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  • HP ProLiant DL980-Oracle TPC-C Benchmark spat

    - by jchang
    The Register reported a spat between HP and Oracle on the TPC-C benchmark. Per above, HP submitted a TPC-C result of 3,388,535 tpm-C for their ProLiant DL980 G7 (8 Xeon X7560 processors), with a cost of $0.63 per tpm-C. Oracle has refused permission to publish. Late last year (2010) Oracle published a result of 30M tpm-C for a 108 processors (sockets) SPARC cluster ($30M complete system cost). Oracle is now comparing this to the HP Superdome result from 2007 of 4M tpm-C at $2.93 per tpm-C, calling...(read more)

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  • Security updates for all supported versions of SQL Server

    - by AaronBertrand
    It's patch Tuesday! [ UPDATE June 19 : Please see my follow-up post about this security update.] Today Microsoft released a security bulletin covering several issues that could potentially affect SQL Server; these exploits include remote code execution, denial of service, information disclosure and elevation of privilege. You should test these patches on all machines running SQL Server, including those running only client tools (e.g. Management Studio or Management Studio Express). The updates affect...(read more)

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  • Making meetings much more efficient

    - by John Paul Cook
    Water. Yes, that’s simple. There needs to be a rule that whoever convenes a meeting be required to drink water. Half a liter of water when the meeting begins and another half a liter every half hour thereafter. That simple rule will motivate the meeting organizer to find closure quickly – and the exit. What day did I post this? Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!...(read more)

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  • Linux Mint is Brilliant

    - by Simon Moon
    Most of my blog posts sound way too whiny. I'm not that guy. (Am I?) I've been using SUSE-flavored Linux for personal projects since 2002 (SUSE Linux 8.1). This past weekend, I made the heart-wrenching decision to abandon openSUSE (version 12.1) in favor of Linux Mint (version Maya). OpenSUSE had just become too burdensome. Packages that installed easily on RedHat or Debian always had issues running on top of OpenSUSE. And I never could get the Heroku Toolbelt installed in any kind of usable state.And so, ...I'm beginning again with this enticing young thing -- Mint with the Cinnamon window environment. Delicious. And while I'll always have fond memories of my years with openSUSE, I've got to admit that Mint makes running Linux feel good again. http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2031

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  • Windows Azure Virtual Machine Readiness and Capacity Assessment for SQL Server

