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• MySQL Connector/Net 6.8.0 alpha has been released

  - by Roberto Garcia

  Dear MySQL users, MySQL Connector/Net 6.8.0, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released. This is an alpha release for 6.8.x and it's not recommended for production environments.It is appropriate for use with MySQL server versions 5.0-5.6 It is now available in source and binary form from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/#downloads and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point-if you can't find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.) The 6.8.0 version of MySQL Connector/Net has support for Entity Framework 6.0 including: - Async Query and Save- Code-Based Configuration- Dependency Resolution- DbSet.AddRange/RemoveRange- Code First Mapping to Insert/Update/Delete Stored Procedures - Configurable Migrations History Table- DbContext can now be created with a DbConnection that is already opened- Custom Code First Conventions The release is available to download at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/#downloads Documentation-------------------------------------You can view current Connector/Net documentation at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/connector-net.html You can find our team blog at http://blogs.oracle.com/MySQLOnWindows You can also post questions on our forums at http://forums.mysql.com/ Enjoy and thanks for the support! Connector/NET Team

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• My Reference for Amy Lewis

  - by Denise McInerney

  The 2013 election campaign for the PASS Board of Directors is underway. There are seven qualified candidates running this year. They all offer a wealth of experience volunteering for PASS and the SQL Server community. One of these candidates, Amy Lewis, asked me to write a reference for her to include on her candidate application. I have a lot of experience working with Amy and was pleased to provide this reference: I enthusiastically support Amy Lewis as a candidate for the PASS Board of Directors. I have known and worked with Amy in various PASS' volunteer capacities for years, starting when we were both leaders of SIGs (the precursors to the Virtual Chapters.) In that time I have seen Amy grow as a leader, taking on increasing responsibility and developing her leadership skills in the process. From the Program Committee to the BI Virtual Chapter to her local user group's SQL Saturday Amy has demonstrated a capacity to organize and lead volunteers. A successful leader delivers results, and does so in a way that encourages and empowers the people she is working with; Amy embodies this leadership style. As Director for Virtual Chapters I have most recently worked with Amy in her capacity of DW/BI VC Leader. This VC is one of our largest and most active, and Amy's leadership is a key contribution to that success. I was pleased to see that Amy was also thinking about succession and prepared other volunteers to take over the chapter leadership. Amy has shown an understanding of PASS' strategic goals and has focused her volunteer efforts to help us reach those goals. For the past couple of years we have been trying to expand PASS reach and relevance to SQL communities around the world. The VCs are a key vehicle for this expansion. Amy embraced this idea and organized the VC to engage volunteers in Europe & Australia and provide content that could reach SQL professionals in those regions. A second key strategy for PASS is expanding into the data analytics space. Again Amy rose to the occasion helping to shape the program for our first Business Analytics Conference and leveraging the BI VC to promote the event. By all measures I think Amy is prepared to serve on the Board and contribute in a positive way.

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• 65536% Autogrowth!

  - by Tara Kizer

  Twice a year, we move our production systems to our disaster recovery site.  Last Saturday night was one of those days.  There are about 50 SQL Server databases to be moved to the DR site, which is done via database mirroring.  It takes only a few seconds to failover, but some databases have a bit more involved work such as setting up replication.  Everything went relatively smooth, but we encountered a weird bug on our most mission critical system.  After everything was successfully failed over to the DR site, it was noticed that mirroring was in a suspended state on one of the databases.  We thought we had run into a SQL Server 2005 bug that we had been encountering and were working with Microsoft on a fix.  Microsoft did fix it in both SQL Server 2005 service pack 3 cumulative update package 13 and service pack 4 cumulative update package 2, however SP3 CU13 and SP4 both recently failed on this system so we were not patched yet with the bug fix.  As the suspended state was causing us issues with replication, we dropped mirroring.  We then noticed we had 10MB of free disk space on the mount point where the principal’s data files are stored.  I knew something went amiss as this system should have at least 150GB free on that mount point.  I immediately checked the main database’s data file and was shocked to see an autgrowth size of 65536%.  The data file autogrew right before mirroring went into the suspended state. 65536%! I didn’t have a lot of time to research if this autgrowth problem was a known SQL Server bug, so I deferred that research to today.  A quick Google search yielded no results but emphasis on “quick”.  I checked our performance system, which was recently restored with a copy of the affected production database, and found the autogrowth setting to be 512MB.  So this autogrowth bug was encountered sometime in the last two weeks.  On February 26th, we had attempted to install SQL 2005 SP4 on production, however it had failed (PSS case open with Microsoft).  I suspected that the SP4 failure was somehow related to this autgrowth bug although that turned out not to be the case. I then tweeted (@TaraKizer) about this problem to see if the SQL Server community (#sqlhelp) had any insights.  It seems several people have either heard of this bug or encountered it.  Aaron Bertrand (blog|twitter) referred me to this Connect item. Our affected database originated on SQL Server 2000 and was upgraded to SQL Server 2005 in 2007.  Back on SQL Server 2000, we were using the default file growth setting which was a percentage.  Sometime after the 2005 upgrade is when we changed it to 512MB.  Our situation seemed to fit the bug Aaron referred to me, so now the question was whether Microsoft had fixed it yet. I received a reply to my tweet from Amit Banerjee (twitter) that it had been fixed in SP3 CU1 (KB958004).  My affected system is SP3 CU8, so I was initially confused why we had encountered the bug.  Because I don’t read things fully, I had missed that there are additional steps you have to follow after applying the bug fix.  Amit set me straight.  Although you can read this information in the KB article, I will also copy it here in case you are as lazy as me and miss the most important section of it (although if you are as lazy as me, you won’t have read this far down my blog post): This hotfix will prevent only future occurrences of this problem. For example, if you restore a database from SQL Server 2000 to a SQL Server 2005 instance that contains this hotfix, this problem will not occur. However, if you already have a database that is affected by this problem, you must follow these steps to resolve this problem manually: Apply this hotfix. Set the file growth settings for the affected files to percentage settings, and then set the settings back to megabyte settings. Take the database offline, and then bring it back online. Verify that the values of the is_percent_growth column are correct in the sys.database_files system table and in the sys.master_files system table.

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• SQL MDS - Updating the Name attribute of member using Staging Table

  - by Randy Aldrich Paulo

  Creating member is usually done by populating the Member Staging Table (tblStgMember), during this process you assign a value for member code and member name. Now if you want to update the member name attribute you can do this by adding record in Attribute staging table (tblStgMemberAttribute) with Attribute Name = "Name". If you try populating the tblStgMember table it will say that the member code already exists.   INSERT INTO mdm.tblStgMemberAttribute (ModelName, EntityName, MemberType_ID, MemberCode, AttributeName, AttributeValue) VALUES (N'Product', N'Product', 1, N'BK-M101', N'Name',N'Updated Member Name Description')

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• New release of &quot;OLAP PivotTable Extensions&quot;

  - by Luca Zavarella

  For those who are not familiar with this add-in, the OLAP PivotTable Extensions add features of interest to Excel 2007 or 2010 PivotTables pointing to an OLAP cube in Analysis Services. One of these features I like very much, is to know the MDX query code associated with the pivot used at that time in Excel: You can find all the details here: http://olappivottableextend.codeplex.com/ It was recently released a new version of the add-in (version 0.7.4), which does not introduce any new features, but fixes a significant bug: Release 0.7.4 now properly handles languages but introduces no new features. International users who run a different Windows language than their Excel UI language may be receiving an error message when they double click a cell and perform drillthrough which reads: "XML for Analysis parser: The LocaleIdentifier property is not overwritable and cannot be assigned a new value". This error was caused by OLAP PivotTable Extensions in some situations, but release 0.7.4 fixes this problem. Enjoy!

