I spend a lot of time working with software houses, helping them to make their applications work well with SQL Server. One thing that I’ve heard loud and clear over the years is that most software houses won’t write a single line of code that will only run on the enterprise edition of SQL Server, because they are not prepared to limit their potential pool of customers to those running enterprise edition.
2014-12-12
We’ve been so excited having local data centres for Microsoft Azure.
The one disappointment has been that Office 365/Power BI has still been based out of Singapore data centres. That has an effect on people that worry about data sovereignty and it also means that we’ve had higher latency on the connections.
But no more! I was really pleased to read an article in the newspaper yesterday that mentioned that Microsoft is moving Office 365 to the Australian data centres. The article claims this is happening in April next year. I can only hope it’s true as this will be a really good outcome thanks Microsoft!
2014-12-10
Learning to write DAX queries is important in the new world of tabular data models. DAX Studio is the best environment right now for learning to write and test DAX queries.
Today Darren Gosbell announced on his blog that version 2.0 of DAX Studio is out the door. This is a superb effort and one that you should both applaud and use.
The biggest improvements seem to be around the UI. It looks very impressive but there is much more to it than just the UI.
2014-12-09
I’ve ended up with a number of Microsoft figurines over the years. It all started with Nine Guy, then went on to the whole Source Force team:
It’s been interesting to see how they’ve evolved over the years. Here are the SQL Server ones:
SQL Server 2005 had a demure little lady that was all Red. She morphed into an orange version by SQL Server 2008 (shown here with me at TechEd USA) in 2008. Later she took on a Neo look from the Matrix, and now there’s a guy, the Query Controller.
2014-12-06
Looking forward to seeing the Perth locals at the SQL Server user group this Thursday night at 5PM.
The topic that the group has chosen is an Introduction to SQL Server High Availability Options.
It’s on at the BHP offices at 125 St Georges Terrace. If you are coming, please ping Jenny to let her know.
I look forward to seeing many of you there.
2014-11-25
I had a lot of good feedback about my post the other day about how to query group membership for a given login.
One tricky question was about how you could let a specfic user be able to find the group membership for another login, without the user being a sysadmin to run the code. Doing that is a bit trickier but can be done by creating a certificate, a login from the certificate, then assigning permissions to that login, and finally applying a digital signature to the procedure using the certificate.
2014-11-19
In a previous post, I was talking about how changing data types from the older ntext, text, and image data types to the current nvarchar(max), varchar(max), and varbinary(max) data types doesn’t achieve the same outcome as having defined the tables that way in the first place, unless you subsequently rebuild the tables.
I also had a question about how you can find out which columns still have pointers to out of row data. Unfortunately, finding that out doesn’t seem so easy and it would vary row by row in the table.
2014-11-17
The regional MVP folk have organised another MVP ComCamp event. Sessions are available in 5 different languages and many sessions are being broadcast. (Most are English) There are two tracks:
If you’d like to attend any of these events, you’ll find more detail here: http://mvp.microsoft.com/en-us/comcamp.aspx
The list of sessions is here:
Live Webcasts Nov 17 - Nov 21, 2014
56 live webcasts, in 2 tracks, featuring MVP speakers will be broadcasted during ComCamp Week, covering a wide range of topics about Office applications and Cloud.
2014-11-17
I’ve run into a situation at a number of sites where the following occurs
One of the causes for this situation is related to how the data in these columns is stored. The ntext, text, and image data types defaulted to having their data stored out of row. The row contained a pointer to where the data was located. By comparison, the nvarchar(max), varchar(max), and varbinary(max) data types default to storing data in-row where possible.
2014-11-17
OK, been doing a bunch of MVA courses as part of the local Microsoft AU dev div heroes campaign. I need to find 5 Australian citizens who have done at least one of the courses below, and get their email addresses.
You don’t have to do the whole of any badge. For example, you could do SQL Server 1, SQL Server 2, or SQL Server 3.
Anyone up for it? Or do all of the ones for a badge for a figurine. They are cute. There are some t-shirts on offer too.
2014-11-16
