The Bit Bucket

One thing about being around the industry since the days when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, is that you can get to be a little philosophical about the industry at times. There are two things that I’ve been thinking about again today, where we seem to be in total denial. One is EULAs; the other is passwords.

Has anyone tested EULAs in court lately? It’s hard to imagine most of them being very enforceable. More importantly, does anyone EVER read them? I was amused a few years back when I was installing an application, clicked over the EULA and the application said “how could you possibly have read that in 1.076 seconds?”. That’s a fair cop.

2011-01-19

Hi Folks,

I’ve been working with SQLCMD mode again today and one thing about it always bites me. If I execute a script like:

:CONNECT SERVER1

SELECT @@VERSION;

:CONNECT SERVER2

SELECT @@VERSION;

:CONNECT SERVER3

SELECT @@VERSION;

I’m sure I’m not the only person that would be surprised to see all three SELECT commands executed against SERVER3 and none executed against SERVER1 or SERVER2. If you think that’s odd behavior, here’s where to vote: https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/611144/sqlcmd-connect-to-a-different-server-should-be-an-implicit-batch-separator#details

2011-01-17

There was a short discussion on the SQL Down Under mailing list this morning about screen resolutions for working with the SQL Server tools. In particular, the issue was about how unusable the tools are on the 1366x768 resolution notebooks that now seem to be the most common. While finding a notebook with an appropriate resolution is obviously the answer at this time, I started thinking that the product itself needs to address this.

2011-01-17

One of the discussion lists that I participate in, had a brief discussion this morning about whether or not it’s possible to perform log shipping between differernt versions of SQL Server. Specifically, can you do log shipping between SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008?

SQL Server does support restoring earlier version databases on later versions of the product. The databases get upgraded along the way when you perform restores of databases. SQL Server also allows you to restore transactions logs from earlier versions of the product but (as Robert Davis points out in the comments below), the upgrade doesn’t happen until recovery of the database occurs. And that’s why you can’t use STANDBY mode in this situation.

2011-01-12

Hi Folks,

A year or two back, I was involved in a project with my colleagues (led by Ron Talmage) to construct an Upgrade Technical Reference for SQL Server 2008. It seemed to be well received.

We’ve updated it now to SQL Server 2008 R2 and it’s just been published. You’ll find it on this web site: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/product-info/why-upgrade.aspx  You’ll need to click on the Upgrade Guide link towards the middle of the RHS under the “Why Upgrade” whitepaper.

2011-01-08

One of the biggest pushes I was trying to make while on the PASS board was to help grow the organization into other areas of the world, and probably a little out of the organization’s comfort zone. We in western English-speaking countries often totally underestimate the passion for SQL Server and the number of professionals that work with it around the world. In my time on the board, I was both amazed and privileged to see the types of events already occurring and the vast number of attendees. Often these numbers simply dwarfed the typical numbers of attendees in more familiar locations.

2010-10-09

One of my colleagues, Itzik Ben-Gan is known to most in the SQL Community, particularly for his passion around the T-SQL language.

He’s recently written an amazing blog post that describes why these functions are needed, along with a plea for helping promote the ideas to the Microsoft product group via the Connect site.

Anyone with an interest in T-SQL should read the post as, by itself, it provides great insights into the language and the possibilities that some subtle changes could bring.

2010-10-09

I also got an email from one of our Brazilian colleagues today. Diego Norgare was telling me about the upcoming Worldwide Online TechDay that will be running on October 30th. Sessions are running in both Portuguese and also in English.

(Link no longer available)

I was particularly intrigued by the session on liposuction for your database.

2010-10-09

I love the data profiling task that was added to SSIS in SQL Server 2008. It allows you to get a profile of the data in a table - this includes things like what are potential candidate keys, what length are the data values in each column, what percentage of rows in a table are null in each column, what is the distribution of values in the data, etc. etc.

2010-10-06

Every so often, Microsoft sends MVPs a set of MSDN subscriptions that we can give to someone that would benefit from them. I have found it to be very interesting in past years and have to say that the most pleased I ever felt giving these away has been to students who are struggling to get into the workforce for some reason (one with a notable disability comes immediately to mind) or to developers that are just down on their luck for some reason.

2010-09-27