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• How can we stop GitHub from emailing too many people too much? [migrated]

  - by Michael Bishop

  I recently joined a research team that uses R and Git/GitHub. The team includes 4 full-time R programmers and 10 social scientists who only run simple analyses. I was told by one of the more experienced programmers on the project that they haven't found a way to use many of GitHub's tools for collaboration (bug reports, to-do lists, code comments, etc.) because they generate emails to everyone who is a contributor to the repo every time. This is incredibly puzzling to me, so I'd love to hear from someone that there are ways to adjust the email settings. I'd expect there would be multiple ways, so that individuals could opt-in or opt-out of certain emails, and also so contributors could explicitly choose whether certain people get certain emails or not. Is it possible to adjust these settings?

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• PASS Summit 2011 &ndash; Part II

  - by Tara Kizer

  I arrived in Seattle last Monday afternoon to attend PASS Summit 2011.  I had really wanted to attend Gail Shaw’s (blog|twitter) and Grant Fritchey’s (blog|twitter) pre-conference seminar “All About Execution Plans” on Monday, but that would have meant flying out on Sunday which I couldn’t do.  On Tuesday, I attended Allan Hirt’s (blog|twitter) pre-conference seminar entitled “A Deep Dive into AlwaysOn: Failover Clustering and Availability Groups”.  Allan is a great speaker, and his seminar was packed with demos and information about AlwaysOn in SQL Server 2012.  Unfortunately, I have lost my notes from this seminar and the presentation materials are only available on the pre-con DVD.  Hmpf! On Wednesday, I attended Gail Shaw’s “Bad Plan! Sit!”, Andrew Kelly’s (blog|twitter) “SQL 2008 Query Statistics”, Dan Jones’ (blog|twitter) “Improving your PowerShell Productivity”, and Brent Ozar’s (blog|twitter) “BLITZ! The SQL – More One Hour SQL Server Takeovers”.  In Gail’s session, she went over how to fix bad plans and bad query patterns.  Update your stale statistics! How to fix bad plans Use local variables – optimizer can’t sniff it, so it’ll optimize for “average” value Use RECOMPILE (at the query or stored procedure level) – CPU hit OPTIMIZE FOR hint – most common value you’ll pass How to fix bad query patterns Don’t use them – ha! Catch-all queries Use dynamic SQL OPTION (RECOMPILE) Multiple execution paths Split into multiple stored procedures OPTION (RECOMPILE) Modifying parameter values Use local variables Split into outer and inner procedure OPTION (RECOMPILE) She also went into “last resort” and “very last resort” options, but those are risky unless you know what you are doing.  For the average Joe, she wouldn’t recommend these.  Examples are query hints and plan guides. While I enjoyed Andrew’s session, I didn’t take any notes as it was familiar material.  Andrew is a great speaker though, and I’d highly recommend attending his sessions in the future. Next up was Dan’s PowerShell session.  I need to look into profiles, manifests, function modules, and function import scripts more as I just didn’t quite grasp these concepts.  I am attending a PowerShell training class at the end of November, so maybe that’ll help clear it up.  I really enjoyed the Excel integration demo.  It was very cool watching PowerShell build the spreadsheet in real-time.  I must look into this more!  On a side note, I am jealous of Dan’s hair.  Fabulous hair! Brent’s session showed us how to quickly gather information about a server that you will be taking over database administration duties for.  He wrote a script to do a fast health check and then later wrapped it into a stored procedure, sp_Blitz.  I can’t wait to use this at my work even on systems where I’ve been the primary DBA for years, maybe there’s something I’ve overlooked.  We are using EPM to help standardize our environment and uncover problems, but sp_Blitz will definitely still help us out.  He even provides a cloud-based update feature, sp_BlitzUpdate, for sp_Blitz so you don’t have to constantly update it when he makes a change.  I think I’ll utilize his update code for some other challenges that we face at my work.

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• My First Weeks at Red Gate

  - by Jess Nickson

  Hi, my name’s Jess and early September 2012 I started working at Red Gate as a Software Engineer down in The Agency (the Publishing team). This was a bit of a shock, as I didn’t think this team would have any developers! I admit, I was a little worried when it was mentioned that my role was going to be different from normal dev. roles within the company. However, as luck would have it, I was placed within a team that was responsible for the development and maintenance of Simple-Talk and SQL Server Central (SSC). I felt rather unprepared for this role. I hadn’t used many of the technologies involved and of those that I had, I hadn’t looked at them for quite a while. I was, nevertheless, quite excited about this turn of events. As I had predicted, the role has been quite challenging so far. I expected that I would struggle to get my head round the large codebase already in place, having never used anything so much as a fraction of the size of this before. However, I was perhaps a bit naive when it came to how quickly things would move. I was required to start learning/remembering a number of different languages and technologies within time frames I would never have tried to set myself previously. Having said that, my first week was pretty easy. It was filled with meetings that were designed to get the new starters up to speed with the different departments, ideals and rules within the company. I also attended some lightning talks being presented by other employees, which were pretty useful. These occur once a fortnight and normally consist of around four speakers. In my spare time, we set up the Simple-Talk codebase on my computer and I started exploring it and worked on my first feature – redirecting requests for URLs that used incorrect casing! It was also during this time that I was given my first introduction to test-driven development (TDD) with Michael via a code kata. Although I had heard of the general ideas behind TDD, I had definitely never tried it before. Indeed, I hadn’t really done any automated testing of code before, either. The session was therefore very useful and gave me insights as to some of the coding practices used in my team. Although I now understand the importance of TDD, it still seems odd in my head and I’ve yet to master how to sensibly step up the functionality of the code a bit at a time. The second week was both easier and more difficult than the first. I was given a new project to work on, meaning I was no longer using the codebase already in place. My job was to take some designs, a WordPress theme, and some initial content and build a page that allowed users of the site to read provided resources and give feedback. This feedback could include their thoughts about the resource, the topics covered and the page design itself. Although it didn’t sound the most challenging of projects when compared to fixing bugs in our current codebase, it nevertheless provided a few sneaky problems that had me stumped. I really enjoyed working on this project as it allowed me to play around with HTML, CSS and JavaScript; all things that I like working with but rarely have a chance to use. I completed the aims for the project on time and was happy with the final outcome – though it still needs a good designer to take a look at it! I am now into my third week at Red Gate and I have temporarily been pulled off the website from week 2. I am again back to figuring out the Simple-Talk codebase. Monday provided me with the chance to learn a bunch of new things: system level testing, Selenium and Python. I was set the challenge of testing a bug fix dealing with the search bars in Simple-Talk. The exercise was pretty fun, although Mike did have to point me in the right direction when I started making the tests a bit too complex. The rest of the week looks set to be focussed on pair programming with Mike as we work together on a new feature. I look forward to the challenges that still face me and hope that I will be able to get up to speed quickly. *fingers crossed*