    - by SQLOS Team
    Windows Azure Virtual Machine Readiness and Capacity Assessment for Windows Server Machine Running SQL Server With the release of MAP Toolkit 8.0 Beta, we have added a new scenario to assess your Windows Azure Virtual Machine Readiness. The MAP 8.0 Beta performs a comprehensive assessment of Windows Servers running SQL Server to determine you level of readiness to migrate an on-premise physical or virtual machine to Windows Azure Virtual Machines. The MAP Toolkit then offers suggested changes to prepare the machines for migration, such as upgrading the operating system or SQL Server. MAP Toolkit 8.0 Beta is available for download here Your participation and feedback is very important to make the MAP Toolkit work better for you. We encourage you to participate in the beta program and provide your feedback at [email protected] or through one of our surveys. Now, let’s walk through the MAP Toolkit task for completing the Windows Azure Virtual Machine assessment and capacity planning. The tasks include the following: Perform an inventory View the Windows Azure VM Readiness results and report Collect performance data for determine VM sizing View the Windows Azure Capacity results and report Perform an inventory: 1. To perform an inventory against a single machine or across a complete environment, choose Perform an Inventory to launch the Inventory and Assessment Wizard as shown below: 2. After the Inventory and Assessment Wizard launches, select either the Windows computers or SQL Server scenario to inventory Windows machines. HINT: If you don’t care about completely inventorying a machine, just select the SQL Server scenario. Click Next to Continue. 3. On the Discovery Methods page, select how you want to discover computers and then click Next to continue. Description of Discovery Methods: Use Active Directory Domain Services -- This method allows you to query a domain controller via the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and select computers in all or specific domains, containers, or OUs. Use this method if all computers and devices are in AD DS. Windows networking protocols --  This method uses the WIN32 LAN Manager application programming interfaces to query the Computer Browser service for computers in workgroups and Windows NT 4.0–based domains. If the computers on the network are not joined to an Active Directory domain, use only the Windows networking protocols option to find computers. System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) -- This method enables you to inventory computers managed by System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM). You need to provide credentials to the System Center Configuration Manager server in order to inventory the managed computers. When you select this option, the MAP Toolkit will query SCCM for a list of computers and then MAP will connect to these computers. Scan an IP address range -- This method allows you to specify the starting address and ending address of an IP address range. The wizard will then scan all IP addresses in the range and inventory only those computers. Note: This option can perform poorly, if many IP addresses aren’t being used within the range. Manually enter computer names and credentials -- Use this method if you want to inventory a small number of specific computers. Import computer names from a files -- Using this method, you can create a text file with a list of computer names that will be inventoried. 4. On the All Computers Credentials page, enter the accounts that have administrator rights to connect to the discovered machines. This does not need to a domain account, but needs to be a local administrator. I have entered my domain account that is an administrator on my local machine. Click Next after one or more accounts have been added. NOTE: The MAP Toolkit primarily uses Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) to collect hardware, device, and software information from the remote computers. In order for the MAP Toolkit to successfully connect and inventory computers in your environment, you have to configure your machines to inventory through WMI and also allow your firewall to enable remote access through WMI. The MAP Toolkit also requires remote registry access for certain assessments. In addition to enabling WMI, you need accounts with administrative privileges to access desktops and servers in your environment. 5. On the Credentials Order page, select the order in which want the MAP Toolkit to connect to the machine and SQL Server. Generally just accept the defaults and click Next. 6. On the Enter Computers Manually page, click Create to pull up at dialog to enter one or more computer names. 7. On the Summary page confirm your settings and then click Finish. After clicking Finish the inventory process will start, as shown below: Windows Azure Readiness results and report After the inventory progress has completed, you can review the results under the Database scenario. On the tile, you will see the number of Windows Server machine with SQL Server that were analyzed, the number of machines that are ready to move without changes and the number of machines that require further changes. If you click this Azure VM Readiness tile, you will see additional details and can generate the Windows Azure VM Readiness Report. After the report is generated, select View | Saved Reports and Proposals to view the location of the report. Open up WindowsAzureVMReadiness* report in Excel. On the Windows tab, you can see the results of the assessment. This report has a column for the Operating System and SQL Server assessment and provides a recommendation on how to resolve, if there a component is not supported. Collect Performance Data Launch the Performance Wizard to collect performance information for the Windows Server machines that you would like the MAP Toolkit to suggest a Windows Azure VM size for. Windows Azure Capacity results and report After the performance metrics are collected, the Azure VM Capacity title will display the number of Virtual Machine sizes that are suggested for the Windows Server and Linux machines that were analyzed. You can then click on the Azure VM Capacity tile to see the capacity details and generate the Windows Azure VM Capacity Report. Within this report, you can view the performance data that was collected and the Virtual Machine sizes.   MAP Toolkit 8.0 Beta is available for download here Your participation and feedback is very important to make the MAP Toolkit work better for you. We encourage you to participate in the beta program and provide your feedback at [email protected] or through one of our surveys. Useful References: Windows Azure Homepage How to guides for Windows Azure Virtual Machines Provisioning a SQL Server Virtual Machine on Windows Azure Windows Azure Pricing     Peter Saddow Senior Program Manager – MAP Toolkit Team

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  • Windows Azure Learning Plan - Architecture

