25Oct 2010 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

Another Must See Session

Uncategorized
I can't believe I missed this one in all the posts and recommendations I've been making about great sessions coming up at the PASS Summit. I'm not sure where my head was. However, I'd be completely remiss if I didn't mention Jennifer McCown's (blog|twitter) session called T-SQL Brush Up. It was the most popular session at the last 24 Hours of PASS. It's going to be even better live, with an interactive audience. Holy cow, I thought I had put it on my Must See Sessions but I must have messed up. Sorry Jen.
Read More
25Oct 2010 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

SQL Rally Voting

Uncategorized
I received word over the weekend that my precon application had made it past committee and was now subject to the community vote. They haven't posted it yet, but please watch this space. I'll be doing an all day session on how to tune sql queries, from monitoring to establish a baseline, to figuring out what's wrong with the query and how to fix it. If that sounds interesting, please vote for my session.
Read More
03Sep 2010 by Grant Fritchey 5 Comments

Recursive Hiearchies in Reporting Services

Uncategorized
I am not a Reporting Services guru and nor do I play one on TV. I am however forced to be all things Microsoft Data where I work. So I frequently find myself stretching way beyond my abilities. I just had to get a report running that feeds from a web service and has a recursive hiearchy with customized aggregation on multiple fields with drill down to a different set of details. Yeah, through the internet I can see the SSRS monsters rolling their eyes at the ease of this task. But for us mere mortals it was work. Since I spent so much time learning how to do it, I thought I'd share. XML as a Source First, because we have a very paranoid (and appropriately so) group of…
Read More
01Aug 2010 by Grant Fritchey 6 Comments

A Milestone

Uncategorized
I just passed 100,000 views on the blog. That's from 400 posts over a period of time starting in March of 2008. You guys have posted 1129 comments. The average views per week went from 39 in 2008 to 160 in 2010. I realize others out there are hitting 100,000 a week, but for some of us small time bloggers, this is a big deal. I just wanted to say thanks for stopping by and I hope my attempts at understanding SQL Server, PowerShell, SCOM, spatial data, Visual Studio, ORM and whatever else I've posted about has been helpful in some way.
Read More
15Jun 2010 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Sarasota SQL Server Users Group

Uncategorized
Tonight I'm presenting for the Sarasota SQL Server Users Group. If you're interested in attending, you can join in using this link. The topic will be "Query Performance Tuning 101." And in case you can't make that, Thursday, June 17th, I'll be on Quest's Pain of the Week. It should be fun too.
Read More
15Jun 2010 by Grant Fritchey 6 Comments

Virtualizing Servers in Production

Uncategorized
The company where I work has been using virtualization in development, QA, testing, etc., for many years now. We have not even attempted virtualization in production. Things change. But, before we did it, I thought I'd bounce the question out to the people who know, What are some things to watch for in using virtual servers in a production environment. Introduction Flat out, I asked people over Twitter. The overall message was extremely positive. No one suggested it was a bad idea. A few thought that some high volume servers are better served by physical boxes. Volume in this case could be read as high amounts of reads or high amount of writes, both were suggested as reasons to avoid virtualization. The cause for this is clear, from each individual; the…
Read More
10Jun 2010 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

I’m a Pain

Uncategorized
Or maybe I'm misreading that I'm supposed to be helping to alleviate pain. Either way, next Thursday, June 17, I'll be taking part in the Quest Pain of the Week webcast: Easy Ways to Fix Hard SQL Server Problems - Without a Guru. It should be a lot of fun. Please stop by and ask hard questions.
Read More