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• The Proper Use of the VM Role in Windows Azure

  - by BuckWoody

  At the Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC) in 2010 we announced an addition to the Computational Roles in Windows Azure, called the VM Role. This new feature allows a great deal of control over the applications you write, but some have confused it with our full infrastructure offering in Windows Hyper-V. There is a proper architecture pattern for both of them. Virtualization Virtualization is the process of taking all of the hardware of a physical computer and replicating it in software alone. This means that a single computer can “host” or run several “virtual” computers. These virtual computers can run anywhere - including at a vendor’s location. Some companies refer to this as Cloud Computing since the hardware is operated and maintained elsewhere. IaaS The more detailed definition of this type of computing is called Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) since it removes the need for you to maintain hardware at your organization. The operating system, drivers, and all the other software required to run an application are still under your control and your responsibility to license, patch, and scale. Microsoft has an offering in this space called Hyper-V, that runs on the Windows operating system. Combined with a hardware hosting vendor and the System Center software to create and deploy Virtual Machines (a process referred to as provisioning), you can create a Cloud environment with full control over all aspects of the machine, including multiple operating systems if you like. Hosting machines and provisioning them at your own buildings is sometimes called a Private Cloud, and hosting them somewhere else is often called a Public Cloud. State-ful and Stateless Programming This paradigm does not create a new, scalable way of computing. It simply moves the hardware away. The reason is that when you limit the Cloud efforts to a Virtual Machine, you are in effect limiting the computing resources to what that single system can provide. This is because much of the software developed in this environment maintains “state” - and that requires a little explanation. “State-ful programming” means that all parts of the computing environment stay connected to each other throughout a compute cycle. The system expects the memory, CPU, storage and network to remain in the same state from the beginning of the process to the end. You can think of this as a telephone conversation - you expect that the other person picks up the phone, listens to you, and talks back all in a single unit of time. In “Stateless” computing the system is designed to allow the different parts of the code to run independently of each other. You can think of this like an e-mail exchange. You compose an e-mail from your system (it has the state when you’re doing that) and then you walk away for a bit to make some coffee. A few minutes later you click the “send” button (the network has the state) and you go to a meeting. The server receives the message and stores it on a mail program’s database (the mail server has the state now) and continues working on other mail. Finally, the other party logs on to their mail client and reads the mail (the other user has the state) and responds to it and so on. These events might be separated by milliseconds or even days, but the system continues to operate. The entire process doesn’t maintain the state, each component does. This is the exact concept behind coding for Windows Azure. The stateless programming model allows amazing rates of scale, since the message (think of the e-mail) can be broken apart by multiple programs and worked on in parallel (like when the e-mail goes to hundreds of users), and only the order of re-assembling the work is important to consider. For the exact same reason, if the system makes copies of those running programs as Windows Azure does, you have built-in redundancy and recovery. It’s just built into the design. The Difference Between Infrastructure Designs and Platform Designs When you simply take a physical server running software and virtualize it either privately or publicly, you haven’t done anything to allow the code to scale or have recovery. That all has to be handled by adding more code and more Virtual Machines that have a slight lag in maintaining the running state of the system. Add more machines and you get more lag, so the scale is limited. This is the primary limitation with IaaS. It’s also not as easy to deploy these VM’s, and more importantly, you’re often charged on a longer basis to remove them. your agility in IaaS is more limited. Windows Azure is a Platform - meaning that you get objects you can code against. The code you write runs on multiple nodes with multiple copies, and it all works because of the magic of Stateless programming. you don’t worry, or even care, about what is running underneath. It could be Windows (and it is in fact a type of Windows Server), Linux, or anything else - but that' isn’t what you want to manage, monitor, maintain or license. You don’t want to deploy an operating system - you want to deploy an application. You want your code to run, and you don’t care how it does that. Another benefit to PaaS is that you can ask for hundreds or thousands of new nodes of computing power - there’s no provisioning, it just happens. And you can stop using them quicker - and the base code for your application does not have to change to make this happen. Windows Azure Roles and Their Use If you need your code to have a user interface, in Visual Studio you add a Web Role to your project, and if the code needs to do work that doesn’t involve a user interface you can add a Worker Role. They are just containers that act a certain way. I’ll provide more detail on those later. Note: That’s a general description, so it’s not entirely accurate, but it’s accurate enough for this discussion. So now we’re back to that VM Role. Because of the name, some have mistakenly thought that you can take a Virtual Machine running, say Linux, and deploy it to Windows Azure using this Role. But you can’t. That’s not what it is designed for at all. If you do need that kind of deployment, you should look into Hyper-V and System Center to create the Private or Public Infrastructure as a Service. What the VM Role is actually designed to do is to allow you to have a great deal of control over the system where your code will run. Let’s take an example. You’ve heard about Windows Azure, and Platform programming. You’re convinced it’s the right way to code. But you have a lot of things you’ve written in another way at your company. Re-writing all of your code to take advantage of Windows Azure will take a long time. Or perhaps you have a certain version of Apache Web Server that you need for your code to work. In both cases, you think you can (or already have) code the the software to be “Stateless”, you just need more control over the place where the code runs. That’s the place where a VM Role makes sense. Recap Virtualizing servers alone has limitations of scale, availability and recovery. Microsoft’s offering in this area is Hyper-V and System Center, not the VM Role. The VM Role is still used for running Stateless code, just like the Web and Worker Roles, with the exception that it allows you more control over the environment of where that code runs.

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• Service Broker Solutions - Don't Forget the Basics

  - by AllenMWhite

  After finally getting a Service Broker solution implemented successfully, I'm really impressed with the technology, and frustrated how difficult it can be to implement and get it really working as expected. First, understand the technology. There are some great resources out there to help you get started. The first place to go is Klaus Aschenbrenner's book, the one that Greg Low reviewed this past week. It's an amazing resource and played a large part in my success. (I bought it for my Kindle, and...(read more)

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• SQLPeople Interviews Wrap Up January 2011 with Matt Velic

  - by andyleonard

  Introduction Late last year I announced an exciting new endeavor called SQLPeople . At the end of 2010 I announced the 2010 SQLPeople Person of the Year . Check out this interview with Matt Velic! SQLPeople is off to a great start. Thanks to all who have our first month awesome - those willing to share and respond to interview requests and those who are enjoying the interviews! Here's a wrap up of January 2011: January 2011 Interviews Matt Velic Cindy Gross Steve Fibich Tim Mitchell Jeremiah Peschka...(read more)

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• Stored Procedures with SSRS? Hmm… not so much

