23Jun 2010 by Grant Fritchey 4 Comments

Learning Powershell

PowerShell
I've been attending a Powershell fundamentals class with Don Jones (blog|twitter). If you read my blog you might be aware of the fact that I've posted a few PowerShell scripts in the past.  So why was I attending a fundamentals class? Because I didn't know what I was doing. I knew going into the class that I needed a better grounding in the fundamentals of Posh, but after the first day of Don's excellent class, I realized that I had been working with PowerShell and didn't have a clue how it really worked. Don's class is excellent and I could spend a lot of time talking about just that (which I'm sure would make Don happy). However I want to concentrate on something that he said during class that really…
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15Jun 2010 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Sarasota SQL Server Users Group

Uncategorized
Tonight I'm presenting for the Sarasota SQL Server Users Group. If you're interested in attending, you can join in using this link. The topic will be "Query Performance Tuning 101." And in case you can't make that, Thursday, June 17th, I'll be on Quest's Pain of the Week. It should be fun too.
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15Jun 2010 by Grant Fritchey 6 Comments

Virtualizing Servers in Production

Uncategorized
The company where I work has been using virtualization in development, QA, testing, etc., for many years now. We have not even attempted virtualization in production. Things change. But, before we did it, I thought I'd bounce the question out to the people who know, What are some things to watch for in using virtual servers in a production environment. Introduction Flat out, I asked people over Twitter. The overall message was extremely positive. No one suggested it was a bad idea. A few thought that some high volume servers are better served by physical boxes. Volume in this case could be read as high amounts of reads or high amount of writes, both were suggested as reasons to avoid virtualization. The cause for this is clear, from each individual; the…
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14Jun 2010 by Grant Fritchey 3 Comments

Maps in Reports!

Spatial Data
I've been playing with SQL Server 2008 R2 for quite a while in the CTP's and what not. But, I hadn't made a concerted effort to look at the new version of Reporting Services... HUGE mistake. There are a number of, not insubstantial, updates to Reporting Services that, probably, are the primary selling points of 2008 R2. The big one, for me, was the incorporation of mapping directly into reports. Did I say big? I'm sorry, I meant, enormous, gigantic, galactic, really, really important... Why you ask? I work for an insurance company. We insure factories, warehouses, that sort of thing. Funny bit of information about a factory, when floods, high wind or earthquakes come calling, they just don't seem to be able to get out of the way adequately. Weird, huh?…
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10Jun 2010 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

I’m a Pain

Uncategorized
Or maybe I'm misreading that I'm supposed to be helping to alleviate pain. Either way, next Thursday, June 17, I'll be taking part in the Quest Pain of the Week webcast: Easy Ways to Fix Hard SQL Server Problems - Without a Guru. It should be a lot of fun. Please stop by and ask hard questions.
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09Jun 2010 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

PASS 2010 Submissions

PASS
Since all the cool kids seem to be posting the sessions that they submitted to the PASS Summit, nerd that I am, I'll follow along and do the same. I submitted four sessions, two by invitation for a Spotlight session and two for regular sessions. I tried to branch out a bit from where I've been in the past to see if I can start talking about different topics. With that in mind, the first session was: Spatial Data: The Business Case We've all seen the cool presentations showing all the pizza joints near the conference center or all the bicycle shops on a biking route, but what's the case for spatial data and business? This session sets out to show how spatial data can be of interest to almost…
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28May 2010 by Grant Fritchey 6 Comments

Buy vs. Build

PowerShell, Tools
It's the classic question faced by everyone in Information Services. I know how to do this and I could build software to do it, but I'm a lazy b_____d so I'd rather just pick up a piece of software that does it for me. I love working for large companies because I can usually get them to purchase stuff so that I can loll around stuffing my face all day instead of doing actual work. Unfortunately, not everyone can afford to pick up Microsoft's Operations Manager or Idera's Diagnostic Manager. But you still need to monitor your servers. With buy eliminated, that leaves build. Which, is where this excellent blog post by Laerte Junior comes in. He lays out how to build a wrapper around calls to get Performan Counter…
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24May 2010 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

Slick New Software

SQL Server
I'm lazy. And frankly, I'm not ashamed to admit it. When a software comes along that can do the work for me, even work I can do just fine on my own, I'm interested. When that software is inexpensive, even better. When it's free... I just got word that Confio is putting together a free version of Ignite, their performance monitoring software. It's basically going to be the current view of performance and not have all the historical tracking and nifty trend reports. Yeah, it's a tease, but it's a tease on a product that focuses on monitoring wait states, something you should be doing. Just remember, reference above, I'm lazy. The thing is, they need some people to help them beta test. Here's the word I received: If you…
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11May 2010 by Grant Fritchey 10 Comments

Recompiles and Constant Learning

T-SQL
When faced with a procedure that looks like this: CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.TestProc (@TestValue INT) AS BEGIN IF @TestValue = 1 BEGIN SELECT * FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader AS soh JOIN Sales.SalesOrderDetail AS sod ON soh.SalesOrderID = sod.SalesOrderID WHERE soh.SalesOrderID = @TestValue END ELSE BEGIN SELECT * FROM Production.Product AS p JOIN Production.ProductDocument AS pd ON p.ProductID = pd.ProductID WHERE p.ProductID = @TestValue END END I used to suggest creating a wrapper procedure in order to avoid the recompiles that occur when the different paths through the IF statement are taken by the optimizer. I mentioned that recently on a post over at SQL Server Central. Gail Shaw (blog | twitter) asked me why I thought there would be a recompile. She said that the optimizer took the query as a whole and…
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27Apr 2010 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

PASS Summit, Kilt Wednesday

PASS
Last year at the PASS Summit we held a silly little event called Kilt Wednesday. Only three people took part, but it was very popular nonetheless. Here's a sample of what it looked like. This year is looking to be a lot bigger. Keep an eye on Twitter for updates under the hash tag: #sqlkilt. If you're going to the 2010 Summit, bring your kilt for Wednesday. Ladies, you're invited too. This is an unofficial event and has nothing to do with the PASS organization. We're just having a little fun. Remember, Seattle is home to Utilikilts, so you can pick up a kilt while you're there.
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