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• Trace File Source Adapter

  The Trace File Source adapter is a useful addition to your SSIS toolbox.  It allows you to read 2005 and 2008 profiler traces stored as .trc files and read them into the Data Flow.  From there you can perform filtering and analysis using the power of SSIS. There is no need for a SQL Server connection this just uses the trace file. Example Usages Cache warming for SQL Server Analysis Services Reading the flight recorder Find out the longest running queries on a server Analyze statements for CPU, memory by user or some other criteria you choose Properties The Trace File Source adapter has two properties, both of which combine to control the source trace file that is read at runtime. SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 trace files are supported for both the Database Engine (SQL Server) and Analysis Services. The properties are managed by the Editor form or can be set directly from the Properties Grid in Visual Studio. Property Type Description AccessMode Enumeration This property determines how the Filename property is interpreted. The values available are: DirectInput Variable Filename String This property holds the path for trace file to load (*.trc). The value is either a full path, or the name of a variable which contains the full path to the trace file, depending on the AccessMode property. Trace Column Definition Hopefully the majority of you can skip this section entirely, but if you encounter some problems processing a trace file this may explain it and allow you to fix the problem. The component is built upon the trace management API provided by Microsoft. Unfortunately API methods that expose the schema of a trace file have known issues and are unreliable, put simply the data often differs from what was specified. To overcome these limitations the component uses  some simple XML files. These files enable the trace column data types and sizing attributes to be overridden. For example SQL Server Profiler or TMO generated structures define EventClass as an integer, but the real value is a string. TraceDataColumnsSQL.xml  - SQL Server Database Engine Trace Columns TraceDataColumnsAS.xml    - SQL Server Analysis Services Trace Columns The files can be found in the %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\PipelineComponents folder, e.g. "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\PipelineComponents\TraceDataColumnsSQL.xml" "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\PipelineComponents\TraceDataColumnsAS.xml" If at runtime the component encounters a type conversion or sizing error it is most likely due to a discrepancy between the column definition as reported by the API and the actual value encountered. Whilst most common issues have already been fixed through these files we have implemented specific exception traps to direct you to the files to enable you to fix any further issues due to different usage or data scenarios that we have not tested. An example error that you can fix through these files is shown below. Buffer exception writing value to column 'Column Name'. The string value is 999 characters in length, the column is only 111. Columns can be overridden by the TraceDataColumns XML files in "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\PipelineComponents\TraceDataColumnsAS.xml". Installation The component is provided as an MSI file which you can download and run to install it. This simply places the files on disk in the correct locations and also installs the assemblies in the Global Assembly Cache as per Microsoft’s recommendations. You may need to restart the SQL Server Integration Services service, as this caches information about what components are installed, as well as restarting any open instances of Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) / Visual Studio that you may be using to build your SSIS packages. Finally you will have to add the transformation to the Visual Studio toolbox manually. Right-click the toolbox, and select Choose Items.... Select the SSIS Data Flow Items tab, and then check the Trace File Source transformation in the Choose Toolbox Items window. This process has been described in detail in the related FAQ entry for How do I install a task or transform component? We recommend you follow best practice and apply the current Microsoft SQL Server Service pack to your SQL Server servers and workstations. Please note that the Microsoft Trace classes used in the component are not supported on 64-bit platforms. To use the Trace File Source on a 64-bit host you need to ensure you have the 32-bit (x86) tools available, and the way you execute your package is setup to use them, please see the help topic 64-bit Considerations for Integration Services for more details. Downloads Trace Sources for SQL Server 2005 -- Trace Sources for SQL Server 2008 Version History SQL Server 2008 Version 2.0.0.382 - SQL Sever 2008 public release. (9 Apr 2009) SQL Server 2005 Version 1.0.0.321 - SQL Server 2005 public release. (18 Nov 2008) -- Screenshots

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• SQL SERVER – Advanced Data Quality Services with Melissa Data – Azure Data Market

  - by pinaldave

  There has been much fanfare over the new SQL Server 2012, and especially around its new companion product Data Quality Services (DQS). Among the many new features is the addition of this integrated knowledge-driven product that enables data stewards everywhere to profile, match, and cleanse data. In addition to the homegrown rules that data stewards can design and implement, there are also connectors to third party providers that are hosted in the Azure Datamarket marketplace.  In this review, I leverage SQL Server 2012 Data Quality Services, and proceed to subscribe to a third party data cleansing product through the Datamarket to showcase this unique capability. Crucial Questions For the purposes of the review, I used a database I had in an Excel spreadsheet with name and address information. Upon a cursory inspection, there are miscellaneous problems with these records; some addresses are missing ZIP codes, others missing a city, and some records are slightly misspelled or have unparsed suites. With DQS, I can easily add a knowledge base to help standardize my values, such as for state abbreviations. But how do I know that my address is correct? And if my address is not correct, what should it be corrected to? The answer lies in a third party knowledge base by the acknowledged USPS certified address accuracy experts at Melissa Data. Reference Data Services Within DQS there is a handy feature to actually add reference data from many different third-party Reference Data Services (RDS) vendors. DQS simplifies the processes of cleansing, standardizing, and enriching data through custom rules and through service providers from the Azure Datamarket. A quick jump over to the Datamarket site shows me that there are a handful of providers that offer data directly through Data Quality Services. Upon subscribing to these services, one can attach a DQS domain or composite domain (fields in a record) to a reference data service provider, and begin using it to cleanse, standardize, and enrich that data. Besides what I am looking for (address correction and enrichment), it is possible to subscribe to a host of other services including geocoding, IP address reference, phone checking and enrichment, as well as name parsing, standardization, and genderization.  These capabilities extend the data quality that DQS has natively by quite a bit. For my current address correction review, I needed to first sign up to a reference data provider on the Azure Data Market site. For this example, I used Melissa Data’s Address Check Service. They offer free one-month trials, so if you wish to follow along, or need to add address quality to your own data, I encourage you to sign up with them. Once I subscribed to the desired Reference Data Provider, I navigated my browser to the Account Keys within My Account to view the generated account key, which I then inserted into the DQS Client – Configuration under the Administration area. Step by Step to Guide That was all it took to hook in the subscribed provider -Melissa Data- directly to my DQS Client. The next step was for me to attach and map in my Reference Data from the newly acquired reference data provider, to a domain in my knowledge base. On the DQS Client home screen, I selected “New Knowledge Base” under Knowledge Base Management on the left-hand side of the home screen. Under New Knowledge Base, I typed a Name and description of my new knowledge base, then proceeded to the Domain Management screen. Here I established a series of domains (fields) and then linked them all together as a composite domain (record set). Using the Create Domain button, I created the following domains according to the fields in my incoming data: Name Address Suite City State Zip I added a Suite column in my domain because Melissa Data has the ability to return missing Suites based on last name or company. And that’s a great benefit of using these third party providers, as they have data that the data steward would not normally have access to. The bottom line is, with these third party data providers, I can actually improve my data. Next, I created a composite domain (fulladdress) and added the (field) domains into the composite domain. This essentially groups our address fields together in a record to facilitate the full address cleansing they perform. I then selected my newly created composite domain and under the Reference Data tab, added my third party reference data provider –Melissa Data’s Address Check- and mapped in each domain that I had to the provider’s Schema. Now that my composite domain has been married to the Reference Data service, I can take the newly published knowledge base and create a project to cleanse and enrich my data. My next task was to create a new Data Quality project, mapping in my data source and matching it to the appropriate domain column, and then kick off the verification process. It took just a few minutes with some progress indicators indicating that it was working. When the process concluded, there was a helpful set of tabs that place the response records into categories: suggested; new; invalid; corrected (automatically); and correct. Accepting the suggestions provided by  Melissa Data allowed me to clean up all the records and flag the invalid ones. It is very apparent that DQS makes address data quality simplistic for any IT professional. Final Note As I have shown, DQS makes data quality very easy. Within minutes I was able to set up a data cleansing and enrichment routine within my data quality project, and ensure that my address data was clean, verified, and standardized against real reference data. As reviewed here, it’s easy to see how both SQL Server 2012 and DQS work to take what used to require a highly skilled developer, and empower an average business or database person to consume external services and clean data. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Utility, T SQL, Technology Tagged: DQS

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• SQL SERVER – LCK_M_XXX – Wait Type – Day 15 of 28

  - by pinaldave

  Locking is a mechanism used by the SQL Server Database Engine to synchronize access by multiple users to the same piece of data, at the same time. In simpler words, it maintains the integrity of data by protecting (or preventing) access to the database object. From Book On-Line: LCK_M_BU Occurs when a task is waiting to acquire a Bulk Update (BU) lock. LCK_M_IS Occurs when a task is waiting to acquire an Intent Shared (IS) lock. LCK_M_IU Occurs when a task is waiting to acquire an Intent Update (IU) lock. LCK_M_IX Occurs when a task is waiting to acquire an Intent Exclusive (IX) lock. LCK_M_S Occurs when a task is waiting to acquire a Shared lock. LCK_M_SCH_M Occurs when a task is waiting to acquire a Schema Modify lock. LCK_M_SCH_S Occurs when a task is waiting to acquire a Schema Share lock. LCK_M_SIU Occurs when a task is waiting to acquire a Shared With Intent Update lock. LCK_M_SIX Occurs when a task is waiting to acquire a Shared With Intent Exclusive lock. LCK_M_U Occurs when a task is waiting to acquire an Update lock. LCK_M_UIX Occurs when a task is waiting to acquire an Update With Intent Exclusive lock. LCK_M_X Occurs when a task is waiting to acquire an Exclusive lock. LCK_M_XXX Explanation: I think the explanation of this wait type is the simplest. When any task is waiting to acquire lock on any resource, this particular wait type occurs. The common reason for the task to be waiting to put lock on the resource is that the resource is already locked and some other operations may be going on within it. This wait also indicates that resources are not available or are occupied at the moment due to some reasons. There is a good chance that the waiting queries start to time out if this wait type is very high. Client application may degrade the performance as well. You can use various methods to find blocking queries: EXEC sp_who2 SQL SERVER – Quickest Way to Identify Blocking Query and Resolution – Dirty Solution DMV – sys.dm_tran_locks DMV – sys.dm_os_waiting_tasks Reducing LCK_M_XXX wait: Check the Explicit Transactions. If transactions are very long, this wait type can start building up because of other waiting transactions. Keep the transactions small. Serialization Isolation can build up this wait type. If that is an acceptable isolation for your business, this wait type may be natural. The default isolation of SQL Server is ‘Read Committed’. One of my clients has changed their isolation to “Read Uncommitted”. I strongly discourage the use of this because this will probably lead to having lots of dirty data in the database. Identify blocking queries mentioned using various methods described above, and then optimize them. Partition can be one of the options to consider because this will allow transactions to execute concurrently on different partitions. If there are runaway queries, use timeout. (Please discuss this solution with your database architect first as timeout can work against you). Check if there is no memory and IO-related issue using the following counters: Checking Memory Related Perfmon Counters SQLServer: Memory Manager\Memory Grants Pending (Consistent higher value than 0-2) SQLServer: Memory Manager\Memory Grants Outstanding (Consistent higher value, Benchmark) SQLServer: Buffer Manager\Buffer Hit Cache Ratio (Higher is better, greater than 90% for usually smooth running system) SQLServer: Buffer Manager\Page Life Expectancy (Consistent lower value than 300 seconds) Memory: Available Mbytes (Information only) Memory: Page Faults/sec (Benchmark only) Memory: Pages/sec (Benchmark only) Checking Disk Related Perfmon Counters Average Disk sec/Read (Consistent higher value than 4-8 millisecond is not good) Average Disk sec/Write (Consistent higher value than 4-8 millisecond is not good) Average Disk Read/Write Queue Length (Consistent higher value than benchmark is not good) Read all the post in the Wait Types and Queue series. Note: The information presented here is from my experience and there is no way that I claim it to be accurate. I suggest reading Book OnLine for further clarification. All the discussion of Wait Stats in this blog is generic and varies from system to system. It is recommended that you test this on a development server before implementing it to a production server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Wait Stats, SQL Wait Types, T SQL, Technology

