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• SQL Server 2012 RTM Cumulative Update #10 is available!

  - by AaronBertrand

  The SQL Server team has released CU #10 for SQL Server 2012 RTM. KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2891666 Build # is 11.0.2420 This build has 4 fixes For most customers, this cumulative update hardly justifies the download, never mind patching and regression testing, at least IMHO. Of the four fixes, two involve SSAS, one involves SSRS, and one involves the database engine tuning advisor. Relevant for builds 11.0.2100 -> 11.0.2419. Do not attempt to install on SQL Server 2012 SP1 (any...(read more)

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• Windows Azure End to End Examples

  - by BuckWoody

  I’m fascinated by the way people learn. I’m told there are several methods people use to understand new information, from reading to watching, from experiencing to exploring. Personally, I use multiple methods of learning when I encounter a new topic, usually starting with reading a bit about the concepts. I quickly want to put those into practice, however, especially in the technical realm. I immediately look for examples where I can start trying out the concepts. But I often want a “real” example – not just something that represents the concept, but something that is real-world, showing some feature I could actually use. And it’s no different with the Windows Azure platform – I like finding things I can do now, and actually use. So when I started learning Windows Azure, I of course began with the Windows Azure Training Kit – which has lots of examples and labs, presentations and so on. But from there, I wanted more examples I could learn from, and eventually teach others with. I was asked if I would write a few of those up, so here are the ones I use. CodePlex CodePlex is Microsoft’s version of an “Open Source” repository. Anyone can start a project, add code, documentation and more to it and make it available to the world, free of charge, using various licenses as they wish. Microsoft also uses this location for most of the examples we publish, and sample databases for SQL Server. If you search in CodePlex for “Azure”, you’ll come back with a list of projects that folks have posted, including those of us at Microsoft. The source code and documentation are there, so you can learn using actual examples of code that will do what you need. There’s everything from a simple table query to a full project that is sort of a “Corporate Dropbox” that uses Windows Azure Storage. The advantage is that this code is immediately usable. It’s searchable, and you can often find a complete solution to meet your needs. The disadvantage is that the code is pretty specific – it may not cover a huge project like you’re looking for. Also, depending on the author(s), you might not find the documentation level you want. Link: http://azureexamples.codeplex.com/site/search?query=Azure&ac=8    Tailspin Microsoft Patterns and Practices is a group here that does an amazing job at sharing standard ways of doing IT – from operations to coding. If you’re not familiar with this resource, make sure you read up on it. Long before I joined Microsoft I used their work in my daily job – saved a ton of time. It has resources not only for Windows Azure but other Microsoft software as well. The Patterns and Practices group also publishes full books – you can buy these, but many are also online for free. There’s an end-to-end example for Windows Azure using a company called “Tailspin”, and the work covers not only the code but the design of the full solution. If you really want to understand the thought that goes into a Platform-as-a-Service solution, this is an excellent resource. The advantages are that this is a book, it’s complete, and it includes a discussion of design decisions. The disadvantage is that it’s a little over a year old – and in “Cloud” years that’s a lot. So many things have changed, improved, and have been added that you need to treat this as a resource, but not the only one. Still, highly recommended. Link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff728592.aspx Azure Stock Trader Sometimes you need a mix of a CodePlex-style application, and a little more detail on how it was put together. And it would be great if you could actually play with the completed application, to see how it really functions on the actual platform. That’s the Azure Stock Trader application. There’s a place where you can read about the application, and then it’s been published to Windows Azure – the production platform – and you can use it, explore, and see how it performs. I use this application all the time to demonstrate Windows Azure, or a particular part of Windows Azure. The advantage is that this is an end-to-end application, and online as well. The disadvantage is that it takes a bit of self-learning to work through.  Links: Learn it: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/bb499684 Use it: https://azurestocktrader.cloudapp.net/

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• SQL University: Parallelism Week - Part 3, Settings and Options

  - by Adam Machanic

  Congratulations! You've made it back for the the third and final installment of Parallelism Week here at SQL University . So far we've covered the fundamentals of multitasking vs. parallel processing and delved into how parallel query plans actually work . Today we'll take a look at the settings and options that influence intra-query parallelism and discuss how best to set things up in various situations. Instance-Level Configuration Your database server probably has more than one logical processor....(read more)

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• Book review (Book 6) - Wikinomics

  - by BuckWoody

  This is a continuation of the books I challenged myself to read to help my career - one a month, for year. You can read my first book review here. The book I chose for November 2011 was: Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, by Don Tapscott   Why I chose this Book: I’ve heard a lot about this book - was one of the “must read” kind of business books (many of which are very “fluffy”) and supposedly deals with collaborating using technology - so I want to see what it says about collaborative efforts and how I can leverage them. What I learned: I really disliked this book. I’ve never been a fan of the latest “business book”, and sadly that’s what this felt like to me. A “business book” is what I call a work that has a fairly simple concept to get across, and then proceeds to use various made-up terms, analogies and other mechanisms to fill hundreds of pages doing it. This perception is at my own – the book is pretty old, and these things go stale quickly. The author’s general point (at least what I took away from it) was: Open Source is good, proprietary is bad. Collaboration is the hallmark of successful companies. In my mind, you can save yourself the trouble of reading this work if you get these two concepts down. Don’t get me wrong – open source is awesome, and collaboration is a good thing, especially in places where it fits. But it’s not a panacea as the author seems to indicate. For instance, he continuously uses the example of MySpace to show a “2.0” company, which I think means that you can enter text as well as read it on a web page. All well and good. But we all know what happened to MySpace, and of course he missed the point entirely about this new web environment: low barriers to entry often mean low barriers to exit. And the open, collaborative company being the best model – well, I think we all know a certain computer company famous for phones and music that is arguably quite successful, and is probably one of the most closed, non-collaborative (at least with its customers) on the planet. So that sort of takes away that argument. The reality of business is far more complicated. Collaboration is an amazing tool, and should be leveraged heavily. However, at the end of the day, after you do your research you need to pick a strategy and stick with it. Asking thousands of people to assist you in building your product probably will not work well. Open Source is great – but some proprietary products are quite functional as well, have a long track record, are well supported, and will probably be upgraded. Everything has its place, so use what works where it is needed. There is no single answer, sadly. So did I waste my time reading the book? Did I make a bad choice? Not at all! Reading the opinions and thoughts of others is almost always useful, and it’s important to consider opinions other than your own. If nothing else, thinking through the process either convinces you that you are wrong, or helps you understand better why you are right.

