Sql-Server

Well, TechEd in Australia and New Zealand have come and gone again already this year. Congrats to the content owners Andrew Coates and Darryl Burling for their efforts again this year and for organising good shows.

I had a really busy week as I was teaching a SQL 2k8 for developers precon on Monday and Tuesday, then had to travel to New Zealand on Tuesday night, just for the day. I got into the hotel about 1am, woke up and did my session at 10:45, another one at 2:20pm and then raced out of the venue into a cab and back to the airport to go back to Sydney. I did my session at TechEd Australia on Thursday.

2008-09-14

Hi Folks,

The summit program committee have confirmed I’ll be doing two sessions at the PASS Summit in Seattle in November. I’ve got upgraded versions of both “Avoiding Stored Proc Recompiles” and “A SQL Server DBA’s Guide To CLR Integration” to cover SQL 2k8 changes. The first session also has a little more time allocated as a spotlight session.

I’m really looking forward to the summit this year and hope to see you all there. Summit details are at the summit site.

2008-09-10

Fellow RD and colleague Ken Spencer posted a little while back that he was having good success loading VPC images off flash drives. I thought it was time to try it myself.

The first concept is that not all flash drives are created equal. I went and found fast ones. I ended up with Corsair Flash Voyager GT drives in 16G, which was just big enough to hold the VPC images I was working with. These are extra fast drives that have matched controllers and memory and are rated up to 34 MB/sec. In Australia, they are $119 AUD but I’ve seen them on US sites for about $63 USD recently.

2008-08-30

SQL Down Under show 39 featuring Kent Tegels is now available for download from www.sqldownunder.com .

In the show, Kent discusses the spatial data type in SQL Server 2008.

2008-08-30

You’ve seen the Olympic torch relay. Well PDC has a brain relay with the PDCnoggin. The Regional Directors are an awesome bunch of people that I’m really honoured to be part of. Many get together for the PDC each time it’s held. Our RD lead Kevin Schuler sent me the PDCnoggin to start the relay, probably because I’m about as far away as it can start.

And now it’s on it’s way to the next RD before it makes its way to the PDC in October in LA.

2008-08-29

I fell for this one this week. If you execute the following code in SQLCMD mode, what would you expect the output to be?

:SETVAR PrincipalServer WINSTD2K8BASE

:SETVAR MirrorServer WINSTD2K8BASE\SQLDEV02

:SETVAR WitnessServer WINSTD2K8BASE\SQLDEV03

:CONNECT $(PrincipalServer)

SELECT @@SERVERNAME;

:CONNECT $(MirrorServer)

SELECT @@SERVERNAME;

:CONNECT $(WitnessServer)

SELECT @@SERVERNAME;

I’m guessing you might not have expected:

WINSTD2K8BASE\SQLDEV03

The problem is the lack of a batch separator. What I should have written was this:

2008-08-29

A friend of mine that works for Microsoft pinged me yesterday about how to strip HTML tags out of text he was trying to display in Reporting Services. He just wanted the text displayed. The typical text looked like this:

SciTech Software is a software development and consulting company. The company was founded in 1991 with the intention of creating software for scientific instruments, but our focus has shifted towards creating tools for developers.

2008-08-25

Rob Sanders pointed me today at the Political Compass. I wondered where I sat in the spectrum. Well this is where. I felt quite a cringe reading some of the questions. I wasn’t surprised that I was more libertarian in my views than authoritarian but I was surprised to see myself slightly more to the left than the right.

2008-08-21

I was setting up mirroring at a client site today and started as I usually do by backing up the primary database and restoring it at the mirror. It would not start mirroring and complained that I didn’t have the latest transaction log backup: the mirror database …., has insufficient transaction log data to preserve the log backup chain of the principal database.

Somewhere along the way, the need to have a transaction log backup has crept in. So, to start mirroring, I just now backup the primary database to a file, backup the transaction log to the same file and then restore both on the mirror server. Then it starts fine.

2008-08-18

Fellow RD Tim Huckaby’s company has been really pushing the capabilities of the surface platform and building a really interesting set of apps. Most are still embargoed but this one is now allowed to be shown:

(link no longer available)

I suspect many of you will find it really interesting. Enjoy!

2008-08-17