  - by Rob Farley

  Little Bobby Tables’ mother says you should always sanitise your data input. Except that I think she’s wrong. The SQL Injection aspect is for another post, where I’ll show you why I think SQL Injection is the same kind of attack as many other attacks, such as the old buffer overflow, but here I want to have a bit of a whinge about the way that some people sanitise data input, and even have a whinge about people who insist on using stored procedures for SSRS reports. Let me say that again, in case you missed it the first time: I want to have a whinge about people who insist on using stored procedures for SSRS reports. Let’s look at the data input sanitisation aspect – except that I’m going to call it ‘parameter validation’. I’m talking about code that looks like this: create procedure dbo.GetMonthSummaryPerSalesPerson(@eomdate datetime) as begin     /* First check that @eomdate is a valid date */     if isdate(@eomdate) != 1     begin         select 'Please enter a valid date' as ErrorMessage;         return;     end     /* Then check that time has passed since @eomdate */     if datediff(day,@eomdate,sysdatetime()) < 5     begin         select 'Sorry - EOM is not complete yet' as ErrorMessage;         return;     end         /* If those checks have succeeded, return the data */     select SalesPersonID, count(*) as NumSales, sum(TotalDue) as TotalSales     from Sales.SalesOrderHeader     where OrderDate >= dateadd(month,-1,@eomdate)         and OrderDate < @eomdate     group by SalesPersonID     order by SalesPersonID; end Notice that the code checks that a date has been entered. Seriously??!! This must only be to check for NULL values being passed in, because anything else would have to be a valid datetime to avoid an error. The other check is maybe fair enough, but I still don’t like it. The two problems I have with this stored procedure are the result sets and the small fact that the stored procedure even exists in the first place. But let’s consider the first one of these problems for starters. I’ll get to the second one in a moment. If you read Jes Borland (@grrl_geek)’s recent post about returning multiple result sets in Reporting Services, you’ll be aware that Reporting Services doesn’t support multiple results sets from a single query. And when it says ‘single query’, it includes ‘stored procedure call’. It’ll only handle the first result set that comes back. But that’s okay – we have RETURN statements, so our stored procedure will only ever return a single result set.  Sometimes that result set might contain a single field called ErrorMessage, but it’s still only one result set. Except that it’s not okay, because Reporting Services needs to know what fields to expect. Your report needs to hook into your fields, so SSRS needs to have a way to get that information. For stored procs, it uses an option called FMTONLY. When Reporting Services tries to figure out what fields are going to be returned by a query (or stored procedure call), it doesn’t want to have to run the whole thing. That could take ages. (Maybe it’s seen some of the stored procedures I’ve had to deal with over the years!) So it turns on FMTONLY before it makes the call (and turns it off again afterwards). FMTONLY is designed to be able to figure out the shape of the output, without actually running the contents. It’s very useful, you might think. set fmtonly on exec dbo.GetMonthSummaryPerSalesPerson '20030401'; set fmtonly off Without the FMTONLY lines, this stored procedure returns a result set that has three columns and fourteen rows. But with FMTONLY turned on, those rows don’t come back. But what I do get back hurts Reporting Services. It doesn’t run the stored procedure at all. It just looks for anything that could be returned and pushes out a result set in that shape. Despite the fact that I’ve made sure that the logic will only ever return a single result set, the FMTONLY option kills me by returning three of them. It would have been much better to push these checks down into the query itself. alter procedure dbo.GetMonthSummaryPerSalesPerson(@eomdate datetime) as begin     select SalesPersonID, count(*) as NumSales, sum(TotalDue) as TotalSales     from Sales.SalesOrderHeader     where     /* Make sure that @eomdate is valid */         isdate(@eomdate) = 1     /* And that it's sufficiently past */     and datediff(day,@eomdate,sysdatetime()) >= 5     /* And now use it in the filter as appropriate */     and OrderDate >= dateadd(month,-1,@eomdate)     and OrderDate < @eomdate     group by SalesPersonID     order by SalesPersonID; end Now if we run it with FMTONLY turned on, we get the single result set back. But let’s consider the execution plan when we pass in an invalid date. First let’s look at one that returns data. I’ve got a semi-useful index in place on OrderDate, which includes the SalesPersonID and TotalDue fields. It does the job, despite a hefty Sort operation. …compared to one that uses a future date: You might notice that the estimated costs are similar – the Index Seek is still 28%, the Sort is still 71%. But the size of that arrow coming out of the Index Seek is a whole bunch smaller. The coolest thing here is what’s going on with that Index Seek. Let’s look at some of the properties of it. Glance down it with me… Estimated CPU cost of 0.0005728, 387 estimated rows, estimated subtree cost of 0.0044385, ForceSeek false, Number of Executions 0. That’s right – it doesn’t run. So much for reading plans right-to-left... The key is the Filter on the left of it. It has a Startup Expression Predicate in it, which means that it doesn’t call anything further down the plan (to the right) if the predicate evaluates to false. Using this method, we can make sure that our stored procedure contains a single query, and therefore avoid any problems with multiple result sets. If we wanted, we could always use UNION ALL to make sure that we can return an appropriate error message. alter procedure dbo.GetMonthSummaryPerSalesPerson(@eomdate datetime) as begin     select SalesPersonID, count(*) as NumSales, sum(TotalDue) as TotalSales, /*Placeholder: */ '' as ErrorMessage     from Sales.SalesOrderHeader     where     /* Make sure that @eomdate is valid */         isdate(@eomdate) = 1     /* And that it's sufficiently past */     and datediff(day,@eomdate,sysdatetime()) >= 5     /* And now use it in the filter as appropriate */     and OrderDate >= dateadd(month,-1,@eomdate)     and OrderDate < @eomdate     group by SalesPersonID     /* Now include the error messages */     union all     select 0, 0, 0, 'Please enter a valid date' as ErrorMessage     where isdate(@eomdate) != 1     union all     select 0, 0, 0, 'Sorry - EOM is not complete yet' as ErrorMessage     where datediff(day,@eomdate,sysdatetime()) < 5     order by SalesPersonID; end But still I don’t like it, because it’s now a stored procedure with a single query. And I don’t like stored procedures that should be functions. That’s right – I think this should be a function, and SSRS should call the function. And I apologise to those of you who are now planning a bonfire for me. Guy Fawkes’ night has already passed this year, so I think you miss out. (And I’m not going to remind you about when the PASS Summit is in 2012.) create function dbo.GetMonthSummaryPerSalesPerson(@eomdate datetime) returns table as return (     select SalesPersonID, count(*) as NumSales, sum(TotalDue) as TotalSales, '' as ErrorMessage     from Sales.SalesOrderHeader     where     /* Make sure that @eomdate is valid */         isdate(@eomdate) = 1     /* And that it's sufficiently past */     and datediff(day,@eomdate,sysdatetime()) >= 5     /* And now use it in the filter as appropriate */     and OrderDate >= dateadd(month,-1,@eomdate)     and OrderDate < @eomdate     group by SalesPersonID     union all     select 0, 0, 0, 'Please enter a valid date' as ErrorMessage     where isdate(@eomdate) != 1     union all     select 0, 0, 0, 'Sorry - EOM is not complete yet' as ErrorMessage     where datediff(day,@eomdate,sysdatetime()) < 5 ); We’ve had to lose the ORDER BY – but that’s fine, as that’s a client thing anyway. We can have our reports leverage this stored query still, but we’re recognising that it’s a query, not a procedure. A procedure is designed to DO stuff, not just return data. We even get entries in sys.columns that confirm what the shape of the result set actually is, which makes sense, because a table-valued function is the right mechanism to return data. And we get so much more flexibility with this. If you haven’t seen the simplification stuff that I’ve preached on before, jump over to http://bit.ly/SimpleRob and watch the video of when I broke a microphone and nearly fell off the stage in Wales. You’ll see the impact of being able to have a simplifiable query. You can also read the procedural functions post I wrote recently, if you didn’t follow the link from a few paragraphs ago. So if we want the list of SalesPeople that made any kind of sales in a given month, we can do something like: select SalesPersonID from dbo.GetMonthSummaryPerSalesPerson(@eomonth) order by SalesPersonID; This doesn’t need to look up the TotalDue field, which makes a simpler plan. select * from dbo.GetMonthSummaryPerSalesPerson(@eomonth) where SalesPersonID is not null order by SalesPersonID; This one can avoid having to do the work on the rows that don’t have a SalesPersonID value, pushing the predicate into the Index Seek rather than filtering the results that come back to the report. If we had joins involved, we might see some of those being simplified out. We also get the ability to include query hints in individual reports. We shift from having a single-use stored procedure to having a reusable stored query – and isn’t that one of the main points of modularisation? Stored procedures in Reporting Services are just a bit limited for my liking. They’re useful in plenty of ways, but if you insist on using stored procedures all the time rather that queries that use functions – that’s rubbish. @rob_farley

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• SSIS Prehistory video

  - by jamiet

  I’m currently wasting spending my Easter bank holiday putting together my presentation SSIS Dataflow Performance Tuning for the upcoming SQL Bits conference in London and in doing so I’m researching some old material about how the dataflow actually works. Boring as it is I’ve gotten easily sidelined and have chanced upon an old video on Channel 9 entitled Euan Garden - Tour of SQL Server Team (part I). Euan is a former member of the SQL Server team and in this series of videos he walks the halls of the SQL Server building on Microsoft’s Redmond campus talking to some of the various protagonists and in this one he happens upon the SQL Server Integration Services team. The video was shot in 2004 so this is a fascinating (to me anyway) glimpse into the development of SSIS from before it was ever shipped and if you’re a geek like me you’ll really enjoy this behind-the-scenes look into how and why the product was architected. The video is also notable for the presence of the cameraman – none other than the now-rather-more-famous-than-he-was-then Robert Scoble. See it at http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/TheChannel9Team/Euan-Garden-Tour-of-SQL-Server-Team-part-I/ Enjoy! @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• T-SQL Tuesday #005: Reporting

  - by Adam Machanic

  This month's T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Aaron Nelson of SQLVariations . Aaron has picked a really fantastic topic: Reporting . Reporting is a lot more than just SSRS. Whether or not you realize it, you deal with all sorts of reports every day. Server up-time reports. Application activity reports. And even DMVs, which as Aaron points out are simply reports about what's going on inside of SQL Server. This month's topic can be twisted any number of ways, so have fun and be creative! I'm really looking...(read more)

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• Hugh Bin-Haad's SQL Rumours

  - by Paul Nielsen

  Insider rumours and gossip from the murky world of the Database Industry, and from the colourful characters that inhabit it http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/editors-corner/insider-insights/ Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!...(read more)

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• Alert visualization recipe: Get out your blender, drop in some sp_send_dbmail, Google Charts API, add your favorite colors and sprinkle with html. Blend till it’s smooth and looks pretty enough to taste.

