The Bit Bucket

Given my interest in science, I’m ashamed to say that I’ve only just got around to reading Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life”. What prompted me to read it this time was watching two episodes of “The Genius of Charles Darwin” while flying across to the U.S. It’s an excellent documentary by Richard Dawkins. Dawkins can see overbearing at times but in this series, he’s measured, accurate and inspiring. In the documentary, he showed one of his most prized possessions: a first edition copy of this book.

2009-10-31

Our buddy Kevin Kline has started a travel meme to provide ideas for people travelling to PASS, given many don’t travel very often. He’s after some good solid travel tips. I’m one of the people he called out so here are a few that come to mind immediately:

1. Delays and mishaps occur. If you don’t allow enough time between flight connections, etc. then you are asking for problems, regardless of what the airline says. For example, I *never* allow an international to domestic connection through Los Angeles of less than three hours and prefer four hours. The further you’re travelling from, the more you can get delayed. Airlines will let you book a two hour connection there. Don’t do it. If you’re feeling frustrated with delays, get over it.

2009-10-26

I’ve had quite a few requests from people for some form of searchability for the content in the SQL Down Under shows. We’ve looked into having show transcripts posted and after a few false starts, I’m pleased to announce that they are starting to come online now in the “Previous Shows” section at: http://www.sqldownunder.com . 

While not perfect, they certainly can help. If you are reading them and find any glaring errors, please just let us know and we’ll fix them. We’re working backwards through the shows and the first three transcripts are available now.

2009-10-25

I missed out on getting a copy of this book when Ed Katibah (aka Spatial Ed) was giving them out at his spatial session at a recent conference but I made a mental note to buy a copy and read it. I’ve finally got to do so.

This is a truly excellent book. I think the title belies the contents. I hadn’t been in a hurry to read it as I thought it would just be a “beginner” level book on using spatial data in SQL Server 2008. How wrong I was. This book covers so much of what you need to know to make effective use of spatial data. It spends time on explaining spatial concepts, proceeds to describe the data types and later thoroughly covers all the methods offered by the types. But the real bonus is the in depth coverage of how to use the spatial types in a practical way. Alastair spends time covering geocoding data, building a SQLCLR-based function for geocoding, building procs to return data, building a web handler to offer spatial feeds, building mashups with both GoogleMaps and VirtualEarth using the feeds, etc.

2009-09-30

I was honored to get asked by Itzik Ben-Gan to write part of this book, along with him, Ed Katibah (Spatial Ed), Isaac Kunen, Dejan Sarka and Roger Wolter. I’m even more pleased that it’s now available, all 832 pages of it!

Needless to say, I do recommend this one :-)

2009-09-24

I’ve been slow to get shows out this year but am pleased to announce that show 44 with guest SQL Server MVP Simon Sabin is now available for download from www.sqldownunder.com .

In this show, Simon discusses full text indexing in SQL Server plus some thoughts on learning MDX and on technical book writing.

Enjoy!

2009-08-30

Gail from the documentation team told me today that the Plan Caching whitepaper I’ve been working on for SQL Server 2008 is now available at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee343986.aspx

Thanks so much to my colleagues Andy Kelly, Itzik Ben-Gan and Eladio Rincion, and Microsoft team members Adam Prout, Campbell Fraser and Xin Zhang for tech-reviewing it.

It’s an update of the whitepaper “Batch compilation, Recompilation and Plan Caching Issues in SQL Server 2005” by Arun Marathe, targeted at SQL Server 2008.

2009-08-04

Just heard that Windows 7 has been released to manufacturing.

Congratulations to the team at Microsoft for this milestone!

2009-07-23

In the last rotation of the Microsoft Certified Masters for SQL Server 2008, I had the pleasure of having Jimmy May in the class. One topic we covered was on disk partition alignment and as I knew Jimmy had been working on the whitepaper, I got him to talk to the class on that topic.

The whitepaper is finally out and I note that another SQL friend Denny Lee is the co-author. You can download it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=5b343389-f7c9-43d0-9892-ddcf55890529

2009-07-05

I’ve had a number of people tell me over the years that they aren’t surprised when I say “Recommended” at the end of any book review I write, as I never seem to say “Not Recommended”. I suppose that comes under the heading of “if you can’t say anything good about something, don’t say anything”. So, I’m going to temporarily change tack with this book.

For a long time, I’ve wished there were more books tackling the thorny topic of refactoring databases. Most people would consider Scott Ambler’s book to be a seminal work in this area but while I loved the fact that he wrote on the topic, I found the methods he used to be way too generic for SQL Server developers and DBAs. For example, where persisted calculated columns could be used, Scott would use triggers. I’d been eagerly awaiting any other books in this area.

2009-07-03