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.
EDITORIAL - HALO 3
This week Steve looks at SQL Server 2008 pricing, Windows XP, and Halo 3
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1508
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TECH NEWS : GENERAL INTEREST
STORING SOLAR POWER EFFICIENTLY - Thermal-power plants could solve some of the problems with solar power by turning sunlight into steam and storing heat for cloudy days....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1422
TECH NEWS : SECURITY
GOVERNMENT SIMULATES ELECTRICAL GRID HACK - There is no evidence any U.S. utility company suffered damage from hackers using this technique, U.S. officials said, but these officials cautioned that affected systems are not routinely monitored as closely as many modern corporate computer networks, so there would be little forensic evidence to study after such a break-in....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1417
TECH NEWS : THE LIGHTER SIDE
HALO 3 REVIEW - Halo is one of those games that has taken on a life of its own. From its origins on the original Xbox as the system's killer app to the questionable follow-up that further refined the multiplayer experience the popularity of the series cannot be overlooked....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1423
TECH NEWS : GENERAL INTEREST
LIST OF GREEN DATA CENTER 'EXPERTS' GROWS - The Lean & Green program provides research and resources for companies seeking to conserve power....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1424
TECH NEWS : SECURITY
OLD HARD DRIVES STILL FULL OF SENSITIVE DATA - Hard drives full of confidential data are still turning up on the second-hand market, researchers have reported....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1425
TECH NEWS
COMING SOON: THE MOTHER OF ALL GENEALOGY DATABASES - Web 2.0 technology, including social networking, is being employed to enable people to make family connections and document them online into massive, growing and shared databases....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1426
TECH NEWS : SECURITY
NJ MAN ADMITS PLANTING COMPUTER 'BOMB' - A computer administrator at one of the nation's largest prescription drug management companies admitted Wednesday he planted an electronic "bomb" in the company's computer system....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1427
THE JOB OF SECURING THE DATABASE - What's the workday like for a database administrator? Well, that depends on whether you want the long answer or the short one. The long one seems to go on for miles: Installing, upgrading, capacity planning, tuning, fixing application performances and recovering documents are just the beginning of it, and that doesn't include firefighting their way through their day-to-day activities.
The short one is easier: chaotic. ...
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1428
TECH NEWS : DATA MINING/WAREHOUSING
BI AND ANALYTICS: A POWER COUPLE - The marriage of business intelligence and text analytics is starting to have a profound impact on companies in several industries, including health care, insurance and finance, which are just waking up to the benefits of tying structured BI data to unstructured text....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1510
Q&A: HOW ANALYTICS CAN HELP YOUR COMPANY (AND THE RED SOX) WIN BIG - It’s no secret that companies such as Capital One Financial Corp. and Harrah’s Entertainment Inc. have for years successfully analyzed data about their customers to gain an edge over rivals. Now that competitive analytics and business intelligence techniques are more mainstream, corporations are jockeying for specialists who have solid analytical skills, says Thomas H. Davenport. He and Jeanne G. Harris teamed up to co-author Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning (Harvard Business School Press, 2007). The two authors spoke with Computerworld’s Thomas Hoffman earlier this year. ...
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1511
BUSINESS OBJECTS LAUNCHES BI ONDEMAND - The new software-as-a-service offering provides subscribers with advanced BI features, such as formatted reporting, dashboards and ad-hoc query and analysis....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1431
TECH NEWS : SECURITY
SYMANTEC WARNS OF CLEVER NEW HACKS - While Internet criminals have many targets, social networks are becoming more popular venues for attack, according to Symantec's latest Internet Security Threat Report. Social networks are valuable to attackers because they provide access to a large number of people, many of whom trust the sites and their security, according to Symantec....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1432
TECH NEWS
GOOGLE OFFERS 'COLLABORATION IN THE CLOUD' - Google added presentation features to its Google Docs application Sept. 17, the latest upgrade to enrich the Google Apps platform and better compete with Microsoft in the office productivity software space....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1433
SQL SERVER NEWS : WEBCASTS
WEBCAST: ADVANCED MANAGEABILITY FOR SQL SERVER 2008 ANALYSIS SERVICES - Wednesday, October 10, 2007
9:30 AM Pacific Time
With Microsoft SQL Server 2008 comes the next release of Analysis Services, which offers advanced features for manageability. One such feature is Dynamic Management Views. These views enable the administrator to query for information regarding connections, sessions, and server performance. ...
