I got back from New Zealand last night after attending the PASS Community Connection event in Porirua (near Wellington) in New Zealand.
It was a fun weekend as always and congratulations need to go to Nathan Pitcher (PASS Chapter leader from Dunedin) for organising it in conjunction with Adrian, Dave, Amanda, Sue and all the gang from the other local chapters as well as the staff of the local polytechnic where the event was held.
2008-12-08
At the PASS Summit in Seattle this year, I had the pleasure of meeting Ola Hallengren. I’ve exchanged emails with him previously and I do want to highlight the tool he provides for SQL Server backup, integrity check and index optimization. You’ll find details on it at:
2008-12-01
I’ve just posted the interview I did with Buck Woody live at the SQL PASS Summit in Seattle recently. In it, Buck talks about roles within the SQL Server product group and then discusses Powershell in relation to SQL Server. It’s available for download from https://sqldownunder.com .
Enjoy!
2008-12-01
I’ve been really busy lately. A big component of that time has been my involvement with the new Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server 2008 program. I was privileged to be chosen to teach six days of the fifteen day program in the recent alpha rotation. In addition, I decided to attend (and pay !) to attend the rotation, do the exams and qualifying lab.
Well it was quite an experience!
2008-11-28
Another project that Ron Talmage and several other of my colleagues have been working on is a new system views poster for SQL Server 2008. I’m told that it’s going to go out with the December issue of SQL Server Magazine.
I got a copy of this at the PASS summit and it’s excellent. In fact, stocks ran out before the conference even really got started.
Congratulations to all involved.
2008-11-28
I’ve been working on the SQL Server 2008 Upgrade Technical Reference with a number of my colleagues (Ron Talmage, Aaron Johal, Steven Abraham, Allan Hirt, Herbert Albert, Antonio Soto, Joe Webb, Craig Utley, Dejan Sarka, Larry Barnes, Pablo Ahumada, Kathy Blomstrom) and a bunch of great folk from Microsoft (Arvind Rao, George Huey, Richard Waymire, Siva Harinath, Edward Melomed, Deepika Mistry, Fernando Caro, Goldie Chaudhuri, Max Verun, Vijay Tandra Sistla, Tom Michaels, Justin Erickson, Devendra Tiwari, Jingwei Lu, Fernando Azpeitia Lopez, Ketan Duvedi, Lukasz Pawlowski, David Noor, Matt Masson, Karandeep Anand, Jen Witsoe, Suzanne Bonney, Megan Bradley, Tresy Kilbourne, Bronwyn McNutt).
2008-11-28
I’m so glad to see that my colleague Itzik Ben-Gan has his T-SQL Fundamentals book now available. This book has been needed for some time. It’s been updated for SQL Server 2008 and I’m sure it’ll fast become one of the standard SQL Server 2008 references.
Details are here: T-SQL Fundamentals
Originally, there was a companion web site for the book, but I note that it’s now gone.
2008-11-02
SQL Down Under show 39 featuring Kent Tegels is now available for download from https://sqldownunder.com .
In the show, Kent discusses the spatial data type in SQL Server 2008.
FOOTNOTE: Sadly our friend Kent has passed away. RIP Kent and thanks for all the fish.
2008-08-30
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.
We have worked in close collaboration with <a href="https://****https://www.thermometric.com/">Thermometric** **AB</a> with some of our products, but now we concentrate on our own tool for the .NET Framework: <b><a href="https://****https://memprofiler.com/">.NET** **Memory Profiler</a></b>.
We have extensive experience developing using C++, Java and C#. Currently, our main development environment is the .NET Framework.
I’d heard this could be done in Reporting Services 2008 so I tried it and it’s easy. I presume others might find simple instructions helpful:
2008-08-25
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