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• Social Networking at Professional Events

  Dr. Masha Petrova compresses, into a small space, much good advice on networking with other professional people. She draws from her own experience as a technical expert to provide a detailed checklist of things you should and shouldn't do at conferences or tradeshows to be a successful 'networker'. As usual, she delivers sage advice with a dash of humour.

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• Immersive UX Changing the Face of Retail

  Changing the Face of Retail is an article Ive been thinking about most of the past couple weeks. I think my goal with the article is to one talk about how technology built into the retail environment can be used to build better experiences for customers and 2 to talk about how this kind of evolutionary extension of the retail environment is better for customers AND retailers.I walked into the Microsoft Retail Store or at least one of them, (see one at Mission Vejo or Scottsdale) and its really impressive...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Sharing My Thoughts on Space Flight

  - by Grant Fritchey

  This went out in the DBA newsletter from Red Gate, but I enjoyed writing it so much, I thought I'd share it to a wider audience: I grew up watching the US space program. I watched men walk on the moon for the first time in 1969, when I was only six years old. From that moment on, I dreamed of going into space. I studied aeronautics and tried to get into the Air Force Academy, all in preparation for my long career as an astronaut. Clearly, that didn't quite work out for me. But it sure could for you. At Red Gate, we're running a new contest: DBA in Space. The prize is a sub-orbital flight. When I first got word of this contest, my immediate response was, "And you need me to go right away and do a test flight? Excellent!" No, no test flight needed, plus I was pretty low on the list of volunteers. "That's OK, I'll just enter." Then I was told that, as a Red Gate employee, I couldn't win. My next response was, "I quit".eventually, I was talked down off the ledge, and agreed to help make this special for some other DBA. Many (most?) of us are science fiction fans, either the soft science of Star Trek and Star Wars, or the hard science of Niven and Pournelle, or Allen Steele. We watched the Shuttles go up and land. We've been dreaming of our own trips into orbit and our vacation-home on the Moon for a long, long time. All that might not arrive on schedule, but you've got a shot at breaking clear of the atmosphere. The first stage is a video quiz, starring Brad McGehee, and it's live at www.DBAinSpace.com now. Go for it. Good luck and God speed!

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• Azure

  - by Grant Fritchey

  I've been tasked to learn SQL Azure, as well as test all the Red Gate products on it. My one, BIG, fear has been that I'll receive some mongo bill in the mail because I've exceeded the MSDN testing limit. I know people that have had that problem. I've been trying to keep an eye on my usage, but, let's face it, it's not something I think about every day. But now I don't have to. Red Gate has been working with Azure, long before I showed up. They already released a little piece of software that I just found out about, it's called CloudTally. It gathers your usage and sends you a daily email so you can know if you're starting to approach that limit. Check it out, it's free.

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• Expanding Influence and Community

  - by Johnm

  When I was just nine years of age my father introduced me to the computer. It was a Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer (aka: CoCo). He shared with me the nuances of writing BASIC and it wasn't long before I was in the back seat of the school bus scribbling, on a pad of paper, the code I would later type. My father demonstrated that while my friends were playing their Atari 2600 consoles, I had the unique opportunity to create my own games on the Coco. One of which provided a great friend of mine hours and hours of hilarity and entertainment. It wasn't long before my father was inviting me to tag along as he drove to the local high school where a gathering of fellow Coco enthusiasts assembled. In these meetings all in attendance would chat about their latest challenges and solutions. They would swap the labors of their sleepless nights eagerly gazing into their green and black screens. Friendships were built and business partners were developed. While these experiences at the time in my pre-teen mind were chalked up to simply sharing time with my father, it had a tremendous impact on me later in life. This past weekend I attended the Louisville SQL Saturday (#45). It was great to see that there were some who brought along their children. It is encouraging to see fresh faces in the crowd at our  monthly IndyPASS meetings. Each time I see the youthful eyes peering from the audience while the finer details of SQL Server is presented, I cannot help but to be transported back to the experiences that I enjoyed in those Coco days. It is exciting to think of how these experiences are impacting their lives and stimulating their minds. Some of these children have actually approached me asking questions about what was presented or simply bragging about their latest discovery in programming. One of the topics that arose in the "Women in Technology" session in Louisville, which was masterfully facilitated by Kathi Kellenberger, was exploring how we could ignite the spark of interest in databases among the youth. It was awesome to hear that there were some that volunteer their time to share their experiences with students. It made me wonder what user groups could achieve if we were to consider expanding our influence and community beyond our immediate peers to include those who are simply enjoying their time with their father or mother.

