Search results matching tag 'SQL Server'

SQL in the City Event Dates Announced!

andyleonard — Sat, 18 May 2013 06:00:00 GMT

If you didn’t know that already, you know it now. The latest evidence to support this claim is the publication of the schedule for US SQL in the City events. They are:

9 Oct – Pasadena
11 Oct – Atlanta
14 Oct – Charlotte

Registration for these events opens 24 May.

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SQL Server in Windows Azure Infrastructure Services – Updated Documentation and Best Practices for GA, Upcoming Blogs

SQLOS Team — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 22:04:16 GMT

It’s been just over a week since Windows Azure announced the GA of Infrastructure Services, marking the beginning of a fully supported Infrastructure as a Service in Windows Azure, with SQL Server as a major component.

Pre-installed SQL Server VMs are available for pay-per-hour usage in the Windows Azure gallery. Currently Enterprise, Standard and Web edition VMs running on Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 are available, with more SQL Server editions coming soon. SQL Server editions running on Windows Server 2012 images are also on the way. For more details on the scenarios and benefits of running SQL Server workloads on Windows Azure Virtual Machines, please visit the SQL Server blog post here.

We are very happy to announce that the updated technical documentation for deploying and running SQL Server in Windows Azure Infrastructures Services is now available online. When deploying SQL Server in Windows Azure Virtual Machines, we recommend that you follow the detailed guidance given in the new SQL Server in Windows Azure Virtual Machines documentation in the library. This documentation includes a series of articles and tutorials that provide detailed guidance on:

Over the next few weeks we are planning a series of blog posts to provide more detailed information on specific SQL Server topics. Subjects in the pipeline include: high availability, disaster recovery, performance, application migration and security. Let us know what topics you would like to see covered in this series by adding comments to this post.

SQL Server Team

Originally posted at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlosteam/

AdventureWorks on Azure donates GBP351.49 to War Child. THANK YOU!

jamiet — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 21:02:35 GMT

Just over 12 months ago I published a blog post entitled AdventureWorks2012 now available for all on SQL Azure. In it I explained that I had set up a Windows Azure SQL Database (then known as SQL Azure database) for the SQL Server community to use and hence familiarise themselves with the SQL Azure offering – I called this initiative “AdventureWorks on Azure”. Judging by the comments that were left in the table that I set up for that very purpose it seems that a number of people were in favour and made use of it:

The credentials to enable you to connect up and leave your own comment are in that same blog post!

Running a SQL Azure database is of course not free hence I asked for the community to support the initiative by contributing via PayPal to its upkeep. I hoped that there might be enough left over to make a charitable donation and as you have probably gathered from the title of this blog post I’m delighted to be able to say that that did indeed happen. A few minutes ago I made a contribution to War Child (the same charity that the SQL Server MVP Deep Dives book donated to) of £351.49

What do War Child do? In their own words:

We look forward to a world in which children's lives aren't torn apart by war.

There's 27 of us in an old false-teeth factory in north London.
We're trying to change the world.

You could say we're a small charity with big ambitions.

We're directly transforming the lives of tens of thousands of children. And we're campaigning to improve the lives of millions more.

Thank you to everyone that made a donation especially to the extremely generous person (who shall remain nameless – you know who you are) that contributed $105.

I would like to keep AdventureWorks on Azure going for another year at least but to do that I need more donations. If you would like to support this initiative for another year take a read of the instructions below that I have copied from last year’s blog post:

AdventureWorks on Azure is being provided for the SQL Server community to use and so I am hoping that that same community will rally around to support this effort by making a voluntary donation to support the upkeep which, going on current pricing, is going to be $119.88 per year. If you would like to contribute to keep AdventureWorks on Azure up and running for that full year please donate via PayPal to adventureworksazure@hotmail.co.uk:

Any amount, no matter how small, will help.

Thank you once again to everyone that donated!

@Jamiet

SQL Server 2008R2 / 2012 Standard & Backup Compression

manowar — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 13:17:06 GMT

This is something that is totally overlooked, in my experience, with SQL Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2012. On the contrary to what happens with SQL Server 2008, the Standard version of SQL Server 2008R2 & SQL Server 2012 supports backup compression:

SQL Server 2008 R2 BOL
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc645993(v=sql.105).aspx
SQL Server 2012 BOL
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc645993(v=sql.110).aspx

Unfortunately a bug in the documentation said the opposite in the past, but it has been fixed quite a long ago now:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sqldocumentation/thread/b4f846e8-a339-422c-bb0b-91751e6c8560/

Just keep it mind

Why We Write #1 - An Interview With Thomas LaRock

drsql — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 00:03:00 GMT

I 've been a writer of trade level technical materials for over 13 years now, writing books, articles, blogs, and even tweets for a variety of outlets, almost exclusively about Microsoft SQL Server. While I won't claim to be the best writer in the world, I feel like I have the process of writing down fairly well, yet, for the life of me, there is still the question of "why do I do this?" stuck in the back of my mind that I have yet to appease.

