Editorial

1968

Database software pre-dates Dr. Codd and the 1986 SQL standard. According to Ken North in this paper (PDF), there were a great many people working on coming up with some sort of standard for storing and working with data.

That makes some sense as I was sure that there was something leading up to Dr. Codd's famous paper. Apparently there was a consoritum, CODASYL, that worked on basic list processing and data extensions to COBOL. The PDF lists a whole bunch of references for existing systems. I'm not sure it's much more than trivial knowledge, but I thought it might be interested to DBAs. I still see Dr. Codd as the father of the DBA career and database systems.

More Servers

I thought we were in the age of virtualization? I mean SUN is showing off their green data center, having gone from 2,177 servers to 1,240 and from 550 to 65 storage arrays. They've reduced their power usage by 75% as well and it seems many companies are moving towards fewer, virtualized servers.

But then I saw this report that server sales are up. I know these are aggregate numbers and it's possible there's been an explosion of sorts in server replacement, and people aren't just buying new servers, but it's a little funny to think that vendors are selling more servers and virtualization is also catching fire.

I'd think it would be one or the other.

The Trinity

I saw an announcement last week that Performance Point 2007 will release in September, and I finally know what it is? It's Proclarity. Granted it's received some update and enhancement, but it's the Proclarity server and it's one third of the Microsoft BI platform. The others are Office 2007, with quite a few BI-type enhancements, and SQL Server 2008.

That's an interesting set of products, especially if SQL Server 2008 is going to be released in Q2 of next year. That's closing on 9 months behind the other products and it's got to make you wonder how many people will look at Performance Point before Katmai ships. I think Microsoft really need to get their products in a little more synch with each other.

Steve Jones

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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.

General Interest

Mining the Moon - At the 21st century's start, few would have predicted that by 2007, a second race for the moon would be under way. Yet the signs are that this is now the case. Furthermore, in today's moon race, unlike the one that took place between the United States and the U.S.S.R. in the 1960s, a full roster of ...(more)

Two-Sided Touch Screen - A pseudo- transparent screen from Microsoft and Mitsubishi lets people enter data from both sides of a handheld device....(more)

Tech News

1968 Survey of Database Systems Uncovered - Ken North has uncovered documents about first-generation database technology in a folder from URS Project-70, a project to add database extensions to a COBOL compiler. He reports the emergence of database systems preceded the relational model and SQL standard, as evidenced by the September 1968 data...(more)

Server Sales in Q2 Reach Heights Not Seen Since 2000 - The box counters at both IDC and Gartner have taken the pulse and blood pressure of the server market for the second quarter of 2007, and as far as they can tell, their patient hasn't been this healthy since the peak of the dot-com boom seven years ago. Server revenues are matching levels not seen s...(more)

Sun Brags About Its New Green Data Center - As many expected, virtualization is driving a whole new wave of server consolidation, and every major server maker is starting to brag about their own internal IT operations and how they walk the green walk, not just talk the green talk. Sun Microsystems was one of the first of the server makers to ...(more)

Security

Hackers Hit Trend Micro's ServerProtect - Security researchers warn of increased activity over TCP port 5168 associated with ServerProtect....(more)

Tech News

Database Standard Could Align Configuration Management Information - Data centers that follow best practices capture configuration information on their running systems in a configuration management database. But after doing so, they find they have one additional problem -- the configuration databases multiply and end up being unable to talk to each other. IBM and Mic...(more)

Security

159 million people affected by data breaches in under three years - Data breaches at universities, government agencies, and corporations have become so common that only the most egregious even make the news anymore. Just how common are they? The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, which tracks major breaches, now says that 159,105,898 records have been leaked since 2005....(more)

Tech News

US to shutter DoD TALON database as it works on replacement - The Department of Defense's eagle is losing a TALON. The military announced this morning that it is closing the much-criticized TALON Reporting System on September 17, but it plans to roll out a new threat reporting system in the future....(more)

Bugs/KB

FIX: An access violation may occur, and you may receive an error message, when you query the sys.dm_exe_sessions DMV - When you run the following statement in Microsoft SQL Server 2005, an access violation may occur:...(more)

FIX: Error message when you synchronize a subscription by using Windows Synchronization Manager - Consider the following scenario. In Microsoft SQL Server 2005, you create a merge replication for a database. Then, you synchronize a subscription by using Windows Synchronization Manager. The merge replication uses the default conflict resolver, or the merge replication uses a custom conflict resol...(more)

