SQL Server

Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 & Windows Server 2008 Launch Event Coming to a City Near You!

Matthew Podwysocki — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 23:22:41 GMT

As noted today, you can now register for the Launch of Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008. You can find the closest event to you from here. For all you DC folks like me, our event is March 25th and you can find that registration information here.

Here is the basic information:

Take a test drive
Come to an event and test drive Windows Server® 2008 operating system, Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008, and Microsoft Visual Studio® 2008.

Meet the experts
Enjoy hands-on labs, face-to-face Q&A sessions with software experts, and other opportunities to interact with development team members.

Bring the products home
Want more? To say thanks for taking part of this exciting launch, you’ll take home a promotional kit with versions of all three products.

I was fortunate to be a part of the Washington DC Vista launch last year, help some of my DP&E give their presentations and even help with "Meet the Experts", so it's a great time. I was just tired by the end of the day directing people where to register and where lunch was. The lines were amazing and just outside in the freezing cold. A good time was had by all!

MSDN Webcast: What I Wish Developers Knew About Writing Queries in SQL Server 2005

Matthew Podwysocki — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 12:05:00 GMT

Microsoft has released a new MSDN webcast entitled What I Wish Developers Knew About Writing Queries in SQL Server 2005. Bill Graziano, a Microsoft SQL Server MVP, from ClearData Consulting will give his experiences and best practices about SQL 2005.

The webcast description notes:

As a consultant, I visit many companies that are having performance problems with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 database. This webcast describes some of the most common problems I see from clients, and explains how to avoid them. I cover reading query plans, SQL Profiler, indexing, correlated sub-queries, temporary tables, and user-defined functions, and show how you can use them together to improve performance.

It's definitely worth checking out if you are looking forbest practices and how to avoid common pitfalls.

Looking at SQL Server 2005 Service Broker (SSB)

Matthew Podwysocki — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 19:41:00 GMT

During the last MICSUG meeting, Geoff Snowman gave a great presentation on "When to Use What" with regards to which remoting and messaging technologies should be used in certain scenarios. The SQL Server 2005 Service Broker (SSB) was mentioned a couple of times in regards to messaging systems and it got me a little intrigued to look at it.

So What Is SSB?

From the Microsoft SQL Server Books Online:

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Service Broker helps developers build scalable, secure database applications. This new technology, a part of the Database Engine, provides a message-based communication platform that enables independent application components to perform as a functioning whole. Service Broker includes infrastructure for asynchronous programming that can be used for applications within a single database or a single instance as well as for distributed applications.

Service Broker reduces application development time by providing much of the infrastructure that is necessary to build a distributed application. Service Broker also makes it easy to scale your application up or down to accommodate the amount of traffic the application receives.

So, this got me to thinking, well, what examples are there? On GotDotNet, they have a site set up for SQL Server Broker Community Samples which has many samples for a brief introduction into the power of the SSB.

For a detailed walkthrough, the latest Visual Studio Magazine has an article called "Program SQL Server 2005’s Service Broker" (Registration Required) in which it provides a pretty in depth analysis on what you can do as well as some code examples. I hope to look at this more in the future!

Free Tool - Red-Gate SQLPrompt

Matthew Podwysocki — Tue, 30 May 2006 18:30:00 GMT

I came across another tool to make my life easier. Red-Gate has released a product called SQLPrompt which provides Intellisense to your SQL. This is a free product (with registration) until September 1st, so hurry while supplies last. Let's go over briefly the features.

This is a tray application that provides the Intellisenses to most major SQL Editors. It sits in the background and monitors when you have a .sql, .prc or other custom file extensions open. From there, it provides the Intellisense features.

This product provides Intellisense to most major SQL editors including the following:

* Visual Studio 2003

* Visual Studio 2005

* Query Analyzer

* Enterprise Manager

* SQL Server Management Studio

* UltraEdit

* EditPlus 2

This application can also remember code snippets that you may have as well as a lot of other features such as specifying trigger words, formatting among other things.

I will show a brief demo of how this is used. First, I will launch Visual Studio 2005 and create a Database project. From there, I will specify my connections and various other data needed.

I will then create a stored procedure. The first time the SQLPrompt is used, it will prompt you for connection credentials for the Intellisense features including database. I will do a simple pubs database query.

Once I start typing, the Intellisense will automatically populate the objects in the appropriate fashion. Here is a simple select from pubs authors.

The above says which tables I have available to me as well as the basic table definitions. Let's go a little further and put an inner join on the table.

This automatically picks up the table it is already linked with for joining purposes. Now that we have this, we must set the ON keyword. SQLPrompt will take care of that as well.

So, as you can see from this brief little demo how powerful this tool can be. This is definitely one to add to the arsenal.

OLE DB Provider for Directory Services

Matthew Podwysocki — Thu, 04 May 2006 00:56:00 GMT

When I was helping out a coworker with an issue for data mining for a logging and auditing ISAPI tool that we created (don't worry I'll get to the basic concepts of what we did), we realized we needed an easy way to pull information from AD easily during our data loads.

SQL Server makes this easy of course with the OLE DB Provider for Directory Services. Information about this can be found here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-US/library/ms190803.aspx for SQL Server 2005. The reference from ADO 2.8 also makes note of this technology here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/ado270/htm/mdrefadsprovspec.asp

This gives you the ability to use user names and passwords through SQL Server logins, although I would definitely recommand against such a procedure for security purposes and maintenance. You can accomplish this however the sp_addlinkedsrvlogin system stored procedure.

Querying the AD object model is very simple from this example:

CREATE VIEW viewADEmails
AS
SELECT [Name], SN [Last Name], email
FROM OPENQUERY( ADSI,
   'SELECT Name, SN, email
   FROM ''LDAP://DC=microsoft,DC=com''
   WHERE objectClass=''user'' AND objectCategory=''Person''')
GO
SELECT * FROM viewADEmails