Sql-Server

There are a number of key books that I’ve missed reading over the years, in areas that interest me. Recently, I’ve been fixing that. One that is always discussed is The Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit by Joy Mundy and Warren Thornthwaite from the Kimball Group.

I would have to say I enjoyed reading it. It is a large book at over 700 pages and a couple of inches thick so it took a while to get through.

2008-07-09

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

I’ve 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 refactoring (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

Hi Folks,

I’ve posted show 36 for SQL Down Under with guest SQL CAT team leader Lubor Kollar up at the site ( https://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

Hi Folks,

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

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

Enjoy!

Regards,

Greg

2008-03-14

Hi Folks,

SQL Down Under show 34 with guest SQL Server MVP Geoff Hiten is now available for download from https://sqldownunder.com . In this show, Geoff discusses SQL Server clustering, SANs and magic SAN dust.

Enjoy!

Regards,

Greg

2008-03-07

Hi Folks,

SQL Down Under show 33 with SQL Server MVP Allen White discussing the automating of administration using SMO and Powershell is available for download from https://sqldownunder.com .

Enjoy!

Regards,

Greg

2008-02-29

Darren Neimke posted a link to some great content today from his colleague Steven Nagy. Steven had done a bunch of posts on getting started with Notification Services.

It’s a great set of posts but it’s important to get the message out that in the next version of the product, Notification Services isn’t just deprecated, it’s gone. It isn’t wise to use it for any new development work unless you’re intending to stay on SQL Server 2005 for the life of your application.

2008-02-24

Hi Folks,

SQL Down Under show 32 with SQL Server product group member Dr Michael Rys is now available for download from https://sqldownunder.com . In this show, Michael discusses why XML matters in SQL Server, provides an overview and tips on the support provided in earlier versions and discusses the changes upcoming in SQL Server 2008.

Enjoy!

Regards,

Greg

2008-02-23