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1512
WEBCAST SERIES - SQL SERVER 2008 - Tuesday, October 09, 2007
9:00 AM Pacific Time
Please join Microsoft and our strategic partners each Tuesday for a weekly series of webcasts which will provide an overview of some of the new and exciting products and technologies set to be released for the coming year. In this series, you will hear from experts about how these new products can be leveraged in your enterprise to deliver great value within the Microsoft Optimization Models of: ...
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1513
SQL SERVER NEWS
NO PRICE INCREASE FOR SQL SERVER 2008 - Microsoft won't raise the price of SQL Server 2008 when it ships, as scheduled, in the second quarter of 2008, SQL Storage chief Ted Kummert told attendees of the 2007 Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) Community Summit last week. He also unveiled new pricing incentives aimed at getting Oracle database users to switch to SQL Server....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1414
MICROSOFT RELEASES PERFORMANCEPOINT SERVER 2007 - Microsoft is releasing Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 on Wednesday, which marks the end of the ProClarity brand with the absorption of those acquired technologies into the new offering....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1436
SQL SERVER NEWS : WEBCASTS
GEEKSPEAK: ADVANCED T-SQL TECHNIQUES WITH TOBIAS THERNSTROM - Wednesday, September 26, 2007
3:00 PM Pacific Time
MSDN geekSpeak is a new kind of webcast series that dispenses with slide decks and scripted demos. Instead, geekSpeak webcasts bring you industry experts in a sort of "talk-radio" format. These experts share their knowledge and experience around a particular developer technology....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1514
WEBCAST: SQL SERVER 2008: NEW PERFORMANCE MONITORING AND TROUBLESHOOTING USING MANAGEMENT STUDIO - Wednesday, September 26, 2007
8:00 AM Pacific Time
The release of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 offers a new framework that ties together the collection, analysis, troubleshooting, reporting, and persistence of SQL Server diagnostics information in the central warehouse. Join this webcast as we describe the feature set for the SQL Server 2008 release and discuss how the performance collection architecture fits within Microsoft System Center Operations Manager....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1515
MICROSOFT NEWS
MICROSOFT EXTENDS WINDOWS XP'S STAY - Bowing to pressure from customers and computer makers, Microsoft plans to keep Windows XP around a little longer....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1416
MICROSOFT NEWS : PATCHES, BUGS
MICROSOFT'S STEALTH UPDATES STYMIE XP REPAIRS - Silent and possibly deadly after all: The controversial XP "stealth upgrade" that Microsoft rolled out this summer may, contrary to initial reports, pose a danger to patched systems....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1439
MICROSOFT SAYS EXCEL 2007 PRODUCES MATH ERRORS - The company says it is working on a fix for the bug, but has yet to release it....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1440
MICROSOFT NEWS
MICROSOFT LIVE SEARCH OVERHAULED; QUADRUPLED INDEX SIZE, RESULTS REVAMPED - Microsoft says that it believes it can "now compete with Google" after the company completed its most significant update to Live Search since its debut more than 2 and a half years ago....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1441
MICROSOFT NEWS : PATCHES, BUGS
MICROSOFT RELEASES OFFICE 2003 SERVICE PACK 3 - The pack makes it easier for users to work with Windows Vista and exchange files with the 2007 Microsoft Office system....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1442
MICROSOFT NEWS
MICROSOFT BAGS TWO MORE BIG LINUX CUSTOMERS - Microsoft has announced that it has inked two more SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 licensing deals, this time with two German industrial giants, as part of its distribution agreement with Novell....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1443
MICROSOFT PONDERS QUESTIONS UNANSWERED BY EU COURT - Although the European Court of First Instance has upheld most of the findings of the European Commission antitrust case against Microsoft, the legal issues are far from resolved, as that decision raises as many questions as it answers....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1444
HARDWARE NEWS
