Search results matching tags 'SQL Server 2008' and 'katmai'

How do the links in YOUR copy of SQL Server 2008 Books Online work?

AaronBertrand — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 23:55:00 GMT

I am just taking a quick show of hands; and maybe some information, if you are willing. (And if this hasn't happened to you, I apologize for taking up your time.)

I have had various problems on multiple installations of Books Online throughout the entire Katmai / SQL Server 2008 cycle. They have been on both 32 and 64-bit; with / without IE8 installed; and with / without Visual Studio installed.

Currently I have one instance where IE8 is not installed, BOL is alongside 2005 on Server 2003, and every single link is not clickable at all. Just no response... I can only navigate to items through the index or search results. On a similar machine the links work, but every single one leads to a page that says, "Sorry, no topics were found for the selected link." Again I must navigate via index or search results. Which is really too bad, because some of those links are much tougher to track down. And now I came across a much more isolated case where on a Vista SP1 machine with IE8 installed, a certain link leads to this "sorry" page from one topic, but not from another topic (the difference is an xmlns attribute in the link, which I think may be the cause of the problem).

You can see what I am talking about in more detail in the following Connect items:

http://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=290461

http://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=357008

(I have some other items about messed-up formatting in IE8, and a lot of others have submitted the same. But I am more curious here about the links, as the formatting issue is being addressed.)

I can't imagine that this kind of thing happens differently across every single machine / VM I use, but it doesn't happen to anyone else? If you have had any issues clicking links in Books Online, please drop a note here providing any specific information we can relay back to Microsoft so they can try harder to reproduce these issues. I mean really, I am not making this stuff up... please help me escape from this madness!

Thanks!

SQL Server has a new logo

AaronBertrand — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 21:51:00 GMT

SQL Server's new logo has been published:

Courtesy of Wesley. And I have taken a screen shot of the new splash screen for Management Studio:

SQL Server 2008 is getting close... I can smell it!

AaronBertrand — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 13:05:00 GMT

No, this is not a "funny funny, ha ha!" April Fool's Day post (though I do find those entertaining, and considered posting one myself). This is for real, and it almost made me tingle a little. I saw this comment from Eric Kang in a Connect item yesterday morning:

"This is a known issue that we have addressed in a release candidate build."

Now, had he posted that this morning, I might have assumed he was taking liberties because of the date. But since it was yesterday, I have to believe that it is genuine. If they're already talking about RC builds, we should see them soon... which means, barring any serious show-stoppers, RTM will be just around the corner.

I'm a little nervous that I'm still finding significant usability issues in CTP6, and since the code is already frozen, these are getting swept under the rug, or deferred to the next release, or maybe we'll see them in a service pack. Or maybe they will address some of them, quietly, in the next CTP / RC release.

In any case, as with all software, if the pros outweigh the cons, then push forward, right? Even with little blemishes here and there, I am excited about starting to seriously work with the product, and hope to have it out in production in short order.

Increased limits for columns / indexes / statistics

AaronBertrand — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 18:33:00 GMT

I am still on the fence about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. However, in the next build of SQL Server 2008 you will be able to get your hands on, you will find that some element limits have changed, just a bit. With the introduction of sparse columns, you can now jam 30,000 columns into a table. No, that is not a typo; I really meant to type 30,000 columns (up from 1,024). You can also create 30,000 statistics (up from 2,000), and 1,000 indexes (up from 250).

This room comes at a cost, though. For tables with sparse columns, the maximum row length drops from 8,060 bytes to 8,018 bytes.

I question whether there is a practical application for this in the real world. There probably is, but I must be in the wrong market segment to understand what it could possibly be.

In any case, I'm sure this news makes someone out there happy.

16 Changed Dynamic Management Views in SQL Server 2008

AaronBertrand — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 13:46:00 GMT

Yesterday Denis Gobo told you about 33 new DMVs in SQL Server 2008; previously, I had noticed that a few of the existing DMVs from 2005 had changed slightly. So, Denis sparked my curiosity, and I ran the following query on a recent build of SQL Server 2008, which had a linked server pointing to SQL Server 2005:

SELECT s1.vn, s1.cn
 FROM
(
        SELECT
                vn = OBJECT_NAME([object_id]),
                cn = name
        FROM
                master.sys.all_columns
        WHERE
                OBJECT_NAME([object_id]) LIKE 'dm[_]%'
)
        s1
LEFT OUTER JOIN
(
        SELECT
                vn = v.name,
                cn = c.name
        FROM
                [SQL2005_LinkedServer].master.sys.all_columns c
        INNER JOIN 
                [SQL2005_LinkedServer].master.sys.all_views v
        ON     
                c.[object_id] = v.[object_id]
        WHERE
               v.name LIKE 'dm[_]%'
)
    s2
ON
        s1.vn = s2.vn
        AND s1.cn = s2.cn
WHERE
    s2.vn IS NULL
    AND EXISTS
    (
        SELECT 1
            FROM [SQL2005_LinkedServer].master.sys.all_views
            WHERE name LIKE 'dm[_]%'
            AND name = s1.vn
    )
ORDER BY
    vn,cn;

Here are the results; 25 new columns across 16 DMVs. Several seem to have to do with resource governor, but the one I think I like the best is sys.dm_os_sys_info.sqlserver_start_time ... this goes back to a suggestion I made on Ladybug, which was a bug/suggestion system that pre-dates Connect.