FIX: Error message when you run a SQL Server 2005 Integration Services package that contains an FTP task - Consider the following scenario. In Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (SSIS), you create an SSIS package that contains an FTP task. The FTP task deletes remote files from a UNIX FTP server or from a Linux FTP server. In this scenario, you may receive an error message that resembles the ...(more)

How to apply a hotfix for SQL Server 2005 in a replication topology - This article describes how to apply a hotfix for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 in a replication topology. In a replication topology, you may have to apply a hotfix to different servers....(more)

FIX: Error message when you try to update the index key columns of a non-unique clustered index - Consider the following scenario. In Microsoft SQL Server 2005, you create a table that has a non-unique clustered index. You run the UPDATE statement to update the index key columns of the non-unique clustered index. In this scenario, you may receive the following error message:...(more)

Event ID: 6036 is logged in the System log when you connect to an instance of SQL Server 2005 - Consider the following scenario. You connect to an instance of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 or to an instance of Microsoft SQL Server 2000 from a Windows Vista-based computer. You use integrated authentication for the connection. In this scenario, a Warning event that resembles the following is logged ...(more)

FIX: Error message when you create a merge replication for tables that have computed columns in SQL Server 2000 - In Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 4 (SP4), you create a merge replication for tables that have computed columns. When you try to synchronize the subscriptions, you receive the following error message in the Replication Merge Agent:...(more)

FIX: Data is not replicated to a subscriber in a different partition by using parameterized row filters in SQL Server 2005 - Consider the following scenario. You set up a merge replication in Microsoft SQL Server 2005. Then, you create different partitions to be sent to different subscribers by using parameterized row filters. When you synchronize a subscriber, some data is not replicated to the subscriber....(more)

FIX: Error message when you run a stored procedure that references tables after you upgrade a database from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005 - Consider the following scenario. In a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database, you have tables that contain columns of the text data type or of the image data type. You upgrade the database from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005. Then, you run a stored procedure that references the tables. In this scena...(more)

Cumulative update package 4 for SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 - This article discusses information that is related to Cumulative Update 4 for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2. This cumulative update package will be released in the October 2007 timeframe. The information that is presented here is subject to change at any time before the release date witho...(more)

FIX: Error message when you try to create an Oracle publication by using the New Publication Wizard - When you try to create an Oracle publication by using the New Publication Wizard in Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 (SP2), you receive an error message that resembles the following:...(more)

FIX: Error message when you run a query that is associated with a parallel execution plan in SQL Server 2005 - onsider the following scenario. You have a computer that is running SQL Server 2005 and has multiple processors. You connect to the instance of SQL Server 2005, and you start a distributed transaction. Then, you create a second connection to the instance. The second connection enlists to the previou...(more)

WebCasts

Webcast: Data Programmability and SQL Server 2008 - Friday, August 31, 2007
9:00 AM Pacific Time
The comprehensive set of application development technologies from Microsoft enables developers to build data-centric solutions that target desktops, mobile devices, online Web servers and enterprise servers using a variety of products, programm...(more)

Microsoft News

First look at Microsoft's Tafiti: sexy Silverlight searching - Microsoft has released a new showcase of its Silverlight web development frameworks, a graphical search engine called Tafiti. Tafiti, which means "do research" in Swahili, is an experimental frontend to Microsoft's Live Search engine. It presents search options in three panes on the screen...(more)

Microsoft PerformancePoint Server 2007 Due in September - Microsoft is set to launch a portion of its business intelligence technology platform, PerformancePoint Server 2007, at an event in New York on Sept. 20. The second piece to Microsoft's BI technology triad, SQL Server 2008 (code-named Katmai), is scheduled to ship in the second quarter of 2008. The ...(more)

Cisco, Microsoft Discuss Aligning Virtualization Efforts - The work Microsoft and Cisco Systems are doing with virtualization is highly complementary, Cisco's chief development officer Charlie Giancarlo said August 20. In an interview with eWEEK along with Bob Muglia, Microsoft's senior vice president for server and tools, Giancarlo said Cisco was looking a...(more)

