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• SQLPass NomCom election: Why I voted twice

  - by Hugo Kornelis

  Did you already cast your votes for the SQLPass NomCom election ? If not, you really should! Your vote can make a difference, so don’t let it go to waste. The NomCom is the group of people that prepares the elections for the SQLPass Board of Directors. With the current election procedures, their opinion carries a lot of weight. They can reject applications, and the order in which they present candidates can be considered a voting advice. So use care when casting your votes – you are giving a lot...(read more)

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• MERGE gives better OUTPUT options

  - by Rob Farley

  MERGE is very cool. There are a ton of useful things about it – mostly around the fact that you can implement a ton of change against a table all at once. This is great for data warehousing, handling changes made to relational databases by applications, all kinds of things. One of the more subtle things about MERGE is the power of the OUTPUT clause. Useful for logging.   If you’re not familiar with the OUTPUT clause, you really should be – it basically makes your DML (INSERT/DELETE/UPDATE/MERGE) statement return data back to you. This is a great way of returning identity values from INSERT commands (so much better than SCOPE_IDENTITY() or the older (and worse) @@IDENTITY, because you can get lots of rows back). You can even use it to grab default values that are set using non-deterministic functions like NEWID() – things you couldn’t normally get back without running another query (or with a trigger, I guess, but that’s not pretty). That inserted table I referenced – that’s part of the ‘behind-the-scenes’ work that goes on with all DML changes. When you insert data, this internal table called inserted gets populated with rows, and then used to inflict the appropriate inserts on the various structures that store data (HoBTs – the Heaps or B-Trees used to store data as tables and indexes). When deleting, the deleted table gets populated. Updates get a matching row in both tables (although this doesn’t mean that an update is a delete followed by an inserted, it’s just the way it’s handled with these tables). These tables can be referenced by the OUTPUT clause, which can show you the before and after for any DML statement. Useful stuff. MERGE is slightly different though. With MERGE, you get a mix of entries. Your MERGE statement might be doing some INSERTs, some UPDATEs and some DELETEs. One of the most common examples of MERGE is to perform an UPSERT command, where data is updated if it already exists, or inserted if it’s new. And in a single operation too. Here, you can see the usefulness of the deleted and inserted tables, which clearly reflect the type of operation (but then again, MERGE lets you use an extra column called $action to show this). (Don’t worry about the fact that I turned on IDENTITY_INSERT, that’s just so that I could insert the values) One of the things I love about MERGE is that it feels almost cursor-like – the UPDATE bit feels like “WHERE CURRENT OF …”, and the INSERT bit feels like a single-row insert. And it is – but into the inserted and deleted tables. The operations to maintain the HoBTs are still done using the whole set of changes, which is very cool. And $action – very convenient. But as cool as $action is, that’s not the point of my post. If it were, I hope you’d all be disappointed, as you can’t really go near the MERGE statement without learning about it. The subtle thing that I love about MERGE with OUTPUT is that you can hook into more than just inserted and deleted. Did you notice in my earlier query that my source table had a ‘src’ field, that wasn’t used in the insert? Normally, this would be somewhat pointless to include in my source query. But with MERGE, I can put that in the OUTPUT clause. This is useful stuff, particularly when you’re needing to audit the changes. Suppose your query involved consolidating data from a number of sources, but you didn’t need to insert that into the actual table, just into a table for audit. This is now very doable, either using the INTO clause of OUTPUT, or surrounding the whole MERGE statement in brackets (parentheses if you’re American) and using a regular INSERT statement. This is also doable if you’re using MERGE to just do INSERTs. In case you hadn’t realised, you can use MERGE in place of an INSERT statement. It’s just like the UPSERT-style statement we’ve just seen, except that we want nothing to match. That’s easy to do, we just use ON 1=2. This is obviously more convoluted than a straight INSERT. And it’s slightly more effort for the database engine too. But, if you want the extra audit capabilities, the ability to hook into the other source columns is definitely useful. Oh, and before people ask if you can also hook into the target table’s columns... Yes, of course. That’s what deleted and inserted give you.

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• Use Those Schemas, People!