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• Getting the URL to the Content Type Hub Programmatically in SharePoint 2010

  - by Damon

  Many organizations use the content-type hub to manage content-types in their SharePoint 2010 environment.  As a developer in these types of organizations, you may one day find yourself in need of getting the URL of the content type hub programmatically.  Here is a quick snippet that demonstrates how to do it fairly painlessly: public static Uri GetContentTypeHubUri(SPSite site) {     TaxonomySession session = new TaxonomySession(site);     return Session.DefaultSiteCollectionTermStore         .ContentTypePublishingHub; }

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• PowerShell and SMO – be careful how you iterate

  - by Fatherjack

  I’ve yet to have a totally smooth experience with PowerShell and it was late on Friday when I crashed into this problem. I haven’t investigated if this is a generally well understood circumstance and if it is then I apologise for repeating everything. Scenario: I wanted to scan a number of server for many properties, including existing logins and to identify which accounts are bestowed with sysadmin privileges. A great task to pass to PowerShell, so with a heavy heart I started up PowerShellISE and started typing. The script doesn’t come easily to me but I follow the logic of SMO and the properties and methods available with the language so it seemed something I should be able to master. Version #1 of my script. And the results it returns when executed against my home laptop server. These results looked good and for a long time I was concerned with other parts of the script, for all intents and purposes quite happy that this was an accurate assessment of the server. Let’s just review my logic for each step of the code at the top. Lines 1 to 7 just set up our variables and write out the header message Line 8 our first loop, to go through each login on the server Line 10 an inner loop that will assess each role name that each login has been assigned Line 11 a test to see if each role has the name ‘sysadmin’ Line 13 write out the login name with a bright format as it is a sysadmin login Line 17 write out the login name with no formatting It is quite possible that here someone with more PowerShell experience than me will be shouting at their screen pointing at the error I made but to me this made total sense. Until I altered the code, I altered lines 6 and 7 of code above to be: $c = $Svr.Logins.Count write-host “There are $c Logins on the server” This changed my output to look like this: This started alarm bells ringing – there are clearly not 13 logins listed So, let’s see where things are going wrong, edit the script so it looks like this. I’ve highlighted the changes to make Running this code shows me these results Our $n variable should count up by one for each login returned and We are clearly missing some logins. I referenced this list back to Management Studio for my server and see the Logins as below, where there are clearly 13 logins. We see a Login called Annette in SSMS but not in the script results so I opened that up and looked at its properties and it’s server roles in particular. The account has only public access to the server. Inspection of the other logins that the PowerShell script misses out show they too are only members of the public role. Right now I can’t work out whether there is a good reason for this and if it should be expected behaviour or not. Please spend a few minutes to leave a comment if you have an opinion or theory for this. How to get the full list of logins. Clearly I needed to get a full list of the logins so set about reviewing my code to see if there was a better way to iterate through the roles for each login. This is the code that I came up with and I think it is doing everything that I need it to. It gives me the expected results like this: So it seems that the ListMembers() method is the trouble maker in my first versions of the code. I would have expected that ListMembers should return Logins that are only members of the public role, certainly Technet makes no reference to it being left out in it’s Login.ListMembers details. Suffice to say, it’s a lesson learned and I will approach using it with caution in future circumstances.