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• Big Data – Buzz Words: Importance of Relational Database in Big Data World – Day 9 of 21

  - by Pinal Dave

  In yesterday’s blog post we learned what is HDFS. In this article we will take a quick look at the importance of the Relational Database in Big Data world. A Big Question? Here are a few questions I often received since the beginning of the Big Data Series - Does the relational database have no space in the story of the Big Data? Does relational database is no longer relevant as Big Data is evolving? Is relational database not capable to handle Big Data? Is it true that one no longer has to learn about relational data if Big Data is the final destination? Well, every single time when I hear that one person wants to learn about Big Data and is no longer interested in learning about relational database, I find it as a bit far stretched. I am not here to give ambiguous answers of It Depends. I am personally very clear that one who is aspiring to become Big Data Scientist or Big Data Expert they should learn about relational database. NoSQL Movement The reason for the NoSQL Movement in recent time was because of the two important advantages of the NoSQL databases. Performance Flexible Schema In personal experience I have found that when I use NoSQL I have found both of the above listed advantages when I use NoSQL database. There are instances when I found relational database too much restrictive when my data is unstructured as well as they have in the datatype which my Relational Database does not support. It is the same case when I have found that NoSQL solution performing much better than relational databases. I must say that I am a big fan of NoSQL solutions in the recent times but I have also seen occasions and situations where relational database is still perfect fit even though the database is growing increasingly as well have all the symptoms of the big data. Situations in Relational Database Outperforms Adhoc reporting is the one of the most common scenarios where NoSQL is does not have optimal solution. For example reporting queries often needs to aggregate based on the columns which are not indexed as well are built while the report is running, in this kind of scenario NoSQL databases (document database stores, distributed key value stores) database often does not perform well. In the case of the ad-hoc reporting I have often found it is much easier to work with relational databases. SQL is the most popular computer language of all the time. I have been using it for almost over 10 years and I feel that I will be using it for a long time in future. There are plenty of the tools, connectors and awareness of the SQL language in the industry. Pretty much every programming language has a written drivers for the SQL language and most of the developers have learned this language during their school/college time. In many cases, writing query based on SQL is much easier than writing queries in NoSQL supported languages. I believe this is the current situation but in the future this situation can reverse when No SQL query languages are equally popular. ACID (Atomicity Consistency Isolation Durability) – Not all the NoSQL solutions offers ACID compliant language. There are always situations (for example banking transactions, eCommerce shopping carts etc.) where if there is no ACID the operations can be invalid as well database integrity can be at risk. Even though the data volume indeed qualify as a Big Data there are always operations in the application which absolutely needs ACID compliance matured language. The Mixed Bag I have often heard argument that all the big social media sites now a days have moved away from Relational Database. Actually this is not entirely true. While researching about Big Data and Relational Database, I have found that many of the popular social media sites uses Big Data solutions along with Relational Database. Many are using relational databases to deliver the results to end user on the run time and many still uses a relational database as their major backbone. Here are a few examples: Facebook uses MySQL to display the timeline. (Reference Link) Twitter uses MySQL. (Reference Link) Tumblr uses Sharded MySQL (Reference Link) Wikipedia uses MySQL for data storage. (Reference Link) There are many for prominent organizations which are running large scale applications uses relational database along with various Big Data frameworks to satisfy their various business needs. Summary I believe that RDBMS is like a vanilla ice cream. Everybody loves it and everybody has it. NoSQL and other solutions are like chocolate ice cream or custom ice cream – there is a huge base which loves them and wants them but not every ice cream maker can make it just right  for everyone’s taste. No matter how fancy an ice cream store is there is always plain vanilla ice cream available there. Just like the same, there are always cases and situations in the Big Data’s story where traditional relational database is the part of the whole story. In the real world scenarios there will be always the case when there will be need of the relational database concepts and its ideology. It is extremely important to accept relational database as one of the key components of the Big Data instead of treating it as a substandard technology. Ray of Hope – NewSQL In this module we discussed that there are places where we need ACID compliance from our Big Data application and NoSQL will not support that out of box. There is a new termed coined for the application/tool which supports most of the properties of the traditional RDBMS and supports Big Data infrastructure – NewSQL. Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will discuss about NewSQL. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• ComboBox Control using silverlight

  - by Aamir Hasan

  DropDown.zip (135.33 kb) LiveDemo Introduction In this article i am  going to explore some of the features of the ComboBox.ComboBox makes the collection visible and allows users to pick an item from the collection.After its first initialization, no matter if you bind a new datasource with fewer or more elements, the dropdown persists its original height.One workaround is the following:1. store the Properties from the original ComboBox2. delete the ComboBox removing it from its container3. create a new ComboBox and place it in the container4. recover the stores Properties5. bind the new DataSource to the newly created combobox Creating Silverlight ProjectCreate a new Silverlight 3 Project in VS 2008. Name it as ComboBoxtSample. Simple Data BindingAdd System.Windows.Control.Data reference to the Silverlight project. Silverlight UserControl Add a new page to display Bus data using DataGrid. Following shows Bus column XAML snippet:The ComboBox element represents a ComboBox control in XAML.  <ComboBox></ComboBox>ComboBox XAML        <StackPanel Orientation="Vertical">            <ComboBox Width="120" Height="30" x:Name="DaysDropDownList" DisplayMemberPath="Name">                <!--<ComboBox.ItemTemplate>                    <DataTemplate>                        <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal">                            <TextBlock Text="{Binding Path=Name}" FontWeight="Bold"></TextBlock>                            <TextBlock Text=", "></TextBlock>                            <TextBlock Text="{Binding Path=ID}"></TextBlock>                        </StackPanel>                    </DataTemplate>                </ComboBox.ItemTemplate>-->            </ComboBox>        </StackPanel>   The following code below is an example implementation Combobox control support data binding     1 By setting the DisplayMemberPath property you can specify which data item in your data you want displayed in the ComboBox.    2 Setting the SelectedIndex allows you to specify which item in the ComboBox you want selected. Business Object public class Bus { public string Name { get; set; } public float Price { get; set; } }   Data Binding private List populatedlistBus() { listBus = new List(); listBus.Add(new Bus() {Name = "Bus 1", Price = 55f }); listBus.Add(new Bus() { Name = "Bus 2", Price = 55.7f }); listBus.Add(new Bus() { Name = "Bus 3", Price = 2f }); listBus.Add(new Bus() { Name = "Bus 4", Price = 6f }); listBus.Add(new Bus() { Name = "Bus 5", Price = 9F }); listBus.Add(new Bus() { Name = "Bus 6", Price = 10.1f }); return listBus; }   The following line of code sets the ItemsSource property of a ComboBox. DaysDropDownList.ItemsSource = populatedlistBus(); Output I hope you enjoyed this simple Silverlight example Conclusion In this article, we saw how data binding works in ComboBox.You learnt how to work with the ComboBox control in Silverlight.

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• SQL SERVER – SSMS: Backup and Restore Events Report

  - by Pinal Dave

  A DBA wears multiple hats and in fact does more than what an eye can see. One of the core task of a DBA is to take backups. This looks so trivial that most developers shrug this off as the only activity a DBA might be doing. I have huge respect for DBA’s all around the world because even if they seem cool with all the scripting, automation, maintenance works round the clock to keep the business working almost 365 days 24×7, their worth is knowing that one day when the systems / HDD crashes and you have an important delivery to make. So these backup tasks / maintenance jobs that have been done come handy and are no more trivial as they might seem to be as considered by many. So the important question like: “When was the last backup taken?”, “How much time did the last backup take?”, “What type of backup was taken last?” etc are tricky questions and this report lands answers to the same in a jiffy. So the SSMS report, we are talking can be used to find backups and restore operation done for the selected database. Whenever we perform any backup or restore operation, the information is stored in the msdb database. This report can utilize that information and provide information about the size, time taken and also the file location for those operations. Here is how this report can be launched.   Once we launch this report, we can see 4 major sections shown as listed below. Average Time Taken For Backup Operations Successful Backup Operations Backup Operation Errors Successful Restore Operations Let us look at each section next. Average Time Taken For Backup Operations Information shown in “Average Time Taken For Backup Operations” section is taken from a backupset table in the msdb database. Here is the query and the expanded version of that particular section USE msdb; SELECT (ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY t1.TYPE))%2 AS l1 ,       1 AS l2 ,       1 AS l3 ,       t1.TYPE AS [type] ,       (AVG(DATEDIFF(ss,backup_start_date, backup_finish_date)))/60.0 AS AverageBackupDuration FROM backupset t1 INNER JOIN sys.databases t3 ON ( t1.database_name = t3.name) WHERE t3.name = N'AdventureWorks2014' GROUP BY t1.TYPE ORDER BY t1.TYPE On my small database the time taken for differential backup was less than a minute, hence the value of zero is displayed. This is an important piece of backup operation which might help you in planning maintenance windows. Successful Backup Operations Here is the expanded version of this section.   This information is derived from various backup tracking tables from msdb database.  Here is the simplified version of the query which can be used separately as well. SELECT * FROM sys.databases t1 INNER JOIN backupset t3 ON (t3.database_name = t1.name) LEFT OUTER JOIN backupmediaset t5 ON ( t3.media_set_id = t5.media_set_id) LEFT OUTER JOIN backupmediafamily t6 ON ( t6.media_set_id = t5.media_set_id) WHERE (t1.name = N'AdventureWorks2014') ORDER BY backup_start_date DESC,t3.backup_set_id,t6.physical_device_name; The report does some calculations to show the data in a more readable format. For example, the backup size is shown in KB, MB or GB. I have expanded first row by clicking on (+) on “Device type” column. That has shown me the path of the physical backup file. Personally looking at this section, the Backup Size, Device Type and Backup Name are critical and are worth a note. As mentioned in the previous section, this section also has the Duration embedded inside it. Backup Operation Errors This section of the report gets data from default trace. You might wonder how. One of the event which is tracked by default trace is “ErrorLog”. This means that whatever message is written to errorlog gets written to default trace file as well. Interestingly, whenever there is a backup failure, an error message is written to ERRORLOG and hence default trace. This section takes advantage of that and shows the information. We can read below message under this section, which confirms above logic. No backup operations errors occurred for (AdventureWorks2014) database in the recent past or default trace is not enabled. Successful Restore Operations This section may not be very useful in production server (do you perform a restore of database?) but might be useful in the development and log shipping secondary environment, where we might be interested to see restore operations for a particular database. Here is the expanded version of the section. To fill this section of the report, I have restored the same backups which were taken to populate earlier sections. Here is the simplified version of the query used to populate this output. USE msdb; SELECT * FROM restorehistory t1 LEFT OUTER JOIN restorefile t2 ON ( t1.restore_history_id = t2.restore_history_id) LEFT OUTER JOIN backupset t3 ON ( t1.backup_set_id = t3.backup_set_id) WHERE t1.destination_database_name = N'AdventureWorks2014' ORDER BY restore_date DESC,  t1.restore_history_id,t2.destination_phys_name Have you ever looked at the backup strategy of your key databases? Are they in sync and do we have scope for improvements? Then this is the report to analyze after a week or month of maintenance plans running in your database. Do chime in with what are the strategies you are using in your environments. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Backup and Restore, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: SQL Reports

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• Replication Services in a BI environment