    - by BuckWoody
    This is one in a series of posts on a Windows Azure Learning Plan. You can find the main post here. This one deals with what an Architect needs to know about Windows Azure.   General Architectural Guidance Overview and general  information about Azure - what it is, how it works, and where you can learn more. Cloud Computing, A Crash Course for Architects (Video) http://www.msteched.com/2010/Europe/ARC202 Patterns and Practices for Cloud Development http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff898430.aspx Design Patterns, Anti-Patterns and Windows Azure http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ignitionshowcase/archive/2010/11/27/design-patterns-anti-patterns-and-windows-azure.aspx Application Patterns for the Cloud http://blogs.msdn.com/b/kashif/archive/2010/08/07/application-patterns-for-the-cloud.aspx Architecting Applications for High Scalability (Video) http://www.msteched.com/2010/Europe/ARC309 David Aiken on Azure Architecture Patterns (Video) http://blogs.msdn.com/b/architectsrule/archive/2010/09/09/arcast-tv-david-aiken-on-azure-architecture-patterns.aspx Cloud Application Architecture Patterns (Video) http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bobfamiliar/archive/2010/10/19/cloud-application-architecture-patterns-by-david-platt.aspx 10 Things Every Architect Needs to Know about Windows Azure http://geekswithblogs.net/iupdateable/archive/2010/10/20/slides-and-links-for-windows-azure-platform-session-at-software.aspx Key Differences Between Public and Private Clouds http://blogs.msdn.com/b/kadriu/archive/2010/10/24/key-differences-between-public-and-private-clouds.aspx Microsoft Application Platform at a Glance http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jmeier/archive/2010/10/30/microsoft-application-platform-at-a-glance.aspx Windows Azure is not just about Roles http://vikassahni.wordpress.com/2010/11/17/windows-azure-is-not-just-about-roles/ Example Application for Windows Azure http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff966482.aspx Implementation Guidance Practical applications for the architect to consider 5 Enterprise steps for adopting a Platform as a Service http://blogs.msdn.com/b/davidmcg/archive/2010/12/02/5-enterprise-steps-for-adopting-a-platform-as-a-service.aspx?wa=wsignin1.0 Performance-Based Scaling in Windows Azure http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/gg232759.aspx Windows Azure Guidance for the Development Process http://blogs.msdn.com/b/eugeniop/archive/2010/04/01/windows-azure-guidance-development-process.aspx Microsoft Developer Guidance Maps http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jmeier/archive/2010/10/04/developer-guidance-ia-at-a-glance.aspx How to Build a Hybrid On-Premise/In Cloud Application http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ignitionshowcase/archive/2010/11/09/how-to-build-a-hybrid-on-premise-in-cloud-application.aspx A Common Scenario of Multi-instances in Windows Azure http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windows-azure-support/archive/2010/11/03/a-common-scenario-of-multi_2d00_instances-in-windows-azure-.aspx Slides and Links for Windows Azure Platform Best Practices http://geekswithblogs.net/iupdateable/archive/2010/09/29/slides-and-links-for-windows-azure-platform-best-practices-for.aspx AppFabric Architecture and Deployment Topologies guide http://blogs.msdn.com/b/appfabriccat/archive/2010/09/10/appfabric-architecture-and-deployment-topologies-guide-now-available-via-microsoft-download-center.aspx Windows Azure Platform Appliance http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/appliance/ Integrating Cloud Technologies into Your Organization Interoperability with Open Source and other applications; business and cost decisions Interoperability Labs at Microsoft http://www.interoperabilitybridges.com/ Windows Azure Service Level Agreements http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/sla/

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  • Joins in single-table queries

