The Bit Bucket

I caught up with James Luetkehoelter at the PASS Summit in Germany a few months back. He sent me a copy of his new book from APress: Pro SQL Server Disaster Recovery.

I managed to finish reading it while heading back from CodeCampSA in Adelaide today (which was a good solid event again - excellent work Peter Griffiths!). I quite enjoyed the book and I like James’ writing style. It’s quite conversational and I could hear him talking to me as I read it.

2008-07-13

Those that I’ve discussed WPF with over the years will know that I think that Microsoft really struggles to demonstrate *business* value for WPF. I’ve attended many sessions where I’ve been shown things like the ability to show a video in the taskbar while you flip the taskbar around the screen :-(

Congratulations to Billy Hollis for his WPF business application presentation done on Carl Franklin’s DNR TV recently. If you’ve been wondering how WPF might add value to a business application, watch the first 24 minutes or so of this show.

2008-07-10

There are a number of key books that I’ve missed reading over the years, in areas that interest me. Recently, I’ve been fixing that. One that is always discussed is The Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit by Joy Mundy and Warren Thornthwaite from the Kimball Group.

I would have to say I enjoyed reading it. It is a large book at over 700 pages and a couple of inches thick so it took a while to get through.

2008-07-09

Well I was called out by Tibor Karaszi, so here goes:

How old were you when you first started programming?

I’d say I was about 19 when I started. I remember in 1976 that I was at University of Queensland. I was doing an honours degree in physics and maths and didn’t have the slightest interest in those computing people that spent their lunch hours looking at great piles of 15x11 listings. By the next year, I was one of them.

2008-07-08

Our team have been working on a number of whitepapers for SQL Server 2008. On of the first of these out the door is Itzik Ben-Gan’s new paper on the T-SQL enhancements. It’s great reading and can be found at:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/cc721270(SQL.100).aspx

I got to work with Ron Talmage on the new partitioning whitepaper. Watch for it soon too.

2008-07-07

I had an interesting note from David Silverlight today pointing out the INETA Community Champion awards. I’d encourage all to take a look at them, at the prizes and see if you should be participating. Details at: (link no longer available)

2008-06-27

I had a note from Bill Graziano this morning telling me that our spotlight sessions for the PASS Summit in Seattle in November have been posted, along with details of some of the other sessions. I’m really looking forward to the summit this year as I had to miss TechEd at the last minute.

2008-06-27

I know this post has the potential for religious-level debate but it’s time to make it anyway.

The more I’ve been working with Analysis Services lately, the more it grates on me that the BI community still seem to be the last ones hanging onto table prefixes. They’re not doing “tblSomeTable” but they are using “dim”, “fact”, etc.

Hasn’t the time for this long gone now?

Most of the argument seems to be about finding tables in a list of tables. You could do that via schemas if you really wanted to. But as Adam Machanic pointed out recently, from 2005 onwards many-to-many dimensions blur these lines anyway.

2008-06-16

A few weeks ago I managed to catch the tail end of the reptiles series that Sir David Attenborough created. If you have a spare 3 1/2 minutes, take a look at this video: http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/lifeincoldblood/video.shtml?licbtt08

People seem to think crocodiles are cold, unintelligent eating machines. This video clearly shows they doing something that I’d suggest that more than 99% of humans couldn’t do, even with pen, paper and a calculator with weeks of notice and a library at their disposal. What fascinates me is how they sense when to do this, given the combination of events happens so infrequently. Yet they arrive and set aside their territorial squabbles for just a day or two at exactly the right time.

2008-06-08

I had heard a lot of praise for Scott Ambler’s book: Database Refactoring: Evolutionary Database Design over the past few years. It’s another relatively classic book that I’ve been slow to read.

I often mentioned to people that when I was at a software design review meeting for Microsoft around the DataDude product (Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals), I noticed that Sachin Rekhi from the team was walking around with a copy of this book under his arm. As Sachin was responsible for the refactorings to go into the product and there was only one (rename) at the time, I thought that was a good sign for where the product might head. I wasn’t aware that he had been a contributor to the book. Sachin wrote some of the opening details.

2008-06-07