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• Developing Schema Compare for Oracle (Part 6): 9i Query Performance

  - by Simon Cooper

  All throughout the EAP and beta versions of Schema Compare for Oracle, our main request was support for Oracle 9i. After releasing version 1.0 with support for 10g and 11g, our next step was then to get version 1.1 of SCfO out with support for 9i. However, there were some significant problems that we had to overcome first. This post will concentrate on query execution time. When we first tested SCfO on a 9i server, after accounting for various changes to the data dictionary, we found that database registration was taking a long time. And I mean a looooooong time. The same database that on 10g or 11g would take a couple of minutes to register would be taking upwards of 30 mins on 9i. Obviously, this is not ideal, so a poke around the query execution plans was required. As an example, let's take the table population query - the one that reads ALL_TABLES and joins it with a few other dictionary views to get us back our list of tables. On 10g, this query takes 5.6 seconds. On 9i, it takes 89.47 seconds. The difference in execution plan is even more dramatic - here's the (edited) execution plan on 10g: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------| Id | Operation | Name | Bytes | Cost |-------------------------------------------------------------------------------| 0 | SELECT STATEMENT | | 108K| 939 || 1 | SORT ORDER BY | | 108K| 939 || 2 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 108K| 938 ||* 3 | HASH JOIN RIGHT OUTER | | 103K| 762 || 4 | VIEW | ALL_EXTERNAL_LOCATIONS | 2058 | 3 ||* 20 | HASH JOIN RIGHT OUTER | | 73472 | 759 || 21 | VIEW | ALL_EXTERNAL_TABLES | 2097 | 3 ||* 34 | HASH JOIN RIGHT OUTER | | 39920 | 755 || 35 | VIEW | ALL_MVIEWS | 51 | 7 || 58 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 39104 | 748 || 59 | VIEW | ALL_TABLES | 6704 | 668 || 89 | VIEW PUSHED PREDICATE | ALL_TAB_COMMENTS | 2025 | 5 || 106 | VIEW | ALL_PART_TABLES | 277 | 11 |------------------------------------------------------------------------------- And the same query on 9i: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------| Id | Operation | Name | Bytes | Cost |-------------------------------------------------------------------------------| 0 | SELECT STATEMENT | | 16P| 55G|| 1 | SORT ORDER BY | | 16P| 55G|| 2 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 16P| 862M|| 3 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 5251G| 992K|| 4 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 4243M| 2578 || 5 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 2669K| 1440 ||* 6 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 398K| 302 || 7 | VIEW | ALL_TABLES | 342K| 276 || 29 | VIEW | ALL_MVIEWS | 51 | 20 ||* 50 | VIEW PUSHED PREDICATE | ALL_TAB_COMMENTS | 2043 | ||* 66 | VIEW PUSHED PREDICATE | ALL_EXTERNAL_TABLES | 1777K| ||* 80 | VIEW PUSHED PREDICATE | ALL_EXTERNAL_LOCATIONS | 1744K| ||* 96 | VIEW | ALL_PART_TABLES | 852K| |------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Have a look at the cost column. 10g's overall query cost is 939, and 9i is 55,000,000,000 (or more precisely, 55,496,472,769). It's also having to process far more data. What on earth could be causing this huge difference in query cost? After trawling through the '10g New Features' documentation, we found item 1.9.2.21. Before 10g, Oracle advised that you do not collect statistics on data dictionary objects. From 10g, it advised that you do collect statistics on the data dictionary; for our queries, Oracle therefore knows what sort of data is in the dictionary tables, and so can generate an efficient execution plan. On 9i, no statistics are present on the system tables, so Oracle has to use the Rule Based Optimizer, which turns most LEFT JOINs into nested loops. If we force 9i to use hash joins, like 10g, we get a much better plan: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------| Id | Operation | Name | Bytes | Cost |-------------------------------------------------------------------------------| 0 | SELECT STATEMENT | | 7587K| 3704 || 1 | SORT ORDER BY | | 7587K| 3704 ||* 2 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 7587K| 822 ||* 3 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 5262K| 616 ||* 4 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 2980K| 465 ||* 5 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 710K| 432 ||* 6 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 398K| 302 || 7 | VIEW | ALL_TABLES | 342K| 276 || 29 | VIEW | ALL_MVIEWS | 51 | 20 || 50 | VIEW | ALL_PART_TABLES | 852K| 104 || 78 | VIEW | ALL_TAB_COMMENTS | 2043 | 14 || 93 | VIEW | ALL_EXTERNAL_LOCATIONS | 1744K| 31 || 106 | VIEW | ALL_EXTERNAL_TABLES | 1777K| 28 |------------------------------------------------------------------------------- That's much more like it. This drops the execution time down to 24 seconds. Not as good as 10g, but still an improvement. There are still several problems with this, however. 10g introduced a new join method - a right outer hash join (used in the first execution plan). The 9i query optimizer doesn't have this option available, so forcing a hash join means it has to hash the ALL_TABLES table, and furthermore re-hash it for every hash join in the execution plan; this could be thousands and thousands of rows. And although forcing hash joins somewhat alleviates this problem on our test systems, there's no guarantee that this will improve the execution time on customers' systems; it may even increase the time it takes (say, if all their tables are partitioned, or they've got a lot of materialized views). Ideally, we would want a solution that provides a speedup whatever the input. To try and get some ideas, we asked some oracle performance specialists to see if they had any ideas or tips. Their recommendation was to add a hidden hook into the product that allowed users to specify their own query hints, or even rewrite the queries entirely. However, we would prefer not to take that approach; as well as a lot of new infrastructure & a rewrite of the population code, it would have meant that any users of 9i would have to spend some time optimizing it to get it working on their system before they could use the product. Another approach was needed. All our population queries have a very specific pattern - a base table provides most of the information we need (ALL_TABLES for tables, or ALL_TAB_COLS for columns) and we do a left join to extra subsidiary tables that fill in gaps (for instance, ALL_PART_TABLES for partition information). All the left joins use the same set of columns to join on (typically the object owner & name), so we could re-use the hash information for each join, rather than re-hashing the same columns for every join. To allow us to do this, along with various other performance improvements that could be done for the specific query pattern we were using, we read all the tables individually and do a hash join on the client. Fortunately, this 'pure' algorithmic problem is the kind that can be very well optimized for expected real-world situations; as well as storing row data we're not using in the hash key on disk, we use very specific memory-efficient data structures to store all the information we need. This allows us to achieve a database population time that is as fast as on 10g, and even (in some situations) slightly faster, and a memory overhead of roughly 150 bytes per row of data in the result set (for schemas with 10,000 tables in that means an extra 1.4MB memory being used during population). Next: fun with the 9i dictionary views.

