Editorial

Financial Squeeze

In case you haven't been paying attention to the financial markets, there have been issues in the US lately with the stock market sliding and a credit squeeze. It's caused some problems for some companies, particularly financial based ones, but the reach could be further than that.

I saw this slideshow about what this "crisis" (I'm not sure it's a crisis) could mean for IT departments and there were some interesting items in there. The possibility of less credit out there will usually mean the CFOs of companies will be more conservative, perhaps lowering budgets. Since many of us have fairly established IT groups with regular updates occuring to hardware and necessary maintenance and support costs, this usually means the fun stuff, new projects, pilots, proof-of-concepts, might get delayed.

Or it might mean enough of a slowdown that you'll have the chance to really test your code and build your own applications rather than buying them.

One other interesting note is the idea that more non-US vendors, especially European ones will gain market share since the Euro and other assorted colorful currencies will be strongr, allowing those vendors to lower prices.

Time to Reboot

It might have been awhile, but last week's release of a number of critical patches means that more than a few of you will likely be rebooting after patching, as quite a few patches from this past week require reboots. I'm not sure how many of these are required for your servers as they target Office, Media Player, and IE, but if you ever browse from a server for some reason, you definitely should apply them.

And even if you don't necessarily need them, if someone is going to apply them for you, it's a good time to be there and ensure your servers recover from a reboot. It's something we don't think about, but a reboot is a perfect time for trouble. A hard drive doesn't want to come back up, some problem in one of the boot sectors or early start routines that's gone unnoticed, even a misconfiguration that doesn't take effect until a reboot.

I've had all of those happen to me and often at bad times. While I don't want to reboot servers every month, I think a once or twice yearly planned boot is a good time to ensure that things are still working. You never know when the will be some issue and you'll have an unexpected reboot only to find your SQL Server instance not starting.

Cross-Platform

Years ago I ran an April Fool's joke that mentioned SQL Server would be released on Linux. It was very popular and it's probably something I should do again.

Anyway, this week I caught a blog post by SSIS guru Jamie Thomson, that Google Gears is a browser extension that incorporates a full searchable RDBMS for storing data locally. He speculates that SQL Server CE might be used ofr a similar type of functionality.

No big deal, CE is merely some DLLs that you invoke to create a SQL Server instance, primarily on smart phones and other very small devices, but it runs fine on Windows desktops as well. The interesting thing Jamie mentions is that Silverlight might require some of these capabilities and it's going to be cross-platform. If that's the case, then will SQL Server CE get ported to other platforms?

Who knows, but I think it would be a good idea. Heck, I think SQL Server itself should get ported. It's just a better product in many ways than Oracle and DB2, easier to work with, more developer friendly, etc. I don't know if they ever would do it, but I think that it's a something worth pursuing.

Heck, I never thought I'd see MacOS on an Intel chip.

Steve Jones

	Improve your hourly rate
	SQL Compare 6 is priced deliberately to make it a no-brainer. At $395 for the standard edition or $595 for the Pro edition, it pays for itself in less than a half-day's work. You can compare and synchronize to and from live databases, snapshots or even SQL scripts. You can deploy live databases from a collection of scripts. You can save out a data source into object SQL files. You can use it for version control, for keeping an audit trail or to schedule your automated nightly build. "SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare are the best purchases we've made in the .NET/SQL environment. They've saved us hours of development time and the fast, easy-to-use database comparison gives us maximum confidence that our migration scripts are correct. We rely on these products for every deployment." Paul Tebbutt, Technical Lead, Universal Music Group Download a free 14-day trial from Red Gate Software
	©Red Gate® Software Ltd 2007

Please support us by visiting our sponsors

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.

Security

Trojan Hidden on Job Search Sites Steals Personal Data - SecureWorks uncovers a cache of records that were stolen from 46,000 victims on a single server used by attackers. ...(more)

Disaster Recovery

Business Continuity: To Err Is Human, To Plan Is Divine - Although disasters make headlines, 80% of all IT outages are caused by human error. To defend against downtime or service interruptions, organizations need to maintain strong business continuity plans....(more)

Tech News

Unisys First Up with TPC-E Benchmark Test - After several years of development, the Transaction Processing Council, an industry consortium that creates and audits commercial transaction processing and data warehousing benchmarks, in March rolled out its long-awaited TPC-E benchmark test. TPC-E was designed to fix many of the criticisms of the...(more)

