The Bit Bucket

I’m really impressed by the rate that the Azure team is making and releasing enhancements. Scott Guthrie posted about these again recently.

The following items in the announcement were ones that I think can be useful to those with an interest in SQL Server:

* General availability of Azure VMs. While we’ve had SQL Database and SQL Reporting available as services in Azure, we don’t have the other parts of the database platform. With Azure VMs, you can spin up a VM to run SQL Server.

2013-04-19

It’s great to see the constant roll-out of capabilities across the Azure platform.

One in particular that many have been waiting for is Active Directory. Scott Guthrie posted today that it’s now available for production use. This is particularly significant and also enables options for on-premises directory sync and federation. If you have been using Office365, you have already been using Azure AD.

Scott also mentioned that they are about to open a preview of a link from OAuth 2 (or OpenID) to Azure AD. That will enable you to use alternate credentials (such as Twitter credentials) to authenticate against Azure AD.

2013-04-09

I posted the other day about a hotfix that’s needed after you apply SQL Server 2012 SP1 CU3, to still be able to open or edit SSIS projects or database maintenance plans in SSDT.

However, I found that after I applied CU3 and the hotfix, that all my stored credential details for SQL Servers was gone. That was particularly nasty for all my Azure-related logons. I had to set them up again.

2013-04-09

One of the common objections that comes up when talking to people about storing their data in Azure, is that “we are not allowed to do it”. In so many cases, that simply isn’t true, or it’s true for a small part of the overall data. In other cases, it’s a case of no-one wanting to be seen to be the first in their industry to do so, for some perceived liability reasons. Again, most of these are unfounded.

2013-04-08

Cumulative Update 3 for SP1 for SQL Server 2012 caused a number of problems with SSIS packages. This also applies to database maintenance plans as they are also SSIS packages.

After applying the update, you could get this error when opening an SSIS package:

The type initializer for ‘Microsoft.DataTransformationServices.Design.SharedIcons’ threw an exception.
Value of ’null’ is not valid for ‘stream’. (System.Drawing)

If you edit a maintenance plan, you could get this error:

2013-04-06

In Melbourne, it was the coldest morning of the year so far but I didn’t mind getting up at 5:30AM to record an interview with Marco Russo. Marco is well-known in the SQL BI community for his writing and presentations.

SQL Down Under show 58 is now online: https://podcast.sqldownunder.com

In this show, Marco discusses concepts and experiences from working with tabular data models in SQL Server Analysis Services.

Enjoy!

2013-04-01

I was one of the speakers today at the 6 Weeks of Azure bootcamp event in Sydney today. During the day, as well as speaking, we have an “unconference”. There’s a lot of discussion on whatever the attendees want to discuss.

One of the offline questions I got today though was about how to hook up Azure Mobile Services to an existing Windows Azure SQL Database rather than using the one that Mobile Services can auto-create. While getting that to work, we learned a few things:

2013-03-23

Hi Folks,

I posted a day or so back about the whitepaper on plan caching and recompilation being published.

Today I had a query from a reader and found that the editor has messed up an example.

For example, I had this example of a query that’s almost identical but where the query plan would be different:

SELECT ProductID  
FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail  
GROUP BY ProductID  
HAVING AVG(OrderQty) > 5  
ORDER BY ProductID;

SELECT productid  
FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail  
GROUP BY ProductID  
HAVING AVG(OrderQty) > 5  
ORDER BY ProductId;

“Helpfully” the editor changed it to:

2013-03-19

Hi Folks,

Over the last year, I’ve been working on an update to the whitepaper Plan Caching in SQL Server 2008 as a background task.

A great group of reviewers have been involved at various stages during the process. Thank you to Paul White, Andrew Kelly, Kalen Delaney, and Rubén Garrigós from the SQL community, along with Leigh Stewart and Jack Li from the SQL Server product team for sharing your knowledge and ideas.

2013-03-16

Hi Folks,

I got to record another podcast today. Show 57 features guest SQL Server MVP Karen López. Karen is well-known in the SQL Community, on her blog and is prolific on Twitter.

In the show, Karen discusses her experiences related to data modelling, including tools, round-tripping, traceability, and model-driven development. She also covers some common mistakes she encounters in this area. Later in the show Karen discusses the challenges in database refactoring, her interest in all things to do with space, and her interest in the open data movement.

2013-03-12