  - by Maria Zakourdaev

    I really like database monitoring. My email inbox have a constant flow of different types of alerts coming from our production servers with all kinds of information, sometimes more useful and sometimes less useful. Usually database alerts look really simple, it’s usually a plain text email saying “Prod1 Database data file on Server X is 80% used. You’d better grow it manually before some query triggers the AutoGrowth process”. Imagine you could have received email like the one below.  In addition to the alert description it could have also included the the database file growth chart over the past 6 months. Wouldn’t it give you much more information whether the data growth is natural or extreme? That’s truly what data visualization is for. Believe it or not, I have sent the graph below from SQL Server stored procedure without buying any additional data monitoring/visualization tool.   Would you like to visualize your database alerts like I do? Then like myself, you’d love the Google Charts. All you need to know is a little HTML and have a mail profile configured on your SQL Server instance regardless of the SQL Server version. First of all, I hope you know that the sp_send_dbmail procedure has a great parameter @body_format = ‘HTML’, which allows us to send rich and colorful messages instead of boring black and white ones. All that we need is to dynamically create HTML code. This is how, for instance, you can create a table and populate it with some data: DECLARE @html varchar(max) SET @html = '<html>' + '<H3><font id="Text" style='color: Green;'>Top Databases: </H3>' + '<table border="1" bordercolor="#3300FF" style='background-color:#DDF8CC' width='70%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='3'>' + '<tr><font color="Green"><th>Database Name</th><th>Size</th><th>Physical Name</th></tr>' + CAST( (SELECT TOP 10                             td = name,'',                             td = size * 8/1024 ,'',                             td = physical_name              FROM sys.master_files               ORDER BY size DESC             FOR XML PATH ('tr'),TYPE ) AS VARCHAR(MAX)) + '</table>' EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_send_dbmail @recipients = '[email protected]', @subject ='Top databases', @body = @html, @body_format = 'HTML' This is the result:   If you want to add more visualization effects, you can use Google Charts Tools https://google-developers.appspot.com/chart/interactive/docs/index which is a free and rich library of data visualization charts, they’re also easy to populate and embed. There are two versions of the Google Charts Image based charts: https://google-developers.appspot.com/chart/image/docs/gallery/chart_gall This is an old version, it’s officially deprecated although it will be up for a next few years or so. I really enjoy using this one because it can be viewed within the email body. For mobile devices you need to change the “Load remote images” property in your email application configuration.           Charts based on JavaScript classes: https://google-developers.appspot.com/chart/interactive/docs/gallery This API is newer, with rich and highly interactive charts, and it’s much more easier to understand and configure. The only downside of it is that they cannot be viewed within the email body. Outlook, Gmail and many other email clients, as part of their security policy, do not run any JavaScript that’s placed within the email body. However, you can still enjoy this API by sending the report as an email attachment. Here is an example of the old version of Google Charts API, sending the same top databases report as in the previous example but instead of a simple table, this script is using a pie chart right from  the T-SQL code DECLARE @html  varchar(8000) DECLARE @Series  varchar(800),@Labels  varchar(8000),@Legend  varchar(8000);     SET @Series = ''; SET @Labels = ''; SET @Legend = ''; SELECT TOP 5 @Series = @Series + CAST(size * 8/1024 as varchar) + ',',                         @Labels = @Labels +CAST(size * 8/1024 as varchar) + 'MB'+'|',                         @Legend = @Legend + name + '|' FROM sys.master_files ORDER BY size DESC SELECT @Series = SUBSTRING(@Series,1,LEN(@Series)-1),         @Labels = SUBSTRING(@Labels,1,LEN(@Labels)-1),         @Legend = SUBSTRING(@Legend,1,LEN(@Legend)-1) SET @html =   '<H3><font color="Green"> '+@@ServerName+' top 5 databases : </H3>'+    '<br>'+    '<img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?'+    'chf=bg,s,DDF8CC&'+    'cht=p&'+    'chs=400x200&'+    'chco=3072F3|7777CC|FF9900|FF0000|4A8C26&'+    'chd=t:'+@Series+'&'+    'chl='+@Labels+'&'+    'chma=0,0,0,0&'+    'chdl='+@Legend+'&'+    'chdlp=b"'+    'alt="'+@@ServerName+' top 5 databases" />'              EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_send_dbmail @recipients = '[email protected]',                             @subject = 'Top databases',                             @body = @html,                             @body_format = 'HTML' This is what you get. Isn’t it great? Chart parameters reference: chf     Gradient fill  bg - backgroud ; s- solid cht     chart type  ( p - pie) chs        chart size width/height chco    series colors chd        chart data string        1,2,3,2 chl        pir chart labels        a|b|c|d chma    chart margins chdl    chart legend            a|b|c|d chdlp    chart legend text        b - bottom of chart   Line graph implementation is also really easy and powerful DECLARE @html varchar(max) DECLARE @Series varchar(max) DECLARE @HourList varchar(max) SET @Series = ''; SET @HourList = ''; SELECT @HourList = @HourList + SUBSTRING(CONVERT(varchar(13),last_execution_time,121), 12,2)  + '|' ,              @Series = @Series + CAST( COUNT(1) as varchar) + ',' FROM sys.dm_exec_query_stats s     CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_sql_text(plan_handle) t WHERE last_execution_time > = getdate()-1 GROUP BY CONVERT(varchar(13),last_execution_time,121) ORDER BY CONVERT(varchar(13),last_execution_time,121) SET @Series = SUBSTRING(@Series,1,LEN(@Series)-1) SET @html = '<img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?'+ 'chco=CA3D05,87CEEB&'+ 'chd=t:'+@Series+'&'+ 'chds=1,350&'+ 'chdl= Proc executions from cache&'+ 'chf=bg,s,1F1D1D|c,lg,0,363433,1.0,2E2B2A,0.0&'+ 'chg=25.0,25.0,3,2&'+ 'chls=3|3&'+ 'chm=d,CA3D05,0,-1,12,0|d,FFFFFF,0,-1,8,0|d,87CEEB,1,-1,12,0|d,FFFFFF,1,-1,8,0&'+ 'chs=600x450&'+ 'cht=lc&'+ 'chts=FFFFFF,14&'+ 'chtt=Executions for from' +(SELECT CONVERT(varchar(16),min(last_execution_time),121)          FROM sys.dm_exec_query_stats          WHERE last_execution_time > = getdate()-1) +' till '+ +(SELECT CONVERT(varchar(16),max(last_execution_time),121)     FROM sys.dm_exec_query_stats) + '&'+ 'chxp=1,50.0|4,50.0&'+ 'chxs=0,FFFFFF,12,0|1,FFFFFF,12,0|2,FFFFFF,12,0|3,FFFFFF,12,0|4,FFFFFF,14,0&'+ 'chxt=y,y,x,x,x&'+ 'chxl=0:|1|350|1:|N|2:|'+@HourList+'3:|Hour&'+ 'chma=55,120,0,0" alt="" />' EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_send_dbmail @recipients = '[email protected]', @subject ='Daily number of executions', @body = @html, @body_format = 'HTML' Chart parameters reference: chco    series colors chd        series data chds    scale format chdl    chart legend chf        background fills chg        grid line chls    line style chm        line fill chs        chart size cht        chart type chts    chart style chtt    chart title chxp    axis label positions chxs    axis label styles chxt    axis tick mark styles chxl    axis labels chma    chart margins If you don’t mind to get your charts as an email attachment, you can enjoy the Java based Google Charts which are even easier to configure, and have much more advanced graphics. In the example below, the sp_send_email procedure uses the parameter @query which will be executed at the time that sp_send_dbemail is executed and the HTML result of this execution will be attached to the email. DECLARE @html varchar(max),@query varchar(max) DECLARE @SeriesDBusers  varchar(800);     SET @SeriesDBusers = ''; SELECT @SeriesDBusers = @SeriesDBusers +  ' ["'+DB_NAME(r.database_id) +'", ' +cast(count(1) as varchar)+'],' FROM sys.dm_exec_requests r GROUP BY DB_NAME(database_id) ORDER BY count(1) desc; SET @SeriesDBusers = SUBSTRING(@SeriesDBusers,1,LEN(@SeriesDBusers)-1) SET @query = ' PRINT '' <html>   <head>     <script type="text/javascript" src="https://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>     <script type="text/javascript">       google.load("visualization", "1", {packages:["corechart"]});        google.setOnLoadCallback(drawChart);       function drawChart() {                      var data = google.visualization.arrayToDataTable([                        ["Database Name", "Active users"],                        '+@SeriesDBusers+'                      ]);                        var options = {                        title: "Active users",                        pieSliceText: "value"                      };                        var chart = new google.visualization.PieChart(document.getElementById("chart_div"));                      chart.draw(data, options);       };     </script>   </head>   <body>     <table>     <tr><td>         <div id="chart_div" style='width: 800px; height: 300px;'></div>         </td></tr>     </table>   </body> </html> ''' EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_send_dbmail    @recipients = '[email protected]',    @subject ='Active users',    @body = @html,    @body_format = 'HTML',    @query = @Query,     @attach_query_result_as_file = 1,     @query_attachment_filename = 'Results.htm' After opening the email attachment in the browser you are getting this kind of report: In fact, the above is not only for database alerts. It can be used for applicative reports if you need high levels of customization that you cannot achieve using standard methods like SSRS. If you need more information on how to customize the charts, you can try the following: Image Based Charts wizard https://google-developers.appspot.com/chart/image/docs/chart_wizard  Live Image Charts Playground https://google-developers.appspot.com/chart/image/docs/chart_playground Image Based Charts Parameters List https://google-developers.appspot.com/chart/image/docs/chart_params Java Script Charts Playground https://code.google.com/apis/ajax/playground/?type=visualization Use the above examples as a starting point for your procedures and I’d be more than happy to hear of your implementations of the above techniques. Yours, Maria

