February 2009 - Posts

• Regional Director Program - From Strength to Strength

  The RDs (Microsoft Regional Directors) are one of the most amazing groups of people I deal with and I'm honoured and humbled to be a member of the group. There is rare talent amongst the group. Every day, I find myself amazed by both the breadth and depth Read More... Posted Tuesday, February 17, 2009 1:25 PM by Greg Low | 5 Comments

• Database Snapshot Performance Whitepaper

  Our colleague at Solid Quality Mentors : Ron Talmage is a writing machine! There's another new whitepaper with his name on it along with Sanjay Mishra from Microsoft. It covers the performance of database snapshots under I/O intensive workloads. You'll Read More... Posted Monday, February 16, 2009 1:25 PM by Greg Low | 0 Comments

• Microsoft retail stores soon?

  This press pass article http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/feb09/02-12CVPRetailStoresPR.mspx makes it look pretty clear that Microsoft Retail Stores are on the way. David Porter has been appointed to head up this initiative. He's been at DreamWorks Read More... Posted Friday, February 13, 2009 12:31 PM by Greg Low | 1 Comments

• PerformancePoint -> where to now? -> Find answers in Wellington

  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 Read More... Posted Thursday, February 12, 2009 12:13 PM by Greg Low | 0 Comments

• OT: Way too hot in Melbourne and Clint Eastwood's excellent

  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 Read More... Posted Saturday, February 07, 2009 7:37 PM by Greg Low | 3 Comments

• OT: Levelator -> Awesome

  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. Read More... Posted Friday, February 06, 2009 3:48 PM by Greg Low | 2 Comments

• SQL Down Under show 43 - Jessica Moss - Reporting Services

  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 http://www.sqldownunder.com . Enjoy! Read More... Posted Friday, February 06, 2009 3:33 PM by Greg Low | 1 Comments

• :: function calling sequence deprecated

  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 Read More... Posted Thursday, February 05, 2009 5:39 PM by Greg Low | 2 Comments

• Disallow results from triggers?

  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. Read More... Posted Thursday, February 05, 2009 4:51 PM by Greg Low | 3 Comments

• Much ado about logins and SIDs

  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 Read More... Posted Monday, February 02, 2009 5:29 PM by Greg Low | 7 Comments

• Canberra SQL Group Next Week

  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. Read More... Posted Monday, February 02, 2009 12:56 PM by Greg Low | 0 Comments