10Nov 2008 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

PASS Summit

PASS
The PASS Summit starts with the pre-conference seminars in just a week. For anyone interested, I'll be blogging once a day from the Summit. I won't be naming names from any of the drunken revels, so you'll need to go elsewhere for that information. As you can see from the side-bar, I'm presenting this year. If you're attending the Summit, please see my session. I'll be going over how to use the Visual Studio Team System Database Edition to deploy to multiple environments. Yes, it sounds a bit dull but if you need to use the tool, I think you'll find the session very helpful. I'm going on Tuesday from 3:00 to 4:15PM. I was competing with Gert Drapers, but it looks like things have changed and it's going to be…
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06Nov 2008 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

More on Andy Warren’s PASS Board Application

PASS
He's continuing to post about it, so I'm going to keep linking to it. I may be able to drive a hit or two his way. See, Andy already provided a service for the community. I had no idea how the nominees were selected. Now we at least have a sense of some of the inner-workings and it's interesting stuff. Not too much of that "inside baseball" tang either.
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04Nov 2008 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

VSTSDBE RC0 Post 3

Tools, Visual Studio
Second round of testing. Instead of associating with a project, I tried creating a reference to a .dbschema file. Same error. This time, I'm going to clear out everything. I tried creating it initially on top of the code from CTP 17. So, another chance to try out the reverse engineer process of "Import Database Schema." Works great. New AdventureWorks database inside Visual Studio with a tested deployment faster than you can spit. Created a new server project. Added a login, just to give it something to do. It deployed fine. On to the compound project. Let's see what happens. Just to see, I did a build and deploy before I added references or objects or anything. It worked great. Whatever that means. I'm taking it a step at a…
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03Nov 2008 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

VSTSDBE RC0 Post 2

nHibernate, Tools
There is no joy in Mudville. The install of RC0 went smoothly. I was able to create a new server project and deploy it. I was able to reverse engineer AdventureWorks into a new project and deploy that. When I went to create a new compound project, combining the output from the two... deployment failed. I got an arcane error about something in the Microsoft.Data.Schema.SchemaModel.ModelSerializationException erroring out. Useful. So, at this point, the functionality I had in my demo for the PASS Summit isn't working. Yikes. I've got two weeks... no pressure... I posted a note about it over at the MSDN discussion site. If you have a solution, swing by and drop it off.
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03Nov 2008 by Grant Fritchey 4 Comments

Great Article on DBA-Developer Conflict

nHibernate, Object Relational Mapping, T-SQL
What a great way to phrase the issue. I love the concept of the people-people impedence mismatch. We're going through it pretty regularly where I work. Our developers are convinced that using an ORM tool, in this case nHibernate, they're eliminating all the problems with the database because they're taking complete control of the database through nHibernate. All code will be on their side of the fence, no more messy stored procedures. All data structures will look like their objects, no more having to figure out those silly JOINS. Best of all, by setting all this up, no more messing with those stupid and obnoxious DBA's. Unfortunately, they're still planning on object persistance (don't call it data storage) inside of a SQL Server database... Um, guys, you haven't eliminated a…
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31Oct 2008 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

VSTSDBE RC0 Install

Tools, Visual Studio
I've downloaded and started the install. The first screen I'm seeing is not filling me with confidence. The executable that is currently running is called "DBProRepair.exe" However, the installed completed without any issues. Just for giggles, I tried opening my PASS presentation (created on CTP 17). If it worked, I wouldn't have to recode. Ah, well, no joy. Not that I expected any. Oh, but the Conversion Report that comes up afterwards is very informative. Reverse engineer against the AdventureWorks2008 database went off without a hitch. All the objects imported into the database with no issues too. So far, so good. Created all the projects. No issues. I'm configuring for a deployment now. We'll see how that goes. Builds worked fine. I forgot to change the deploy action the first…
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31Oct 2008 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Visual Studio Team System Database Edition GDR RC

Tools, Visual Studio
I'm a bit late to notice this, but Gert Drapers announced on Monday that the release candidate for VSTSDBE, or good ole VSDB as I've decided to call it, is now available. I figured they'd do something during the Professional Developers Conference (where supposedly a new printing of my book was being given out). Now I need to get on the stick & upgrade my virtual... maybe. According to the post, functionality hasn't changed. Maybe I should just leave everything alone on my machine until after PASS... Nah! I'll post progress for the uninstall, the install and the recreation of the compound project.
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30Oct 2008 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Procedure Cache and Dynamic Management Views

SQL Server, T-SQL
I'm just going through the chapter on the procedure cache in the new book and I'm having a blast playing with the dynamic management views and functions that let you access the procedure cache. It's just too much fun and way too easy to get detailed information about the queries in the system, not like the old days. First, you can access the cache itself with the DMV, sys.dm_exec_cached_plans. This shows some of the data describing the plan in cache, but most importantly it provides the plan_handle. You need this for other joins later. You can also use sys.dm_exec_query_stats to get aggregated performance statistics about the plan. It also has the plan_handle and two things new to SQL Server 2008, the query_hash and the query_plan_hash, also known as query fingerprints.…
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