008. Now, right-click the result and click "Copy With headers". However, I get zero rows back, and when I try to copy nothing + headers, I get: TITLE: Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio ------------------------------ Value cannot be null. Parameter name: data (System.Windows.Forms) ------------------------------ BUTTONS: OK ------------------------------ This looks like a bug ... anyhow ... there is another way. B) I can run sp_help table_of_interest;. However, I end up getting too much back. I get 7 different tables back but I am only interested in the second one. The columns of the second table are: Column_name | Type | Computed | Length | Prec | Scale | Nullable | TrimTrailingBlanks | FixedLenNullInSource | Collation I might be interested in just a Column_name and Type, but maybe other columns. So ... since sp_help probably runs a bunch of queries ... how do I get under the hood? How can I run the second query AND filter down the number of columns that I am interested in? Many Thanks!

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• How to: Check which table is the biggest, in SQL Server

  - by AngelEyes

  The company I work with had it's DB double its size lately, so I needed to find out which tables were the biggest. I found this on the web, and decided it's worth remembering! Taken from http://www.sqlteam.com/article/finding-the-biggest-tables-in-a-database, the code is from http://www.sqlteam.com/downloads/BigTables.sql   /************************************************************************************** * *  BigTables.sql *  Bill Graziano (SQLTeam.com) *  [email protected] *  v1.1 * **************************************************************************************/ DECLARE @id INT DECLARE @type CHARACTER(2) DECLARE @pages INT DECLARE @dbname SYSNAME DECLARE @dbsize DEC(15, 0) DECLARE @bytesperpage DEC(15, 0) DECLARE @pagesperMB DEC(15, 0) CREATE TABLE #spt_space   (      objid    INT NULL,      ROWS     INT NULL,      reserved DEC(15) NULL,      data     DEC(15) NULL,      indexp   DEC(15) NULL,      unused   DEC(15) NULL   ) SET nocount ON -- Create a cursor to loop through the user tables DECLARE c_tables CURSOR FOR   SELECT id   FROM   sysobjects   WHERE  xtype = 'U' OPEN c_tables FETCH NEXT FROM c_tables INTO @id WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0   BEGIN       /* Code from sp_spaceused */       INSERT INTO #spt_space                   (objid,                    reserved)       SELECT objid = @id,              SUM(reserved)       FROM   sysindexes       WHERE  indid IN ( 0, 1, 255 )              AND id = @id       SELECT @pages = SUM(dpages)       FROM   sysindexes       WHERE  indid < 2              AND id = @id       SELECT @pages = @pages + Isnull(SUM(used), 0)       FROM   sysindexes       WHERE  indid = 255              AND id = @id       UPDATE #spt_space       SET    data = @pages       WHERE  objid = @id       /* index: sum(used) where indid in (0, 1, 255) - data */       UPDATE #spt_space       SET    indexp = (SELECT SUM(used)                        FROM   sysindexes                        WHERE  indid IN ( 0, 1, 255 )                               AND id = @id) - data       WHERE  objid = @id       /* unused: sum(reserved) - sum(used) where indid in (0, 1, 255) */       UPDATE #spt_space       SET    unused = reserved - (SELECT SUM(used)                                   FROM   sysindexes                                   WHERE  indid IN ( 0, 1, 255 )                                          AND id = @id)       WHERE  objid = @id       UPDATE #spt_space       SET    ROWS = i.ROWS       FROM   sysindexes i       WHERE  i.indid < 2              AND i.id = @id              AND objid = @id       FETCH NEXT FROM c_tables INTO @id   END SELECT TOP 25 table_name = (SELECT LEFT(name, 25)                             FROM   sysobjects                             WHERE  id = objid),               ROWS = CONVERT(CHAR(11), ROWS),               reserved_kb = Ltrim(Str(reserved * d.low / 1024., 15, 0) + ' ' + 'KB'),               data_kb = Ltrim(Str(data * d.low / 1024., 15, 0) + ' ' + 'KB'),               index_size_kb = Ltrim(Str(indexp * d.low / 1024., 15, 0) + ' ' + 'KB'),               unused_kb = Ltrim(Str(unused * d.low / 1024., 15, 0) + ' ' + 'KB') FROM   #spt_space,        MASTER.dbo.spt_values d WHERE  d.NUMBER = 1        AND d.TYPE = 'E' ORDER  BY reserved DESC DROP TABLE #spt_space CLOSE c_tables DEALLOCATE c_tables