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• Too Clever for My Own Good

  - by AjarnMark

  Yesterday I caught myself being a little too clever for my own good with some ASP.NET code.  It seems that I have forgotten some of my good old classic HTML and JavaScript skills, and become too dependent on the .NET Framework and WebControls to do the work for me.  Here’s the scenario… In order to improve the User Interface and better communicate to the user when something is happening that they need to wait for, we have started to modify some of our larger (slower) pages to display messages like Processing… or Reloading… while they are cycling through a postback.  (Yes, I understand this could be improved by using AJAX / Callbacks and so on, but even then, you need to let your user know that they need to wait for that section to be re-rendered, so for the moment these pages will continue to use good ol’ Postbacks.)  It’s a very simple trick, really.  All I want to do is when some control triggers a postback, first run a little client-side JavaScript to hide the main contents of the page (such as a GridView) and display the appropriate message.  This lets the user know, “Hey, we’re doing something, don’t click another link or scroll and try to take action right now.” The first places I hooked this up were easy.  Most common cause of a postback:  Buttons.  And when you’re writing the markup or declarative code for an ASP:Button control, there is the handy OnClientClick property which is designed for just this purpose…to run client-side JavaScript before the postback occurs.  This is distinguished from the OnClick property which tells the control what Server-side code to run.  Great!  Done!  Easy! But then there are other controls like DropDownLists and CheckBoxes that we use on our pages with the AutoPostback=True setting which cause postbacks.  And these don’t have OnClientClick or OnClientSelectedIndexChanged events.  So I started getting creative, using an ASP:CustomValidator control in conjunction with setting the CausesValidation and ValidationGroup settings on these controls, which basically caused the action on the control to fire the Custom Validator, which was defined with a Client Side validation function which then did the hide content/show message code (and return a meaningless IsValid setting).  This also caused me to define a different ValidationGroup setting for my real data entry validator controls so that I could control them separately and only have them fire when I really wanted validation, and not just my show/hide trick. For a little while I was pretty proud of myself for coming up with this clever approach to get around what I considered to be a serious oversight on the DropDownList and CheckBox controls declarative syntax.  Then, in the midst of my smugness, just as I was about to commit my changes to the source code repository, it dawned on me that there is a much simpler and much more appropriate way to accomplish this.  All that I really needed to do was to put in my server-side code (I used the Page_Init section) a call to MyControl.Attributes.Add(“onClick”, “myJavaScriptFunctionName()”) for the checkboxes, and for the DropDownLists (which become select tags) use “onChange” instead of “onClick”.  This is exactly the type of thing that the Attributes collection is there for…so you can add attributes to be rendered with the control that you would have otherwise stuck right into the HTML markup if you had been doing this by hand in the first place. Ugh!  A few hours wasted on clever tricks that I ended up completely removing, but I did learn a lot more about custom validators and validation groups in the process.  And got a good reminder that all that stuff (HTML, JavaScript, and CSS) I learned back when I wrote classic ASP pages is still valuable today.  Oh, and one more thing…don’t get lulled into too much reliance on the the whiz-bang tool to do it for you.  After all, WebControls are just another layer of abstraction, and sometimes you need to dig down through the layers and get a little closer to the native language.

