28Apr 2008 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

A Book

Misc
It's only the E-Book, the print version won't be available for another couple of weeks, but... I HAVE A BOOK PUBLISHED! It's also available here. I can not possibly thank the man who gave me the opportunity, carried my sorry-ass down the track, made me write something that closely approximated English, challenged just about every assumption that I walked in with, in other words, did more to make the book happen than I did, Tony Davis. I also had some simply amazing help from Brad McGehee. Brad must have looked up and double checked every single fact I wrote down because I think he found a correction for most of them. Amazing guys. Thanks so much. When you consider how much time & effort these guys put in, I'm not…
Read More
28Apr 2008 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Community Building

Misc
Building a community is hard. I'm one of the leaders of the Southern New England SQL Server Users Group, SNESSUG, a PASS affiliate. We've been going for just over a year. We were launched by the drive and initiative of one person, who got us going and then had to leave. We've been on our own for about four months now. It's been difficult without the drive of the founder, but we're getting the job done & moving things forward. Andy Leanard, MVP, Solid Quality Mentor, nice guy (for a DBA), has a series of posts that, while short, are very helpful guide-posts for those attempting to start a community or keep one running (read them bottom to top). If you're in that position or thinking about volunteering at your…
Read More
04Apr 2008 by Grant Fritchey 3 Comments

Sequel or Ess Cue Ell

Misc
It's Friday, why not a goofy post. What kind of DBA are you? Do you pronounce the bit at the beginning of SQL Server 2008 as a word, sequel, or as three letters, ess cue ell? I'm a sequel kind of guy myself for most everyday conversation. I do occasionally break it down when I need really specific clarity, but those events are rare. Anyone else?  And after you answer it here, go over to SSC and answer the question there too.
Read More
21Mar 2008 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Virtual Servers

Misc
The dev teams that we support have long believed that if only they had an infinite number of environments then the deployment and integration issues that they, and we, wrestle with would go away. Never mind pointing out that if you have problems integrating then spreading yourself on to even more servers with even more isolation of individual development teams would only radically increase the problem. I tried that. I was shut down. Anyway, we had been using a tool set from one of the heavy hitter virtual environment companies. Supposedly it was going to make it possible for us to implement as many virtual environments, not just servers, but sets of servers, as we wanted. Months of work have gone by. I just got the word through back channels...…
Read More
17Mar 2008 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Presentation Last Week

Misc, SQL Server, T-SQL
Last week I presented at the Southern New England SQL Server User Group (SNESSUG) where I'm the Program Director. I presented from the book, Dissecting Execution Plans, that is supposed to be published any day now. I kept it basic and it flowed very well. The audience seemed receptive and there were a few questions. Mostly around figuring out what to do when you saw certain problems within the execution plans. Since that was the goal of the presentation, I was ready for most of the questions. I got stumped once on a Constant Scan operation. I finally looked it up this morning and feel silly. Here's the query: INSERT INTO [AdventureWorks].[Person].[Address]      ([AddressLine1]      ,[AddressLine2]      ,[City]      ,[StateProvinceId]      ,[PostalCode]      ,[rowguid]      ,[ModifiedDate] VALUES ('1313 Mockingbird Lane'…
Read More