Note that my quest specifically deals with non-verbal communication, because it seems to me that presentations are a completely different sort of "why" altogether.

So I have decided to survey as many of my technical writing colleagues and find out their answer to the "why" question. The only criteria for being included in this set is that you write about a subject like programming, gadgets, computer administration, etc.; and that you don't make your most of your living from writing (in other words, if you stopped writing today, tomorrow you would not be in fear of sleeping in the gutter.)

To get the process started, I have asked Thomas LaRock to be my first survey participant. Tom is a SQL Server MVP, has written a very popular book called DBA Survivor for Apress, frequently tweets as @sqlrockstar, and blogs at www.thomaslarock.com where he maintains a popular ranked list of SQL bloggers (of which I am listed in the tempdb category). He is a member of the executive committee of SQL PASS, and is very active in the SQL community as a speaker. He currently works for Confio as a Technical Evangelist. Tom is also quite well known in our SQL communitiy as a lover of the delightful cured porcine meat known as bacon.

If you want to see Tom in person, he will be doing a pre-conference seminar with Grant Fritchey and Dandy Weyn this year at Tech-Ed North America in early June in New Orleans entitled How to Be a Successful DBA in the Changing World of Cloud and On-Premise Data.

-------------------------------------

1. Every good superhero (or in your case, SQL Rockstar) has an origin story. What got you involved in writing?

Tom: The birth of my daughter. I wanted to record as many details as possible and since I had 10MB of available space for a website as part of my cable package (yeah...10 MEGABYTES BABY!) it was easy enough to get a website up quickly and easily. The writing came easily, too, since I was writing about something so close to my heart, something I remain passionate about to this day.

2. We all have influencers that have advanced our careers as writers. It may be a teacher who told you that you had great potential? Another writer who impressed you that you wanted to be like? Or perhaps on the other end of the spectrum it was a teacher who told you that you were too stupid to write well enough to spell your own name, much less have people one day impressed with your writing? Who were your influences that stand out as essential parts of your journey to the level of writer you have become?

Tom: I never try to be exactly like someone else. If I did then I would always be second best. Instead I've learned to take bits and pieces of different people and shape them into who I am today. The writer I admire most these days is Bill Simmons followed by Gregg Easterbrook. Both are known more for their sports writing but their style of writing is one that I try my best to emulate: it's human. I do not enjoy the dryness of technical writing, I prefer to write from my heart about things that I enjoy. That makes it less of a chore.

3. My writing process is pretty drawn out, often starting on my phone in OneNote, sometimes finishing in 10 minutes, but often taking a year (or years) to finish an idea. Can you describe the process you go through to write, from inception of an idea until it gets put out for consumption?

Tom: I used to start a draft inside of WordPress but lately I have been using EverNote to track my ideas and take notes. From there I just decide to go and get it done. I do my best to follow a very loose format: describe a problem, explain why it's an issue, help readers understand any and all tradeoff (cost, benefits, risks), and a few action items for them to use as a take away. Once I have that framework in my head it doesn't take long to get to a finished product. I think I may spend more time on finding a decent image to use with my post than the actual writing itself.

4. Assume a time machine has been created, and you are allowed to go back in time to speak to a group of potential writers, in which you and I are in attendance. What would you tell "past us", and do you think that your advice would change where you and I are in our careers now?

Tom: Write for yourself first. Feed your own soul. Don't worry about what your readers want. You can't write for others, they will never be happy with what you have done. The only person that needs to be happy with your words is you. When you write and share yourself then your readership will grow with people who are naturally drawn to you, and it makes it easier for you to keep sharing your words with people that want to hear them. And no, this advice wouldn't change. Ever.

5. Finally, beyond the "how" questions, now the big one. There are only 24 hours in a day, and there are no doubt tremendous pulls on your time from family, friends, and pork products, yet, even considering just your blog output, you obviously sit down at a keyboard very often to write. Why?

Tom: Most of the time I just feel that I have words that need to be written. Doing so helps to feed my soul. I'm at a keyboard a lot because my job requires it, and I am able to spend a lot of my day just writing as a way to communicate with others. Sometimes it's an email, sometimes it's a support ticket, other times it's a blog post.