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• PASS: Bylaw Changes

  - by Bill Graziano

  While you’re reading this, a post should be going up on the PASS blog on the plans to change our bylaws.  You should be able to find our old bylaws, our proposed bylaws and a red-lined version of the changes.  We plan to listen to feedback until March 31st.  At that point we’ll decide whether to vote on these changes or take other action. The executive summary is that we’re adding a restriction to prevent more than two people from the same company on the Board and eliminating the Board’s Officer Appointment Committee to have Officers directly elected by the Board.  This second change better matches how officer elections have been conducted in the past. The Gritty Details Our scope was to change bylaws to match how PASS actually works and tackle a limited set of issues.  Changing the bylaws is hard.  We’ve been working on these changes since the March board meeting last year.  At that meeting we met and talked through the issues we wanted to address.  In years past the Board has tried to come up with language and then we’ve discussed and negotiated to get to the result.  In March, we gave HQ guidance on what we wanted and asked them to come up with a starting point.  Hannes worked on building us an initial set of changes that we could work our way through.  Discussing changes like this over email is difficult wasn’t very productive.  We do a much better job on this at the in-person Board meetings.  Unfortunately there are only 2 or 3 of those a year. In August we met in Nashville and spent time discussing the changes.  That was also the day after we released the slate for the 2010 election. The discussion around that colored what we talked about in terms of these changes.  We talked very briefly at the Summit and again reviewed and revised the changes at the Board meeting in January.  This is the result of those changes and discussions. We made numerous small changes to clean up language and make wording more clear.  We also made two big changes. Director Employment Restrictions The first is that only two people from the same company can serve on the Board at the same time.  The actual language in section VI.3 reads: A maximum of two (2) Directors who are employed by, or who are joint owners or partners in, the same for-profit venture, company, organization, or other legal entity, may concurrently serve on the PASS Board of Directors at any time. The definition of “employed” is at the sole discretion of the Board. And what a mess this turns out to be in practice.  Our membership is a hodgepodge of interlocking relationships.  Let’s say three Board members get together and start a blog service for SQL Server bloggers.  It’s technically for-profit.  Let’s assume it makes $8 in the first year.  Does that trigger this clause?  (Technically yes.)  We had a horrible time trying to write language that covered everything.  All the sample bylaws that we found were just as vague as this. That led to the third clause in this section.  The first sentence reads: The Board of Directors reserves the right, strictly on a case-by-case basis, to overrule the requirements of Section VI.3 by majority decision for any single Director’s conflict of employment. We needed some way to handle the trivial issues and exercise some judgment.  It seems like a public vote is the best way.  This discloses the relationship and gets each Board member on record on the issue.   In practice I think this clause will rarely be used.  I think this entire section will only be invoked for actual employment issues and not for small side projects.  In either case we have the mechanisms in place to handle it in a public, transparent way. That’s the first and third clauses.  The second clause says that if your situation changes and you fall afoul of this restriction you need to notify the Board.  The clause further states that if this new job means a Board members violates the “two-per-company” rule the Board may request their resignation.  The Board can also  allow the person to continue serving with a majority vote.  I think this will also take some judgment.  Consider a person switching jobs that leads to three people from the same company.  I’m very likely to ask for someone to resign if all three are two weeks into a two year term.  I’m unlikely to ask anyone to resign if one is two weeks away from ending their term.  In either case, the decision will be a public vote that we can be held accountable for. One concern that was raised was whether this would affect someone choosing to accept a job.  I think that’s a choice for them to make.  PASS is clearly stating its intent that only two directors from any one organization should serve at any time.  Once these bylaws are approved, this policy should not come as a surprise to any potential or current Board members considering a job change.  This clause isn’t perfect.  The biggest hole is business relationships that aren’t defined above.  Let’s say that two employees from company “X” serve on the Board.  What happens if I accept a full-time consulting contract with that company?  Let’s assume I’m working directly for one of the two existing Board members.  That doesn’t violate section VI.3.  But I think it’s clearly the kind of relationship we’d like to prevent.  Unfortunately that was even harder to write than what we have now.  I fully expect that in the next revision of the bylaws we’ll address this.  It just didn’t make it into this one. Officer Elections The officer election process received a slightly different rewrite.  Our goal was to codify in the bylaws the actual process we used to elect the officers.  The officers are the President, Executive Vice-President (EVP) and Vice-President of Marketing.  The Immediate Past President (IPP) is also an officer but isn’t elected.  The IPP serves in that role for two years after completing their term as President.  We do that for continuity’s sake.  Some organizations have a President-elect that serves for one or two years.  The group that founded PASS chose to have an IPP. When I started on the Board, the Nominating Committee (NomCom) selected the slate for the at-large directors and the slate for the officers.  There was always one candidate for each officer position.  It wasn’t really an election so much as the NomCom decided who the next person would be for each officer position.  Behind the scenes the Board worked to select the best people for the role. In June 2009 that process was changed to bring it line with what actually happens.  An Officer Appointment Committee was created that was a subset of the Board.  That committee would take time to interview the candidates and present a slate to the Board for approval.  The majority vote of the Board would determine the officers for the next two years.  In practice the Board itself interviewed the candidates and conducted the elections.  That means it was time to change the bylaws again. Section VII.2 and VII.3 spell out the process used to select the officers.  We use the phrase “Officer Appointment” to separate it from the Director election but the end result is that the Board elects the officers.  Section VII.3 starts: Officers shall be appointed bi-annually by a majority of all the voting members of the Board of Directors. Everything else revolves around that sentence.  We use the word appoint but they truly are elected.  There are details in the bylaws for term limits, minimum requirements for President (1 prior term as an officer), tie breakers and filling vacancies. In practice we will have an election for President, then an election for EVP and then an election for VP Marketing.  That means that losing candidates will be able to fall down the ladder and run for the next open position.  Another point to note is that officers aren’t at-large directors.  That means if a current sitting officer loses all three elections they are off the Board.  Having Board member votes public will help with the transparency of this approach. This process has a number of positive and negatives.  The biggest concern I expect to hear is that our members don’t directly choose the officers.  I’m going to try and list all the positives and negatives of this approach. Many non-profits value continuity and are slower to change than a business.  On the plus side this promotes that.  On the negative side this promotes that.  If we change too slowly the members complain that we aren’t responsive.  If we change too quickly we make mistakes and fail at various things.  We’ve been criticized for both of those lately so I’m not entirely sure where to draw the line.  My rough assumption to this point is that we’re going too slow on governance and too quickly on becoming “more than a Summit.”  This approach creates competition in the officer elections.  If you are an at-large director there is no consequence to losing an election.  If you are an officer the only way to stay on the Board is to win an officer election or an at-large election.  If you are an officer and lose an election you can always run for the next office down.  This makes it very easy for multiple people to contest an election. There is value in a person moving through the officer positions up to the Presidency.  Having the Board select the officers promotes this.  The down side is that it takes a LOT of time to get to the Presidency.  We’ve had good people struggle with burnout.  We’ve had lots of discussion around this.  The process as we’ve described it here makes it possible for someone to move quickly through the ranks but doesn’t prevent people from working their way up through each role. We talked long and hard about having the officers elected by the members.  We had a self-imposed deadline to complete these changes prior to elections this summer. The other challenge was that our original goal was to make the bylaws reflect our actual process rather than create a new one.  I believe we accomplished this goal. We ran out of time to consider this option in the detail it needs.  Having member elections for officers needs a number of problems solved.  We would need a way for candidates to fall through the election.  This is what promotes competition.  Without this few people would risk an election and we’ll be back to one candidate per slot.  We need to do this without having multiple elections.  We may be able to copy what other organizations are doing but I was surprised at how little I could find on other organizations.  We also need a way for people that lose an officer election to win an at-large election.  Otherwise we’ll have very little competition for officers. This brings me to an area that I think we as a Board haven’t done a good job.  We haven’t built a strong process to tell you who is doing a good job and who isn’t.  This is a double-edged sword.  I don’t want to highlight Board members that are failing.  That’s not a good way to get people to volunteer and run for the Board.  But I also need a way let the members make an informed choice about who is doing a good job and would make a good officer.  Encouraging Board members to blog, publishing minutes and making votes public helps in that regard but isn’t the final answer.  I don’t know what the final answer is yet.  I do know that the Board members themselves are uniquely positioned to know which other Board members are doing good work.  They know who speaks up in meetings, who works to build consensus, who has good ideas and who works with the members.  What I Could Do Better I’ve learned a lot writing this about how we communicated with our members.  The next time we revise the bylaws I’d do a few things differently.  The biggest change would be to provide better documentation.  The March 2009 minutes provide a very detailed look into what changes we wanted to make to the bylaws.  Looking back, I’m a little surprised at how closely they matched our final changes and covered the various arguments.  If you just read those you’d get 90% of what we eventually changed.  Nearly everything else was just details around implementation.  I’d also consider publishing a scope document defining exactly what we were doing any why.  I think it really helped that we had a limited, defined goal in mind.  I don’t think we did a good job communicating that goal outside the meeting minutes though. That said, I wish I’d blogged more after the August and January meeting.  I think it would have helped more people to know that this change was coming and to be ready for it. Conclusion These changes address two big concerns that the Board had.  First, it prevents a single organization from dominating the Board.  Second, it codifies and clearly spells out how officers are elected.  This is the process that was previously followed but it was somewhat murky.  These changes bring clarity to this and clearly explain the process the Board will follow. We’re going to listen to feedback until March 31st.  At that time we’ll decide whether to approve these changes.  I’m also assuming that we’ll start another round of changes in the next year or two.  Are there other issues in the bylaws that we should tackle in the future?

