Editorial

Die Access, Die

I had to lead with this one because I have a similar view as this post. Access is handy, quick, does a few things nicely, but creates headaches and many more poorly written applications than I think are necessary. And why would you buy it when Express is free?

I understand it can build applications, but honestly these days someone should be able to use a framework or whip up a web app that does what you need almost as quickly. And would be easier to move on to another engine if need be, refactored, whatever. Get rid of Access.

Assurance

There is a very interesting blog from Bruce Schneier this week on Assurance and security. It starts out with the voting machine testing, but don't let that dissuade you. Dig further and he talks about many fundamental problems that we have in digital security and how we attack them.

He makes good points about security, but honestly I don't think it's so much the cost that drives things as the marketing folks. They're so afraid of a black mark or any admission of issues, they want us to presume security so they can sell products.

Schneier has written before security is a cost and insurance will make up for the technical issues. I tend to agree.

Miscellaneous Notes

Since there were a bunch of interesting things I saw this week, I thought I'd highlight a few more.

There's a new build of XP, and it's no SP3. There's an SP2c because we're running out of activation keys. Wow! That's a testament to success for the OS (though we could do without the keys). It gives me a reason to keep on chugging with XP for the foreseeable future instead of upgrading to Vista. I am considering a new laptop as this one is now 3 years old and feeling a little aged.

Should you maintain three data centers for disaster recovery?. Of course it makes you more secure, but at what cost? I don't think this makes sense for the vast majority of businesses. We lose data all the time from human error, etc. Weigh the costs, but don't set up a third without being sure of the risk and payback. I think you'd be better off spreading out your data to 3 places, all maybe 1/2 size, and spreading the load.

Lastly, a great quote about blogging at Microsoft and what an exec said: "we hire smart people, let's trust them to be smart about what they do." I've heard that this is the policy on blogging at Microsoft: be smart.

Steve Jones

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	©Red Gate® Software Ltd 2007

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All the headlines and interesting SQL Server information that we've collected over the past week, and sometimes even a few repeats if we think they fit. These headlines are gathered throughout the week and are posted in real time at the website. Check there for information throughout the week or enjoy this weekly summary of the SQL Server world.

Disaster Recovery

Should you maintain three data centers for disaster recovery? - Pushed in part by U.S. business regulations concerning data preservation, financial and other high-end organizations are moving to a three data center architecture for disaster recovery, says Wikibon.org community member and data center consultant Josh Krischer. In this architecture, two nearby data...(more)

Tech News

Changes at MySQL draw fire from community - MySQL AB has made it harder for developers to use the enterprise edition of its database software for free, sparking a debate about whether the company has strayed from its obligation to the open-source community. Kaj Arno, MySQL vice president for community, announced in his blog this week that the...(more)

Sybase Ready to Take On Oracle in Databases - Sybase CEO John Chen says the company will focus on technology to differentiate itself in the database market. Database software remains the bread and butter of Sybase, which enjoyed growth in the number of new licenses last year after the release of its Adaptive Server Enterprise 15 product. ...(more)

Microsoft News

Windows XP: The OS that won't die? - Microsoft Corp. has had to create a new build of Windows XP Professional for computer makers because the six-year-old operating system's continued popularity has nearly exhausted the supply of product activation keys. The new build, dubbed SP2c, includes no fixes or feature changes, but was created ...(more)

Microsoft's Halo 3 Pre-Orders Exceed 1M - Microsoft Corp. says orders ahead of the official launch of the fast-paced shooter video game "Halo 3" exceed 1 million in North America, breaking pre-order records in the video game industry....(more)

Security

Patch Tuesday to Bring 9 Microsoft Bandages - Microsoft's Patch Tuesday is bringing nine fixes, six of which address critical problems in Windows and Office....(more)

Hardware News

Storage Guru: Q&A With Garth Gibson - The man who brought you RAID is working to help storage keep pace with high-performance computing demands. ...(more)

Security

Help! Someone has deleted events from my Windows event log! - From time to time I hear this, and it usually turns out not to be the case. First, a little background....(more)

SQL Server Compact Edition

Notification to Pull - As developers start architecting their apps with Sync Services for ADO.NET they're starting to ask questions about the holes we didn't get complete in this 1.0 release. One such topic is how can I send changes from the server to the client, without the client having to ask? There are a few problem...(more)

T-SQL

Dynamic Crosstab with multiple PIVOT Columns - Jeff Smith in his weblog showed how to generate Crosstab reports using a stored procedure. It works only for one PIVOT Column.I had a requirement to generate crosstab reports with more than one pivot column. So I used the same approach he used and modified his procedure as shown below...(more)

SQL Server 2005

Is statistics over non-indexed columns updated by index rebuild? - Short answer: no. This question came up today in the MCT discussion group. My gut instinct said no, but I wanted to test it to be certain. But first a brief background:...(more)

Analysis Services / BI

Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, and Data Marts - The terms Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, and Data Marts are used interchangeably by many people so I thought it would be good to explain the differences....(more)