  - by BuckWoody

  Database Schemas are just containers – they aren’t users or anything else – think of a sub-directory on the hard drive. In early versions of SQL Server we “hid” schemas, placing all objects under “dbo”, which gave the erroneous perception that Schemas are users. In SQL Server 2005, we “un-hid” or re-introduced schemas within the database. Users can have a default schema (a place where their new objects go), you can add new schemas and transfer objects between them, and they have many other benefits. But I still see a lot of applications, developed by shops I know as well as vendors, that don’t make use of a Schema. Everything is piled under dbo. I completely understand this – since permissions can be granted to a schema, they feel a lot like a user, so it’s just easier not to worry about both users and schemas when you create a database. But if you’ll use them properly you can make your application more understandable and portable. You should at least take a few minutes and read more about them – you owe it to your users: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms190387.aspx Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• links worth clicking&hellip;

  - by Chris Williams

  Scanning my Twitter feed almost always proves to be fruitful when looking for cool/interesting links to share. Here are a few of the highlights: I read this blog post from Justin Angel today, pretty interesting stuff: Windows Phone 7 – Unlocked ROMs  Looks like there’s a lot of good stuff floating just under the surface in the latest build of the WP7 Emulator. (Courtesy of @JustinAngel) Next up is this video titled Game Design Tutorials: From Seconds to Hours of Gameplay. If you’re into Indie Game Development, or just like watching videos… this one is pretty short at 5 minutes, but contains some good information about increasing the duration of fun gameplay in your game. (Courtesy of @Kei_tchan) If you are a Firefly (or Castle, or Dr. Horrible’s Singalong Blog) fan, check out this Facebook campaign to get Nathan Fillion to host SNL: http://tinyurl.com/2dh5m67  It worked for Betty White, so why not, right? (Courtesy of @DGalloway42)

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• Two BULK INSERT issues I worked around recently

  - by AaronBertrand

  Since I am still afraid of SSIS, and because I am dealing mostly with CSV files and table structures that are relatively simple and require only one of the three letters in the acronym "ETL," I find myself using BULK INSERT a lot. I have been meaning to switch to using CLR, since I am doing a lot of file system querying using xp_cmdshell, but I haven't had the chance to really explore it yet. I know, a lot of you are probably thinking, wow, look at all those bad habits. But for every person thinking...(read more)

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• 24 Hours of PASS - Today!

  - by andyleonard

  24 Hours of PASS (2010) starts this morning! Tune in! :{> Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!...(read more)

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• Updatable columnstore index, sp_spaceused and sys.partitions

  - by Michael Zilberstein

  Columnstore index in SQL Server 2014 contains 2 new important features: it can be clustered and it is updateable. So I decided to play with both. As a “control group” I’ve taken my old columnstore index demo from one of the ISUG (Israeli SQL Server Usergroup) sessions. The script itself isn’t important – it creates partition function with 7 partitions (actually 8 but one remains empty), table on it and populates the table with 63 million rows – 9 million in each partition. So I used the same script...(read more)

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• Catching multiple exceptions on the client is robust and easy

  - by Alexander Kuznetsov

  Maria Zakourdaev has just demonstrated that if our T-SQL throws multiple exceptions, ERROR_MESSAGE() in TRY..CATCH block will only expose one. When we handle errors in C#, we have a very easy access to all errors. The following procedure throws two exceptions: CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.ThrowsTwoExceptions AS BEGIN ; RAISERROR ( 'Error 1' , 16 , 1 ) ; RAISERROR ( 'Error 2' , 16 , 1 ) ; END ; GO EXEC dbo.ThrowsTwoExceptions ; Both exceptions are shown by SSMS: Msg 50000 , LEVEL 16 , State 1 , PROCEDURE...(read more)

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• SQLSaturday #69 - Philly Love

  - by Mike C

  Thanks to the Philly SQL Server User Group (PSSUG) and to everyone who attended SQLSaturday #69 in the City of Brotherly Love yesterday. It was a great event with a lot of great people. My presentations are available for download at the links below: http://www.sqlsaturday.com/viewsession.aspx?sat=69&sessionid=3333 http://www.sqlsaturday.com/viewsession.aspx?sat=69&sessionid=3334 I just went through my speaker evaluations, and I'm happy to report the response was pretty positive across the...(read more)

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• SSIS Denali as part of “Enterprise Information Management”

  - by jorg

  When watching the SQL PASS session “What’s Coming Next in SSIS?” of Steve Swartz, the Group Program Manager for the SSIS team, an interesting question came up: Why is SSIS thought of to be BI, when we use it so frequently for other sorts of data problems? The answer of Steve was that he breaks the world of data work into three parts: Process of inputs BI   Enterprise Information Management All the work you have to do when you have a lot of data to make it useful and clean and get it to the right place. This covers master data management, data quality work, data integration and lineage analysis to keep track of where the data came from. All of these are part of Enterprise Information Management. Next, Steve told Microsoft is developing SSIS as part of a large push in all of these areas in the next release of SQL. So SSIS will be, next to a BI tool, part of Enterprise Information Management in the next release of SQL Server. I'm interested in the different ways people use SSIS, I've basically used it for ETL, data migrations and processing inputs. In which ways did you use SSIS?

