The Bit Bucket

Last week I had an opportunity to record a new podcast with Kasper DeJonge from the SQL Server Analysis Services team. Kasper has also been working on Power Pivot and many other areas.

SQL Server 2016 is lining up to be a great release for Analysis Services with significant enhancements for both tabular and multi-dimensional data models.

I hope you enjoy the show. You’ll find it here:

https://sqldownunder.com/podcast

2016-04-09

I spend a lot of my time working with ISVs (or software houses) and with individual developers. For SQL Server to have a long-term future, we need to be appealing to more and more new developers, to get them to understand that SQL Server is a great platform for building their applications above.

One of the most important aspects of this right up front, is making it really frictionless to get started with SQL Server.

2016-04-04

Hi Folks,

I recently got to record a new podcast with Riccardo Muti and Chris Finlan from the SQL Server Reporting Services team.

Over recent years, Reporting Services seemed to be in a rut without forward momentum.

2016 however promises to be a really big year for Reporting Services.

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

Enjoy!

2016-03-13

In recent months, I’ve been brushing up my R skills. I’ve had a few areas of interest in this:

• R in Azure Machine Learning
• R in relation to Power BI and general analytics
• R embedded (somewhat) in SQL Server 2016

As a client tool, I’ve been using RStudio. It’s been good and very simple but it’s a completely separate environment. So I was excited when I saw there was to be a preview of new R tooling for Visual Studio.

2016-03-10

Hi Folks,

We’ve taken a fairly long break but now back into the swing for SQL Server 2016 and Power BI.

The first of the new series of shows is a show on the current state of Power BI with Jen Underwood.

You’ll find it here: SQL Down Under Podcast

Enjoy!

Regards,

Greg

2015-12-27

We recently started working with the new Personal Data Management Gateway for Power BI. Overall, we really like it but the error messages in most of Power BI have left much to be desired.

One error that we were encountering made us feel like the service was flaky as it seemed to happen randomly. When we tried to refresh a dataset, we got this error:

The Power BI team came to the rescue and worked out what was happening. Turns out that you cannot currently refresh more than once every 5 minutes. That also includes within 5 minutes of your initial upload. Unfortunately, this is the error returned when you attempt it.

2015-07-14

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