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• It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice

  - by BuckWoody

  I’ve been a little “preachy” lately, telling you that you should let people finish their sentences, and always check a problem out before you tell a user that their issue is “impossible”. Well, I’ll round that out with one more tip today. Keep in mind that all of these things are actions I’ve been guilty of, hopefully in the past. I’m kind of a “work in progress”. And yes, I know these tips are coming from someone who picks on people in presentations, but that is of course done in fun, and (hopefully) with the audience’s knowledge.   (No, this isn’t aimed at any one person or event in particular – I just see it happen a lot)   I’ve seen, unfortunately over and over, someone in authority react badly to someone who is incorrect, or at least perceived to be incorrect. This might manifest itself in a comment, post, question or whatever, but the point is that I’ve seen really intelligent people literally attack someone they view as getting something wrong. Don’t misunderstand me; if someone posts that you should always drop a production database in the middle of the day I think you should certainly speak up and mention that this might be a bad idea!  No, I’m talking about generalizations or even incorrect statements done in good faith. Let me explain with an example.   Suppose someone makes the statement: “If you don’t have enough space on your system, you can just use a DBCC command to shrink the database”. Let’s take two responses to this statement.   Response One: “That’s insane. Everyone knows that shrinking a database is a stupid idea, you’re just going to fragment your indexes all over the place.” Response Two: “That’s an interesting take – in my experience and from what I’ve read here (someurl.com) I think this might not be a universal best practice.”   Of course, both responses let the person making the statement and those reading it know that you don’t agree, and that it’s probably wrong. But the person you responded to and the general audience hearing you (or reading your response) might form two different opinions of you.   The first response says to me “this person really needs to be right, and takes arguments personally. They aren’t thinking of the other person at all, or the folks reading or hearing the exchange. They turned an incorrect technical statement into a personal attack. They haven’t left the other party any room to ‘save face’, and they have potentially turned what could be a positive learning experience for everyone into a negative. Also, they sound more than just a little arrogant.”   The second response says to me “this person has left room for everyone to save face, has presented evidence to the contrary and is thinking about moving the ball forward and getting it right rather than attacking someone for getting it wrong.” It’s the idea of questioning a statement rather than attacking a person.   Perhaps you have a different take. Maybe you think the “direct” approach is best – and maybe that’s worked for you. Something to consider is what you’ve really accomplished while using that first method. Sure, the info you provide is correct, and perhaps someone out there won’t shrink a database because of your response – but perhaps you’ve turned a lot more people off, and now they won’t listen to your other valuable information. You’ll be an expert, but another one of the nameless, arrogant jerks in technology. And I don’t think anyone likes to be thought of that way.   OK, I’ll get down off of the high-horse now. And I’ll keep the title of this entry (said to me by my grandmother when I was a little kid) in mind when I dismount. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice

  - by BuckWoody

  I’ve been a little “preachy” lately, telling you that you should let people finish their sentences, and always check a problem out before you tell a user that their issue is “impossible”. Well, I’ll round that out with one more tip today. Keep in mind that all of these things are actions I’ve been guilty of, hopefully in the past. I’m kind of a “work in progress”. And yes, I know these tips are coming from someone who picks on people in presentations, but that is of course done in fun, and (hopefully) with the audience’s knowledge.   (No, this isn’t aimed at any one person or event in particular – I just see it happen a lot)   I’ve seen, unfortunately over and over, someone in authority react badly to someone who is incorrect, or at least perceived to be incorrect. This might manifest itself in a comment, post, question or whatever, but the point is that I’ve seen really intelligent people literally attack someone they view as getting something wrong. Don’t misunderstand me; if someone posts that you should always drop a production database in the middle of the day I think you should certainly speak up and mention that this might be a bad idea!  No, I’m talking about generalizations or even incorrect statements done in good faith. Let me explain with an example.   Suppose someone makes the statement: “If you don’t have enough space on your system, you can just use a DBCC command to shrink the database”. Let’s take two responses to this statement.   Response One: “That’s insane. Everyone knows that shrinking a database is a stupid idea, you’re just going to fragment your indexes all over the place.” Response Two: “That’s an interesting take – in my experience and from what I’ve read here (someurl.com) I think this might not be a universal best practice.”   Of course, both responses let the person making the statement and those reading it know that you don’t agree, and that it’s probably wrong. But the person you responded to and the general audience hearing you (or reading your response) might form two different opinions of you.   The first response says to me “this person really needs to be right, and takes arguments personally. They aren’t thinking of the other person at all, or the folks reading or hearing the exchange. They turned an incorrect technical statement into a personal attack. They haven’t left the other party any room to ‘save face’, and they have potentially turned what could be a positive learning experience for everyone into a negative. Also, they sound more than just a little arrogant.”   The second response says to me “this person has left room for everyone to save face, has presented evidence to the contrary and is thinking about moving the ball forward and getting it right rather than attacking someone for getting it wrong.” It’s the idea of questioning a statement rather than attacking a person.   Perhaps you have a different take. Maybe you think the “direct” approach is best – and maybe that’s worked for you. Something to consider is what you’ve really accomplished while using that first method. Sure, the info you provide is correct, and perhaps someone out there won’t shrink a database because of your response – but perhaps you’ve turned a lot more people off, and now they won’t listen to your other valuable information. You’ll be an expert, but another one of the nameless, arrogant jerks in technology. And I don’t think anyone likes to be thought of that way.   OK, I’ll get down off of the high-horse now. And I’ll keep the title of this entry (said to me by my grandmother when I was a little kid) in mind when I dismount. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Cannot insert explicit value for identity column in table ‘table’ when IDENTITY_INSERT is set to OFF

  - by Derek D.

  This error occurs when trying to insert into a column containing an identity. An Identity column is not able to be inserted into without the use of a special command mentioned below. Identity columns are columns that automatically increment when a value is inserted into a row. They are commonly used [...]

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• How I use schemas.

  - by Alexander Kuznetsov

  I use schemas to simplify granting permissions. For tables and views, I have three schemas: Data, the actual data my customers need. Can only be modified via sprocs. Staging, only visible to data loaders and devs. Full privileges on INSERT?UPDATE/DELETE for those who see it. Config, the configuration data used in loads, only visible to data loaders and devs. Can only be modified via sprocs. For sprocs/UDFs I have the following schemas: Readers Writers ETL ConfigReaders ConfigWriters Also I have dbo...(read more)

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• FileNameColumnName property, Flat File Source Adapter : SSIS Nugget

  - by jamiet

  I saw a question on MSDN’s SSIS forum the other day that went something like this: I’m loading data into a table from a flat file but I want to be able to store the name of that file as well. Is there a way of doing that? I don’t want to come across as disrespecting those who took the time to reply but there was a few answers along the lines of “loop over the files using a For Each, store the file name in a variable yadda yadda yadda” when in fact there is a much much simpler way of accomplishing this; it just happens to be a little hidden away as I shall now explain! The Flat File Source Adapter has a property called FileNameColumnName which for some reason it isn’t exposed through the Flat File Source editor, it is however exposed via the Advanced Properties: You’ll see in the screenshot above that I have set FileNameColumnName=“Filename” (it doesn’t matter what name you use, anything except a non-zero string will work). What this will do is create a new column in our dataflow called “Filename” that contains, unsurprisingly, the name of the file from which the row was sourced. All very simple. This is particularly useful if you are extracting data from multiple files using the MultiFlatFile Connection Manager as it allows you to differentiate between data from each of the files as you can see in the following screenshot: So there you have it, the FileNameColumnName property; a little known secret of SSIS. I hope it proves to be useful to someone out there. @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Windows and SQL Azure Best Practices: Affinity Groups