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• New T-SQL Functionality in SQL Server 2008

  - by ejohnson2010

  In my most recent posts I have looked at a few of the new features offered in T-SQL in SQL Server 2008. In this post, I want to take a closer look at some of the smaller additions, but additions that are likely to pack a big punch in terms of efficiency. First let’s talk a little about compound operators. This is a concept that has been around in programming languages for a long time, but has just now found its way into T-SQL. For example, the += operator will add the values to the current variable...(read more)

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• TechEd 2010 Followup

  - by AllenMWhite

  Last week I presented a couple of sessions at Tech Ed NA in New Orleans. It was a great experience, even though my demos didn't always work out as planned. Here are the sessions I presented: DAT01-INT Administrative Demo-Fest for SQL Server 2008 SQL Server 2008 provides a wealth of features aimed at the DBA. In this demofest of features we'll see ways to make administering SQL Server easier and faster such as Centralized Data Management, Performance Data Warehouse, Resource Governor, Backup Compression...(read more)

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• SQL Saturday #274 Slovenia

  - by Dejan Sarka

  Yes, here it is SQL Saturday #274 is coming to Slovenia (#sqlsatSlovenia). The event will take place on Saturday, December 21st, at company pixi* labs, Informacijske tehnologije, d.o.o. Poslovna cona A 2 SI-4208 Šencur This company generously offered to host the event. We, the whole Slovenian SQL Server community, are very grateful for this. At this time, a call for speakers went out, and we are already getting the first proposals. We are especially happy that we will get possibility to show the foreign speakers how beautiful Slovenia and especially the capital Ljubljana is in December. Expect a lot of partying right on the streets, no matter of weather. Be prepared, we have slightly weird customs when it comes to drinks. For example, our regular special discount offer is not three drinks for the price of two; it is six drinks for the price of five. If you are a speaker or want to become one, consider sending a proposal. Since most of the sessions will be held in English and you don’t want to speak, consider coming as a visitor as well. Or maybe you would be interested to become a sponsor. Although we are targeting a low budgeted event, any kind of sponsorship is very welcome. Please feel free to contact the organizers if you are interested to become a sponsor: Matija Lah – [email protected], Mladen Prajdic - [email protected], or Dejan Sarka  - [email protected]. Looking forward to see you all!

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• Starting this week: Dublin, Maidenhead, and London

  - by KKline

  This might be most most overcommitted four-week period of time ever in my life. I’m tired just thinking about it! Not only am I traveling internationally and speaking over the next few weeks, I’m also helping on two book projects, learning some new applications from Quest Software, and helping on a small Transact-SQL refactoring project. Swag on hand? I’ve got a special printing of 500 video training DVDs for this trip: SQL Server Training on DMVs Performance Monitor and Wait Events Plus, I’ll have...(read more)

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• The Team Behind SQL Saturday 60 In Cleveland

  - by AllenMWhite

  Last July I asked the assembled group at the Ohio North SQL Server Users Group meeting if they'd be interested in putting on a SQL Saturday. Enthusiastically, they said yes! A great group of people came together and met, first monthly, then every other week, and finally every week, taking time from their families to do the things necessary to put together a SQL Saturday event here in Cleveland. Their work has been amazing and any of you attending our event will see what a great job they've all done....(read more)

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• Quote of the day – on when NOT to say something

  - by BuckWoody

  I think many of us can say something right at the right time. But there’s a deeper skill: “Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.” - Benjamin Franklin Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• PowerPivot course: Copenhagen, Dublin and Zurich new dates available for booking

  - by AlbertoFerrari

  Wow, this time I have been able to make an announcement before Marco Russo! The PowerPivot course we are bringing in tour all over Europe has three new dates available for booking: Copenhagen : 21-22, March 2011 at the Radisson Blu Royal Hotel. Dublin : 28-29, March 2011 at the Microsoft Ireland Building 3. Zurich : 4-5, April 2011 at Digicom Academy AG. The registrations are now open on the www.powerpivotworkshop.com web site., where you can find all the relevant information about the course. As...(read more)

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• Powershell, SMO and Database Files

  - by dbaduck

  In response to some questions about renaming a physical file for a database, I have 2 versions of Powershell scripts that do this for you, including taking the database offline and then online to make the physical change match the meta-data. First, there is an article about this at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms345483.aspx . This explains that you start by setting the database offline, then alter the database and modify the filename then set it back online. This particular article does...(read more)

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• T-SQL User-Defined Functions: the good, the bad, and the ugly (part 3)