-------------------------------------

I want to thank Tom for being my first participant in my experiment. I find his answer to the “why” question very similar to mine, in that he doesn’t so much offer a tangible reason, but more that he feels compelled to do so. I have to say that the question of how he got started is really quite unexpected, and very interesting, and is going to affect my future questions I ask because more than just the origin story, it will be interesting to see whether people started writing technically first, or for some other reason. I know that before I wrote my first book, I had never written 2 pages of material that wasn’t graded rather harshly by someone with PhD behind their name (or at least one of their low paid minions.)

Unfortunately (or fortunately if you enjoyed this first entry) Tom certainly did not resolve any of my questions to any level of satisfaction so I am going to have to continue to ask more of my technical writer colleagues for their opinion as well.

To that end, my next interviewee will be Mark Vaillancourt, whose website is http://markvsql.com/ and whom has a degree in English and Theatre (so he will know if it should have been whom or who earlier in this probably run on sentence), so that could make for quite an interesting interview. Perhaps he may resolve my curiosity about how one can go from the seemingly non-technical to spending his time working on SQL Server Business Intelligence. I don’t know but I look forward to finding out.

Connected development in SSDT versus SSMS

jamiet — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 16:28:00 GMT

When you install the database projects template of SSDT you get SQL Server Object Explorer (SSOX) installed as well. SSOX is a pane within Visual Studio and is the main enabler of the Connected Development experience that the SSDT team have attempted to provide.

SSOX provides some really cool capabilities that are not in SQL Server Management Studio (I hope to blog about them in the near future). In theory these capabilities make it possible for a database developer to spend all their time in SSDT (i.e. Visual Studio) thus making SSMS a pureplay DBA tool (this does of course depend on your definition of both a database developer and a DBA, but I’m not getting into that debate here).

With that in mind I have spent a few days trying to work without SSMS, preferring to live wholly inside Visual Studio instead. By and large I was able to do everything I needed to do from within Visual Studio however there were a few nuances about the experience that kept pushing me back to SSMS, I detail those nuances below.

Server groups

SSOX combines the functions of SSMS’s Object Explorer and Registered Servers pane. I don’t mind either way of working but it does mean that there is no ability to group servers in SSOX like you can in the Registered Servers pane

F6

In SSMS I regularly use the F6 keyboard shortcut to jump between the query, results & messages panes of a query window. No such keyboard shortcut exists in SSDT and they’ve already canned my request on Connect to get this fixed (even though it laughably has status “closed as fixed”).

UPDATE: See the comments below where Brett Gerhardi informed me of a different keyboard shortcut that does the same thing as F6. Actually its not quite the same, if you have multiple resultsets in your results pane then the behaviour is slightly different to F6 in SSMS - but that's not an issue you'll hot frequently.

Change Connection

The context menu in SSMS provides the ability to change a connection as well as connect and disconnect:

SSDT doesn’t have change connection and believe me, you don’t know how much you use a feature until its not there:

There’s also no hotkey to jump to “Connection” on the context menu like there is in SSMS (“C”) and I find that annoying too.

Those were the main annoyances that forced me back to SSMS. The lack of F6 was a major bugbear for me as I am a big keyboard shortcut junkie. If such things don’t bother you then you may be able to live in Visual Studio quite happily. If you have any similar experiences to share I’d be keen to read them.

@Jamiet

Trapping SQL Server Errors with Extended Events

manowar — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 16:45:06 GMT

One very useful usage of Extended Events is the ability to trap SQL Server error without the need to have a server trace running (which, btw, is deprecated), with the additional feature of being able to query the data as soon as it comes in. This means that we a solution to monitor and trap errors as soon as they happen can be easily created, in order to help developers to fix problems as soon as they are detected. This is really, really, really helpful especially in very big applications, where the code base is quite old and there is no-one really knowing everything of the solution.

