I was privileged to be able to attend and present at SQL Saturday 46 in Raleigh, NC, this last weekend. It was a great collection of people presenting some amazing stuff. I want to say, right off, I think this is the best SQL Saturday event I've been to. I say that despite the fact that I've helped put on a SQL Saturday. I also say that despite the fact that my sample size on SQL Saturday's is fairly low. I've only been to three (including the one I put on). You have to understand, the people who put on #sqlsat46, the Triangle SQL Server Users Group, did an absolutely outstanding job. They had clearly done the early work of getting sponsorships and organizing. This weekend, all that early work…
I am not a Reporting Services guru and nor do I play one on TV. I am however forced to be all things Microsoft Data where I work. So I frequently find myself stretching way beyond my abilities. I just had to get a report running that feeds from a web service and has a recursive hiearchy with customized aggregation on multiple fields with drill down to a different set of details. Yeah, through the internet I can see the SSRS monsters rolling their eyes at the ease of this task. But for us mere mortals it was work. Since I spent so much time learning how to do it, I thought I'd share. XML as a Source First, because we have a very paranoid (and appropriately so) group of…
I just passed 100,000 views on the blog. That's from 400 posts over a period of time starting in March of 2008. You guys have posted 1129 comments. The average views per week went from 39 in 2008 to 160 in 2010. I realize others out there are hitting 100,000 a week, but for some of us small time bloggers, this is a big deal. I just wanted to say thanks for stopping by and I hope my attempts at understanding SQL Server, PowerShell, SCOM, spatial data, Visual Studio, ORM and whatever else I've posted about has been helpful in some way.
One of the best things to come out with Powershell V2 is remoting and asynchronous calls. Between the two of these, you can basically send commands simultaneously to a number of SQL Server instances. BUT... and there always seems to be one of those, there is a lot of work required to get this running right. I'm going to outline what I did recently to test the ability of PowerShell to begin administering my servers remotely. Hopefully this provide the basis for a checklist and a how-to. I'll update this post over time so that I get things right. Enable remoting on the machines you wish to call This requires admin privileges, but it's pretty simple unless you need to modify which ports are available, etc. But to get it going the easiest…
It's a Friday, the day governments & companies traditionally deliver bad news. I recived the bad news earlier in the week, but I'm passing it on now: The Standard is dead. Let me first say, a couple of authors are right in the middle of finishing up articles. Those will be completed and published and you'll get paid. Andy sums up some of the reasons why the Standard failed very nicely in his blog post. I agree with them, if not where the responsibility lies. Andy takes most of it on himself because, well, he's that kind of guy, may the gods bless him. But, the fact is, I took on the job and just wasn't prepared for what it would entail. The "editing" part of the job was hard.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Two years old. In March of 2008 I received a whopping 96 visits. I'm up to 1900 so far this month. I'd call that a positive growth trend. Thanks for stopping by, especially if you've been here more than once.