HP OFFERS DATA BACKUP SYSTEM FOR LEGAL DISCOVERY - Hewlett-Packard, which had some well publicized legal troubles of its own not long ago, has unveiled a data backup system to help other companies when they are hit with a lawsuit or regulatory audit....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1445
HDS'S YOSHIDA MOUNTS MAID ASSAULT - Hu Yoshida, CTO of HDS, insists that his company has no MAID offerings, despite unveiling its own power saving technology earlier this week. The exec even chased down reporters who highlighted the resemblance between HDS's offering and MAID, a technology for spinning down disks. "With MAID, everything is idle -- you spin it up when you need to access [the drives]," he says. "Our approach is the opposite -- everything is spinning, and you power it down when you don't need it."...
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1516
THE WORLD'S BIGGEST SANS - We at Byte and Switch are on the trail of the world's biggest SAN, and this article reveals our initial findings. There are several reasons we've embarked on the search for gargantuan storage networks. For one, large SANs push the envelope. If I'm looking to expand a network of 5 Tbytes, what better way than to study the fate of those who've gone above the petabyte level? Big SAN stories furnish a glimpse into the outer limits of scaleability....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1517
INTEL TRIES THE SLOW AND STEADY APPROACH - By the time the 2007 Intel Developer Forum ended here Sept. 20, two things were certain: Intel has no shortage of code names for its upcoming product lines, and the company kept any future surprises under wraps. ...
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1448
HITACHI BLADES GO VIRTUAL - Hitachi is adding virtualization capabilities to its Xeon-based blades for the first time. ...
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1449
AMD TRIES FOR THE CYCLE WITH TRIPLE-CORE CHIP - In baseball, amassing a single, double, triple and home run in the same game is known as hitting for the cycle. AMD will try for the chip industry equivalent next year. The company announced plans Monday to introduce a desktop PC processor with three cores in the first quarter of 2008....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1518
BLOGS : T-SQL
A HANDY BUT LITTLE-KNOWN SQL FUNCTION: NULLIF() - A web application I have inherited uses data from a stored procedure that returns two columns: Description and Override. Basically, for each item returned, the web page should display the Description unless an Override is provided, in which case the Override is displayed. This appears to be a simple case of using ISNULL() or COALESCE():...
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1451
SQL SERVER 2005 TOO SMART? - I was involved in a discussion today about the ISNUMERIC() function
Someone proposed a nested solution like this...
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1452
BLOGS : DATABASE DESIGN, THEORY AND DEVELOPMENT
DISK TRENDS WILL DRIVE THE NEED FOR COLUMN STORES - In a recent post, Sam Madden explained the benefits that column-store architecture offers decision support applications. Summarizing briefly, columns stores have two significant advantages over row stores for such applications: First, only the columns needed by a query need to be read from disk; second, column stores, by their very nature, can be compressed much more effectively than row stores....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1453
BLOGS : INTEGRATION SERVICES
SSIS: NORMALISER COMPONENT BUG FIX - 17 days ago I released my Normaliser Component but embarrassingly it turns out there was a small bug. Any null values in the sorted columns on the component input would cause the component to throw a nasty unhandled error....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1454
SSIS PIPELINE PERFORMANCE CHANGES IN KATMAI - The SSIS pipeline is being changed in Katmai to allow more parallel processing. For any multi processor machine this should result in a performance improvement....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1455
BLOGS : T-SQL
DR. UNKNOWN, OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE NULL - Two months ago, I posted the first two parts of a series about NULL. After that, I went quiet. Much to do and little time was one excuse. But to be honest, I also lost interest. However, I felt I owe my readers to conclude the series, so I have now forced myself to write and publish the last parts before moving on to more interesting subjects ...
