The Bit Bucket

Several of my customers lately have mentioned that when they’ve added a node to a Windows failover cluster for supporting an Availability Group, that they’ve ended up with an outage because the non-shared drives have been taken offline by the installation process. All commented that it didn’t use to happen on Windows Server 2008 R2 and they were taken by surprise when it happened on Windows Server 2012 R2.

I mentioned it in the MVP list and one of my US buddies Allan Hirt said that we need to uncheck the relevant checkbox during the install.

2016-05-02

Hi Folks,

One of the intriguing options that’s coming as part of SQL Server 2016 is StretchDB. I’ve been spending some time working with it and learning about it, and I’ve ended up with lots of questions.

It was great to get an opportunity to speak to Joe Yong to get all my questions sorted.

Hope you’ll enjoy it too. You’ll find it here:

SQL Down Under Podcast

2016-05-01

Last week I had an opportunity to record a new podcast with Kasper DeJonge from the SQL Server Analysis Services team. Kasper has also been working on Power Pivot and many other areas.

SQL Server 2016 is lining up to be a great release for Analysis Services with significant enhancements for both tabular and multi-dimensional data models.

I hope you enjoy the show. You’ll find it here:

https://podcast.sqldownunder.com

2016-04-09

I spend a lot of my time working with ISVs (or software houses) and with individual developers. For SQL Server to have a long-term future, we need to be appealing to more and more new developers, to get them to understand that SQL Server is a great platform for building their applications above.

One of the most important aspects of this right up front, is making it really frictionless to get started with SQL Server.

2016-04-04

Hi Folks,

I recently got to record a new podcast with Riccardo Muti and Chris Finlan from the SQL Server Reporting Services team.

Over recent years, Reporting Services seemed to be in a rut without forward momentum.

2016 however promises to be a really big year for Reporting Services.

You’ll find the show here: SQL Down Under Podcast

Enjoy!

2016-03-13

In recent months, I’ve been brushing up my R skills. I’ve had a few areas of interest in this:

* R in Azure Machine Learning

* R in relation to Power BI and general analytics

* R embedded (somewhat) in SQL Server 2016

As a client tool, I’ve been using RStudio. It’s been good and very simple but it’s a completely separate environment. So I was excited when I saw there was to be a preview of new R tooling for Visual Studio.

2016-03-10

Hi Folks,

My series of articles for SQL Server Magazine continues. Last month, I started a short series about a large database that needed to go on a diet. This month, I look at a bit of the internals of row and page compression, to see what happens with you use this.

http://sqlmag.com/database-administration/data-tales-7-case-database-diet-part-2

Enjoy!

2016-03-09

We normally run our Power BI Core Skills class as the 2nd day of the week in our 5 day BI Core Skills.

We’ve had extra demand for the Power BI day so we’ve added an extra one in Melbourne on May 10th. Details are here:

SQL Down Under Training

Early bird pricing ends April 26th.

2016-03-05

I love it when I get queries that are actually easy to answer.

Today, one of my developer friends asked me if it was better to use BETWEEN or to use >= and <= when filtering for a range of dates.

From a logic perspective, I like the idea that a single predicate expresses your intent rather than needing two predicates to do the same. For example, consider the following two queries:

2016-03-02

Hi Folks,

My next article for SQL Server Magazine is out now. I’ve decided that New Year is the time that most people discuss diets and databases don’t have to be an exception.

I’m discussing one large client who had a database that really needed to be trimmed down. That involved a whole range of mechanisms and the outcome was great: major size reduction and significant performance improvement.

I’ve decided to discuss this across a series of articles, each covering part of the story about how the reductions were produced and the rationale for each.

2016-01-28