26Nov 2012 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Treat Yourself to Knowledge

Misc
There's a one day sale going on at Apress today, 11/26/12. All their eBooks are $15. This means you can start learning about query performance tuning, or get started as a DBA, or explore a whole range of topics by different authors presenting some of the best in the business knowledge. Yes, these are all Apress books that I've written on different topics. This is your chance to pick them up at a pretty steep discount. I know I'm heading over there to buy Jason Strate and Ted Krueger's book on indexing. Check mine out. Check Jason & Ted's out. Just find yourself something and treat yourself to some knowledge. Today's a great day to do it.
Read More
21Nov 2012 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Final 2012 Learning Opportunity

Misc
There's still a little time left in the year. I know some businesses have allocated training budgets and if they don't spend the money, they lose it from their budget. So a few of you might still be looking for opportunities to get your learn on. I've got one more big one before the end of the year. You can try heading down to Florida for the Live 360 conference. I'll be there along with several friends (love my #sqlfamily). I'm presenting two sessions, one on setting up an environment for performance testing using the new distributed playback capabilities from SQL Server 2012 and one on introducing the accidental DBA to backups. You can still register here to attend these sessions and all the other great ones being presented. Last…
Read More
19Nov 2012 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Living with the Surface, Maybe

Surface
No major updates at the moment. I still haven't played with remoting through PowerShell. I'm just living with it. Had an interesting problem start today. You can swipe from the sides to get different behaviors. Swipe in from the top or bottom and you get menu choices in the app you're in. Swipe in from the right and you get the Charms. Swipe in from the left... well, you're supposed to get the list of recent apps or the ability to set an app in another window or even switch to the previous application, all depending on how you swipe. Except, mine stopped. Hurrah. I did a bunch of poking around to figure out why this happened, hoping I'm not looking at a hardware issue (oh please, not that). When…
Read More
16Nov 2012 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

HDInsight and Buggy Whips

HDInsight
I sat the through the big announcements at the 2011 PASS Summit about the partnership between Microsoft and Hadoop. I recognized it as... interesting, but not necessarily earth shattering. I was aware of the NoSQL movement and understood that it answered a pain point that structured data couldn't really adequately answer, but that was really it. Then I sat through the sessions this year showing the stuff coming out with the Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) and PolycBAse. Then I watched Dr. Dewitt promise me that I'd be seeing similar functionality within the main SQL Server tool and suddenly... I looked at my structured data knowledge, glanced back at the stuff going on in the keynotes and frankly, they really did look a lot like automobiles. Quick clarification, I've mentioned it…
Read More
14Nov 2012 by Grant Fritchey 3 Comments

Remote Desktop and Surface

Surface
The Windows RT operating system is not the same as Windows. After all the talk about the upcoming OS and hardware, this should not be a shock to anyone. This means that there are going to be some apps that just won't run on your RT device. OK, not a problem. Because you can always attack to a remote desktop session, right? Maybe. The principal app for doing remote desktop from the RT has a funky name. It's called Remote Desktop. It was not installed on my machine by default. I had to go and get it from the Store. No big deal. The UI is incredibly simple. Enter the name of  the PC you want to connect to. I have not made my Surface a part of my domain…
Read More
12Nov 2012 by Grant Fritchey 3 Comments

Surface Problems With Azure

Surface
I've been posting about the Surface over the last couple of weeks and I've tried really hard to be positive about it. But there are some serious problems with the device. I've already made a stink about the apps, but this time, I want to talk about the Microsoft ecosystem. I'm working more and more with online services. These vary from storage, such as SkyDrive to Amazon Servers to Azure. And Azure is my problem. I sit here, typing into a device that is really, really close to being fully productive despite being extremely small and light. Really close. And, it's supposed to be a major player within the Microsoft world. It's what the new OS was designed for, or so I thought. But, I might have just found my…
Read More
11Nov 2012 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

Purpose of the Surface RT

Surface
I'm a little over two weeks with the Surface at this point. I've been travelling all of that time, so I have been using the Surface quite a lot, as I used to my (beloved) Android tablet. It took a little while to get functional enough, upgrading the dysfunctional Office that came installed, figuring out how to get various email set up, learning how to use the touch type, and figuring out the operating system. But, at this time, the Surface is close to functional. Close. But what's it for? First, it's a consumption device. I've got a web browser in my hands, wherever I go, as long as I can get WIFI. That gives me a hefty chunk of the world to work with. I can rent movies. I've…
Read More
09Nov 2012 by Grant Fritchey 6 Comments

Using the Surface

Surface
I'm attempting to push this thing. I want it to be a production device, not just a consumption device. Frankly, until there are a lot more apps (which don't crash & burn), this isn't all that attractive a consumption device. Typing with the touch keyboard has gotten radically better as I've worked with it. So much so, it's starting to mess with the way I type on a real keyboard, jut a little. I find a little pause, every so often, after typing quite a few words, resting my fingers, just for a moment, on the home keys (bless my typing class in high school), getting my index fingers reoriented to the little indents that mark F and J. I actually just used that last sentence as an example. Each…
Read More
09Nov 2012 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

PASS Summit Day 3: Dr. David Dewitt

PASS
Two quick points, I'm putting this blog together using the Surface.. ooh... and this isn't a keynote, but a spotlight session at the Summit. Still, I thought I would live blog my thoughts because I've done it for every time Dr. Dewitt has spoken at the Summit. Right off, he has a slide with a little brain character representing himself. But, we're talking PolyBase, and futures. This is basically a way to combine hadoop unstructured nosql data with structured storage within SQL Server. Mostly this is within the new Parallel Datawarehouse. But it's coming to all of SQL Server, so we need to learn this. The information ties directly back to what was presented at yesterday's keynote. HDFS is the file system. On top of that a framework for executing…
Read More
08Nov 2012 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

PASS Summit 2012 Day 2: Keynote

PASS
Welcome to Day 2 of the PASS Summit! It's been a very exciting event so far. Today I'm presenting two sessions, one on tuning queries by fixing bad parameter sniffing and one on reading execution plans. Please stop by, or watch the one on execution plans on TV as PASS is livestreaming events all day long on SQL TV (which is what I used to call Profiler). The intro video, which can be good or goofy was really good this year. They had people from all over the world talking in their native language, making the point that the PASS organization is a global community. It really is. Doug McDowell is giving us the finance and governance information for the PASS organization. I find this boring and vital at the…
Read More