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  • SQL SERVER – Finding Latch Statistics

    - by pinaldave
    Last month I wrote SQL Server Wait Types and Queues series SQL SERVER – Summary of Month – Wait Type – Day 28 of 28. I had great fun to write the series. I learned a lot and I felt this has created some deep interest on the subject with others. I recently received very interesting question from one of the reader after reading SQL SERVER – PAGELATCH_DT, PAGELATCH_EX, PAGELATCH_KP, PAGELATCH_SH, PAGELATCH_UP – Wait Type – Day 12 of 28 that if they can know what kind of latches are waiting and what is their count. Absolutely! SQL Server team has already provided DMV which does the same. -- Latch SELECT * FROM sys.dm_os_latch_stats ORDER BY wait_time_ms DESC Above script will return you details about how many latches were waiting for how long. After going over this script I feel like going deep into the subject further. I will post a blog post on the subject soon. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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  • SQL Server 2008 R2: StreamInsight changes at RTM: Access to grouping keys via explicit typing

    - by Greg Low
    One of the problems that existed in the CTP3 edition of StreamInsight was an error that occurred if you tried to access the grouping key from within your projection expression. That was a real issue as you always need access to the key. It's a bit like using a GROUP BY in TSQL and then not including the columns you're grouping by in the SELECT clause. You'd see the results but not be able to know which results are which. Look at the following code: var laneSpeeds = from e in vehicleSpeeds group e...(read more)

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  • Six Unusual Blogs I Like

    - by Bill Graziano
    I subscribe to and read over 100 SQL Server blogs every day.  I link to posts that I think are interesting.  I also read a fair number of non-SQL Server blogs.  Here are a few that I think are interesting. danah boyd. She is a researcher with Microsoft and writes about privacy, social media and teenagers.  I discovered her blog while looking for strategies to keep my personal and professional life separate.  (I haven’t found a good solution to that yet.)  Her stories of how teenagers use Facebook and other social media tools are fascinating. Clayton’s Web Snacks.  Steve Clayton works at Microsoft and has a variety of blogs out there.  This one focuses on … hmmm.  His latest posts are on graffiti, infographics, paper tweets, cartoons and slow motion videos.  It’s mostly visual and you never really know what you’ll get.  It’s always interesting though and I like what he posts.  It’s good creative stuff. Seth Godin.  Seth writes about Marketing.  I read him for motivation to get off my butt and get things done.  He’s a great motivator who encourages you to think big.  And do something! Ask the Pilot.  Patrick Smith is a commercial airline pilot writing about the airline industry.  He’s a great debunker of myths (no they don’t reduce oxygen in the cabin to keep you docile).  My favorite topics include the TSA, flying myths, airport reviews and flight delays. My old favorite flight blog used to be enplaned.  No one knew who wrote it.  It focused on the economics of the airline industry.  It was fascinating stuff.  One day it was gone.  The entire blog was deleted.  Someone tracked down some partial archives and put them online. The Agent’s Journal.  Jack Bechta is an NFL agent.  He writes about the business side of the NFL, the draft and free agency.  Lately he’s been writing about the potential lockout.  He has a distinct lack of hype which I find very refreshing.  xkcd.  I call this the comic for smart people.  A little math, some IT and internet privacy thrown in all make an unusual comic. Funny and intelligent.