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• PASS: Election Changes for 2011

  - by Bill Graziano

  Last year after the election, the PASS Board created an Election Review Committee.  This group was charged with reviewing our election procedures and making suggestions to improve the process.  You can read about the formation of the group and review some of the intermediate work on the site – especially in the forums. I was one of the members of the group along with Joe Webb (Chair), Lori Edwards, Brian Kelley, Wendy Pastrick, Andy Warren and Allen White.  This group worked from October to April on our election process.  Along the way we: Interviewed interested parties including former NomCom members, Board candidates and anyone else that came forward. Held a session at the Summit to allow interested parties to discuss the issues Had numerous conference calls and worked through the various topics I can’t thank these people enough for the work they did.  They invested a tremendous number of hours thinking, talking and writing about our elections.  I’m proud to say I was a member of this group and thoroughly enjoyed working with everyone (even if I did finally get tired of all the calls.) The ERC delivered their recommendations to the PASS Board prior to our May Board meeting.  We reviewed those and made a few modifications.  I took their recommendations and rewrote them as procedures while incorporating those changes.  Their original recommendations as well as our final document are posted at the ERC documents page.  Please take a second and read them BEFORE we start the elections.  If you have any questions please post them in the forums on the ERC site. (My final document includes a change log at the end that I decided to leave in.  If you want to know which areas to pay special attention to that’s a good start.) Many of those recommendations were already posted in the forums or in the blogs of individual ERC members.  Hopefully nothing in the ERC document is too surprising. In this post I’m going to walk through some of the key changes and talk about what I remember from both ERC and Board discussions.  I’ll pay a little extra attention to things the Board changed from the ERC.  I’d also encourage any of the Board or ERC members to blog their thoughts on this. The Nominating Committee will continue to exist.  Personally, I was curious to see what the non-Board ERC members would think about the NomCom.  There was broad agreement that a group to vet candidates had value to the organization. The NomCom will be composed of five members.  Two will be Board members and three will be from the membership at large.  The only requirement for the three community members is that you’ve volunteered in some way (and volunteering is defined very broadly).  We expect potential at-large NomCom members to participate in a forum on the PASS site to answer questions from the other PASS members. We’re going to hold an election to determine the three community members.  It will be closer to voting for Summit sessions than voting for Board members.  That means there won’t be multiple dedicated emails.  If you’re at all paying attention it will be easy to participate.  Personally I wanted it easy for those that cared to participate but not overwhelm those that didn’t care.  I think this strikes a good balance. There’s also a clause that in order to be considered a winner in this NomCom election, you must receive 10 votes.  This is something I suggested.  I have no idea how popular the NomCom election is going to be.  I just wanted a fallback that if no one participated and some random person got in with one or two votes.  Any open slots will be filled by the NomCom chair (usually the PASS Immediate Past President).  My assumption is that they would probably take the next highest vote getters unless they were throwing flames in the forums or clearly unqualified.  As a final check, the Board still approves the final NomCom. The NomCom is going to rank candidates instead of rating them.  This has interesting implications.  This was championed by another ERC member and I’m hoping they write something about it.  This will really force the NomCom to make decisions between candidates.  You can’t just rate everyone a 3 and be done with it.  It may also make candidates appear further apart than they actually are.  I’m looking forward talking with the NomCom after this election and getting their feedback on this. The PASS Board added an option to remove a candidate with a unanimous vote of the NomCom.  This was primarily put in place to handle people that lied on their application or had a criminal background or some other unusual situation and we figured it out. We list an explicit goal of three candidate per open slot. We also wanted an easy way to find the NomCom candidate rankings from the ballot.  Hopefully this will satisfy those that want a broad candidate pool and those that want the NomCom to identify the most qualified candidates. The primary spokesperson for the NomCom is the committee chair.  After the issues around the election last year we didn’t have a good communication plan in place.  We should have and that was a failure on the part of the Board.  If there is criticism of the election this year I hope that falls squarely on the Board.  The community members of the NomCom shouldn’t be fielding complaints over the election process.  That said, the NomCom is ranking candidates and we are forcing them to rank some lower than others.  I’m sure you’ll each find someone that you think should have been ranked differently.  I also want to highlight one other change to the process that we started last year and isn’t included in these documents.  I think the candidate forums on the PASS site were tremendously helpful last year in helping people to find out more about candidates.  That gives our members a way to ask hard questions of the candidates and publicly see their answers. This year we have two important groups to fill.  The first is the NomCom.  We need three people from our membership to step up and fill this role.  It won’t be easy.  You will have to make subjective rankings of your fellow community members.  Your actions will be important in deciding who the future leaders of PASS will be.  There’s a 50/50 chance that one of the people you interview will be the President of PASS someday.  This is not a responsibility to be taken lightly. The second is the slate of candidates.  If you’ve ever thought about running for the Board this is the year.  We’ve never had nine candidates on the ballot before.  Your chance of making it through the NomCom are higher than in any previous year.  Unfortunately the more of you that run, the more of you that will lose in the election.  And hopefully that competition will mean more community involvement and better Board members for PASS. Is this the end of changes to the election process?  It isn’t.  Every year that I’ve been on the Board the election process has changed.  Some years there have been small changes and some years there have been large changes.  After this election we’ll look at how the process worked and decide what steps to take – just like we do every year.

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• Handy SQL Server Function Series: Part 1

  - by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)

  I've been preparing to give a presentation on SQL Server for a while now, and a topic that was recommended was SQL Server functions.  More specifically, the lesser-known functions (like @@OPTIONS), and maybe some interesting ways to use well-known functions (like using PARSENAME to split IP addresses)  I think this is a veritable goldmine of useful information, and researching for the presentation has confirmed that beyond my initial expectations.I even found a few undocumented/underdocumented functions, so for the first official article in this series I thought I'd start with 2 of each, COLLATIONPROPERTY() and COLLATIONPROPERTYFROMID().COLLATIONPROPERTY() provides information about (wait for it) collations, SQL Server's method for handling foreign character sets, sort orders, and case- or accent-sensitivity when sorting character data.  The Books Online entry for  COLLATIONPROPERTY() lists 4 options for code page, locale ID, comparison style and version.  Used in conjunction with fn_helpcollations():SELECT *, COLLATIONPROPERTY(name,'LCID') LCID, COLLATIONPROPERTY(name,'CodePage') CodePage, COLLATIONPROPERTY(name,'ComparisonStyle') ComparisonStyle, COLLATIONPROPERTY(name,'Version') Version FROM fn_helpcollations()You can get some excellent information. (c'mon, be honest, did you even know about fn_helpcollations?)Collations in SQL Server have a unique name and ID, and you'll see one or both in various system tables or views like syscolumns, sys.columns, and INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS.  Unfortunately they only link the ID and name for collations of existing columns, so if you wanted to know the collation ID of Albanian_CI_AI_WS, you'd have to declare a column with that collation and query the system table.While poking around the OBJECT_DEFINITION() of sys.columns I found a reference to COLLATIONPROPERTYFROMID(), and the unknown property "Name".  Not surprisingly, this is how sys.columns finds the name of the collation, based on the ID stored in the system tables.  (Check yourself if you don't believe me)Somewhat surprisingly, the "Name" property also works for COLLATIONPROPERTY(), although you'd already know the name at that point.  Some wild guesses and tests revealed that "CollationID" is also a valid property for both functions, so now:SELECT *, COLLATIONPROPERTY(name,'LCID') LCID, COLLATIONPROPERTY(name,'CodePage') CodePage, COLLATIONPROPERTY(name,'ComparisonStyle') ComparisonStyle, COLLATIONPROPERTY(name,'Version') Version, COLLATIONPROPERTY(name,'CollationID') CollationID FROM fn_helpcollations() Will get you the collation ID-name link you…probably didn't know or care about, but if you ever get on Jeopardy! and this question comes up, feel free to send some of your winnings my way. :)And last but not least, COLLATIONPROPERTYFROMID() uses the same properties as COLLATIONPROPERTY(), so you can use either one depending on which value you have available.Keep an eye out for Part 2!

