There has been quite a bit of confusion now over the future directions for the PerformancePoint product. I’m glad to see a few of the PASS chapters tackling the topic head-on.
Adrian from the Wellington chapter has organised Rob Hawthorne to present a session on this. I wish I was going to be in Wellington that night and could be there. The details are:
Thursday, 19th March 2009 – 6pm (pizza and drinks from 5.30pm)
2009-02-12
Today officially ended up getting to 46.4 in Melbourne. That’s 115.5 for those still on Fahrenheit and way, way too hot no matter what you measure it in.
So we headed off to see a movie. Took a while to park. No-one seemed to want to park anywhere that wasn’t under cover. No big surprise there.
We ended up seeing “Gran Tourino”, the Clint Eastwood movie. He was actor, producer and director. What an excellent piece of work from him. Clint is a grizzly old Korean War veteran who used to work in the Ford plant in Detroit. His world isn’t what he’d imagined it would be. His relationship with the Asian neighbours made for a great story. I won’t spoil the plot by telling you anything too much about it but we all thoroughly enjoyed it.
2009-02-07
A while back, I took a look at Levelator (from the Conversations Network) and it was a bit rough around the edges. It’s a tool that take an audio conversation like a podcast and evens out the audio levels of the different speakers. This is no easy trick. I normally spend a while on this with every podcast we produce. I’ve still had comments that sometimes my voice is almost deafening but the guest is a bit quiet. I’ve found the main problem is that people you interview vary their amplitude enormously at different parts of the interview.
2009-02-06
I’ve finally got show 43 posted up today. In this show, Jessica Moss discusses Reporting Services in 2008 and overall lessons learned with Reporting Services in all versions.
You can download it now from https://sqldownunder.com .
Enjoy!
2009-02-06
Another item that I’ve seen used a lot which is now deprecated is the :: function calling sequence.
If you have code like:
SELECT * FROM ::fn_virtualfilestats(2,1);
You should now instead be coding it as:
SELECT * FROM sys.fn_virtualfilestats(2,1);
2009-02-05
At a meeting I was at a few months back, it was noted that in a future version of SQL Server, the intention was to disallow results being returned from triggers. That surprised me somewhat.
My main concern with this was about my ability to debug triggers. I often seem to end up working on systems where people have layers of nested triggers. (Perhaps I’m just lucky that way). Usually I have to end up using a combination of PRINT statements and writing values into tables to work out what’s going on in the triggers. And given that the action of the triggers may well be rolled-back, writing to a table is often not a simple option if you want the values to still be there later.
2009-02-05
Just had our Canberra mate Jeff Wharton confirm that he’s organised a SQL user group meeting while I’m there next week. I’ll be doing the session “Answering the queries your users really want to ask” which covers full-text indexes in SQL Server 2008. I find three categories of people in these sessions:
Whichever category you fall into, we’ll cover off why it should be part of your arsenal from SQL Server 2008 onwards. If you’ll be in Canberra, we’d love to see you there. Meeting is Tuesday 10th February at Excom in the city, 6pm start (food from 5:30) and we’ll be done about 7pm.
2009-02-02
Some time back I posted about Logins and SIDs and I’ve had a number of people ask me for examples. So I’ve updated the post here.
A very common issue that’s raised in the newsgroups relates to SQL Server logins that need to be moved between servers. When you recreate a SQL Server login (ie: not a Windows one), by default you get a new security ID (SID), even though you have the same user name and password.
2009-02-02
I’m really proud of the work my colleagues did on the SQL Server 2008 System Views poster in conjunction with our partners. Ron Talmage led our team. But the best news is that it’s now available for download for free:
2009-01-30
Victor Isakov has decided to spin up a new SQL Server user group that will be meeting on the 1st Wednesday of each month, at Westpac Place in the city. He describes the group as focussing on best practices, optimisation, design and implementation and is aiming directly at the local corporate market.
Access to Westpac Place will be quickest if you have pre-registered so Victor is asking you to let him know you’re coming by sending him an email to [email protected] .
2009-01-29