Great to see our buddy Ola Hallengren has created an updated version of his database maintenance scripts. Many people use these in place of the database maintenance plans that ship with SQL Server.
Here’s the updated info from Ola and the best part is that they continue to be free:
New Version Available
A new version of the SQL Server Maintenance Solution is now available. The new version supports SQL Server 2012.
2012-04-22
I’ve been working on a team with Roger Doherty building parts of what’s now become the SQL Server 2012 Early Adoption Cook Book.
So, if you work on the bleeding edge of SQL Server and are keen to get your head around what’s coming, this is a seriously good resource.
Time to go and get it.
The material is constructed as a large number of bite-sized pieces. Each presentation is about 15 minutes in length, and each demo is about 5 minutes. And there are lots of them.
2012-02-02
We have a very common customer scenario where the customer decides to upgrade to a new version (in this case let’s say SQL Server 2012). They run upgrade advisor and note that there are a whole lot of problems. They think “Hey that’s way too much to deal with right now. I don’t have time”.
So they don’t deal with them. They upgrade the server to 2012 but leave their db_compat level at a lower level with the intention of dealing with the problems later.
2011-12-24
Well it’s been a while since I’ve posted up a new podcast. (I know, I know).
But I’ve just started a new series for SQL Server 2012. First out of the gate is Roger Doherty (Senior Program Manager in the SQL Server team) with an overview of all the key SQL Server 2012 pillars and enhancements.
You’ll find it here:
https://sqldownunder.com/podcast
Enjoy!
2011-12-21
Over the years, I’ve seen several causes of this error in SQL Server Integration Services but today I came across another one.
You can get this error if you’ve used 3rd party components (particularly data sources) and the licensing for those components has expired.
Hope that helps someone sometime.
2011-12-13
One of the things that I have been pestering the SQL team to do is to name their updates according to what is contained in them. For example, instead of just:
sqlncli.msi
What I’d prefer is that the file was called something like:
SQLServerNativeClient2k8SP1CU3x64.msi
So I normally rename them as soon as I receive them, to avoid confusion in future. However, today I found that doing so caused me a problem. After renaming the file, and installing it, the installation failed with the error:
2011-11-26
It’s great to see that volume 2 of MVP Deep Dives is now available and will be distributed at the PASS summit next week. I’m really sad that I won’t be at the book signing next week but I’d encourage you all to get along, order a copy and have it signed.
A huge thanks has to go to Kalen Delaney for her management of this project and a big thanks to my fellow editors Louis Davidson, Brad McGehee, Paul Nielsen, Paul Randal, and Kimberly Tripp for their efforts. A special mention for Paul Nielsen whose ideas and spirit around volume 1 that have continued into this new volume.
2011-10-06
Part of the value in the ongoing evolution of the T-SQL language is that we are moving further and further towards being declarative rather than prescriptive ie: we are able to tell SQL Server what we want, rather than how to do it. Over time, that raises more and more possibilities for the optimizer to work with us to achieve a better outcome.
For example, note the following query against the AdventureWorksDW database:
2011-09-11
With SQL Server, there often seems to be an over-emphasis on the items that provide bullet points for the marketing brochure. Yet, small but useful changes to the product can make a more profound impact on DBAs/developers than the new items that are highlighted by those bullet points.
One of the things I loved about Reporting Services in SQL Server 2008 R2 is the amount of focus they provided on ease of use. In particular, the addition of data bars, lookup functions, pagination control, rendering targets in expressions, domain scope, etc. made a huge difference to anyone that really needs to build reports.
2011-09-11
I’ve been doing some work with PowerPivot and SharePoint/Excel Services this week. I wanted the user interface to have slicers for:
But I wanted the slicer to be preselected for the current month. There is no property on the slicers to set a default value. I read a number of websites and the suggestion was to use VBA code to set the value. This works but if you want to have the VBA code run at workbook open, you have to create a macro-enabled workbook, and these are not supported by Excel Services.
2011-08-11
