27Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

SQL Server Standard, Volume 6, Issue #1

Misc, PASS
It's alive! It's alive! That's enough from Colin Clive. It'll be out for the Summit. SQL Server Standard lives again! Although, not quite in the same shape as it used to be. But hey, stitching stuff together out of dead tissue is messy work. I want to thank our first author who had to suffer through quite a few growing pains and help us blaze a trail through the woods, Thomas LaRock. I want to thank my boss at PASS for all the support especially the time I started whining, Andy Warren. And there's this other guy, who has helped just a ton in this effort in every way, and lead the technical edit team, Brad McGehee. We have a photo credit to Pat Write for the front. Craig Ellis has done…
Read More
23Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

PASS Summit One Week Away

PASS
It's just a week and a couple of days before I'll be hopping a plane for Seattle and the 2009 PASS Summit. I'm as excited about this one as I was my first summit, maybe more so. I'm going to get to see a bunch of friends that I only see once a year and hopefully meet in person people I've only interacted with online. A very large part of the PASS Summit is networking. I'd like to meet people who actually read my fumbling attempts at understanding how SQL Server works and how to best work with it. If you'd like to have a chat, there are a lot places to track me down: Monday, most of the day I'll be going to various PASS meetings, so if you're…
Read More
21Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

Characters

SQL Server, T-SQL, Tools
No, I'm not talking about a Dickens novel. I'm talking about the number of characters in a string. I had a painful time recently because of the word "characters."  If you take a look at the dynamic management view sys.dm_exec_sql_text you can get the queries that have been run on your system that are still in the cache. It's a great utility. Better still, you can get specific statements from the code that are actively running through sys.dm_exec_requests or ones that have run through sys.dm_exec_query_stats. To do this is very simple. Each of these DMV's has a pair of columns, statement_start_offset and statement_end_offset. These columns, and I'm quoting directly from books online measure the "number of character" offset from the beginning of the SQL string and from the end of…
Read More
21Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Free Training RIGHT NOW

SQL Server, T-SQL
Quest Connect 2009 is occurring even as I type this. Get on over there if you're interested in some free training. I recorded a session on understanding execution plans. But even better, there are live sessions with some great people. Stop reading this, click the link, get yourself some free training.
Read More
21Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Birds Of a Feather Lunch

PASS
The PASS Summit agenda is shaping up and it's already looking to be much busier than last year. The latest is the Birds of a Feather lunch. It's lunch with an MVP. At least 50 different MVP's will be hosting a table each. At each table a topic of discussion will be hosted by the MVP present. It should be a lot fun. It'll be a great way to meet people and share war stories, tips, approaches, what ever. The list of topics and the MVP's leading are available here at Mike Walsh's blog. I'll be hosting a table on Team Development. I crack jokes about beating up developers, but really I see them as partners and teammates. We're all working towards a common goal, delivering the product, whatever it…
Read More
15Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

SQL Server Standard Update

Misc
The first article should be out within a week or so (knock wood). I hav a winner for the contest to help us pick the artwork for the cover. Leo Pasta. Congrats. Get in touch with me at: grantedd -at- gmail.com so that I can send you your prize.
Read More
14Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

SNESSUG October Meeting

PASS
The Southern New England SQL Server Users Group's October meeting was a bit sparsely attended with 7 attendees. The sponsor for the night was ApexSQL. The presenation was by AJ Dharmapuri who spoke on using DMV's. Barbara Sampson, SNESSUG Treasurer, did a demo of ApexSQL's SQLEdit. It's a pretty powerful TSQL coding and scripting tool. There's a lot of functionality that worked in a very snappy way during the demo and looked great. I may need to spend some time with their products to see if we can put them to work. As part of the sponsorship, we gave away a license for the Apex SQL Univeral Studio. Quite a prize. I was very excited to see AJ's presentation for a few reasons. First, because he presented on DMV's, based…
Read More
14Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

SQL Server Central Guest Editorial

Misc
My second guest editorial is up at SQL Server Central. These are fun to do (especially the video) even though they're a shocking amount of work considering their size. My hat's off to Steve for churning these out day after day. The man does earn his keep. Anyway, go on over and let me know if you have a favorite character from history that might make a good DBA.
Read More
13Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Operations Manager Feedback

Tools
If you're involved with maintaining Microsoft Operations Manager, you probably have a few things you'd like to tell the developers, such as, couldn't you get some sort of override manager/explorer built into the system? Well, they've built a new feedback mechanism through the updated Connect interface. Get on over there and make your voice heard. Yeah, I wasn't really tracking it either until I saw this post from the OM development team's blog.
Read More
13Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey 5 Comments

Table Variables Are Only in Memory: Fact or Myth

SQL Server, T-SQL
I keep seeing these concepts that have long been disproven, posted again and again on newsgroups as if they were valid information. The latest? Table variables are better because they're only in memory where as temporary tables write to the disk through tempdb. This one is abjectly wrong. I'm not even going to hedge with "it depends." From a macro point of view, there are only a few differences between temporary tables and table variables, statistics being the biggest. Temporary tables have 'em and table variables don't. Other than that, both will reside completely in memory or will swap out to the disk through tempdb, depending on their size. Some of the minor differences, and why you might want to use table variables over temporary tables, table variables won't cause a statement recompile while temporary tables will, table…
Read More