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, June 08, 2013

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, June 08, 2013Popular ReleasesXomega Framework: Xomega.Framework 1.4: Adding support for Visual Studio 2012 and .Net framework 4.5. Minor bug fixes and enhancements.sb0t v.5: sb0t 5.14: Stability fix in script engine. Avatar.exists property fixed in scripting. cb0t custom font protocol re-added and updated to support new Ares.ASP.NET MVC Forum: MVCForum v1.3.5: This is a bug release version, with a couple of small usability features and UI changes. All the small amount of bugs reported in v1.3 have been fixed, no upgrade needed just overwrite the files and everything should just work.Json.NET: Json.NET 5.0 Release 6: New feature - Added serialized/deserialized JSON to verbose tracing New feature - Added support for using type name handling with ISerializable content Fix - Fixed not using default serializer settings with primitive values and JToken.ToObject Fix - Fixed error writing BigIntegers with JsonWriter.WriteToken Fix - Fixed serializing and deserializing flag enums with EnumMember attribute Fix - Fixed error deserializing interfaces with a valid type converter Fix - Fixed error deser...IIS Express GUI: IISExpressGUI Version 1.0 beta: This is a beta version Tested on Windows Xp (IISExpress 7.5) and Windows 8 (IISExpress 8.0) Works with default installation path for IISExpress Manages only web sites configured in IIS Express applicationhost.config Works with default path for applicationhost.config Application expects that applicationhost.config existsDNN Extension Url Providers: Latest Release: Latest Release of all Extension Url ProvidersChristoc's DotNetNuke Module Development Template: DotNetNuke 7 Project Templates V2.3 for VS2012: V2.3 - Release Date 6/5/2013 Items addressed in this 2.3 release Fixed bad namespace for BusinessController in one of the C# templates. Updated documentation in all templates. Setting up your DotNetNuke Module Development Environment Installing Christoc's DotNetNuke Module Development Templates Customizing the latest DotNetNuke Module Development Project TemplatesPulse: Pulse 0.6.7.0: A number of small bug fixes to stabilize the previous Beta. Sorry about the never ending "New Version" bug!QlikView Extension - Animated Scatter Chart: Animated Scatter Chart - v1.0: Version 1.0 including Source Code qar File Example QlikView application Tested With: Browser Firefox 20 (x64) Google Chrome 27 (x64) Internet Explorer 9 QlikView QlikView Desktop 11 - SR2 (x64) QlikView Desktop 11.2 - SR1 (x64) QlikView Ajax Client 11.2 - SR2 (based on x64)BarbaTunnel: BarbaTunnel 7.2: Warning: HTTP Tunnel is not compatible with version 6.x and prior, HTTP packet format has been changed. Check Version History for more information about this release.SuperWebSocket, a .NET WebSocket Server: SuperWebSocket 0.8: This release includes these changes below: Upgrade SuperSocket to 1.5.3 which is much more stable Added handshake request validating api (WebSocketServer.ValidateHandshake(TWebSocketSession session, string origin)) Fixed a bug that the m_Filters in the SubCommandBase can be null if the command's method LoadSubCommandFilters(IEnumerable<SubCommandFilterAttribute> globalFilters) is not invoked Fixed the compatibility issue on Origin getting in the different version protocols Marked ISub...BlackJumboDog: Ver5.9.0: 2013.06.04 Ver5.9.0 (1) ?????????????????????????????????($Remote.ini Tmp.ini) (2) ThreadBaseTest?? (3) ????POP3??????SMTP???????????????? (4) Web???????、?????????URL??????????????? (5) Ftp???????、LIST?????????????? (6) ?????????????????????Media Companion: Media Companion MC3.569b: New* Movies - Autoscrape/Batch Rescrape extra fanart and or extra thumbs. * Movies - Alternative editor can add manually actors. * TV - Batch Rescraper, AutoScrape extrafanart, if option enabled. Fixed* Movies - Slow performance switching to movie tab by adding option 'Disable "Not Matching Rename Pattern"' to Movie Preferences - General. * Movies - Fixed only actors with images were scraped and added to nfo * Movies - Fixed filter reset if selected tab was above Home Movies. * Updated Medi...Nearforums - ASP.NET MVC forum engine: Nearforums v9.0: Version 9.0 of Nearforums with great new features for users and developers: SQL Azure support Admin UI for Forum Categories Avoid html validation for certain roles Improve profile picture moderation and support Warn, suspend, and ban users Web administration of site settings Extensions support Visit the Roadmap for more details. Webdeploy package sha1 checksum: 9.0.0.0: e687ee0438cd2b1df1d3e95ecb9d66e7c538293b Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.93: Added -esc:BOOL switch (CodeSettings.AlwaysEscapeNonAscii property) to always force non-ASCII character (ch > 0x7f) to be escaped as the JavaScript \uXXXX sequence. This switch should be used if creating a Symbol Map and outputting the result to the a text encoding other than UTF-8 or UTF-16 (ASCII, for instance). Fixed a bug where a complex comma operation is the operand of a return statement, and it was looking at the wrong variable for possible optimization of = to just .VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: VG-Ripper 2.9.42: changes NEW: Added Support for "GatASexyCity.com" links NEW: Added Support for "ImgCloud.co" links NEW: Added Support for "ImGirl.info" links NEW: Added Support for "SexyImg.com" links FIXED: "ImageBam.com" linksDocument.Editor: 2013.22: What's new for Document.Editor 2013.22: Improved Bullet List support Improved Number List support Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsCarrotCake, an ASP.Net WebForms CMS: Binaries and PDFs - Zip Archive (v. 4.3 20130528): Features include a content management system and a robust featured blogging engine. This includes configurable date based blog post URLs, blog post content association with categories and tags, assignment/customization of category and tag URL patterns, simple blog post feedback collection and review, blog post pagination/indexes, designation of default blog page (required to make search, category links, or tag links function), URL date formatting patterns, RSS feed support for posts and pages...PHPExcel: PHPExcel 1.7.9: See Change Log for details of the new features and bugfixes included in this release, and methods that are now deprecated.Droid Explorer: Droid Explorer 0.8.8.10 Beta: Fixed issue with some people having a folder called "android-4.2.2" in their build-tools path. - 16223 New ProjectsActiveRoad: IRoad browser settings library Configuration for authentication and data validation iRoad system.AeroHockey: -ASP.NET Web Form Survey: Survey Management, virtual project for ASP.NET Web Form group members.BattleFury: BattleFury is a Game where multiple players can log into a server and fight against each other. The twist is that you can use the given libraries to create codeDomino to Exchange Migration: A Multifunctional server migration tool Mail Migration Wizard is a batch conversion method that flawlessly accomplishes bulk NSF to PST migration or Lotus NotesEAV Manager: Allows users add entities and manager entitiesGet country name from IP: This is an API that outputs two letter country name for a given IP address. This api gives accurate name of the country for a given IPv4 address.Gpx File Cleaner: The GPX file cleaner is a small geocaching tool to remove vendor specific XML elements from a GPX file and reduces the information to the baseline GPX 1.0.HIPC: Party Time!Kunlun: ????????,???? ?? ?????????????,???????C/S????New-NuGetPackage PowerShell Script: New-NuGetPackage.ps1 is a PowerShell script to make creating and publishing NuGet packages quick and easy, whether packing from a .nuspec or project file.ProXR Library: The Pro XR library is a native C# library for communicating to a Pro XR relay controller over TCP/IP or serial port communications. Sarcasm: Fuck yeahSE_Agency_Project: ????? ?? ????? ???? ????? ?????????SharpDevelop Version Selector: This is a replacement for the Visual Studio Version Selector that allows the user to open SLN files based off of user defined rules.SPBusiness: Business Classes to support SharePoint DevelopmentStepsManager: An all in one library to implement a step management in your application in few lines of code.Switchboard: A simple message broker that receives messages from a queue and passes them to plug-in handlers loaded at run time.TasteKidSharp: C# TasteKid API wrapper (www.tastekid.com) ThriveFast SharePoint Utilities: A collection of useful utilities for SharePoint 2010 & 2013 brought to you by ThriveFast. TopBoss: TestingWCSF Contrib Modular Sitemap / Nav Graph (Example): This is NOT an attempt to fork the great WCSF contrib probject. I wrote some stuff to try to extend the idea of using modules to modularizing the sitemap and using it help provide views for the navigation graphs used by the xml pageflow library. I'm posting the code here so I can get some community feedback related to the validity of ideas, the implementation and possible suggestions on improvement with respect to keeping modules at loosely coupled as possible. Cheers PeteWindows 8 Loopback Exemption Manager: GUI to enable Loopback Exemptions for Windows 8 Modern UI Apps Windows Store App Calendar Control: Windows Store App Calendar Control (XAML)