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• The one feature that would make me invest in SSIS 2012

  - by Peter Larsson

  This week I was invited my Microsoft to give two presentations in Slovenia. My presentations went well and I had good energy and the audience was interacting with me. When I had some time over from networking and partying, I attended a few other presentations. At least the ones who where held in English. One of these was "SQL Server Integration Services 2012 - All the News, and More", given by Davide Mauri, a fellow co-worker from SolidQ. We started to talk and soon came into the details of the new things in SSIS 2012. All of the official things Davide talked about are good stuff, but for me, the best thing is one he didn't cover in his presentation. In earlier versions of SSIS than 2012, it is possible to have a stored procedure to act as a data source, as long as it doesn't have a temp table in it. In that case, you will get an error message from SSIS that "Metadata could not be found". This is still true with SSIS 2012, so the thing I am talking about is not really a SSIS feature, it's a SQL Server 2012 feature. And this is the EXECUTE WITH RESULTSETS feature! With this, you can have a stored procedure with a temp table to deliver the resultset to SSIS, if you execute the stored procedure from SSIS and add the "WITH RESULTSETS" option. If you do this, SSIS is able to take the metadata from the code you write in SSIS and not from the stored procedure! And it's very fast too. Let's say you have a stored procedure in earlier versions and when referencing that stored procedure in SSIS forced SSIS to call the stored procedure (which can take hours), to retrieve the metadata. Now, with RESULTSETS, SSIS 2012 can continue in milliseconds! This is because you provide the metadata in the RESULTSETS clause, and if the data from the stored procedure doesn't match this RESULTSETS, you will get an error anyway, so it makes sense Microsoft has provided this optimization for us.

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• Moving from local machine to group web development environment

  - by Djave

  I'm a freelancer who currently creates websites locally using something like MAMP to test websites locally before pushing them live with FTP. I'm looking at taking on my first employee, and I would need to be able to work on websites with them simultaneously. Can anyone explain or provide links to some good documentation on team workflow, or some key phrases I should be googling to get started on my set up? Unlike a lot of the stackoverflow community I've never worked in a dev team, large or small as I'm self taught so just need to know where to start. At present I'm thinking I need an extra computer to use as a server, then use Git or some such to version control files on that computer, as well as installing apache on it so it can be viewed by any computers in my current home network. Is this heading down the right track?

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• PASS: Board Q&amp;A at the Summit

  - by Bill Graziano

  The last two years we’ve put the Board in front of the members and taken questions.  We’re going to do that again this year.  It will be in Room 307/308 from 12:15 to 1:30 on Friday. Yes, this time overlaps with the Birds of a Feather Lunch and the start of afternoon sessions – but only partially.  You can attend the Q&A and still get to parts of both of those.  There just isn’t a great time to do this.  Every time overlaps with something. We can’t do it after the last session on Friday.  We can’t fit it between the last session and the evening events on Wednesday or Thursday.  We had some discussion around breakfast time but I didn’t think that was realistic.  This is the least bad time we could come up with. Last year we had 60-70 people attend.  These are the items that were specific things that I could work on: The first question was whether to increase transparency around individual votes of Board members.  We approved this at the Board meeting the following day.  The only caveat was that if the Board is given confidential information as a basis for their vote then we may not be able to disclose individual votes.  Putting a Director in a position where they can’t publicly defend the reason for their vote is a difficult situation.  Thanks Kendal! Can we have a Board member discretionary fund?  As background, I took a couple of people to lunch so we could have a quiet place to talk.  I bought lunch but wasn’t able to expense it back to PASS.  We just don’t have a budget item for things like this.  I think we should.  I would guess the entire Board would like it also.  It was in an earlier version of the budget but came out as part of a cost-cutting move to balance the budget.  I’d like to see it added back in but we’ll have to see. I know there were a comments about the elections.  At this point we had created the Election Review Committee.  I’ve already written at length about this process. Where does IT work go?  PASS started to publish our internal management reports starting in December 2010.  You can find them on our Governance page.  These aren’t filtered at all and include a variety of information about IT projects.  The most recent update had roughly a page of updates related to IT.  Lots of the work was related to Summit and the Orator tool that we use to manage speaker submissions. There were numerous requests that Tina Turner not be repeated.  Done.  I don’t think we’ll do anything quite like that again.  We had a request for a payment plan for Summit.  We looked into this briefly but didn’t take any action.  We didn’t think the effort was worth the small number of people that would use it.  If you disagree, submit this on our Summit Feedback site and get some votes. There were lots of suggestions around the first-timers events – especially from first timers.  You can find all our current activities related to first-timers at the First Timers page on the Summit web site.  Plus links to 34 (!) blog posts on suggestions for first-timers.  And a big THANK YOU to Confio and Red Gate for sponsoring this. I hope you get the chance to attend.  These events are very helpful to me as a Board member.  I like being able to look around the room as comments are being made and see the audience reaction.  It helps me gauge the interest in an idea. I’d also like to direct you to the Summit Feedback site.  You can submit and vote on ideas to make the Summit a better experience.  As of right now we have the suggestions from last year still up.  We may reset these prior to the Summit though.

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• Error: type or namespace name 'AssemblyKeyFileAttribute' and 'AssemblyKeyFile' could not be found

  To associate an assembly with a strong key file to store it to GAC, we use should include following line after all the imports and before defing namespace. For VB.NET:  <Assembly: AssemblyKeyFile("c:\path\mykey.snk")> For C#:    [assembly: AssemblyKeyFile(@"c:\path\mykey.snk")] but, you might encounter following two errors at the time of creating Assembly for GAC. 1. The type or namespace name 'AssemblyKeyFileAttribute' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?) 2. The type or namespace name 'AssemblyKeyFile' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?) How to resolve these errors: Just include "System.Reflection" namespace. It resolve above two errors. span.fullpost {display:none;}

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• How to Create Event Receivers for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

  You'll be surprised at how often you'll use event receivers instead of Workflow in order to implement functionality in Sharepoint, so it's probably a good idea to know more about them. And who better to get you started with a simple guide to using them than Charles Lee? span.fullpost {display:none;}

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• Max Degree of Parallelism Server-Side Setting

  - by Tara Kizer

  Recently I opened a case with Microsoft PSS to help us through a severe performance problem on a new system.  As part of that case, the PSS engineer checked our “max degree of parallelism” server-side setting.  It is our standard to use 4 on our production systems that have 16 CPUs (2 sockets, quad-core, hyper-threaded).  The PSS engineer had me run the below query to get Microsoft’s recommended value of “max degree of parallelism” server-side setting for our 16-CPU system: select case when cpu_count / hyperthread_ratio > 8 then 8 else cpu_count / hyperthread_ratio end as optimal_maxdop_setting from sys.dm_os_sys_info; The query returned 2.  I made the change using sp_configure, and it did not resolve our issue.  We have decided to leave it in place for now.   Do you agree with this query?  What are your thoughts on this? If you decide to change your setting to reflect the output of this query, please test it first to ensure there are no negative side effects.

