The Bit Bucket

I had a day of mixed emotions today.

I (and I assume most of the world) have been horrified by a “religious” massacre in Afghanistan. (Link no longer available)

Today, however, I also had the reverse experience and a seriously uplifting one. This afternoon I drove through Marysville. For those that don’t know it, it’s a town that was wiped off the face of the map by bushfires in Victoria a while back. Hundreds of people died. I was roughly in the area and so I made a point of popping into Marysville to see how they were coping. In general, I find that the people in those towns don’t want hand-outs so much as business. So I try to visit them and spend some cash in their shops, etc.

2011-04-03

There was a discussion on our internal mailing list today about how to get a list of reserved words for SQL Server. It strikes me that there should be a system view that returns this. It could also return details of the version of the product where the word was added and an indication of if the use of the word is deprecated.

If you agree, you know the drill. Vote once, vote often :-)

2011-03-25

This one is a bit annoying. When you apply SP1 for Visual Studio 2010 (VS2010), one of the side effects seems to be that you lose Intellisense in SQL Server Management Studio 2008 R2 (SSMS).

If Intellisense matters to you, you might want to wait for a cumulative update to fix it.

Details here: https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/650569/ssms-2008-r2-is-losing-intellisense-after-installing-visual-studio-2010-sp1

2011-03-23

Since the removal of the 8KB limit on serialization, the ability to define new data types using SQL CLR integration is now almost at a usable level, apart from one key omission: indexes.

We have no ability to create our own types of index to support our data types. As a good example of this, consider that when Microsoft introduced the geometry and geography (spatial) data types, they did so as system CLR data types but also needed to introduce a spatial index as a new type of index. Those of us that need to work with the product as it’s supplied can’t just create our own new types of index objects.

2011-03-09

Just posting this blog tonight hoping it might save someone else a bunch of time. For call recording on Skype, I use a program called Pamela. Lately, when I’d first installed it, it would work fine. Later, however, it would come up and say:

“Another application (Pamela.exe) is attempting to access Skype, but we are unable to respond”.

You just have to love these sorts of messages that don’t give you the slightest clue about what the problem is.

2011-03-03

I’ve had a number of people over the years ask about whether or not a particular type of object is a good candidate for SQL CLR integration. The rules that I normally apply are as follows:

Database Object	Transact-SQL	Managed Code
Scalar UDF	Generally poor performance	Good option when limited or no data-access
Table-valued UDF	Good option if data-related	Good option when limited or no data-access
Stored Procedure	Good option	Good option when external access is required or limited data access
DML Trigger	Good option	Rarely a good option as most perform substantial data access
DDL Trigger	OK option if only limited processing of XML EVENTDATA	Good option for extensive processing of XML EVENTDATA
Aggregate	Not possible	Good option
User-defined Data Type	Only alias types	Good option

 Scalar UDFs written in Transact-SQL are well-known for causing performance problems in SQL Server environments. Managed code is often a good option (and generally a much faster option) for implementing scalar UDFs as long as the functions do not depend on heavy data access.Table-valued Functions that are data-oriented are likely to be best implemented in Transact-SQL. A common use case for managed code in table-valued UDFs is for functions that need to access external resources such as the file system, environment variables, registry, etc.

2011-02-25

It’s good to see some airports that have queues for people that travel frequently and know what they’re doing. But I’m left thinking that IT vendors need to have something similar.

Bigpond (part of Telstra) in Australia have recently introduced new 42MB/sec modems on their 3G network. It’s actually just a pair of 21MB/sec modems linked together but the idea is cute. Around most of the country, they work pretty well. In the middle of the CBD in Melbourne however, at present they just don’t work.

2011-02-22

Our MVP buddy Erland Sommarskog doesn’t post articles that often but when he does, you should read them. His latest post is here:

http://www.sommarskog.se/query-plan-mysteries.html  

It talks about why a query might be slow when sent from an application but fast when you execute it in SSMS. But it covers way more than that. There is a great deal of good info on how queries are executed and query plans generated.

Highly recommended!

2011-02-22

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