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1456
TABLE-VALUED PARAMETERS - SQL SERVER 2008 - Hi... here is one more article on SQL Server 2008 Enhancements. In past we should have found it a bit difficult to pass numerous parameters to the T-SQL Statements or Functions or Stored Procedures. The approach we used to take is creating a Temporary Table on Demand and insert the values to the Temporary Table and then call the requisite procedure. In SQL Server 2008 the Table-Valued Parameters have been introduced that helps in us eliminating the cumbersome process....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1457
BLOGS : ANALYSIS SERVICES / BI
CREATE A DEFAULT MEASURE IN AS2005 CUBES - In some cases, it is not obvious or easy to create a default measure in AS2005 cubes. In fact, there is no default measure by default, which can lead to long query times for queries that specify no measures....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1458
USING UNFORMATTED CELL VALUES IT MAY IMPROVE QUERY PERFORMANCE - If a report does not use formatted cell values, query time can be reduced. An example is a Reporting Services report that does its own formatting and therefore would not use the formatted values from SSAS. ...
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1459
PROCESS ONLY ONE PARTITION SO YOU CAN BROWSE THE CUBE - If you want to browse the cube and validate dimensions, hierarchies and calculations using the data from only one partition, here is what you can do....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1460
HOW TO DETECT SUBSELECT INSIDE MDX CALCULATIONS (AKA MULTISELECT IN EXCEL 2007) - The subject of multiselect friendly calculations is a popular one in forums. I have written about it before here, here and here. In February 2008 I will write a blog which will give a definite answer on how AS2008 will deal with it (which is follow up on this post). But in the meantime, questions about AS2005 keep coming. By now, most people realize that it is possible to detect presence of set in WHERE clause by using EXISTING operator, which takes care of multiselect queries generated by Excel 2003 and other tools....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1461
BLOGS : SECURITY
SECURITY AND COPY PROTECTION - I have been watching the SQL Server Security forum for several years now and there is one question that gets spawned about once a month under different titles. It invariably begins with a request for guidance on how to secure access to a database, which sounds like a reasonable security inquiry, but after a while it becomes clear that the subject is copy protection for some application's database. All right, but why does it matter?...
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1462
BLOGS : PERFORMANCE AND TUNING
SQL NEXUS - You can currently download the latest version of SQL Nexus from www.sqlnexus.net. For those who don’t know, SQL Nexus is a SQL Server performance analysis tool written by Bart Duncan and me. ...
