The Bit Bucket

With each update to Azure, it’s been getting easier to implement options for SQL Server. One of the challenges for the teams that write documentation and training is this rate of change.

For a long time, Availability Groups weren’t able to be implemented properly on Azure as there was a limit of one IP address per VM. That problem was fixed some months back.

I recently needed to set up Availability Groups wholly within Azure. I followed the documentation here:

2014-06-21

Gartner tends to publish magic quadrant leader boards related to a variety of technology areas.

It was interesting to note that the latest leader board has Azure moved up into the Leader quadrant. The only other player in that quadrant is Amazon. That’s a big step up for the team, given the IaaS business really only went to GA in April last year.

You’ll find details here: Gartner Report

2014-05-31

Customers used to complain that the tooling for creating BI projects (Analysis Services MD and Tabular, Reporting Services, and Integration services) has been based on earlier versions of Visual Studio than the ones they were using for their other work in Visual Studio (such as C#, VB, and ASP.NET projects).

To alleviate that problem, the shipment of those tools has been decoupled from the shipment of the SQL Server product. In SQL Server 2014, the BI tooling isn’t even included in the released version of SQL Server. This allows the team to keep up-to-date with the releases of Visual Studio. A little while back, I was really pleased to see that the Visual Studio 2013 update for SSDT-BI (SQL Server Data Tools for Business Intelligence) had been released. Unfortunately, they then had to be withdrawn.

2014-05-25

One quiet addition to the tools that have been released recently was the set of project templates for creating BI projects (Integration Services, Analysis Services, Reporting Services) within Visual Studio 2013.

It is really great to be able to use the same version of these as we are using for other code development in Visual Studio.

Thanks to the team for updating them so quickly!

2014-04-04

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