Barclay Hill, Program Manager for Visual Studio Team System Database Edition at Microsoft has just launched a new blog that I'm excited about. He's going to be blogging on best practices for VSTS:DB. His initial post outlines the topics he hopes to address and it's an impressive list. I responded immediately with an offer to help because I'm using the tool and struggling a bit to get it to do everything we need and because I really like all that VSTS:DB has done for me and my team already. Any one else interested in pitching in should go over there and get involved. Here's what I sent as an initial message: I saw your blog post and request for interest and participation and decided to pitch in. The company where…
Anyone reading this who attended the New England Data Camp and filled out an eval, for any of the sessions, thanks. For those 63 evals between the two sessions that I received, thanks. Here are the aggregates on my sessions: Using Visual Studio Team System Database Edition: Average of Knowledge 8.344827586 Average of Presentation 8.482758621 Average of Preparation 8.103448276 Average of Interesting 8.172413793 Average of Overall 8.275862069 Number of Submissions 29 Understanding Execution Plans Average of Knowledge 8.647058824 Average of Presentation 8.617647059 Average of Preparation 8.705882353 Average of Interesting 8.529411765 Average of Overall 8.625 Number of Submissions 34 These are all on a scale of 1-9. I'm really quite happy with the results. Here are the average results for all the speakers and all the sessions at the Data Camp:…
It's getting a lot closer to the 24th. On Saturday, January 24th, the first ever New England Data Camp will launch. We've got a number of speakers registered. Aaron Bertrand and Andrew Novick are guys I've got a lot respect for. I've been to their presentations before and they've been consistently very good. We've got a few guys I haven't heard of personally, Talbott Crowell, Ayad Shammout, Sunil Kadimdiwan, Igor Moochnick. I'm going to present on execution plans and multi-environment deployments using DBPro (updated from the PASS presentation). The other presentations cover topics from using the Resource Governor on SQL Server 2008 to Defending SQL Server from Injection Attacks to Create better and more Useful Cubes. It's shaping up to be an actual event. If you're in the neighborhood (New…
From the Data Dude himself. This is great news. I've been working with the CTP's for several months now, telling the other DBA's on my team that they had to wait until it was completely ready for release. It's been a long wait, but I'm sure it's worth it. My congratulations to the team. I met several of you at the PASS Summit. I really apreciate the work you've put into this great tool. It really makes a difference in how we develop and deploy databases. The changes in the GDR are making a great utility even better. Thanks Mr. Drapers. Thanks also to Jamie Laflen, especially for helping validate some of the ideas I presented at PASS. Thanks to all the rest of the team, whose names I don't…
What a day. I'm not going to do justice to the keynote. First off, the room was frigging huge (not Tech-Ed huge, but enormous for PASS). It was pretty full too. The keynote wasn't terribly exciting, but it was terribly interesting. Watching 150tb databases process queries in less than 30 seconds is not something you see every day. Of more interest to me was the info on the new deployment mechanisms across database "fabrics" coming up with the new version of SQL Server (yes, it's at least two years away, but it's only two years away). It pretty clearly incorporates some of VSDB, but it's also a bit different. It includes data for example. This will be something for me to keep an eye on. My first session was with Allen White.…
A few posts ago I outlined the problems I was having getting the RC0 of the GDR to deploy appropriately. I was successful in a deployment, so I thought I was done. Yesterday I went to do a run through of the presentation for PASS and my deploy failed. Despite the fact that I'm running on the same machine with the same project that worked before. I've now gone back through the whole process again, but I'm getting nothing but failures. It's totally hosed. At this point, barring a miracle, I'm going to present the process and then explain that I can't demo it because of failures. I don't know if it's just a configuration issue with my virtual machine or something flawed in the release. Either way, I'm at…
The PASS Summit starts with the pre-conference seminars in just a week. For anyone interested, I'll be blogging once a day from the Summit. I won't be naming names from any of the drunken revels, so you'll need to go elsewhere for that information. As you can see from the side-bar, I'm presenting this year. If you're attending the Summit, please see my session. I'll be going over how to use the Visual Studio Team System Database Edition to deploy to multiple environments. Yes, it sounds a bit dull but if you need to use the tool, I think you'll find the session very helpful. I'm going on Tuesday from 3:00 to 4:15PM. I was competing with Gert Drapers, but it looks like things have changed and it's going to be…
Second round of testing. Instead of associating with a project, I tried creating a reference to a .dbschema file. Same error. This time, I'm going to clear out everything. I tried creating it initially on top of the code from CTP 17. So, another chance to try out the reverse engineer process of "Import Database Schema." Works great. New AdventureWorks database inside Visual Studio with a tested deployment faster than you can spit. Created a new server project. Added a login, just to give it something to do. It deployed fine. On to the compound project. Let's see what happens. Just to see, I did a build and deploy before I added references or objects or anything. It worked great. Whatever that means. I'm taking it a step at a…
There is no joy in Mudville. The install of RC0 went smoothly. I was able to create a new server project and deploy it. I was able to reverse engineer AdventureWorks into a new project and deploy that. When I went to create a new compound project, combining the output from the two... deployment failed. I got an arcane error about something in the Microsoft.Data.Schema.SchemaModel.ModelSerializationException erroring out. Useful. So, at this point, the functionality I had in my demo for the PASS Summit isn't working. Yikes. I've got two weeks... no pressure... I posted a note about it over at the MSDN discussion site. If you have a solution, swing by and drop it off.
I've downloaded and started the install. The first screen I'm seeing is not filling me with confidence. The executable that is currently running is called "DBProRepair.exe" However, the installed completed without any issues. Just for giggles, I tried opening my PASS presentation (created on CTP 17). If it worked, I wouldn't have to recode. Ah, well, no joy. Not that I expected any. Oh, but the Conversion Report that comes up afterwards is very informative. Reverse engineer against the AdventureWorks2008 database went off without a hitch. All the objects imported into the database with no issues too. So far, so good. Created all the projects. No issues. I'm configuring for a deployment now. We'll see how that goes. Builds worked fine. I forgot to change the deploy action the first…