  - by jorg

  In this blog post I will explain the principles of SQL Server Replication Services without too much detail and I will take a look on the BI capabilities that Replication Services could offer in my opinion. SQL Server Replication Services provides tools to copy and distribute database objects from one database system to another and maintain consistency afterwards. These tools basically copy or synchronize data with little or no transformations, they do not offer capabilities to transform data or apply business rules, like ETL tools do. The only “transformations” Replication Services offers is to filter records or columns out of your data set. You can achieve this by selecting the desired columns of a table and/or by using WHERE statements like this: SELECT <published_columns> FROM [Table] WHERE [DateTime] >= getdate() - 60 There are three types of replication: Transactional Replication This type replicates data on a transactional level. The Log Reader Agent reads directly on the transaction log of the source database (Publisher) and clones the transactions to the Distribution Database (Distributor), this database acts as a queue for the destination database (Subscriber). Next, the Distribution Agent moves the cloned transactions that are stored in the Distribution Database to the Subscriber. The Distribution Agent can either run at scheduled intervals or continuously which offers near real-time replication of data! So for example when a user executes an UPDATE statement on one or multiple records in the publisher database, this transaction (not the data itself) is copied to the distribution database and is then also executed on the subscriber. When the Distribution Agent is set to run continuously this process runs all the time and transactions on the publisher are replicated in small batches (near real-time), when it runs on scheduled intervals it executes larger batches of transactions, but the idea is the same. Snapshot Replication This type of replication makes an initial copy of database objects that need to be replicated, this includes the schemas and the data itself. All types of replication must start with a snapshot of the database objects from the Publisher to initialize the Subscriber. Transactional replication need an initial snapshot of the replicated publisher tables/objects to run its cloned transactions on and maintain consistency. The Snapshot Agent copies the schemas of the tables that will be replicated to files that will be stored in the Snapshot Folder which is a normal folder on the file system. When all the schemas are ready, the data itself will be copied from the Publisher to the snapshot folder. The snapshot is generated as a set of bulk copy program (BCP) files. Next, the Distribution Agent moves the snapshot to the Subscriber, if necessary it applies schema changes first and copies the data itself afterwards. The application of schema changes to the Subscriber is a nice feature, when you change the schema of the Publisher with, for example, an ALTER TABLE statement, that change is propagated by default to the Subscriber(s). Merge Replication Merge replication is typically used in server-to-client environments, for example when subscribers need to receive data, make changes offline, and later synchronize changes with the Publisher and other Subscribers, like with mobile devices that need to synchronize one in a while. Because I don’t really see BI capabilities here, I will not explain this type of replication any further. Replication Services in a BI environment Transactional Replication can be very useful in BI environments. In my opinion you never want to see users to run custom (SSRS) reports or PowerPivot solutions directly on your production database, it can slow down the system and can cause deadlocks in the database which can cause errors. Transactional Replication can offer a read-only, near real-time database for reporting purposes with minimal overhead on the source system. Snapshot Replication can also be useful in BI environments, if you don’t need a near real-time copy of the database, you can choose to use this form of replication. Next to an alternative for Transactional Replication it can be used to stage data so it can be transformed and moved into the data warehousing environment afterwards. In many solutions I have seen developers create multiple SSIS packages that simply copies data from one or more source systems to a staging database that figures as source for the ETL process. The creation of these packages takes a lot of (boring) time, while Replication Services can do the same in minutes. It is possible to filter out columns and/or records and it can even apply schema changes automatically so I think it offers enough features here. I don’t know how the performance will be and if it really works as good for this purpose as I expect, but I want to try this out soon!

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• SQLAuthority News – Learning Trip – Traveling to Learn SQL Server

  - by pinaldave

  I am currently traveling to Delhi to learn SQL Server in person from my friend. You can read more details about why am I learning SQL Server.  I have signed up for the course End to End SQL Server Business Intelligence at Koenig Solutions. Yesterday I blogged about my registration experience and today I am going to write about my  experience once I arrived at Delhi. From Ahmedabad to Delhi I stay with my wife and daughter in Bangalore (IT Hub of India), my hometown is Ahmedabad. My parents stay in city nearby Ahmedabad. I decided to spend few days with my folks before I sign up for 3 days of solid learning. I had selected an early morning flight to Delhi. I landed at 8:30 AM in Delhi. As soon as I checked email in my mobile I was really glad that I had received details of my pick up vehicle from Koenig. I walked out of the airport and I noticed that a driver was waiting with a placard with my name and photo associated with it. He was in Koenig uniform so there was no chance to make mistakes. In minutes of landing in Delhi I was in my transport heading to the Koenig Training Center. After the quick introduction driver handed me a bag (to be precise Eco friendly bag). The bag contained following items: My registration form All necessary documents in print which I had received earlier A Printed Book of the course next day INR 1000 (What?) I was glad to receive the bag but I was very confused with the Rs 1000. I decided to figure this out once I reach to the training center. Arriving at Koenig Inn Deluxe Koenig registration fees include all the stay and meals. I had opted for Koenig Inn Deluxe as my stay as it was recommended by my friend as well it was the right economical choice for me. When I reached to my accommodation, they were well aware of my arrival and was immediately led to my spacious room. The room is well equipped with all the amenities (hot water, air condition, coffee table, munching snacks,  and free internet) and the staff is very friendly. I immediately got ready as I had to go to Koenig Training Center to meet Center Head for a quick introduction. Koenig Inn Delux Koenig Training Center The training center is within five minutes of distance from the accommodation. I was lead to center head right away and had a very meaningful conversation with Ms Hema regarding my learning goals. She gave me a quick tour of the training center. I was amazed with the numbers of lab rooms they have in the center. The labs are spacious and give the most needed hand’s on experience to the users. I was led to the lab where I was suppose to learn my class the very next day as well I was provided my trainer’s profile. Mystery of Rs 1000 Well, after all this I have still not forgotten why I was provided Rs 1000 when arrived at the airport. When I asked about that I was told that because many students comes from foreign places and they may not have Indian Currency when they land at airport. This was for their immediate consumption till they arrive at the training center. Later on they can get their currency converted to local currency at Koenig Travel Desk. My curiosity was satisfied but I had not expected this answer. I am amazed at the attention to the details. Koenig Travel Desk When I heard about Koenig Travel Desk, I remembered that I have few friends in Delhi and Gurgaon. I had completed all of the formalities so I had reset of the day on my hand. I requested the travel desk if they can arrange a day cab for me so I can visit my friends in Guragon. Within 10 minutes I was on my way to Gurgaon. Telerik India Office Visit What did I do in Guragaon? I met my friends Abhishek Kant, Dhananjay Kumar and Amit Chowdhary. I visited Telerik India office and we had an excellent conversation on various aspects of technology and community. The Telerik India office is very spacious and Abhishek Kant (Telerik India Country Manager) gave us a quick tour of the office. We had an excellent lunch and dinner. One thing is for sure – the day was well spent. Pinal Dave, Dhananjay Kumar and Abhishek Kant Later evening I returned to my accommodation and decided to read up a few of the topics which I was going to learn next day. In tomorrow’s blog post I will discuss about my learning experience. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Training, T SQL, Technology

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• Knockoutjs - stringify to handling observables and custom events

  - by Renso

  Goal: Once you viewmodel has been built and populated with data, at some point it goal of it all is to persist the data to the database (or some other media). Regardless of where you want to save it, your client-side viewmodel needs to be converted to a JSON string and sent back to the server. Environment considerations: jQuery 1.4.3+ Knockoutjs version 1.1.2   How to: So let’s set the stage, you are using Knockoutjs and you have a viewmodel with some Knockout dependencies. You want to make sure it is in the proper JSON format and via ajax post it to the server for persistence.   First order of business is to deal with the viewmodel (JSON) object. To most the JSON stringifier sounds familiar. The JSON stringifier converts JavaScript data structures into JSON text. JSON does not support cyclic data structures, so be careful to not give cyclical structures to the JSON stringifier. You may ask, is this the best way to do it? What about those observables and other Knockout properties that I don’t want to persist or want their actual value persisted and not their function, etc. Not sure if you were aware, but KO already has a method; ko.utils.stringifyJson() - it's mostly just a wrapper around JSON.stringify. (which is native in some browsers, and can be made available by referencing json2.js in others). What does it do that the regular stringify does not is that it automatically converts observable, dependentObservable, or observableArray to their underlying value to JSON. Hold on! There is a new feature in this version of Knockout, the ko.toJSON. It is part of the core library and it will clone the view model’s object graph, so you don’t mess it up after you have stringified  it and unwrap all its observables. It's smart enough to avoid reference cycles. Since you are using the MVVM pattern it would assume you are not trying to reference DOM nodes from your view. Wait a minute. I can already see this info on the http://knockoutjs.com/examples/contactsEditor.html website, why mention it all here? First of this is a much nicer blog, no orange ? At this time, you may want to have a look at the blog and see what I am talking about. See the save event, how they stringify the view model’s contacts only? That’s cool but what if your view model is a representation of your object you want to persist, meaning it has no property that represents the json object you want to persist, it is the view model itself. The example in http://knockoutjs.com/examples/contactsEditor.html assumes you have a list of contacts you may want to persist. In the example here, you want to persist the view model itself. The viewmodel here looks something like this:     var myViewmodel = {         accountName: ko.observable(""),         accountType: ko.observable("Active")     };     myViewmodel.isItActive = ko.dependentObservable(function () {         return myViewmodel.accountType() == "Active";     });     myViewmodel.clickToSaveMe = function() {         SaveTheAccount();     }; Here is the function in charge of saving the account: Function SaveTheAccount() {     $.ajax({         data: ko.toJSON(viewmodel),         url: $('#ajaxSaveAccountUrl').val(),         type: "POST",         dataType: "json",         async: false,         success: function (result) {             if (result && result.Success == true) {                 $('#accountMessage').html('<span class="fadeMyContainerSlowly">The account has been saved</span>').show();                 FadeContainerAwaySlowly();             }         },         error: function (xmlHttpRequest, textStatus, errorThrown) {             alert('An error occurred: ' + errorThrown);         }     }); //ajax }; Try run this and your browser will eventually freeze up or crash. Firebug will tell you that you have a repetitive call to the first function call in your model that keeps firing infinitely.  What is happening is that Knockout serializes the view model to a JSON string by traversing the object graph and firing off the functions, again-and-again. Not sure why it does that, but it does. So what is the work around: Nullify your function calls and then post it:         var lightweightModel = viewmodel.clickToSaveMe = null;         data: ko.toJSON(lightweightModel), So then I traced the JSON string on the server and found it having issues with primitive types. C#, by the way. So I changed ko.toJSON(model) to ko.toJS(model), and that solved my problem. Of course you could just create a property on the viewmodel for the account itself, so you only have to serialize the property and not the entire viewmodel. If that is an option then that would be the way to go. If your view model contains other properties in the view model that you also want to post then that would not be an option and then you’ll know what to watch out for. Hope this helps.

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• CQRS &ndash; Questions and Concerns

