The Bit Bucket

The RDs (Microsoft Regional Directors) are one of the most amazing groups of people I deal with and I’m honoured and humbled to be a member of the group. There is rare talent amongst the group. Every day, I find myself amazed by both the breadth and depth of knowledge. I also love the off-the-wall humour.

Our lead Kevin Schuler does a great job of looking after our interests and of herding the cats. I was really pleased to receive a global impact award from Kevin today, covering 2008. It looks excellent and I’m pleased to see that it features “The Region”. If you haven’t looked into “The Region”, I’d suggest doing so. I don’t have time to read all the blogs by all the Regional Directors. I wish I could read them all but “The Region” is the next best thing. It’s a moderated feed of the highest quality posts made by Regional Directors.

2009-02-17

Our colleague Ron Talmage is a writing machine! There’s another new whitepaper with his name on it along with Sanjay Mishra from Microsoft.

It covers the performance of database snapshots under I/O intensive workloads. You’ll find it here: http://download.microsoft.com/download/d/9/4/d948f981-926e-40fa-a026-5bfcf076d9b9/DBSnapshotPerf.docx

Great work Ron and Mishra!

2009-02-16

A recent press article makes it look pretty clear that Microsoft Retail Stores are on the way. David Porter has been appointed to head up this initiative. He’s been at DreamWorks for the last year or two but was with Wal-Mart for 25 years prior. That should bring some interesting retail experience into the company.

2009-02-13

There has been quite a bit of confusion now over the future directions for the PerformancePoint product. I’m glad to see a few of the PASS chapters tackling the topic head-on.

Adrian from the Wellington chapter has organised Rob Hawthorne to present a session on this. I wish I was going to be in Wellington that night and could be there. The details are:

Thursday, 19th March 2009 – 6pm (pizza and drinks from 5.30pm)

2009-02-12

Today officially ended up getting to 46.4 in Melbourne. That’s 115.5 for those still on Fahrenheit and way, way too hot no matter what you measure it in.

So we headed off to see a movie. Took a while to park. No-one seemed to want to park anywhere that wasn’t under cover. No big surprise there.

We ended up seeing “Gran Tourino”, the Clint Eastwood movie. He was actor, producer and director. What an excellent piece of work from him. Clint is a grizzly old Korean War veteran who used to work in the Ford plant in Detroit. His world isn’t what he’d imagined it would be. His relationship with the Asian neighbours made for a great story. I won’t spoil the plot by telling you anything too much about it but we all thoroughly enjoyed it.

2009-02-07

A while back, I took a look at Levelator (from the Conversations Network) and it was a bit rough around the edges. It’s a tool that take an audio conversation like a podcast and evens out the audio levels of the different speakers. This is no easy trick. I normally spend a while on this with every podcast we produce. I’ve still had comments that sometimes my voice is almost deafening but the guest is a bit quiet. I’ve found the main problem is that people you interview vary their amplitude enormously at different parts of the interview.

2009-02-06

I’ve finally got show 43 posted up today. In this show, Jessica Moss discusses Reporting Services in 2008 and overall lessons learned with Reporting Services in all versions.

You can download it now from https://sqldownunder.com .

Enjoy!

2009-02-06

Another item that I’ve seen used a lot which is now deprecated is the :: function calling sequence.

If you have code like:

SELECT * FROM ::fn_virtualfilestats(2,1);

You should now instead be coding it as:

SELECT * FROM sys.fn_virtualfilestats(2,1);

2009-02-05

At a meeting I was at a few months back, it was noted that in a future version of SQL Server, the intention was to disallow results being returned from triggers. That surprised me somewhat.

My main concern with this was about my ability to debug triggers. I often seem to end up working on systems where people have layers of nested triggers. (Perhaps I’m just lucky that way). Usually I have to end up using a combination of PRINT statements and writing values into tables to work out what’s going on in the triggers. And given that the action of the triggers may well be rolled-back, writing to a table is often not a simple option if you want the values to still be there later.

2009-02-05

Just had our Canberra mate Jeff Wharton confirm that he’s organised a SQL user group meeting while I’m there next week. I’ll be doing the session “Answering the queries your users really want to ask” which covers full-text indexes in SQL Server 2008. I find three categories of people in these sessions:

* those that have never used full-text indexing in SQL Server

* those that have old pain associated with trying to use it

2009-02-02