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1463
BLOGS : SECURITY
THE PASSWORD NIGHTMARE - There are several best practices for dealing with passwords, but one that gets overlooked a LOT is the one that says never use your personal account for services or processes. The reason usually given is because when you change your password, the processes will stop working. That's nice, but so often people don't care about that. They prefer the ease of being able to use their account because they know it has the rights they need, and they can control the credentials and not have to get any other groups involved....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1464
BLOGS : ANALYSIS SERVICES / BI
MINING WIZARD AND COLUMN CONTENT - When you create a new mining model with the Data Mining Wizard, It seems that the wizard does not detect correctly the content type of attributes if your local settings are other than US English. During the wizard, there is
a button called "Detect" in one of the pages; if you click on it, it detects the content type better (still not perfect)....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1465
BLOGS : SECURITY
MICROSOFT, MOBILE, AND SECURITY - So if you had told me that one day I would be invited to Microsoft to talk about a subject I’ve now been involved in researching on and off for over six years and something I must say that has burned in my belly with passion for most for most of it, I would have said ‘unlikely’. However as I write, this is indeed what I’m doing. Microsoft has invited for a second time an employee of Symantec to present at BlueHat- Matt Conovor was the first on heap overflows....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1466
BLOGS : ANALYSIS SERVICES / BI
COMPRESSION WITHOUT COMPRESSION IN SQL SERVER 2005 SP2 FACT TABLES - In case you weren't at the excellent SQL Community yesterday evening, I thought I would share a top tip for getting on top of your fact tables in the next version of SQL Server. Mark Hill of Edenbrook gave the evening an update of the relational engine as it affect BI and we then got into a debate about the merits of the new compression feature. My understanding is that is particularly effective against fact tables and can improve performance by reducing I/O albeit at the expense of CPU usage....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1467
BLOGS : SQL SERVER COMPACT EDITION
SYNC SERVICES AND SQL SERVER 2008 CHANGE TRACKING...A PERFECT MATCH? - Just saw Aaron Bertrand's post from PASS on SQL Server 2008 Change Tracking vs Change Data Capture (change data capture (or CDC) is in the current CTP; change tracking is not). I'm not at PASS this week myself, but home while the house is being re-roofed. His post seems to confirm something I'd suspected all along....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1468
BLOGS : T-SQL
AGGREGATION WITH CUBE - In my last post, I wrote about how aggregation WITH ROLLUP works. In this post, I will discuss how aggregation WITH CUBE works. Like the WITH ROLLUP clause, the WITH CUBE clause permits us to compute multiple "levels" of aggregation in a single statement. To understand the difference between these two clauses, let's look at an example. We'll use the same fictitious sales data from last week's example....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1469
BLOGS : PERFORMANCE POINT
PERFORMANCEPOINT SERVER 2007: PLANNING SERVER TOPOLOGY - This is a great diagram that shows the server topology for PPS Planning....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1470
BLOGS : ANALYSIS SERVICES / BI
ONE-TO-ONE ATTRIBUTE RELATIONSHIPS: FORKS VERSUS CHAINS - It's a fairly common occurrence to have several attributes in a dimension describing the same thing: products can have long and short descriptions, for example, or you might want to display dates in different formats, or show the full names of states or just their abbreviations. AS doesn't give you any functionality to specifically handle this - something I've heard from people who've used other OLAP tools is that it would be great to set up 'aliases' for attributes, r...
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1471
SQL SERVER 2008 AND ANALYSIS SERVICES DMV'S - One of the cool new features coming in SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services are Dynamic Management Views (DMV). Actually I never thought of them as DMVs coming from my background, but since everyone else calls them that, there's no reason we shouldn't either....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1472
BLOGS : DATABASE DESIGN, THEORY AND DEVELOPMENT
SEARCH ENGINE Q&A #1: RUNNING OUT OF TRANSACTION LOG SPACE - One of the great things about the blog engine we use is that it shows all the search engine queries that led to someone clicking through to the site. I've been looking through the logs to see what kind of problems people are having that end up here. In this occasional series, I'm going to pick a search engine query and blog about it - hopefully helping out people who have the problem in future....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1473
BLOGS : SQL SERVER 2005
INCREASE YOUR PRODUCTIVITY WITH QUERY ANALYZER/SQL SERVER MANAGEMENT STUDIO - In Query Analyzer you can save a lot of time by using this trick instead of typing all the column names of a table ...
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1474
BLOGS : CAREER
SPEAKING - Today I made my first presentation at a PASS conference. The whole process took months to come together. I started back in the Spring putting together my abstract and was fortunate to be accepted. After it was accepted, I went to work putting it all together. I prepared my talk and presented to a couple of user groups, which was very helpful. Not only did I get to practice my speech, but I also discovered that my laptop had some issues connecting to a projector. I managed to get everything straightened out and set my sights on Denver. ...
