A Book

Misc
It's only the E-Book, the print version won't be available for another couple of weeks, but... I HAVE A BOOK PUBLISHED! It's also available here. I can not possibly thank the man who gave me the opportunity, carried my sorry-ass down the track, made me write something that closely approximated English, challenged just about every assumption that I walked in with, in other words, did more to make the book happen than I did, Tony Davis. I also had some simply amazing help from Brad McGehee. Brad must have looked up and double checked every single fact I wrote down because I think he found a correction for most of them. Amazing guys. Thanks so much. When you consider how much time & effort these guys put in, I'm not…
Read More

Community Building

Misc
Building a community is hard. I'm one of the leaders of the Southern New England SQL Server Users Group, SNESSUG, a PASS affiliate. We've been going for just over a year. We were launched by the drive and initiative of one person, who got us going and then had to leave. We've been on our own for about four months now. It's been difficult without the drive of the founder, but we're getting the job done & moving things forward. Andy Leanard, MVP, Solid Quality Mentor, nice guy (for a DBA), has a series of posts that, while short, are very helpful guide-posts for those attempting to start a community or keep one running (read them bottom to top). If you're in that position or thinking about volunteering at your…
Read More

Easy Fix To Problem #1

nHibernate, Object Relational Mapping, Tools
I did a little bit, and I mean a little bit, of looking through the documentation on nHibernate and located a spot for the schema, actually  a couple of spots. It can be added to the Hibernate Mapping definition, which will make it a default for all classes within the definition, and by extension all the tables in the database you connect to. You can also add it to the class definition, specifying a particular schema for a given table. So now the query looks like this: exec sp_executesql N'INSERT INTO dbo.users (Name, Password, EmailAddress, LastLogon, LogonId) VALUES (@p0, @p1, @p2, @p3, @p4)',N'@p0 nvarchar(9),@p1 nvarchar(6),@p2 nvarchar(13),@p3 datetime,@p4 nvarchar(9)',@p0=N'Jane Cool',@p1=N'abc123',@p2=N'jane@cool.com',@p3='2008-04-25 11:11:48:000',@p4=N'jane_cool' On to the data length problem.
Read More

nHibernate First Impressions

Object Relational Mapping, Tools
If I'm going to have to support it, I want to understand it. So, I got going yesterday, installing nHibernate 2.0 and walking through the Quick Start Guide. My C# is a bit rusty, to say the least, but I managed to sqeak by. The Guide is meant for an older version of nHibernate and there have been a few changes made that affect the code displayed. What that means is, I had to do more than simply type up what was presented to me. Which, was actually good because it forced me to do a bit more learning in order to get everything to work. What I found was interesting. I can see why developers like this. It really does let you treat the database as just another object…
Read More

LINQ and (by extension) ORM Discussion

Object Relational Mapping
Steve Jones' editorial today was questioning the use of LINQ. His focus was on the security aspects. The discussion went past that. This is a bit of circular reference since I posted over there and linked back to my ORM Concerns post below. There are a lot of interesting points being made. Some of it, from a DBA stand-point, is quite repetitive although I'd prefer to think of it as reinforcing. Steve's editorial is worth a read and the discussion is excellent.
Read More

SCOM Error

Tools
We've been getting a lot of alerts saying "Performance Module could not find a performance counter." It's been making me nuts. I finally did a search on the web and found an entry over on the Operations Manager Product Team blog. It's a known issues with SP1. I'm posting this, not because I'm complaining. I'm not. SP1 solved several issues that I had and I'm very happy to have installed it. Unfortunately, it introduced problems. Just not as many as it solved.
Read More

SQL Server 2005 SP3

SQL Server
I've said it before and I'll say it again, Microsoft Connect really works. There has been a campaign going throughout the SQL Server community to get a new service pack out for SQL Server 2005. Microsoft had, at the very least, suggested that they were not going to release any more service packs for 2005. That's all changed now. I saw the announcement in Kalen Delaney's editorial from SQL Sever Magazine UPDATE. That's worth a read all on it's own. And consider this, 704 votes made this happen. That's 704 people who took the time & trouble to click their mouse a few times. If that's all it takes to influence Redmond, then you should all be over there using Connect as often as possible to get the fixes, changes or…
Read More

ORM Concerns

Object Relational Mapping
Object Relational Mapping (ORM) software is a great idea. You can't deny that the mismatch between objects and relational data has to be dealt with. Instead of all the time, money and effort being spent here, why not get a tool that does most of the work for you? But... One direction that this can lead is towards dumb databases. After all, if putting a piece of software between the object & the db makes things easier, how much easier if the db and the object look exactly the same. Ta-da! Even less code to write & maintain. Unfortunately, TANSTAAFL (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch) still applies. What you save in initial coding you will pay for in reporting, data cleanup, integrity issues, data integration issues...…
Read More

nHibernate Database Benefits and Costs?

Object Relational Mapping, SQL Server
I posted this question over at SQL Server Central, just like my last post, I'm also posting it here. I need some help. I've been trying to research this and I can't find good, hard facts. Any help would be deeply appreciated. It looks like we might be facing a large project shifting over to using ORM methods through nHibernate. I'm trying to get a read from the database community on what exactly I should expect in terms of issues, challenges and headaches during the development process. I'm also interested in any long term maintenance issues, troubleshooting problems, etc. If your developers implemented ORM all the way down to storing object data on the database in a non-normalized/object oriented fashion, how did that affect you? Did it muck up reporting?…
Read More

ORM Research

SQL Server
I posted this over at SQL Server Central, but I thought I'd repeat the question here: I really need some help on this one. One of our development teams is looking into ORM as a way to get code out the door faster. I've been doing a bunch of research on the topic (I'll post the links below) and I've found some interesting discussions over the pluses & minuses of the methdology. There are lots of positive examples of how well it works from all the vendors of various ORM products. I can't find any concrete examples of failed projects or long term maintenance nightmares or anything else like that. Even if ORM is the greatest thing since the flush toilet, there must be failures out there. Does anyone have…
Read More