    - by Rob Farley
    Tables are only metadata. They don’t store data. I’ve written something about this before, but I want to take a viewpoint of this idea around the topic of joins, especially since it’s the topic for T-SQL Tuesday this month. Hosted this time by Sebastian Meine (@sqlity), who has a whole series on joins this month. Good for him – it’s a great topic. In that last post I discussed the fact that we write queries against tables, but that the engine turns it into a plan against indexes. My point wasn’t simply that a table is actually just a Clustered Index (or heap, which I consider just a special type of index), but that data access always happens against indexes – never tables – and we should be thinking about the indexes (specifically the non-clustered ones) when we write our queries. I described the scenario of looking up phone numbers, and how it never really occurs to us that there is a master list of phone numbers, because we think in terms of the useful non-clustered indexes that the phone companies provide us, but anyway – that’s not the point of this post. So a table is metadata. It stores information about the names of columns and their data types. Nullability, default values, constraints, triggers – these are all things that define the table, but the data isn’t stored in the table. The data that a table describes is stored in a heap or clustered index, but it goes further than this. All the useful data is going to live in non-clustered indexes. Remember this. It’s important. Stop thinking about tables, and start thinking about indexes. So let’s think about tables as indexes. This applies even in a world created by someone else, who doesn’t have the best indexes in mind for you. I’m sure you don’t need me to explain Covering Index bit – the fact that if you don’t have sufficient columns “included” in your index, your query plan will either have to do a Lookup, or else it’ll give up using your index and use one that does have everything it needs (even if that means scanning it). If you haven’t seen that before, drop me a line and I’ll run through it with you. Or go and read a post I did a long while ago about the maths involved in that decision. So – what I’m going to tell you is that a Lookup is a join. When I run SELECT CustomerID FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader WHERE SalesPersonID = 285; against the AdventureWorks2012 get the following plan: I’m sure you can see the join. Don’t look in the query, it’s not there. But you should be able to see the join in the plan. It’s an Inner Join, implemented by a Nested Loop. It’s pulling data in from the Index Seek, and joining that to the results of a Key Lookup. It clearly is – the QO wouldn’t call it that if it wasn’t really one. It behaves exactly like any other Nested Loop (Inner Join) operator, pulling rows from one side and putting a request in from the other. You wouldn’t have a problem accepting it as a join if the query were slightly different, such as SELECT sod.OrderQty FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader AS soh JOIN Sales.SalesOrderDetail as sod on sod.SalesOrderID = soh.SalesOrderID WHERE soh.SalesPersonID = 285; Amazingly similar, of course. This one is an explicit join, the first example was just as much a join, even thought you didn’t actually ask for one. You need to consider this when you’re thinking about your queries. But it gets more interesting. Consider this query: SELECT SalesOrderID FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader WHERE SalesPersonID = 276 AND CustomerID = 29522; It doesn’t look like there’s a join here either, but look at the plan. That’s not some Lookup in action – that’s a proper Merge Join. The Query Optimizer has worked out that it can get the data it needs by looking in two separate indexes and then doing a Merge Join on the data that it gets. Both indexes used are ordered by the column that’s indexed (one on SalesPersonID, one on CustomerID), and then by the CIX key SalesOrderID. Just like when you seek in the phone book to Farley, the Farleys you have are ordered by FirstName, these seek operations return the data ordered by the next field. This order is SalesOrderID, even though you didn’t explicitly put that column in the index definition. The result is two datasets that are ordered by SalesOrderID, making them very mergeable. Another example is the simple query SELECT CustomerID FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader WHERE SalesPersonID = 276; This one prefers a Hash Match to a standard lookup even! This isn’t just ordinary index intersection, this is something else again! Just like before, we could imagine it better with two whole tables, but we shouldn’t try to distinguish between joining two tables and joining two indexes. The Query Optimizer can see (using basic maths) that it’s worth doing these particular operations using these two less-than-ideal indexes (because of course, the best indexese would be on both columns – a composite such as (SalesPersonID, CustomerID – and it would have the SalesOrderID column as part of it as the CIX key still). You need to think like this too. Not in terms of excusing single-column indexes like the ones in AdventureWorks2012, but in terms of having a picture about how you’d like your queries to run. If you start to think about what data you need, where it’s coming from, and how it’s going to be used, then you will almost certainly write better queries. …and yes, this would include when you’re dealing with regular joins across multiples, not just against joins within single table queries.

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  • Query Tuning Mastery at PASS Summit 2012: The Video

    - by Adam Machanic
    An especially clever community member was kind enough to reverse-engineer the video stream for me, and came up with a direct link to the PASS TV video stream for my Query Tuning Mastery: The Art and Science of Manhandling Parallelism talk, delivered at the PASS Summit last Thursday. I'm not sure how long this link will work , but I'd like to share it for my readers who were unable to see it in person or live on the stream. Start here. Skip past the keynote, to the 149 minute mark. Enjoy!...(read more)

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  • List SQL Server Instances using the Registry

    - by BuckWoody
    I read this interesting article on using PowerShell and the registry, and thought I would modify his information a bit to list the SQL Server Instances on a box. The interesting thing about listing instances this was is that you can touch remote machines, find the instances when they are off and so on. Anyway, here’s the scriptlet I used to find the Instances on my system: $MachineName = '.' $reg = [Microsoft.Win32.RegistryKey]::OpenRemoteBaseKey('LocalMachine', $MachineName) $regKey= $reg.OpenSubKey("SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Microsoft SQL Server\\Instance Names\\SQL" ) $regkey.GetValueNames() You can read more of his article to find out the reason for the remote registry call and so forth – there are also security implications here for being able to read the registry. Script Disclaimer, for people who need to be told this sort of thing: Never trust any script, including those that you find here, until you understand exactly what it does and how it will act on your systems. Always check the script on a test system or Virtual Machine, not a production system. Yes, there are always multiple ways to do things, and this script may not work in every situation, for everything. It’s just a script, people. All scripts on this site are performed by a professional stunt driver on a closed course. Your mileage may vary. Void where prohibited. Offer good for a limited time only. Keep out of reach of small children. Do not operate heavy machinery while using this script. If you experience blurry vision, indigestion or diarrhea during the operation of this script, see a physician immediately. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • Refreshing imported MySQL data with MySQL for Excel