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• Quote of the Day: Dissenting Opinions

  - by BuckWoody

  Seems in our current climate the only thing we can’t tolerate is someone else’s thoughts. The sides of the arguments we hear are those that are the most shrill. In that environment, you’ll notice there are some people in the back that don’t speak up – but are troubled by the discord. Those may be the people you really want to hear from. “It is the man who does not want to express an opinion whose opinion I want.“ - Abraham Lincoln Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• An XEvent a Day (31 of 31) – Event Session DDL Events

  - by Jonathan Kehayias

  To close out this month’s series on Extended Events we’ll look at the DDL Events for the Event Session DDL operations, and how those can be used to track changes to Event Sessions and determine all of the possible outputs that could exist from an Extended Event Session.  One of my least favorite quirks about Extended Events is that there is no way to determine the Events and Actions that may exist inside a Target, except to parse all of the the captured data.  Information about the Event...(read more)

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• Try a sample: Using the counter predicate for event sampling

  - by extended_events

  Extended Events offers a rich filtering mechanism, called predicates, that allows you to reduce the number of events you collect by specifying criteria that will be applied during event collection. (You can find more information about predicates in Using SQL Server 2008 Extended Events (by Jonathan Kehayias)) By evaluating predicates early in the event firing sequence we can reduce the performance impact of collecting events by stopping event collection when the criteria are not met. You can specify predicates on both event fields and on a special object called a predicate source. Predicate sources are similar to action in that they typically are related to some type of global information available from the server. You will find that many of the actions available in Extended Events have equivalent predicate sources, but actions and predicates sources are not the same thing. Applying predicates, whether on a field or predicate source, is very similar to what you are used to in T-SQL in terms of how they work; you pick some field/source and compare it to a value, for example, session_id = 52. There is one predicate source that merits special attention though, not just for its special use, but for how the order of predicate evaluation impacts the behavior you see. I’m referring to the counter predicate source. The counter predicate source gives you a way to sample a subset of events that otherwise meet the criteria of the predicate; for example you could collect every other event, or only every tenth event. Simple CountingThe counter predicate source works by creating an in memory counter that increments every time the predicate statement is evaluated. Here is a simple example with my favorite event, sql_statement_completed, that only collects the second statement that is run. (OK, that’s not much of a sample, but this is for demonstration purposes. Here is the session definition: CREATE EVENT SESSION counter_test ON SERVERADD EVENT sqlserver.sql_statement_completed    (ACTION (sqlserver.sql_text)    WHERE package0.counter = 2)ADD TARGET package0.ring_bufferWITH (MAX_DISPATCH_LATENCY = 1 SECONDS) You can find general information about the session DDL syntax in BOL and from Pedro’s post Introduction to Extended Events. The important part here is the WHERE statement that defines that I only what the event where package0.count = 2; in other words, only the second instance of the event. Notice that I need to provide the package name along with the predicate source. You don’t need to provide the package name if you’re using event fields, only for predicate sources. Let’s say I run the following test queries: -- Run three statements to test the sessionSELECT 'This is the first statement'GOSELECT 'This is the second statement'GOSELECT 'This is the third statement';GO Once you return the event data from the ring buffer and parse the XML (see my earlier post on reading event data) you should see something like this: event_name sql_text sql_statement_completed SELECT ‘This is the second statement’ You can see that only the second statement from the test was actually collected. (Feel free to try this yourself. Check out what happens if you remove the WHERE statement from your session. Go ahead, I’ll wait.) Percentage Sampling OK, so that wasn’t particularly interesting, but you can probably see that this could be interesting, for example, lets say I need a 25% sample of the statements executed on my server for some type of QA analysis, that might be more interesting than just the second statement. All comparisons of predicates are handled using an object called a predicate comparator; the simple comparisons such as equals, greater than, etc. are mapped to the common mathematical symbols you know and love (eg. = and >), but to do the less common comparisons you will need to use the predicate comparators directly. You would probably look to the MOD operation to do this type sampling; we would too, but we don’t call it MOD, we call it divides_by_uint64. This comparator evaluates whether one number is divisible by another with no remainder. The general syntax for using a predicate comparator is pred_comp(field, value), field is always first and value is always second. So lets take a look at how the session changes to answer our new question of 25% sampling: CREATE EVENT SESSION counter_test_25 ON SERVERADD EVENT sqlserver.sql_statement_completed    (ACTION (sqlserver.sql_text)    WHERE package0.divides_by_uint64(package0.counter,4))ADD TARGET package0.ring_bufferWITH (MAX_DISPATCH_LATENCY = 1 SECONDS)GO Here I’ve replaced the simple equivalency check with the divides_by_uint64 comparator to check if the counter is evenly divisible by 4, which gives us back every fourth record. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to test this session. Why order matters I indicated at the start of this post that order matters when it comes to the counter predicate – it does. Like most other predicate systems, Extended Events evaluates the predicate statement from left to right; as soon as the predicate statement is proven false we abandon evaluation of the remainder of the statement. The counter predicate source is only incremented when it is evaluated so whether or not the counter is incremented will depend on where it is in the predicate statement and whether a previous criteria made the predicate false or not. Here is a generic example: Pred1: (WHERE statement_1 AND package0.counter = 2)Pred2: (WHERE package0.counter = 2 AND statement_1) Let’s say I cause a number of events as follows and examine what happens to the counter predicate source. Iteration Statement Pred1 Counter Pred2 Counter A Not statement_1 0 1 B statement_1 1 2 C Not statement_1 1 3 D statement_1 2 4 As you can see, in the case of Pred1, statement_1 is evaluated first, when it fails (A & C) predicate evaluation is stopped and the counter is not incremented. With Pred2 the counter is evaluated first, so it is incremented on every iteration of the event and the remaining parts of the predicate are then evaluated. In this example, Pred1 would return an event for D while Pred2 would return an event for B. But wait, there is an interesting side-effect here; consider Pred2 if I had run my statements in the following order: Not statement_1 Not statement_1 statement_1 statement_1 In this case I would never get an event back from the system because the point at which counter=2, the rest of the predicate evaluates as false so the event is not returned. If you’re using the counter target for sampling and you’re not getting the expected events, or any events, check the order of the predicate criteria. As a general rule I’d suggest that the counter criteria should be the last element of your predicate statement since that will assure that your sampling rate will apply to the set of event records defined by the rest of your predicate. Aside: I’m interested in hearing about uses for putting the counter predicate criteria earlier in the predicate statement. If you have one, post it in a comment to share with the class. - Mike Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Working with Sub-Optimal Disk Configurations (Making the best of what you’ve got)