Business Intelligence - What is it? - In the world of management speak it is common practice to re-brand an essentially old idea with a new name. Many years ago we had EIS (executive information systems), decision support systems and MI (management information) systems. I am sure there are experts out there who will post me precise de...(more)

Business Intelligence - or putting the I into IT - As I have mentioned I am the new kid on the blog in Eileen Brown's team. This means that for most of the time I am the trainee and my peers are all light years ahead of me - except that is when it comes to Business Intelligence. Then the conversation goes a bit like this (with apologies to the Cat i...(more)

Security

Assurance - Over the past several months, the state of California conducted the most comprehensive security review yet of electronic voting machines. People who I consider to be security experts analyzed machines from three different manufacturers, performing both a red-team attack analysis and a detailed sourc...(more)

Analysis Services / BI

Police Data Mining Done Right - It's nice to find an example of the police using data mining correctly: not as security theater, but more as a business-intelligence tool:...(more)

DMO/SMO/Powershell

Reading directly from SQL Server - A small example of reading a value from an SQL Server. In this case the maximum memory allowed for the SQL Server Instance....(more)

Performance Point

PerformancePoint Server 2007 Monitoring and Analytics: Got CTP4 today - Well, a little birdy dropped off CTP4 for me to start using today (well, I had access to his shared drive). I quickly uninstalled CTP3 and installed CTP4. Worked like a charm the first time. I open a CTP3 project file and published and it worked like a charm. Sometimes you have to worry about t...(more)

Performance and Tuning

Reduce the Contention on tempdb with Trace Flag 1118: Take 2 - My earlier attempt to see what's going on with trace flag 1118 on SQL Server 2005 SP2 (9.00.3042) didn't take me too far because the results were not conclusive. I was motivated by seemingly conflicting suggestions from KB article Q936185 and whitepaper Working with tempdb in SQL Server 2005....(more)

T-SQL

SQL SERVER - 2005 - List All The Column With Specific Data Types - Since we upgraded to SQL Server 2005 from SQL Server 2000, we have used following script to find out columns with specific datatypes many times. It is very handy small script....(more)

Software Development

Agile: Planning Poker and Scrum - Who said you can?t gamble at work and what is Scrum anyway? Scrum is an agile process for developing software. With Scrum, projects progress via a series of iterations called sprints. A sprint can be 2 weeks, 3 weeks or a month. The sprint is a deliverable, after the completion of the sprint you are...(more)

Career

The Biggest Problem We Face - Last night I gave a presentation to the Pacific Northwest SQL User Group. I mentioned that we often think our biggest problems are lack of time, too much work, people we have to deal with or technical issues. But all of us get done only what we can, we manage to deal with the people at work that are...(more)

Software Development

The Visible Long-Term Costs of NOT Doing it Right - Jeff Brown has a good post about in response to my No Broken Windows post.

My beef is that the absolute cost differential Ayende cites in this case is too small to be meaningful. The difference between a 1 hour task and a 4 hour task is 3 hours of sleep later in the week.

...(more)

The only metric that counts: Maintainability - There are a lot of code metrics that float around, measuring lines of code, code complexity, number of classes/methods, test coverage, etc. The important thing there is to remember that all of those are fairly meaningless....(more)

Hiring and getting hired - Hammett is talking about how hard it is to hire good people. A part of my job used to be verifying candidates' technical abilities for our company's Head Hunters division. Getting people is easy, getting good people is so damn hard it is not even funny. I saw a lot of really bad programmers ( I stil...(more)

T-SQL

SQL Challenge, getting historical data: solution - As it turned out, this isn't that hard, all I needed to do was remember my trusty DateRange function, modify it to on months instead of days, and it was off to the races. This type of code does make my head hurt a tiny bit, it packs a lot into it....(more)

Database Design, Theory and Development

Working with ANTLR: HQL Grammar - I am currently trying to build an ANTLR grammar for HQL. There is already an existing one for Hibernate 3, but that one is based on ANLTR 2.x and supports quite a bit more than NHibernate does at the moment (DML statements, for instance). After several failed attempts to port the grammar to ANTLR 3 ...(more)

Software Development

On Software Teams - It's been about half a year since I threw out my My Programming Manifesto, and I've started to collect some things that I missed the first time around. As always, you should be reading this as "..while there is value in the items on the right, *I, Jeremy D. Miller, sole author of the Shade Tre...(more)

SQL Server 2005

Maintenance Plan MetaData - I was recently asked about which tables are involved in a maintenance plan in SQL Server 2005.The primary tables are: msdb.dbo.sysmaintplan_subplans msdb.dbo.sysmaintplan_log msdb.dbo.sysmaintplan_logdetail msdb.dbo.sysdbmaintplans msdb.dbo.sysdbmaintplan_jobs msdb.dbo.sysdbmaintplan_databases msdb....(more)