  - by Hugo Kornelis

  I showed why T-SQL scalar user-defined functions are bad for performance in two previous posts. In this post, I will show that CLR scalar user-defined functions are bad as well (though not always quite as bad as T-SQL scalar user-defined functions). I will admit that I had not really planned to cover CLR in this series. But shortly after publishing the first part , I received an email from Adam Machanic , which basically said that I should make clear that the information in that post does not apply...(read more)

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

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

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

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• Difference between DISTINCT and VALUES in DAX

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  I recently got a question about differences between DISTINCT and VALUES in DAX and thanks to Jeffrey Wang I created a simple example to describe the difference. Consider the two tables below: Fact and Dim tables, having a single column with the same name of the table. A relationship exists between Fact[Fact] and Dim[Dim]. This relationship generates a referential integrity violations in table Fact for rows containing C, which doesn’t exist in table Dim. In this case, an empty row is virtually inserted...(read more)

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• Other SCOM users at SQLSaturday #65 Vancouver?

  - by merrillaldrich

  After a little hair-graying fun around passport renewal and family logistics, it looks like I'll be at the Vancouver SQLSaturday ! I am pumped. (I was entirely convinced they would call it "SQLSaturd' eh?" and I'm frankly a little disappointed about the name... :-) I'm on the tail end of a three-month deployment of System Center Operations Manager with the SQL management pack - if you are a DBA and SCOM user, too, I'd love to meet you and talk shop at the SQLSaturday event. Please drop me a line...(read more)

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• Optimize Many-to-Many with SUMMARIZE and Other Techniques

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  We are still in the early days of DAX and even if I have been using it since 2 years ago, there is still a lot to learn on that. One of the topics that historically interests me (and many of the readers here, probably) is the many-to-many relationships between dimensions in a dimensional data model. When I and Alberto wrote the The Many to Many Revolution 2.0 we discovered the SUMMARIZE based pattern very late in the whitepaper writing. It is very important for performance optimization and it should be always used. In the last month, Gerhard Brueckl also presented an approach based on cross table filtering behavior that simplify the syntax involved, even if it’s harder to explain how it works internally. I published a short article titled Optimize Many-to-Many Calculation in DAX with SUMMARIZE and Cross Table Filtering on SQLBI website just to provide a quick reference to the three patterns available. A further study is still required to compare performance between SUMMARIZE and Cross Table Filtering patterns. Up to now, I haven’t observed big differences between them, even if their execution plans might be not identical and this suggest me that depending on other conditions you might favor one over the other.

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• Big Data Learning Resources

  - by Lara Rubbelke

  I have recently had several requests from people asking for resources to learn about Big Data and Hadoop. Below is a list of resources that I typically recommend. I'll update this list as I find more resources. Let's crowdsource this... Tell me your favorite resources and I'll get them on the list! Books and Whitepapers Planning for Big Data Free e-book Great primer on the general Big Data space. This is always my recommendation for people who are new to Big Data and are trying to understand it....(read more)

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• Cloud Computing: Start with the problem

  - by BuckWoody

  At one point in my life I would build my own computing system for home use. I wanted a particular video card, a certain set of drives, and a lot of memory. Not only could I not find those things in a vendor’s pre-built computer, but those were more expensive – by a lot. As time moved on and the computing industry matured, I actually find that I can buy a vendor’s system as cheaply – and in some cases far more cheaply – than I can build it myself.   This paradigm holds true for almost any product, even clothing and furniture. And it’s also held true for software… Mostly. If you need an office productivity package, you simply buy one or use open-sourced software for that. There’s really no need to write your own Word Processor – it’s kind of been done a thousand times over. Even if you need a full system for customer relationship management or other needs, you simply buy one. But there is no “cloud solution in a box”.  Sure, if you’re after “Software as a Service” – type solutions, like being able to process video (Windows Azure Media Services) or running a Pig or Hive job in Hadoop (Hadoop on Windows Azure) you can simply use one of those, or if you just want to deploy a Virtual Machine (Windows Azure Virtual Machines) you can get that, but if you’re looking for a solution to a problem your organization has, you may need to mix Software, Infrastructure, and perhaps even Platforms (such as Windows Azure Computing) to solve the issue. It’s all about starting from the problem-end first. We’ve become so accustomed to looking for a box of software that will solve the problem, that we often start with the solution and try to fit it to the problem, rather than the other way around.  When I talk with my fellow architects at other companies, one of the hardest things to get them to do is to ignore the technology for a moment and describe what the issues are. It’s interesting to monitor the conversation and watch how many times we deviate from the problem into the solution. So, in your work today, try a little experiment: watch how many times you go after a problem by starting with the solution. Tomorrow, make a conscious effort to reverse that. You might be surprised at the results.

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