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• Big Data – Role of Cloud Computing in Big Data – Day 11 of 21

  - by Pinal Dave

  In yesterday’s blog post we learned the importance of the NewSQL. In this article we will understand the role of Cloud in Big Data Story What is Cloud? Cloud is the biggest buzzword around from last few years. Everyone knows about the Cloud and it is extremely well defined online. In this article we will discuss cloud in the context of the Big Data. Cloud computing is a method of providing a shared computing resources to the application which requires dynamic resources. These resources include applications, computing, storage, networking, development and various deployment platforms. The fundamentals of the cloud computing are that it shares pretty much share all the resources and deliver to end users as a service.  Examples of the Cloud Computing and Big Data are Google and Amazon.com. Both have fantastic Big Data offering with the help of the cloud. We will discuss this later in this blog post. There are two different Cloud Deployment Models: 1) The Public Cloud and 2) The Private Cloud Public Cloud Public Cloud is the cloud infrastructure build by commercial providers (Amazon, Rackspace etc.) creates a highly scalable data center that hides the complex infrastructure from the consumer and provides various services. Private Cloud Private Cloud is the cloud infrastructure build by a single organization where they are managing highly scalable data center internally. Here is the quick comparison between Public Cloud and Private Cloud from Wikipedia:   Public Cloud Private Cloud Initial cost Typically zero Typically high Running cost Unpredictable Unpredictable Customization Impossible Possible Privacy No (Host has access to the data Yes Single sign-on Impossible Possible Scaling up Easy while within defined limits Laborious but no limits Hybrid Cloud Hybrid Cloud is the cloud infrastructure build with the composition of two or more clouds like public and private cloud. Hybrid cloud gives best of the both the world as it combines multiple cloud deployment models together. Cloud and Big Data – Common Characteristics There are many characteristics of the Cloud Architecture and Cloud Computing which are also essentially important for Big Data as well. They highly overlap and at many places it just makes sense to use the power of both the architecture and build a highly scalable framework. Here is the list of all the characteristics of cloud computing important in Big Data Scalability Elasticity Ad-hoc Resource Pooling Low Cost to Setup Infastructure Pay on Use or Pay as you Go Highly Available Leading Big Data Cloud Providers There are many players in Big Data Cloud but we will list a few of the known players in this list. Amazon Amazon is arguably the most popular Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider. The history of how Amazon started in this business is very interesting. They started out with a massive infrastructure to support their own business. Gradually they figured out that their own resources are underutilized most of the time. They decided to get the maximum out of the resources they have and hence  they launched their Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) service in 2006. Their products have evolved a lot recently and now it is one of their primary business besides their retail selling. Amazon also offers Big Data services understand Amazon Web Services. Here is the list of the included services: Amazon Elastic MapReduce – It processes very high volumes of data Amazon DynammoDB – It is fully managed NoSQL (Not Only SQL) database service Amazon Simple Storage Services (S3) – A web-scale service designed to store and accommodate any amount of data Amazon High Performance Computing – It provides low-tenancy tuned high performance computing cluster Amazon RedShift – It is petabyte scale data warehousing service Google Though Google is known for Search Engine, we all know that it is much more than that. Google Compute Engine – It offers secure, flexible computing from energy efficient data centers Google Big Query – It allows SQL-like queries to run against large datasets Google Prediction API – It is a cloud based machine learning tool Other Players Besides Amazon and Google we also have other players in the Big Data market as well. Microsoft is also attempting Big Data with the Cloud with Microsoft Azure. Additionally Rackspace and NASA together have initiated OpenStack. The goal of Openstack is to provide a massively scaled, multitenant cloud that can run on any hardware. Thing to Watch The cloud based solutions provides a great integration with the Big Data’s story as well it is very economical to implement as well. However, there are few things one should be very careful when deploying Big Data on cloud solutions. Here is a list of a few things to watch: Data Integrity Initial Cost Recurring Cost Performance Data Access Security Location Compliance Every company have different approaches to Big Data and have different rules and regulations. Based on various factors, one can implement their own custom Big Data solution on a cloud. Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will discuss about various Operational Databases supporting Big Data. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• Umbraco Bingo

  - by Vizioz Limited

  This year's Umbraco Code Garden Conference ( Festival ) was excellent, it was great to see so many familiar faces again, to see some inspiring talks and to enjoy the local beverages!It has become a bit of a tradition at Umbraco conference's to host a Bingo game where the prizes are various Umbraco branded accessories, only a true Umbracoholic would want ;-)This year, the luck gods were shinning down on me and I won the "grand prize" delivered by a "motorcycle courier" as it was such a large present... at least, that was the build up to finding out what it was! So everyone including myself were thinking, if this is that big, how on earth will I get it on the plane home!Luckily, it was actually easy to fit in the luggage, as you will see below :)