  - by BuckWoody

  When you create a Windows Azure application, you’ll pick a subscription to put it under. This is a billing container - underneath that, you’ll deploy a Hosted Service. That holds the Web and Worker Roles that you’ll deploy for your applications. along side that, you use the Storage Account to create storage for the application. (In some cases, you might choose to use only storage or Roles - the info here applies anyway) As you are setting up your environment, you’re asked to pick a “region” where your application will run. If you choose a Region, you’ll be asked where to put the Roles. You’re given choices like Asia, North America and so on. This is where the hardware that physically runs your code lives. We have lots of fault domains, power considerations and so on to keep that set of datacenters running, but keep in mind that this is where the application lives. You also get this selection for Storage Accounts. When you make new storage, it’s a best practice to put it where your computing is. This makes the shortest path from the code to the data, and then back out to the user. One of the selections for the location is “Anywhere U.S.”. This selection might be interpreted to mean that we will bias towards keeping the data and the code together, but that may not be the case. There is a specific abstraction we created for just that purpose: Affinity Groups. An Affinity Group is simply a name you can use to tie together resources. You can do this in two places - when you’re creating the Hosted Service (shown above) and on it’s own tree item on the left, called “Affinity Groups”. When you select either of those actions, You’re presented with a dialog box that allows you to specify a name, and then the Region that  names ties the resources to. Now you can select that Affinity Group just as if it were a Region, and your code and data will stay together. That helps with keeping the performance high. Official Documentation: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/hh531560.aspx

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• Enforce SSIS naming conventions using BI-xPress

  - by jamiet

  A long long long time ago (in 2006 in fact) I published a blog post entitled Suggested Best Practises and naming conventions in which I suggested a bunch of acronyms that folks could use to prefix object names in their SSIS packages, thus allowing easier identification of those objects in log records, here is a sample of some of those suggestions: If you have adopted these naming conventions (and I am led to believe that a bunch of people have) then you might like to know that you can now check for adherence to these conventions using a tool called BI-xPress from Pragmatic Works. BI-xPress includes a feature called the Best Practices Analyzer that scans your packages and assess them according to some rules that you specify. In addition Pragmatic Works have made available a collection of these rules that adhere to the naming conventions I specified in 2006 You can download this collection however I recommend you first read the accompanying article that demonstrates the capabilities of the Best Practices Analyzer. Pretty cool stuff. @Jamiet

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• Getting It Right The First Time

  - by andyleonard

  Introduction This post is the seventeenth 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 This post is about getting software right...(read more)

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• R2 is RTMd!

  - by DavidWimbush

  Check it out: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/sqlserver/default.aspx No sign at MSDN downloads yet :(

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• Speaking at PASS 2012… Exciting and Scary… As usual…

  - by drsql

  Edit: As I reread this, I felt I should clarify.. As usual refers mostly to the "Scary" part. I have a lot of stage fright that I have to work through. And it is always exciting to be picked. I have been selected this year at the PASS Summit 2012 to do two sessions, and they are both going to be interesting. Pre-Con: Relational Database Design Workshop - Abstract Triggers: Born Evil or Misunderstood? - Abstract The pre-con session entitled Relational Database Design Workshop will be (at least) the...(read more)

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• Database Change Management - Setup for Initial Create Scripts, Subsequent Migration Scripts

  - by Martin Aatmaa

  I've got a database change management workflow in place. It's based on SQL scripts (so, it's not a managed code-based solution). The basic setup looks like this: Initial/ Generate Initial Schema.sql Generate Initial Required Data.sql Generate Initial Test Data.sql Migration 0001_MigrationScriptForChangeOne.sql 0002_MigrationScriptForChangeTwo.sql ... The process to spin up a database is to then run all the Initlal scripts, and then run the sequential Migration scripts. A tool takes case of the versioning requirements, etc. My question is, in this kind of setup, is it useful to also maintain this: Current/ Stored Procedures/ dbo.MyStoredProcedureCreateScript.sql ... Tables/ dbo.MyTableCreateScript.sql ... ... By "this" I mean a directory of scripts (separated by object type) that represents the create scripts for spinning up the current/latest version of the database. For some reason, I really like the idea, but I can't concretely justify it's need. Am I missing something? The advantages would be: For dev and source control, we would have the same object-per-file setup that we're used to For deployment, we can spin up a new DB instance to the latest version either by running the Initial+Migrate, or by running the scripts from Current/ For dev, we do not need a DB instance running in order to do development. We can do "offline" development on the Current/ folder. The disadvantages would be: For each change, we need to update the scripts in the Current/ folder, as well as create a Migration script (in the Migration/ folder) Thanks in advance for any input!