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  • Is SQL Azure a newbies springboard?

    - by jamiet
    Earlier today I was considering the various SQL Server platforms that are available today and I wondered aloud, wonder how long until the majority of #sqlserver newcomers use @sqlazure instead of installing locally Let me explain. My first experience of development was way back in the early 90s when I would crank open VBA in Access or Excel and start hammering out some code, usually by recording macros and looking at the code that they produced (sound familiar?). The reason was simple, Office was becoming ubiquitous so the barrier to entry was incredibly low and, save for a short hiatus at university, I’ve been developing on the Microsoft platform ever since. These days spend most of my time using SQL Server. I take a look at SQL Azure today I see a lot of similarities with those early experiences, the barrier to entry is low and getting lower. I don’t have to download some software or actually install anything other than a web browser in order to get myself a fully functioning SQL Server  database against which I can ostensibly start hammering out some code and I believe that to be incredibly empowering. Having said that there are still a few pretty high barriers, namely: I need to get out my credit card Its pretty useless without some development tools such as SQL Server Management Studio, which I do have to install. The second of those barriers will disappear pretty soon when Project Houston delivers a web-based admin and presentation tool for SQL Azure so that just leaves the matter of my having to use a credit card. If Microsoft have any sense at all then they will realise the huge potential of opening up a free, throttled version of SQL Azure for newbies to party on; they get to developers early (just like they did with me all those years ago) and it gives potential customers an opportunity to try-before-they-buy. Perhaps in 20 years time people will be talking about SQL Azure as being their first foray into the world of coding! @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • Tips for adapting Date table to Power View forecasting #powerview #powerbi

    - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)
    During the keynote of the PASS Business Analytics Conference, Amir Netz presented the new forecasting capabilities in Power View for Office 365. I immediately tried the new feature (which was immediately available, a welcome surprise in a Microsoft announcement for a new release) and I had several issues trying to use existing data models. The forecasting has a few requirements that are not compatible with the “best practices” commonly used for a calendar table until this announcement. For example, if you have a Year-Month-Day hierarchy and you want to display a line chart aggregating data at the month level, you use a column containing month and year as a string (e.g. May 2014) sorted by a numeric column (such as 201405). Such a column cannot be used in the x-axis of a line chart for forecasting, because you need a date or numeric column. There are also other requirements and I wrote the article Prepare Data for Power View Forecasting in Power BI on SQLBI, describing how to create columns that can be used with the new forecasting capabilities in Power View for Office 365.

