Sql-Server

I know this post has the potential for religious-level debate but it’s time to make it anyway.

The more I’ve been working with Analysis Services lately, the more it grates on me that the BI community still seem to be the last ones hanging onto table prefixes. They’re not doing “tblSomeTable” but they are using “dim”, “fact”, etc.

Hasn’t the time for this long gone now?

Most of the argument seems to be about finding tables in a list of tables. You could do that via schemas if you really wanted to. But as Adam Machanic pointed out recently, from 2005 onwards many-to-many dimensions blur these lines anyway.

2008-06-16

A few weeks ago I managed to catch the tail end of the reptiles series that Sir David Attenborough created. If you have a spare 3 1/2 minutes, take a look at this video: http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/lifeincoldblood/video.shtml?licbtt08

People seem to think crocodiles are cold, unintelligent eating machines. This video clearly shows they doing something that I’d suggest that more than 99% of humans couldn’t do, even with pen, paper and a calculator with weeks of notice and a library at their disposal. What fascinates me is how they sense when to do this, given the combination of events happens so infrequently. Yet they arrive and set aside their territorial squabbles for just a day or two at exactly the right time.

2008-06-08

I had heard a lot of praise for Scott Ambler’s book: Database Refactoring: Evolutionary Database Design over the past few years. It’s another relatively classic book that I’ve been slow to read.

I often mentioned to people that when I was at a software design review meeting for Microsoft around the DataDude product (Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals), I noticed that Sachin Rekhi from the team was walking around with a copy of this book under his arm. As Sachin was responsible for the refactorings to go into the product and there was only one (rename) at the time, I thought that was a good sign for where the product might head. I wasn’t aware that he had been a contributor to the book. Sachin wrote some of the opening details.

2008-06-07

I haven’t posted up any book reviews recently so it’s time to catch up a bit. For some reason, it had taken me ages to get to read Kalen’s latest book in the Inside SQL Server series: Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2005 - Query Tuning and Optimization.

As expected, it’s a great piece of work. I very much enjoyed the chapters written by other authors as well, particulary those from Adam Machanic and Craig Freedman. Ron Talmage, Sunil Agarwal and Lubor Kollar have also made strong contributions to this work.

2008-06-07

This is another one of those books I picked up in an airport when I ran out of reading material while travelling. One of the key criteria I applied when choosing the book was whether or not I’d finish reading it by the time we landed. We had a bit of a delay boarding so I’d definitely finished it by the time we’d landed. It’s in the “quick reads” series and it is just that.

2008-06-07

Hi Folks,

I’ve posted show 36 for SQL Down Under with guest SQL CAT team leader Lubor Kollar up at the site ( www.sqldownunder.com ). In the show, Lubor discusses the SQL CAT team and some SQL Server 2008 features such as the resource governor and compression.

Enjoy!

2008-06-07

It was great to see an announcement from Francesco Ballena today that his VB to VB.net conversion tool has finally hit the market. It’s at www.vbmigration.com and looks like the sort of tool that was needed when VB.NET was first released. It sure would have avoided a lot of angst in the community. I was particularly impressed by the quote at http://www.vbmigration.com/Blog/default.aspx . I’d have to say I could definitely relate to the sentiment expressed in it. Congratulations Francesco!

2008-05-28

Hi Folks,

I was so pleased today to finally get my new geek “toy” installed. I bought a Rode Podcaster mike a while back but didn’t get a chance to install it till today. I love the balanced arm that lets me get it positioned so well while still able to type. And then I can just push it out of the way. It’s a broadcast quality mike and is in a shock mount. I’ve already noticed a major difference in the sound quality, including vastly reduced background noise. I’ve got a pop-filter for it which I might end up using too.

2008-05-19

I love seeing people start to undertake research work in computing areas. There aren’t nearly enough. Oscar Trimboli told me today that he’s undertaking predoctoral work at present and his topic is the “Impact of Software as a Service on Australian Independent Software Vendors”. Oscar is keen to recruit ISVs who are either traditional ISVs or SaaS (Software as a Service) ISVs (or a combination) that have their management and marketing decision making based in Australia. If that sounds like you, I’d encourage you to get in touch with Oscar (Oscar_trimboli @ hotmail.com) and answer his survey questions. Alternately, if you have strong opinions about this space, I’m sure he’d love to hear them.

2008-04-21

I’ve been travelling a lot lately and one of the problems that always comes up is how to share a single Internet connection in a hotel room with my wife Mai who’s usually travelling with me. (She does remote SQL Server DBA work).

My colleague Fernando Guerrero suggested I try his USB-to-Ethernet adapter (a SiteCom one) and use Internet Connection Sharing. I installed the drivers for the SiteCom device (which is a good small size too) and configured ICS and it just worked. I thought this was excellent until Tuesday last week when the latest update for Vista came down from Microsoft.com. (I’m pretty sure that’s what did it). Along with rebooting my machine in the middle of the day (I’d so love to discuss that with the windows update author), my ICS no longer worked.

2008-04-13