  - by Dylan Smith

  I’ve been doing a lot of learning on CQRS and Event Sourcing over the last little while and I have a number of questions that I haven’t been able to answer. 1. What is the benefit of CQRS when compared to a typical DDD architecture that uses Event Sourcing and properly captures intent and behavior via verb-based commands? (other than Scalability) 2. When using CQRS what do you do with complex query-based logic? I’m going to elaborate on #1 in this blog post and I’ll do a follow-up post on #2. I watched through Greg Young’s video on the business benefits of CQRS + Event Sourcing and first let me say that I thought it was an excellent presentation that really drives home a lot of the benefits to this approach to architecture (I watched it twice in a row I enjoyed it so much!). But it didn’t answer some of my questions fully (I wish I had been there to ask these of Greg in person!). So let me pick apart some of the points he makes and how they relate to my first question above. I’m completely sold on the idea of event sourcing and have a clear understanding of the benefits that it brings to the table, so I’m not going to question that. But you can use event sourcing without going to a CQRS architecture, so my main question is around the benefits of CQRS + Event Sourcing vs Event Sourcing + Typical DDD architecture Architecture with Event Sourcing + Commands on Left, CQRS on Right Greg talks about how the stereotypical architecture doesn’t support DDD, but is that only because his diagram shows DTO’s coming up from the client. If we use the same diagram but allow the client to send commands doesn’t that remove a lot of the arguments that Greg makes against the stereotypical architecture? We can now introduce verbs into the system. We can capture intent now (storing it still requires event sourcing, but you can implement event sourcing without doing CQRS) We can create a rich domain model (as opposed to an anemic domain model) Scalability is obviously a benefit that CQRS brings to the table, but like Greg says, very few of the systems we create truly need significant scalability Greg talks about the ability to scale your development efforts. He says CQRS allows you to split the system into 3 parts (Client, Domain/Commands, Reads) and assign 3 teams of developers to work on them in parallel; letting you scale your development efforts by 3x with nearly linear gains. But in the stereotypical architecture don’t you already have 2 separate modules that you can split your dev efforts between: The client that sends commands/queries and receives DTO’s, and the Domain which accepts commands/queries, and generates events/DTO’s. If this is true it’s not really a 3x scaling you achieve with CQRS but merely a 1.5x scaling which while great doesn’t sound nearly as dramatic (“I can do it with 10 devs in 12 months – let me hire 5 more and we can have it done in 8 months”). Making the Query side “stupid simple” such that you can assign junior developers (or even outsource it) sounds like a valid benefit, but I have some concerns over what you do with complex query-based logic/behavior. I’m going to go into more detail on this in a follow-up blog post shortly. He also seemed to focus on how “stupid-simple” it is doing queries against the de-normalized data store, but I imagine there is still significant complexity in the event handlers that interpret the events and apply them to the de-normalized tables. It sounds like Greg suggests that because we’re doing CQRS that allows us to apply Event Sourcing when we otherwise wouldn’t be able to (~33:30 in the video). I don’t believe this is true. I don’t see why you wouldn’t be able to apply Event Sourcing without separating out the Commands and Queries. The queries would just operate against the domain model instead of the database. But you’d still get the benefits of Event Sourcing. Without CQRS the queries would only be able to operate against the current state rather than the event history, but even in CQRS the domain behaviors can only operate against the current state and I don’t see that being a big limiting factor. If some query needs to operate against something that is not captured by the current state you would just have to update the domain model to capture that information (no different than if that statement were made about a Command under CQRS). Some of the benefits I do see being applicable are that your domain model might end up being simpler/smaller since it only needs to represent the state needed to process commands and not worry about the reads (like the Deactivate Inventory Item and associated comment example that Greg provides). And also commands that can be handled in a Transaction Script style manner by the command handler simply generating events and not touching the domain model. It also makes it easier for your senior developers to focus on the command behavior and ignore the queries, which is usually going to be a better use of their time. And of course scalability. If anybody out there has any thoughts on this and can help educate me further, please either leave a comment or feel free to get in touch with me via email:

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• SanjayP&rsquo;s venture after Microsoft involves no Microsoft

  - by eddraper

  When I was at Microsoft, I always found Sanjay Parthasarathy to be a bright and passionate leader.  While he was a bit disconnected at times with what was really going on out in the trenches, I always thought he was true believer in what we in Developer Platform and Evangelism (DPE) were doing.  He got it.  He had started DPE and kicked a lot of doors down up in Redmond to make it happen.  Back in the early 2000s, battles over platform choices at large customers was trench warfare… bayonets and hand grenades at the P-Code level.  This model was not at all suited to Microsoft’s org structure at the time.  While there were plenty of people fully able to have competitive conversations around Windows Server, or AD, or Exchange, or the desktop, there weren’t many that could have deep technical conversations around Java vs .NET and the platform “stack” as a cohesive, unified unit of value.  This task fell to DPE. Sanjay ended up leaving Microsoft a number of months before me in 2009 and I remember thinking these exact words: “holy shit, SanjayP left Microsoft.”  When SanjayP left DPE years before that,  Sheila Gulati had stepped into his shoes and I thought we where starting to miss a beat.  Sheila had built an amazing business at Microsoft India, but I don’t recall being inspired by her as a leader.  SanjayP’s talks felt like the opening scene of “Patton” with George C. Scott pacing in front of the American flag.  Sheila was a voice on a con-call.  When she moved on in 2007, Walid Abu-Hadba was given the reigns.  Personally, I don’t ever recall even seeing his face.  I think I might recall hearing his voice on some con-calls, but for all intents and purposes he was invisible to me.  Perhaps this was the beginning of my carelessness around seeking “visibility.” Fast forward to Build 2011.  First off, we have no PDC – we have Build.  Microsoft had made an 11 year investment by this time in building an organization to make its technology relevant to developers.  One would think such an org would be in the driver’s seat of such an event, but we see Windows product group people on the podiums.  Watching, I could see the messaging unfold… but no story.  It was like the old days.  Demos and PowerPoints by team members building the tech, and in many cases VPs.  The ensuing confusion is almost legendary now.  Windows 8 was, and is, a pretty big deal… but who is telling the story – not just features and benefits, but the story around how it all fits together. Having been out of Microsoft for two years now, and looking in, I can only conclude that the “DPE of old” has at best been emasculated, and at worst been completely marginalized by internal politics, or perhaps the eternal march of the corporate entropy generator that resides at all large companies.  I don’t think this is a good thing for anyone. And now, back to Sanjay who is the father of Microsoft DPE… I noticed that he has moved back to India and is doing start-up work.  His current company Indix looks to be doing some interesting things with “big data” and here’s their stack: Nary a trace of anything Microsoft.  What could account for this?  I wonder….  Better availability of labor and expertise in India for this stack?  Donno, but even in India, leet R and Hadoop skills have to be hard to find. Technical superiority?  This, I sincerely doubt. This stack, with SanjayP’s name as CEO leaves me with an unsettling feeling.  If he did believe, he no longer does.  One doesn’t place bets with real money on things they don’t believe in.  Perhaps he never did believe, and was a corporate creature seeking to find a niche for himself after which he manipulated me and others.  Or perhaps… anger… be it passive aggression or an outright “in your face F*** you” to his former masters. I guess in the end, only he knows the true reason… But I have my theory...

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• SQLAuthority News – A Real Story of Book Getting ‘Out of Stock’ to A 25% Discount Story Available

  - by pinaldave

  As many of my readers may know, I have recently written a few books.  Right now I’d like to talk about SQL Server Interview Questions and Answers (http://bit.ly/sqlinterviewbook ), my newest release. What inspired me to write this book was similar to my motivations for my previous titles – I wanted to help people understand SQL Server concepts and ace interview questions so that they could get a great job they love, as much as I love my own job. If you are new to SQL Server, don’t think I left you out of my book writing efforts. If you are new to the subject or have not had to deal with SQL Server in a long time, this book is perfect for someone who wants or needs a last minute refresher. If you are facing an upcoming interview and want to impress your future bosses, this book is perfect for getting you up to speed in a short time. However, if you are already an expert, you will still find a lot to learn and many pointers and suggestions that go deep into the subject. As I said before, I wrote this book in order to help my community, and I certainly hoped that this book would become popular. However, we decided to print a very limited number of copies to begin with. We did not think that it would sell out since much of the information is available for free online. We could not have been more wrong! We incorrectly estimated what people wanted. We did not realize that there is still a need and an interest for structured learning. So, with great reservations, we printed quite a large number of copies – and it still ran out in 36 hours! We got call from the online store with a request for more copies within 12 hours. But we had printed only as many as we had sent them. There were no extra copies. We finally talked to the printer to get more copies. However, due to festivals and holidays the copies could not be shipped to the online retailer for two days. We knew for sure that they were going to be out of the book for 48 hours. 48 hours – this was very difficult as the book was very highly anticipated. Many people wanted to buy this book quickly, and receive it soon in order to meet a deadline or to study for an upcoming test of their knowledge. But now this book was out of stock on the retail store. The way the online store works is that if the Indian-priced book is not there they list the US version of the book so that buyers will not be disappointed. The problem was that the US price of the book is three times more than the Indian price – which means one has to pay three times as much to buy this book instead of the previous very low price. We received a lot of communication on this subject, here are some examples: We are now businessmen and only focusing on money Why has the price tripled in 36 hours Why we are not honest with the price If the prices will ever come down And some of the letters we cannot post here! Well, finally after 48 hours the Indian stock was finally available online. Thanks to our printer who worked day and night to get all the copies printed. He divided the complete stock in two parts. The first part they sent immediately to online retailer  and the second part they kept with them to sell. Finally, the online retailer got them online promptly as well, and the price returned to normal. Our book once again got in business and became the eighth most popular new release in 36 hours. We appreciate your love and support. Without all of your interest and love we would have never come this far and the book would not be so successful. After thinking about all your support and how patient you were with our online troubles, the online retailer has decided to give an extra 25% discount for a limited time only. I think the 48 hours when the book was out of stock were very horrible and stressful and I’d like to apologize to my loyal readers for the mishap. I hope that the 25% off is enough to sooth any remaining hurt feelings, and that everyone will continue to learn and discover things in the book. Once again thank you so much and I truly hope that you all enjoy reading the book as much as I enjoyed writing it. My book SQL Server Interview Questions and Answers is available now. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Interview Questions and Answers, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Book Review, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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• SQLAuthority News – Training and Consultancy and Travel – Story of 30 Last 30 Days

  - by pinaldave

  Today’s blog post is not technical as usual. Here, I present a real story, and I also invite you all to share your thoughts or opinions on this post. I am a professional SQL Server Trainer; I also do consultation in the area of the Performance Tuning and Query Optimizations. In any month, I like the mix of both in my schedule. I prefer to do training for one week, and then commit the next week for some consultation work. Due to the advancement in technology, for most of the consultation works, there is no client location visit or first time visit for understanding the project. Usually, I conduct high-end training sessions or 400 level training, and these training sessions are very intensive most of the time. Always after completing the training for 5 days straight away at 400 level, I make sure to take out some time to cool down and relax. During this time, I prefer to work on optimization projects. Consultancy is great as it keeps me updated regarding what is going on in the real world. As we all know, all those trainers who have real world experience are always considered to be the best trainers. My learning is immense during my consultations with the real client and while resolving real problems. I share the same with my students the very next week when I go for training sessions. For the same reason, every class is different from the previous ones. An experience trainer would tell you that the class is best if it is driven by Students the way instructor wants! The best scenario is as described above; but you won’t get the best scenario all the time. I was on road for nearly 25 days out of the last 30 days and involved in doing various SQL Server-related trainings. Here is what I have done in the last 30 days. I have gathered the following details from my expenditure reports, which are maintained by my wife. There are few points related to my personal expenses and few other related to business. I maintain a separate list for each of these expenses, but here I have aggregated them. Last 30 days - Training 23 days - 4 – two days training classes – 8 days of training 3 – five days training classes – 15 days of training 1 – one day training classes – 2 days of training Flights 18 flights - 8 – Kingfisher 6 – Spicejet 2 – Jet light 2 – Jet connect Stay in different cities Hyderabad – 16 days Chennai – 6 days Bangalore – 2 days Ahmedabad – 6 days (Hometown) Meals – 54 (Averaging less than 2 per day) Room Services – 16 times Training Campuses – 20 times Restaurants – 6 times Home – 12 times Taxi/Cabs – 64 times (Averaging more than 2 per day) Hotel Cab – 34 times Meru Cab – 8 times Easy Cabs – 10 times Auto Rickshaw – 2 times Looking at the above statistics, I can see that I have eaten less than what I should have, which is not good, and traveled in taxi more than what I should have. Also the temperatures in different cities were very different, not to mention the humidity as well. I missed my family, especially my little girl (9 months). When I was at home, I used to have a proper healthy meal every single day; however, when I was traveling, the food was something I had to compromise on. I have previously written about my travel experience with different airlines, my opinion is still same about them. Well, I have question to all of you road warriors, how do you manage your health and enthusiasm during situations I am going through. I have couple of time stomach upset as well sour throat. I drink lots of water and do my best to keep up. Any idea? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• SQLAuthority News – Why VoIP Service Providers Should Think About NuoDB’s Geo Distribution

