An interesting question came up in a recent class regarding testing SSIS in Visual Studio: "How can we capture the information in the Progress tab after a debug session?". My immediate reaction was to implement package logging but the answer lay elsewhere... Read more
The last day at PASS is always with mixed feelings but as they say "Don't cry because it's over, just smile because it happened". Easier said than done as President Wayne Snyder got all choked up when he acknowledged Kevin Kline's awesome 10 years contribution to the leadership of PASS. Standing ovation in Seattle. Read more
Another great day in Seattle at the PASS Summit 2009. The highlight for me was getting 23 SQL Server MVPs to sign a copy of the SQL Server MVP Deep Dives book just released. All royalties are to be donated to the http://www.WarChild.org charity. The book store at the conference sold all of its 150 copies. It's a great book and a great cause. Read more
The day started out with "Bruce" Wayne Snyder providing opening remarks at the PASS Summit 2009 and finished with "Batman Returns" on the AMC channel. In between was a festival of SQL Server know-how and networking. A great day. Read more
It's great to be back in Seattle for the SQL PASS Summit 2009. This year it has a different structure with one pre-conference day for extra seminars and one post-conference day instead of 2 pre-conference days. This is a good idea and should prevent people disapearing early on the last day of the conference. We'll see... Read more
The last session of last year's PASS in Seattle was another standing room only session that went far beyond the advertised time. I think the phrase was "You don't have to go home, but you sure have to get out of here...". It was the great subject of Virtualization of SQL Servers with Hyper-V. I hope to get an update in Seattle next week. Read more
OK, so I am still going through the 168 sessions at the SQL PASS Summit next week in Seattle. I must admit, I am relying on my knowledge of the speakers as my first priority. But a good title always grabs your attention so let's take a look at some...
Yesterday, I highlighted "DBA's behaving badly... Worst Practices for Database Administrators" by Rod Colledge. I think I can contribute to this subject by experience so I'll be there. Read more
When there are 160+ sessions to choose from, the choices are difficult at the PASS Summit 2009 in Seattle. We can attend maybe a keynote speech and 4 other sessions per day. Many times it comes down to the presenter. Sometimes the title plays a factor. Now that we can download the presentations in advance we can do our homework in advance and actually explore the content before we make a choice.
The nice thing about the SQL PASS Itinerary Planner, is that you can search by time, by category, by title, by presenter etc to make your choice up front. http://summit2009.sqlpass.org/ Read more
There's a nice new facility on the sqlpass.org web site that allows you to plan your itinerary for next week's conference. In past years, we have always used a paper copy that gets much maligned during the week. Now we can plan everything online, upload to Outlook, download to our cell phone and away we go to Seattle. You can even download the presentations in advance for a greener conference all round. No more paper copies. Very cool.
http://www.softconference.com/pass/scheduleBuilder.asp Read more
"From Nov 2-5, 1,000s of SQL Server pros and I will be in Seattle at PASS Summit. See you there! http://summit2009.sqlpass.org ".
I promised I would copy and paste that to my blog...but it's true!
I have to decide which of the 168 sessions to attend in the 3 days available...yikes!
There are five tracks this year at the PASS Summit:
Enterprise Database Administration and Deployment Read more
Database & Application Development
BI Platform Architecture, Development and Administration (New)
BI Information Delivery (New) and
Professional Development
An interesting question came up during a class recently about Deadlocks. The dreaded deadlock in SQL Server produces an error 1205 and causes one transaction to fail and a rollback issued. Deadlocks are different from classic blocking behavior.
Blocking means one transaction is waiting for a resource (e.g. a row in the process of being updated) that is locked by another. This causes a delay, but when the lock is released the blocking will stop and the waiting transaction will complete. Read more
It's only just over a week away...A big shout out for the SQL PASS Summit 2009 in Seattle Nov 2nd through 5th. I'll be there for sure...blogging, of course...
http://summit2009.sqlpass.org/
Here's a look back as last year's event:
Dear Diary - SQL PASS in Seattle – Day 1
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/35649
Dear Diary - SQL PASS in Seattle – Day 2
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/35851
Dear Diary - SQL PASS in Seattle – Day 3
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/35917
cheers
Brian
Last week I presented at my local PASS Chapter meeting (Professional Association for SQL Server). It was great to participate in the meeting and to network with other SQL Professionals in my area. My presentation was "What's new with R2?" and covered the latest features in the SQL Server 2008 R2 CTP. Read more
An interesting question came up during my recent SQL Server 2008 class. When we were covering Replication, one student asked when stopping replication which do you stop first, the publisher or the subscribers?
I must admit, the answer did not immediately come to mind. His thought was to shutdown the Publisher first but what if the Subscribers had outstanding updates that had not replicated? Conversely, if you shut down the Subscribers first, they may not have the updates from the Publisher. Read more
I have been testing out the SQL Server 2008 R2 CTP from August and been experimenting with the SQL Server Utlity to perform multi-server management from a central server. You can also monitor Data-tier applications and their activity on the database server. Read more
Data Mining is relatively new technology but it provides extremely powerful functionality for our Business Intelligence solutions. The typical Data Warehouse may be multiple terabytes so how do we sift through that data to uncover data patterns and valuable nuggets of information? Recently, I have been discussing "Performance" Data Warehouses. Can we apply the same strategies there too? Of course... Read more
Log Shipping in SQL Server has been around for a while and still provides an easy method for redundancy and load balancing. It uses standard backup and restore technology to ship backups to a standby server creating a read-only copy of the database.
The frequency of the log backups defines the latency of the standby server. The default is 15 minutes. These backups are "shipped" via a shared folder and then restored to the database on the standby server using WITH STANDBY. Read more
In my last blog entry, I talked about setting up a Utility Control Point in SQL Server 2008 R2 (CTP) and enrolling managed instances so we can monitor multiple servers from that UCP. Graphical icons in the Utility Explorer show servers that are under or overutilized. So how does it define under or overutilized? Read more
One of the new features of SQL Server 2008 R2 is the SQL Server Utility which gives a unified view of your "managed servers" so that you can monitor multiple SQL Servers' health from a central server called a Utility Control Point (UCP). I have been testing using the R2 August CTP... Read more
I was asked recently about Replication with different versions of SQL Server i.e. Multiple versions of SQL Server in a Replication topology. Generally, Microsoft supports replication back to two previous versions. We just need to know the rules. Let's take a look.
Including the two previous releases, we can therefore replicate between SQL Server 2008, 2005 and 2000. Of course, certain service packs need to be applied: SQL 2000 has to have SP3 and SQL 2005 needs SP2. Read more
Brian D. Egler, MCITP/MCSE/MCT 2009, is currently an instructor with Global Knowledge, teaching various Microsoft training courses. He is a SQL specialist with a focus on SQL Server, Windows, .Net and XML. Egler has been a technical instructor for over 20 years and has more than 10 years experience with SQL Server, data modeling, database design, application development including IMS, DB2, Sybase. Every year he runs the Boston Marathon for cancer research.
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