15Mar 2010 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

SNESSUG March Meeting

Misc, SQL Server
Aaron Bertrand showed up to teach us tips and tricks for SQL Server Management Studio. We had to move our meeting night because of a conflict at our wonderful host, New England Tech. But we still had 12 people show up. For SNESSUG, that was a good turnout. I gave away some swag that I had received from Microsoft and some stuff that we had purchased. Bribary works (at least that's my theory, so feel free to bribe me, whenever). Aaron's presentation was great. He's just showing nothing but meat. There's no fluff. He's just showing a series of tips & tricks in SSMS and explains why you want to use them. First revelation, -nosplash has no effect whatsoever on load time. He called it a placebo. It just kept…
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11Mar 2010 by Grant Fritchey 9 Comments

Location of the PASS Summit Follow-up

PASS
I got a little distracted after lunch and was reading through some of the various bloggers reactions to the decision to keep the Summit in Seattle for the forseeable future. I enjoyed Brent Ozar's take on the situation, but the thing that struck me square in the eyes and inspired me to add one more post of my own, was a comment on Brent's post by Aaron. Scroll down and read it. Here's the part that really made an impact: This whole situation is making me less interested in supporting the organization. As a relative newcomer to PASS and having never attended a Summit, I’m turned off by the “come talk to Microsoft employees” stance. I’d rather them say come and talk to (or sing Karaoke with?) cool guys like…
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10Mar 2010 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Location of the PASS Summit

PASS
There has been some discussion recently around the location of the PASS Summit. The debate was centered on the results from a recent survey hosted by PASS. Today's Community Connector has an editorial by the PASS President, Rushabh Mehta, explaining why those of us on the East Coast will be flying to the other side of the continent for the next two years, and supplying the results of the survey I get why they're doing this. Microsoft really will commit more resources to an event that is in their back yard. I get it. I also understand, that those of us who consider the PASS Summit a big part of our "community" are actually in the minority. Most people attending the Summit aren't involved in the community, aren't interested in…
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09Mar 2010 by Grant Fritchey 4 Comments

Blog Anniversary

Misc
Two years old. In March of 2008 I received a whopping 96 visits. I'm up to 1900 so far this month. I'd call that a positive growth trend. Thanks for stopping by, especially if you've been here more than once.
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08Mar 2010 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

MacGyver?

Misc
Who the heck is MacGyver? Television program you say? Hang on. I need to visit imdb.com... Oh, the late eighties... Yeah, I wasn't watching TV in the late eighties. Actually I didn't own a TV in the late eighties. But reading a few of the plot lines (you guys watched this?) I get the idea. Nuts. I don't think I'm MacGyver. Can't we just buy something to fix the problem? Honestly, the only thing that comes to mind was the time when I needed to get alerts when jobs failed, but I couldn't install DBMail on the server because our admin types didn't want mail clients on our machines. What to do? Use event forwarding. Instead of setting up the mail client on a server, I got it installed on a…
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01Mar 2010 by Grant Fritchey 3 Comments

Powershell for Batch Operations

PowerShell
I'm right in the middle of moving one of our databases from Oracle to SQL Server (and I just love saying that, over & over). Evidently the most common practice in Oracle is to leave all the tables as heaps. That's a tad bit problematic approach for SQL Server. We moved the structure from Oracle to SQL Server with almost no changes and now we're cleaning up the mess fixing the structure iterating the design. I needed to drop & recreate 250 plus indexes.  Remember, I'm lazy. A few minutes bouncing around the web and looking at the wonderful book "SQL Server 2008 Administration with Windows Powershell" and I put together a simple little script that generates a script for dropping and recreating all the primary keys on the tables and, as a…
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26Feb 2010 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

Help with Learning Powershell

PowerShell
If you're not reading Buck Woody's blog, why not? Today he posted a helpful hint for getting performance counters directly out of PowerShell v2. I'll add a little bit to the hint, don't try running this on your XP boxes. It doesn't hurt anything, but you get a helpful little message "Get-Counter : This cmdlet can only run on Vista and above."
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19Feb 2010 by Grant Fritchey 11 Comments

So You Want to Write a Book?

Misc
What the heck is wrong with you? Still interested? Fine. I'll tell you my take on this whole business. I'm only an expert on this if you take the adage that the expert is the guy that's a page head of you in reading a book. To date I have published two full books and three chapters in a third. I can easily think of enough people who all have more experience than that with book writing that I'd have to take off both shoes to count them all. Is anyone still reading? Cool. So you have the desire to write a book? Let me pop your first bubble. You will make very little money. This bears repeating. You will make very little money. If you were to figure out your hourly…
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15Feb 2010 by Grant Fritchey 4 Comments

nHibernate Database, First Look

nHibernate
I'm getting my first look at a full-fledged nHibernate database developed by consultants for our company. I thought I'd share my initial impressions. I'll be capturing trace events from the database over the next couple of weeks, so I'll be following up on the behavior of nHibernate within this database as well. The first thing I saw & thought was, "Foreign key constraints. Thank the gods." That really is good news. I was frankly concerned that they might go with the "let the code handle it" approach. There are quite a few null columns. I'm also seeing tons & tons of nvarchar(255) which must the default string size. Lots of bit fields too. They also used bigint in a lot of places too. None of this is definitively good or bad,…
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