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/forums/Coffeehouse/479201-Video-Request-Madison-Gemini-and-Kilimanjaro/ Technorati Tags: SQL Server,SQL Server Madison,SQL...
I wasn’t 100% sure myself so I clarified with MS that the restricted license of SQL Server standard that comes with Team Foundation Server 2008 is limited to SQL Server 2005 standard. In short, even though SQL 2008 Standard or Enterprise is supported with TFS 2008, you MUST LICENSE IT SEPERATELY from your TFS license. This is consistent with what you read in the VSTS 2008 Licensing Whitepaper. Technorati Tags: TFS,Install,SQL Server...
I am a keen believer when building applications in having a clean logical architecture with separation of concerns as much as possible – taking into account the goals of the project and the environment in which the application will be maintained. As such, when it makes sense I believe in use of MVC, MVP, MVVM etc type patterns to enable efficient development and maintenance of applications. I can testify to the worth of adopting these styles to improve the quality of products developed from my experience...
When building applications we usually want to adopt the write once user everywhere or DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) goals for simpler maintenance, validation, configuration,etc etc. So for business applications the situation is usually develop a control, that can be re-used and that can have different data bound to it for the situation in which it is used. Silverlight has a fantastic mechanism – the Silverlight Property System - that manages data binding among other things. This means that the late...
This is the final post in a four part series to demonstrate how to use the standard MSFT technologies to implement a CRUD data application in Silverlight. The steps in this post build upon those completed in part 3. The goal of this series is to show those of you who are relatively new to Silverlight how analogous building such an app in Silverlight is to say building it in ASP.NET, Win Forms or WPF. This app is built on Visual Studio 2008 SP1, SQL Server 2008, Silverlight 2.0 and the Silverlight...
SQL Server allows you to set a case sensitive collation at both the database and column level but often you will need to do a case sensitive search when everything is case insensitive. Not to worry, you can set the collation directly in the query. /* To test string equality including case when the DB is not case sensitive you must include collation as part of the test as follows: */ declare @mystring1 varchar(10) declare @mystring2 varchar(10) set @mystring1 ='abc' set @mystring2 ='ABC' -- by default...
This is the second post in a series to demonstrate how to use the standard MSFT technologies to implement a CRUD data application in Silverlight. The steps in this post build upon those completed in part 1. The goal of this series is to show those of you who are relatively new to Silverlight how analogous building such an app in Silverlight is to say building it in ASP.NET, Win Forms or WPF. This app is built on Visual Studio 2008 SP1, SQL Server 2008, Silverlight 2.0 and the Silverlight Toolkit...
This is the first post in a series to demonstrate how to use the standard MSFT technologies to implement a CRUD data application in Silverlight. This post is beginners stuff - there’s nothing advanced here. Most readers with some experience of Silverlight will learn nothing from this post, but I want to start at the beginning so those of you who are relatively new to Silverlight can see how analogous building such an app in Silverlight is to say building it in ASP.NET, Win Forms or WPF. This app...
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...
In a word – wonderful. I’m doing some work on a project where somebody had a bit of a fetish for nested views. I’m not talking about one view inside another. I’m talking about one view that joins a couple of other views that each join to other views as well. I needed to add a value to the output of the outer-most view and before I added ~another~ join I wanted to know if the table in question was already joined in one of the nested views. Drilling down into them would have taken time. I remembered...
I need a little bit of code to get the last processed date for the cube that my site connects to: Public Function GetCubeLastProcessedDates(ByVal AnalysisServer As String) As Collection(Of CubeInfo) Dim result As Collection(Of CubeInfo) Dim identity As WindowsIdentity = WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent() Dim eCode As Integer = CommonUtility.RevertToSelf() Dim oServer As New Server Try result = New Collection(Of CubeInfo) oServer.Connect(String.Format(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture, "data Source = {0};",...
I was doing a data conversion that involved importing data from a flat-file source into SQL Server. I fired up SSIS and created the Data Flow tasks that would move the data into the SQL Server tables. The problem was, the longer fields (i.e. a “Notes” column) were all being truncated no matter what data type I made the destination field. So I created a Data Conversion task to sit between the Flat-File data source and the SQL Server Destination. After I had tried every conceivable destination data...