  - by Jonathan Kehayias

  This is the first post in a what will be a series of posts on working with a sub-optimal disk configuration to squeeze as much performance out of it as possible.  You might ask what a Sub-Optimal Disk Configuration?  In this case it is a Dell Powervault MD3000 with 15 Seagate Barracuda ES.2 SAS 1 TB 7.2K RPM disks (Model Number ST31000640SS).  This equates to just under 14TB of raw storage that can configured into a number of RAID configurations.  In this case, the disk array...(read more)

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• Speaking at SQLRelay. Will you be there?

  - by jamiet

  SQL Relay (#sqlrelay) is fast approaching and I wanted to take this opportunity to tell you a little about it.SQL Relay is a 5-day tour around the UK that is taking in five Server Server user groups, each one comprising a full day of SQL Server related learnings. The dates and venues are:21st May, Edinburgh22nd May, Manchester23rd May, Birmingham24th May, Bristol30th May, LondonClick on the appropriate link to see the full agenda and to book your spot.SQL Relay features some of this country's most prominent SQL Server speakers including Chris Webb, Tony Rogerson, Andrew Fryer, Martin Bell, Allan Mitchell, Steve Shaw, Gordon Meyer, Satya Jayanty, Chris Testa O'Neill, Duncan Sutcliffe, Rob Carrol, me and SQL Server UK Product Manager Morris Novello so I really encourage you to go - you have my word it'll be an informative and, more importantly, enjoyable day out from your regular 9-to-5.I am presenting my session "A Lap Around the SSIS Catalog" at Edinburgh and Manchester so if you're going, I hope to see you there.@Jamiet

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• Poor Man’s PowerShell TFS SSMS Integration

  - by merrillaldrich

  This is lame. Still, here goes: I need, increasingly, to author both PowerShell and SQL Server scripts, bundle them into a solution and store that in TFS. Usually the PowerShell scripts are very closely related to SQL Server, and have a lot of SQL in them. I am hopeful that 2012 SSDT, or the tighter integration of SSMS and Visual Studio in 2012, might help put all of this in one place, but for now I am stuck in SSMS 2008 R2. So here are my blunt attempts to marry these activities. (This post is rather...(read more)

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• (Blogger) Map GoDaddy Domain For Blogger Custom Domain

  - by zulhfreelancer

  I just bought a new domain from GoDaddy (nurayka.net) and I want to use it for my .blogspot.com blog now. Here is my Blogger settings. And here is my GoDaddy DNS settings. After more than 24 hours, I still can't view my blog with that custom domain. It seems that it might be something wrong with my DNS settings. Does my DNS settings correct? Does GoDaddy Domain Forwarding should be enabled from 'nurayka.net' to 'www.nurayka.net'? Note: Before this, I have go through the GoDaddy Blogger DNS Setup and CNAME Tutorial. In the GoDaddy Blogger DNS Setup, I entered 'www.nurayka.net' and in the CNAME record (www), I entered 'ghs.google.com'. Thank You!

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• Striving to be boring - or at least have boring systems

  - by merrillaldrich

  A developer I work with, whom I respect a great deal, reminded me of this truism today. I'm not sure who came up with the original, but they deserve credit wherever they are: “A good system administrator is a bored system administrator.” As a DBA, this really rings true for me. Being a DBA should not be a thrilling job. Within reason, there should not be myriad surprises, nor a roller coaster ride, wondering what will break each day. There should not be numerous 2 AM calls or frantic fixes. If there...(read more)

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• Summit Old, Summit New, Summit Borrowed...