View	Column
dm_db_file_space_usage	database_fragment_id
dm_exec_cached_plans	pool_id
dm_exec_query_memory_grants	group_id
dm_exec_query_memory_grants	ideal_memory_kb
dm_exec_query_memory_grants	is_small
dm_exec_query_memory_grants	pool_id
dm_exec_query_resource_semaphores	pool_id
dm_exec_requests	group_id
dm_exec_sessions	group_id
dm_fts_active_catalogs	is_importing
dm_os_buffer_descriptors	numa_node
dm_os_memory_cache_entries	pool_id
dm_os_schedulers	quantum_length_us
dm_os_sys_info	sqlserver_start_time
dm_os_sys_info	sqlserver_start_time_ms_ticks
dm_os_tasks	parent_task_address
dm_os_worker_local_storage	broker_address
dm_repl_schemas	re_colattr
dm_repl_traninfo	begin_time
dm_repl_traninfo	commit_time
dm_repl_traninfo	error_count
dm_repl_traninfo	is_known_cdc_tran
dm_repl_traninfo	session_id
dm_repl_traninfo	session_phase
dm_tran_active_transactions	filestream_transaction_id

My Top 10 list for SQL Server 2008

ErinW — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 17:21:00 GMT

Long gone are the days when you can reasonably expect to know all aspects of SQL Server at a deep level. When a new version starts to emerge, I try to put some scope around the features that I will dive more deeply into. I'm publishing my list here so that like-minded SQL Server enthusiasts may become aware of a feature or two that was lost in that one-page Powerpoint slide you see in most of the presentations on SQL Server 2008.

Note: I put together this list during the summer as an roadmap for personal testing with the CTP releases. In December 2007, a whitepaper, "An Introduction to New Data Warehouse Scalability Features in SQL Server 2008", was released that includes a short writeup on each of these features, as well as some additional improvements to SSAS, SSIS and SSRS. If you are interested in the types of features I mention below, I highly recommend you check out this whitepaper.

My focus is on Business Intelligence and performance (particularly in terms of relational data warehouse performance). With that said and in no particular order, here is my list of top 10 features in SQL Server 2008, and why. I plan to post more detail about several of these in the future:

MERGE command - this is a new TSQL command that will allow you to combine an Insert with an Update command, sometimes referred to as an UPSERT. This is particularly useful in loading a data warehouse. You will no longer have to test for a row's existence in order to take one of two paths (INSERT or UPDATE, or even DELETE).
Star Join - this could have a tremendous impact on queries in a relational data warehouse. Data warehouse queries are characteristically performance hogs. Since a large percentage of data is usually selected, the query optimizer often cannot take advantage of indexes like it can with more selective OLTP queries.
Change Data Capture (CDC) - this feature can be used in SQL Server 2008 data sources to automatically track changes in data that require a row to be re-sent to a data warehouse. This makes ETL from a SQL Server 2008 data source far more efficient and straight-forward.
INSERT INTO - no structural changes have been made to the statement, but minimal logging can be implement, much like BULK INSERT or SELECT..INTO, under the right conditions.
Lookups in SSIS - though SSIS lookups were incredibly enhanced from DTS (where they were virtually unusable), the performance of this task has been tuned to improve performance and minimize resource utilization. In lieu of blogging about this later, I'll refer to a blog post by Jamie Thomson who explains this feature in detail and far better than I could.
Data compression - this is potentially huge! First of all, compression is an option, so if if the CPU hit is an issue you can choose not to implement compression. Data compression means more data on fewer pages, which has a domino effect on performance (more pages in memory, better memory utilization, and improved page life expectancy).
Partitioning enhancements - there's an issue in SQL Server 2005 partitioning parallelism that affects queries on a few number of partitions but greater than 1. If only one partition is queried, intra-partition parallelism is implemented effectively. If greater than one, a single thread is used to process each partition, which results in under-parallelism with queries on just a few partitions. This has been addressed in SQL Server 2008 (future post).
Resource Governor - if you haven't seen the demo on this, you should. You can implement resource governing rules that affect inflight queries. One scenario I see for this is in environments where ETL occurs simultaneously with data warehouse queries, such as in a real-time environment.
Backup compression - this will dramatically affect backup times for large data warehouses. This capability is currently available through third party vendors but some DBAs are currently unable to leverage these solutions due to company standards or budget constraints.
Partition-aligned indexed views (IVs) - this allows for the use of IVs on fact tables. Indexed views on partitioned tables is virtually unusable in SQL Server 2005 because of the requirement to drop and recreate dependent IVs whenever a fact table partition SWITCH is made. I'll explain why I think this is such a big deal in a future post.

