SQL Server
There are 36 entries for the tag SQL Server
Last October I learnt my company wanted to put together a new blog/social networking policy. I decided that out of respect for my employer I wouldn’t blog until this was sorted out. This was perhaps was an easy decision to make as I was separating from my ex-wife at the time and frankly needed the time to concentrate on other things. So now the company has a brand new policy and I’m back into the dating game I thought I would blow off the cobwebs and get back to what I enjoy doing. First and foremost...
A little while back I posted a question on Channel 9 wanting to know more about SQL Server ‘Madison’ project. Well Charles Torre being the extremely nice bloke that he is (Thanks Charles I owe you another beer, perhaps not London Pride next time!) got on a plane from Redmond down to Orange County and went to pay the Madison development team and in particular Christian Kleinerman for is the Product Unit Manager for the Madison development, a visit The video is a good introduction into Madison, it...
I’ve started a thread on Channel 9 to ask my questions about Madison, Gemini and Kilimanjaro which is now 2008 R2. If you’ve got any burning questions why don’t you put them there as well. The Channel 9 team are planning to do a series of video’s with the SQL Server Dev Group so they will put our questions to them. The Channel 9 thread can be found here : http://channel9.msdn.com/fo... Technorati Tags: SQL Server,SQL Server Madison,SQL...
Continuing my series of great free stuff for SQL Server I’ve pulled a rabbit out of the hat for you today! In this economic climate one of the first things that seems to get cut is the training budget so anything that can help get your head around stuff is a big plus. To help Microsoft has released SQL Server 2008 Developer Training Kit So what does the Training Kit contain … Presentations (6) Filestream Spatial T-SQL Date and Time Types SQLCLR Reporting Services Demos (12) AdventureWorks Racing...
Codeplex is a wonderful site. However not just for the .Net coder but the SQL Server guy/gal can find plenty of goodies there as well. One such goody is the FineBuild utility that does as the name suggest helps create a ‘Fine Build’ of your SQL Server install. All to often installing SQL Server can turn into a day long process with the various additional service packs, CU’s, tools and utility to install. Well FineBuild can automate all of that so all you need to do is run the start script, go off...
It’s not often we get stuff for free but Microsoft has decided to give away a complete book, not just afew sample chapters. All you have to do is go to this link , press the ‘Sign Up’ button, leave some details about yourself, if you’ve registered with MSDN before it’ll just pick up you existing details and then pdf will download. So what’s the catch? Well you will be signing up to Microsoft Press Book Connection monthly newsletter and learn about new books on Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and other...
R2 ! As you may know I’m abit of a SQL Server nut so I was particularly interested in the announcement at the recent TechEd of SQL Server 2008 R2. R2 is the combination of the Kilimanjaro, Madison and Gemini projects. Kilimanjaro is adding support for up to 256 processors to the existing code base. Whilst Madison follows on from the purchase of DataAllegro last year moving data to handling petabytes of data. Lastly Gemini is about taking on Qlikview and providing Analysis Services using column-oriented...
As you can guess from the title I have written this post completely on my iPhone.A part from the obvious restrictions, such as the small keyboard, it wasn't a wholly unpleasant experience making the whole notion of using a device like this to construct posts a viable option.What put me off attempting to do this before was indeed screen-size but the iPhone does just about cross the boundary in a useable experience.So I'm a little late to the iPhone party with all the fuss happening last year but it...
Servers are the backbone of enterprise computing today, most websites for example run on either Apache or IIS and will be running on a server of some description. Perhaps because of servers ubiquity it is easy to become complacent about them especially as they are rarely seen but understanding what a server can offer you and it's limitations will definitely help with software development. Servers on the whole are built more of the practicality side than for the esthetics, there is no need to make...
Does your software or database run like a dog? Running out of space? Or doesn't recover well in a disaster? ... then your storage configuration may be one of the reasons. This is a short little post just to give you a heads-up on the basics. You may know bits of it already, hence why I have broken it up into a Q&A format so you can skip what you already now. The Hard-Disk Well we've all seen a hard-disk but the likelihood is that it was in a desktop and you're the only person that uses it at...
For the next few weeks I'm going to be turning my attentions to Microsoft SQL Server as the new version, 2008 is now with us and even has it's first big patch CU1. I am however not going to focus on coding as plenty of others on GWB have that sufficiently covered. It is fair to say that SQL Server has turned into a monster, it's far more than just a database product these days, it is a complete data management suit of tools. Some of the tools are fully fledged complex products in their own right...
As I've been helping out with VMware I wanted to consider the old question of whether developers really could work inside virtual environments? As we know virtual environments can help maximise under utilised resources, CPU, RAM, diskspace and save on space, power, HVAC and TCO with centralised support and maintenance. Another main advantage of virtualised environments that is particularly attract to many developers is the ability to remote work which is a requirement that has become far more common...
