02Nov 2009 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

PASS Summit 2009 – Day -1

PASS
The official start date for the summit is Tuesday, but trust me, everything kicked off on Sunday when registration opened. 4:00PM the doors opened and I was second through the door (had to be polite, there was a lady in front of me). Registration went smooth as silk. And then the fun started. The PASS Community Summit has a key word in the middle there, Community. Well it was on display. All these people that I know in person, like the people I work with at PASS, online, all the SQL Server Central Posters and the Twitter crowd, and by reputation, MVP's and others that I've heard of, read or seen present, are all milling around, introducing themselves, hugging old friends, making new ones. The fellowship in  a group like…
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30Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey 3 Comments

More PASS Activities

PASS
As if I needed more. I'll be sitting at the blogger table and blogging live (as live as I get) during the keynotes. It should be fun. As I said on Twitter, this means I get to pick on the cool kids. Life is good. Thursday I'll be doing a book signing with Apress between 12:30PM-1:00PM across from the Summit bookstore. I don't have a clue which book we're talking about since they'll be supplying it. I hope it's the Performance Tuning one, but it might be the Introduction one. Either way, that's another place to track me down & say hello. In addition to my keynote blogging, I'll put up a summary for each day of the summit just like last year. It's looking to be a great summit.
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28Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey 6 Comments

Snags With Profiler GUI

SQL Server, T-SQL, Tools
Running the Profiler GUI against a production server is not something you should do. I've outlined my research into exactly why in the past. But I hit another little issue with the Profiler GUI as part of work I'm doing on a Microsoft PSS call (more on that in another post). We have a procedure on one of our systems that is erroring out, but only on a particular server and only when called from the application, not when it's called, on the same server, from SQL Server Management Studio. I needed to capture some trace events and do it quickly, so I decided to use the GUI, just this once. I put filters on it so that I would only collect certain data, and the database I was collecting…
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27Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

SQL Server Standard, Volume 6, Issue #1

Misc, PASS
It's alive! It's alive! That's enough from Colin Clive. It'll be out for the Summit. SQL Server Standard lives again! Although, not quite in the same shape as it used to be. But hey, stitching stuff together out of dead tissue is messy work. I want to thank our first author who had to suffer through quite a few growing pains and help us blaze a trail through the woods, Thomas LaRock. I want to thank my boss at PASS for all the support especially the time I started whining, Andy Warren. And there's this other guy, who has helped just a ton in this effort in every way, and lead the technical edit team, Brad McGehee. We have a photo credit to Pat Write for the front. Craig Ellis has done…
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23Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

PASS Summit One Week Away

PASS
It's just a week and a couple of days before I'll be hopping a plane for Seattle and the 2009 PASS Summit. I'm as excited about this one as I was my first summit, maybe more so. I'm going to get to see a bunch of friends that I only see once a year and hopefully meet in person people I've only interacted with online. A very large part of the PASS Summit is networking. I'd like to meet people who actually read my fumbling attempts at understanding how SQL Server works and how to best work with it. If you'd like to have a chat, there are a lot places to track me down: Monday, most of the day I'll be going to various PASS meetings, so if you're…
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21Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

Characters

SQL Server, T-SQL, Tools
No, I'm not talking about a Dickens novel. I'm talking about the number of characters in a string. I had a painful time recently because of the word "characters."  If you take a look at the dynamic management view sys.dm_exec_sql_text you can get the queries that have been run on your system that are still in the cache. It's a great utility. Better still, you can get specific statements from the code that are actively running through sys.dm_exec_requests or ones that have run through sys.dm_exec_query_stats. To do this is very simple. Each of these DMV's has a pair of columns, statement_start_offset and statement_end_offset. These columns, and I'm quoting directly from books online measure the "number of character" offset from the beginning of the SQL string and from the end of…
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21Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Free Training RIGHT NOW

SQL Server, T-SQL
Quest Connect 2009 is occurring even as I type this. Get on over there if you're interested in some free training. I recorded a session on understanding execution plans. But even better, there are live sessions with some great people. Stop reading this, click the link, get yourself some free training.
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21Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Birds Of a Feather Lunch

PASS
The PASS Summit agenda is shaping up and it's already looking to be much busier than last year. The latest is the Birds of a Feather lunch. It's lunch with an MVP. At least 50 different MVP's will be hosting a table each. At each table a topic of discussion will be hosted by the MVP present. It should be a lot fun. It'll be a great way to meet people and share war stories, tips, approaches, what ever. The list of topics and the MVP's leading are available here at Mike Walsh's blog. I'll be hosting a table on Team Development. I crack jokes about beating up developers, but really I see them as partners and teammates. We're all working towards a common goal, delivering the product, whatever it…
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15Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

SQL Server Standard Update

Misc
The first article should be out within a week or so (knock wood). I hav a winner for the contest to help us pick the artwork for the cover. Leo Pasta. Congrats. Get in touch with me at: grantedd -at- gmail.com so that I can send you your prize.
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