  - by Pinal Dave

  You can always tell when someone’s showing off their cool, cutting edge comms technology. They tend to raise their voice a lot. Back in the day they’d announce their gadget leadership to the rest of the herd by shouting into their cellphone. Usually the message was no more urgent than “Hi, I’m on my cellphone!” Now the same types will loudly name-drop a different technology to the rest of the airport lounge. “I’m leveraging the wifi,” a fellow passenger bellowed, the other day, as we filtered through the departure gate. Nobody needed to know that, but the subtext was “look at me everybody”. You can tell the really advanced mobile user – they tend to whisper. Their handset has a microphone (how cool is that!) and they know how to use it. Sometimes these shouty public broadcasters aren’t even connected anyway because the database for their Voice over IP (VoIP) platform can’t cope. This will happen if they are using a traditional SQL model to try and cope with a phone network which has far flung offices and hundreds of mobile employees. That, like shouting into your phone, is just wrong on so many levels. What VoIP needs now is a single, logical database across multiple servers in different geographies. It needs to be updated in real-time and automatically scaled out during times of peak demand. A VoIP system should scale up to handle increased traffic, but just as importantly is must then go back down in the off peak hours. Try this with a MySQL database. It can’t scale easily enough, so it will keep your developers busy. They’ll have spent many hours trying to knit the different databases together. Traditional relational databases can possibly achieve this, at a price. Mind you, you could extend baked bean cans and string to every point on the network and that would be no less elegant. That’s not really following engineering principles though is it? Having said that, most telcos and VoIP systems use a separate, independent solution for each office location, which they link together – loosely.  The more office locations, the more complex and expensive the solution becomes and so the more you spend on maintenance. Ideally, you’d have a fluid system that can automatically shift its shape as the need arises. That’s the point of software isn’t it – it adapts. Otherwise, we might as well return to the old days. A MySQL system isn’t exactly baked bean cans attached by string, but it’s closer in spirit to the old many teethed mechanical beast that was employed in the first type of automated switchboard. NuoBD’s NewSQL is designed to be a single database that works across multiple servers, which can scale easily, and scale on demand. That’s one system that gives high connectivity but no latency, complexity or maintenance issues. MySQL works in some circumstances, but a period of growth isn’t one of them. So as a company moves forward, the MySQL database can’t keep pace. Data storage and data replication errors creep in. Soon the diaspora of offices becomes a problem. Your telephone system isn’t just distributed, it is literally all over the place. Though voice calls are often a software function, some of the old habits of telephony remain. When you call an engineer out, some of them will listen to what you’re asking for and announce that it cannot be done. This is what happens if you ask, say, database engineers familiar with Oracle or Microsoft to fulfill your wish for a low maintenance system built on a single, fluid, scalable database. No can do, they’d say. In fact, I heard one shouting something similar into his VoIP handset at the airport. “I can’t get on the network, Mac. I’m on MySQL.” You can download NuoDB from here. “NuoDB provides the ability to replicate data globally in real-time, which is not available with any other product offering,” states Weeks.  “That alone is remarkable and it works. I’ve seen it. I’ve used it.  I’ve tested it. The ability to deploy NuoDB removes a tremendous burden from our support and engineering teams.” Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: NuoDB

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• Open Source but not Free Software (or vice versa)

  - by TRiG

  The definition of "Free Software" from the Free Software Foundation: “Free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer.” Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it means that the program's users have the four essential freedoms: The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0). The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2). The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this. A program is free software if users have all of these freedoms. Thus, you should be free to redistribute copies, either with or without modifications, either gratis or charging a fee for distribution, to anyone anywhere. Being free to do these things means (among other things) that you do not have to ask or pay for permission to do so. The definition of "Open Source Software" from the Open Source Initiative: Open source doesn't just mean access to the source code. The distribution terms of open-source software must comply with the following criteria: Free Redistribution The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale. Source Code The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form. Where some form of a product is not distributed with source code, there must be a well-publicized means of obtaining the source code for no more than a reasonable reproduction cost preferably, downloading via the Internet without charge. The source code must be the preferred form in which a programmer would modify the program. Deliberately obfuscated source code is not allowed. Intermediate forms such as the output of a preprocessor or translator are not allowed. Derived Works The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software. Integrity of The Author's Source Code The license may restrict source-code from being distributed in modified form only if the license allows the distribution of "patch files" with the source code for the purpose of modifying the program at build time. The license must explicitly permit distribution of software built from modified source code. The license may require derived works to carry a different name or version number from the original software. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research. Distribution of License The rights attached to the program must apply to all to whom the program is redistributed without the need for execution of an additional license by those parties. License Must Not Be Specific to a Product The rights attached to the program must not depend on the program's being part of a particular software distribution. If the program is extracted from that distribution and used or distributed within the terms of the program's license, all parties to whom the program is redistributed should have the same rights as those that are granted in conjunction with the original software distribution. License Must Not Restrict Other Software The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be open-source software. License Must Be Technology-Neutral No provision of the license may be predicated on any individual technology or style of interface. These definitions, although they derive from very different ideologies, are broadly compatible, and most Free Software is also Open Source Software and vice versa. I believe, however, that it is possible for this not to be the case: It is possible for software to be Open Source without being Free, or to be Free without being Open Source. Questions Is my belief correct? Is it possible for software to fall into one camp and not the other? Does any such software actually exist? Please give examples. Clarification I've already accepted an answer now, but I seem to have confused a lot of people, so perhaps a clarification is in order. I was not asking about the difference between copyleft (or "viral", though I don't like that term) and non-copyleft ("permissive") licenses. Nor was I asking about your personal idiosyncratic definitions of "Free" and "Open". I was asking about "Free Software as defined by the FSF" and "Open Source Software as defined by the OSI". Are the two always the same? Is it possible to be one without being the other? And the answer, it seems, is that it's impossible to be Free without being Open, but possible to be Open without being Free. Thank you everyone who actually answered the question.

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• ASP.NET Web API - Screencast series Part 3: Delete and Update

  - by Jon Galloway

  We're continuing a six part series on ASP.NET Web API that accompanies the getting started screencast series. This is an introductory screencast series that walks through from File / New Project to some more advanced scenarios like Custom Validation and Authorization. The screencast videos are all short (3-5 minutes) and the sample code for the series is both available for download and browsable online. I did the screencasts, but the samples were written by the ASP.NET Web API team. In Part 1 we looked at what ASP.NET Web API is, why you'd care, did the File / New Project thing, and did some basic HTTP testing using browser F12 developer tools. In Part 2 we started to build up a sample that returns data from a repository in JSON format via GET methods. In Part 3, we'll start to modify data on the server using DELETE and POST methods. So far we've been looking at GET requests, and the difference between standard browsing in a web browser and navigating an HTTP API isn't quite as clear. Delete is where the difference becomes more obvious. With a "traditional" web page, to delete something'd probably have a form that POSTs a request back to a controller that needs to know that it's really supposed to be deleting something even though POST was really designed to create things, so it does the work and then returns some HTML back to the client that says whether or not the delete succeeded. There's a good amount of plumbing involved in communicating between client and server. That gets a lot easier when we just work with the standard HTTP DELETE verb. Here's how the server side code works: public Comment DeleteComment(int id) { Comment comment; if (!repository.TryGet(id, out comment)) throw new HttpResponseException(HttpStatusCode.NotFound); repository.Delete(id); return comment; } If you look back at the GET /api/comments code in Part 2, you'll see that they start the exact same because the use cases are kind of similar - we're looking up an item by id and either displaying it or deleting it. So the only difference is that this method deletes the comment once it finds it. We don't need to do anything special to handle cases where the id isn't found, as the same HTTP 404 handling works fine here, too. Pretty much all "traditional" browsing uses just two HTTP verbs: GET and POST, so you might not be all that used to DELETE requests and think they're hard. Not so! Here's the jQuery method that calls the /api/comments with the DELETE verb: $(function() { $("a.delete").live('click', function () { var id = $(this).data('comment-id'); $.ajax({ url: "/api/comments/" + id, type: 'DELETE', cache: false, statusCode: { 200: function(data) { viewModel.comments.remove( function(comment) { return comment.ID == data.ID; } ); } } }); return false; }); }); So in order to use the DELETE verb instead of GET, we're just using $.ajax() and setting the type to DELETE. Not hard. But what's that statusCode business? Well, an HTTP status code of 200 is an OK response. Unless our Web API method sets another status (such as by throwing the Not Found exception we saw earlier), the default response status code is HTTP 200 - OK. That makes the jQuery code pretty simple - it calls the Delete action, and if it gets back an HTTP 200, the server-side delete was successful so the comment can be deleted. Adding a new comment uses the POST verb. It starts out looking like an MVC controller action, using model binding to get the new comment from JSON data into a c# model object to add to repository, but there are some interesting differences. public HttpResponseMessage<Comment> PostComment(Comment comment) { comment = repository.Add(comment); var response = new HttpResponseMessage<Comment>(comment, HttpStatusCode.Created); response.Headers.Location = new Uri(Request.RequestUri, "/api/comments/" + comment.ID.ToString()); return response; } First off, the POST method is returning an HttpResponseMessage<Comment>. In the GET methods earlier, we were just returning a JSON payload with an HTTP 200 OK, so we could just return the  model object and Web API would wrap it up in an HttpResponseMessage with that HTTP 200 for us (much as ASP.NET MVC controller actions can return strings, and they'll be automatically wrapped in a ContentResult). When we're creating a new comment, though, we want to follow standard REST practices and return the URL that points to the newly created comment in the Location header, and we can do that by explicitly creating that HttpResposeMessage and then setting the header information. And here's a key point - by using HTTP standard status codes and headers, our response payload doesn't need to explain any context - the client can see from the status code that the POST succeeded, the location header tells it where to get it, and all it needs in the JSON payload is the actual content. Note: This is a simplified sample. Among other things, you'll need to consider security and authorization in your Web API's, and especially in methods that allow creating or deleting data. We'll look at authorization in Part 6. As for security, you'll want to consider things like mass assignment if binding directly to model objects, etc. In Part 4, we'll extend on our simple querying methods form Part 2, adding in support for paging and querying.

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• How to Automate your Database Documentation

  - by Jonathan Hickford

  In my previous post, “Automating Deployments with SQL Compare command line” I looked at how teams can automate the deployment and post deployment validation of SQL Server databases using the command line versions of Red Gate tools. In this post I’m looking at another use for the command line tools, namely using them to generate up-to-date documentation with every database change. There are many reasons why up-to-date documentation is valuable. For example when somebody new has to work on or administer a database for the first time, or when a new database comes into service. Having database documentation reduces the risks of making incorrect decisions when making changes. Documentation is very useful to business intelligence analysts when writing reports, for example in SSRS. There are a couple of great examples talking about why up to date documentation is valuable on this site:  Database Documentation – Lands of Trolls: Why and How? and Database Documentation Using SQL Doc. The short answer is that it can save you time and reduce risk when you need that most! SQL Doc is a fast simple tool that automatically generates database documentation. It can create documents in HTML, Word or pdf files. The documentation contains information about object definitions and dependencies, along with any other information you want to associate with each object. The SQL Doc GUI, which is included in Red Gate’s SQL Developer Bundle and SQL Toolbelt, allows you to add additional notes to objects, and customise which objects are shown in the docs.  These settings can be saved as a .sqldoc project file. The SQL Doc command line can use this project file to automatically update the documentation every time the database is changed, ensuring that documentation that is always up to date. The simplest way to keep documentation up to date is probably to use a scheduled task to run a script every day. However if you have a source controlled database, or are using a Continuous Integration (CI) server or a build server, it may make more sense to use that instead. If  you’re using SQL Source Control or SSDT Database Projects to help version control your database, you can automatically update the documentation after each change is made to the source control repository that contains your database. To get this automation in place,  you can use the functionality of a Continuous Integration (CI) server, which can trigger commands to run when a source control repository has changed. A CI server will also capture and save the documentation that is created as an artifact, so you can always find the exact documentation for a specific version of the database. This forms an always up to date data dictionary. If you don’t already have a CI server in place there are several you can use, such as the free open source Jenkins or the free starter editions of TeamCity. I won’t cover setting these up in this article, but there is information about using CI servers for automating database tasks on the Red Gate Database Delivery webpage. You may be interested in Red Gate’s SQL CI utility (part of the SQL Automation Pack) which is an easy way to update a database with the latest changes from source control. The PowerShell example below shows how to create the documentation from a database. That database might be your integration database or a shared development database that is always up to date with the latest changes. $serverName = "server\instance" $databaseName = "databaseName" # If you want to document multiple databases use a comma separated list $userName = "username" $password = "password" # Path to SQLDoc.exe $SQLDocPath = "C:\Program Files (x86)\Red Gate\SQL Doc 3\SQLDoc.exe" $arguments = @( "/server:$($serverName)", "/database:$($databaseName)", "/username:$($userName)", "/password:$($password)", "/filetype:html", "/outputfolder:.", # "/project:$args[0]", # If you already have a .sqldoc project file you can pass it as an argument to this script. Values in the project will be overridden with any options set on the command line "/name:$databaseName Report", "/copyrightauthor:$([Environment]::UserName)" ) write-host $arguments & $SQLDocPath $arguments There are several options you can set on the command line to vary how your documentation is created. For example, you can document multiple databases or exclude certain types of objects. In the example above, we set the name of the report to match the database name, and use the current Windows user as the documentation author. For more examples of how you can customise the report from the command line please see the SQL Doc command line documentation If you already have a .sqldoc project file, or wish to further customise the report by including or excluding specific objects, you can use this project on the command line. Any settings you specify on the command line will override the defaults in the project. For details of what you can customise in the project please see the SQL Doc project documentation. In the example above, the line to use a project is commented out, but you can uncomment this line and then pass a path to a .sqldoc project file as an argument to this script.  Conclusion Keeping documentation about your databases up to date is very easy to set up using SQL Doc and PowerShell. By using a CI server to run this process you can trigger the documentation to be run on every change to a source controlled database, and keep historic documentation available. If you are considering more advanced database automation, e.g. database unit testing, change script generation, deploying to large numbers of targets and backup/verification, please email me at [email protected] for further script samples or if you have any questions.

