The Bit Bucket

I know that many of my readers appreciate finding out when free eBooks become available.

Microsoft Virtual Academy has been releasing quite a few lately.

In particular, SQL Server and database folk might want to take a look at the following:

• Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2014
• Introducing Windows Server 2012 R2
• Introducing Microsoft Azure HDInsight
• Microsoft Azure Essentials: Fundamentals of Azure
• Microsoft Azure Essentials: Fundamentals of Azure
• Introducing Windows Azure for IT Professionals
• Rethinking Enterprise Storage: A Hybrid Cloud Model

2015-02-20

This is the first year for Microsoft’s new Ignite conference. Many people are keen to go but figure it would break the bank.

Here’s another option:

The Microsoft Virtual Academy have their Heroes program running again. You get one point in the draw for just signing up. Even better though, take some courses and both learn something worthwhile and increase your chances of winning the competition:

Sign up and enter here now: SIGN UP           (NOTE: Australians Only for this one sadly)

2015-02-16

Recently I published a series of blog posts that provided scripts for rebuilding clustered columnstore indexes.

Niko Neugebauer sent me a suggested update to the latest version of those scripts and it makes sense. The change will help to filter out row groups that are not compressed and Niko noted that as Microsoft have started to include more objects (like Tombstone values)  into sys.column_store_row_groups in Azure SQLDatabase, he believes that will help to prevent future SQL versions having a problem with the scripts.

2015-01-31

Earlier, I posted a maintenance script that could be used with clustered columnstore indexes to try to determine when they should be rebuilt. Reorganize is not a very useful operation for these indexes as it basically just forces a close of the existing delta store, ready for compression.

One of the problems with a clustered columnstore index is that it doesn’t work as well if the segments have been created at less than the maximum potential size of 1048576 rows per segment. Over use of reorganize options could cause this, but more likely it will be to do with loading the index with small batches of data, rather than loading large batches in BULK INSERT operations.

2015-01-09

For general index maintenance, our friend Old Hallengren has an awesome solution for most people: https://ola.hallengren.com/sql-server-index-and-statistics-maintenance.html

We’ve started to have customers using clustered columnstore indexes in SQL Server 2014, and they need to be treated differently. I checked Ola’s latest scripts today to see what happens with columnstore indexes. It appears that the code ignores nonclustered columnstore indexes (ie: index type of 6), which makes sense as we need to rebuild them whenever the data changes, and in the meantime, the table is read-only. So that makes lots of sense.

2015-01-09

At a client site today and they asked me about a warning that they got every time they manually failed over their SQL Server availability group.

It said: “The current WSFC cluster quorum vote configuration is not recommended for the availability group.” They were puzzled by this as they had a valid quorum configuration. In their case, they had a two node cluster using MNS (majority node set) and a fileshare witness.

2014-12-22

I’ve been hoping this would happen for a while and now it’s here (in beta).

Whenever I take a certification exam, I find it removes my ability to work for most of a day, so I tend to schedule myself for two or three exams in a day, to avoid the overhead. It also means that I tend to limit the number of exams that I would take.

Online proctoring of exams changes all that for me. If I can just schedule an exam for lunch time or night, or weekend from my own office, I’ll be much more inclined to take more certification exams.

2014-12-22

I spend a lot of time working with software houses, helping them to make their applications work well with SQL Server. One thing that I’ve heard loud and clear over the years is that most software houses won’t write a single line of code that will only run on the enterprise edition of SQL Server, because they are not prepared to limit their potential pool of customers to those running enterprise edition.

2014-12-12

As most websites do, we collect analytics on the people visiting our site https://sqldownunder.com

I thought it might be interesting to share the breakdown of visitors to our site. Keep in mind that we have a primarily Microsoft-oriented audience. Enjoy!

No surprise on the native languages:

Country breakdown reflects the amount of local traffic we have for instructor-led courses. Most others are podcast listeners:

We first noticed Chrome slightly outstripping IE a while back but recently, it’s changed a lot. I suspect that IE11 will have been as issue here:

2014-10-30

I had the pleasure of recording another SQL Down Under show today.

Show 64 features Microsoft Azure DocumentDB product group member discussing Azure DocumentDB and what SQL Server DBAs and developers need to know about it.

JSON-based storage has been one of the highest rated requests for enhancements to SQL Server. While we haven’t got those enhancements yet, DocumentDB nicely fills a gap between NoSQL databases and relational databases.

You’ll find the show here: SQL Down Under Podcast

2014-10-30