  - by Rob Farley

  PASS Summit is coming up, and I thought I’d post a few things. Summit Old... At the PASS Summit, you will get the chance to hear presentations by the SQL Server establishment. Just about every big name in the SQL Server world is a regular at the PASS Summit, so you will get to hear and meet people like Kalen Delaney (@sqlqueen) (who just recently got awarded MVP status for the 20th year running), and from all around the world such as the UK’s Chris Webb (@technitrain) or Pinal Dave (@pinaldave) from India. Almost all the household names in SQL Server will be there, including a large contingent from Microsoft. The PASS Summit is by far the best place to meet the legends of SQL Server. And they’re not all old. Some are, but most of them are younger than you might think. ...Summit New... The hottest topics are often about the newest technologies (such as SQL Server 2012). But you will almost certainly learn new stuff about older versions too. But that’s not what I wanted to pick on for this point. There are many new speakers at every PASS Summit, and content that has not been covered in other places. This year, for example, LobsterPot’s Roger Noble (@roger_noble) is giving a presentation for the first time. He’s a regular around the Australian circuit, but this is his first time presenting to a US audience. New Zealand’s Paul White (@sql_kiwi) is attending his first PASS Summit, and will be giving over four hours of incredibly deep stuff that has never been presented anywhere in the US before (I can’t say the world, because he did present similar material in Adelaide earlier in the year). ...Summit Borrowed... No, I’m not talking about plagiarism – the talks you’ll hear are all their own work. But you will get a lot of stuff you’ll be able to take back and apply at work. The PASS Summit sessions are not full of sales-pitches, telling you about how great things could be if only you’d buy some third-party vendor product. It’s simply not that kind of conference, and PASS doesn’t allow that kind of talk to take place. Instead, you’ll be taught techniques, and be able to download scripts and slides to let you perform that magic back at work when you get home. You will definitely find plenty of ideas to borrow at the PASS Summit. ...Summit Blue Yeah – and there’s karaoke. Blue - Jason - SQL Karaoke - YouTube

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• Trace flags - TF 1117

  - by Damian

  I had a session about trace flags this year on the SQL Day 2014 conference that was held in Wroclaw at the end of April. The session topic is important to most of DBA's and the reason I did it was that I sometimes forget about various trace flags :). So I decided to prepare a presentation but I think it is a good idea to write posts about trace flags, too. Let's start then - today I will describe the TF 1117. I assume that we all know how to setup a TF using starting parameters or registry or in the session or on the query level. I will always write if a trace flag is local or global to make sure we know how to use it. Why do we need this trace flag? Let’s create a test database first. This is quite ordinary database as it has two data files (4 MB each) and a log file that has 1MB. The data files are able to expand by 1 MB and the log file grows by 10%: USE [master] GO CREATE DATABASE [TF1117]  ON  PRIMARY ( NAME = N'TF1117',      FILENAME = N'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL12.SQL2014\MSSQL\DATA\TF1117.mdf' ,      SIZE = 4096KB ,      MAXSIZE = UNLIMITED,      FILEGROWTH = 1024KB ), ( NAME = N'TF1117_1',      FILENAME = N'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL12.SQL2014\MSSQL\DATA\TF1117_1.ndf' ,      SIZE = 4096KB ,      MAXSIZE = UNLIMITED,      FILEGROWTH = 1024KB )  LOG ON ( NAME = N'TF1117_log',      FILENAME = N'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL12.SQL2014\MSSQL\DATA\TF1117_log.ldf' ,      SIZE = 1024KB ,      MAXSIZE = 2048GB ,      FILEGROWTH = 10% ) GO Without the TF 1117 turned on the data files don’t grow all up at once. When a first file is full the SQL Server expands it but the other file is not expanded until is full. Why is that so important? The SQL Server proportional fill algorithm will direct new extent allocations to the file with the most available space so new extents will be written to the file that was just expanded. When the TF 1117 is enabled it will cause all files to auto grow by their specified increment. That means all files will have the same percent of free space so we still have the benefit of evenly distributed IO. The TF 1117 is global flag so it affects all databases on the instance. Of course if a filegroup contains only one file the TF does not have any effect on it. Now let’s do a simple test. First let’s create a table in which every row will fit to a single page: The table definition is pretty simple as it has two integer columns and one character column of fixed size 8000 bytes: create table TF1117Tab (      col1 int,      col2 int,      col3 char (8000) ) go Now I load some data to the table to make sure that one of the data file must grow: declare @i int select @i = 1 while (@i < 800) begin       insert into TF1117Tab  values (@i, @i+1000, 'hello')        select @i= @i + 1 end I can check the actual file size in the sys.database_files DMV: SELECT name, (size*8)/1024 'Size in MB' FROM sys.database_files  GO   As you can see only the first data file was  expanded and the other has still the initial size:   name                  Size in MB --------------------- ----------- TF1117                5 TF1117_log            1 TF1117_1              4 There is also other methods of looking at the events of file autogrows. One possibility is to create an Extended Events session and the other is to look into the default trace file:     DECLARE @path NVARCHAR(260); SELECT    @path = REVERSE(SUBSTRING(REVERSE([path]),          CHARINDEX('\', REVERSE([path])), 260)) + N'log.trc' FROM    sys.traces WHERE   is_default = 1; SELECT    DatabaseName,                 [FileName],                 SPID,                 Duration,                 StartTime,                 EndTime,                 FileType =                         CASE EventClass                                     WHEN 92 THEN 'Data'                                    WHEN 93 THEN 'Log'             END FROM sys.fn_trace_gettable(@path, DEFAULT) WHERE   EventClass IN (92,93) AND StartTime >'2014-07-12' AND DatabaseName = N'TF1117' ORDER BY   StartTime DESC;   After running the query I can see the file was expanded and how long did the process take which might be useful from the performance perspective.    Now it’s time to turn on the flag 1117. DBCC TRACEON(1117)   I dropped the database and recreated it once again. Then I ran the queries and observed the results. After loading the records I see that both files were evenly expanded: name                  Size in MB --------------------- ----------- TF1117                5 TF1117_log            1 TF1117_1              5 I found also information in the default trace. The query returned three rows. The last one is connected to my first experiment when the TF was turned off.  The two rows shows that first file was expanded by 1MB and right after that operation the second file was expanded, too. This is what is this TF all about J  

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• Security updates for all supported versions of SQL Server

  - by AaronBertrand

  It's patch Tuesday! [ UPDATE June 19 : Please see my follow-up post about this security update.] Today Microsoft released a security bulletin covering several issues that could potentially affect SQL Server; these exploits include remote code execution, denial of service, information disclosure and elevation of privilege. You should test these patches on all machines running SQL Server, including those running only client tools (e.g. Management Studio or Management Studio Express). The updates affect...(read more)

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• Where is the SQL Azure Development Environment