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• Metro: Using Templates

  - by Stephen.Walther

  The goal of this blog post is to describe how templates work in the WinJS library. In particular, you learn how to use a template to display both a single item and an array of items. You also learn how to load a template from an external file. Why use Templates? Imagine that you want to display a list of products in a page. The following code is bad: var products = [ { name: "Tesla", price: 80000 }, { name: "VW Rabbit", price: 200 }, { name: "BMW", price: 60000 } ]; var productsHTML = ""; for (var i = 0; i < products.length; i++) { productsHTML += "<h1>Product Details</h1>" + "<div>Product Name: " + products[i].name + "</div>" + "<div>Product Price: " + products[i].price + "</div>"; } document.getElementById("productContainer").innerHTML = productsHTML; In the code above, an array of products is displayed by creating a for..next loop which loops through each element in the array. A string which represents a list of products is built through concatenation. The code above is a designer’s nightmare. You cannot modify the appearance of the list of products without modifying the JavaScript code. A much better approach is to use a template like this: <div id="productTemplate"> <h1>Product Details</h1> <div> Product Name: <span data-win-bind="innerText:name"></span> </div> <div> Product Price: <span data-win-bind="innerText:price"></span> </div> </div> A template is simply a fragment of HTML that contains placeholders. Instead of displaying a list of products by concatenating together a string, you can render a template for each product. Creating a Simple Template Let’s start by using a template to render a single product. The following HTML page contains a template and a placeholder for rendering the template: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <title>Application1</title> <!-- WinJS references --> <link href="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/css/ui-dark.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/base.js"></script> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/ui.js"></script> <!-- Application1 references --> <link href="/css/default.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="/js/default.js"></script> </head> <body> <!-- Product Template --> <div id="productTemplate"> <h1>Product Details</h1> <div> Product Name: <span data-win-bind="innerText:name"></span> </div> <div> Product Price: <span data-win-bind="innerText:price"></span> </div> </div> <!-- Place where Product Template is Rendered --> <div id="productContainer"></div> </body> </html> In the page above, the template is defined in a DIV element with the id productTemplate. The contents of the productTemplate are not displayed when the page is opened in the browser. The contents of a template are automatically hidden when you convert the productTemplate into a template in your JavaScript code. Notice that the template uses data-win-bind attributes to display the product name and price properties. You can use both data-win-bind and data-win-bindsource attributes within a template. To learn more about these attributes, see my earlier blog post on WinJS data binding: http://stephenwalther.com/blog/archive/2012/02/26/windows-web-applications-declarative-data-binding.aspx The page above also includes a DIV element named productContainer. The rendered template is added to this element. Here’s the code for the default.js script which creates and renders the template: (function () { "use strict"; var app = WinJS.Application; app.onactivated = function (eventObject) { if (eventObject.detail.kind === Windows.ApplicationModel.Activation.ActivationKind.launch) { var product = { name: "Tesla", price: 80000 }; var productTemplate = new WinJS.Binding.Template(document.getElementById("productTemplate")); productTemplate.render(product, document.getElementById("productContainer")); } }; app.start(); })(); In the code above, a single product object is created with the following line of code: var product = { name: "Tesla", price: 80000 }; Next, the productTemplate element from the page is converted into an actual WinJS template with the following line of code: var productTemplate = new WinJS.Binding.Template(document.getElementById("productTemplate")); The template is rendered to the templateContainer element with the following line of code: productTemplate.render(product, document.getElementById("productContainer")); The result of this work is that the product details are displayed: Notice that you do not need to call WinJS.Binding.processAll(). The Template render() method takes care of the binding for you. Displaying an Array in a Template If you want to display an array of products using a template then you simply need to create a for..next loop and iterate through the array calling the Template render() method for each element. (function () { "use strict"; var app = WinJS.Application; app.onactivated = function (eventObject) { if (eventObject.detail.kind === Windows.ApplicationModel.Activation.ActivationKind.launch) { var products = [ { name: "Tesla", price: 80000 }, { name: "VW Rabbit", price: 200 }, { name: "BMW", price: 60000 } ]; var productTemplate = new WinJS.Binding.Template(document.getElementById("productTemplate")); var productContainer = document.getElementById("productContainer"); var i, product; for (i = 0; i < products.length; i++) { product = products[i]; productTemplate.render(product, productContainer); } } }; app.start(); })(); After each product in the array is rendered with the template, the result is appended to the productContainer element. No changes need to be made to the HTML page discussed in the previous section to display an array of products instead of a single product. The same product template can be used in both scenarios. Rendering an HTML TABLE with a Template When using the WinJS library, you create a template by creating an HTML element in your page. One drawback to this approach of creating templates is that your templates are part of your HTML page. In order for your HTML page to validate, the HTML within your templates must also validate. This means, for example, that you cannot enclose a single HTML table row within a template. The following HTML is invalid because you cannot place a TR element directly within the body of an HTML document:   <!-- Product Template --> <tr> <td data-win-bind="innerText:name"></td> <td data-win-bind="innerText:price"></td> </tr> This template won’t validate because, in a valid HTML5 document, a TR element must appear within a THEAD or TBODY element. Instead, you must create the entire TABLE element in the template. The following HTML page illustrates how you can create a template which contains a TR element: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <title>Application1</title> <!-- WinJS references --> <link href="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/css/ui-dark.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/base.js"></script> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/ui.js"></script> <!-- Application1 references --> <link href="/css/default.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="/js/default.js"></script> </head> <body> <!-- Product Template --> <div id="productTemplate"> <table> <tbody> <tr> <td data-win-bind="innerText:name"></td> <td data-win-bind="innerText:price"></td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div> <!-- Place where Product Template is Rendered --> <table> <thead> <tr> <th>Name</th><th>Price</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody id="productContainer"> </tbody> </table> </body> </html>   In the HTML page above, the product template includes TABLE and TBODY elements: <!-- Product Template --> <div id="productTemplate"> <table> <tbody> <tr> <td data-win-bind="innerText:name"></td> <td data-win-bind="innerText:price"></td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div> We discard these elements when we render the template. The only reason that we include the TABLE and THEAD elements in the template is to make the HTML page validate as valid HTML5 markup. Notice that the productContainer (the target of the template) in the page above is a TBODY element. We want to add the rows rendered by the template to the TBODY element in the page. The productTemplate is rendered in the default.js file: (function () { "use strict"; var app = WinJS.Application; app.onactivated = function (eventObject) { if (eventObject.detail.kind === Windows.ApplicationModel.Activation.ActivationKind.launch) { var products = [ { name: "Tesla", price: 80000 }, { name: "VW Rabbit", price: 200 }, { name: "BMW", price: 60000 } ]; var productTemplate = new WinJS.Binding.Template(document.getElementById("productTemplate")); var productContainer = document.getElementById("productContainer"); var i, product, row; for (i = 0; i < products.length; i++) { product = products[i]; productTemplate.render(product).then(function (result) { row = WinJS.Utilities.query("tr", result).get(0); productContainer.appendChild(row); }); } } }; app.start(); })(); When the product template is rendered, the TR element is extracted from the rendered template by using the WinJS.Utilities.query() method. Next, only the TR element is added to the productContainer: productTemplate.render(product).then(function (result) { row = WinJS.Utilities.query("tr", result).get(0); productContainer.appendChild(row); }); I discuss the WinJS.Utilities.query() method in depth in a previous blog entry: http://stephenwalther.com/blog/archive/2012/02/23/windows-web-applications-query-selectors.aspx When everything gets rendered, the products are displayed in an HTML table: You can see the actual HTML rendered by looking at the Visual Studio DOM Explorer window:   Loading an External Template Instead of embedding a template in an HTML page, you can place your template in an external HTML file. It makes sense to create a template in an external file when you need to use the same template in multiple pages. For example, you might need to use the same product template in multiple pages in your application. The following HTML page does not contain a template. It only contains a container that will act as a target for the rendered template: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <title>Application1</title> <!-- WinJS references --> <link href="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/css/ui-dark.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/base.js"></script> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/ui.js"></script> <!-- Application1 references --> <link href="/css/default.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="/js/default.js"></script> </head> <body> <!-- Place where Product Template is Rendered --> <div id="productContainer"></div> </body> </html> The template is contained in a separate file located at the path /templates/productTemplate.html:   Here’s the contents of the productTemplate.html file: <!-- Product Template --> <div id="productTemplate"> <h1>Product Details</h1> <div> Product Name: <span data-win-bind="innerText:name"></span> </div> <div> Product Price: <span data-win-bind="innerText:price"></span> </div> </div> Notice that the template file only contains the template and not the standard opening and closing HTML elements. It is an HTML fragment. If you prefer, you can include all of the standard opening and closing HTML elements in your external template – these elements get stripped away automatically: <html> <head><title>product template</title></head> <body> <!-- Product Template --> <div id="productTemplate"> <h1>Product Details</h1> <div> Product Name: <span data-win-bind="innerText:name"></span> </div> <div> Product Price: <span data-win-bind="innerText:price"></span> </div> </div> </body> </html> Either approach – using a fragment or using a full HTML document  — works fine. Finally, the following default.js file loads the external template, renders the template for each product, and appends the result to the product container: (function () { "use strict"; var app = WinJS.Application; app.onactivated = function (eventObject) { if (eventObject.detail.kind === Windows.ApplicationModel.Activation.ActivationKind.launch) { var products = [ { name: "Tesla", price: 80000 }, { name: "VW Rabbit", price: 200 }, { name: "BMW", price: 60000 } ]; var productTemplate = new WinJS.Binding.Template(null, { href: "/templates/productTemplate.html" }); var productContainer = document.getElementById("productContainer"); var i, product, row; for (i = 0; i < products.length; i++) { product = products[i]; productTemplate.render(product, productContainer); } } }; app.start(); })(); The path to the external template is passed to the constructor for the Template class as one of the options: var productTemplate = new WinJS.Binding.Template(null, {href:"/templates/productTemplate.html"}); When a template is contained in a page then you use the first parameter of the WinJS.Binding.Template constructor to represent the template – instead of null, you pass the element which contains the template. When a template is located in an external file, you pass the href for the file as part of the second parameter for the WinJS.Binding.Template constructor. Summary The goal of this blog entry was to describe how you can use WinJS templates to render either a single item or an array of items to a page. We also explored two advanced topics. You learned how to render an HTML table by extracting the TR element from a template. You also learned how to place a template in an external file.