General Interest

2007 Young Innovator - Tapan Parikh, 33, University of Washington, Simple, powerful mobile tools for developing economies
...(more)

Tech News

Internships Becoming the Golden Ticket - Recent and near-college graduates who are trying to crack the secret code to finding their dream job after graduation have countless approaches: papering the town with their resumes and cover letters, scouring the classifieds for hours each day, calling everyone they know to see who can get them in ...(more)

Citrix Acquiring XenSource for $500 Million - Citrix Systems is acquiring XenSource, whose founders helped develop the open-source Xen hypervsior, for $500 million in a move that caps a significant week in the development of virtualization technology....(more)

Green IT Goes Untapped by Enterprise, Vendors Say - Vendors continue to push energy-efficient products, but say enterprise adoption is slow....(more)

WebCasts

Webcast: Server Consolidation with SQL Server - Thursday, August 23, 2007
8:00 AM Pacific Time
Microsoft SQL Server supports multiple options for server consolidation, providing organizations with the flexibility to choose the consolidation approach that best meets their requirements in order to centralize data services management and r...(more)

Microsoft News

Microsoft Faces 3 Big Threats - Microsoft COO Kevin Turner outlines the challenges the company faces, including Linux and competition with the Xbox. ...(more)

Imagine That! - Microsoft has announced winners of its Imagine Cup competition, and we would like to congratulate some of the winners....(more)

Will Microsoft Buy the New Citrix? - A Microsoft acquisition of Citrix would allow it to distance itself from the awkward GPL aspects of what XenSource does, analysts say....(more)

Patches, Bugs

Microsoft Internet Explorer Multiple Vulnerabilities - 1) An error when parsing certain CSS strings can be exploited to cause a memory corruption when a user e.g. visits a malicious website. Successful exploitation may allow execution of arbitrary code.

2) The tblinf32.dll or vstlbinf.dll ...(more)

Microsoft Windows OLE Automation Memory Corruption Vulnerability - The vulnerability is caused due to an input validation error in OLE Automation when processing certain script requests. This can be exploited to cause a memory corruption when a user e.g. visits a specially crafted website....(more)

Microsoft Virtual PC / Virtual Server Privilege Escalation Vulnerability - The vulnerability is caused due to an error within certain components that communicate with the host OS and can be exploited to cause a heap-based buffer overflow. Successful exploitation allows an administrative user on a guest OS to e.g. execute arbitrary code on the host OS or other guest OS's.(more)

Windows Graphics Rendering Engine Image Handling Vulnerability - The vulnerability is caused due to a boundary error in the graphics rendering engine when parsing images. Successful exploitation may allow execution of arbitrary code if a user e.g. opens a specially crafted attachment in an e-mail.
...(more)

Microsoft Windows Vista Gadgets Code Execution Vulnerabilities - Three vulnerabilities have been reported in Microsoft Windows Vista, which can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a user's system.

1) An error in the Feed Headlines gadget when parsing HTML attributes can be exploited to execute arbitrary code via a specially crafted RSS post....(more)

Microsoft Windows Vector Markup Language Buffer Overflow - The vulnerability is caused due to a boundary error in the Vector Markup Language (VML) implementation (vgx.dll). This can be exploited to cause a buffer overflow during the VML rendering when a user e.g.
visits a malicious website using Internet Explorer.
...(more)

Microsoft XML Core Services Memory Corruption Vulnerability - A vulnerability has been reported in Microsoft XML Core Services, which can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a user's system. The vulnerability is caused due to an input validation error when handling certain script requests. This can be exploited to cause a memory corruption when a us...(more)

Windows Media Player Skin Handling Code Execution Vulnerabilities - Two vulnerabilities have been reported in Windows Media Player, which can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a user's system.