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• How to determine if you should use full or differential backup?

  - by Peter Larsson

  Or ask yourself, "How much of the database has changed since last backup?". Here is a simple script that will tell you how much (in percent) have changed in the database since last backup. -- Prepare staging table for all DBCC outputs DECLARE @Sample TABLE         (             Col1 VARCHAR(MAX) NOT NULL,             Col2 VARCHAR(MAX) NOT NULL,             Col3 VARCHAR(MAX) NOT NULL,             Col4 VARCHAR(MAX) NOT NULL,             Col5 VARCHAR(MAX)         )   -- Some intermediate variables for controlling loop DECLARE @FileNum BIGINT = 1,         @PageNum BIGINT = 6,         @SQL VARCHAR(100),         @Error INT,         @DatabaseName SYSNAME = 'Yoda'   -- Loop all files to the very end WHILE 1 = 1     BEGIN         BEGIN TRY             -- Build the SQL string to execute             SET     @SQL = 'DBCC PAGE(' + QUOTENAME(@DatabaseName) + ', ' + CAST(@FileNum AS VARCHAR(50)) + ', '                             + CAST(@PageNum AS VARCHAR(50)) + ', 3) WITH TABLERESULTS'               -- Insert the DBCC output in the staging table             INSERT  @Sample                     (                         Col1,                         Col2,                         Col3,                         Col4                     )             EXEC    (@SQL)               -- DCM pages exists at an interval             SET    @PageNum += 511232         END TRY           BEGIN CATCH             -- If error and first DCM page does not exist, all files are read             IF @PageNum = 6                 BREAK             ELSE                 -- If no more DCM, increase filenum and start over                 SELECT  @FileNum += 1,                         @PageNum = 6         END CATCH     END   -- Delete all records not related to diff information DELETE FROM    @Sample WHERE   Col1 NOT LIKE 'DIFF%'   -- Split the range UPDATE  @Sample SET     Col5 = PARSENAME(REPLACE(Col3, ' - ', '.'), 1),         Col3 = PARSENAME(REPLACE(Col3, ' - ', '.'), 2)   -- Remove last paranthesis UPDATE  @Sample SET     Col3 = RTRIM(REPLACE(Col3, ')', '')),         Col5 = RTRIM(REPLACE(Col5, ')', ''))   -- Remove initial information about filenum UPDATE  @Sample SET     Col3 = SUBSTRING(Col3, CHARINDEX(':', Col3) + 1, 8000),         Col5 = SUBSTRING(Col5, CHARINDEX(':', Col5) + 1, 8000)   -- Prepare data outtake ;WITH cteSource(Changed, [PageCount]) AS (     SELECT      Changed,                 SUM(COALESCE(ToPage, FromPage) - FromPage + 1) AS [PageCount]     FROM        (                     SELECT CAST(Col3 AS INT) AS FromPage,                             CAST(NULLIF(Col5, '') AS INT) AS ToPage,                             LTRIM(Col4) AS Changed                     FROM    @Sample                 ) AS d     GROUP BY    Changed     WITH ROLLUP ) -- Present the final result SELECT  COALESCE(Changed, 'TOTAL PAGES') AS Changed,         [PageCount],         100.E * [PageCount] / SUM(CASE WHEN Changed IS NULL THEN 0 ELSE [PageCount] END) OVER () AS Percentage FROM    cteSource

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• Secret of SQL Trace Duration Column

  - by Dan Guzman

  Why would a trace of long-running queries not show all queries that exceeded the specified duration filter?  We have a server-side SQL Trace that includes RPC:Completed and SQL:BatchCompleted events with a filter on Duration >= 100000.  Nearly all of the queries on this busy OLTP server run in under this 100 millisecond threshold so any that appear in the trace are candidates for root cause analysis and/or performance tuning opportunities. After an application experienced query timeouts, the DBA looked at the trace data to corroborate the problem.  Surprisingly, he found no long-running queries in the trace from the application that experienced the timeouts even though the application’s error log clearly showed detail of the problem (query text, duration, start time, etc.).  The trace did show, however, that there were hundreds of other long-running queries from different applications during the problem timeframe.  We later determined those queries were blocked by a large UPDATE query against a critical table that was inadvertently run during this busy period. So why didn’t the trace include all of the long-running queries?  The reason is because the SQL Trace event duration doesn’t include the time a request was queued while awaiting a worker thread.  Remember that the server was under considerable stress at the time due to the severe blocking episode.  Most of the worker threads were in use by blocked queries and new requests were queued awaiting a worker to free up (a DMV query on the DAC connection will show this queuing: “SELECT scheduler_id, work_queue_count FROM sys.dm_os_schedulers;”).  Technically, those queued requests had not started.  As worker threads became available, queries were dequeued and completed quickly.  These weren’t included in the trace because the duration was under the 100ms duration filter.  The duration reflected the time it took to actually run the query but didn’t include the time queued waiting for a worker thread. The important point here is that duration is not end-to-end response time.  Duration of RPC:Completed and SQL:BatchCompleted events doesn’t include time before a worker thread is assigned nor does it include the time required to return the last result buffer to the client.  In other words, duration only includes time after the worker thread is assigned until the last buffer is filled.  But be aware that duration does include the time need to return intermediate result set buffers back to the client, which is a factor when large query results are returned.  Clients that are slow in consuming results sets can increase the duration value reported by the trace “completed” events.

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• Repository and Ticket management in a Windows Environment

  - by saifkhan

  I’ve been using AxoSoft’s bug tracking application for a while, although and excellent piece of software I had some issues with it ·         It was SLOOOW (both desktop and web). I don’t care what Axosoft says, I tired multiple servers etc. I’ve been long enough in this field to tell you when something is not right with an app. ·         The cost! It’s not feasible for a small team.   I must say though, that they have some nice features which are not commonly found on other bug tracking software. I wouldn’t go on to list any here. I would prefer you download and try their app and see for yourself. In my quest to find a replacement, I tried a few. The successor had to satisfy the following ·         A 99.99% Windows Environment. ·         Bug Tracking. ·         Ticket Management (power users and project managers can open tickets on projects). ·         Repository (I decided to merge bug tracking and repository to get my team to be more productive). ·         Unlimited users. ·         Cost. Being the head of IT security for the firm I work for, making the decision to move data offsite was a hard decision to make, but turned out to be one I am not regretting so far. My choice was down to Altassian JIRA and codebaseHQ. I ended up going with the latter… (I still love the greenhopper from Altassian…its freaking cool!) CodebaseHQ is nice and simple and has all the features I needed. I’ve been using them for a few months now and very happy. Their pricing…well, see for yourself. I was also able to get our SVN data… (Yes, SVN! I don’t go near the Visual Sourcesafe thing…it’s not that safe (pardon the pun). I am hearing some nice things about TFS 2010) over to codebaseHQ. We use VisualSVN to access repositories. …so if you are a Windows developer (or team) codebaseHQ is worth checking out!

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• Missing Indexes DMV Report, 3 billion Impact!