I've turned my hand to a bit of Infrastructure Architecture and lending a hand working out what physical servers would make good candidates for making the transition to virtual. IBM, HP and DELL, to name afew, all offer services to work out what would make good candidates for you. There is also tools that can also help such as the popular PlateSpin's PowerRecon but to be fair these methods only really give potential technical candidates, that’s half the story! What about the business perspective?...
Roles in Perth, Scotland Business Analyst Support Analyst/Programmers for Home Services systems Roles in Basingstoke, England Analyst/Programmers for Energy Sales systems with C#.Net or PL/SQL skills Roles in Havant, England Project Managers Business Analysts Senior Analyst/Programmers with ORACLE skills Analyst/Programmers with ORACLE skills Analyst/Programmers with ORACLE E Business Suite skills Lead Systems Designers IT Security Engineers Database Administrators (DBAs) ORACLE or SQL Server skills...
To add to my frustrating time this week with my 1418 error when setting up Database Mirroring under SQL Server 2005. I was dogged by a continuous 'Service Unavailable' message when trying to load a ASP.NET page under IIS running under Windows 2003 R2. Typically 'Service Unavailable' is a nice catch all message that doesn't give anything away, and so it shouldn't as hackers learn about websites by generating exceptions. Diagnosing the real reason for the error is a case of reading the IIS error logs...
Finally after spending hours building 3 servers (to do the job of the primary, mirror and witness) and installing SQL Server 2005 Enterprise with SP2 all sitting in the same domain. I was ready to try out Database Mirroring which arguably is one of the main reason people can justify the cost of purchasing the Enterprise edition. It should be easy, fill in the wizard and bob's your uncle, your trusty database is ready for instant uninterrupted failover goodness. In my case it all fell over with the...
BI has always been a rich vain of the IT industry. Rich because there was so much excellent competition. The really cool thing about many BI products was that they effectively could bolt onto most of the popular databases so it was pretty straight forward to chop and change and to also build your capability into one tool! The larger IT vendors however where not leaders in the BI space. The leader were the specialists, the experts. Now sadly the bigger BI vendors and market leaders are nearly all...
It is a logical, reasonable and best practice stance to examine getting the most out of assets that are already at your disposal especially if there is an emphasis of reduce costs which is one of the driving factors for selecting SOA in the first place. With SOA one of the most emotive technical issues to tackle is where to host the ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) as there is an attraction to examining hosting the ESB on existing hardware, a mainframe would seem an obvious choice. In this post I will...
In this post I will be taking a high level look at what a possible SOA implementation architecture scenario and what it might look like giving an indication of what technologies are involved. This example scenario is a SOA implementation for call-centres using Microsoft Technologies, some you may have heard of, and others that are sadly as yet unsung. A few things to note, I haven’t come across a medium to large organisation that doesn’t use Citrix for the UI deployment so this is why...
As normal service has resumed and I’m blogging again (admittedly I’m not going to blog about absolutely everything) here is a wonderful little utility I found on my travels for adding Intellisense to editor in SQL Server. It’s called promptSQL from Red Gate. I really love how Intellisense makes me more productive (i.e. lazy) in Visual Studio and I was wondering about its rather obvious admission from SQL Server 2005 Management Studio, missing a trick strings to mind. Anyway for...
Arguably one of the most common things you will do in SQL Server stored proc's after writing SELECT, INSERT, UDPATE & DELETE statements is to retrieve the new record ID of the row of data that has just been inserted. For sometime now the most popular way to do this is @@IDENTITY, but @@IDENTITY does have a flaw and that is it will return the ID of the last record created anywhere in the database, so if another process is inserting a record somewhere else, you could receive that ID instead. With...
No rest for the wicked! My first week back has meant clocking up the miles and visiting vendors and attending meetings. One of the software vendors I went to visit was Sybase at their Maidenhead office and particularly their mobility division. I would like to thank Ian Matthews and Tim Roberts for there hospitality. The day visit was a deep dive into the Afaria mobility management product. Afaria, if you have done your homework, is the pretty much the market leader in the mobility management space...
The lovely Eileen reported recently that Exchange is going exclusively 64bit, the article can be found here. I have to say I'm not completely surprised that this trend has started and lets be honest, it's not a bad thing as it's mini-waves like this in the industry that keeps us all gainfully employed. Hmm, hence perhaps why Dell, HP and Intel were launch partners at the recent VS2005, SQL Server 2005 & Biztalk 2006 event...
