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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15Mar 2010 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

SNESSUG March Meeting

Misc, SQL Server
Aaron Bertrand showed up to teach us tips and tricks for SQL Server Management Studio. We had to move our meeting night because of a conflict at our wonderful host, New England Tech. But we still had 12 people show up. For SNESSUG, that was a good turnout. I gave away some swag that I had received from Microsoft and some stuff that we had purchased. Bribary works (at least that's my theory, so feel free to bribe me, whenever). Aaron's presentation was great. He's just showing nothing but meat. There's no fluff. He's just showing a series of tips & tricks in SSMS and explains why you want to use them. First revelation, -nosplash has no effect whatsoever on load time. He called it a placebo. It just kept…
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11Mar 2010 by Grant Fritchey 9 Comments

Location of the PASS Summit Follow-up

PASS
I got a little distracted after lunch and was reading through some of the various bloggers reactions to the decision to keep the Summit in Seattle for the forseeable future. I enjoyed Brent Ozar's take on the situation, but the thing that struck me square in the eyes and inspired me to add one more post of my own, was a comment on Brent's post by Aaron. Scroll down and read it. Here's the part that really made an impact: This whole situation is making me less interested in supporting the organization. As a relative newcomer to PASS and having never attended a Summit, I’m turned off by the “come talk to Microsoft employees” stance. I’d rather them say come and talk to (or sing Karaoke with?) cool guys like…
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10Mar 2010 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Location of the PASS Summit

PASS
There has been some discussion recently around the location of the PASS Summit. The debate was centered on the results from a recent survey hosted by PASS. Today's Community Connector has an editorial by the PASS President, Rushabh Mehta, explaining why those of us on the East Coast will be flying to the other side of the continent for the next two years, and supplying the results of the survey I get why they're doing this. Microsoft really will commit more resources to an event that is in their back yard. I get it. I also understand, that those of us who consider the PASS Summit a big part of our "community" are actually in the minority. Most people attending the Summit aren't involved in the community, aren't interested in…
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