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• PASS Summit 2010 Recap

  - by AjarnMark

  Last week I attended my eighth PASS Summit in nine years, and every year it is a fantastic event!  I was fortunate my first year to have a contact (Bill Graziano (blog | Twitter) from SQLTeam) that I was expecting to meet, and who got me started on a good track of making new contacts.  Each year I have made a few more, and renewed friendships from years past.  Many of the attendees agree that the pure networking opportunities are one of the best benefits of attending the Summit.  And there’s a lot of great technical stuff, too, some of the things that stick out for me this year include… Pre-Con Monday: PowerShell with Allen White (blog | Twitter).  This was the first time that I attended a pre-con.  For those not familiar with the concept, the regular sessions for the conference are 75-90 minutes long.  For an extra fee, you can attend a full-day session on a single topic during a pre- or post-conference training day.  I had been meaning for several months to dive in and learn PowerShell, but just never seemed to find (or make) the time for it, so when I saw this was one of the all-day sessions, and I was planning to be there on Monday anyway, I decided to go for it.  And it was well worth it!  I definitely came out of there with a good foundation to build my own PowerShell scripts, plus several sample scripts that he showed which already cover the first four or five things I was planning to do with PowerShell anyway.  This looks like the right tool for me to build an automated version of our software deployment process, which right now contains many repeated steps.  Thanks Allen! Service Broker with Denny Cherry (blog | Twitter).  I remembered reading Denny’s blog post on Using Service Broker instead of Replication, and ever since then I have been thinking about using this to populate a new reporting-focused Data Repository that we will be building in the near future.  When I saw he was doing this session, I thought it would be great to get more information and be able to ask the author questions.  When I brought this idea back to my boss, he really liked it, as we had previously been discussing doing nightly data loads, with an option to manually trigger a mid-day load if up-to-the-minute data was needed for something.  If we go the Service Broker route, we can keep the Repository current in near real-time.  Hooray! DBA Mythbusters with Paul Randal (blog | Twitter).  Even though I read every one of the posts in Paul’s blog series of the same name, I had to go see the legend in person.  It was great, and I still learned something new! How to Conduct Effective Meetings with Joe Webb (blog | Twitter).  I always like to sit in on a session that Joe does.  I met Joe several years ago when both he and Bill Graziano were on the PASS Board of Directors together, and we have kept in touch.  Joe is very well-spoken and has great experience with both SQL Server and business.  And we could certainly use some pointers at my work (probably yours, too) on making our meetings more effective and to run on-time.  Of course, now that I’m the Chapter Leader for the Professional Development virtual chapter, I also had to sit in on this ProfDev session and recruit Joe to do a presentation or two for the chapter next year. Query Optimization with David DeWitt.  Anyone who has seen Dr. David DeWitt present the 3rd keynote at a PASS Summit over the last three years knows what a great time it is to sit and listen to him make some really complicated and advanced topic easy to understand (although it still makes your head hurt).  It still amazes me that the simple two-table join query from pubs that he used in his example can possibly have 22 million possible physical query plans.  Ouch! Exhibit Hall:  This year I spent more serious time in the exhibit hall than any year past.  I have talked my boss into making a significant (for us) investment in monitoring tools next year, and this was a great opportunity to talk with all the big-hitters.  Readers of mine may recall that I fell in love with the SQL Sentry Power Suite several months ago and wrote a blog entry about it just from the trial version.  Well as things turned out, short-term budget priorities shifted, and we weren’t able to make the purchase then.  I have it in the budget for next year, but since I was going to the Summit, my boss wanted me to look at the other options to see if this was really the one that we wanted.  I spent a couple of hours talking with representatives from Red-Gate, Idera, Confio, and Quest about their offerings, and giving them each the same 3 scenarios that I wanted to be able to accomplish based on the questions and issues that arise in our company.  It was interesting to discover the different approaches or “world view” that each vendor takes to the subject of performance monitoring and troubleshooting.  I may write a separate article that goes into this in more depth, but the product that best aligned with our point of view, and met the current needs we have is still the SQL Sentry Power Suite.  I’m not saying that the others are bad or wrong or anything like that, just that the way they tackled the issue did not align as well with our particular needs as does SQL Sentry’s product.  And that was something I learned too, when you go shopping for these products, you really need to know what you want to get from them.  It’s best if you have a few example scenarios from work that you can use to test out how well each tool fits your particular needs. Overall, another GREAT event.  I can’t wait to get the DVDs so I can sit in on a bunch of other sessions that I couldn’t get to because I was in one of the ones above.  And I can hardly wait until next year!

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• Silverlight Cream for February 26, 2011 -- #1052

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Mark Monster, Gill Cleeren, Pencho Popadiyn, Kevin Dockx, Joost van Schaik, Jesse Liberty, John Papa, Jeremy Likness, Arik Poznanski(-2-), Page Brooks, Deborah Kurata, Mike Snow, Alfred Astort, Samuel Jack, XAMLNinja, and Shawn Wildermuth. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Asynchronous Callbacks with Rx" Jesse Liberty WP7: "Phoney Windows Phone 7 Project Now Available!" Shawn Wildermuth MVVM: "Validating our ViewModel" Mark Monster Shoutouts: Shawn Wildermuth has a video up of his FadingMessage class to show it off: Introducing Phoney's FadingMessage Class From SilverlightCream.com: Validating our ViewModel Mark Monster discusses Validation in his latest post... using INotifyDataErrorInfo and his own implementation of a ViewModel base that supports it and INPC. Getting ready for Microsoft Silverlight Exam 70-506 (Part 7) Gill Cleeren hits part 7 of his series at SilverlightShow on a great walk through Silverlight and getting ready for the exam. This is the final part and concentrates on deploying apps. Windows Phone 7–Creating Custom Keyboard Pencho Popadiyn has a post at SilverlightShow discussing problems with WP7 keyboards in his native Bulgaria, and his solution to the problem... create his own. 360 Degrees Feedback by Kevin Dockx Kevin Dockx produced a white paper for his company about an employee review solution they did in Silverlight. The white paper is available, and SilverlightShow interviewd Kevin to answer questions about the app. Extended Windows Phone 7 page for handling rotation, focused element updates and back key press Looks like Joost van Schaik has a few posts I've missed... and I'm not going to get to them all today! ... this one is about the base class he uses for WP7 apps... a bunch of utilities he uses... definitely worth a look (and a take). Asynchronous Callbacks with Rx Jesse Liberty has his 8th post in the Rx series up and this one's on Asynchronous Callbacks... if you haven't seen this before, you should definitely look into it... cool stuff, Jesse! Silverlight TV 63: Exploring National Instruments' App Using Data and Business Features John Papa has Silverlight TV number 63 up and is talking to Steve Lasker about National Instruments and their Lab View product. Great demo and discussion. Jounce Part 11: Debugging MEF Jeremy Likness's latest (number 11) in his series on his MVVM framework Jounce is out, and he's discussing how to debug MEF, which Jounce handles nicely through the logging he provides... and you can use it externally to Jounce. Get Twitter Trends on Windows Phone 7 Arik Poznanski has a couple Twitter for WP7 posts up... first is one for pulling Twitter trends from whatthetrend.com... plus the code to do it. Searching Twitter on Windows Phone 7 In his next post, Arik Poznanski shows how to search twitter from your WP7 ... again with code. Tiled Background Control in Silverlight Page Brooks shows how to get a tiled background control in Silverlight ... did you know there was one in the JetPack them? Silverlight Charting: Displaying Data Above the Column Deborah Kurata continues her charting posts with this one displaying the column value above the column. I like this... it has a clean look and all the data is available at a glance. Silverlight: Tasks on the Win7 Mobile Phone Mike Snow has a list of the WP7 tasks available and an example of using them... looks like a pretty good reference! 10 of 10 - Aesthetics and alignment matter Alfred Astort discusses aesthetics and WP7 dev... looks like it's the same as any app development, but if you're not doing it, you should be. Simon Squared – We have Multi-player: Days 4, 5 and (ahem!) 6 Samuel Jack details the completion of his multi-player game for WP7 utilizing Azure, in the hour-by-hour detail he's done the rest... plus a video of the final product! Who ate all the pies!! XAMLNinja has a very good discussion/link set of Charting posts all leading up to a portrait-only version of charting for WP7 with labels that looks looks great Phoney Windows Phone 7 Project Now Available! Shawn Wildermuth has a collection of classes he always uses with WP7 dev, and he's sharing them with all of us a "Phoney" Tools project on Codeplex... and now has a NuGet project also. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• My History with Agile

  - by Robert May

  I’m going to write my history with Agile here.  That way, in future posts, I can refer back to it, instead of typing it out in the post that contains information you may actually want to read.  Note that I’m actually a pretty senior developer, and do lots of technical interviews.  I’m an Agile fan because of the difference it makes in peoples lives and the improvement in quality it brings, and I’ll sacrifice my technological advance to help teams. Management History I started management pretty early in my career, starting with the first job that I ever had.  I actually do NOT have a CS or similar degree.  I have a Bachelor’s of Business Administration with an emphasis in Computer Information Systems. My first management gigs were around call center work and were very schedule oriented.  I didn’t understand the true value of teams, and I’m ashamed to admit, I actually installed a fingerprint scanner as a time clock in this job.  I shudder to think of the impact that I had on the team spirit.  I didn’t even trust them enough to fill out their time cards correctly.  How sad. I was managing nearly 100 people in this position, with the help of a great set of subordinates. I did try to come up with reward programs for the team, but again, didn’t understand the concept of team, so instead of letting the team determine how the rewards should work, I mandated from on high, which isn’t a good thing. I was told that I wasn’t the type that would be a good manager by people whom I respected a lot.  They said it because I was a computer geek, since they don’t understand good management either, but in retrospect, they were right about me then.  I was too green. After my first job, I went on to other jobs and with the exception of one job, I’ve managed people at them all.  The rest of the management story is important for understanding agile, so I’ll save it for my next post. Technical History I’ve been in software development for many, many years.  I technically started programming on a commodore 64 in basic.  I didn’t know that I was programming, but I was sure having fun.  That was followed by batch files, Gorilla hacking (I always had to win), WordPerfect Macro programming and other things that taught me the basics. My first “real” job was with a telephone company, and that’s where I made my first database application in DataEase, wrote my first VBA app and started using real programming tools, like turbo pascal, vb3-vb5, and semi-real tools like RPG and VisualRPG.  I wrote my first web page in 1994, and built my first data driven web page in 1995 using perlDB.  You really can do anything with Perl.  At this time, I also started a Linux based internet service provider that is still in operation today.  One of the people I worked with is now a Microsoft employee building and designing frameworks you probably know well.  Smart guy.  I also built my first ASP applications connecting to Sql Server 6.5, setup Exchange 5.5 for the company, and many other system administration stuff.  I’m a programmer by choice, mostly because I don’t really like PC support. From there, I went on to a large state agency.  I got to see and maintain true waterfall projects.  5 years of maintaining the 200 VB COM+ (MTS, actually) dlls that were used to calculate a single number is a long time.  That was all Microsoft DNS technologies.  SQL Server and VB6 were the tools of choice, although .net started to be a factor near the end of employment.  I did some heavy XML work at this job and even wrote an XSD parser and validator in VB6 that was a shim until MSXML 3.0 came out.  Prior to 3.0, XSD’s weren’t supported, and I didn’t want to write DTDs. Ironically, jobs after this were more generic.  I pretty much settled in on the .net framework and revisions of it.  Lots of WPF, some silverlight, lots of ASP.NET, some SQL Azure, lots of SQL Server, some Oracle, but I don’t think that I was as passionate about development and technologies.  I was more into the management of development.  I like people. Technorati Tags: Agile,history

