30Sep 2013 by Grant Fritchey 9 Comments

An Experiment Concludes

Misc, Professional Development
[caption id="attachment_2548" align="alignleft" width="300"] That was hard work[/caption] You may or may not have noticed, but every single week day for the month of September, I've put up a blog post. Some were short little blurbs linking to some other person's blog or an article that I decided to comment on. Some were the normal, longer, type of posts that I put up, explaining some bit of technical behavior that has interested me or that I've had questions about. This is the last week day of the month and I'm excited to be able to go back to blogging 1-2 times a week again. There was no small amount of stress ensuring that I had posts scheduled out for each day, coming up with ideas, getting them written up. Whew!…
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27Sep 2013 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Azure Offerings Continue to Expand

Azure
We just received word of a bunch of new functionality over at Scott Guthrie's blog. Not a lot of stuff for data pro's... unless you work with Oracle. Yeah, you can now create Oracle VMs. See the image below:   I swear, I can't tell you why this gives me the giggles, but it does. See, Oracle really does have a cloud offering, and it's Microsoft. Ha! Well, anyway, check out the link on Scott's blog to see the other changes to billing, security, etc. Absolutely worth the read. <snicker>Oracle on Azure. Oh, and if you need to get going on Oracle and you have an MSDN account, you can link your MSDN account to an Azure account for zero cost. Check it out here and enter to win an…
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26Sep 2013 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

PASS Votes

PASS
I've already made my own intentions clear. I'm casting one of my votes for Allen Kinsel. But, I get three votes. Some of you may be asking yourselves, why didn't recommend two other candidates? Honesty time. First, no one else asked me to. I'm actually glad of this. If I received requests for help from more than three of the candidates, I would be very hard pressed to choose. Yes, I ultimately have to, but I don't have to publicly reject anyone. At this point, it looks like I'm ready to vote for every other candidate. That's a good thing from my standpoint, maybe not so much from theirs. However, if anyone wanted a little help, they should have asked. That's a good policy with life in general. Second, I…
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25Sep 2013 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

AdventureWorks2012 Bug on Azure

Azure
While I have production databases in Azure, I can't exactly experiment with them at will. Further, while they mostly have pretty innocuous data, it's not all public. So, I need a mechanism for creating a database that I can play with in Azure. I use AdventureWorks. I get it. It's not that big (actually a good thing for Azure) and it's not a great database design which doesn't reflect reality (I would argue makes this reflects reality as I've seen it). However, it's a handy resource because you can go to Codeplex and download it. That makes it a great way to teach others because everyone has access to it. But... The other day I download the database and install it on my Azure system. I wanted cleaned up copies…
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24Sep 2013 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Premium Database on Azure

Azure
One of the things that can make Windows Azure SQL Databases (WASD) attractive is the fact that they run inside of a managed environment. But, that does mean that you're sharing resources with other databases. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but if people are extremely worried about performance, yet, still want to take advantage of all the cool stuff in WASD, there is a way to do this; Premium Databases. I requested access to the early access program and was able to get it. You can request it by clicking on this link and scrolling down to Premium Database. Once you get access you should see this in your list of servers: To create a Premium Database you just create a  database any way you would normally (T-SQL through…
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23Sep 2013 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

PASS Votes and So Should You

PASS
To put it bluntly, you need to go cast a vote for Allen Kinsel for the PASS Board. In his own words, here's why Allen is running. Why am I supporting Allen? First, he's a friend. But ignore that. This isn't, or at least shouldn't be, a popularity contest. It's about getting what you want, what you need, out of the PASS organization. I absolutely believe that Allen has the best interests of this organization at heart. He wants to make a difference for the better. More than that, I've seen him working as a volunteer within the organization where he does make a difference, does make things better. He brings passion to the job. If you've ever volunteered to help run any kind of organization, you'll know that one…
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20Sep 2013 by Grant Fritchey 4 Comments

Web Design & Azure

Azure
I've listened to tons of programmers and DBAs complain about the look of Windows Azure. But, I'm friends with several design people, work with some pretty darned good designers at Red Gate, and I live in sin with a graphic artist (AKA: Mrs. Scary). While the developers and DBAs complain, lots of the designers seem pretty happy with it. Microsoft has a pretty serious team working on it. You can see an interview with them that tells you a little bit about how they did it. I thought it was interesting. And don't forget, that little contest to win a car ends in just over a week. This is almost your last chance to connect your MSDN account to a zero-cost Azure account and enter for a chance. Or not.…
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19Sep 2013 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

SQL Lighthouse

Azure, Redgate Software
Red Gate is constantly experimenting with technology. Because of a long history working within the Microsoft space, a lot of the new experimentation is in and around Azure. One new venture that could be online soon is SQL Lighthouse. It's a mechanism for dealing with changing structures in an unrestricted Windows Azure SQL Database where you have multiple developers making changes. Potentially, this is pretty interesting. Please follow the link, check it out, and sign up to be alerted when the program becomes available. Many people are just getting started with Azure, especially wrapping their heads around the concepts of using a Platform as a Service rather than having infrastructure, local, virtual, or on the cloud. If this is you, and you have an MSDN license, you can get that…
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18Sep 2013 by Grant Fritchey 17 Comments

Finding Ad Hoc Queries with Query Hash

SQL Server, T-SQL
I was presenting a session on how to read execution plans when I received a question: Do you have a specific example of how you can use the query hash to identify similar query plans. I do, but I couldn't show it right then, so the person asking requested this blog post. If you're dealing with lots of application generated, dynamic or ad hoc T-SQL queries, then attempting to determine tuning opportunities, missing indexes, incorrect structures, etc., becomes much more difficult because you don't have a single place to go to see what's happening. Each ad hoc query looks different... or do they. Introduced in SQL Server 2008 and available in the standard Dynamic Management Objects (DMO), we have a mechanism to identify ad hoc queries that are similar in…
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17Sep 2013 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

Great Idea: Tribal SQL

Misc
Writing books, even just a chapter, is not easy. Yet, people are desperate to do it for some reason. But, it's actually hard to break into writing (not that hard, I did it after all). So, when you get the chance to work on a book, if you're crazy enough to think you want to, jump on the opportunity. My good friend, and co-author of SQL Server MVP Deep Dives Volume 2, Jenn McCown (b|t) had an idea. Instead of gathering up a bunch of the usual suspects, what if you gave people who have never published anything a shot at writing a chapter. Yeah, insane, right? But then again, every author you know, at one point, wasn't published. Someone gave them a chance. Jenn is just that kind of…
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