14Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

SNESSUG October Meeting

PASS
The Southern New England SQL Server Users Group's October meeting was a bit sparsely attended with 7 attendees. The sponsor for the night was ApexSQL. The presenation was by AJ Dharmapuri who spoke on using DMV's. Barbara Sampson, SNESSUG Treasurer, did a demo of ApexSQL's SQLEdit. It's a pretty powerful TSQL coding and scripting tool. There's a lot of functionality that worked in a very snappy way during the demo and looked great. I may need to spend some time with their products to see if we can put them to work. As part of the sponsorship, we gave away a license for the Apex SQL Univeral Studio. Quite a prize. I was very excited to see AJ's presentation for a few reasons. First, because he presented on DMV's, based…
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14Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

SQL Server Central Guest Editorial

Misc
My second guest editorial is up at SQL Server Central. These are fun to do (especially the video) even though they're a shocking amount of work considering their size. My hat's off to Steve for churning these out day after day. The man does earn his keep. Anyway, go on over and let me know if you have a favorite character from history that might make a good DBA.
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13Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Operations Manager Feedback

Tools
If you're involved with maintaining Microsoft Operations Manager, you probably have a few things you'd like to tell the developers, such as, couldn't you get some sort of override manager/explorer built into the system? Well, they've built a new feedback mechanism through the updated Connect interface. Get on over there and make your voice heard. Yeah, I wasn't really tracking it either until I saw this post from the OM development team's blog.
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13Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey 5 Comments

Table Variables Are Only in Memory: Fact or Myth

SQL Server, T-SQL
I keep seeing these concepts that have long been disproven, posted again and again on newsgroups as if they were valid information. The latest? Table variables are better because they're only in memory where as temporary tables write to the disk through tempdb. This one is abjectly wrong. I'm not even going to hedge with "it depends." From a macro point of view, there are only a few differences between temporary tables and table variables, statistics being the biggest. Temporary tables have 'em and table variables don't. Other than that, both will reside completely in memory or will swap out to the disk through tempdb, depending on their size. Some of the minor differences, and why you might want to use table variables over temporary tables, table variables won't cause a statement recompile while temporary tables will, table…
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10Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Another Book

Uncategorized
Well, part of one anyway. I wrote three chapters of Rob Walter's new book, Beginning SQL Server 2008 Administration. I think I've mentioned it before. Well, my copies showed up in the mail. Nothing like holding that book in your hands as proof that you've done it. When everything is electronic and we stop printing dead tree books... I don't think it's going to be nearly as satisfying to finish a book. Please, look it over. I think it's going to be a good resource for people just getting started as DBA's.
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10Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

3 Weeks to the PASS Summit

PASS
The PASS Summit is only three weeks away and I'm getting awfully excited. It's not too late to register. Heck, you can register at the door, but you'll pay full price. If you want to save a little, use this registration code, FRP3D, and tell them you know me. They'll hook you up & you'll save $200.  If you're involved with designing, building, developing, developing against, supporting or maintaining SQL Server databases or manage any of those who do any of the above, this is where you should be for the first week of November. You're going to get great information from presentations by top experts within the SQL Server community. Speaking of community, this is one to take part in. You're going to be able to network, talk to, confer, converse…
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08Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

SNESSUG September Meeting

Misc
We had a good night with 13 people attending. I ran unopposed for president of SNESSUG for my second, and final, term. We were graced with the prescence of Jeff Moden, MVP and on of the top posters over at SQL Server Central. He was just visiting. He's a great guy and I was very happy for the chance to meet him in person. Jeff is going to be at the PASS Summit this year, so you too can have a chance to meet him. The presentation was on SSAS and SSRS by Sunil Kadimdiwan. He did a full introduction of cubes from Excel to Analysis Services, all with the purpose of showing how to generate good reports using Reporting Services. Attendees were very interested in some of the security settings…
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08Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

PASS Log Reader Awards

PASS
Brent Ozar, Andy Warren and Jeremiah Peschka have put together a blogger award called the PASS Log Reader Award. I took a couple of posts that I did in the last year and entered. No, I'm not going to say which ones and I don't expect to win because I just picked 'em up, as is, no edits and submitted. I didn't browse all my posts, I didn't rank them, rate them, or do anything else. I just picked two that seemed to describe something and describe it reasonably well. The way I look at it, win or lose, this is supporting PASS, so it's worth taking part. Plus, I like a little competition. The award will be presented at the Summit (which is only three weeks away!).
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06Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Hey, ho, where’d you go…

PASS
Ohio? I'm presenting on Thursday to the Columbus SQL Server Users Group, home of the newly minted MVP, Jeremiah Peschka (congrats again). It's to be a virtual presentation through live meeting. The topic is a Understanding Execution Plans. This time I hope that one of us remembers to hit the record button unlike last time when I did this presentation for the PASS AppDev Virtual Chapter. If you're in the area, come on down and meet me, virtually. Show runs from 6:30-8:30, although all that time is not my presentation, so I suspect Jeremiah has some more fun planned.
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05Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey 15 Comments

Ad Hoc Queries Don’t Reuse Execution Plans: Myth or Fact

SQL Server, T-SQL
Another frequently heard story is that stored procedures get and reuse execution plans, but ad hoc queries do not. A lot of people believe this and say as much online and in the real world. Unlike my last myth, this time, I'm going to give you the DBA answer to this question. It depends. There are ad hoc queries and there are ad hoc queries. The classic ad hoc query looks like this: DECLARE @sql NVARCHAR(MAX), @value int; SET @value = 43668; SET @sql = 'SELECT * FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader AS soh '; SET @sql = @sql + 'JOIN Sales.SalesOrderDetail AS sod '; SET @sql = @sql + 'ON soh.SalesOrderID = sod.SalesOrderID '; SET @sql = @sql + 'WHERE soh.SalesOrderID = ' + CAST(@value AS NVARCHAR); EXEC (@sql); And as ad…
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