  - by BuckWoody

  Recently I posted an entry explaining that you can develop in Windows Azure without having to connect to the main service on the Internet, using the Software Development Kit (SDK) which installs two emulators - one for compute and the other for storage. That brought up the question of the same kind of thing for SQL Azure. The short answer is that there isn’t one. While we’ll make the development experience for all versions of SQL Server, including SQL Azure more easy to write against, you can simply treat it as another edition of SQL Server. For instance, many of us use the SQL Server Developer Edition - which in versions up to 2008 is actually the Enterprise Edition - to develop our code. We might write that code against all kinds of environments, from SQL Express through Enterprise Edition. We know which features work on a certain edition, what T-SQL it supports and so on, and develop accordingly. We then test on the actual platform to ensure the code runs as expected. You can simply fold SQL Azure into that same development process. When you’re ready to deploy, if you’re using SQL Server Management Studio 2008 R2 or higher, you can script out the database when you’re done as a SQL Azure script (with change notifications where needed) by selecting the right “Engine Type” on the scripting panel: (Thanks to David Robinson for pointing this out and my co-worker Rick Shahid for the screen-shot - saved me firing up a VM this morning!) Will all this change? Will SSMS, “Data Dude” and other tools change to include SQL Azure? Well, I don’t have a specific roadmap for those tools, but we’re making big investments on Windows Azure and SQL Azure, so I can say that as time goes on, it will get easier. For now, make sure you know what features are and are not included in SQL Azure, and what T-SQL is supported. Here are a couple of references to help: General Guidelines and Limitations: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee336245.aspx Transact-SQL Supported by SQL Azure: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee336250.aspx SQL Azure Learning Plan: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/buckwoody/archive/2010/12/13/windows-azure-learning-plan-sql-azure.aspx

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• Performance tuning of tabular data models in Analysis Services

  - by Greg Low

  More and more practical information around working with tabular data models is starting to appear as more and more sites get deployed.At SQL Down Under, we've already helped quite a few customers move to tabular data models in Analysis Services and have started to collect quite a bit of information on what works well (and what doesn't) in terms of performance of these models. We've also been running a lot of training on tabular data models.It was great to see a whitepaper on the performance of these models released today.Performance Tuning of Tabular Models in SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services was written by John Sirmon, Greg Galloway, Cindy Gross and Karan Gulati. You'll find it here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn393915.aspx

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• Book Review: Poke the Box

  - by andyleonard

  Introduction Seth Godin's latest book is called Poke the Box . I'm still reading it, but I have these thoughts to share: Initiate The theme of the book is to start something. Initiate. Engage. Don't wait to be picked - pick yourself. I so identify with this sentiment. It's a driving tenet behind SQLPeople . Seth points out the (dying) manufacturing mindset in the US has led many to wait for approval, wait to be picked, wait for someone else to initiate - and then dive in. It's safer that way: the...(read more)

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• Forcing an External Activation with Service Broker

  - by Davide Mauri

  In these last days I’ve been working quite a lot with Service Broker, a technology I’m really happy to work with, since it can give a lot of satisfaction. The scale-out solution one can easily build is simply astonishing. I’m helping a company to build a very scalable and – yet almost inexpensive – invoicing system that has to be able to scale out using commodity hardware. To offload the work from the main server to satellite “compute nodes” (yes, I’ve borrowed this term from PDW) we’re using Service Broker and the External Activator application available in the SQL Server Feature Pack. For those who are not used to work with SSB, the External Activation is a feature that allows you to intercept the arrival of a message in a queue right from your application code. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms171617.aspx (Look for “Event-Based Activation”) In order to make life even more easier, Microsoft released the External Activation application that saves you even from writing even this code. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sql_service_broker/archive/tags/external+activator/ The External Activator application can be configured to execute your own application so that each time a message – an invoice in my case – arrives in the target queue, the invoking application is executed and the invoice is calculated. The very nice feature of External Activator is that it can automatically execute as many configured application in order to process as many messages as your system can handle.  This also a lot of create a scale-out solution, leaving to the developer only a fraction of the problems that usually came with asynchronous programming. Developers are also shielded from Service Broker since everything can be encapsulated in Stored Procedures, so that – for them – developing such scale-out asynchronous solution is not much more complex than just executing a bunch of Stored Procedures. Now, if everything works correctly, you don’t have to bother of anything else. You put messages in the queue and your application, invoked by the External Activator, process them. But what happen if for some reason your application fails to process the messages. For examples, it crashes? The message is safe in the queue so you just need to process it again. But your application is invoked by the External Activator application, so now the question is, how do you wake up that app? Service Broker will engage the activation process only if certain conditions are met: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms171601.aspx But how we can invoke the activation process manually, without having to wait for another message to arrive (the arrival of a new message is a condition that can fire the activation process)? The “trick” is to do manually with the activation process does: sending a system message to a queue in charge of handling External Activation messages: declare @conversationHandle uniqueidentifier; declare @n xml = N' <EVENT_INSTANCE>   <EventType>QUEUE_ACTIVATION</EventType>   <PostTime>' + CONVERT(CHAR(24),GETDATE(),126) + '</PostTime>   <SPID>' + CAST(@@SPID AS VARCHAR(9)) + '</SPID>   <ServerName>[your_server_name]</ServerName>   <LoginName>[your_login_name]</LoginName>   <UserName>[your_user_name]</UserName>   <DatabaseName>[your_database_name]</DatabaseName>   <SchemaName>[your_queue_schema_name]</SchemaName>   <ObjectName>[your_queue_name]</ObjectName>   <ObjectType>QUEUE</ObjectType> </EVENT_INSTANCE>' begin dialog conversation     @conversationHandle from service        [<your_initiator_service_name>] to service          '<your_event_notification_service>' on contract         [http://schemas.microsoft.com/SQL/Notifications/PostEventNotification] with     encryption = off,     lifetime = 6000 ; send on conversation     @conversationHandle message type     [http://schemas.microsoft.com/SQL/Notifications/EventNotification] (@n) ;     end conversation @conversationHandle; That’s it! Put the code in a Stored Procedure and you can add to your application a button that says “Force Queue Processing” (or something similar) in order to start the activation process whenever you need it (which should not occur too frequently but it may happen). PS I know that the “fire-and-forget” (ending the conversation without waiting for an answer) technique is not a best practice, but in this case I don’t see how it can hurts so I decided to stay very close to the KISS principle []

