09Jun 2010 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

PASS 2010 Submissions

PASS
Since all the cool kids seem to be posting the sessions that they submitted to the PASS Summit, nerd that I am, I'll follow along and do the same. I submitted four sessions, two by invitation for a Spotlight session and two for regular sessions. I tried to branch out a bit from where I've been in the past to see if I can start talking about different topics. With that in mind, the first session was: Spatial Data: The Business Case We've all seen the cool presentations showing all the pizza joints near the conference center or all the bicycle shops on a biking route, but what's the case for spatial data and business? This session sets out to show how spatial data can be of interest to almost…
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28May 2010 by Grant Fritchey 6 Comments

Buy vs. Build

PowerShell, Tools
It's the classic question faced by everyone in Information Services. I know how to do this and I could build software to do it, but I'm a lazy b_____d so I'd rather just pick up a piece of software that does it for me. I love working for large companies because I can usually get them to purchase stuff so that I can loll around stuffing my face all day instead of doing actual work. Unfortunately, not everyone can afford to pick up Microsoft's Operations Manager or Idera's Diagnostic Manager. But you still need to monitor your servers. With buy eliminated, that leaves build. Which, is where this excellent blog post by Laerte Junior comes in. He lays out how to build a wrapper around calls to get Performan Counter…
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24May 2010 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

Slick New Software

SQL Server
I'm lazy. And frankly, I'm not ashamed to admit it. When a software comes along that can do the work for me, even work I can do just fine on my own, I'm interested. When that software is inexpensive, even better. When it's free... I just got word that Confio is putting together a free version of Ignite, their performance monitoring software. It's basically going to be the current view of performance and not have all the historical tracking and nifty trend reports. Yeah, it's a tease, but it's a tease on a product that focuses on monitoring wait states, something you should be doing. Just remember, reference above, I'm lazy. The thing is, they need some people to help them beta test. Here's the word I received: If you…
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11May 2010 by Grant Fritchey 10 Comments

Recompiles and Constant Learning

T-SQL
When faced with a procedure that looks like this: CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.TestProc (@TestValue INT) AS BEGIN IF @TestValue = 1 BEGIN SELECT * FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader AS soh JOIN Sales.SalesOrderDetail AS sod ON soh.SalesOrderID = sod.SalesOrderID WHERE soh.SalesOrderID = @TestValue END ELSE BEGIN SELECT * FROM Production.Product AS p JOIN Production.ProductDocument AS pd ON p.ProductID = pd.ProductID WHERE p.ProductID = @TestValue END END I used to suggest creating a wrapper procedure in order to avoid the recompiles that occur when the different paths through the IF statement are taken by the optimizer. I mentioned that recently on a post over at SQL Server Central. Gail Shaw (blog | twitter) asked me why I thought there would be a recompile. She said that the optimizer took the query as a whole and…
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27Apr 2010 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

PASS Summit, Kilt Wednesday

PASS
Last year at the PASS Summit we held a silly little event called Kilt Wednesday. Only three people took part, but it was very popular nonetheless. Here's a sample of what it looked like. This year is looking to be a lot bigger. Keep an eye on Twitter for updates under the hash tag: #sqlkilt. If you're going to the 2010 Summit, bring your kilt for Wednesday. Ladies, you're invited too. This is an unofficial event and has nothing to do with the PASS organization. We're just having a little fun. Remember, Seattle is home to Utilikilts, so you can pick up a kilt while you're there.
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22Apr 2010 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

PASS Summit Content Survey Results

PASS
The results of a survey conducted by the PASS organization have been posted (thanks to the Board for all their work, again). Since getting to speak at PASS is a competition, I really shouldn't be pointing this out, because I'd like to speak again. However, if you're trying to decide whether or not a detailed discussion of Windows Server 2008 Collation would be more interesting to the attendees than a session on Filtered Indexes (it wouldn't) you can go check it out on the survey. It should help you make better choices for what the attendees want to see. Of course, if everyone runs off and submits sessions on the same four or five topics, that's going to open up others. Regardless, this is a service to the attendees because…
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21Apr 2010 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

SQL Server Standard: Volume 7, Issue 3

Misc
FINALLY! It's not like Don Gabor had the article done in January or anything...oh wait. He did have the article done in January. However, it looks like we might be breaking the log jam and we'll be publishing a number of SQL Server Standard issues. Anyway, do you want to learn how to talk techie to non-techies? You do? That's excellent because I've got a fantatic article by Don Gabor (blog), just for you. Please go and read it.
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20Apr 2010 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

SQL Saturday #39, New York, New York

PASS
A town so big they named it twice. If you're not excited about SQL Saturday in NYC this weekend... why not? Take a look at the schedule. There are some excellent speakers presenting there. This is going to be a great opportunity to learn a lot of stuff, network with your peers, and possibly pick up a bit of free swag. What's not to like? See old friends, meet new friends, learn stuff and all for free. I'm presenting a session called MUQT (pronounced "MUCK" the T is silent because we shouldn't be doing this).
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19Apr 2010 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Powershell Script for Verifying Space

PowerShell
First let me say, I know my Powershell skills are sub-par. I'm working on it. Slowly but surely. That said, I had a problem to solve. It's one that I could have done with TSQL, but it would be very ugly TSQL, probably involving dynamic queries, and even for admin scripts, I try to avoid that. So, I went for SMO and WMI wrapped by Powershell to solve the problem. What was the problem you ask? We automate as many of our processes as we can. One process we do is resetting databases from production or other sources. Our processes work very well, but we occasionally run into a problem where the source system db has grown and the target system doesn't have the required disk space. So, we needed…
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16Apr 2010 by Grant Fritchey 10 Comments

Powershell SMO Problem

PowerShell
We've been running the Enterprise Policy Management tools available from Codeplex for a few months now (Thanks to Buck Woody's (blog | twitter) session at the PASS Summit). They're honestly great. It's a fantastic way to use Policy Based Management on 2000 and 2005 servers. We did hit some issues with timeouts and looking at the script, it made a call to invoke-sqlcmd, but didn't pass the -querytimeout value. That means it default to 30 seconds and the import to database process was taking more than a minute for some of our queries. I did a little looking around and decided to just disable the timeout by passing a value of zero (0). But, I still got timeouts. Finally, after a bit of searching around, I found a closed (because…
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