    - by Javier Rivera
    Welcome to another blog post from the MySQL for Excel Team. Today we're going to talk about a new feature included since MySQL for Excel 1.3.0, you can install the latest GA or maintenance version using the MySQL Installer or optionally you can download directly any GA or non-GA version from the MySQL Developer Zone.As some users suggested in our forums we should be maintaining the link between tables and Excel not only when editing data through the Edit MySQL Data option, but also when importing data via Import MySQL Data. Before 1.3.0 this process only provided you with an offline copy of the Table's data into Excel and you had no way to refresh that information from the DB later on. Now, with this new feature we'll show you how easy is to work with the latest available information at all times. This feature is transparent to you (it doesn't require additional steps to work as long as the users had the Create an Excel Table for the imported MySQL table data option enabled. To ensure you have this option checked, click over Advanced Options... after the Import Data dialog is displayed). The current blog post assumes you already know how to import data into excel, you could always take a look at our previous post How To - Guide to Importing Data from a MySQL Database to Excel using MySQL for Excel if you need further reference on that topic. After importing Data from a MySQL Table into Excel, you can refresh the data in 3 ways.1. Simply right click over the range of the imported data, to show the pop-up menu: Click over the Refresh button to obtain the latest copy of the data in the table. 2. Click the Refresh button on the Data ribbon: 3. Click the Refresh All button in the Data ribbon (beware this will refresh all Excel tables in the Workbook): Please take a note of a couple of details here, the first one is about the size of the table. If by the time you refresh the table new columns had been added to it, and you originally have imported all columns, the table will grow to the right. The same applies to rows, if the table has new rows and you did not limit the results , the table will grow to to the bottom of the sheet in Excel. The second detail you should take into account is this operation will overwrite any changes done to the cells after the table was originally imported or previously refreshed: Now with this new feature, imported data remains linked to the data source and is available to be updated at all times. It empowers the user to always be able to work with the latest version of the imported MySQL data. We hope you like this this new feature and give it a try! Remember that your feedback is very important for us, so drop us a message with your comments, suggestions for this or other features and follow us at our social media channels: MySQL on Windows (this) Blog: https://blogs.oracle.com/MySqlOnWindows/ MySQL for Excel forum: http://forums.mysql.com/list.php?172 Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/mysql YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/MySQLChannel Thanks!

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  • Visually stunning maps and PivotViewer

    - by Rob Farley
    One of the things about PivotViewer is that it runs in the Silverlight platform and can be extended recently. One of my guys at LobsterPot, Roger Noble, has used this to incorporate a Bing Maps layer, showing items which have  Latitude and Longitude values there. We’re already talking to a hospital about using this to allow them to browse their patient data, including showing the patients on a map according to which bed they’re in. Interesting times – this will involve having custom tiles instead of the ones from Bing Maps, but the idea is similar. Of course, we’ll be using Bing Maps to show where the patients live. I should also mention that this is a work-in-progress still. Figuring out how to use PivotViewer isn’t trivial, and we’ve done quite a lot of experimenting to see how to get things working. If you find bugs, please feel free to let me know (rob_farley at hotmail will usually reach me), and we’ll add them to our list. Here are some screenshots that I made recently using the collection at http://pivot.lobsterpot.com.au/flickr – by selecting a tag, you can get a new bunch of images. A couple of images that were taken in Iceland. Some from St Mary’s Lighthouse near Newcastle, UK. And some from around Big Ben in London. I’d recommend using either Firefox or Internet Explorer if you choose to browse this yourself. It seems the Chrome browser support for Silverlight doesn’t quite handle things as nicely as we’d all like. I imagine that at some point, we may enhance the Flickr collection, to be able to search on more than tags, but as a sample collection, it seems to work quite well.