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1475
BLOGS : T-SQL
DBCC OPENTRAN() BEHAVIOR - I recently was bitten by some not so obvious behavior with DBCC OPENTRAN() that I would like to share. Basically this command is supposed to show you the oldest open transaction within the specified database or the current one if none is specified. If you run the example below you can see the expected behavior....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1476
BLOGS : SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
DOUBLE STANDARD? - While this is nothing new, a conversation I had with a client the other day got me thinking more than I wanted to about what I see as sort of a double – standard for lack of a better term at the moment. Now I fully realize this can turn into a full out war of opinions, I feel the need to blog about it. But please keep in mind the focus of the argument and understand that I am in no way bashing or hyping one side vs. the other. What I am referring to is the mindset that it is OK or even encouraged for an application developer to develop both the app objects and the database objects....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1477
BLOGS : SECURITY
THE MULTICS OPERATING SYSTEM - Multics was an operating system from the 1960s, and had better security than a lot of operating systems today. This article from 2002 talks about Multics security, and the lessons learned that are still relevant today....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1478
BLOGS : T-SQL
OPTIMIZING CONDITIONAL WHERE CLAUSES: AVOIDING ORS AND CASE EXPRESSIONS - Often, we need to create a flexible stored procedure that returns data that is optionally filtered by some parameters. If you wish to apply a filter, you set the parameter to the necessary value, if not, you leave it null. This is pretty standard stuff, of course, that we can write fairly easily, without the need for dynamic SQL, like this:...
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1479
BLOGS : CAREER
DBA INTERVIEWS FROM BOTH SIDES OF THE TABLE - A few months ago I was conducting interviews for a Production DBA position that we were creating, and an interesting thing happened...I ran into a candidate who was much like me a few years earlier. Unfortunately neither of us qualified. Here are some lessons from that experience......
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1480
BLOGS : T-SQL
FINDING GROUP OF RECORDS WITH A CERTAIN STATUS - I recently was given the task to optimize some code prior to a client's upgrade to SQL Server 2005.
The objective for the old code was to get all orders where status for all orderlines where set to 'DROP'....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1481
FINDING RECORDS IN ONE TABLE NOT PRESENT IN ANOTHER TABLE - The objective is to fetch all records in one table that are not present in another table. The most common code I’ve seen at client sites includes the use of NOT IN, because this keyword is included in most programming languages and programmers tend to use this technique when writing stored procedures in the database too. The code example I have found in most cases is this simple and understandable...
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1482
BLOGS : SQL SERVER 2005
SSMS TOOLS PACK - AN ADD-IN FOR SQL MANAGEMENT STUDIO 2005 IS OUT (BETA STAGE) - SSMS Tools Pack is an Add-In (Add-On) for Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio 2005 and Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express 2005....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1483
BLOGS : SERVICE BROKER / SOA
SERVICE BROKER TUTORIALS UPDATE IN MSDN - The new MSDN release online now has a major overhaul of the Service Broker tutorials chapter:
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1519...
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1484
BLOGS : T-SQL
CODE GENERATOR - Call it a code generator, software factory, or just a clever script. If you can write code that writes code - you win, even if just a small victory for humans in this contest we call software development....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1485
BLOGS : REPORTING SERVICES
KEEPING YOUR REPORT SERVERS AWAKE (OR NO MORE WAITING FOR REPORT SERVER TO STARTUP) - Reporting Services in SQL 2005 is hosted in IIS. IIS has a performance optimization built-in that you cannot disable (AFAIK), which shuts down an application once there is a period of 20 minutes of inactivity. This is governed by the Idle Timeout IIS Metabase property. ...
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1486
BLOGS : ANALYSIS SERVICES / BI
MDX STUDIO V0.1.1 UPDATE - Yesterday announcement of MDX Studio has generated lots of feedback, and I would like to thank everybody for taking your time to try this early version. Below I address most of the comments I received:...