To start a Extended Events sessions in order to trap SQL Server errors with severity greater than 10, just run the following script:

CREATE EVENT SESSION [error_trap] ON SERVER
ADD EVENT sqlserver.error_reported
    (
        ACTION    (package0.collect_system_time,package0.last_error,sqlserver.client_app_name,sqlserver.client_hostname,sqlserver.database_id,sqlserver.database_name,sqlserver.nt_username,sqlserver.plan_handle,sqlserver.query_hash,sqlserver.session_id,sqlserver.sql_text,sqlserver.tsql_frame,sqlserver.tsql_stack,sqlserver.username)
        WHERE    ([severity]>10)
    )
ADD TARGET package0.event_file
    (
        SET filename=N'D:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL11.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQL\XEvents\error_trap.xel'
    )
WITH
    (
        STARTUP_STATE=OFF
    )
GO

ALTER EVENT SESSION [error_trap] ON SERVER
STATE = START;
GO

The problem with Exended Events is that they only talks XML which is surely flexible and extensible, but not at all confortable to be queried. That’s why I prefer to turn it into something relational. Using the xml nodes function and pivoting data can make the trick:

IF (OBJECT_ID('tempdb..#e') IS NOT NULL) DROP TABLE #e
go

WITH cte AS
(
    SELECT
        CAST(event_data AS XML) AS event_data
    FROM
        sys.fn_xe_file_target_read_file('D:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL11.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQL\XEvents\error_trap*.xel', NULL, NULL, NULL)
),
cte2 AS
(
    SELECT
        event_number = ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY T.x)
    ,    event_name = T.x.value('@name', 'varchar(100)')
    ,    event_timestamp = T.x.value('@timestamp', 'datetimeoffset')
    ,    event_data
    FROM
        cte
    CROSS APPLY
        event_data.nodes('/event') T(x)
)
SELECT * INTO #e FROM cte2
go

WITH cte3 AS
(
    SELECT
        c.event_number,
        c.event_timestamp,
        --data_field = T2.x.value('local-name(.)', 'varchar(100)'),
        data_name = T2.x.value('@name', 'varchar(100)'),
        data_value = T2.x.value('value[1]', 'varchar(max)'),
        data_text = T2.x.value('text[1]', 'varchar(max)')
    FROM
        #e c
    CROSS APPLY
        c.event_data.nodes('event/*') T2(x)
),
cte4 AS
(
    SELECT
        *
    FROM
        cte3
    WHERE
        data_name IN ('error_number', 'severity', 'message', 'database_name', 'database_id', 'client_hostname', 'client_app_name', 'collect_system_time', 'username')
)
SELECT
    *
FROM
    cte4
PIVOT
    (MAX(data_value) FOR data_name IN ([error_number], [severity], [message], database_name, database_id, username, client_hostname, client_app_name, collect_system_time)) T
WHERE
    [severity] > 10
ORDER BY
    event_timestamp DESC
go

and voilà, now all errors can be easily identified:

It’s now very easy to create reports and dashboards to monitor the system in (near) real time. And this is vital when you run a 24x7 online business.

sp_ssiscatalog v1.0.2.0 now available for download [SSIS]

jamiet — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 22:51:20 GMT

v1.0.2.0 – what’s in it?

Things have been a bit quiet on the sp_ssiscatalog front since I last blogged about it three months ago in December 2012. Rest-assured development continues apace however and today I’m making available a minor update, v1.0.2.0 which is now available for download from Codeplex. For those that don’t know I describe sp_ssiscatalog as:

sp_ssiscatalog is a stored procedure that makes it easy to query for information that is strewn around the SSIS Catalog.

There aren’t too many functional changes in this release, it is more focused on making sp_ssiscatalog easier to use. Back in Documenting sp_ssiscatalog I explained how I was adding documentation to the messages tab of SSMS. Hence as of this new release when you execute sp_ssiscatalog you will see information such as this:

which I think should be very useful for anyone that wants to use sp_ssiscatalog to its fullest. Even I who wrote the thing and has been using it day-in, day-out for quite some time now can’t remember the names of all the parameters – now I no longer have to!

Note that you can turn off the display of the documentation using the @show_docs parameter:

exec sp_ssiscatalog @show_docs=0

If you want to display only the documentation and not actually have sp_ssiscatalog do any querying of the SSIS Catalog its @show_docs_only:

exec sp_ssiscatalog @show_docs_only=1

If you have any suggestions for future enhancements please put them in the comments below or submit them to the discussions page on the Codeplex site.

As a reminder, here is the sort of thing you can do with sp_ssiscatalog:

--Return all failed executions  
EXEC [dbo].[sp_ssiscatalog] @operation_type='execs',@execs_status_desc='failed'


--Return all executions for a specified folder
EXEC [dbo].[sp_ssiscatalog] @operation_type='execs',@execs_folder_name='My folder'


--Return all executions of a specified package in a specified project
EXEC [dbo].[sp_ssiscatalog] @operation_type='execs',@execs_project_name='My project', @execs_package_name='Pkg.dtsx'


--Return information about the most recent execution
EXEC [dbo].[sp_ssiscatalog]

One last thing, if sp_ssiscatalog is useful to you and you’d like to support future development feel free to donate to my personal beer fund at http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_xclick&business=jamie@jamie-thomson.net&item_name=Supporting%20sp_ssiscatalog.