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• Allen for Umbraco - Upload photos from your iPhone - iPad and iPod Touch

  - by Vizioz Limited

  At last year's UK Umbraco Festival we gave a demo of our alpha version of Allen for Umbraco, at that stage the application only worked on an iPhone and was a very quick prototype to see what people thought.When we returned to our office the next day, we decided if we were going to release Allen for Umbraco into the wild we really should start again from scratch, the main two reasons for this were;First to ensure it was a truly Universal application ( i.e. it can be installed on an iPhone, iPad or iPod ) which looks and behaves differently depending on the device. The second reason was we really wanted the application to be the foundations of more than just image uploading for Umbraco, for this to be the case we ensured the new version was built following proven design patterns and with lots of unit tests so that we can easily extended it.We have lots of plans for future versions of Allen for Umbraco including adding iCloud support to keep all your settings in sync across your multiple Apple devices. We are also working on support for Umbraco 5 which should be release soon.When you download the App and setup your site, make sure you have a look at the Image Resizing settings, by default we have set these to resize your images to 512 pixels wide, however you can choose from a variety of different resizing methods (by Height, Width, Fit within a frame or the full size image).Also, by default when you select a photo you will see that the image is named with it's date and time stamp of when the photograph was taken (or the current date and time if the original date is not stored in your image). If you click on this name you can edit the name of your photo before it is uploaded.Finally, we are really keep to get your feedback, so within the App help section you will find a way to submit Suggestions and if needed, you can send up Support emails from within the App :)We hope you enjoy the first version of Allen for Umbraco and we look forward to bringing you lots of exciting additional functionality in the future!

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• Five Things To Which SQL Server Should Say "Goodbye and Good Riddance"

  - by Adam Machanic

  I was tagged by master blogger Aaron Bertrand and asked to identify five things that should be removed from SQL Server. Easy enough, or so I thought... 1) Tempdb . But I should qualify that a bit. Tempdb is absolutely necessary for SQL Server to properly function, but in its current state is easily the number one bottleneck in the majority of SQL Server instances. Many other DBMS vendors abandoned the "monolithic, instance-scoped temporary data space" years ago, yet SQL Server soldiers on, putting...(read more)

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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #005

  - by pinaldave

  Here is the list of curetted articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2006 SQL SERVER – Cursor to Kill All Process in Database I indeed wrote this cursor and when I often look back, I wonder how naive I was to write this. The reason for writing this cursor was to free up my database from any existing connection so I can do database operation. This worked fine but there can be a potentially big issue if there was any important transaction was killed by this process. There is another way to to achieve the same thing where we can use ALTER syntax to take database in single user mode. Read more about that over here and here. 2007 Rules of Third Normal Form and Normalization Advantage – 3NF The rules of 3NF are mentioned here Make a separate table for each set of related attributes, and give each table a primary key. If an attribute depends on only part of a multi-valued key, remove it to a separate table If attributes do not contribute to a description of the key, remove them to a separate table. Correct Syntax for Stored Procedure SP Sometime a simple question is the most important question. I often see in industry incorrectly written Stored Procedure. Few writes code after the most outer BEGIN…END and few writes code after the GO Statement. In this brief blog post, I have attempted to explain the same. 2008 Switch Between Result Pan and Query Pan – SQL Shortcut Many times when I am writing query I have to scroll the result displayed in the result set. Most of the developer uses the mouse to switch between and Query Pane and Result Pane. There are few developers who are crazy about Keyboard shortcuts. F6 is the keyword which can be used to switch between query pane and tabs of the result pane. Interesting Observation – Use of Index and Execution Plan Query Optimization is a complex game and it has its own rules. From the example in the article we have discovered that Query Optimizer does not use clustered index to retrieve data, sometime non clustered index provides optimal performance for retrieving Primary Key. When all the rows and columns are selected Primary Key should be used to select data as it provides optimal performance. 2009 Interesting Observation – TOP 100 PERCENT and ORDER BY If you pull up any application or system where there are more than 100 SQL Server Views are created – I am very confident that at one or two places you will notice the scenario wherein View the ORDER BY clause is used with TOP 100 PERCENT. SQL Server 2008 VIEW with ORDER BY clause does not throw an error; moreover, it does not acknowledge the presence of it as well. In this article we have taken three perfect examples and demonstrated which clause we should use when. Comma Separated Values (CSV) from Table Column A Very common question – How to create comma separated values from a table in the database? The answer is also very common if we use XML. Check out this article for quick learning on the same subject. Azure Start Guide – Step by Step Installation Guide Though Azure portal has changed a quite bit since I wrote this article, the concept used in this article are not old. They are still valid and many of the functions are still working as mentioned in the article. I believe this one article will put you on the track to use Azure! Size of Index Table for Each Index – Solution Earlier I have posted a small question on this blog and requested help from readers to participate here and provide a solution. The puzzle was to write a query that will return the size for each index that is on any particular table. We need a query that will return an additional column in the above listed query and it should contain the size of the index. This article presents two of the best solutions from the puzzle. 2010 Well, this week in 2010 was the week of puzzles as I posted three interesting puzzles. Till today I am noticing pretty good interesting in the puzzles. They are tricky but for sure brings a great value if you are a database developer for a long time. I suggest you go over this puzzles and their answers. Did you really know all of the answers? I am confident that reading following three blog post will for sure help you enhance the experience with T-SQL. SQL SERVER – Challenge – Puzzle – Usage of FAST Hint SQL SERVER – Puzzle – Challenge – Error While Converting Money to Decimal SQL SERVER – Challenge – Puzzle – Why does RIGHT JOIN Exists 2011 DVM sys.dm_os_sys_info Column Name Changed in SQL Server 2012 Have you ever faced a situation where something does not work? When you try to fix it - you enjoy fixing it and started to appreciate the breaking changes. Well, this was exactly I felt yesterday. Before I begin my story, I want to candidly state that I do not encourage anybody to use * in the SELECT statement. Now the disclaimer is over – I suggest you read the original story – you will love it! Get Directory Structure using Extended Stored Procedure xp_dirtree Here is the question to you – why would you do something in SQL Server where you can do the same task in command prompt much easily. Well, the answer is sometime there are real use cases when we have to do such thing. This is a similar example where I have demonstrated how in SQL Server 2012 we can use extended stored procedure to retrieve directory structure. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• New DMV… not yet

  - by Michael Zilberstein

  Downloaded and installed new toy: And while reading BOL, stumbled upon new extremely useful DMV: sys.dm_exec_query_profiles . This DMV enables DBA to monitor query progress while it is being executed. Counters in the DMV are per operation per thread. So we’ll be able to monitor in real time which thread (even for parallel processing) processes which node in the plan. Or find heavy operations “post mortem”. We all know the uncomfortable feeling when some heavy query runs and the boss starts asking...(read more)

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• Performance Gains using Indexed Views and Computed Columns

  - by NeilHambly

  Hello This is a quick follow-up blog to the Presention I gave last night @ the London UG Meeting ( 17th March 2010 ) It was a great evening and we had a big full house (over 120 Registered for this event), due to time constraints we had I was unable to spend enough time on this topic to really give it justice or any the myriad of questions that arose form the session, I will be gathering all my material and putting a comprehensive BLOG entry on this topic in the next couple of days.. In the meantime here is the slides from last night if you wanted to again review it or if you where not @ the meeting If you wish to contact me then please feel free to send me emails @ [email protected] Finally  - a quick thanks to Tony Rogerson for allowing me to be a Presenter last night (so we know who we can blame !)  and all the other presenters for thier support Watch this space Folks more to follow soon.. 