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  • The importance of Unit Testing in BI

    - by Davide Mauri
    One of the main steps in the process we internally use to develop a BI solution is the implementation of Unit Test of you BI Data. As you may already know, I’ve create a simple (for now) tool that leverages NUnit to allow us to quickly create Unit Testing without having to resort to use Visual Studio Database Professional: http://queryunit.codeplex.com/ Once you have a tool like this one, you can start also to make sure that your BI solution (DWH and CUBE) is not only structurally sound (I mean, the cube or the report gets processed correctly), but you can also check that the logical integrity of your business rules is enforced. For example let’s say that the customer tell you that they will never create an invoice for a specific product-line in 2010 since that product-line is dismissed and will never be sold again. Ok we know that this in theory is true, but a lot of this business rule effectiveness depends on the fact the people does not do a mistake while inserting new orders/invoices and the ERP used implements a check for this business logic. Unfortunately these last two hypotesis are not always true, so you may find yourself really having some invoices for a product line that doesn’t exists anymore. Maybe this kind of situation in future will be solved using Master Data Management but, meanwhile, how you can give and idea of the data quality to your customers? How can you check that logical integrity of the analytical data you produce is exactly what you expect? Well, Unit Testing of a DWH or a CUBE can be a solution. Once you have defined your test suite, by writing SQL and MDX queries that checks that your data is what you expect to be, if you use NUnit (and QueryUnit does), you can then use a tool like NUnit2Report to create a nice HTML report that can be shipped via email to give information of data quality: In addition to that, since NUnit produces an XML file as a result, you can also import it into a SQL Server Database and then monitor the quality of data over time. I’ll be speaking about this approach (and more in general about how to “engineer” a BI solution) at the next European SQL PASS Adaptive BI Best Practices http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/eu2010/Agenda/ProgramSessions/AdaptiveBIBestPratices.aspx I’ll enjoy discussing with you all about this, so see you there! And remember: “if ain't tested it's broken!” (Sorry I don’t remember how said that in first place :-)) Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • Transferring Email to Google Apps - Timing

    - by picus
    I did a site for a client a few months back. Hosting & email was setup through Dreamhost VPS. Hosting has not been an issue, but email has become increasingly dodgy. Long story short, they want to transfer to Google Apps for Biz. They already have the mailboxes setup - they are on macs so they will be transferring using the gmail email importer for mac - my question is this - should they transfer their domain over first or their emails? I'm a developer so I have no problem changing their DNS settings, but I am not an IT manager type by any stretch so I am a bit in the dark about process - my proposed process was: Delete any junk/deleted mail from current environment Backup email locally copy emails to google apps via importer Switch domain and update mac mail settings It seems that doing the domain first would be best but I don't know if that is possible. I have been trying to find a generic checklist, but i haven't been able to.

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  • Survey: Do you write custom SQL CLR procedures/functions/etc

    - by James Luetkehoelter
    I'm quite curious because despite the great capabilities of writing CLR-based stored procedures to off-load those nasty operations TSQL isn't that great at (like iteration, or complex math), I'm continuing to see a wealth of SQL 2008 databases with complex stored procedures and functions which would make great candidates. The in-house skill to create the CLR code exists as well, but there is flat out resistance to use it. In one scenario I was told "Oh, iteration isn't a problem because we've trained...(read more)

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  • Back in Atlanta! Wed, Feb 9 2011

    - by KKline
    I always enjoy spending time with my friends from Atlanta, as well as meeting folks and making new friends. If you live in the Atlanta area, I hope you'll join me on the evening of Wednesday, February 9th, 2011. Details are at the Atlanta SQL Server user group website . It's common knowledge that I have a terrible memory for many things. However, one of the few things that my memory is usually really good at is remember names & faces (and remembering stories, but that is another story as well)....(read more)

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  • Server Systems for SQL Server 2012 per core licensing

    - by jchang
    Until recently, the SQL Server Enterprise Edition per processor (socket) licensing model resulted in only 2 or 3 server system configurations being the preferred choice. Determine the number of sockets: 2, 4 or 8. Then select the processor with the most compute capability at that socket count level. Finally, fill the DIMM sockets with the largest capacity ECC memory module at reasonable cost per GB. Currently this is the 16GB DIMM with a price of $365 on the Dell website, and $240 from Crucial. The...(read more)

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  • #MDX in London and speculation about future books

    - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)
    Chris Webb, who wrote the Expert Cube Development with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services book with me and Alberto , is preparing another Introduction to MDX course in London, this time from October 26th to 28th. It is now a three day course (previously it was two day) and you can find every other detail here . You might be wondering whether we are writing something else... well, we don't have plan to release a new edition of the Analysis Services book - after all, all the content of the...(read more)

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  • Andrejus Keeps Cranking Out the Tips

    - by steve.muench
    I've been working on designing and implementing a new set of features for an upcoming Oracle ADF release for the past several months (and several more to come) and this has put a real limit on the time I have available for helping external customers and internal teams, as well as the time I have for blogging. Thankfully, the ADF community at large has many other voices they can listen to for tips and techniques. One I wanted to highlight specifically today is Andrejus Baranovskis' blog, which is steadily building up a high-quality archive of downloadable ADF examples based on his real-world consulting experiences, each with a corresponding explanatory article. If you're not already subscribed to Andrejus' blog, I highly recommend it. Keep up the great work, Andrejus!

