The Bit Bucket

I always say that one of the things that I love about consulting or mentoring work is that I see things (mostly code) that I would have never have thought of, both good and bad. You could spend all day dreaming up bizarre ideas and never come close to the ones that I just happen to come across.

A good example of this was a site I was at a while back where every table had a GUID name. Yes, I’m talking about tables named dbo.[3B38AB7E-FB80-4E56-9E5A-6ECED7A8FA17] and so on. They had tens of thousands of tables named this way. Query plans were close to unreadable.

2015-05-28

Hi Folks, on the 5th June (yes that’s Friday next week), I’m running a Data Camp day for the local Microsoft team. It’s being held at Cliftons in the city.

We’ve got four topics for  the day:

• Azure SQL DB
• Azure DocumentDB
• Azure Machine Learning
• Azure Stream Analytics

If you want to get your head around any/all of these, we’d love to see you there. Places are limited but you must register and can do so here: https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032627085&Culture=en-AU&community=0

2015-05-25

The team at Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA) have pushed out some new content that’s relevant to database people.

First, if you’re wondering about using Azure for SQL Server, the Jumpstart for SQL Server in Azure VMs is worth a look. Longer term, I suspect we’ll mostly end up using SQL Server as a platform service (Azure SQL DB) but in the short-term, implementing it in a VM will be more common as it’s probably both easier when migrating existing applications and a little more familiar to most.

2015-05-24

I find many of the MVA courses great for quickly getting across concepts or areas that I haven’t worked with before.

This month, the local MVP program has asked me to highlight the following MVA courses. The first two in particular look useful for SQL folk. The third one provides good background:

Azure IaaS Technical Fundamentals

Deep Dive into Networking Storage and Disaster Recovery Scenarios

Embracing Open Source Technologies to Accelerate and Scale Solutions

2015-04-18

Hi Folks, we’ve been working hard on a new Azure Machine Learning course.

Come and spend a solid day finding out why Azure Machine Learning should be part of your arsenal.

Our first Melbourne offering of Azure Machine Learning Core Skills is 31st July. I’d love to see you there:

SQL Down Under Training

2015-04-15

Have you looked into Azure Machine Learning as yet?

If not, this might help. It’s a free eBook on getting started with it. Click the book to follow the link:

2015-04-14

Was speaking with a customer today about an issue where they were receiving “Out of Memory” exceptions when trying to load a 32 bit PostgreSQL ODBC driver from within an SSIS package.

When the package was run from the command line using Dtexec, all was fine. When the package was run from within the SSIS Catalog, the same package refused to run. They had presumed it was some issue to do with 32 bit vs 64 bit drivers. The customer resolved it by installing the latest 64 bit PostgreSQL ODBC drivers.

2015-04-10

Recently, I wrote about one of the issues with the Invoke-SqlCmd commandlet where it sets the ApplicationName when you use the parameter that should set the host.

Fellow MVP Ben Miller sent me a copy of the Invoke-SqlCmd3 that they were using. It was much better.

I then realized that there were many other options missing from these commandlets (such as options for Database Mirroring and Availablity Groups) and so I set about improving it.

2015-04-03

One of the common challenges that arises in many applications is around how to optimize the SQL Server performance of dynamic search queries. For example, we’ve all seen applications with screens like this:

Often, there will be many, many more fields to be searched. What I often hear from developers is that there is no way to optimize the query because you don’t know in advance which options the user will choose. While this is partly true, it assumes that human behaviour is much more random than it really is. Let me explain:

2015-04-01

The Power BI team have released details of their March update to the standalone Power BI designer.

The first thing I noticed is just how much faster the tool operates. The blog post mentioned performance enhancements but I really, really noticed them.

One particular enhancement  that I wanted to call out was the additional of a connector for Google Analytics. I’ve been trying that this morning and have found it really easy to use. All the standard categories appear as available sets of data:

2015-03-27