Speaker of the Month, July 2014

Professional Development
Another month another bunch of great presentations. I almost don't want to do this any more. It's hard. I sit through a presentation and I think, "Well, here's the winner this month." Then I go to another presentation and I think, "Well, fudge, now one of these people loses." Then I go to a third and I'm simply blown away. And now I have to pick. Well, it's hard. So let me do this, I'm going to declare two winners this month, but only review one of them. Hey, my blog, my rules. First, I want to award speaker of the month for July 2014 to Wayne Sheffield(b|t) and his presentation Table Variables and Temp Tables that I saw at SQL Saturday 294. What's my measure? That I learned stuff…
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Installing SQL Server 2012 RC0

Uncategorized
Very short informational post. If you’re like me and you’ve been running the public Client Technology Preview (CTP3) of SQL Server Denali, uh, I mean 2012, then the news about the release of RC0 is pretty exciting stuff… until you realize that you’re going to have to tear down your virtual test machine, removing the CTP in order to prep for the install of RC0. I love playing with the toys, but I hate working on the toys, if you know what I mean. Great news. You can upgrade from CTP3 to RC0 in place. I know because I’ve done it. When you run the install and you get to the screen that asks what type of install you want, select Upgrade, as highlighted below: I know it doesn’t say…
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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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SQL Server 2008 Free Instance

Uncategorized
If you don't want to risk blowing up your laptop (like I did) and you're not interested in setting up and maintaining a virtual server, but you still want to test SQL Server 2008. Then, PASS (Professional Association of SQL Server Users), Dell & MaximumASP have a solution. Just go to SQL Server Beta. You can set up a private instance and it will persist between sessions.
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