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• SQL Saturday and Exploring Data Privacy

  - by Johnm

  I have been highly impressed with the growth of the SQL Saturday phenomenon. It seems that an announcement for a new wonderful event finds its way to my inbox on a daily basis. I have had the opportunity to attend the first of the SQL Saturday's for Tampa, Chicago, Louisville and recently my home town of Indianapolis. It is my hope that there will be many more in my future. This past weekend I had the honor of being selected to speak amid a great line up of speakers at SQL Saturday #82 in Indianapolis. My session topic/title was "Exploring Data Privacy". Below is a brief synopsis of my session: Data Privacy in a Nutshell        - Definition of data privacy        - Examples of personally identifiable data        - Examples of Sensitive data Laws and Stuff        - Various examples of laws, regulations and policies that influence the definition of data privacy        - General rules of thumb that encompasses most laws Your Data Footprint        - Who has personal information about you?        - What are you exchanging data privacy for?        - The amazing resilience of data        - The cost of data loss Weapons of Mass Protection       - Data classification       - Extended properties       - Database Object Schemas       - An extraordinarily brief introduction of encryption       - The amazing data professional  <-the most important point of the entire session! The subject of data privacy is one that is quickly making its way to the forefront of the mind of many data professionals. Somewhere out there someone is storing personally identifiable and other sensitive data about you. In some cases it is kept reasonably secure. In other cases it is kept in total exposure without the consideration of its potential of damage to you. Who has access to it and how is it being used? Are we being unnecessarily required to supply sensitive data in exchange for products and services? These are just a few questions on everyone's mind. As data loss events of grand scale hit the headlines in a more frequent succession, the level of frustration and urgency for a solution increases. I assembled this session with the intent to raise awareness of sensitive data and remind us all that we, data professionals, are the ones who have the greatest impact and influence on how sensitive data is regarded and protected. Mahatma Gandhi once said "Be the change you want to see in the world." This is guidance that I keep near to my heart as I approached this topic of data privacy.