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• How to add items to the Document Types context menu.

  - by Vizioz Limited

  I am currently working on an extension to Umbraco that needed an extra menu item on the Document Types menu in the Settings section, my first thought was to use the BeforeNodeRender event to add the menu item, but this event only fires on the Content and Media menu trees.See: Codeplex Issue 21623The "temporary" solution has been to extend the "loadNodeTypes" class, I say temporary because I assume that the core team may well extend the event functionality to the entire menu tree in the future which would be much better and would prevent you from having to complete override the menu items.This was suggested by Slace on my "is it possible to add an item to the context menu in tree's other than media content" post on the our.umbraco.org site.There are three things you need to do:1) Override the loadNodeTypesusing System.Collections.Generic;using umbraco.interfaces;using umbraco.BusinessLogic.Actions;namespace Vizioz.xMind2Umbraco{ // Note: Remember these menu's might change in future versions of Umbraco public class loadNodeTypesMenu : umbraco.loadNodeTypes { public loadNodeTypesMenu(string application) : base(application) { } protected override void CreateRootNodeActions(ref List<IAction> actions) { actions.Clear(); actions.Add(ActionNew.Instance); actions.Add(xMindImportAction.Instance); actions.Add(ContextMenuSeperator.Instance); actions.Add(ActionImport.Instance); actions.Add(ContextMenuSeperator.Instance); actions.Add(ActionRefresh.Instance); } protected override void CreateAllowedActions(ref List<IAction> actions) { actions.Clear(); actions.Add(ActionCopy.Instance); actions.Add(xMindImportAction.Instance); actions.Add(ContextMenuSeperator.Instance); actions.Add(ActionExport.Instance); actions.Add(ContextMenuSeperator.Instance); actions.Add(ActionDelete.Instance); } }}2) Create a new Action to be used on the menuusing umbraco.interfaces;namespace Vizioz.xMind2Umbraco{ public class xMindImportAction : IAction { #region Implementation of IAction public static xMindImportAction Instance { get { return umbraco.Singleton<xMindImportAction>.Instance; } } public char Letter { get { return 'p'; } } public bool ShowInNotifier { get { return true; } } public bool CanBePermissionAssigned { get { return true; } } public string Icon { get { return "editor/OPEN.gif"; } } public string Alias { get { return "Import from xMind"; } } public string JsFunctionName { get { return "openModal('dialogs/xMindImport.aspx?id=' + nodeID, 'Publish Management', 550, 480);"; } } public string JsSource { get { return string.Empty; } } #endregion }}3) Update the UmbracoAppTree table, my case I changed the following:TreeHandlerTypeFrom: loadNodeTypesTo: loadNodeTypesMenuTreeHandlerAssemblyFrom: umbracoTo: Vizioz.xMind2UmbracoAnd the result is:

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• Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse (OEPE) 11gR1 (11.1.1.7) now supports ADF Faces Tags

  - by pieter.humphrey

  So the recent release of OEPE 11.1.1.7 has the ADF community buzzing.   In addition to reading the product manager's blog entry on the new release... http://blogs.oracle.com/gstachni/2011/02/oracle_enterprise_pack_for_ecl_3.html ...it's important to realize what this support entails now and in the future.    This first step, of supporting ADF Faces tags, is not prelude to *complete* ADF support in OEPE.  Rather, the aim of the Eclipse support is to provide tools for the MVC (Model-View-Controller) parts of the ADF runtime stack.   This means that we plan to support ADFm and ADFc as well in the future, but not the entire ADF stack (ADF BC, etc).    Hope this gives people an idea of what to expect, and we look forward to your feedback in the forums! See a demo on Shay's blog: http://blogs.oracle.com/shay/2011/02/adf_faces_now_in_eclipse.html   Technorati Tags: eclipse,java,development,ADF11g,Oracle,ADF Faces del.icio.us Tags: eclipse,java,development,ADF11g,Oracle,ADF Faces

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• Management and Monitoring Tools for Windows Azure

  - by BuckWoody

  With such a large platform, Windows Azure has a lot of moving parts. We’ve done our best to keep the interface as simple as possible, while giving you the most control and visibility we can. However, as with most Microsoft products, there are multiple ways to do something – and I’ve always found that to be a good strength. Depending on the situation, I might want a graphical interface, a command-line interface, or just an API so I can incorporate the management into my own tools, or have third-party companies write other tools. While by no means exhaustive, I thought I might put together a quick list of a few tools you can use to manage and monitor Windows Azure components, from our IaaS, SaaS and PaaS offerings. Some of the products focus on one area more than another, but all are available today. I’ll try and maintain this list to keep it current, but make sure you check the date of this post’s update – if it’s more than six months old, it’s most likely out of date. Things move fast in the cloud. The Windows Azure Management Portal The primary tool for managing Windows Azure is our portal – most everything you need is there, from creating new services to querying a database. There are two versions as of this writing – a Silverlight client version, and a newer HTML5 version. The latter is being updated constantly to be in parity with the Silverlight client. There’s a balance in this portal between simplicity and power – we’re following the “less is more” approach, with increasing levels of detail as you work through the portal rather than overwhelming you with a single, long “more is more” page. You can find the Portal here: http://windowsazure.com (then click “Log In” and then “Portal”) Windows Azure Management API You can also use programming tools to either write your own interface, or simply provide management functions directly within your solution. You have two options – you can use the more universal REST API’s, which area bit more complex but work with any system that can write to them, or the more approachable .NET API calls in code. You can find the reference for the API’s here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ee460799.aspx  All Class Libraries, for each part of Windows Azure: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee393295.aspx  PowerShell Command-lets PowerShell is one of the most powerful scripting languages I’ve used with Windows – and it’s baked into all of our products. When you need to work with multiple servers, scripting is really the only way to go, and the Windows Azure PowerShell Command-Lets allow you to work across most any part of the platform – and can even be used within the services themselves. You can do everything with them from creating a new IaaS, PaaS or SaaS service, to controlling them and even working with security and more. You can find more about the Command-Lets here: http://wappowershell.codeplex.com/documentation (older link, still works, will point you to the new ones as well) We have command-line utilities for other operating systems as well: https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/downloads/  Video walkthrough of using the Command-Lets: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUILD/BUILD2011/SAC-859T  System Center System Center is actually a suite of graphical tools you can use to manage, deploy, control, monitor and tune software from Microsoft and even other platforms. This will be the primary tool we’ll recommend for managing a hybrid or contiguous management process – and as time goes on you’ll see more and more features put into System Center for the entire Windows Azure suite of products. You can find the Management Pack and README for it here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=11324  SQL Server Management Studio / Data Tools / Visual Studio SQL Server has two built-in management and development, and since Version 2008 R2, you can use them to manage Windows Azure Databases. Visual Studio also lets you connect to and manage portions of Windows Azure as well as Windows Azure Databases. You can read more about Visual Studio here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ee405484  You can read more about the SQL tools here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ee621784.aspx  Vendor-Provided Tools Microsoft does not suggest or endorse a specific third-party product. We do, however, use them, and see lots of other customers use them. You can browse to these sites to learn more, and chat with their folks directly on how they support Windows Azure. Cerebrata: Tools for managing from the command-line, graphical diagnostics, graphical storage management - http://www.cerebrata.com/  Quest Cloud Tools: Monitoring, Storage Management, and costing tools - http://communities.quest.com/community/cloud-tools  Paraleap: Monitoring tool - http://www.paraleap.com/AzureWatch  Cloudgraphs: Monitoring too -  http://www.cloudgraphs.com/  Opstera: Monitoring for Windows Azure and a Scale-out pattern manager - http://www.opstera.com/products/Azureops/  Compuware: SaaS performance monitoring, load testing -  http://www.compuware.com/application-performance-management/gomez-apm-products.html  SOASTA: Penetration and Security Testing - http://www.soasta.com/cloudtest/enterprise/  LoadStorm: Load-testing tool - http://loadstorm.com/windows-azure  Open-Source Tools This is probably the most specific set of tools, and the list I’ll have to maintain most often. Smaller projects have a way of coming and going, so I’ll try and make sure this list is current. Windows Azure MMC: (I actually use this one a lot) http://wapmmc.codeplex.com/  Windows Azure Diagnostics Monitor: http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/wazdmon  Azure Application Monitor: http://azuremonitor.codeplex.com/  Azure Web Log: http://www.xentrik.net/software/azure_web_log.html  Cloud Ninja:Multi-Tennant billing and performance monitor -  http://cnmb.codeplex.com/  Cloud Samurai: Multi-Tennant Management- http://cloudsamurai.codeplex.com/    If you have additions to this list, please post them as a comment and I’ll research and then add them. Thanks!