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  • Cumulative Update #1 for SQL Server 2005 SP4

    - by AaronBertrand
    Well, much quicker than I would have suspected, the SQL Server Release Services team has incorporated all of the fixes in 2005 SP3's CU #12 into the first CU for SP4. Thanks to Chris Wood for the heads up. You can get the new Cumulative Update here: KB #2464079 : Cumulative update package 1 for SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 4 The nice round number of build 5000 didn't last long either; this CU will update you from 9.00.5000 to 9.00.5254....(read more)

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  • SQL Server 2008 R2 still requires a trace flag for Lock Pages in Memory

    - by AaronBertrand
    Almost two years ago, I blogged that Lock Pages in Memory was finally available to Standard Edition customers (Enterprise Edition customers had long been deemed smart enough to not abuse this feature). In addition to applying a cumulative update (2005 SP3 CU4 or 2008 SP1 CU2), in order to take advantage of LPIM, you also had to enable trace flag 845. Since the trace flag isn't documented for SQL Server 2008 R2, several of us in the community assumed that it was no longer required (since it was introduced...(read more)

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  • SQL Server 2012 content on Channel 9

    - by jamiet
    A mountain of SQL Server 2012 video content featuring Greg Low, Jonathan Kehayias, Joe Sack and Roger Doherty has just been released on Channel 9. Channel 9 has great support for tags and RSS feeds so if you want to automatically download all of that content simply you can add the following RSS feed: http://channel9.msdn.com/Tags/sql+server+2012/RSS to your podcast reader of choice and have fun learning about all the new features in SQL Server 2012 such as: AlwaysOn Power View SSDT SSRS Data Alerts SSAS Tabular Modelling DAX Improvements MDS improvements SSIS improvements DQS StreamInsight improvements Data-Tier Apps (DACs) LocalDB FileTable Spatial improvements T-SQL paging Distributed Replay XEvents improvements ADO.Net Code-first T-SQL improvements Server roles Partitioning improvements ColumnStore Whew, quite a list! @jamiet

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  • #SQLMug - Like a collectors set of 5 x geeky SQL Mugs?

    - by Greg Low
    Hi Folks,For a while, I've been wanting to get some great SQL mugs printed for SQL Down Under but I need further inspiration so here's your chance to get a collectors set of 5 SQL mugs:Send me (greg @ sqldownunder . com) a great line to go onto the mugs, along with your country and a delivery address. I'll pick the best 5 and get mugs printed with those sayings. If you're one of the 5, I'll send you a collectors set with one of each of the 5. Simple enough?Here are some ideas I've already received to get you started:Chuck Norris gets NULL. Nothing compares to him either.ALTER MUG  SET SINGLE_USER  WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE;DENY CONTROL  ON OBJECT::MUG  TO public;knock knock who's there? sp_ sp_who? spid 1, spid 2, spid 3, spid 4... ALTER DATABASE CriticalDB SET ChuckNorrisMode = ON WITH NOWAIT;I'll probably cut off new entries around the end of April.

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  • ALT.NET Seattle

    - by GeekAgilistMercenary
    Time to rock the ALT.NET scene and head up to the conference this weekend.  I must say, out of all the conferences I have been to the ALT.NET Conference is by far one of the best.  Great minds, great attitudes, awesome chances to learn, awesome changes to expand on one's ideas with others that hit on the same hurdles!  All in all, last year was great and I am expecting it to be a great conference this year also. For more information check out the ALT.NET site: http://2010conf.altnetseattle.org/ To get more involved in the monthly ALT.NET events in Seattle: http://groups.google.com/group/altnetseattle http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=111345965570 http://www.altnetseattle.org/ If you are in the Seattle area this weekend, be sure to hit up the conference. For original entry and other blog entries check out my personal blog.

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  • Can you over-normalize?

    - by drsql
    Now, don’t get too excited and grab your pitchforks and torches. Clearly, it is extremely possible to overdo something in the design, but very often normalization takes the rap as being the culprit. In my “Database Design Fundamentals” presentation, one of my favorite things to do is ask “What is the most important normal form?” 9 out of 10 times, someone answers “Third”. When I ask what they have against fourth, the usually say that it makes the database work too slow. But when they find out that...(read more)

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  • Query Tuning Mastery at PASS Summit 2012: The Demos

