SNESSUG President
I've been crazy busy and I didn't mention this before, but last Wednesday I was elected (unapposed) to the post of President of the Southern New England SQL Server Users Group (SNESSUG).
Video Lessons
A while back, I wrote a book, Dissecting SQL Server Execution Plans. Because of it, I had some conversations with Steve Jones & Andy Warren. For a SQL Server geek, heady company. Anyway, they asked me what my plans are for the book. Plans? I wrote it. I thought that was the plan. But they meant lessons, licensing and all that kind of stuff. I didn't have a clue, but they did. A few weeks ago I flew down to Florida and recorded a bunch of short video lesson plans derived from the book and from discussions with Andy Warren. It was a blast. They've now been published over at JumpstartTV. I hope you find them useful. I had a blast doing them and learned a lot from Andy and…
VSTS 2008 Database Edition GDR CTP 16
CTP 15 utterly hosed the virtual device I had it on. I tried uninstalling, but it just wouldn't come off clean. I finally have rebuilt the virtual and reinstalled everything except VSTSDB GDR. Having learned my lesson (the hard way as usual), I started a differential on my virtual for the install of CTP 16 so that I can roll back and install the release candidate and the release as they come out without having to go through that whole rebuild thing again. While Gert & crew are still making some changes, the fundamentals are still there so my presentation at PASS should work fine as currently defined. The only problem I ran into was that I couldn't get the database to deploy by simply clicking on the deploy menu…
PASS Summit
It looks like this year is going to be pretty good. They've expanded the program. If you're not going, you should consider it. Personally, I'm pretty excited. I'm presenting our build and deployment process using Visual Studio Team System Database Edition. I've got the first half of the presentation down cold because it's how we've been doing our deployments for a couple of years now. The second half concerns me a bit. I'm showing the new release that works with SQL Server 2008. Unfortunately that new release isn't done and I keep having to update my code and slides as the new versions come out with different functionality. I'm more than a little bit nervous about that part of the presentation. I wish there was a way to bounce it…
Query Fingerprints and Plan Fingerprints
SQL Server 2008 has been released, but the full capabilities of the product are still be discovered. This isn't a case of discovery so much as Microsoft, in the person of Bart Duncan, has shown us something new. Read the article. This is one of the most exciting things I've seen in a long time. It's especially exciting as we see databases becoming less and less manageable through the implementation of tools like nHibernate. As I noted in a previous post, nHibernate will create a lot of execution plans. With the capabilities here, we'll be able to easily and quickly aggregate some of those plans to identify the costly queries coming out of nHibernate without having to resort to 24 hour Profiler monitoring. Great stuff.
Training and Learning
I think these are usually two different things, but most people conflate the two. There was a great discussion over at SQL Server Central based on an editorial by Steve Jones. It's worth reading through to see how people learn or get themselves trained. One common theme is reading books. I'm looking at stacks of them all over my desk, so it would be hard to deny their use. If you too like to read, then I've got something for you. Red Gate is doing a promotion where, when you purchase SQL Tool Belt, you can also download five E-Books offered by Apress. Several of them look pretty interesting, so this is a good deal. Not to mention, if you're not using some of the tools from SQL Tool Belt already, you're…
SQL Server 2008 Install, cont.
OK. Hopefully you're all reading this stuff BEFORE trying to do the install and certainly BEFORE uninstalling everything in sight. The latest version of SQL Prompt, version 3.9, is 2008 compatible AND doesn't cause this problem with the install. So, I've got to reinstall the software. Time to track down my license. I hope I kept that email.
SQL Server 2008 Install, cont.
OK. I found some information. The first suggests uninstalling SQL Prompt. I tried it and that did the trick. The second suggest was to do a brute-force removal of the registry key: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\90. I didn't get there. Install is running on the desktop now. That seems a bit mean of Microsoft, requiring me to uninstall Red Gate's SQL Prompt, especially since it's such a great little tool. I wonder if I can install it on top of 2008? Time for some more research.
SQL Server 2008 Install
I just finished the install of SQL Server 2008 RTM on my laptop. No real issues except that it wanted SP1 of Visual Studio installed before it would complete. Once I had that done, everything was up and running. The new install routines are nicer than the old ones if a bit more detailed. My desktop is another matter. SQL Server 2008 objected to a SQL Server 2005 Express install. I removed that. It still thinks Express is installed. I'm removing all of SQL Server 2005 to see what happens. The error reported was pretty non-helpful. This is a bit odd since the laptop also has a copy of Express installed. Well, uninstalling all things SQL Server didn't work. Sql2005SsmsExpressFacet is failing. It simply states: "The SQL Server 2005 Express…
More on Table Valued Functions
From the hits in the search results, this is a popular topic. That being so, I'd like to redirect you to another blog that has some more detailed tests available. These tests show more of the shortcomings of multi-statement table valued functions. Gail Shaw is an MVP and a regular at SQL Server Central. She's worth tracking and this post shows why. I want to be clear. I'm not suggesting that you never, ever, use multi-statement table valued functions. There may be places where their use is helpful. I'm saying that using them comes with a very heavy cost, so you better be sure that they are in fact needed in the situation, whatever it is. There was a long discussion and debate over at SQL Server Central recently on…