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• concurrency::accelerator

  - by Daniel Moth

  Overview An accelerator represents a "target" on which C++ AMP code can execute and where data can reside. Typically (but not necessarily) an accelerator is a GPU device. Accelerators are represented in C++ AMP as objects of the accelerator class. For many scenarios, you do not need to obtain an accelerator object, since the runtime has a notion of a default accelerator, which is what it thinks is the best one in the system. Examples where you need to deal with accelerator objects are if you need to pick your own accelerator (based on your specific criteria), or if you need to use more than one accelerators from your app. Construction and operator usage You can query and obtain a std::vector of all the accelerators on your system, which the runtime discovers on startup. Beyond enumerating accelerators, you can also create one directly by passing to the constructor a system-wide unique path to a device if you know it (i.e. the “Device Instance Path” property for the device in Device Manager), e.g. accelerator acc(L"PCI\\VEN_1002&DEV_6898&SUBSYS_0B001002etc"); There are some predefined strings (for predefined accelerators) that you can pass to the accelerator constructor (and there are corresponding constants for those on the accelerator class itself, so you don’t have to hardcode them every time). Examples are the following: accelerator::default_accelerator represents the default accelerator that the C++ AMP runtime picks for you if you don’t pick one (the heuristics of how it picks one will be covered in a future post). Example: accelerator acc; accelerator::direct3d_ref represents the reference rasterizer emulator that simulates a direct3d device on the CPU (in a very slow manner). This emulator is available on systems with Visual Studio installed and is useful for debugging. More on debugging in general in future posts. Example: accelerator acc(accelerator::direct3d_ref); accelerator::direct3d_warp represents a target that I will cover in future blog posts. Example: accelerator acc(accelerator::direct3d_warp); accelerator::cpu_accelerator represents the CPU. In this first release the only use of this accelerator is for using the staging arrays technique that I'll cover separately. Example: accelerator acc(accelerator::cpu_accelerator); You can also create an accelerator by shallow copying another accelerator instance (via the corresponding constructor) or simply assigning it to another accelerator instance (via the operator overloading of =). Speaking of operator overloading, you can also compare (for equality and inequality) two accelerator objects between them to determine if they refer to the same underlying device. Querying accelerator characteristics Given an accelerator object, you can access its description, version, device path, size of dedicated memory in KB, whether it is some kind of emulator, whether it has a display attached, whether it supports double precision, and whether it was created with the debugging layer enabled for extensive error reporting. Below is example code that accesses some of the properties; in your real code you'd probably be checking one or more of them in order to pick an accelerator (or check that the default one is good enough for your specific workload): void inspect_accelerator(concurrency::accelerator acc) { std::wcout << "New accelerator: " << acc.description << std::endl; std::wcout << "is_debug = " << acc.is_debug << std::endl; std::wcout << "is_emulated = " << acc.is_emulated << std::endl; std::wcout << "dedicated_memory = " << acc.dedicated_memory << std::endl; std::wcout << "device_path = " << acc.device_path << std::endl; std::wcout << "has_display = " << acc.has_display << std::endl; std::wcout << "version = " << (acc.version >> 16) << '.' << (acc.version & 0xFFFF) << std::endl; } accelerator_view In my next blog post I'll cover a related class: accelerator_view. Suffice to say here that each accelerator may have from 1..n related accelerator_view objects. You can get the accelerator_view from an accelerator via the default_view property, or create new ones by invoking the create_view method that creates an accelerator_view object for you (by also accepting a queuing_mode enum value of deferred or immediate that we'll also explore in the next blog post). Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• Linux Mint is Brilliant

  - by Simon Moon

  Most of my blog posts sound way too whiny. I'm not that guy. (Am I?) I've been using SUSE-flavored Linux for personal projects since 2002 (SUSE Linux 8.1). This past weekend, I made the heart-wrenching decision to abandon openSUSE (version 12.1) in favor of Linux Mint (version Maya). OpenSUSE had just become too burdensome. Packages that installed easily on RedHat or Debian always had issues running on top of OpenSUSE. And I never could get the Heroku Toolbelt installed in any kind of usable state.And so, ...I'm beginning again with this enticing young thing -- Mint with the Cinnamon window environment. Delicious. And while I'll always have fond memories of my years with openSUSE, I've got to admit that Mint makes running Linux feel good again. http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2031

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• Community Events and Workshops in November 2012 #ssas #tabular #powerpivot