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1487
BLOGS : SQL SERVER 2005
SQL SERVER - 2005 - MULTIPLE LANGUAGE SUPPORT - SQL Server supports multiple languages. Information about all the languages are stored in sys.syslanguages system view. You can run following script in Query Editor and see all the information about each language. Information about Months and Days varies for each language....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1488
BLOGS : SQL SERVER 2008 (KATMAI)
SQL SERVER 2008: BACKUP COMPRESSION - Over the next few months I'll be blogging a lot about new features that are coming in SQL Server 2008 for DBAs and ITPros. First up is Backup Compression. This has been one of most heavily requested features since before I joined the SQL team back in 1999 - for me it's really cool that it's in this coming release. ...
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1489
SQL SERVER 2008: ON INSTALLING THE LATEST CTP... - My previous post on Backup Compression reminded me to post about installing the latest SQL Server 2008 CTP (here's a link to the download page). I've installed SQL Server 2008 many times, both within Microsoft and since leaving in August, but I've never done it on a system that has SQL Server 2000 installed too....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1490
BLOGS : T-SQL
SQL TEASER PASS SPECIAL: TABLE SIZE - What will be the outcome of this script?
First we create a table with a total of 6000 bytes
Next we increase col2 from 1000 to 2000 bytes, this will give us a total of 7000 bytes
Finally we add col3 which has 1000 bytes, this will give us a total of 8000 bytes...
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1491
AGGREGATION WITH ROLLUP - In this post, I'm going to discuss how aggregation WITH ROLLUP works. The WITH ROLLUP clause permits us to execute multiple "levels" of aggregation in a single statement. For example, suppose we have the following fictitious sales data. (This is the same data that I used for my series of posts on the PIVOT operator.)...
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1492
BLOGS : SQL CLR
SQLCLR AND SYSTEM FUNCTIONALITY IN SQL SERVER 2008 - PART 3 - So, Microsoft.SqlServer.Types lives in the resource database and runs in its own appdomain when its used by system functions, like SELECT * FROM sys.assemblies. Let's try an experiment with the following setup....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1493
BLOGS : SQL SERVER 2008 (KATMAI)
SQL SERVER 2008 AND .NET FRAMEWORK VERSIONS - So, people always ask... now that .NET Framework 3.0 installed on my system and there's going to be a new version of .NET that includes LINQ, what version of the framework will SQL Server load now, in SQL Server 2008? Does 2.0 still load? Or does it load 3.0 or 3.5?...
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1494
AN EXAMPLE OF USING ODBC AND SQL SERVER 2008 TABLE-VALUED PARAMETERS - Back at TechEd US, I'd spoken with Chris Lee, who's in charge of SQL Native Client. That's the OLE DB provider and ODBC driver that ship with SQL Server. SQL Server 2008 has a new version of the provider and driver, and when I'd asked if support for the new features (like the new DATE/TIME data types and table-valued parameters) Chris had not only replied "yes", but given me a demo of using table-valued parameters from ODBC to show off and post if I wanted to....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1495
BLOGS : CAREER
PASS CONFERENCE (THURSDAY) - Thursday started off with a session on integrating ERWin and Visual Studio Team System for Database Professionals. I've been looking forward to using these two tools together so I was glad to see a session like this. Unfortunately, the session was supposed to be a 300-level session, but was actually not quite a 200-level. The pace was painfully slow and the examples far too simple to get any meaningful value from the session. I found greater value going to the vendor's booth (which I did after I left the session) and talking with the folks there....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1496
PASS CONFERENCE (WEDNESDAY) - The first day at PASS is always exciting. Starting with the keynote address by Ted Kummert and ending with the vendor exposition, it's great to see people again that you only get to see once or twice a year. Kummert's address mentioned the data explosion, and the focus of SQL Server 2008 on bringing all of your data into the database. There were some interesting demos and I look forward to actually getting my hands on the bits that do the amazing things they showed, like Intellisense in the query editor, the resource governor and managing servers through policies....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1497
BLOGS : SQL SERVER 2005
COPY_ONLY BACKUPS AND SSMS - Here's a surprising one: SQL Server 2005 introduced the COPY_ONLY option of the BACKUP command. This is relevant for ...
