Sql-Server

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

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