Microsoft Moves UC Ball Forward - Microsoft, here at VoiceCon, acknowledged the need to provide more fine-tuned monitoring of call quality on VOIP (voice over IP) calls when it launched its new Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Quality of Experience Monitoring Server....(more)

Hardware News

Toshiba Unveils First 32GB High-Density Flash Card - Toshiba revealed Aug. 22 that it will soon add three new high-density flash memory cards to its product lineup?including one it touts as the world's first 32GB flash card....(more)

Teradata server promises a 75% drop in power use - Teradata, a division of NCR Corp., has announced a new server that promises a 75% reduction in electricity use. Announcing the availability of the Teradata 5500 server, Noel Pettitt, the company's general manager for Australia and New Zealand, said the server can also co-exist with multiple generati...(more)

500 GB External Drives Tested - The hard drive as we know it has changed. It is still a small box of iron casting with rotating platters inside, but it is no longer just the place where you install your operating system and some applications. The hard drive is shifting towards the center of our digital world, as it does not only s...(more)

T-SQL

Come out, come out, wherever you are: Finding SSNS instances using T-SQL - As database professionals, we may responsible for dozens, if not scores, of SQL Servers throughout our department or enterprise. Now that Microsoft has announced that Notification Services will not ship as part of the SQL Server 2008 product, how can you readily identify which of the servers in your...(more)

Database Design, Theory and Development

Composite Primary Keys - Ah ? primary keys ? such a topic! When discussing what columns to define as a primary key in your data models, two large points always tend to surface:...(more)

T-SQL

Viewing Database Updates through ODBC using Profiler - I just finished writing a small data update utility to copy a single row of data from a custom written application into a piece of packaged software. Usually when I do this I turn on Profiler, watch the packaged software insert a row and then copy what they did. This helps me find all the odd litt...(more)

Security

Xp_cmdshell and permissions - This blog post was inspired from a newsgroup discussion. The question basically is:
What do you need to do in order to use xp_cmdshell? Note that there are obvious security implications of doing this. (I'm not recommending usage of xp_cmdshell in general, this is a technical blog post!) We firs...(more)

Deep Into Windows

Remote destop across multiple screens. - Do you have multiple screens attached to your computer. If you want a remote desktop connection to open and cover all the screens then you can use the /span option. To do this create a shortcut or edit the existing one for remoe desktop and add /span after %systemroot%\system32\mstsc.exe....(more)

Integration Services

DTS still alive in 2008? - I was on a call with several other folks the other day discussing "Katmai". The topic of DTS came up. MSFT had indicated that support for DTS would not go beyond SQL Server 2005 in a variety of channels. I can remember the dozens of Upgrade Advisor messages that always appeared. I just ...(more)

Performance and Tuning

Performance Impact: Finding the Most Optimal Batch Size - In my previous posts (1, 2, 3), I focused on the performance behavior of setting the checkpoints and transaction commit sizes to once every 16 inserts and once every 100,000 inserts. A question remains: what is the most optimal size?...(more)

T-SQL

Summer SQL Teaser #12 Numeric - Hi and welcome to another fascinating SQL summer teaser. Summer it is except in Princeton where it was 50 degrees this week. There was no teaser last week because of a death in the family, I had to go to a wake and a funeral last week. That is why this teaser will be posted on a Thursday instead of ...(more)

Database Design, Theory and Development

Optimized Non-clustered Index Maintenance in Per-Index Plans - In my last post, I showed how SQL Server 2005 only updates non-clustered indexes when the data in the index actually changes. For my example, I used a simple update statement that results in a per-row or narrow plan. In this post, I'll show how this optimization works in a per-index or wide update...(more)

Analysis Services / BI

Grain - The devil is in the detail - Business Intelligence is just like digital photography, the more detail you want the more space you are going to use and in both cases we talk about grain and granularity. If you have ever worked with RAW files on a 'Prosumer' (an IT Professional with as back ground in Japanese wrestling?) camera y...(more)

Are you Ready for Business Intelligence? - I have come across many occasions where IT Professionals have pushed really hard to use all of the BI stuff in SQL Server and have got nowhere fast. Not because they don't know what they are doing nor because they didn't give it their best. So before you have a go it might be worth exploring why b...(more)

Database Design, Theory and Development

Bulk logged recovery model and log backups - This post is inspired from a discussion about bulk logged recovery model and log backup. Some basics:...(more)

