i can't find the video, but these guys demoed this technology about 2 years ago at some tech conference. i thought it was pretty amazing and i didn't realize that ms had picked it up and run with it. techcrunch has a cool video of it all now that it's released. the video will say it all. check it out. http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/29/microsoft-announces-surface-computer/ i knew they were releasing 'something' tonight at midnight that was supposed to be some awesome new technology. i fell asleep but, as i'm sure you can see by the early timestamp i was actually still thinking about it in my...

this is a repost of something i wrote a long time ago. there are already stored procs to view table sizes on a specific table. this was just something that i wrote so that i could create a list of all of the tables in the current database and change the sort orders if i wanted. it also gave me the ability to filter based on table sizes if i needed to only see tables in a certain range.sorry the code formatting is lame. blame the new version of community server.  -- view all table sizes -- author: royashbrook - royashbrook@yahoo.com -- april 2005   select       so.id...

I sent out this link to some people just to peruse as an example of someone using SQL2005 as solution stack. I received the following question back from someone. What is a one-star schema?  It is mentioned in the White Paper. "What, indeed?", I said. I replied that it was a commonly used design schema used in data analysis and that I would have to refresh my memory so I could provide a much better answer.  Well, I have refreshed my memory and I thought I'd post my reply here. Basically, a star schema is a way of organizing data in an analysis, or...

i've received this question from many developers who either weren't sysadmins ever or just forgot. some, perhaps, are just lazy and don't want to look it up or remember it. it may be that others still just want to see if *i* remember. =P the command line to view what nt groups you are in is, literally:  net user %username% /domain   include the % symbols and it will use the environment variable for your username.  

so i came across this article today in my surfing. it's written by Nik Cubrilovic who has a pretty cool blog and it's about his initial experience switching to vista from os x. The experience he records is extremely positive. It makes me want to try using my laptop at home more. For a little background, I have a work laptop that has windows xp professional on it. We use a lot of encryption and protection etc at work so sometimes it seems slow, but overall it's very responsive and usable. It's a IBM Z61t with 2GB of RAM and...

This tip is the pimpness. There are really no downsides and it can help a lot if you are having heavy contention with your tempdb.   http://support.microsoft.com/kb/328551/en-us   here’s a summary of what you do:   Increase the number of tempdb data files to be at least equal to the number of processors. Also, create the files with equal sizing.   That’s pretty much it. Definitely read the article though as it has a ton of great technical information...

I’m fixing to start upgrading some servers to SP2. Here’s some reading material if you are in the same boat.   Nice Summary(has the links below as well): Microsoft's What's New Microsoft's ReadMe   A search on Google or on Microsoft’s SQL forums will reveal plenty of single point errors. I definitely recommend installing in a dev or test environment first and testing until you can’t test anymore. =)

I’m wanting to compile a basic best practices list for SSIS. I don’t really need to get into tons of details for my list, I really just want to say have the big 10 DO and the big 10 DO NOT. Here are my sources for research so far./font>  /font> http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/ssisperf.mspx/span>/p> http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/technologies/ssisperfstrat.mspx/span>/p> http://blogs.msdn.com/ashvinis/archive/2005/09/27/474563.aspx/span>/p> http://blogs.conchango.com/jamiethomson/archive/2006/01/05/2554.aspx/span>/p> http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/sql-server-2005/sql-server-2005-ssis-tuning-the-dataflow-task//span>/p> http://blogs.conchango.com/jamiethomson/archive/2006/02/21/2930.aspx/span>/p>  /font> additionally, here’s a cool little tip/trick about dynamic sql in ssis./font> http://blogs.conchango.com/jamiethomson/archive/2005/12/09/SSIS_3A00_-Using-dynamic-SQL-in-an-OLE-DB-Source-component.aspx/span>/p>  /font> /html>]]>

 Free Enterprise Service Bus based in .NET. If you are looking at implementing an ESB and you have the option of going the open source route, give it a look. check out the jump start guide for some more details.  

just saw this on http://blogs.msdn.com/queryoptteam/archive/2006/06/01/613516.aspx which i found on mark garner's awesome blog.

