The Bit Bucket

I had the distinct honour (honor) this week of recording a new SQL Down Under podcast with Paul Larson.

Paul is a principal researcher at Microsoft and is one of the keen minds involved in the technologies behind the in-memory tables (Hekaton) and clustered columnstore indexes in SQL Server 2014.

In this podcast, Paul explains his role, and discusses how these core enhancements in SQL Server 2014 have been implemented.

2014-04-04

When you visit websites, you may or may not have noticed the small icons that appear in the title bar areas. These are called Favicons. Here’s an example of one in Chrome:

In Internet Explorer, they appear in several places:

    

They are only a small visible aspect of your website but they greatly improve how professional the site looks in a browser. In IE, they also appear when you open a new page:

2014-02-28

I’ve always thought that the support for spatial data types that was added in SQL Server 2008 was one of the best parts of that release.

In SQL Server 2012, a great set of enhancements were made to the spatial support.

We’ve had lots of interest lately in SQL Server spatial so we’ve been working on a new course that targets it specifically. We’re pleased that we’ve now added a brand new one day SQL Server Spatial Core Skills course to our list of regularly scheduled courses. It covers a wide variety of topics from understanding the data types, to loading data, geolocation, indexing, etc. It also covers the enhancements that were made in 2012.

2014-02-28

I hear comments from people all the time that say it’s not worth posting details on the Connect website as they don’t get actioned anyway. While it can seem a frustrating process, and often take quite a while, improvements do come from there.

At a SQL Saturday event in Brisbane, I was speaking to an attendee (Ian Roberts) who was complaining that DQS was returning what he perceived as the wrong status. More importantly, the results from using the DQS client differed from using the SSIS transform. He described it this way:

2014-02-22

Recently I’ve been working on a system where I had to create a test script that reliably recreated a database each time it was executed. I’ve done this many times before and thought I knew how but I was wrong. It turns out that reliably dropping a database in a script that you run from SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) is harder than it looks. (It’s also harder than it should be).

2014-01-06

In the sessions that I was attending in Redmond yesterday, I was interested to see the presenter discussing the idea of having individual database files in the cloud as some sort of bizarre option that’s now available in SQL Server 2014. I don’t see it as bizarre at all. However, I see two distinct use cases that make complete sense to me:

Overcoming Drive Limitations in Azure-based SQL Virtual Machines

2013-11-20

The Azure team keep rolling out improvements at an amazing pace. Scott Guthrie posted recently about the latest set of changes. Here are the ones that I think are most important for SQL people:

Import/Export Hard Drives

Even though Azure storage accounts can hold a very large amount of data, one of the big questions has always been about how to get that data into the storage account in the first place. That question is now answered because the new Windows Azure Import/Export service lets you ship hard drives directly to the Azure team for uploading. The reverse is also available. If you export a large amount of data to a storage account, you can move it onto a hard drive and have the drive sent to you.

2013-11-14

I had the distinct honour (honor) this week of recording a new SQL Down Under podcast with Dr David DeWitt from the Jim Gray Systems Lab at Microsoft. Anyone that has been to a PASS summit over the last few years would know that David seems to have single-handedly converted morning keynotes into must-attend events.

In this podcast, David explains his role, gives a philosophical view on where we’re at in the database industry and discusses core enhancements in SQL Server 2014.

2013-11-14

Hi Folks,

If you want to get your head around the core improvements coming in the SQL Server 2014 wave, I’m presenting a Technet Live session on November 29th (Australian time).

Registration is here: https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032570709&Culture=en-AU&community=0

I’d love to see you online.

2013-11-14

A while back, we changed the format of our monthly SQL PASS meetings to a virtual format for most meetings, as it makes it easier for a lot of people to attend.

Tomorrow (lunch time Melbourne time), I’m delivering another one on compression technologies in SQL Server. In this session, we’ll take a tour through vardecimal in 2005, then onto row and page compression in 2008, then xVelocity based compression in 2012, and finally looking at what 2014 offers in this regard.

2013-10-07