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.
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14Sep 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Editorial on SQL Server Central

Misc, Tools
My first one over there. It's discussing whether or not you should do two things, build your own monitoring tool, come out in particular favor of one tool or suite of tools from a single vendor. Please read it and watch the video. And, even more importantly, leave a comment in the discussion.
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03Mar 2009 by Grant Fritchey 4 Comments

Pay for it!

Tools
For those searching for the string "sql prompt 3.8 | rapidshare,"  that happened to somehow come by my blog, twice, I just looked it up on the web site. SQL Prompt is only $195. If you're professional enough to need it, surely you can afford to pay the licensing fee. Seriously now. It's not like Red Gate is some gigantic corporate entity that would be incapable of noticing that you just robbed them of a single license. Reg Gate is a company so small and personal that I, who have never worked for them a day in my life, have met the CEO. Great guy too. I do understand where you're coming from. Long, long ago I worked in tech support and only did programming on the side.  I "borrowed" a…
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04Feb 2009 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

VSTS:DB Composite Projects

Tools, Visual Studio
I've seen several searches go by from people who are looking for how to create composite projects. Here's a quick run-down. In the example, I'm going to create a main database project called BaseDB, a server project called MyServer, and a composite project that combines the two called Comp. This project is just another database project as you can see in Figure 1: [caption id="attachment_379" align="alignnone" width="450" caption="New Database Project"][/caption] Once the new project is created, you need to right click on the References object in the Solution Explorer. Figure 2: From the pop-up menu select Add Database Reference. The window in Figure 3 will pop up: [caption id="attachment_383" align="alignnone" width="450" caption="Add Database Reference"][/caption] You can select the other projects for a dynamic view into their changes, or for a…
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27Jan 2009 by Grant Fritchey 3 Comments

New England Data Camp Evals

PASS, T-SQL, Tools
Anyone reading this who attended the New England Data Camp and filled out an eval, for any of the sessions, thanks. For those 63 evals between the two sessions that I received, thanks. Here are the aggregates on my sessions: Using Visual Studio Team System Database Edition: Average of Knowledge 8.344827586 Average of Presentation 8.482758621 Average of Preparation 8.103448276 Average of Interesting 8.172413793 Average of Overall 8.275862069 Number of Submissions 29 Understanding Execution Plans Average of Knowledge 8.647058824 Average of Presentation 8.617647059 Average of Preparation 8.705882353 Average of Interesting 8.529411765 Average of Overall 8.625 Number of Submissions 34 These are all on a scale of 1-9. I'm really quite happy with the results. Here are the average results for all the speakers and all the sessions at the Data Camp:…
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22Jan 2009 by Grant Fritchey 7 Comments

SQL Server 2008 Management Studio Trick

Tools
I just had a Tremors moment. "Everybody knows about 'em Earl, we just never told you." Except that no one I showed it to has ever seen it before. So maybe this is something a little new. I had a database selected in the Object Explorer window and I had the Object Explorer Details window open. I noticed a little icon at the bottom of the screen: Then I saw that the bar above it was a moveable bar. So I moved it and saw this: Whoa! So then I tried a table, HumanResources.Department from AdventureWorks2008: Which caused me to check a procedure: Each line has a little icon on the side that lets you copy it, line by line. It's really just a way to display the basic properties…
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20Jan 2009 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

Incremental Deployments using Visual Studio Database Edition GDR

Tools, Visual Studio
I'm stuck. I've been advocating that our company use composite projects for our deployments using the VSTSDBE GDR (Visual Studio Team System Database Edition, General Distribution Release for those not instantly geeky).  In a nutshell, VSTSDBE offers two mechanisms for deployment across multiple environments. Both of these work wonderfully well for automation when you are doing a full tear-down and rebuild. When you're doing incremental deployments, they both fail. Option 1: Use SQL Command variables to set environment specific variables such as file location, etc., and post-deployment scripts to set security. This works. It's the method we used prior to the GDR. Unfortunately, security and other environment specific information is hidden inside scripts rather than visible to a given configuration directly within the VS interface. Option 2: Create a composite…
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14Jan 2009 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

SQL Server 2008 Upgrade Lab at Microsoft

Tools
I got an invite to take part in a lab at the Microsoft Technology Center in Waltham. I took advantage of it. I'll use this post to describe the experience so that anyone else with the opportunity will know what to expect.  [caption id="attachment_333" align="alignnone" width="450" caption="They knew I was coming"] [/caption] First, you recieve a very explicit set of pre-requisites. You need to install the SQL Server Upgrade Assistant, a tool that Microsoft licensed Scalability Experts to create for them. You have to run this against a small database, >25gb. The tool backups up all the databases from the server (so you need to put it on to a test box, rather than try to move an entire production system worth of databases). It then starts a trace that captures all the…
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