If there’s any doubt that interest in all things SQL Server related just continues to grow, the latest download statistics from my SQL Down Under show show just how fast.
I’m really excited that last month was the first time we broke the 30,000 downloads per month barrier. Onwards and upwards!
2008-04-01
I was on a flight from Houston to Washington via Dallas today. We seemed to sit forever on the tarmac in Dallas, in fact just over 1.5 hours from leaving gate to taking off. The captain was warning that if he had to stop and restart the engines one more time, we’d have had to return to the terminal for more fuel.
However, the good thing was that I finished reading Down Under by Bill Bryson. I’m a real fan of Bill’s writing and this book is no exception. It provides a wonderful and very humourous summary of his trips throughout a good chunk of Australia. Bill has a way of providing insights that is sorely lacking in most authors. I found myself laughing out loud many times while reading it. I also enjoyed the extra chapter at the end about his time growing up in the U.S. in the 1950s.
2008-03-31
I had to go through the signup procedure for direct account access for Bank of America today. It reminded me of how much nonsense gets perpetrated and how it’s always done supposedly in the name of security. In the end, it usually achieves the exact opposite of what they are trying to achieve.
First, you need to generate a digital certificate to use. The bank has a sign-up site for this. After entering my details, I was greeted with:
2008-03-26
Sorry to all for the delay in working these out but we’ve now posted details of the sessions for CodeCampOz in 2008. You can view them on the “2008” tab at the code camp oz website.
There’s a really great lineup of sessions. We also have two extra special guests: Jonas Folleso from Norway and Fernando Guerrero from Spain.
This year, there is also a precon event on Friday afternoon prior to the main event on Saturday and Sunday.
2008-03-20
I’ve been playing around with full text search in SQL Server 2008 and was intrigued by the DMF sys.dm_fts_parser(). It allows you to see the result of the word-breaking occurring within full text search. If you execute the query:
select * from sys.dm_fts_parser(’“Hello Greg. How are you? I haven’’t seen you for a while.”’,1033,0,0);
It returns the following data (along with some other columns):
occurrence special_term display_term
-—————————————–
1 Exact Match hello
2 Exact Match greg
10 End Of Sentence END OF FILE
11 Noise Word how
12 Noise Word are
13 Noise Word you
21 End Of Sentence END OF FILE
22 Noise Word i
23 Exact Match haven’t
24 Exact Match seen
25 Noise Word you
26 Noise Word for
27 Noise Word a
28 Noise Word while
36 End Of Sentence END OF FILE
2008-03-20
I was really sad to hear that Arthur C Clarke died today. For those that enjoyed his work, it’s worth watching his “goodbye” video he made on the occasion of his birthday in December 2007. He knew at that time that the end was near. I particularly liked his choice of a Rudyard Kipling poem to read at the end. You’ll find the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLXQ7rNgWwg
2008-03-19
One of the things I really don’t like in the Declarative Management Framework is the term “On change - prevent” for the execution mode. Given we don’t have INSTEAD OF DDL triggers and only AFTER DDL triggers, we can’t *prevent* these things at all. All we can do is roll them back after they happen. I think the name should be changed to “On change - rollback” to reflect what’s actually happening.
2008-03-19
Hi Folks,
SQL Down Under show 35 with guest SQL Server DPE Evangelist Roger Doherty is now available for download from www.sqldownunder.com .
In the show, Roger discusses what developers are looking forward to in SQL Server 2008.
Enjoy!
Regards,
Greg
2008-03-14
While on site this week, another common problem that I see everywhere arose again.
When you need to format currency, you use the “c” format right? It’s in nearly every set of course materials I’ve ever seen.
In many cases, that’s wrong!
Take a long hard think about whether you really want the monetary values that you display automatically converting to the client system’s currency. If you are reporting financial figures, for example, is it really appropriate that they should mysteriously suddenly change from dollars to yen because the client is based in Zama City rather than in New York City? Not likely. A million dollars in sales might be good but a million yen in sales not quite so good :-)
2008-03-14
I spent time working with Reporting Services again today on a client site. The complexity of the reports we were working on reminded me that I really, really don’t like seeing T-SQL scripts (or really any business logic) embedded in reports.
DBAs tend to be considered a conservative bunch. One thing they’re usually conservative about is refactoring their databases. In many cases, this is because they have little idea what they will break when they make database changes. I’ve seen countless organisations that have allowed direct access to tables from client Access-based applications and have then lost control of the ability to ever change anything in the database because of the hundreds of little applications and reports that they might then break. I spend a lot of time talking to them about how to regain control of the situation.
2008-03-11
