This was a pretty cool event. The advertising leading up to it seemed to really cover the community very well. There was even a link to 24 Hours of PASS in my team's local web site. Unfortunately, I'm not an iron man like Tom LaRock, watching all 24 hours. I only hit a few sessions. The first session I hit was Allen White's PowerShell for SQL Server. I have attended a couple of his presentations at the PASS Summit. I think he's done a great job of gleaning better and better examples out of his presentations. This one was good. I loved the way he put together the backup processes for automating backups. It looked good, took into account common issues, it just worked. I was really happy I got…
My turn to answer Chris Shaw's questions "Do I feel I have a reliable SAN solution?" and "Describe Database Mirroring for the layman?" Thanks Tim. I've a feeling you're going to be disappointed. SAN: Hell, how should I know? Want to talk about a black box? Our SAN, as far as I'm aware, is run by a group of crack-shot ninja assassins and powered by pureed virgin unicorn. This strange mix of esoteric skill, magic and blood is evidently able to provide us with just about perfect up time. Once, one of the ninja's must have gone rogue (speculation) and had to be put down by his brother ninjas because we had a drive disappear on the cluster server. It took us a couple of hours, but it recovered as if it…
PASS just published a new Top 10 list of mine over at the their web site. This one is the Top 10 Articles on the web if you're trying to learn about spatial data. I'm not trying to say that I know what I'm doing with spatial data. I'm still feeling my way forward. These articles have proved to be the most useful in the learning I've done so far. I wanted to publish a little more information than we put into our Top 10 lists over at PASS. Having the list is good, but I thought it needed a bit of commentary to be complete. All these articles are good and all the web sites hosting the articles have good stuff on them. A few of the web sites stand out. Paul Randal's…
Allen White, who introduced me to the wonders of PowerShell at last year's PASS Summit, has published a white paper on using PowerShell within SQL Server 2008 with Microsoft. This is great news. If you're, as Brent Ozar so nicely put it, a noob like me in working with Powershell, this is going to be a great resource. Congratulations Allen, and thanks.
I try to shy away from humor in any of my posts because what I think is funny, others think is irritating or stupid (examples: I LOATHE Adam Sandler and I thought Hudson Hawk was funny. So there. I'm completely out of the main stream of America where comedy is concerned). I wanted to post something funny about getting an upgraded listing over at SQLRockStar's Blog Rankings. I've started it several times, looking to the Oscars and trying to  imitate Sally Fields or maybe that little Italian guy, toss in a Native American being really sombre & sad, a few streakers, an old guy doing push-ups (ohe-handed, even though he cheated a bit on the form, I still can't do those, even cheating)... None of it worked. I do appreciate wit, I just…
In my previous post, Spatial Data Hurts My Brain, I showed how a query used the spatial index, but hurt performance. Several people jumped in to try to help out. Thanks to Bob Beauchamin, Isaac Kunin, Gail Shaw, and Valerie Yakich (via Twitter). I've definately learned a bit more than I knew previously about spatial data and spatial indexes. I've posted about it before, but it bears repeating, if you're just starting out, I can't recommend Alistair Aitchison's book, Beginning Spatial with SQL Server 2008, enough. Here's where I'm at. I think I was confusing/confused/confounded/something about what to expect from a spatial index. I'm going to present two queries and two indexes and try to explain why each works well, or not together, mainly as a means for enabling my…
Before I describe this, let me thank Lynn Pettis over at SQL Server Central for coming up with the answer. This morning a developer walked up and asked me what would happen if he ran a query that looked like this: SELECT 1.SomeString I said that he'd get an error. No, he says, try it. So I try it and I get this: Somestring 1 Try it yourself. It works just fine. I'd never seen that before and didn't have a clue what it was. Thinking that Microsoft had supplied some new short hand to define aliases I ran this: SELECT 'dude'.dudette Which resulted in the error: Â Msg 258, Level 15, State 1, Line 1 Cannot call methods on varchar. Â Which is what I would have expected. I…
Thanks SQLBatman. It's not like I need to do work or something. Who has been a great leader in your career and what has made them a great leader? First, I need to define what I understand a leader to be and then I'll see if I have any great ones on the list. There are a lot of ways to define what a leader is. You could say simply the managers, team leads, CEO's and CIO's that you've worked for or with are leaders. But I don't see that. I think of a leader and I see Henry V and the St. Crispin's day speech, "...And gentlemen in England now-a-bed shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks that fought with…
My first book is finally in print. OK. I know. It sounds funny. But my first book was printed in only a limited print run from Red Gate, most of which they gave away at Tech Ed last year. Then they offered it for free in an electronic form. Very few people got a printed copy. Well, if you were waiting around for the dead tree version, it's here! Thanks again to Tony Davis & Brad McGehee for all the work they did. It just wouldn't have been possible without them.
Jamie Laflen and Barclay Hill have published an article in MSDN Magazine outlining the new features in in VSTS:DB GDR. The description of the intent and use of the server project is extremely enlightening. I wasn't aware of the master.dbschema files available for use within a project. Luckily I haven't needed them yet. Another thing I wasn't aware of, if you use the refactoring tools, say rename a table, not only does it save you a lot of typing, but the project will remember that the table was renamed and instead of dropping and recreating it in the next deployment, it will issue SP_RENAME. I'm spreading that word to my team right now. Another good point is that you can make a configuration to work only on your local machine…