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• Embracing Imperfection

  - by Johnm

  The pursuit of perfection is a road on which we often find ourselves traveling. It is an unpaved road filed with pot-holes and ruts that often destroy our stride. The shoulders of this road are lined with the bones and rotting carcasses of well planned projects, solutions and dreams of others who have dared the journey. Often the choice to engage in this travel is a compulsive one. We can't help but to pack our bags and make the trip. We justify it by equating it to the delivery of a quality product or service. We use our past travels as validation of our worthiness and value. Our shared experience, as tortured pilgrims of perfection, reveals that each odyssey that bewitched us resulted in a stark reminder of the very weaknesses and fears that we were attempting to mollify. The voice of the critic that berated us for the lack of craftsmanship was our own. Although, at the end of the journey our own critical voice was joined by the gnashing of teeth of those who could not reap the fruit of your labor due to its lack of timely delivery. There is another road in which to travel. It is the pursuit of embracing imperfection. The cost of traveling this route is your contribution to its eternal construction. Each segment is designed uniquely. At times it has the appearance of a patchwork quilt; while other times it is well organized and highly measured. In all cases, its construction has continually advanced and been utilized as each segment was delivered by its architect. Those who choose to select this spindle of these crossroads crack open the shells of their fears to reveal the vapor that is within. They construct their houses upon these shells. Through their hunger for mastery they wring every drop of nectar from failure and discard its husks to the ditches of this road. Through their efforts the thoroughfare begins to develop a personality of its own, a beautifully human one, rich with the strengths and weaknesses of all of its contributors. Like many of us, the pursuit of perfection has not served me well. In fact, I would say that it has been more damaging than it has been helpful. While the perfectionist in me occasionally makes its presence known, I consider myself a "recovering perfectionist". It is evident to me that there is immense beauty found in imperfection. I choose to embrace it. It is grounding. It is constructive. It is honest.

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• Book Review: Defensive Database Programming With SQL Server

  It distils a great deal of practical experience; the writing of it was a considerable task; It packs in a great deal of information. Alex's book shows how to write robust database applications, and we can all learn from it. We took the book to a critic who never minces his words, and were relieved to find that Joe Celko liked it.

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• Feature Usage Reporting in Early Access Programs

  After doing Web development, you can get very used to the luxury of having basic information about your users' machines and browsers. With their permission, you can also get the same information from an application, and can even get more targeted anonymous information that will tell you how the features are used. Kevin explains how this can be used with early access builds to improve the reliability and usability of applications.

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• Connection Strings, an Overview

  We asked Phil to come up with a simple explanation of connection strings. We somehow weren't expecting a 'quote of the day' for your database, or a C# application to gather data from the internet. However, sometimes the oblique approach is the best, especially when the knowledge comes from hard-won experience by a cynical man.

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• Aspect-oriented Programming and Code Contracts in ASP.NET MVC

  There are some aspects to application programming, such as logging, tracing, profiling, authentication and authorization that cut across the business objects. These are difficult to deal with in an object-oriented paradigm without resorting to code-injection, code-duplication or interdependencies. In ASP.NET MVC, you can use attributes in the form of action filters to provide a neater way of implementing these cross-curring concerns.

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• Antenna Aligner Part 5: Devil is in the detail