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  • The SSIS tuning tip that everyone misses

    - by Rob Farley
    I know that everyone misses this, because I’m yet to find someone who doesn’t have a bit of an epiphany when I describe this. When tuning Data Flows in SQL Server Integration Services, people see the Data Flow as moving from the Source to the Destination, passing through a number of transformations. What people don’t consider is the Source, getting the data out of a database. Remember, the source of data for your Data Flow is not your Source Component. It’s wherever the data is, within your database, probably on a disk somewhere. You need to tune your query to optimise it for SSIS, and this is what most people fail to do. I’m not suggesting that people don’t tune their queries – there’s plenty of information out there about making sure that your queries run as fast as possible. But for SSIS, it’s not about how fast your query runs. Let me say that again, but in bolder text: The speed of an SSIS Source is not about how fast your query runs. If your query is used in a Source component for SSIS, the thing that matters is how fast it starts returning data. In particular, those first 10,000 rows to populate that first buffer, ready to pass down the rest of the transformations on its way to the Destination. Let’s look at a very simple query as an example, using the AdventureWorks database: We’re picking the different Weight values out of the Product table, and it’s doing this by scanning the table and doing a Sort. It’s a Distinct Sort, which means that the duplicates are discarded. It'll be no surprise to see that the data produced is sorted. Obvious, I know, but I'm making a comparison to what I'll do later. Before I explain the problem here, let me jump back into the SSIS world... If you’ve investigated how to tune an SSIS flow, then you’ll know that some SSIS Data Flow Transformations are known to be Blocking, some are Partially Blocking, and some are simply Row transformations. Take the SSIS Sort transformation, for example. I’m using a larger data set for this, because my small list of Weights won’t demonstrate it well enough. Seven buffers of data came out of the source, but none of them could be pushed past the Sort operator, just in case the last buffer contained the data that would be sorted into the first buffer. This is a blocking operation. Back in the land of T-SQL, we consider our Distinct Sort operator. It’s also blocking. It won’t let data through until it’s seen all of it. If you weren’t okay with blocking operations in SSIS, why would you be happy with them in an execution plan? The source of your data is not your OLE DB Source. Remember this. The source of your data is the NCIX/CIX/Heap from which it’s being pulled. Picture it like this... the data flowing from the Clustered Index, through the Distinct Sort operator, into the SELECT operator, where a series of SSIS Buffers are populated, flowing (as they get full) down through the SSIS transformations. Alright, I know that I’m taking some liberties here, because the two queries aren’t the same, but consider the visual. The data is flowing from your disk and through your execution plan before it reaches SSIS, so you could easily find that a blocking operation in your plan is just as painful as a blocking operation in your SSIS Data Flow. Luckily, T-SQL gives us a brilliant query hint to help avoid this. OPTION (FAST 10000) This hint means that it will choose a query which will optimise for the first 10,000 rows – the default SSIS buffer size. And the effect can be quite significant. First let’s consider a simple example, then we’ll look at a larger one. Consider our weights. We don’t have 10,000, so I’m going to use OPTION (FAST 1) instead. You’ll notice that the query is more expensive, using a Flow Distinct operator instead of the Distinct Sort. This operator is consuming 84% of the query, instead of the 59% we saw from the Distinct Sort. But the first row could be returned quicker – a Flow Distinct operator is non-blocking. The data here isn’t sorted, of course. It’s in the same order that it came out of the index, just with duplicates removed. As soon as a Flow Distinct sees a value that it hasn’t come across before, it pushes it out to the operator on its left. It still has to maintain the list of what it’s seen so far, but by handling it one row at a time, it can push rows through quicker. Overall, it’s a lot more work than the Distinct Sort, but if the priority is the first few rows, then perhaps that’s exactly what we want. The Query Optimizer seems to do this by optimising the query as if there were only one row coming through: This 1 row estimation is caused by the Query Optimizer imagining the SELECT operation saying “Give me one row” first, and this message being passed all the way along. The request might not make it all the way back to the source, but in my simple example, it does. I hope this simple example has helped you understand the significance of the blocking operator. Now I’m going to show you an example on a much larger data set. This data was fetching about 780,000 rows, and these are the Estimated Plans. The data needed to be Sorted, to support further SSIS operations that needed that. First, without the hint. ...and now with OPTION (FAST 10000): A very different plan, I’m sure you’ll agree. In case you’re curious, those arrows in the top one are 780,000 rows in size. In the second, they’re estimated to be 10,000, although the Actual figures end up being 780,000. The top one definitely runs faster. It finished several times faster than the second one. With the amount of data being considered, these numbers were in minutes. Look at the second one – it’s doing Nested Loops, across 780,000 rows! That’s not generally recommended at all. That’s “Go and make yourself a coffee” time. In this case, it was about six or seven minutes. The faster one finished in about a minute. But in SSIS-land, things are different. The particular data flow that was consuming this data was significant. It was being pumped into a Script Component to process each row based on previous rows, creating about a dozen different flows. The data flow would take roughly ten minutes to run – ten minutes from when the data first appeared. The query that completes faster – chosen by the Query Optimizer with no hints, based on accurate statistics (rather than pretending the numbers are smaller) – would take a minute to start getting the data into SSIS, at which point the ten-minute flow would start, taking eleven minutes to complete. The query that took longer – chosen by the Query Optimizer pretending it only wanted the first 10,000 rows – would take only ten seconds to fill the first buffer. Despite the fact that it might have taken the database another six or seven minutes to get the data out, SSIS didn’t care. Every time it wanted the next buffer of data, it was already available, and the whole process finished in about ten minutes and ten seconds. When debugging SSIS, you run the package, and sit there waiting to see the Debug information start appearing. You look for the numbers on the data flow, and seeing operators going Yellow and Green. Without the hint, I’d sit there for a minute. With the hint, just ten seconds. You can imagine which one I preferred. By adding this hint, it felt like a magic wand had been waved across the query, to make it run several times faster. It wasn’t the case at all – but it felt like it to SSIS.