    - by Adam Machanic
    For the second year in a row, I was asked to deliver a 500-level "Query Tuning Mastery" talk in room 6E of the Washington State Convention Center, for the PASS Summit. ( Here's some information about last year's talk, on workspace memory. ) And for the second year in a row, I had to deliver said talk at 10:15 in the morning, in a room used as overflow for the keynote, following a keynote speaker that didn't stop speaking on time. Frustrating! Last Thursday, after very, very quickly setting up and...(read more)

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  • An XEvent a Day (31 of 31) – Event Session DDL Events

    - by Jonathan Kehayias
    To close out this month’s series on Extended Events we’ll look at the DDL Events for the Event Session DDL operations, and how those can be used to track changes to Event Sessions and determine all of the possible outputs that could exist from an Extended Event Session.  One of my least favorite quirks about Extended Events is that there is no way to determine the Events and Actions that may exist inside a Target, except to parse all of the the captured data.  Information about the Event...(read more)

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  • TechEd 2010 Thanks and Demos

    - by Adam Machanic
    Thank you to everyone who attended my three sessions at this year's TechEd show in New Orleans. I had a great time presenting and answering the really great questions posed by attendees. My sessions were: DAT317 T-SQL Power! The OVER Clause: Your Key to No-Sweat Problem Solving Have you ever stared at a convoluted requirement, unsure of where to begin and how to get there with T-SQL? Have you ever spent three days working on a long and complex query, wondering if there might be a better way? Good...(read more)

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  • The Data Scientist

    - by BuckWoody
    A new term - well, perhaps not that new - has come up and I’m actually very excited about it. The term is Data Scientist, and since it’s new, it’s fairly undefined. I’ll explain what I think it means, and why I’m excited about it. In general, I’ve found the term deals at its most basic with analyzing data. Of course, we all do that, and the term itself in that definition is redundant. There is no science that I know of that does not work with analyzing lots of data. But the term seems to refer to more than the common practices of looking at data visually, putting it in a spreadsheet or report, or even using simple coding to examine data sets. The term Data Scientist (as far as I can make out this early in it’s use) is someone who has a strong understanding of data sources, relevance (statistical and otherwise) and processing methods as well as front-end displays of large sets of complicated data. Some - but not all - Business Intelligence professionals have these skills. In other cases, senior developers, database architects or others fill these needs, but in my experience, many lack the strong mathematical skills needed to make these choices properly. I’ve divided the knowledge base for someone that would wear this title into three large segments. It remains to be seen if a given Data Scientist would be responsible for knowing all these areas or would specialize. There are pretty high requirements on the math side, specifically in graduate-degree level statistics, but in my experience a company will only have a few of these folks, so they are expected to know quite a bit in each of these areas. Persistence The first area is finding, cleaning and storing the data. In some cases, no cleaning is done prior to storage - it’s just identified and the cleansing is done in a later step. This area is where the professional would be able to tell if a particular data set should be stored in a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS), across a set of key/value pair storage (NoSQL) or in a file system like HDFS (part of the Hadoop landscape) or other methods. Or do you examine the stream of data without storing it in another system at all? This is an important decision - it’s a foundation choice that deals not only with a lot of expense of purchasing systems or even using Cloud Computing (PaaS, SaaS or IaaS) to source it, but also the skillsets and other resources needed to care and feed the system for a long time. The Data Scientist sets something into motion that will probably outlast his or her career at a company or organization. Often these choices are made by senior developers, database administrators or architects in a company. But sometimes each of these has a certain bias towards making a decision one way or another. The Data Scientist would examine these choices in light of the data itself, starting perhaps even before the business requirements are created. The business may not even be aware of all the strategic and tactical data sources that they have access to. Processing Once the decision is made to store the data, the next set of decisions are based around how to process the data. An RDBMS scales well to a certain level, and provides a high degree of ACID compliance as well as offering a well-known set-based language to work with this data. In other cases, scale should be spread among multiple nodes (as in the case of Hadoop landscapes or NoSQL offerings) or even across a Cloud provider like Windows Azure Table Storage. In fact, in many cases - most of the ones I’m dealing with lately - the data should be split among multiple types of processing environments. This is a newer idea. Many data professionals simply pick a methodology (RDBMS with Star Schemas, NoSQL, etc.) and put all data there, regardless of its shape, processing needs and so on. A Data Scientist is familiar not only with the various processing methods, but how they work, so that they can choose the right one for a given need. This is a huge time commitment, hence the need for a dedicated title like this one. Presentation This is where the need for a Data Scientist is most often already being filled, sometimes with more or less success. The latest Business Intelligence systems are quite good at allowing you to create amazing graphics - but it’s the data behind the graphics that are the most important component of truly effective displays. This is where the mathematics requirement of the Data Scientist title is the most unforgiving. In fact, someone without a good foundation in statistics is not a good candidate for creating reports. Even a basic level of statistics can be dangerous. Anyone who works in analyzing data will tell you that there are multiple errors possible when data just seems right - and basic statistics bears out that you’re on the right track - that are only solvable when you understanding why the statistical formula works the way it does. And there are lots of ways of presenting data. Sometimes all you need is a “yes” or “no” answer that can only come after heavy analysis work. In that case, a simple e-mail might be all the reporting you need. In others, complex relationships and multiple components require a deep understanding of the various graphical methods of presenting data. Knowing which kind of chart, color, graphic or shape conveys a particular datum best is essential knowledge for the Data Scientist. Why I’m excited I love this area of study. I like math, stats, and computing technologies, but it goes beyond that. I love what data can do - how it can help an organization. I’ve been fortunate enough in my professional career these past two decades to work with lots of folks who perform this role at companies from aerospace to medical firms, from manufacturing to retail. Interestingly, the size of the company really isn’t germane here. I worked with one very small bio-tech (cryogenics) company that worked deeply with analysis of complex interrelated data. So  watch this space. No, I’m not leaving Azure or distributed computing or Microsoft. In fact, I think I’m perfectly situated to investigate this role further. We have a huge set of tools, from RDBMS to Hadoop to allow me to explore. And I’m happy to share what I learn along the way.