Career

Tired and Strained eyes? You're looking at the wrong part of your computer monitor! - And no, you shouldn't look at the back of it. :) Whenever I talk to anyone about looking at the computer monitor for a longer period of time everyone thinks i'm nuts when i say i can look at it for 12 hours straight with no problem at all. ...(more)

De Do Do Do, De Da Da DA DBA DBAA - It's becoming increasingly common for me to walk into the office and be asked I would be able to spare half an hour to install 250GB of RAID 5 disk in a development server. Like many of our clients, my co-workers are confused by the roles and increasingly grand titles we consultants have given ourse...(more)

Integration Services

Informatica -vs- SSIS pipeline throughput - A long time ago my colleague The Galloping Data Architect and I wrote a paper entitled "A Comparison of Enterprise Class Data Integration Tools. SQL Server Integration Services for the Informatica Customer". You can get it from here and read what I had to say about it on this blog here....(more)

SSIS: Big improvements to Lookup in SQL Server 2008 - I awoke this morning to find my inbox full of automated replies from msftconn@microsoft.com thus indicating that someone on the SSIS team has been busy updating many of my submissions to Connect. Generally it was the usual "Closed, Won't Fix" update (grrr) but there was some good news abou...(more)

T-SQL

Everything Scales - The tune to a Bush song is running through my head as I type this... the band, not the president - although imagining the President singing the song is an interesting brain-stretch....(more)

What is the position of a row ? - The simple answer is there isn't one. If you insert 1000 rows into a table and then want to get back the 43rd row you inserted you can't. You can read through all rows and return the 43rd one that the database reads from the table but that is not the same thing....(more)

SQL Server 2005

SQL Server 2005 - RDTSC Truths and Myths Discussed - I posted some updates to my blog entry about the RDTSC and drift warnings in May. See the following link http://blogs.msdn.com/psssql/archive/2006/11/27/sql-server-2005-sp2-will-introduce-new-messages-to-the-error-log-related-to-timing-activities.aspx Because the CPU drift issue has continued to ...(more)

Reporting Services

Charting the Future - It is old news by now that Microsoft has acquired the intellectual rights to the Dundas Reporting Services controls, including the Dundas chart, map, gauge, and calendar. At this point, it is not known if all controls will make it to Katmai but the chart will definitely will. The July CTP (CTP4) inc...(more)

Performance and Tuning

Performance Impact: Manual Checkpoints are not Necessarily Evil - In my two previous posts on the performance impact of frequent manual checkpoints and the I/O behavior of frequent manual checkpoints, I demonstrated that frequently issuing manual checkpoints can be bad for performance and why it's bad from the storage perspective. If you were led to believe that m...(more)

SQL Server 2008 (Katmai)

XEvent: Some final followup questions (slight return...) - Last blog entry on SQL Server Extended Events for a while. But...a couple of questions came up since I wrote my first blog entry on SQL Server Extended Events.
What are the major advantages to SQL Server Extended Events?
Is this really using the Crimson event system?...(more)

Finishing XEvent package items, syntax, and semantics (moon turn the tides...) - This won't be as long of an entry because I'm trying to finish describing the items that you can use in an XEvent session, that is, the items that exist in a package....(more)

More about XEvent: actions and targets (still raining, still dreaming) - It's another rainy day in Portland in summer, so I thought I'd stay inside and write more about SQL Server 2008 Extended Events....(more)

More about SQL Server 2008 extended events: packages, events, and event sessions - It's summertime in Oregon and its been nice and warm out (75-85F) lately. But today its raining (or specifically, the skies are quite ominous right now), so it's time to write more about my latest favorite subject: SQL Server 2008 Extended Events....(more)

SQL Server 2005

Working with SSIS in SQL Server 2005 - I thought I would document my exploits in SQL Server SSIS 2005 conversion of DTS packages and the scheduling. I had a DTS package that used the ProtectionLevel ?Encrypt Sensitive Data with User Key? that I did not design or create. When I migrated them from SQL 2000 to SQL 2005, I used BI studio to ...(more)

Analysis Services / BI

Slowly Changing Dimensions and Surrogate Keys - You would expect there to be a record and hopefully only one record for each sales person in a typical sales system and another record in another table for each of the customers. But what happens when a one of these sales people gets assigned to a different territory or is promoted to be a regional...(more)

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