So I ran into a situation today where I needed to rename a database. Unfortunately, unknown to me, I had that database setup as my default database. Although I had SA role in sql, as soon as I took the database offline to rename it, I couldn’t do anything. Unfortunately, I didn’t notice the problem right away because, I wasn’t really doing anything else on the box at the time except running some other queries and those were already logged in...

i personally like the file system. it's generally easier on me since i'm normally authoring the jobs and don't have hundreds of packages to manage. if i did have hundreds of packages to manage and i didn't author, i might prefer the server. here are some great blog posts about this subject. pros and cons of both mostly pros for file system As a bonus during my research I came across this blog which appears to detail an experience of trying to continuously integrate a data-mart among other things. http://mgarner.wordpress.com/2006/08/31/automating-ssis-deployment/ http://mgarner.wordpress.com/2006/09/24/builddb-open-source-tool-for-the-agile-sql2005-database/ http://mgarner.wordpress.com/2006/10/22/ndataunit-unit-testing-tool/ 

so not too long ago, we had a need to monitor the space used by our tempdb. one of the other dbas had sent out a script on how to do it that i imagine he found somewhere. when i finally got around to processing that email i forwarded him the sp_spaceused command. very easy built in proc that will give you this information. run it in the db you are in to see the space used there or use a full path to see another database. eg. anotherdb.dbo.sp_spaceused. very easy. =) here's a fun forum post about a lot of...

I'm sure plenty of you have seen these hanging on peoples walls. They are the pretty little foldout maps from MS that describe stuff. they have them for tons of things and here is a link to the download location for the SQL2005 System Views map. http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/d/f/0dfe488e-a335-4480-8a8a-b405e32f4368/SQL2005_Sys_Views.pdf A brief search on the web yielded links to more maps here:http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=771aeb45-9d27-4d1f-acd1-9b950637d64e&DisplayLang=en I tried to find some more, but.... well it was just way too hard. =P  

Solid state baby! It's coming! http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/corp/pressoffice/en/2007/2007_04_24_rr_000?c=us&l=en&s=corp http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/peripherals/adatas-128gb-solid-state-drive-sees-the-light-of-day-231693.php This isn't really anything new, but I'm just chomping at the bit for solid state to really take off. The i-RAM from Gigabyte can be seen here and is a exactly what I dreamed of  back in the late 90s. I'm still surprised that more of these items haven't come out with the relative cheapness of RAM.      

snipped from here. Openrowset now allows the BULK clause to be specified which accepts a filename and format specification. An OLE-DB driver for flat-files or XML would also do the job but this is a nice work-around for the native stack. The only difficulty is getting your head around the format for the .fmt file but after that it 'just works':     select *     from openrowset(bulk N'c:\temp\test.txt', formatfile = 'c:\temp\test.fmt') as x see this previous post about bulk importing and format files etc.

OK, so it wasn't that many. I think it's funny that so many people are suprised that IBM is trying to basically take advantage of cheaper working conditions in other places. They want to kill their pensions and take advantage of the brilliant people working in other countries that don't require 6 figures per year and a pension plan to do mediocre work. Ultimately the stock game is all about the people at the top getting richer than they already are. It's a game they play, and that's the way it is. Calling them scumbags or unethical etc is just...

The WAITFOR command isn’t exactly new. But, I don’t really use it much. I did however recently have a desire to do some duration testing that wasn’t something akin to ‘insert 100000 rows into a table and see if stuff slows down.’ I wanted to simulate say a couple of transactions a second for a short period of time. Just a few minutes, really. I probably would have turned to writing some sort of mini test application for c# or writing a...

 OK, so several times recently I have heard about SSIS being able to load 1TB in an hour. These comments had no reference other than something they read once, which is cool because we all probably do that stuff all the time. So, I have current need to research and define some SSIS and General Integration best practices. One of the items I came across was "Load 1TB in less than 1 hour" which is quite sweet. By quite sweet, I mean that it does show you to load a massive amount of data. It is also sweet in that...

There are a ton of articles about using command cancel vs close when you are using a datareader. The idea is that it will make things faster if you cancel the command rather than just closing it if you have an occasion to interrupt the execution. If you don’t cancel, it seems that it will read the rest of the items even if you break the loop, it just won’t do anything with them. Since you are breaking out, you normally don’t need to process the rest of the records, and so you can simply cancel the execution of that...

Davegot a request to allow someone to setup Visual Studio 6 so they could use Visual InterDev. I’m talking about recently, not years ago. For reasons I’m sure most people can guess, those packages are not allowed. It took me about 15 seconds on Google to locate the answer for this person. The answer is really to use a new version of Visual Studio. Anyway, I thought I’d post the links we sent to this individual just in case anyone else has a burning need to debug asp code./font>  /font> ...