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• Running Jetty under Windows Azure Using RoleEntryPoint in a Worker Role

  - by Shawn Cicoria

  This post is built upon the work of Mario Kosmiskas and David C. Chou’s prior postings – from here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mariok/archive/2011/01/05/deploying-java-applications-in-azure.aspx  http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dachou/archive/2010/03/21/run-java-with-jetty-in-windows-azure.aspx As Mario points out in his post, when you need to have more control over the process that starts, it generally is better left to a RoleEntryPoint capability that as of now, requires the use of a CLR based assembly that is deployed as part of the package to Azure. There were things I liked especially about Mario’s post – specifically, the ability to pull down the JRE and Jetty runtimes at role startup and instantiate the process using the extracted bits.  The way Mario initialized the java process (and Jetty) was to take advantage of a role startup task configured as part of the service definition.  This is a great quick way to kick off processes or tasks prior to your role entry point.  However, if you need access to service configuration values or role events, that’s where RoleEntryPoint comes in.  For this PoC sample I moved the logic for retrieving the bits for the jre and jetty to the worker roles OnStart – in addition to moving the process kickoff to the OnStart method.  The Run method at this point is there to loop and just report the status of the java process. Beyond just making things more parameterized, both Mario’s and David’s articles still form the essence of the approach. The solution that accompanies this post provides all the necessary .NET based Visual Studio project.  In addition, you’ll need: 1. Jetty 7 runtime http://www.eclipse.org/jetty/downloads.php 2. JRE http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html Once you have these the first step is to create archives (zips) of the distributions.  For this PoC, the structure of the archive requires that the root of the archive looks as follows: JRE6.zip jetty---.zip Upload the contents to a storage container (block blob), and for this example I used /archives as the location.  The service configuration has several settings that allow, which is the advantage of using RoleEntryPoint, the ability to provide these things via native configuration support from Azure in a worker role. Storage Explorer You can use development storage for testing this out – the zipped version of the solution is configured for development storage.  When you’re ready to deploy, you update the two settings – 1 for diagnostics and the other for the storage container where the /archives are going to be stored. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="HostedJetty" osFamily="2" osVersion="*"> <Role name="JettyWorker"> <Instances count="1" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <!--<Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString" value="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=<accountName>;AccountKey=<accountKey>" />--> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> <Setting name="JettyArchive" value="jetty-distribution-7.3.0.v20110203b.zip" /> <Setting name="StartRole" value="true" /> <Setting name="BlobContainer" value="archives" /> <Setting name="JreArchive" value="jre6.zip" /> <!--<Setting name="StorageCredentials" value="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=<accountName>;AccountKey=<accountKey>"/>--> <Setting name="StorageCredentials" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" />   For interacting with Storage you can use several tools – one tool that I like is from the Windows Azure CAT team located here: http://appfabriccat.com/2011/02/exploring-windows-azure-storage-apis-by-building-a-storage-explorer-application/  and shown in the prior picture At runtime, during role initialization and startup, Azure will call into your RoleEntryPoint.  At that time the code will do a dynamic pull of the 2 archives and extract – using the Sharp Zip Lib <link> as Mario had demonstrated in his sample.  The only different here is the use of CLR code vs. PowerShell (which is really CLR, but that’s another discussion). At this point, once the 2 zips are extracted, the Role’s file system looks as follows: Worker Role approot From there, the OnStart method (which also does the download and unzip using a simple StorageHelper class) kicks off the Java path and now you have Java! Task Manager Jetty Sample Page A couple of things I’m working on to enhance this is to extract the jre and jetty bits not to the appRoot but to a resource location defined as part of the service definition. ServiceDefinition.csdef <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="HostedJetty" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceDefinition"> <WorkerRole name="JettyWorker"> <Imports> <Import moduleName="Diagnostics" /> <Import moduleName="RemoteAccess" /> <Import moduleName="RemoteForwarder" /> </Imports> <Endpoints> <InputEndpoint name="JettyPort" protocol="tcp" port="80" localPort="8080" /> </Endpoints> <LocalResources> <LocalStorage name="Archives" cleanOnRoleRecycle="false" sizeInMB="100" /> </LocalResources>   As the concept matures a bit, being able to update dynamically the content or jar files as part of a running java solution is something that is possible through continued enhancement of this simple model. The Visual Studio 2010 Solution is located here: HostingJavaSln_NDA.zip

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• SQL SERVER – Parsing SSIS Catalog Messages – Notes from the Field #030

  - by Pinal Dave

  [Note from Pinal]: This is a new episode of Notes from the Field series. SQL Server Integration Service (SSIS) is one of the most key essential part of the entire Business Intelligence (BI) story. It is a platform for data integration and workflow applications. The tool may also be used to automate maintenance of SQL Server databases and updates to multidimensional cube data. In this episode of the Notes from the Field series I requested SSIS Expert Andy Leonard to discuss one of the most interesting concepts of SSIS Catalog Messages. There are plenty of interesting and useful information captured in the SSIS catalog and we will learn together how to explore the same. The SSIS Catalog captures a lot of cool information by default. Here’s a query I use to parse messages from the catalog.operation_messages table in the SSISDB database, where the logged messages are stored. This query is set up to parse a default message transmitted by the Lookup Transformation. It’s one of my favorite messages in the SSIS log because it gives me excellent information when I’m tuning SSIS data flows. The message reads similar to: Data Flow Task:Information: The Lookup processed 4485 rows in the cache. The processing time was 0.015 seconds. The cache used 1376895 bytes of memory. The query: USE SSISDB GO DECLARE @MessageSourceType INT = 60 DECLARE @StartOfIDString VARCHAR(100) = 'The Lookup processed ' DECLARE @ProcessingTimeString VARCHAR(100) = 'The processing time was ' DECLARE @CacheUsedString VARCHAR(100) = 'The cache used ' DECLARE @StartOfIDSearchString VARCHAR(100) = '%' + @StartOfIDString + '%' DECLARE @ProcessingTimeSearchString VARCHAR(100) = '%' + @ProcessingTimeString + '%' DECLARE @CacheUsedSearchString VARCHAR(100) = '%' + @CacheUsedString + '%' SELECT operation_id , SUBSTRING(MESSAGE, (PATINDEX(@StartOfIDSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@StartOfIDString) + 1), ((CHARINDEX(' ', MESSAGE, PATINDEX(@StartOfIDSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@StartOfIDString) + 1)) - (PATINDEX(@StartOfIDSearchString, MESSAGE) + LEN(@StartOfIDString) + 1))) AS LookupRowsCount , SUBSTRING(MESSAGE, (PATINDEX(@ProcessingTimeSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@ProcessingTimeString) + 1), ((CHARINDEX(' ', MESSAGE, PATINDEX(@ProcessingTimeSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@ProcessingTimeString) + 1)) - (PATINDEX(@ProcessingTimeSearchString, MESSAGE) + LEN(@ProcessingTimeString) + 1))) AS LookupProcessingTime , CASE WHEN (CONVERT(numeric(3,3),SUBSTRING(MESSAGE, (PATINDEX(@ProcessingTimeSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@ProcessingTimeString) + 1), ((CHARINDEX(' ', MESSAGE, PATINDEX(@ProcessingTimeSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@ProcessingTimeString) + 1)) - (PATINDEX(@ProcessingTimeSearchString, MESSAGE) + LEN(@ProcessingTimeString) + 1))))) = 0 THEN 0 ELSE CONVERT(bigint,SUBSTRING(MESSAGE, (PATINDEX(@StartOfIDSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@StartOfIDString) + 1), ((CHARINDEX(' ', MESSAGE, PATINDEX(@StartOfIDSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@StartOfIDString) + 1)) - (PATINDEX(@StartOfIDSearchString, MESSAGE) + LEN(@StartOfIDString) + 1)))) / CONVERT(numeric(3,3),SUBSTRING(MESSAGE, (PATINDEX(@ProcessingTimeSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@ProcessingTimeString) + 1), ((CHARINDEX(' ', MESSAGE, PATINDEX(@ProcessingTimeSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@ProcessingTimeString) + 1)) - (PATINDEX(@ProcessingTimeSearchString, MESSAGE) + LEN(@ProcessingTimeString) + 1)))) END AS LookupRowsPerSecond , SUBSTRING(MESSAGE, (PATINDEX(@CacheUsedSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@CacheUsedString) + 1), ((CHARINDEX(' ', MESSAGE, PATINDEX(@CacheUsedSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@CacheUsedString) + 1)) - (PATINDEX(@CacheUsedSearchString, MESSAGE) + LEN(@CacheUsedString) + 1))) AS LookupBytesUsed ,CASE WHEN (CONVERT(bigint,SUBSTRING(MESSAGE, (PATINDEX(@StartOfIDSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@StartOfIDString) + 1), ((CHARINDEX(' ', MESSAGE, PATINDEX(@StartOfIDSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@StartOfIDString) + 1)) - (PATINDEX(@StartOfIDSearchString, MESSAGE) + LEN(@StartOfIDString) + 1)))))= 0 THEN 0 ELSE CONVERT(bigint,SUBSTRING(MESSAGE, (PATINDEX(@CacheUsedSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@CacheUsedString) + 1), ((CHARINDEX(' ', MESSAGE, PATINDEX(@CacheUsedSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@CacheUsedString) + 1)) - (PATINDEX(@CacheUsedSearchString, MESSAGE) + LEN(@CacheUsedString) + 1)))) / CONVERT(bigint,SUBSTRING(MESSAGE, (PATINDEX(@StartOfIDSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@StartOfIDString) + 1), ((CHARINDEX(' ', MESSAGE, PATINDEX(@StartOfIDSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@StartOfIDString) + 1)) - (PATINDEX(@StartOfIDSearchString, MESSAGE) + LEN(@StartOfIDString) + 1)))) END AS LookupBytesPerRow FROM [catalog].[operation_messages] WHERE message_source_type = @MessageSourceType AND MESSAGE LIKE @StartOfIDSearchString GO Note that you have to set some parameter values: @MessageSourceType [int] – represents the message source type value from the following results: Value     Description 10           Entry APIs, such as T-SQL and CLR Stored procedures 20           External process used to run package (ISServerExec.exe) 30           Package-level objects 40           Control Flow tasks 50           Control Flow containers 60           Data Flow task 70           Custom execution message Note: Taken from Reza Rad’s (excellent!) helper.MessageSourceType table found here. @StartOfIDString [VarChar(100)] – use this to uniquely identify the message field value you wish to parse. In this case, the string ‘The Lookup processed ‘ identifies all the Lookup Transformation messages I desire to parse. @ProcessingTimeString [VarChar(100)] – this parameter is message-specific. I use this parameter to specifically search the message field value for the beginning of the Lookup Processing Time value. For this execution, I use the string ‘The processing time was ‘. @CacheUsedString [VarChar(100)] – this parameter is also message-specific. I use this parameter to specifically search the message field value for the beginning of the Lookup Cache  Used value. It returns the memory used, in bytes. For this execution, I use the string ‘The cache used ‘. The other parameters are built from variations of the parameters listed above. The query parses the values into text. The string values are converted to numeric values for ratio calculations; LookupRowsPerSecond and LookupBytesPerRow. Since ratios involve division, CASE statements check for denominators that equal 0. Here are the results in an SSMS grid: This is not the only way to retrieve this information. And much of the code lends itself to conversion to functions. If there is interest, I will share the functions in an upcoming post. If you want to get started with SSIS with the help of experts, read more over at Fix Your SQL Server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: Notes from the Field, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Backup and Restore, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: SSIS