1) An error in the parsing of header information in skin files can be exploited to execute arbitrary code on a user's system by tricking the user into ...(more)

Microsoft Excel rtWnDesk Record Memory Corruption Vulnerability - Secunia Research has discovered a vulnerability in Microsoft Excel, which can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a user's system. The vulnerability is caused due to an error when validating an index value in the rtWnDesk record and can be exploited to corrupt memory via a specially craft...(more)

Microsoft Internet Explorer FTP Credentials Exposure - A weakness has been reported in Microsoft Internet Explorer, which may expose FTP usernames and passwords. When Internet Explorer is used to access an FTP site, the username and password is stored in the file (e.g. an HTML file) when viewing and then saving (using "File" -> "SaveAs...(more)

Hardware News

Getting the Most Out of MAID - Could MAID-based storage systems be the answer to users' power and cooling problems, or is the technology just another management headache for IT?...(more)

AT&T Lets Businesses Tap into Storage Over SONET Rings - AT&T looks to save businesses the hassle and cost of adding more fiber and storage gear to their networks. ...(more)

Intel Cranks Out Two More Quads, AMD Sets Barcelona Date - The exchange of fire between Intel and Advanced Micro Devices continues in their chip war today. Intel is putting out two more quad-core Xeon processors for servers and workstations in the wake of AMD finally setting a real launch date for its "Barcelona" quad-core Opteron processors, aime...(more)

AMD to Ease Multicore Development - AMD's new program, "Hardware Extensions for Software Parallelism," aims to make it easier for developers to write applications for multicore processors....(more)

Software Development

A cross-platform version of SQL Server? - I have just had an interesting off-line conversation with SQL Server MVP Chuck Boyce about Google Gears. If you read the blurb:...(more)

SQL Server 2008 (Katmai)

More T-SQL Goodness in SQL Server 2008 (codename katmai) - Back in June I talked about some T-SQL enhancements that are coming our way in SQL Server 2008. One of those things is the ability to define multiple rows in an INSERT statement like so:...(more)

Performance and Tuning

Performance Impact: Frequent Manual Checkpoints and Their I/O Behavior - In my previous blog post on the performance impact of frequent manual checkpoints, I highlighted the performance peril of going overboard with manual checkpoints, and I suggested that a major contributing factor was the failure of frequent manual checkpoints to take advantage of the throughput poten...(more)

SQL Server 2005

Longhorn (Windows Server) and SQL Server - Feeling a bit adventurous, I've installed the latest Longhorn Beta and then SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition on top of it. Other than the inevitable video driver issues, it's been pretty stable....(more)

Software Development

Open Source at Microsoft - Microsoft has announced a new Open Source At Microsoft site to put the spotlight on its strategy for the Open Source development methodology. The aim is that it serves as a gateway for info about open source engagements and activities across Microsoft, so if you want to find out Microsoft's perpecti...(more)

SQL Server 2005

SQL SERVER - 2005 - Explanation and Script for Online Index Operations - Create, Rebuild, Drop - SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition supports online index operations. Index operations are creating, rebuilding and dropping indexes. The question which I receive quite often - what is online operation? Is online operation is related to web, internet or local network?...(more)

SQL Server 2008 (Katmai)

XEvent in SQL Server 2008 - When I'm doing problem solving, its always good to have too much information rather than too little. With this in mind, I was quite interested in looking at SQL Server Extended Events (XEvent support) in SQL Server 2008....(more)

Making the XEvent ETW target run - When starting out with XEvent support, I thought it would be good to start with the ETW target, although you can capture and catagorize events in buckets with the async bucketizer target, and pair related events (like obtain lock/release lock) with the pair matching target. Both VERY cool. But I jus...(more)

Database Design, Theory and Development

The Dimensional Model - What's different about a data warehouse is that all of the information from the line of business or source systems gets rearranged into two types of information: Dimensions contains a group of descriptive attributes. An example is a product where we have its colour, size, description, product group...(more)

SQL Server 2005

Maintenance Plans for Backups = FIRED - Executed as user: CUSTSVCDB01\SYSTEM. Microsoft (R) SQL Server Execute Package Utility Version 9.00.3042.00 for 32-bit Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1984-2005. All rights reserved. Started: 4:00:00 PM Progress: 2007-08-14 16:00:11.66 Source: {4E701E84-81ED-4B7D-A3B4-ACBF7D0CAC3F} Exec...(more)

Database Design, Theory and Development

The problem isn't the poor database model; It's that external code is bound to the schema - Dealing with poorly designed databases is a simple and common fact of life for programmers. It happens, sometimes due to lack of experience or education, or sometimes because business requirements were never analyzed properly or they changed. It's hard to avoid poor database designs, but it takes on...(more)