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  • MCM Lab exam this week

    - by Rob Farley
    In two days I’ll’ve finished the MCM Lab exam, 88-971. If you do an internet search for 88-971, it’ll tell you the answer is –883. Obviously. It’ll also give you a link to the actual exam page, which is useful too, once you’ve finished being distracted by the calculator instead of going to the thing you’re actually looking for. (Do people actually search the internet for the results of mathematical questions? Really?) The list of Skills Measured for this exam is quite short, but can essentially be broken down into one word “Anything”. The Preparation Materials section is even better. Classroom Training – none available. Microsoft E-Learning – none available. Microsoft Press Books – none available. Practice Tests – none available. But there are links to Readiness Videos and a page which has no resources listed, but tells you a list of people who have already qualified. Three in Australia who have MCM SQL Server 2008 so far. The list doesn’t include some of the latest batch, such as Jason Strate or Tom LaRock. I’ve used SQL Server for almost 15 years. During that time I’ve been awarded SQL Server MVP seven times, but the MVP award doesn’t actually mean all that much when considering this particular certification. I know lots of MVPs who have tried this particular exam and failed – including Jason and Tom. Right now, I have no idea whether I’ll pass or not. People tell me I’ll pass no problem, but I honestly have no idea. There’s something about that “Anything” aspect that worries me. I keep looking at the list of things in the Readiness Videos, and think to myself “I’m comfortable with Resource Governor (or whatever) – that should be fine.” Except that then I feel like I maybe don’t know all the different things that can go wrong with Resource Governor (or whatever), and I wonder what kind of situations I’ll be faced with. And then I find myself looking through the stuff that’s explained in the videos, and wondering what kinds of things I should know that I don’t, and then I get amazingly bored and frustrated (after all, I tell people that these exams aren’t supposed to be studied for – you’ve been studying for the last 15 years, right?), and I figure “What’s the worst that can happen? A fail?” I’m told that the exam provides a list of scenarios (maybe 14 of them?) and you have 5.5 hours to complete them. When I say “complete”, I mean complete – you don’t get to leave them unfinished, that’ll get you ‘nil points’ for that scenario. Apparently no-one gets to complete all of them. Now, I’m a consultant. I get called on to fix the problems that people have on their SQL boxes. Sometimes this involves fixing corruption. Sometimes it’s figuring out some performance problem. Sometimes it’s as straight forward as getting past a full transaction log; sometimes it’s as tricky as recovering a database that has lost its metadata, without backups. Most situations aren’t a problem, but I also have the confidence of being able to do internet searches to verify my maths (in case I forget it’s –883). In the exam, I’ll have maybe twenty minutes per scenario (but if I need longer, I’ll have to take longer – no point in stopping half way if it takes more than twenty minutes, unless I don’t see an end coming up), so I’ll have time constraints too. And of course, I won’t have any of my usual tools. I can’t take scripts in, I can’t take staff members. Hopefully I can use the coffee machine that will be in the room. I figure it’s going to feel like one of those days when I’ve gone into a client site, and found that the problems are way worse than I expected, and that the site is down, with people standing over me needing me to get things right first time... ...so it should be fine, I’ve done that before. :) If I do fail, it won’t make me any less of a consultant. It won’t make me any less able to help all of my clients (including you if you get in touch – hehe), it’ll just mean that the particular problem might’ve taken me more than the twenty minutes that the exam gave me. @rob_farley PS: Apparently the done thing is to NOT advertise that you’re sitting the exam at a particular time, only that you’re expecting to take it at some point in the future. I think it’s akin to the idea of not telling people you’re pregnant for the first few months – it’s just in case the worst happens. Personally, I’m happy to tell you all that I’m going to take this exam the day after tomorrow (which is the 19th in the US, the 20th here). If I end up failing, you can all commiserate and tell me that I’m not actually as unqualified as I feel.