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• Visualising data a different way with Pivot collections

  - by Rob Farley

  Roger’s been doing a great job extending PivotViewer recently, and you can find the list of LobsterPot pivots at http://pivot.lobsterpot.com.au Many months back, the TED Talk that Gary Flake did about Pivot caught my imagination, and I did some research into it. At the time, most of what we did with Pivot was geared towards what we could do for clients, including making Pivot collections based on students at a school, and using it to browse PDF invoices by their various properties. We had actual commercial work based on Pivot collections back then, and it was all kinds of fun. Later, we made some collections for events that were happening, and even got featured in the TechEd Australia keynote. But I’m getting ahead of myself... let me explain the concept. A Pivot collection is an XML file (with .cxml extension) which lists Items, each linking to an image that’s stored in a Deep Zoom format (this means that it contains tiles like Bing Maps, so that the browser can request only the ones of interest according to the zoom level). This collection can be shown in a Silverlight application that uses the PivotViewer control, or in the Pivot Browser that’s available from getpivot.com. Filtering and sorting the items according to their facets (attributes, such as size, age, category, etc), the PivotViewer rearranges the way that these are shown in a very dynamic way. To quote Gary Flake, this lets us “see patterns which are otherwise hidden”. This browsing mechanism is very suited to a number of different methods, because it’s just that – browsing. It’s not searching, it’s more akin to window-shopping than doing an internet search. When we decided to put something together for the conferences such as TechEd Australia 2010 and the PASS Summit 2010, we did some screen-scraping to provide a different view of data that was already available online. Nick Hodge and Michael Kordahi from Microsoft liked the idea a lot, and after a bit of tweaking, we produced one that Michael used in the TechEd Australia keynote to show the variety of talks on offer. It’s interesting to see a pattern in this data: The Office track has the most sessions, but if the Interactive Sessions and Instructor-Led Labs are removed, it drops down to only the sixth most popular track, with Cloud Computing taking over. This is something which just isn’t obvious when you look an ordinary search tool. You get a much better feel for the data when moving around it like this. The more observant amongst you will have noticed some difference in the collection that Michael is demonstrating in the picture above with the screenshots I’ve shown. That’s because it’s been extended some more. At the SQLBits conference in the UK this year, I had some interesting discussions with the guys from Xpert360, particularly Phil Carter, who I’d met in 2009 at an earlier SQLBits conference. They had got around to producing a Pivot collection based on the SQLBits data, which we had been planning to do but ran out of time. We discussed some of ways that Pivot could be used, including the ways that my old friend Howard Dierking had extended it for the MSDN Magazine. I’m not suggesting I influenced Xpert360 at all, but they certainly inspired us with some of their posts on the matter So with LobsterPot guys David Gardiner and Roger Noble both having dabbled in Pivot collections (and Dave doing some for clients), I set Roger to work on extending it some more. He’s used various events and so on to be able to make an environment that allows us to do quick deployment of new collections, as well as showing the data in a grid view which behaves as if it were simply a third view of the data (the other two being the array of images and the ‘histogram’ view). I see PivotViewer as being a significant step in data visualisation – so much so that I feature it when I deliver talks on Spatial Data Visualisation methods. Any time when there is information that can be conveyed through an image, you have to ask yourself how best to show that image, and whether that image is the focal point. For Spatial data, the image is most often a map, and the map becomes the central mode for navigation. I show Pivot with postcode areas, since I can browse the postcodes based on their data, and many of the images are recognisable (to locals of South Australia). Naturally, the images could link through to the map itself, and so on, but generally people think of Spatial data in terms of navigating a map, which doesn’t always gel with the information you’re trying to extract. Roger’s even looking into ways to hook PivotViewer into the Bing Maps API, in a similar way to the Deep Earth project, displaying different levels of map detail according to how ‘zoomed in’ the images are. Some of the work that Dave did with one of the schools was generating the Deep Zoom tiles “on the fly”, based on images stored in a database, and Roger has produced a collection which uses images from flickr, that lets you move from one search term to another. Pulling the images down from flickr.com isn’t particularly ideal from a performance aspect, and flickr doesn’t store images in a small-enough format to really lend itself to this use, but you might agree that it’s an interesting concept which compares nicely to using Maps. I’m looking forward to future versions of the PivotViewer control, and hope they provide many more events that can be used, and even more hooks into it. Naturally, LobsterPot could help provide your business with a PivotViewer experience, but you can probably do a lot of it yourself too. There’s a thorough guide at getpivot.com, which is how we got into it. For some examples of what we’ve done, have a look at http://pivot.lobsterpot.com.au. I’d like to see PivotViewer really catch on a data visualisation tool.

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• An Alphabet of Eponymous Aphorisms, Programming Paradigms, Software Sayings, Annoying Alliteration

  - by Brian Schroer

  Malcolm Anderson blogged about “Einstein’s Razor” yesterday, which reminded me of my favorite software development “law”, the name of which I can never remember. It took much Wikipedia-ing to find it (Hofstadter’s Law – see below), but along the way I compiled the following list: Amara’s Law: We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run. Brook’s Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. Clarke’s Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Law of Demeter: Each unit should only talk to its friends; don't talk to strangers. Einstein’s Razor: “Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler” is the popular paraphrase, but what he actually said was “It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience”, an overly complicated quote which is an obvious violation of Einstein’s Razor. (You can tell by looking at a picture of Einstein that the dude was hardly an expert on razors or other grooming apparati.) Finagle's Law of Dynamic Negatives: Anything that can go wrong, will—at the worst possible moment. - O'Toole's Corollary: The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum. Greenspun's Tenth Rule: Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. (Morris’s Corollary: “…including Common Lisp”) Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law. Issawi’s Omelet Analogy: One cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs - but it is amazing how many eggs one can break without making a decent omelet. Jackson’s Rules of Optimization: Rule 1: Don't do it. Rule 2 (for experts only): Don't do it yet. Kaner’s Caveat: A program which perfectly meets a lousy specification is a lousy program. Liskov Substitution Principle (paraphrased): Functions that use pointers or references to base classes must be able to use objects of derived classes without knowing it Mason’s Maxim: Since human beings themselves are not fully debugged yet, there will be bugs in your code no matter what you do. Nils-Peter Nelson’s Nil I/O Rule: The fastest I/O is no I/O.    Occam's Razor: The simplest explanation is usually the correct one. Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Quentin Tarantino’s Pie Principle: “…you want to go home have a drink and go and eat pie and talk about it.” (OK, he was talking about movies, not software, but I couldn’t find a “Q” quote about software. And wouldn’t it be cool to write a program so great that the users want to eat pie and talk about it?) Raymond’s Rule: Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.  Sowa's Law of Standards: Whenever a major organization develops a new system as an official standard for X, the primary result is the widespread adoption of some simpler system as a de facto standard for X. Turing’s Tenet: We shall do a much better programming job, provided we approach the task with a full appreciation of its tremendous difficulty, provided that we respect the intrinsic limitations of the human mind and approach the task as very humble programmers.  Udi Dahan’s Race Condition Rule: If you think you have a race condition, you don’t understand the domain well enough. These rules didn’t exist in the age of paper, there is no reason for them to exist in the age of computers. When you have race conditions, go back to the business and find out actual rules. Van Vleck’s Kvetching: We know about as much about software quality problems as they knew about the Black Plague in the 1600s. We've seen the victims' agonies and helped burn the corpses. We don't know what causes it; we don't really know if there is only one disease. We just suffer -- and keep pouring our sewage into our water supply. Wheeler’s Law: All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection... Except for the problem of too many layers of indirection. Wheeler also said “Compatibility means deliberately repeating other people's mistakes.”. The Wrong Road Rule of Mr. X (anonymous): No matter how far down the wrong road you've gone, turn back. Yourdon’s Rule of Two Feet: If you think your management doesn't know what it's doing or that your organisation turns out low-quality software crap that embarrasses you, then leave. Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Zawinski is also responsible for “Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll use regular expressions.' Now they have two problems.” He once commented about X Windows widget toolkits: “Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes.”

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• Chart Control in ASP.Net 4 – Second Part

  - by sreejukg

    Couple of weeks before, I have written an introduction about the chart control available in .Net framework. In that article, I explained the basic usage of the chart control with a simple example. You can read that article from the url http://weblogs.asp.net/sreejukg/archive/2010/12/31/getting-started-with-chart-control-in-asp-net-4-0.aspx. In this article I am going to demonstrate how one can generate various types of charts that can be generated easily using the ASP.Net chart control. Let us recollect the data sample we were working in the previous sample. The following is the data I used in the previous article. id SaleAmount SalesPerson SaleType SaleDate CompletionStatus (%) 1 1000 Jack Development 2010-01-01 100 2 300 Mills Consultancy 2010-04-14 90 3 4000 Mills Development 2010-05-15 80 4 2500 Mike eMarketting 2010-06-15 40 5 1080 Jack Development 2010-07-15 30 6 6500 Mills Consultancy 2010-08-24 65 In this article I am going to demonstrate various graphical reports generated from this data with the help of chart control. The following are the reports I am going to generate 1. Representation of share of Sales by each Sales person. 2. Representation of share of sales data according to sale type 3. Representation of sales progress over time period I am going to demonstrate how to bind the chart control programmatically. In order to facilitate this, I created an aspx page named “SalesAnalysis.Aspx” to my project. In the page I added the following controls 1. Dropdownlist control – with id ddlAnalysisType, user will use this to choose the type of chart they want to see. 2. A Button control – with id btnSubmit , by clicking this button, the chart based on the dropdownlist selection will be shown to the user 3. A label Control – with id lblMessage, to display the message to the user, initially this will ask the user to select an option and click on the button. 4. Chart control – with id chrtAnalysis, by default, I set visible = false so that during the page load the chart will be hidden to the users. The following is the initial output of the page. Generating chart for salesperson share Now from Visual Studio, I have double clicked on the button; it created the event handler btnSubmit_Click. In the button Submit event handler, I am using a switch case to execute the corresponding SQL statement and bind it to the chart control. The below is the code for generating the sales person share chart using a pie chart. The above code produces the following output The steps for creating the above chart can be summarized as follows. You specify a chart area, then a series and bind the chart to some x and y values. That is it. If you want to control the chart size and position, you can set the properties for the ChartArea.Position element. For e.g. in the previous code, after instantiating the chart area, setting the below code will give you a bigger pie chart. c.Position.Width = 100; c.Position.Height = 100; The width and height values are in percentage. In this case the chart will be generated by utilizing all the width and height of the chart object. See the output updated with the width and height set to 100% each. Generate Chart for sales type share Now for generating the chart according to the sales type, you just need to change the SQL query and x and y values of the chart. The Sql query used is “SELECT SUM(saleAmount) amount, SaleType from SalesData group by SaleType” and the X-Value is amount and Y-Values is SaleType. s.XValueMember = "SaleType"; s.YValueMembers = "amount"; After modifying the above code with these, the following output is generated. Generate Chart for sales progress over time period For generating the progress of sale chart against sales amount / period, line chart is the ideal tool. In order to facilitate the line chart, you can use Chart Type as System.Web.UI.DataVisualization.Charting.SeriesChartType.Line. Also we need to retrieve the amount and sales date from the data source. I have used the following query to facilitate this. “SELECT SaleAmount, SaleDate FROM SalesData” The output for the line chart is as follows Now you have seen how easily you can build various types of charts. Chart control is an excellent one that helps you to bring business intelligence to your applications. What I demonstrated in only a small part of what you can do with the chart control. Refer http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd456632.aspx for further reading. If you want to get the project files in zip format, post your email below. Hope you enjoyed reading this article.

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