Connect needs an "Ignored" status

AaronBertrand — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 11:57:00 GMT

The SQL team seems to have been quite busy recently, commenting on and closing out many bugs and suggestions that have been raised, I suppose as they close out work on the SQL Server 2008 codebase.

Some (like Buck Woody and Bill Ramos, among others) have been very good about commenting that while they can't address the issue(s) for SQL Server 2008, they will be looking at the work for a future version of SQL Server.

Other issues seem to have been completely ignored.

About a week ago, I filed a suggestion entitled "SSMS : deleting constraint needs to be easier." This is about how a unique constraint, for example, gets placed in the wrong spot in the Object Explorer hierarchy, and subsequently how a "Delete" context menu item is offered in cases where it can only be doomed to failure.

Initially, the comment from Microsoft (12/9) looked promising. Then this morning, the issue was closed as "Resolved (Won't Fix)." Without a comment as to why.

Personally, I don't think this issue (as well as countless others that have been similarly discarded) has been "resolved" at all. Certainly I can understand that they're not going to invest months and months of effort into making SSMS better. But defer the issue, or something. Right now the resolution seems to be, "Yep, that's the way it is. Get used to it."

Registered Servers become more useful

AaronBertrand — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 12:35:00 GMT

In playing with the latest CTP for SQL Server 2008, I stumbled across some new context menu items for a server group node in Registered Servers. You can now right-click a group node and choose options such as "New Query" or "Object Explorer." When I first saw the items in the list, I thought it was some kind of bug, because how can you launch a new query connected to a group of servers? Well, it does exactly that. In the new query window, you can say:

SELECT * FROM master.sys.tables;

And you will get a list of the tables on each server, with extra columns for [Server Name] and [Login]. Very useful, right?

However, a couple of things to note:

(a) for at least right now, do not mix versions in each server group, unless you only plan to run queries against objects that you know have identical schema. For example, if you try to run the above query against a group that includes both 2005 and 2008 instances, the resultsets can't be merged/unioned, because SQL Server 2008 has new columns.

(b) the resultset is sorted first by [Server Name]. I tried to add an ORDER BY clause that would allow me, for example, to select the highest values from DMVs across a set of servers, not caring about the order of the [Server Name]. It did not result in an error, but SSMS still injects its own ORDER BY clause that prevents the sorting of the data in any other way. The answer I received on Connect (Item #315260): pull the data into Excel if you want to sort another way.

November CTP (CTP5) is now publicly available!

AaronBertrand — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 18:22:00 GMT

What are you waiting for? Go get it!

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=3BF4C5CA-B905-4EBC-8901-1D4C1D1DA884

Why are you still reading this?

November CTP : Initial impressions of SSMS changes

AaronBertrand — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 03:16:00 GMT

[Updates below in BOLD.]

On loading SSMS for the first time, I noticed a few things. First of all, the row(s) affected message is now prefixed with information on the instance and login relevant to the query execution:

As illustrated in the graphic, this information is already available in the status bar. Why are they spoon-feeding it to us in the row(s) affected message?

Next, I noticed the region-like behavior that has been added. You cannot define your own regions, but the more typical code blocks you would want to hide/show are supported by default. (Except block comments.)

In the same graphic, notice that error highlighting is not all that perfect just yet. Sure, it identifies common syntax errors and undeclared variables, but it also yields a false positive on perfectly valid function names, such as OBJECT_SCHEMA_NAME(). [Note from Connect #311086 : this will be fixed.] Notice also that syntax highlighting has taken a step backward. sys.objects, for example, should be green; OBJECT_SCHEMA_NAME and OBJECT_ID should be pink. [Note from Connect #311089 : this will be fixed.]

And finally, I got to play with the much-anticipated IntelliSense functionality. I already knew that it was not supported for many syntax operators (primarily SELECT). It was pretty fast in my tests against a local instance, however I have not played with it yet remotely (performance here is the main reason I can't use Red-Gate's product). I was disappointed to discover that in a query with a single table/view, if you do not use an alias, the auto-complete list includes everything under the sun, making it very cumbersome to find and select valid column names. [Note from Connect #311088 : they are trying to make this better, including sorting in CTP6.] If you use an alias, however, this allows you to narrow down your list considerably. Not the most intuitive thing in the world, but I guess I will learn.