My favorite SQL Server command is: STUFF. What an awesome name for a command. During a recent data conversion I had to combine many duplicate part records in the Part table, but retain the values from all of the duplicate part rows. I used STUFF to collapse the rows: Select Distinct [CustomerPartNo] ,[CustomerNo] ,(Stuff((Select ', ' + CustomerDescription From [PARTS] T2 Where T2.[CustomerPartNo] = T1.[CustomerPartNo] and T2.[CustomerNo] = T2.[CustomerNo] FOR XML PATH('')),1,2,'')) From [PARTS] T1...
First, download the new Data Dude. Download page http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=bb3ad767-5f69-4db9-b1c9-8f55759846ed&displaylang=en Setup http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/a/e/0ae1153a-8798-474a-93e6-d19299f37c8b/setup.exe Read Me http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/a/e/0ae1153a-8798-474a-93e6-d19299f37c8b/Readme.mht Documentation: http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/a/e/0ae1153a-8798-474a-93e6-d19299f37c8b/Documentation.zip Once you get it going the...
What a mouthful! Has there ever been any products with names as long as the Team System toolset ;), Maybe thats why it is just called Data Dude. Anyway, congratulations to the Data Dude team for this wonderful piece of work. I have been following the GDR for a while and I have been very impressed with the capabilities on offer. Although this is billed as a new release of Data Dude, it is really a completely new product with a brand new architecture. They have made many improvements to scalability,...
In the Baton Rouge Area with as open Tuesday afternoon? Check out the SQL Server Users Group Meeting this week. Location: At Lamar Advertising Thursday, October 23, 2008 5:45 PM - 8:00 PM Sponsored By: FuelTrac Presenter: Mike Huguet BIO Mike is an Enterprise Solutions Architect for Sparkhound, Inc. with over 9 years of experience in developing business solutions for Enterprise, Mid-market, and governmental customers. Five of those years have been as a consultant working with clients such as Jiffy...
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...
Last February, Bill Gates announced a free software giveaway to college university students and high school students as well. Here is what was offered to them: Microsoft developer tools. Visual Studio is the Swiss Army knife of computer programming. These professional-grade products provide a security-enhanced and reliable environment, enabling students to program everything from a cell phone to a robot or to create their own Web page. Students will also be able to invent compelling new gaming content...
I am pleased to announce that the BIDS Helper team have just released v1.3 which is our first release with support for SQL Server 2008. With these release we have also improved our international support. All of the features in BIDS Helper still only display in English in their user interfaces. But in previous versions, some of the features of would not work at all in non-English versions of BIDS because of the way we were integrating into BIDS. This has now been fixed and all of the features of BIDS...
Employee Info Starter Kit is an asp.net starter kit, which demonstrates the use of simple CRUD operations for maintaining a company's employee information. It has been developed by me as a guideline for building enterprise level projects. In last few months this starter kit placed in the top chart at code.msdn.microsoft.com for several times regarding the popularity. A very exciting news for all of Employee Info Starter Kit fans is yesterday this starter kit has been placed in the front page of Official...
I suppose I was naive in thinking that once I received my Microsoft MVP award, I could breathe a bit. But we've had sooo much Developer Community activity, I haven't had a chance to breathe, much less blog. I still haven't had an opportunity to blog about the MVP Summit! Needless to say, the MVP Summit was a blast (other than having a digestive track illness, where I missed the last day's keynotes). The best thing about the Summit was the ability to meet and talk directly with the product teams....
I have vastly been neglecting my blogging. So as not to be outdone by Chris Koenig .... I was able to meetup with the organizers of the event, Jason Pluenneke, Curt Wolfe, Boyd Evert, & Dennis Berk several weeks ago. I am personally very excited about this new user group starting up. Partly because of my small part in helping them (one of my roles as the INETA Membership Mentor), but mostly because of my passion for databases. I'm really looking forward to what will be coming out of the group....
I had to search through an audit table to find times when the value changes in a specific field. Considering an audit table DateModified DateTime ID varchar() Quantity decimal Price decimal I wanted to find the rows when Quantity changed for the same ID. I've been able to accomplish that using the ROW_NUMBER function of SQL 2005 Here's the query: select Row_Number() OVER (PARTITION BY ID Order BY ID, DateModified) as RowID, DateModified, Quantity, ID INTO #TempData from AuditTable select a.ID, b.DateModified,...
Microsoft Data Platform Rich data services from SQL Server Using of course SOAP REST and APP within SQL Server SSDS. Live contacts has ADO.NET Connections... SYNC Framework synchronize contacts between endpoints. pulling or GET from url into xml or web service. Metadata file with Vcard info. No invoke needed within browser just service on box? SQL Server Data Services: Application Agility Scales without limits Business Ready SLA Scalable or downgradable to 2005 or 2000? SQL Server Data Services Layers:...
