Sql-Server

I’m loving my Kindle. I seem to be getting through books so much faster. One book that I recently read was Book Review: Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel 2010: Give Your Data Meaning by Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari.

I really liked this book. It provided quite good coverage of PowerPivot use in Excel 2010 and also spent some time mapping the use of PowerPivot to organizational requirements. Marco and Alberto provided more coverage of DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) than I have seen anywhere else, particularly in relation to the CALCULATE verb.

2011-06-01

I’ve never been very keen on the option to add additional clauses in the CREATE SCHEMA statement as I’ve seen lots of issues when scripts are executed manually. You get a different outcome, depending upon how you execute it. For example:

CREATE SCHEMA SomeSchema AUTHORIZATION Someone

CREATE TABLE Blah (Some table definition);

If someone executes the first line on its own, then the second line, the table gets created in their default schema, whereas if they execute the statement as a whole, the table gets created in the new schema. But the one that makes no sense to me is the DCL clause. If I change the above to:

2011-06-01

Since I’ve been posting book reviews, I’ve already had a few questions about the Kindle and what I think about it.

I have the 9" DX with 3G and love it. The 3G is so useful. You don’t need to have a 3G provider account and it just seems to work almost everywhere I travel to (including even China). I’m not sure how Amazon make that work but it’s great. I see a book, click to order it and moments later the book is on my Kindle.

2011-06-01

The other day I mentioned to a friend that you could only perform an UPDATE against a table-valued function in T-SQL when the function was declared as an inline TVF. He basically didn’t understand the point being made at all. That’s not really suprising as the idea of performing an UPDATE against a function does my head in, in terms of everything I ever thought I knew about programming languages.I really don’t think it should even be permitted but regardless, here’s an example:

2011-05-22

Our buddy Ola Hallengren has released another version of his database maintenance tooling. (Free !) I’ve seen quite a lot of people using Ola’s scripts rather than standard database maintenance plans, and with happy outcomes.

In the new version, he has optimized performance in IndexOptimize for databases with large number of indexes or SQL Servers with large number of databases. Ola said that the time for rebuilding or reorganizing indexes is the same, but the time for investigating indexes has been reduced.

2011-05-20

Skype sent down an auto-update today. Looks like it’s now 5.3.0.111. Regardless, every time I started Skype, it said:

Exception EXMLDocError in module ezPMUtils.dll at 000E8FCA

Reboots, etc. didn’t fix it. What did fix it was moving the file ezPMUtils.dll from the folder C:\Program Files (x86)\Skype\Plugin Manager to the folder C:\Program Files (x86)\Skype\Plugin Manager\MLS. Note that at first I tried copying the file to that folder but that did not fix the issue. Moving the file, however, did “fix” the issue in that the error no longer occurs. But of course, the extras manager also no longer functions. It would be really great to see *something* from the people at Skype about this issue.

2011-05-15

This error that I came across today typifies what I hate about error messages that I see in various programs.

I was trying to change a drive letter in the system management console in Windows Server 2008 R2. I had upgraded my drive to a new drive and when I restarted my Windows Server VHD installation, it had reassigned all my drive letters. So I tried to set the Drive D drive letter to Drive L (back to the same drive letter it used to have). I had previously changed the Drive E to Drive G without an issue. But when I tried to make this change, the error message popped up saying “The parameter is incorrect”.

2011-05-12

A team from our company has been working with the SQL product team members and reviewers to produce a series of enterprise data warehouse guidance documents. They cover the following topics:

Chapter 1 - Overview

Chapter 2 - Data Architecture

Chapter 3 - Integration Architecture

Chapter 4 - Database Administration

Chapter 5 - Performance, Monitoring and Tuning

You’ll find them here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh147624.aspx

It’s great to see these documents now published. Enjoy!

2011-05-12

Hi Folks,

Hope this helps someone. After upgrading to IE9 and SQL Server 2008 R2 CU7, I found that I couldn’t access Report Manager anymore. I found that even though I was in the BUILTIN\Administrators group, that I had to specifically add myself to the Content Managers role in Reporting Services for the root folder of Report Manager. (I have no idea why as it used to work ok) NOTE: I had to do this with UAC turned off, otherwise, Site Settings, etc. were not visible. Remember to turn UAC back on if you did this temporarily.

2011-04-20

At our company we teach quite a lot of classes and that means we do a lot of printing. So, we decided to move up to a really serious printer. Whenever we go to a high-end print shop, they all use Fuji Xerox Docucenter printers. So we thought we should get one.

These are truly amazing printers/copiers. The print quality is the best available. The print speed is awesome (and just based on your budget). The capabilties are exactly what we need. The printers are renowned for their reliability and the price of the printers reflects their high-end status.

2011-04-05