The Bit Bucket

In Melbourne, it was the coldest morning of the year so far but I didn’t mind getting up at 5:30AM to record an interview with Marco Russo. Marco is well-known in the SQL BI community for his writing and presentations.

SQL Down Under show 58 is now online: https://podcast.sqldownunder.com

In this show, Marco discusses concepts and experiences from working with tabular data models in SQL Server Analysis Services.

Enjoy!

2013-04-01

I posted a day or so back about the whitepaper on plan caching and recompilation being published.

Today I had a query from a reader and found that the editor has messed up an example.

For example, I had this example of a query that’s almost identical but where the query plan would be different:

SELECT ProductID  
FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail  
GROUP BY ProductID  
HAVING AVG(OrderQty) > 5  
ORDER BY ProductID;

SELECT productid  
FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail  
GROUP BY ProductID  
HAVING AVG(OrderQty) > 5  
ORDER BY ProductId;

Helpfully the editor changed it to:

2013-03-19

Over the last year, I’ve been working on an update to the whitepaper Plan Caching in SQL Server 2008 as a background task.

A great group of reviewers have been involved at various stages during the process. Thank you to Paul White, Andrew Kelly, Kalen Delaney, and Rubén Garrigós from the SQL community, along with Leigh Stewart and Jack Li from the SQL Server product team for sharing your knowledge and ideas.

2013-03-16

Hi Folks,

I got to record another podcast today. Show 57 features guest SQL Server MVP Karen López. Karen is well-known in the SQL Community, on her blog and is prolific on Twitter.

In the show, Karen discusses her experiences related to data modelling, including tools, round-tripping, traceability, and model-driven development. She also covers some common mistakes she encounters in this area. Later in the show Karen discusses the challenges in database refactoring, her interest in all things to do with space, and her interest in the open data movement.

2013-03-12

I recorded another podcast today with Thomas LaRock, aka SQL Rock Star.

In this show, Tom and I discussed the migration of many DBAs into architect roles, the challenges in constant learning (and useful resources for doing so), the hype around big data, the role of Windows Azure in our future, and upcoming PASS events.

It’s online now: https://podcast.sqldownunder.com

Enjoy!

2013-03-02

I recorded another podcast today. This time it’s SQL Server MVP Erin Welker discussing dimensional modelling and being a BI consultant.

The show is online now: https://podcast.sqldownunder.com

Enjoy!

2013-02-23

Over the last few months, I’ve been a tech reviewer on John Sirmon and Heidi Steen’s new whitepaper.

It’s published today on MSDN: Hardware Sizing a Tabular Solution (SQL Server Analysis Services)

Its goal is to help you determine the amount of memory and CPU resources needed to accommodate query and processing workloads in a production environment.

Recommended!

2013-02-13

There are some terms in IT that make their way straight into the hype stratosphere. Unfortunately “big data” is one of these. I see very few systems that I’d contend are actually “big data”. However, I endlessly see the term applied to data stores that are trivial by today’s standards. This might help the marketing teams but it’s sad none-the-less. There are some technological challenges that really do start to bite as the data volume really does start to become large, and as the proportion of unstructured and semi-structured data increases. There are also some very interesting new tools that allow us to process larger volumes of data faster, particularly in relation to analytics, and a large market building around Hadoop and its derivatives.

2013-02-10

SQL Server 2008 R2 SP2 and SQL Server 2012 SP1 introduced sys.dm_db_stats_properties. This DMV is a new way to check the number of rows that have been modified since the last time a set of statistics was updated. It is described here

In the latest version of Ola’s tools, he’s made use of this new DMV for customers that are on one of these SQL Server versions. For customers on earlier versions, he continues to use sys.sysindexes in the same way he did previously.

2013-02-08

SQL Down Under show 54 is now available for download.

In this show, I spoke with Grant Fritchey on his experiences with query tuning and reading SQL Server execution plans. We also discuss SQL Kilts.

You’ll find the show at our podcasts page: https://sqldownunder.com/Resources/Podcast.aspx

Enjoy!

2013-02-02