I found this nugget of a tool today. I haven't tried it out yet, but it sounds like one terrific tool. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=8C0F970E-C653-4C15-9E51-6A6CADFCA363&displaylang=en The SQL Server Management Pack monitors the availability and performance of SQL Server 2000 and 2005 and can issue alerts for configuration problems. Availability and performance monitoring is done using synthetic transactions. In addition, the Management Pack collects Event Log alerts...
When we first started the new project there was no question that it would be ASP.NET. It's what I knew and I trusted it to get us there. I wasn't going to risk a startup by playing with Ruby on Rails or PHP when I knew very little about it. I also went directly to SQL Server for the same reasons. But during the first weeks of development we needed to run MySQL to power some software we thought for sure we were going to need to run. That threw a wrench in the plans. Did we really want to run two database...
The November CTP of SQL Server 2008 was released on the connect MSDN Downloads site at the end of last week and when you open up a cube in BIDS you will see a new tab for aggregations. I figured I might give you a bit a walk through what you can expect from this new tab. What this tab does is to let you see all the aggregation designs that relate to a given measure group. It also lets you manage which partitions are using a particular aggregation design. As with the other Analysis Services designers,...
Kent Tegels, of Enjoy Another Sandwich, joined us yesterday to talk about SQL Server and adoption amongst developers and DBAs. During this podcast, Steve Loethen, Microsoft Partner Evangelist, takes on the role as co-host. In this show we talk a lot about CLR Stored Procedures and where they really fit. Kent is really excited about Spatial support in SQL Server 2008 and it definitely comes through when you talk to him. Listen to Kent discuss SQL Server! Technorati tags: SQL Server, HDC, Kent Tegels...
We had a great show yesterday with Bill Vaughn, author and former VB project manager, talking about SQL Server and how developers should look at later versions of SQL Server. Read more about Bill here and BetaV Corporation. If you haven't made the move to SQL Server 2005, Bill discusses with us what is good and bad about the product as a developer and talks through some of the issues you might have during the migration Listen to Bill Vaughn discuss SQL Server! Technorati tags: HDC, Bill Vaughn, SQL...
Here is a little script I find useful. It drops all tables, views and stored procedures in a database. exec sp_MSforeachtable 'DROP TABLE ? PRINT ''? dropped'' 'GO /* Drop all non-system stored procs */declare @name varchar(128)declare @SQL varchar(254) SELECT @name = (select top 1 name FROM sysobjects WHERE type = 'P' And category = 0 order by name)while @name is not nullbegin select @SQL = 'drop procedure [dbo].[' + rtrim(@name) +']'exec (@SQL) print 'Dropped :' + @name SELECT @name = (select top...
I have spent quite some time latetly creating two SQL Server Reporting Services reports that read data from a Web services. Given that I had to solve a couple of non-trivial issues and that I did not find much documentation, I have written a few tips in this article. Tip 1: How to specify the value of the WS complex type parameter? Tip 3: How to pass another dataset as XML to the Web service? Tip 2: How to read XML from a database without truncation of the results? Technorati tags: SQL Server, SSRS,...
Things have been a bit crazy the last couple of days (my wife is pregnant and there have been a few complications), but I wanted to share some links I've come across the last couple of days: Video - Visual Studio 2005 for Database Professionals (MS Channel 9) Implementing Role Based Security with ASP.NET using Windows Authentication and SQL Server (From ScottGu's Blog) Free web site templates - Open Source Web Designs Chris Technorati : .NET, ASP.NET, Database Professionals, Microsoft, Open Source,...
I'm not a DTS wizard by any means. I don't use it a whole lot, and always consider writing a program to move data around instead (Although I rarely do since DTS is usually quicker and can be set up pretty quickly) since I don't find it very intuitive. When I needed to move a list of users from one database to another, either inserting if they didn't exist, or updating information if they did, I wanted to see if DTS had a simple solution. Now I had to do a lot of searching online before I figured...
If you've used Visual Studio, and ever switched to SQL Server (Query Analyzer, for example), you've probably wished for Intellisense. I know I have. Now, Red Gate, makers of the best SQL products (besides the server itself) out there, is offering SQL Prompt for free until September 2006. I've downloaded it, and will be installing it soon, considering I work with SQL stored procedures on a daily basis right now. It adds intellisense to a whole slew of products, including Query Analyzer and Visual...