  - by Tara Kizer

  We’ve been having some major performance issues with one of the applications that I support.  The database is on SQL Server 2005 and is about 150GB in size.  We’ve identified a couple of issues already on the database side.  The first issue is that some query (or maybe several queries) is getting a bad execution plan at some point in time during the day.  When it occurs, database performance comes to a grinding halt.  We know it’s a bad execution plan as running DBCC FREEPROCCACHE immediately resolves the problem system-wide.  As we have not yet identified the problematic query, we’ve put a temporary solution in place that frees the procedure cache on an hourly basis via a SQL Agent job.  This is not ideal, but it is getting us through the day without a major problem.  We are actively working on identifying the problematic query and hope to disable the SQL Agent job soon. Earlier this week, we had a major slowdown for one of the processes of this application.  I was unable to find any database performance issues, but I continued to investigate it.  One of things that I typically do when investigating database performance issues is run the “Missing Indexes DMV Report” (that’s what I call it at least).  When analyzing the output of that report, I immediately dismiss anything under 1 million “Impact” as I want to target the “low-hanging fruit” initially.  When I ran the report earlier this week, I was shocked to find a suggested index with an impact of over 3 billion! Do I win a prize for the highest impact?  Has anyone seen a value higher than mine?  My exact value was 3154284120.67765. The performance issue from earlier this week ended up being an application problem, but it also brought to light a much needed index.  I had previously seen this index come up in that report but always with a much lower impact.  I had never considered it as the index’s selectivity is very low.  It’s a composite index with three columns.  The first column is not selective, the first two columns are not selective, and the three columns together are not selective.  In fact, no matter how I order it, the index will not be selective at all.  I briefly discussed this with Kimberly Tripp, and she said that this was okay for covering indexes.  Selectivity is irrelevant for a covering index.  She indicated that she’s even created indexes with gender as the first column in the index.  I’ve got lots to learn still!

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• AdventureWorks 2014 Sample Databases Are Now Available

  - by aspiringgeek

    Where in the World is AdventureWorks? Recently, SQL Community feedback from twitter prompted me to look in vain for SQL Server 2014 versions of the AdventureWorks sample databases we’ve all grown to know & love. I searched Codeplex, then used the bing & even the google in an effort to locate them, yet all I could find were samples on different sites highlighting specific technologies, an incomplete collection inconsistent with the experience we users had learned to expect.  I began pinging internally & learned that an update to AdventureWorks wasn’t even on the road map.  Fortunately, SQL Marketing manager Luis Daniel Soto Maldonado (t) lent a sympathetic ear & got the update ball rolling; his direct report Darmodi Komo recently announced the release of the shiny new sample databases for OLTP, DW, Tabular, and Multidimensional models to supplement the extant In-Memory OLTP sample DB.  What Success Looks Like In my correspondence with the team, here’s how I defined success: 1. Sample AdventureWorks DBs hosted on Codeplex showcasing SQL Server 2014’s latest-&-greatest features, including:  In-Memory OLTP (aka Hekaton) Clustered Columnstore Online Operations Resource Governor IO 2. Where it makes sense to do so, consolidate the DBs (e.g., showcasing Columnstore likely involves a separate DW DB) 3. Documentation to support experimenting with these features As Microsoft Senior SDE Bonnie Feinberg (b) stated, “I think it would be great to see an AdventureWorks for SQL 2014.  It would be super helpful for third-party book authors and trainers.  It also provides a common way to share examples in blog posts and forum discussions, for example.”  Exactly.  We’ve established a rich & robust tradition of sample databases on Codeplex.  This is what our community & our customers expect.  The prompt response achieves what we all aim to do, i.e., manifests the Service Design Engineering mantra of “delighting the customer”.  Kudos to Luis’s team in SQL Server Marketing & Kevin Liu’s team in SQL Server Engineering for doing so. Download AdventureWorks 2014 Download your copies of SQL Server 2014 AdventureWorks sample databases here.

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• 10 Steps to access Oracle stored procedures from Crystal Reports

  Requirements to access Oracle stored procedures from CR The following requirements must be met in order for CR to access an Oracle stored procedure: 1. You must create a package that defines the REF CURSOR. This REF CURSOR must be strongly bound to a static pre-defined structure (see Strongly Bound REF CURSORs vs Weakly Bound REF CURSORs). This package must be created separately and before the creation of the stored procedure. NOTE Crystal Reports 9 native connections will support Oracle stored procedures created within packages as well as Oracle stored procedures referencing weakly bound REF CURSORs. Crystal Reports 8.5 native connections will support Oracle stored procedures referencing weakly bound REF CURSORs. 2. The procedure must have a parameter that is a REF CURSOR type. This is because CR uses this parameter to access and define the result set that the stored procedure returns. 3. The REF CURSOR parameter must be defined as IN OUT (read/write mode). After the procedure has opened and assigned a query to the REF CURSOR, CR will perform a FETCH call for every row from the query's result. This is why the parameter must be defined as IN OUT. 4. Parameters can only be input (IN) parameters. CR is not designed to work with OUT parameters. 5. The REF CURSOR variable must be opened and assigned its query within the procedure. 6. The stored procedure can only return one record set. The structure of this record set must not change, based on parameters. 7. The stored procedure cannot call another stored procedure. 8. If using an ODBC driver, it must be the CR Oracle ODBC driver (installed by CR). Other Oracle ODBC drivers (installed by Microsoft or Oracle) may not function correctly. 9. If you are using the CR ODBC driver, you must ensure that in the ODBC Driver Configuration setup, under the Advanced Tab, the option 'Procedure Return Results' is checked ON. 10. If you are using the native Oracle driver and using hard-coded date selection within the procedure, the date selection must use either a string representation format of 'YYYY-DD-MM' (i.e. WHERE DATEFIELD = '1999-01-01') or the TO_DATE function with the same format specified (i.e. WHERE DATEFIELD = TO_DATE ('1999-01-01','YYYY-MM-DD'). For more information, refer to kbase article C2008023. 11. Most importantly, this stored procedure must execute successfully in Oracle's SQL*Plus utility. If all of these conditions are met, you must next ensure you are using the appropriate database driver. Please refer to the sections in this white paper for a list of acceptable database drivers. span.fullpost {display:none;}

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• 3D Display Issue When Using Latest Java Runtime Versions - Patch now available...

  - by [email protected]

  Typically I focus my blog posts on Support process topics, and reserve most of the technical topics for the Support newsletter. This topic, however, warrants a quick mention in the blog since I know it's been affecting many users recently. For customers using the Client/Server Deployment of AutoVue, users that had upgraded their client Java Runtime Environment (JRE) to version 1.6.0_19 or later suddenly noticed that their 3D files were opening blank in AutoVue. This issue was due to a change in JRE version 1.6.0_19, and the AutoVue team now offers a patch to address the issue in AutoVue version 20.0.0. The patch number is 10268316, is available through the My Oracle Support portal, and is described further in KM Note 1104821.1. We'll mention it again in our next Support newsletter, and the AutoVue team will target to roll the same fix into the next available release of the product.

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