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• SQL SERVER – SQL in Sixty Seconds – Last Three Episodes – Need Your Opinion

  - by Pinal Dave

  I have been blogging for almost 7 years and building video content for around 2 years. After spending so much time on blogging and creating video, I have got the quite a good idea what people would like to read and what people like to watch. However, there is one thing, which I am constantly struggling after almost a year and I would like to get your opinion about it. Though, this may look very simple to you but it is very crucial to me and I would like to know your opinion about it. I have been building video almost every week for my SQL in Sixty Seconds series and it has been quite popular. So far on my YouTube Channel there are over 2600 subscribers and over 250K views. Here is my problem – there are about 50+ videos on SQL in Sixty Seconds Series but the not every video is popular. There are a few videos which are extremely popular and there are videos which are absolutely struggling to get even single view. I have yet not figured out what people would love to watch on this channel. I noticed lots of people watching various videos but hardly anyone leaving comments or suggestions. At the end of the blog posts associated with the SQL in Sixty Seconds, I always ask which video people would love to watch, but I get a very low response over there too. What I wonder is that why such a low engagement of viewers/readers on the video blog posts where as the channel is success and lots of people are watching the video? What do you think I should change in my video to increase the engagement? Here are my last three videos from SQL in Sixty Seconds channel and I would like to know your feedback. Remove Cached Login from SSMS Connect Dialog – SQL in Sixty Seconds #049 RESEED Identity Column in Database Table – SQL in Sixty Seconds #051 Puzzle SET ANSI_NULLS and Resultset – SQL in Sixty Seconds #052  The feedback which I will like the most will for sure get a special surprise gift for me. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL in Sixty Seconds, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology, Video

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• Have Fun with Mozilla Firefox’s Spark and Ember Paper Toys [Geek Project]

  - by Asian Angel

  Are you looking for a fun paper-craft project to work on while showing your support for Mozilla Firefox? Then you will enjoy the Spark and Ember paper toys that the folks from the Mozilla Indonesia community have put together. Each comes in an easy to print three page PDF file for easy storage and sharing with friends. Photo courtesy of Mozilla Blog Indonesia. Download the Spark Paper Toy Download the Ember Paper Toy [via Mozilla Blog Indonesia] What is a Histogram, and How Can I Use it to Improve My Photos?How To Easily Access Your Home Network From Anywhere With DDNSHow To Recover After Your Email Password Is Compromised

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• Silverlight Cream for March 06, 2010 -- #808

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: András Velvárt, felix corke, Colin Eberhardt, Christopher Bennage, Gergely Orosz, Entity Spaces Team Blog, Mike Taulty(-2-), Jit Ghosh, and Jesse Liberty. Shoutouts: Jeremy Likness expands on the Silverlight Team's post Vancouver Olympics - How'd We Do That? Gavin Wignall has a post up Creating a 360 photograph of an object with Silverlight Photosynth From SilverlightCream.com: Transforming an Ugly Duckling into a Graceful Swan With Expression Blend and Silverlight - Part 2 Intro Animation András Velvárt has part 2 of his Transformation series up at SilverlightShow... he's taking the initro animation to a new length, allowing playback even... cool video tutorial! Free Silverlight 4 beta skin! felix corke has a Silerlight 4 theme up for us all to use. If you like a dark theme like Blend, you'll like this... I like it! Linq to Visual Tree Colin Eberhardt has a great tutorial up for using LINQ to query the WPF or Silverlight Visual Tree while retaining the tree structure. He also has links out to other techniques. XAML Attributes on Separate Lines Christopher Bennage has a post up showing how to easily get all your XAML attributes on separate lines using a VS menu option... I didn't know that! Using built-in, embedded and streamed fonts in Silverlight Gergely Orosz has a post up at ScottLogic going over Fonts in Silverlight -- built-in, embedded, or streamed, and examples with code. EntitySpaces 2010 Two Part Series on Silverlight and WCF Entity Spaces Team Blog has a pair of videos up on Entity Spaces 2010, WCF, and Silverlight. Part 1 is the intro and explanation, part 2 is a full-up app demonstrating it. MEF, Silverlight and the DeploymentCatalog In an attempt to respond fully to a query, Mike Taulty literally pushed the record button and took off on what became a tutorial video on building a real Silverlight app utilizing MEF. Silverlight 4, Experiment with Pluggable Navigation and a WCF Data Service Mike Taulty has an experiment detailed on his blog about pluggable navigation and Silverlight 4. He walks through the history of how we got to this point then takes on in an example... good external links too Enhancing Silverlight Video Experiences with Contextual Data This is a post on the MSDN Magazine site where Jit Ghosh has a great long post about not only Smooth Streaming with Silverlight, but also adding context data to your video. When Is It OK To Hack? Read what all Jesse Liberty gets involved in when he's trying to get something out the door and has to work around a problem. Just about as interesting are the comments ... check it out and leave your own! Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    MIX10

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• Share your Santa Clouse pictures and win great prices with the Enablement Advent calendar

  - by Jürgen Kress

  Like last year we want to give you the opportunity to share your Christmas picture with the community! Make sure you send us your Santa Clouse, Snowman or your Rudolph pictures! The best pictures will be awarded with an Oracle wool cap and published at our blog. Thanks to our Enablement team you also have to opportunity to win great prices with our online Advent calendar: and the Happy Holiday message from Judson Althoff For more information on the SOA Partner Community please feel free to register at www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Website Technorati Tags: SOA Community,Oracle,OPN,advent calendar,Jürgen Kress,Santa clouse,Judson Althoff

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• Share your Santa Clouse pictures and win great prices with the Enablement Advent calendar

  - by Jürgen Kress

  Like last year we want to give you the opportunity to share your Christmas picture with the community! Make sure you send us your Santa Clouse, Snowman or your Rudolph pictures! The best pictures will be awarded with an Oracle wool cap and published at our blog. Thanks to our Enablement team you also have to opportunity to win great prices with our online Advent calendar: For more information on the SOA Partner Community please feel free to register at www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Website Technorati Tags: SOA Community,Oracle,OPN,advent calendar,Jürgen Kress,Santa clouse

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• JavaScript Intellisense Improvements with VS 2010

  This is the twentieth in a series of blog posts Im doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release.  Todays blog post covers some of the nice improvements coming with JavaScript intellisense with VS 2010 and the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express.  Youll find with VS 2010 that JavaScript Intellisense loads much faster for large script files and with large libraries, and that it now provides statement completion support for more advanced scenarios compared to previous versions...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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