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• Book Review: Pro SQL Server 2008 Relational Database Design and Implementation

  - by Alexander Kuznetsov

  Investing in proper database design is a very efficient way to cut maintenance costs. If we expect a system to last, we need to make sure it has a good solid foundation - high quality database design. Surely we can and sometimes do cut corners and save on database design to get things done faster. Unfortunately, such cutting corners frequently comes back and bites us: we may end up spending a lot of time solving issues caused by poor design. So, solid understanding of relational database design is...(read more)

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• Introducing SQLPeople - the Blog Series!

  - by andyleonard

  Introduction The first 50.5 weeks of 2010 have been interesting, to say the least. My experiences in 2010 can best be summed up in a single word: educational. I've learned a lot this year! One important thread wove its way through my 2010 experiences... Relationships Are Everything How we interact defines community. Relationships define community. Our community is more than the sum of our members. Trust and respect are the capital of community. And just like money, this capital can be invested, exchanged,...(read more)

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• The penultimate audit trigger framework

  - by Piotr Rodak

  So, it’s time to see what I came up with after some time of playing with COLUMNS_UPDATED() and bitmasks. The first part of this miniseries describes the mechanics of the encoding which columns are updated within DML operation. The task I was faced with was to prepare an audit framework that will be fairly easy to use. The audited tables were to be the ones directly modified by user applications, not the ones heavily used by batch or ETL processes. The framework consists of several tables and procedures...(read more)

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• July, the 31 Days of SQL Server DMO’s – Day 22 (sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats)

  - by Tamarick Hill

  The sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats Dynamic Management Function is used to return information about the fragmentation levels, page counts, depth, number of levels, record counts, etc. about the indexes on your database instance. One row is returned for each level in a given index, which we will discuss more later. The function takes a total of 5 input parameters which are (1) database_id, (2) object_id, (3) index_id, (4) partition_number, and (5) the mode of the scan level that you would like to run. Let’s use this function with our AdventureWorks2012 database to better illustrate the information it provides. SELECT * FROM sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats(db_id('AdventureWorks2012'), NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL) As you can see from the result set, there is a lot of beneficial information returned from this DMF. The first couple of columns in the result set (database_id, object_id, index_id, partition_number, index_type_desc, alloc_unit_type_desc) are either self-explanatory or have been explained in our previous blog sessions so I will not go into detail about these at this time. The next column in the result set is the index_depth which represents how deep the index goes. For example, If we have a large index that contains 1 root page, 3 intermediate levels, and 1 leaf level, our index depth would be 5. The next column is the index_level which refers to what level (of the depth) a particular row is referring to. Next is probably one of the most beneficial columns in this result set, which is the avg_fragmentation_in_percent. This column shows you how fragmented a particular level of an index may be. Many people use this column within their index maintenance jobs to dynamically determine whether they should do REORG’s or full REBUILD’s of a given index. The fragment count represents the number of fragments in a leaf level while the avg_fragment_size_in_pages represents the number of pages in a fragment. The page_count column tells you how many pages are in a particular index level. From my result set above, you see the the remaining columns all have NULL values. This is because I did not specify a ‘mode’ in my query and as a result it used the ‘LIMITED’ mode by default. The LIMITED mode is meant to be lightweight so it does collect information for every column in the result set. I will re-run my query again using the ‘DETAILED’ mode and you will see we now have results for these rows. SELECT * FROM sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats(db_id('AdventureWorks2012'), NULL, NULL, NULL, ‘DETAILED’)   From the remaining columns, you see we get even more detailed information such as how many records are in a particular index level (record_count). We have a column for ghost_record_count which represents the number of records that have been marked for deletion, but have not physically been removed by the background ghost cleanup process. We later see information on the MIN, MAX, and AVG record size in bytes. The forwarded_record_count column refers to records that have been updated and now no longer fit within the row on the page anymore and thus have to be moved. A forwarded record is left in the original location with a pointer to the new location. The last column in the result set is the compressed_page_count column which tells you how many pages in your index have been compressed. This is a very powerful DMF that returns good information about the current indexes in your system. However, based on the mode you select, it could be a very resource intensive function so be careful with how you use it. For more information on this Dynamic Management Function, please see the below Books Online link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms188917.aspx Follow me on Twitter @PrimeTimeDBA

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