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  • PASS Summit 2011 &ndash; Part III

    - by Tara Kizer
    Well we’re about a month past PASS Summit 2011, and yet I haven’t finished blogging my notes! Between work and home life, I haven’t been able to come up for air in a bit.  Now on to my notes… On Thursday of the PASS Summit 2011, I attended Klaus Aschenbrenner’s (blog|twitter) “Advanced SQL Server 2008 Troubleshooting”, Joe Webb’s (blog|twitter) “SQL Server Locking & Blocking Made Simple”, Kalen Delaney’s (blog|twitter) “What Happened? Exploring the Plan Cache”, and Paul Randal’s (blog|twitter) “More DBA Mythbusters”.  I think my head grew two times in size from the Thursday sessions.  Just WOW! I took a ton of notes in Klaus' session.  He took a deep dive into how to troubleshoot performance problems.  Here is how he goes about solving a performance problem: Start by checking the wait stats DMV System health Memory issues I/O issues I normally start with blocking and then hit the wait stats.  Here’s the wait stat query (Paul Randal’s) that I use when working on a performance problem.  He highlighted a few waits to be aware of such as WRITELOG (indicates IO subsystem problem), SOS_SCHEDULER_YIELD (indicates CPU problem), and PAGEIOLATCH_XX (indicates an IO subsystem problem or a buffer pool problem).  Regarding memory issues, Klaus recommended that as a bare minimum, one should set the “max server memory (MB)” in sp_configure to 2GB or 10% reserved for the OS (whichever comes first).  This is just a starting point though! Regarding I/O issues, Klaus talked about disk partition alignment, which can improve SQL I/O performance by up to 100%.  You should use 64kb for NTFS cluster, and it’s automatic in Windows 2008 R2. Joe’s locking and blocking presentation was a good session to really clear up the fog in my mind about locking.  One takeaway that I had no idea could be done was that you can set a timeout in T-SQL code view LOCK_TIMEOUT.  If you do this via the application, you should trap error 1222. Kalen’s session went into execution plans.  The minimum size of a plan is 24k.  This adds up fast especially if you have a lot of plans that don’t get reused much.  You can use sys.dm_exec_cached_plans to check how often a plan is being reused by checking the usecounts column.  She said that we can use DBCC FLUSHPROCINDB to clear out the stored procedure cache for a specific database.  I didn’t know we had this available, so this was great to hear.  This will be less intrusive when an emergency comes up where I’ve needed to run DBCC FREEPROCCACHE. Kalen said one should enable “optimize for ad hoc workloads” if you have an adhoc loc.  This stores only a 300-byte stub of the first plan, and if it gets run again, it’ll store the whole thing.  This helps with plan cache bloat.  I have a lot of systems that use prepared statements, and Kalen says we simulate those calls by using sp_executesql.  Cool! Paul did a series of posts last year to debunk various myths and misconceptions around SQL Server.  He continues to debunk things via “DBA Mythbusters”.  You can get a PDF of a bunch of these here.  One of the myths he went over is the number of tempdb data files that you should have.  Back in 2000, the recommendation was to have as many tempdb data files as there are CPU cores on your server.  This no longer holds true due to the numerous cores we have on our servers.  Paul says you should start out with 1/4 to 1/2 the number of cores and work your way up from there.  BUT!  Paul likes what Bob Ward (twitter) says on this topic: 8 or less cores –> set number of files equal to the number of cores Greater than 8 cores –> start with 8 files and increase in blocks of 4 One common myth out there is to set your MAXDOP to 1 for an OLTP workload with high CXPACKET waits.  Instead of that, dig deeper first.  Look for missing indexes, out-of-date statistics, increase the “cost threshold for parallelism” setting, and perhaps set MAXDOP at the query level.  Paul stressed that you should not plan a backup strategy but instead plan a restore strategy.  What are your recoverability requirements?  Once you know that, now plan out your backups. As Paul always does, he talked about DBCC CHECKDB.  He said how fabulous it is.  I didn’t want to interrupt the presentation, so after his session had ended, I asked Paul about the need to run DBCC CHECKDB on your mirror systems.  You could have data corruption occur at the mirror and not at the principal server.  If you aren’t checking for data corruption on your mirror systems, you could be failing over to a corrupt database in the case of a disaster or even a planned failover.  You can’t run DBCC CHECKDB against the mirrored database, but you can run it against a snapshot off the mirrored database.

