The Bit Bucket

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

There has been a lot of discussion over the years about whether or not it’s a good idea to introduce new functionality in service packs (for SQL Server, the OS, and others). The concern is that it can invalidate testing, invalidate documentation, books, courseware, etc. However, it can also introduce much-needed features without having to wait for another version of the product. It’s been even-less likely that new functionality would be introduced in a cumulative update (or CU), which are basically a set of rolled-up hotfixes.

2013-01-27

I promised there would be a bunch of shows this year. The second one is now published.

In this show, SQL Server MVP Grant Paisley describes PowerPivot, Power View, Analysis Services Tabular vs Multidimensional and shares the lessons he’s learned when working with these tools.

The show is here: https://sqldownunder.com/podcast

Enjoy!

2013-01-22

One of the issues that is often raised with Windows Azure SQL Database is that you don’t get to pick the name of your server, so you end up with a bizarre name such as:

yy2l95dk1k.database.windows.net.

I can understand why the team did this. Apparently when they first set it up, they allowed you to pick your own server name, so everyone started registering Coke, Pepsi, etc. Not wanting to have yet another place for people to argue about name ownership, they quickly removed that ability. I’m glad they did.

2013-01-21

When I’ve been putting data into Windows Azure SQL Database (WASD) in the past, I’d normally been providing the dates from my own system. This week, I had the first time where I wanted to put a column default that provided a date in WASD. It suddenly dawned on me that I wasn’t sure what timezone the date would be from. As I was using the Southeast Asia data centre (in Singapore), I was presuming the value would be based on Singapore’s timezone. So it was time to find out.

2013-01-20

Hi folks, I’m back into the swing with a bunch of new podcasts coming, featuring SQL Server 2012. First up is Clustering MVP Allan Hirt discussing SQL Server HA with AlwaysOn. Allan also discusses the deployment of SQL Server on Windows Server Core.

Thanks for all the emails that said they loved the shows and told me to get them happening again soon. I think you’ll like the ones that are lined up. You’ll find the shows here:  https://sqldownunder.com/Resources/Podcast.aspx

2013-01-13

Hi Folks,

I have to say that I’m really impressed by the rate at which the Windows Azure Mobile Services team is rolling out updates and samples. In particular, it’s good to see a new sample for using Geolocation, given how common a requirement that is in mobile apps today. It’s worth checking out the following:

·         New Code Samples page on WindowsAzure.com

·         Updated WindowsAzure.com Tutorials and Resources page that includes new tutorials and related videos from the new Windows Azure Mobile Services channel 9 series

2013-01-11

While the level of compatibility of Windows Azure SQL Databases is high, there are a number of things that need to be dealt with differently, compared with how they are done with on-premises SQL Server.

An example of this, today I needed to know how full one of my databases was. I wanted to know how much space I had used but also to know what the limit was. My first attempt was the usual system views such as:

2013-01-03