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

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’s meme, 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

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 the end of his Life in Cold Blood series episode about crocodiles.

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’ve 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 refactoring (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

I haven’t posted up any book reviews recently so it’s time to catch up a bit. For some reason, it had taken me ages to get to read Kalen’s latest book in the Inside SQL Server series: Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2005 - Query Tuning and Optimization .

As expected, it’s a great piece of work. I very much enjoyed the chapters written by other authors as well, particulary those from Adam Machanic and Craig Freedman. Ron Talmage, Sunil Agarwal and Lubor Kollar have also made strong contributions to this work.

2008-06-07

This is another one of those books I picked up in an airport when I ran out of reading material while travelling. One of the key criteria I applied when choosing the book was whether or not I’d finish reading it by the time we landed. We had a bit of a delay boarding so I’d definitely finished it by the time we’d landed. It’s in the quick reads series and it is just that.

2008-06-07

Hi Folks,

I’ve posted show 36 for SQL Down Under with guest SQL CAT team leader Lubor Kollar up at the site ( https://sqldownunder.com ). In the show, Lubor discusses the SQL CAT team and some SQL Server 2008 features such as the resource governor and compression.

Enjoy!

2008-06-07

It was great to see an announcement from Francesco Ballena today that his VB to VB.net conversion tool has finally hit the market. It’s at www.vbmigration.com and looks like the sort of tool that was needed when VB.NET was first released. It sure would have avoided a lot of angst in the community. I was particularly impressed by the discussion in Carl’s podcast . I’d have to say I could definitely relate to the sentiment expressed in it. Congratulations Francesco!

2008-05-28