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  I and Alberto have a busy agenda until the end of the month, but if you are based in Northern Europe there are many chance to meet one of us in the next couple of weeks! Belgium, 20 November 2012 – SQL Server Days 2012 with Marco Russo I will present two sessions in this conference, “Data Modeling for Tabular” and “Querying and Optimizing DAX” Copenhagen, 21-22 November, 2012 – SSAS Tabular Workshop with Alberto Ferrari Alberto will be the speaker for 2 days – you can still register if you want a full immersion! Copenhagen, 21 November 2012 – Free Community Event with Alberto Ferrari (hosted in Microsoft Hellerup) In the evening Alberto will present “Excel 2013 PowerPivot in Action” Munich, 27-28 November 2012 - SSAS Tabular Workshop with Alberto Ferrari The SSAS workshop will run also in Germany, this time in Munich. Also here there is still some seat still available. Munich, 27 November 2012 - Free Community Event with Alberto Ferrari (hosted in Microsoft ) In the evening Alberto will present “Excel 2013 PowerPivot in Action” Moscow, 27-28 November 2012 – TechEd Russia 2012 with Marco Russo I will speak during the keynote on November 27 and I will present two session the day after, “Developing an Analysis Services Tabular Project BI Semantic Model” and “Excel 2013 PowerPivot in Action” Stockholm, 29-30 November 2012 - SSAS Tabular Workshop with Marco Russo I will run this workshop in Stockholm – if you want to register here, hurry up! Few seats still available! Stockholm, 29 November 2012 - Free Community Event with Marco Russo In the evening I will present “Excel 2013 PowerPivot in Action” If you want to attend a SSAS Tabular Workshop online, you can also register to the Online edition of December 5-6, 2012, which is still in early bird and is scheduled with a friendly time zone for America’s countries (which could be good for Europe too, in case you don’t mind attending a workshop until midnight!).

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• Hadoop growing pains

  - by Piotr Rodak

  This post is not going to be about SQL Server. I have been reading recently more and more about “Big Data” – very catchy term that describes untamed increase of the data that mankind is producing each day and the struggle to capture the meaning of these data. Ten years ago, and perhaps even three years ago this need was not so recognized. Increasing number of smartphones and discernable trend of mainstream Internet traffic moving to the smartphone generated one means that there is bigger and bigger stream of information that has to be stored, transformed, analysed and perhaps monetized. The nature of this traffic makes if very difficult to wrap it into boundaries of relational database engines. The amount of data makes it near to impossible to process them in relational databases within reasonable time. This is where ‘cloud’ technologies come to play. I just read a good article about the growing pains of Hadoop, which became one of the leading players on distributed processing arena within last year or two. Toby Baer concludes in it that lack of enterprise ready toolsets hinders Hadoop’s apprehension in the enterprise world. While this is true, something else drew my attention. According to the article there are already about half of a dozen of commercially supported distributions of Hadoop. For me, who has not been involved into intricacies of open-source world, this is quite interesting observation. On one hand, it is good that there is competition as it is beneficial in the end to the customer. On the other hand, the customer is faced with difficulty of choosing the right distribution. In future, when Hadoop distributions fork even more, this choice will be even harder. The distributions will have overlapping sets of features, yet will be quite incompatible with each other. I suppose it will take a few years until leaders emerge and the market will begin to resemble what we see in Linux world. There are myriads of distributions, but only few are acknowledged by the industry as enterprise standard. Others are honed by bearded individuals with too much time to spend. In any way, the third fact I can’t help but notice about the proliferation of distributions of Hadoop is that IT professionals will have jobs.   BuzzNet Tags: Hadoop,Big Data,Enterprise IT

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• Blogger sub-directory

  - by user137263

  There has long been a debate on the internet about SEO in relation to using either sub-domains or sub-directories for blogs. I am not terribly interested in that debate. I merely want to redirect my blogger blog to my domain, the easiest way possible, and in a manner least likely to impair the current functionality of my server/websites. I believe that the simplest way in which to do this is to use a subdirectory for the blog (although I am slightly concerned that the CNAME record will be shared by both) My question is this: how to use custom domain sub-directories when blogger refuse their use; complaining that the "URL must not end with a path" when a user attempts to establish such a custom domain? Google searches on this matter are oddly useless, as most results return Blogger's forum entries that always seem to direct to Blogger's Help home page o.O (using the search facilities of Blogger's Help directory itself fails to unearth these forum posts). Any pointers (no pun intended) would be greatly appreciated.

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• Installing SharePoint 2010 and PowerPivot for SharePoint on Windows 7

