08Mar 2010 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

MacGyver?

Misc
Who the heck is MacGyver? Television program you say? Hang on. I need to visit imdb.com... Oh, the late eighties... Yeah, I wasn't watching TV in the late eighties. Actually I didn't own a TV in the late eighties. But reading a few of the plot lines (you guys watched this?) I get the idea. Nuts. I don't think I'm MacGyver. Can't we just buy something to fix the problem? Honestly, the only thing that comes to mind was the time when I needed to get alerts when jobs failed, but I couldn't install DBMail on the server because our admin types didn't want mail clients on our machines. What to do? Use event forwarding. Instead of setting up the mail client on a server, I got it installed on a…
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01Mar 2010 by Grant Fritchey 3 Comments

Powershell for Batch Operations

PowerShell
I'm right in the middle of moving one of our databases from Oracle to SQL Server (and I just love saying that, over & over). Evidently the most common practice in Oracle is to leave all the tables as heaps. That's a tad bit problematic approach for SQL Server. We moved the structure from Oracle to SQL Server with almost no changes and now we're cleaning up the mess fixing the structure iterating the design. I needed to drop & recreate 250 plus indexes.  Remember, I'm lazy. A few minutes bouncing around the web and looking at the wonderful book "SQL Server 2008 Administration with Windows Powershell" and I put together a simple little script that generates a script for dropping and recreating all the primary keys on the tables and, as a…
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26Feb 2010 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

Help with Learning Powershell

PowerShell
If you're not reading Buck Woody's blog, why not? Today he posted a helpful hint for getting performance counters directly out of PowerShell v2. I'll add a little bit to the hint, don't try running this on your XP boxes. It doesn't hurt anything, but you get a helpful little message "Get-Counter : This cmdlet can only run on Vista and above."
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19Feb 2010 by Grant Fritchey 11 Comments

So You Want to Write a Book?

Misc
What the heck is wrong with you? Still interested? Fine. I'll tell you my take on this whole business. I'm only an expert on this if you take the adage that the expert is the guy that's a page head of you in reading a book. To date I have published two full books and three chapters in a third. I can easily think of enough people who all have more experience than that with book writing that I'd have to take off both shoes to count them all. Is anyone still reading? Cool. So you have the desire to write a book? Let me pop your first bubble. You will make very little money. This bears repeating. You will make very little money. If you were to figure out your hourly…
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15Feb 2010 by Grant Fritchey 4 Comments

nHibernate Database, First Look

nHibernate
I'm getting my first look at a full-fledged nHibernate database developed by consultants for our company. I thought I'd share my initial impressions. I'll be capturing trace events from the database over the next couple of weeks, so I'll be following up on the behavior of nHibernate within this database as well. The first thing I saw & thought was, "Foreign key constraints. Thank the gods." That really is good news. I was frankly concerned that they might go with the "let the code handle it" approach. There are quite a few null columns. I'm also seeing tons & tons of nvarchar(255) which must the default string size. Lots of bit fields too. They also used bigint in a lot of places too. None of this is definitively good or bad,…
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01Feb 2010 by Grant Fritchey 4 Comments

SQL Saturday #34 Wrap-up

PASS
Whew! It's over. New England Data Camp v2, aka, SQL Saturday #34, was completed on Saturday. Going in we had maxed out our online registrations at 500, an accomplishment by itself. During registration on the day of the event, we  shut down registration and just started waving people through the door at 300. Our best guess at the total attendance was 340 (not the 375 I tweeted during the delirium of the day). There were a couple of minor glitches and one major one. The major glitch was not enough vegetarian food. We just ran out. Everyone else seemed to get a meal. We had just a few, read that 3 or 4, sandwhiches at the end of the day. I want to personally thank Adam Machanic for all the…
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27Jan 2010 by Grant Fritchey 8 Comments

SQL Saturday #34

PASS
The event is this Saturday. Take a look at our sponsors, speakers and the program. It's going to be a great opportunity to learn about SQL Server and things around SQL Server. If you're in the New England area, please register and take advantage of this excellent event. 450 of your peers are already pledging to show up. This is going to be a good time for networking too.
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25Jan 2010 by Grant Fritchey 3 Comments

A Call to Arms

SQL Server, T-SQL
Phil Factor's most recent guest editorial over at SQL Server Central has, to a degree, pointed out that the emporer's spiffy new outfit... well, it's not exactly there. That's why he looks so nekkid. But seriously, the very idea of naming objects inside of the database with Hungarian-style notation really should end. Phil's right. There's absolutely no reason why you should name a unique index ixuTableName when UniqueTableName or TableNameUnique would do the job just as well and not be nearly as obscure. I confess to using this type of naming convention all the time, but I'm realizing that I don't need it and it's largely just habit. There are possible exceptions, for instance you want to group all lookup tables in your database so you name them lkTableName, but…
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21Jan 2010 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

PowerShell Script for Creating Indexes

PowerShell, SQL Server, T-SQL
I needed to create an identical index on a bunch of tables within one of my projects (yes, I know this is problematic on multiple levels and I'm working on that too). Rather than sitting around typing this up, I decided to use PowerShell to do the work for me. I'm still very much learning how to do things in PowerShell so this took me almost as long as it would have to type them up, but now I know more than I did. Having gone through the pain of trying to find a good example on the web that did exactly what I wanted (they're out there, just hard to find), I decided I'd add this one in so the next person had at least one more source of…
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