Sql-Server

It was great to see a friend (and former colleague) of mine, Aaron Saikovski being appointed as the first Groove MVP for Australia.

Congratulations Aaron!

2008-04-03

Each year the Microsoft Regional Director program issues Global Reach Impact Awards. It was great to see seven from our company receiving awards:

Gold Awards - Fernando Guerrero, Richard Hundhausen, Greg Low, Mauro Sant’Anna

Silver Awards - John Alexander, Shervin Shakibi

Bronze Award - Ken Spencer

The Impact Award represents Microsoft’s respect for the work these Regional Directors do in evangelizing Microsoft technologies and products worldwide. That’s an oustanding result for our company. Congratulations also to all other Regional Directors receiving awards this year.

2008-04-02

If there’s any doubt that interest in all things SQL Server related just continues to grow, the latest download statistics from my SQL Down Under show show just how fast.

I’m really excited that last month was the first time we broke the 30,000 downloads per month barrier. Onwards and upwards!

2008-04-01

I was on a flight from Houston to Washington via Dallas today. We seemed to sit forever on the tarmac in Dallas, in fact just over 1.5 hours from leaving gate to taking off. The captain was warning that if he had to stop and restart the engines one more time, we’d have had to return to the terminal for more fuel.

However, the good thing was that I finished reading Down Under by Bill Bryson. I’m a real fan of Bill’s writing and this book is no exception. It provides a wonderful and very humourous summary of his trips throughout a good chunk of Australia. Bill has a way of providing insights that is sorely lacking in most authors. I found myself laughing out loud many times while reading it. I also enjoyed the extra chapter at the end about his time growing up in the U.S. in the 1950s.

2008-03-31

I had to go through the signup procedure for direct account access for Bank of America today. It reminded me of how much nonsense gets perpetrated and how it’s always done supposedly in the name of security. In the end, it usually achieves the exact opposite of what they are trying to achieve.

First, you need to generate a digital certificate to use. The bank has a sign-up site for this. After entering my details, I was greeted with:

2008-03-26

Sorry to all for the delay in working these out but we’ve now posted details of the sessions for CodeCampOz in 2008. You can view them on the “2008” tab at the code camp oz website.

There’s a really great lineup of sessions. We also have two extra special guests: Jonas Folleso from Norway and Fernando Guerrero from Spain.

This year, there is also a precon event on Friday afternoon prior to the main event on Saturday and Sunday.

2008-03-20

I’ve been playing around with full text search in SQL Server 2008 and was intrigued by the DMF sys.dm_fts_parser(). It allows you to see the result of the word-breaking occurring within full text search. If you execute the query:

select * from sys.dm_fts_parser(’“Hello Greg. How are you? I haven’’t seen you for a while.”’,1033,0,0);

It returns the following data (along with some other columns):

occurrence  special_term     display_term
-—————————————– 1           Exact Match      hello
2           Exact Match      greg
10          End Of Sentence  END OF FILE
11          Noise Word       how
12          Noise Word       are
13          Noise Word       you
21          End Of Sentence  END OF FILE
22          Noise Word       i
23          Exact Match      haven’t
24          Exact Match      seen
25          Noise Word       you
26          Noise Word       for
27          Noise Word       a
28          Noise Word       while
36          End Of Sentence  END OF FILE

2008-03-20

I was really sad to hear that Arthur C Clarke died today. For those that enjoyed his work, it’s worth watching his “goodbye” video he made on the occasion of his birthday in December 2007. He knew at that time that the end was near. I particularly liked his choice of a Rudyard Kipling poem to read at the end. You’ll find the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLXQ7rNgWwg

2008-03-19

One of the things I really don’t like in the Declarative Management Framework is the term “On change - prevent” for the execution mode. Given we don’t have INSTEAD OF DDL triggers and only AFTER DDL triggers, we can’t *prevent* these things at all. All we can do is roll them back after they happen. I think the name should be changed to “On change - rollback” to reflect what’s actually happening.

2008-03-19

Hi Folks,

SQL Down Under show 35 with guest SQL Server DPE Evangelist Roger Doherty is now available for download from www.sqldownunder.com .

In the show, Roger discusses what developers are looking forward to in SQL Server 2008.

Enjoy!

Regards,

Greg

2008-03-14