  - by smisner

  Many people like me want (or need) to do their business intelligence development work on a laptop. As someone who frequently speaks at various events or teaches classes on all subjects related to the Microsoft business intelligence stack, I need a way to run multiple server products on my laptop with reasonable performance. Once upon a time, that requirement meant only that I had to load the current version of SQL Server and the client tools of choice. In today's post, I'll review my latest experience with trying to make the newly released Microsoft BI products work with a Windows 7 operating system. The entrance of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 into the BI stack complicated matters and I started using Virtual Server to establish a "suitable" environment. As part of the team that delivered a lot of education as part of the Yukon pre-launch activities (that would be SQL Server 2005 for the uninitiated), I was working with four - yes, four - virtual servers. That was a pretty brutal workload for a 2GB laptop, which worked if I was very, very careful. It could also be a finicky and unreliable configuration as I learned to my dismay at one TechEd session several years ago when I had to reboot a very carefully cached set of servers just minutes before my session started. Although it worked, it came back to life very, very slowly much to the displeasure of the audience. They couldn't possibly have been less pleased than me. At that moment, I resolved to get the beefiest environment I could afford and consolidate to a single virtual server. Enter the 4GB 64-bit laptop to preserve my sanity and my livelihood. Likewise, for SQL Server 2008, I managed to keep everything within a single virtual server and I could function reasonably well with this approach. Now we have SQL Server 2008 R2 plus Office SharePoint Server 2010. That means a 64-bit operating system. Period. That means no more Virtual Server. That means I must use Hyper-V or another alternative. I've heard alternatives exist, but my few dabbles in this area did not yield positive results. It might have been just me having issues rather than any failure of those technologies to adequately support the requirements. My first run at working with the new BI stack configuration was to set up a 64-bit 4GB laptop with a dual-boot to run Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V. However, I was generally not happy with running Windows Server 2008 R2 on my laptop. For one, I couldn't put it into sleep mode, which is helpful if I want to prepare for a presentation beforehand and then walk to the podium without the need to hold my laptop in its open state along the way (my strategy at the TechEd session long, long ago). Secondly, it was finicky with projectors. I had issues from time to time and while I always eventually got it to work, I didn't appreciate those nerve-wracking moments wondering whether this would be the time that it wouldn't work. Somewhere along the way, I learned that it was possible to load SharePoint 2010 in a Windows 7 which piqued my interest. I had just acquired a new laptop running Windows 7 64-bit, and thought surely running the BI stack natively on my laptop must be better than running Hyper-V. (I have not tried booting to Hyper-V VHD yet, but that's on my list of things to try so the jury of one is still out on this approach.) Recently, I had to build up a server with the RTM versions of SQL Server 2008 R2 and Sharepoint Server 2010 and decided to follow suit on my Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit laptop. The process is slightly different, but I'm happy to report that it IS possible, although I had some fits and starts along the way. DISCLAIMER: These products are NOT intended to be run in production mode on the Windows 7 operating system. The configuration described in this post is strictly for development or learning purposes and not supported by Microsoft. If you have trouble, you will NOT get help from them. I might be able to help, but I provide no guarantees of my ability or availablity to help. I won't provide the step-by-step instructions in this post as there are other resources that provide these details, but I will provide an overview of my approach, point you to the relevant resources, describe some of the problems I encountered, and explain how I addressed those problems to achieve my desired goal. Because my goal was not simply to set up SharePoint Server 2010 on my laptop, but specifically PowerPivot for SharePoint, I started out by referring to the installation instructions at the PowerPiovt-Info site, but mainly to confirm that I was performing steps in the proper sequence. I didn't perform the steps in Part 1 because those steps are applicable only to a server operating system which I am not running on my laptop. Then, the instructions in Part 2, won't work exactly as written for the same reason. Instead, I followed the instructions on MSDN, Setting Up the Development Environment for SharePoint 2010 on Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008. In general, I found the following differences in installation steps from the steps at PowerPivot-Info: You must copy the SharePoint installation media to the local drive so that you can edit the config.xml to allow installation on a Windows client. You also have to manually install the prerequisites. The instructions provides links to each item that you must manually install and provides a command-line instruction to execute which enables required Windows features. I will digress for a moment to save you some grief in the sequence of steps to perform. I discovered later that a missing step in the MSDN instructions is to install the November CTP Reporting Services add-in for SharePoint. When I went to test my SharePoint site (I believe I tested after I had a successful PowerPivot installation), I ran into the following error: Could not load file or assembly 'RSSharePointSoapProxy, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. I was rather surprised that Reporting Services was required. Then I found an article by Alan le Marquand, Working Together: SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services Integration in SharePoint 2010,that instructed readers to install the November add-in. My first reaction was, "Really?!?" But I confirmed it in another TechNet article on hardware and software requirements for SharePoint Server 2010. It doesn't refer explicitly to the November CTP but following the link took me there. (Interestingly, I retested today and there's no longer any reference to the November CTP. Here's the link to download the latest and greatest Reporting Services Add-in for SharePoint Technologies 2010.) You don't need to download the add-in anymore if you're doing a regular server-based installation of SharePoint because it installs as part of the prerequisites automatically. When it was time to start the installation of SharePoint, I deviated from the MSDN instructions and from the PowerPivot-Info instructions: On the Choose the installation you want page of the installation wizard, I chose Server Farm. On the Server Type page, I chose Complete. At the end of the installation, I did not run the configuration wizard. Returning to the PowerPivot-Info instructions, I tried to follow the instructions in Part 3 which describe installing SQL Server 2008 R2 with the PowerPivot option. These instructions tell you to choose the New Server option on the Setup Role page where you add PowerPivot for SharePoint. However, I ran into problems with this approach and got installation errors at the end. It wasn't until much later as I was investigating an error that I encountered Dave Wickert's post that installing PowerPivot for SharePoint on Windows 7 is unsupported. Uh oh. But he did want to hear about it if anyone succeeded, so I decided to take the plunge. Perseverance paid off, and I can happily inform Dave that it does work so far. I haven't tested absolutely everything with PowerPivot for SharePoint but have successfully deployed a workbook and viewed the PowerPivot Management Dashboard. I have not yet tested the data refresh feature, but I have installed. Continue reading to see how I accomplished my objective. I unintalled SQL Server 2008 R2 and started again. I had different problems which I don't recollect now. However, I uninstalled again and approached installation from a different angle and my next attempt succeeded. The downside of this approach is that you must do all of the things yourself that are done automatically when you install PowerPivot as a new server. Here are the steps that I followed: Install SQL Server 2008 R2 to get a database engine instance installed. Run the SharePoint configuration wizard to set up the SharePoint databases. In Central Administration, create a Web application using classic mode authentication as per a TechNet article on PowerPivot Authentication and Authorization. Then I followed the steps I found at How to: Install PowerPivot for SharePoint on an Existing SharePoint Server. Especially important to note - you must launch setup by using Run as administrator. I did not have to manually deploy the PowerPivot solution as the instructions specify, but it's good to know about this step because it tells you where to look in Central Administration to confirm a successful deployment. I did spot some incorrect steps in the instructions (at the time of this writing) in How To: Configure Stored Credentials for PowerPivot Data Refresh. Specifically, in the section entitled Step 1: Create a target application and set the credentials, both steps 10 and 12 are incorrect. They tell you to provide an actual Windows user name and password on the page where you are simply defining the prompts for your application in the Secure Store Service. To add the Windows user name and password that you want to associate with the application - after you have successfully created the target application - you select the target application and then click Set credentials in the ribbon. Lastly, I followed the instructions at How to: Install Office Data Connectivity Components on a PowerPivot server. However, I have yet to test this in my current environment. I did have several stops and starts throughout this process and edited those out to spare you from reading non-essential information. I believe the explanation I have provided here accurately reflect the steps I followed to produce a working configuration. If you follow these steps and get a different result, please let me know so that together we can work through the issue and correct these instructions. I'm sure there are many other folks in the Microsoft BI community that will appreciate the ability to set up the BI stack in a Windows 7 environment for development or learning purposes. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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