Installation Instructions

Download the zip file at DB v1.0.2.0. It contains two files, SsisReportingPack.dacpac & SSISDB.dacpac
Unzip to a folder of your choosing
Open a command prompt and change to the directory into which you unzipped the files
Execute:
- "%PROGRAMFILES(x86)%\Microsoft SQL Server\110\DAC\bin\sqlpackage.exe" /a:Publish /tdn:SsisReportingPack /sf:SSISReportingPack.dacpac /v:SSISDB=SSISDB /tsn:(local)
  (/tsn specifies the target server, change as appropriate. /tdn specifies the database name, you can call it whatever you like.)

If everything works OK you’ll see something like the following:

This will (if it doesn’t already exist) create a database called [SsisReportingPack] (or whatever you chose to call it) which contains [dbo].[sp_ssiscatalog].

Deployment of client-specific database code using SSDT

jamiet — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 13:24:00 GMT

Yesterday I attended SQL Saturday 194 in Exeter for which many people deserve credit but especially the organisers Jonathan Allen & Annette Allen and the sponsors Fusion-IO, Confio Software, Nexus, Big Bang Data Company, Purple Frog Systems, Redgate, idera, Pluralsight, Jurys Inn Exeter & Wrox.

I gave a talk entitled Declarative Database Development with SSDT; both during the session and then afterwards on Twitter Leo Pasta asked me

would you have any extra references on how to handle client-specific changes to the DB schema

I promised Leo an answer, hence this blog post.

If I understand Leo’s question correctly he has an application that is used by multiple clients, he has a separate instance of the application for every client, and the database requires client-specific customisations; luckily for Leo there is a new feature in SSDT that is perfect for this situation. First let’s set up our solution in SSDT:

We have three database projects:

_core - This contains all the objects that are common to all clients. For demonstration purposes it simply contains a table called [Sales]
clientFoo – All the objects that are required only by client “Foo”. In this case there is view which aggregates the data in [Sales] by Customer

clientBar – All the objects that are required only by client “Bar”. In this case there is view which aggregates the data in [Sales] by Location

In order that the reference to table [Sales] in the two views can be resolved both of the client-specific projects have a database reference to _core:

It is those database references that allows objects in clientFoo/clientBar to refer to objects in _core. Now here’s the important bit. When we set up those two database references we must specify that the objects in the referenced project are intended to be in the same database:

Having objects from one database split over multiple projects is called composite projects. The effect of this is that (by default) whenever clientFoo or clientBar are deployed the objects in _core will get deployed as well. We can see this in the output when we deploy clientFoo:

Notice how even though we chose not to deploy _core two objects have been created; table [Sales] (from the _core project) and view [vSalesPerCustomer]. This is the new feature in SSDT that I spoke of above – a deployment of a project will (by default) also deploy all the objects in referenced projects where objects in the referenced database are intended to be in the same database (incidentally this functionality replaces the “partial projects” feature from previous incarnations of SSDT).

Note that you can change this default behaviour in the advanced publish settings by unchecking the “Include composite objects” box:

Hence, with the “Include Composite Objects” setting turned on, we can deploy both projects clientFoo & clientBar and both will contain table [Sales] plus their own client-specific view:

which (I hope) is exactly what Leo was after!

That’s all there is to it. A very very nice new feature of SSDT!

@Jamiet

New job, new computer, new software installs

jamiet — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 09:35:48 GMT

Three days ago I started a new job and put a shout out on Twitter looking for suggestions as to what software bits-n-pieces I as a SQL Server developer should install.

I got some great replies (click here to see them all) and here is the list of all “stuff” that I then installed (N.B. SQL Server and Visual Studio came pre-installed):

Redgate SQLPrompt
Pragmatic Works DBA Express (in order to get Data Surf)
SQL Sentry Plan Explorer
SQL Server Data Tools
BIDS Helper
Notepad++
Sublime Text
SSMS Tools Pack
Powershell 3.0
SQLPSX
SnagIt
PureText
Visual Studio Productivity Power Tools
Live Writer
SkyDrive desktop app
Chrome
Yammer Desktop App

A lot of those aren’t strictly speaking SQL Server related but, for me, they’re still invaluable.

Do you have a similar list? Don’t be afraid to share ‘em and put a link below! And let me know if you think I’ve missed anything important.

@Jamiet