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  • Performance impact: What is the optimal payload for SqlBulkCopy.WriteToServer()?

    - by Linchi Shea
    For many years, I have been using a C# program to generate the TPC-C compliant data for testing. The program relies on the SqlBulkCopy class to load the data generated by the program into the SQL Server tables. In general, the performance of this C# data loader is satisfactory. Lately however, I found myself in a situation where I needed to generate a much larger amount of data than I typically do and the data needed to be loaded within a confined time frame. So I was driven to look into the code...(read more)

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  • Linked servers and performance impact: Direction matters!

    - by Linchi Shea
    When you have some data on a SQL Server instance (say SQL01) and you want to move the data to another SQL Server instance (say SQL02) through openquery(), you can either push the data from SQL01, or pull the data from SQL02. To push the data, you can run a SQL script like the following on SQL01, which is the source server: -- The push script -- Run this on SQL01 use testDB go insert openquery(SQL02, 'select * from testDB.dbo.target_table') select * from source_table; To pull the data, you can run...(read more)

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  • System Variables, Stored Procedures or Functions for Meta Data

    - by BuckWoody
    Whenever you want to know something about SQL Server’s configuration, whether that’s the Instance itself or a database, you have a few options. If you want to know “dynamic” data, such as how much memory or CPU is consumed or what a particular query is doing, you should be using the Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) that you can read about here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms188754.aspx  But if you’re looking for how much memory is installed on the server, the version of the Instance, the drive letters of the backups and so on, you have other choices. The first of these are system variables. You access these with a SELECT statement, and they are useful when you need a discrete value for use, say in another query or to put into a table. You can read more about those here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms173823.aspx You also have a few stored procedures you can use. These often bring back a lot more data, pre-formatted for the screen. You access these with the EXECUTE syntax. It is a bit more difficult to take the data they return and get a single value or place the results in another table, but it is possible. You can read more about those here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms187961.aspx Yet another option is to use a system function, which you access with a SELECT statement, which also brings back a discrete value that you can use in a test or to place in another table. You can read about those here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms187812.aspx  By the way, many of these constructs simply query from tables in the master or msdb databases for the Instance or the system tables in a user database. You can get much of the information there as well, and there are even system views in each database to show you the meta-data dealing with structure – more on that here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms186778.aspx  Some of these choices are the only way to get at a certain piece of data. But others overlap – you can use one or the other, they both come back with the same data. So, like many Microsoft products, you have multiple ways to do the same thing. And that’s OK – just research what each is used for and how it’s intended to be used, and you’ll be able to select (pun intended) the right choice. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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