T-SQL

Passing an array (CSV) to a stored procedure with data validation, no loops, no self joins - just REPLACE - Yet another take on the CSV route for passing an array to a stored procedure, this one is clever though ? it?s got full data validation because I load the values into a table, but with no loops, no self-joins; just dynamic SQL and the REPLACE function...(more)

Is 'YYYY-MM-DD' always treated as year, month, date? - Most of you already know the answer to this question: no. I won't recap the rules for interpretation of the current datetime literals, as I have an article on the subject: http://www.karaszi.com/SQLServer/info_datetime.asp...(more)

SQL Server Compact Edition

Configuring Visual Studio 2005 for use with SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition - A number of people have been a bit confused how to get SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition (also known as version 3.1) working with Visual Studio 2005. The fact that we enabled a new product mid-steam within a Visual Studio ship cycle was quite an accomplishment, but there were a few cracks that people...(more)

Integration Services

SSIS: Team Development Experiences - Recently on this blog I mentioned in passing that I have been working for some considerable time now on a project with multiple SSIS developers. A few people asked me if I could give a rundown of how we went about this, any experiences of team development I could pass on, and any pitfalls that I had...(more)

Security

Secure by design - Whenever you're developing a new application that hits SQL Server, make sure you design in security from the outset. In the new releae of the Community Tehcnal Preview (CTP) for SQL Server 2008, you'll notice that there are several new improvements in security. Even the documentation has been improv...(more)

Asking for Passwords - How do you get a password out of an IRS agent? Just ask: Sixty-one of the 102 people who got the test calls, including managers and a contractor, complied with a request that the employee provide his or her user name and temporarily change his or her password to one the caller suggested, accordi...(more)

Software Development

If I were in sales and Steve Jones were my customer... - First of all, fortunately for our shareholders (myself included!), I'm not in sales, technical or otherwise. Heh. Second, I consider Steve Jones (of SQLServerCentral.com fame) a good friend. So with the good sense of humor that one expects of such friends and all the other "this is supposed to ...(more)

Reporting Services

The Perfect Host - This is my first blog about SSRS 2008. The July CTP (CTP4) of SQL Server 2008 (aka Katmai) includes the new hosting model of Reporting Services. Gone is the dependency to IIS and all the management headaches associated with it. Instead, the SSRS Windows service pulls a nice trick by hosting the http...(more)

The New Kid on the Block (aka Stand-alone Report Designer) - The need for a stand-alone Report Designer is real. True, developers, including myself, enjoyed the VS.NET Report Designer. But novice users were overwhelmed with the complexity of the VS.NET IDE environment. In addition, not all IT shops rejoiced over the idea to install VS.NET or BIDS just to auth...(more)

Integration Services

Network causing SSIS package startup delays? - This issue is covered pretty well by blogs in the context of SSMS (Dan Jones and Euan Garden) and in the context of SSIS service it has a KB article. But I still see forums posts and private questions that show that not all SSIS users are aware of it or realize that the same issue can cause SSIS pac...(more)

Redirecting output of Execute Process Task - Can you guess why this does not work?

A customer is trying to use the Execute Process Task to execute the preplog.exe application (Microsoft utility) and pass the following command-line arguments: inetsv1.log > inetsv1.txt.

Expected result: When the package runs, con...(more)

Deep Into Windows

The Case of the Failed File Compression - The other day Bryce tried to use Explorer?s Send To Compressed (zipped) Folder feature, seen below, to package up his latest Process Monitor source code updates to send me....(more)

SQL Server 2005

Reduce the Contention on tempdb with Trace Flag 1118: To Enable, or Not to Enable? - A recently published KB article Q936185 seems to contradict the recommendation of using trace flag 1118 and multiple tempdb data files with equal sizing to reduce the contention on tempdb object allocation in SQL Server 2005. The article states the following:...(more)

SQL SERVER - 2005 - List Tables in Database Without Primary Key - This is very simple but effective script. It list all the table without primary keys....(more)

Performance Point

On PerformancePoint Server 2007 Planning Features (Part 6) - Once we have defined and designed business models as well as our input forms, the next step towards implementing a budget cycle is to get our analysts and contributors involved. This post provides an overview of how we use PPS Planning Business Modeler (PBM) to implement workflows relevant to budget...(more)

Software Development

It is August 6th? - So what? Or for those of you who have been paying close attention, you know that August 6th is the date I promised the first Power Tools to be released. So where are they? We are not there yet, we released the first release candidate today, I need to finish two more threat models and then we are rea...(more)

Analysis Services / BI

MDX Editor for SQLMS - feedback) of an MDX editor he's working on that integrates with SQL Management Studio and adds some of the more obvious functionality that SQLMS is missing. You can read more about it here as well as download it:...(more)

SQLBits and the next BI Evening - I've been meaning to blog about these two events for a while but somehow not got round to doing so... Anyway, first date for your diary is the evening of September 26th when the next BI evening will be held in London, at the offices of IM Group. Registration isn't open yet (I'll update this post whe...(more)

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