26Jan 2009 by Grant Fritchey 14 Comments

New England Data Camp v1.0 Results

Misc, PASS, SQL Server
I believe that the very first New England Data Camp was a success. We had about 185 attendees. There 18 sessions from 16 speakers. Both the sessions I gave and the one I sat in on were full. Credit goes to to Adam Machanic who did 90% of the work pulling this together. Amazing job Adam. My personal thanks to our sponsors.  First, Microsoft, who provided us with a magnificent facility, nice swag, a full AV suite, coffee and donuts and in the morning, and a lot of help. It wouldn't have come out as well as it did without you guys. Next, the Professional Association of SQL Server Users (PASS), who supplied us with money, without which we could not have eaten lunch, a few posters to decorate the…
Read More
22Jan 2009 by Grant Fritchey 7 Comments

SQL Server 2008 Management Studio Trick

Tools
I just had a Tremors moment. "Everybody knows about 'em Earl, we just never told you." Except that no one I showed it to has ever seen it before. So maybe this is something a little new. I had a database selected in the Object Explorer window and I had the Object Explorer Details window open. I noticed a little icon at the bottom of the screen: Then I saw that the bar above it was a moveable bar. So I moved it and saw this: Whoa! So then I tried a table, HumanResources.Department from AdventureWorks2008: Which caused me to check a procedure: Each line has a little icon on the side that lets you copy it, line by line. It's really just a way to display the basic properties…
Read More
20Jan 2009 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

Incremental Deployments using Visual Studio Database Edition GDR

Tools, Visual Studio
I'm stuck. I've been advocating that our company use composite projects for our deployments using the VSTSDBE GDR (Visual Studio Team System Database Edition, General Distribution Release for those not instantly geeky).  In a nutshell, VSTSDBE offers two mechanisms for deployment across multiple environments. Both of these work wonderfully well for automation when you are doing a full tear-down and rebuild. When you're doing incremental deployments, they both fail. Option 1: Use SQL Command variables to set environment specific variables such as file location, etc., and post-deployment scripts to set security. This works. It's the method we used prior to the GDR. Unfortunately, security and other environment specific information is hidden inside scripts rather than visible to a given configuration directly within the VS interface. Option 2: Create a composite…
Read More
14Jan 2009 by Grant Fritchey 8 Comments

Microsoft Concept Center

Misc
During my recent visit to the Microsoft Technology Center in Waltham, Rich Crane gave me a tour of the facility. It included a room, I think he called the Concept Center. It was a little theatre type of arrangement around a series of work areas or work styles. Microsoft uses the room for demo's that go WAY beyond some silly PowerPoint slide show. Here are a few pictures I took while I was there. [gallery order="DESC" orderby="post_name"]
Read More
14Jan 2009 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

SQL Server 2008 Upgrade Lab at Microsoft

Tools
I got an invite to take part in a lab at the Microsoft Technology Center in Waltham. I took advantage of it. I'll use this post to describe the experience so that anyone else with the opportunity will know what to expect.  [caption id="attachment_333" align="alignnone" width="450" caption="They knew I was coming"] [/caption] First, you recieve a very explicit set of pre-requisites. You need to install the SQL Server Upgrade Assistant, a tool that Microsoft licensed Scalability Experts to create for them. You have to run this against a small database, >25gb. The tool backups up all the databases from the server (so you need to put it on to a test box, rather than try to move an entire production system worth of databases). It then starts a trace that captures all the…
Read More
13Jan 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Red Gate Crib Sheet Compendium

SQL Server, T-SQL
Red Gate has compiled a bunch of it's Cribsheets into a single E-book, the SQL Server Cribsheet Compendium. It's pretty cool. I've got two entries in there, performance tuning and backups & restores, along with great articles from Robyn Page, Phil Factor, Robert Sheldon and Amirthalingam Prasanna, pretty heady company. It's worth a look.
Read More
09Jan 2009 by Grant Fritchey 4 Comments

Something Wicked This Way Comes

T-SQL
I sure hope peoples thumbs are pricking. I found this on the Apress web site. I guess it's OK to talk about it now that the first draft is finished. The second draft only has one chapter left and I finished copy editing on Chapter 6 of 16 yesterday. In other words, I'm going to have a new book published soon. The original plan was for May, but I heard a rumor that it might come out in March.
Read More
07Jan 2009 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

New England Data Camp v.1.0

PASS, T-SQL
It's getting a lot closer to the 24th.  On Saturday, January 24th, the first ever New England Data Camp will launch. We've got a number of speakers registered. Aaron Bertrand and Andrew Novick are guys I've got a lot respect for. I've been to their presentations before and they've been consistently very good.  We've got a few guys I haven't heard of personally, Talbott Crowell, Ayad Shammout, Sunil Kadimdiwan, Igor Moochnick. I'm going to present on execution plans and multi-environment deployments using DBPro (updated from the PASS presentation).  The other presentations cover topics from using the Resource Governor on SQL Server 2008 to Defending SQL Server from Injection Attacks to Create better and more Useful Cubes. It's shaping up to be an actual event. If you're in the neighborhood (New…
Read More
07Jan 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Table Valued Functions

T-SQL
I've been blogging for a whole nine months now. I decided to look back and see what's bringing people to the site. The number one search phrase is "sql server 2005 service pack 3" but the overwhelming topic that most people are using to get to the site are user defined functions, specifically multi-statement table valued user defined functions. It's completely understandable. Ever since I first saw these things in use back in SQL Server 2000, I thought they were slick. Unfortunately appearances can be deceiving. The reason so many people are searching out information on these things is because they just don't work very well. SQL Server can't create statistics on the tables generated through the multi-statement UDF. Because it has no statistics to work with, the query optimizer…
Read More