Now this is just one of those ideas where you know that a company has too much money to spend on their marketing budget (Fantastic!). But just goes to show that I suspect that more than one person in Redmond does indeed have a sense of humour. Microsoft After Dark is an hour long video where prominent Microsoft guys have an informal question and answer session over a game of big bucks, winner takes all, competition black-jack. I suspect that the guys aren’t using their own money because there...
For sometime now my home PC hasn’t really been behaving itself. It’s been slow in parts and mysterious errors have surfaced in commonly used applications. A whole bunch of those repair and optimisation utilities have been thrown at my PC over the years but the simple fact was that the machine was suffering from to much clutter. I had released a while ago that I had never completely rebuild my machine from scratch I had always upgraded my PC with each new version of Windows from 98 to...
News coming out of the PDC about an exciting new a set of standard query operators for use in working with data regardless of the data source! In essence they are a set of .net libraries that will extend C# and Visual Basic, from the examples on Microsoft site there is a strong impression that this is a sort of SQL type addition to the languages, that still happily works in a OO fashion. For example extracted from the Microsoft website. Where - Simple 1 This sample prints each element of an input...
Let’s talk more about SQL Server 2005 new stuff! As before I will keep it short and sweet. I won't go into depth of what can be done with these commands because I think I would bored you, but I just want to give you a hint of what I've found cool. The OUTPUT clause IMHO is a great time saver. The one thing I do with an insert stored procedure is to return the new key ID. Now, I haven’t been all that happy with using statements such as … SELECT MAX(tableID) From DavesTable …...
Whilst on the subject of SQL Server 2005, I wanted to just talk about a new feature that is coming in the new SQL Server Mobile Edition that I’m excited about. Well you know when you can run .Net code on a mobile device from the Visual Studio IDE? Well in the new version of SQL Server Mobile Edition and SQL Server 2005 you will be able to run SQL on the device from the SQL Server Management Studio! Big deal!? Well yes if you have tried to use the SQL editor on a PDA which is so painful typing...
I know I don’t often talk about code, but I have recently had the good fortune to get back into playing around with the new version of SQL Server 2005. I think I’m going to do a few small posts on some of the new things I’ve found that I like. Insert and Merge, finally your can ‘Upsert’! Upsert is a mythical feature where you can insert and update data with one command. It's not quite in one command but the effect is the same with a simple set of syntax. MERGE INTO DavesTable USING DavesTempTable...
It’s been a little quiet on the blog of late for good reason. At work this product has been keeping me busy. Unfortunately because of corporate communication policy I cannot tell you how or where we are using it. Some of you in the Enterprise space may have heard of Barloworld, for those of you who haven't it's the market leader in the inventory management space and will soon be migrating from Delphi to a full .Net product, which isn't common knowledge. Barloworld have a strong open-source...
Thanks to Ian for the original post on Channel 9. Training is very important and these free courses from Microsoft are a God send. The one that has really caught my eye is, Course 2925: Building Managed Code for SQL Server 2005 and Creating SOA Apps with Visual Studio 2005. Now I’m wading my way through it as we speak! Now being a free course you don’t expect them to be all that good, well this one is and before you ask the question, yes I would pay for it if it wasn’t free. These...
After discovering that “Error 32000: xxxxxx” is basically a general catch-all error and can literally mean a multitude of different things I decided to blow away the VMWARE server and start again and re-install a la text book. No work ‘a-rounds’, second guessing, short cuts, just following the installation guide to the letter and guess what! It installed this time without a hitch! So what is my prognosis? If you get an “Error 32000: xxxx blah” message you haven’t...
Have you built a mobile solution for you company from scratch? Yes, I’ve tried it too. Don’t get me wrong Visual Studio is a very powerful tool and the emulators are a great step forward but for my mind most of the pieces of the solution just aren’t there and you have to end up building most of that yourself. The risk is the components parts are not built to best practice and often aren’t as productive as they could be. In this space you are still very much on your own. Often...
Today I spend part of it installing Microsoft latest version of SQL Server 2005 Enterprise April CTP and the Team System Server BETA 2 installing a vanilla Windows 2003 Enterprise server (of course with all the packs and security updates) sitting under VMWARE GSX 3.1. I’ve installed SQL Server 2005 twice before and this time was the easiest installation, went this time without a hitch, the only prerequisite this time was the addition of Windows Installer 3.1, which will require the installation...
Yesterday, I attended DeveloperDays at what Microsoft Campus in Reading, UK. A good days was had by all and I sure as hell learnt allot, but I did feel very much overwhelmed when I got home last-night, so I hit the sack with one hell of a head-ache, hence writing about it today. The session I enjoyed the most where … Craig Murphy's introduction to Scrum. Now I must say that I’m very much an advocate of Agile development, so learning about Scrum and learning how you could project manager...