14Apr 2010 by Grant Fritchey 23 Comments

The SQL Server Community

PASS
I attended, and spoke at, the inaugural meeting of the Seacoast SQL Server User's group last night. There were about 60 people in attendance. An excellent turn-out and congratulations go out to Mike Walsh (blog | twitter) and the other organizers. I was curious about something after watching Mike present the PASS monthly slide-deck. He asked how many people were PASS members. Approximately a third of the audience raised their hands. When it was my turn to speak, I asked how many people had heard of Buck Woody (blog | twitter). I was honestly shocked when only about 6 people raised their hands. Then I asked how many had heard of Paul Randal (blog | twitter). This time I had about 9-12 people. Finally, I asked about Brent Ozar (blog…
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13Apr 2010 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

Southern New England SQL Server Users Group

Misc
Tomorrow, Wednesday April 14th, is the next SNESSUG meeting. We're going to get a great presentation from Scott Abrants on using Visual Studio Team System for database deployments. I saw Scott presenting this at SQL Saturday:Boston to a packed room. If you didn't get to see it then, come on down to Rhode Island tomorrow evening. You won't be sorry.
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12Apr 2010 by Grant Fritchey 5 Comments

Seacoast SQL Users Group

Misc
Tomorrow is the Seacost SQL Server User's Group inaugural meeting. I'll be presenting a session called "Understanding Execution Plans." It's my introductory session on execution plans and I love giving it. Please come by and support this new user group. Mike Walsh (blog | twitter), the new user group president, is under the impression I draw a big crowd. While that isn't true, please show up anyway just so that Mike has a successful first meeting. I promise a bit of free stuff. Remember, interactivity is bribed encouraged.
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09Apr 2010 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

Thoughts on ORM

nHibernate, Object Relational Mapping
I've posted before about issues I'm having either with behaviors of nHibernate, or behaviors of teams using nHibernate, but I don't think I've made my thoughts on ORM too clear. Let me do that now. I think some form of ORM is here to stay. There are lots of different ORM tools out there and acceptance of them is absolutely growing. Further, it should grow. Developing software is hard and if you can write code that reduces the overall amount of code you have to write, I'm in favor of it. I'm not convinced that the current crop of tools are quite as good as they ought to be, but most of them seem very flexible which should mean implementation of them can be, overall, beneficial to your project. That's…
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06Apr 2010 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

24 Hours of PASS v2.0

PASS
The kids over at the Professional Association of SQL Server Users have done it again. They're hosting 24 Hours of PASS: Celebrating SQL Server 2008 R2. That's 24 hours of free training by top names in the business, providing you with the information you want and need. I'm not presenting this year (I may cry), but who cares. This is going to be a great chance to get some serious learning. I'm sure going to attend as many sessions as I can. First one that I've already got marked is Andy Leonard's on database development patterns. That's a topic that's near & dear to my heart. So follow the link, look the offerings over, and register right away.
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06Apr 2010 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

Confio Ignite: First Impressions

SQL Server
One of the national sponsors for SQL Satuday is Confio Software. Just because they sponsor SQL Saturday, it's worth checking out their product, but they also host the speaker's dinner at these events. So, having eaten off their dime, I felt obligated to take a look. I'm glad I did. Confio Ignite is a monitoring software that keeps real-time and historical track of the performance of your SQL Server (and Oracle and DB2) database servers. It's focus is on wait states and queues, a very common method for troubleshooting performance. You can get a trial download from their web site to run for a couple of weeks yourself. Everyone's first impression of a software, after the web site of course, is when go to do the install. The install routine for Ignite was very…
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05Apr 2010 by Grant Fritchey 25 Comments

nHibernate, First Look at TSQL

nHibernate
I've blogged in the past about the nHibernate project that has been going on at my company for the last eighteen months. Prior to today, I have only seen the database generated by nHibernate. But today I finally started seeing some TSQL code. My first impressions... oy! There are two levels of concern coming out of the gate. First, it appears that some of the programming decisions, completely independent of nHibernate, are going to cause problems. Second, it appears we're going to be hitting issues with nHibernate. First, the programming decision. I've been using Confio to monitor this server for a few days now (look for upcoming posts on my eval of Confio). Only one day has captured any real activity from the nHibernate team (and yes, I'm basically spying on…
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01Apr 2010 by Grant Fritchey 5 Comments

Renewed as an MVP

Misc
I received my renewal notice and, after checking the message header, it is April 1st, I got very happy. I'd try to wax poetic about this, but I just read Paul Randal's (blog | twitter) comments on the fact that he and Kimberly Tripp (blog) were just renewed. As in lots of things, he did a better job than I can in describing exactly what this means.
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23Mar 2010 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

SQL Saturday #39 New York

PASS
New York, New York, it's a hell of a town. The Bronx is up and the Battery's down. The people ride in a hole in the ground... Anyway, my abstract for SQL Saturday #39 in New York was accepted a while ago, but I just got all my reservations set, so I'm going for sure. This should be a pretty exciting event based on the people and the schedule. Hope to see you there.
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18Mar 2010 by Grant Fritchey 5 Comments

Undocumented Virtual Column: %%lockres%

SQL Server, T-SQL
One of my development teams needed a mechanism for identifying the value of a key that was part of a lock (don't ask). I'd never tried doing that before. Obviously if you hit the DMV sys.dm_tran_locks you can see the hash of the key in the resource_description column. But how to pull the value back. After some research, I first found this excellent article by the late, great, Ken Henderson (I really wish he was still around). The article outlined, among other things, the use of an undocumented "virtual" column called %%lockres%%. Some more searching then uncovered this great article by James Rowland-Jones, AKA Claypole. He described how, in a very high volume system, he used %%lockres%% to identify the source of a deadlock as the internal mechanisms that SQL Server uses to manage locks, the hash…
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