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  • 2011 PASS Board Applicants: Geoff Hiten

    - by andyleonard
    Introduction I am interviewing 2011 PASS Board Nominee Applicants. As listed on the PASS Board Elections site the applicants are: Rob Farley Geoff Hiten Adam Jorgensen Denise McInerney Sri Sridharan Kendal Van Dyke I'm asking everyone the same questions and blogging the responses in the order received. Geoff Hiten is next up: Interview With Geoff Hiten 1. What's your day job? I am a Principal Consultant for Intellinet, a business technology consulting company based in Atlanta.  I work in our...(read more)

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  • June 2013 Cumulative Updates for SQL Server 2008 R2

    - by AaronBertrand
    Well, surely at least partly in response to the CU6 mess I reported earlier today , and partly because they were due, Microsoft has released new cumulative updates that contain - among other things - updated code that avoids the symptom introduced with earlier updates (though this regression fix doesn't seem to appear in the KB articles - unless by "corruption" they meant ridiculous size increase). SQL Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 Cumulative Update # 13 KB Article: KB #2855792 5 fixes listed at...(read more)

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  • 24 Hours of PASS scheduling

    - by Rob Farley
    I have a new appreciation for Tom LaRock (@sqlrockstar), who is doing a tremendous job leading the organising committee for the 24 Hours of PASS event (Twitter: #24hop). We’ve just been going through the list of speakers and their preferences for time slots, and hopefully we’ve kept everyone fairly happy. All the submitted sessions (59 of them) were put up for a vote, and over a thousand of you picking your favourites. The top 28 sessions as voted were all included (24 sessions plus 4 reserves), and duplicates (when a single presenter had two sessions in the top 28) were swapped out for others. For example, both sessions submitted by Cindy Gross were in the top 28. These swaps were chosen by the committee to get a good balance of topics. Amazingly, some big names missed out, and even the top ten included some surprises. T-SQL, Indexes and Reporting featured well in the top ten, and in the end, the mix between BI, Dev and DBA ended up quite nicely too. The ten most voted-for sessions were (in order): Jennifer McCown - T-SQL Code Sins: The Worst Things We Do to Code and Why Michelle Ufford - Index Internals for Mere Mortals Audrey Hammonds - T-SQL Awesomeness: 3 Ways to Write Cool SQL Cindy Gross - SQL Server Performance Tools Jes Borland - Reporting Services 201: the Next Level Isabel de la Barra - SQL Server Performance Karen Lopez - Five Physical Database Design Blunders and How to Avoid Them Julie Smith - Cool Tricks to Pull From Your SSIS Hat Kim Tessereau - Indexes and Execution Plans Jen Stirrup - Dashboards Design and Practice using SSRS I think you’ll all agree this is shaping up to be an excellent event.

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  • Temporary Tables in Stored Procedures

    - by Paul White
    Ask anyone what the primary advantage of temporary tables over table variables is, and the chances are they will say that temporary tables support statistics and table variables do not. This is true, of course; even the indexes that enforce PRIMARY KEY and UNIQUE constraints on table variables do not have populated statistics associated with them, and it is not possible to manually create statistics or non-constraint indexes on table variables. Intuitively, then, any query that has alternative execution...(read more)

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  • Adaptive Case Management OTN WebCast with Danilo Schmiedel

    - by JuergenKress
    Oracle ACE Director Danilo Schmiedel, SOA/BPM solution architect with Opitz Consulting in Germany, talks about Adaptive Case Management, Predictive Analytics, and Process Mining. Watch the video here. To download the Adaptive Case Management post mentioned in this interview, please visit the blog post. SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Technorati Tags: ACM,Adaptive Case Management,Danilo Schmiedel,Opitz,OTN,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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  • An XEvent a Day (21 of 31) – The Future – Tracking Blocking in Denali

    - by Jonathan Kehayias
    One of my favorite features that was added to SQL Server 2005 has been the Blocked Process Report trace event which collects an XML report whenever a process is blocked inside of the database engine longer than the user configurable threshold.  I wrote an article about this feature on SQL Server Central  two years ago titled Using the Blocked Process Report in SQL Server 2005/2008 .  One of the aspects of this feature is that it requires that you either have a SQL Trace running that...(read more)

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  • PASS Board of Directors Election - Making Progress

    - by RickHeiges
    It is almost time to cast your vote in this year's PASS BoD Elections. Things have changed considerably since the first PASS BoD election that I participated in. That was in 2001. I hadn't even been to a Summit or even a chpater meeting yet. I had registered for the PASS Summit 2001 (which was postponed to Jan 2002 btw). Back then, the elections were held at the summit and on paper, but there was no summit that year. If you wanted to vote, you needed to print out a ballot and fax it in. I think that...(read more)

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  • Dear ISV: You’re Keeping Me Awake Nights with Your VARCHAR() Dates

    - by merrillaldrich
    I generally sleep well and deeply. My wife and I once went to sleep, back when we lived in the Heights neighborhood in Houston, and when we woke up the next day, the house across the street had been removed . We never heard a thing. However, tonight it’s 3 AM here in Seattle and I am wide awake writing to you about data types. Why? Because a software vendor is making me crazy with their database schema. This is sad and wrong on many levels, but there it is. It’s harder, I think, to be held responsible...(read more)

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