The Bit Bucket

While we were at TechEd in LA, Mai and I got to catch up with an old friend:

2009-06-08

I had a query from an attendee of my full-text indexing session at TechEd US. He asked how he can find out which documents (or how many) still need to be processed. I did a little investigation on this and here’s my best guess:

<WARNING: Undocumented and potentially just a guess!>

1. Query for the objectid of your full-text index. You can do this by:

select * from sys.fulltext_indexes

2. Open an admin connection to your system ie: connect to admin:SERVER instead of SERVER.

2009-06-03

One of the members of our Asian regional development team for PASS is Jacob Sebastian. A week or so back he told me he’d written an eBook for the Red-Gate folk on XML Schemas in SQL Server. I downloaded it expecting it to be fifty to a hundred pages. It was 483 pages. What can I say: Jacob is a writing machine. You can download it from Jacob’s blog.

2009-05-26

The title pretty much says it all. The May 2009 version of SQL Server Books Online is now available for download from:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=765433f7-0983-4d7a-b628-0a98145bcb97

2009-05-24

Microsoft lost a lot of good people this week. I have to say this change has me dumbfounded. Steve has become a friend over many years of presenting at the same events. I’ve usually found him to be one of the most interesting people at any of these events. He’s also usually the one of top presenters (if not the top) at most of these events.

Good luck Steve.

2009-05-08

Most people are aware that a “database” glitch caused the download servers for Windows 7 RC to fail the other day. What annoys me though is that the headlines always say “Database glitch” or “SQL Server glitch”. Based on what Paul Randall was posting today, it seems like a pretty simple “Design glitch” or a “Developer glitch”.

Every month, I find myself at sites with issues caused by the lack of database-related skills in developer teams. SQL Server does such a good job and is so easy to work with that it seems like many developer teams think they don’t need database-related skills, particularly at the design stage. How can that message get changed? Or is that a lost cause and the product needs to simply become:

2009-05-07

I’m really pleased to hear that our Colombian friend Jaime Tarquino (who is a Microsoft premier field engineer) has completed his Microsoft Certified Masters for SQL Server 2008.

A very big congratulations Jaime !

2009-05-04

I’m back in Melbourne doing some performance-tuning work this week.

Yesterday’s issue ended up being a caching problem in middle-tier code. These issues are surprisingly common.

The symptoms were hundreds of thousands of calls to a particular stored proc over a period of half an hour. It’s a timely reminder that when you’re tracing using SQL Trace calls or Profiler, it’s important to avoid filtering out calls that aren’t using too many resources, until you’ve looked at the bigger picture. For example, the logical reads, CPU, duration, etc. on each call were close to zero. No call on its own was a problem but the overall effect of the calls was staggering.

2009-04-22

One of the things that has always surprised me with SQL Server is the lack of extensibility points. In fact, the team seems to go out of their way to remove or avoid them. SQL Server Management Studio is an obvious example but I see it as a much deeper problem.

Taking SQL Server 2008 as a recent example, there is a fixed list of facets. Why? Surely there must be a well-defined interface that all the supplied ones adhere to. Why isn’t that interface exposed?

2009-04-18

Microsoft have announced that they won’t be running a BI conference as a separate event this year and that they will be supporting the SQL PASS summit as one of their key BI events for the year.

Because of that, PASS has extended the call for speakers (that originally was to close at April 10th), to allow for those that might now want to consider speaking at the summit.

Regardless, this means that the SQL PASS Summit will truly be the place to be for SQL Server and BI professionals this year. I hope to see you there.

2009-04-10