Reporting Services

How to set a default date in Microsoft Reporting Services - Setting default dates in reporting services can be tricky. Click here to learn how....(more)

High Availability

Data Data everywhere even when you think its gone - The biggest problem I have faced in IT over the last decade has been loss of data. I have had the problem at work where servers have crashed and lost data, more often than not due to failure of disks. I have also personally felt the pain in a hard disk losing its partition information, and frequentl...(more)

Reporting Services

RDL Object Model on the Horizon - As I mentioned in a previous blog, SQL Server 2008 will probably include an RDL Object Model. This is great news for developers who generate report definitions programmatically. No more custom RDL object models as the one I talked about during my TechEd presentation....(more)

Analysis Services / BI

How to Get Extended Properties with SSAS OLE DB Provider - Many report developers find the SSAS data provider too restrictive for authoring reports from UDM. Instead, they replace it with the native Microsoft OLE DB Provider for Analysis Services 9.0 which gives them maximum flexibility at the expense of convenience (the query has to be hand-generated, para...(more)

MDX is like chess - Solution to the puzzle - It is time to publish the solution to the MDX puzzle from the "MDX is like chess" blog. I wrote it before going to my summer vacation. Since then I received several answers. While nobody answered correctly all 3 questions, there are still winners....(more)

T-SQL

Performance Impact: Frequent Manual Checkpoints - Recently, I was asked why the following script took a very long time to insert 24GB of data into a single table in SQL Server 2005 (the database is in the simple recovery mode):...(more)

Did you Know? Nesting Transactions - Transact-SQL provides three different methods of transaction control: autocommit transactions, explicit transactions and implicit transactions....(more)

Software Development

More on Access - OK, well, the response to my last Access post was a lot more than expected. There are some pretty good comments in there. Some of you made some very good points, both for and against my post. And for the first time in a long time I actually got on and approved comments so everyone could see them....(more)

Performance Point

On PerformancePoint Server 2007 Planning Features (Part 7) - In Part 6 of this series, we initiated an assignment workflow, enabling our users to contribute, review and/or approve data entry in response to notifications. In this short post, we continue our journey through a PPS Plan cycle, using the PPS Add-in for Excel to submit or review budget data within ...(more)

Software Development

Power Tools Download Link - They are here!

* Dependency Viewer
* Refactoring...(more)

SQL Server 2008 (Katmai)

SSAS 2008: Data Management Views - Vidas recently did a post about a couple of new features that will be available in SSAS 2008 (but that are not in the July CTP). One of which was DMVs (Data Management Views....(more)

Analysis Services / BI

Explaining: BottomCount, Filter and Null in SSAS2005 and ProClarity - Thomas was recently explaining some issues he had with the BottomCount() function in MDX. It was difficult to answer this in a comment on the post, so I thought I would see if I could address some of his issues here....(more)

Database Design, Theory and Development

Optimized Non-clustered Index Maintenance - Insert, update, and delete plans consist of two parts. The first part or read cursor identifies the list of rows to be inserted, update, or deleted. The second part or write cursor performs the actual insert, update, or delete. Let's look at a simple example:...(more)

LINQ

Awkward Testability for Linq for SQL - I have been just recently informed about a significant problem with Linq for SQL. It doesn't support testing easily. You can see the bug report here, and as usual, it was closed as Won't Fix without even providing an explanation. Did I mention already that I don't like Connect's approach to it? Yes,...(more)

Software Development

.NET StockTrader and J2EE Interoperability - Microsoft?s Greg Leake recently penned a digest article describing a benchmark the company produced that compared a .NET server setup to an IBM WebSphere server setup. The task at hand was a stock trading application. It is hard to recall a time when a company published a benchmark competition that ...(more)

SQL Server 2005

Script of the Day - Find the Cores on a System - Sure, you can get the number of processors fairly easily ffrom SQL Server. But did you know you can also get the number of actual cores as well? This little gem works with SQL Server 2005:...(more)

Below is a list of sources that we use in compiling this newsletter. If you have any ideas on other places to check, please feel free to let us know:

To be removed from this list, send a blank email. Many people have issues with sending plain text emails or their from address is slightly different than their reply to address. If you have any problems leaving the list, please contact the webmaster@databasedaily.com.

Note: This is not the SQLServerCentral.com daily newsletter list. If you want to be removed from that list, you can change your profile or follow the instructions on that list.