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1498
BLOGS : DATABASE DESIGN, THEORY AND DEVELOPMENT
STONEBRAKER COMMENTS ON OODB MARKET FAILURES, DATA WAREHOUSE PAIN, AND COLUMN ADVANTAGES - In my recent post, a reader made the following comments:
1. OODBs failed because RDBMS vendors added OO functionality
2. Data warehouse users are not in pain
3. Column stores only beat row stores on poorly designed warehouse schemas
In my opinion, all three claims are false....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1499
BLOGS : CAREER
5 THINGS EVERY DBA SHOULD KNOW LIKE THE BACK OF THEIR HAND... - OK, I put in shameless plugs, but that got me thinking about topics that every DBA should really, really understand. I'm talking a Kalen level of understand (Geeks unite!). I won't be explaining all of these things - take some initiative and hit Books Online and all of the other blogs and publications out there and really take the time to absorb it. If you've ever come one of my classes, you'll recognize these topics since rant about them so much....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1500
BLOGS : HARDWARE
SCALE UP WITH SQL SERVER 2005 / SQL SERVER 2008 - NUMA - This article is related to the NUMA (Non Uniform Memory Access) feature available with SQL Server. NUMA is a very useful feature to scale up the Server....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1501
SQL SERVER AND SANS: THE QUEUEDEPTH SETTING OF A HOST BUS ADAPTER (HBA) - Too many DBAs tend to view a drive presented from a Storage Area Network (SAN) as something of a monolithic nature. They look at the drive as if it had some intrinsic performance characteristics. This view doesn't help one appreciate the true performance characteristics of such a drive....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1502
BLOGS : DATABASE DESIGN, THEORY AND DEVELOPMENT
CORRUPTION: LAST RESORTS THAT PEOPLE TRY FIRST... - These next few posts are based off part of my Secrets of Fast Detection and Recovery from Database Corruptions session from TechEd and various user groups around the world (see here for a video recording from TechEd). I'll also be doing this session at ITForum in Barcelona in November, and as a live webcast for Microsoft sometime over the next month or so (I'll publicize the date nearer the time). I did a few posts on these subjects last year but now I want to reorder them, add a post about using emergency mode and walk you through some emergency mode demo scripts....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1503
CHECKDB FROM EVERY ANGLE: WHAT DOES IT DO? - On the Storage Engine blog last year I started two series that I got distracted from - one on CHECKDB and one on fragmentation. With the benefit of hindsight, I'm going to start 3 series on my new blog here - one on CHECKDB ('CHECKDB from every angle'), one on indexes ('Indexes from every angle'), and one on internals ('Inside the Storage Engine'). The first few posts of each will be updated reposts of a few from the previous blog, just for completeness....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1504
BLOGS : ANALYSIS SERVICES / BI
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE VIRTUAL CUBE? - I got asked a very odd question today - "How do you use virtual cubes in Analaysis Services 2005?". I was momentarily speechless (a rare thing for those that know me!). This got me to thinking that there must be quite a few installations of the previous version analysis services 2000 (AS2000) out there run by IT professionals who may have had a look at the current version and gone wibble wibble. ...
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1505
LEAN AND MEAN - When you build a cube in analysis services it is very easy to expose every attribute in every dimension to the user. You can also add-in every measure and if you don't feel that's enough then you can create your own calculated members to add to the users' fun. ...
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1506
BLOGS : SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
USING INTERFACES TO IMPROVE THE TESTABILITY OF YOUR DATASET ARCHITECTURE - Datasets tend to make applications really hard to test. In this entry I'll explain a method you can use to improve the testability of your architecture....
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/354811/1507
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Received on Sat Sep 29 2007 - 15:23:34 EDT