  - by Chris George

  "The first 90% of a project takes 90% of the time and the last 10% takes the another 200%"  (excerpt from onista) Now that I have a working app (more or less), it's time to make it pretty and slick. I can't stress enough how useful it is to get other people using your software, and my simple app is no exception. I handed my iPhone to a couple of my colleagues at Red Gate and asked them to use it and give me feedback. Immediately it became apparent that the delay between the list page being shown and the list being drawn was too long, and everyone who tried the app clicked on the "Recalculate" button before it had finished. Similarly, selecting a transmitter heralded a delay before the compass page appeared with similar consequences. All users expected there to be some sort of feedback/spinny etc. to show them it is actually doing something. In a similar vein although for opposite reasons, clicking the Recalculate button did indeed recalculate the available transmitters and redraw them, but it did this too fast! One or two users commented that they didn't know if it had done anything. All of these issues resulted in similar solutions; implement a waiting spinny. Thankfully, jquery mobile has one built in, primarily used for ajax operations. Not wishing to bore you with the many many iterations I went through trying to get this to work, I'll just give you my solution! (Seriously, I was working on this most evenings for at least a week!) The final solution for the recalculate problem came in the form of the code below. $(document).on("click", ".show-page-loading-msg", function () {            var $this = $(this),                theme = $this.jqmData("theme") ||                        $.mobile.loadingMessageTheme;            $.mobile.showPageLoadingMsg(theme, "recalculating", false);            setTimeout(function ()                           { $.mobile.hidePageLoadingMsg(); }, 2000);            getLocationData();        })        .on("click", ".hide-page-loading-msg", function () {              $.mobile.hidePageLoadingMsg();        }); The spinny is activated by setting the class of a button (for example) to the 'show-page-loading-msg' class. &lt;a data-role="button" class="show-page-loading-msg"Recalculate This means the code above is fired, calling the showPageLoadingMsg on the document.mobile object. Then, after a 2 second timeout, it calls the hidePageLoadingMsg() function. Supposedly, it should show "recalculating" underneath the spinny, but I've not got that to work. I'm wondering if there is a problem with the jquery mobile implementation. Anyway, it doesn't really matter, it's the principle I'm after, and I now have spinnys!

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• We have our standards, and we need them

  - by Tony Davis

  The presenter suddenly broke off. He was midway through his section on how to apply to the relational database the Continuous Delivery techniques that allowed for rapid-fire rounds of development and refactoring, while always retaining a “production-ready” state. He sighed deeply and then launched into an astonishing diatribe against Database Administrators, much of his frustration directed toward Oracle DBAs, in particular. In broad strokes, he painted the picture of a brave new deployment philosophy being frustratingly shackled by the relational database, and by especially by the attitudes of the guardians of these databases. DBAs, he said, shunned change and “still favored tools I’d have been embarrassed to use in the ’80′s“. DBAs, Oracle DBAs especially, were more attached to their vendor than to their employer, since the former was the primary source of their career longevity and spectacular remuneration. He contended that someone could produce the best IDE or tool in the world for Oracle DBAs and yet none of them would give a stuff, unless it happened to come from the “mother ship”. I sat blinking in astonishment at the speaker’s vehemence, and glanced around nervously. Nobody in the audience disagreed, and a few nodded in assent. Although the primary target of the outburst was the Oracle DBA, it made me wonder. Are we who work with SQL Server, database professionals or merely SQL Server fanbois? Do DBAs, in general, have an image problem? Is it a good career-move to be seen to be holding onto a particular product by the whites of our knuckles, to the exclusion of all else? If we seek a broad, open-minded, knowledge of our chosen technology, the database, and are blessed with merely mortal powers of learning, then we like standards. Vendors of RDBMSs generally don’t conform to standards by instinct, but by customer demand. Microsoft has made great strides to adopt the international SQL Standards, where possible, thanks to considerable lobbying by the community. The implementation of Window functions is a great example. There is still work to do, though. SQL Server, for example, has an unusable version of the Information Schema. One cast-iron rule of any RDBMS is that we must be able to query the metadata using the same language that we use to query the data, i.e. SQL, and we do this by running queries against the INFORMATION_SCHEMA views. Developers who’ve attempted to apply a standard query that works on MySQL, or some other database, but doesn’t produce the expected results on SQL Server are advised to shun the Standards-based approach in favor of the vendor-specific one, using the catalog views. The argument behind this is sound and well-documented, and of course we all use those catalog views, out of necessity. And yet, as database professionals, committed to supporting the best databases for the business, whatever they are now and in the future, surely our heart should sink somewhat when we advocate a vendor specific approach, to a developer struggling with something as simple as writing a guard clause. And when we read messages on the Microsoft documentation informing us that we shouldn’t rely on INFORMATION_SCHEMA to identify reliably the schema of an object, in SQL Server!

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• Separating text strings into a table of individual words in SQL via XML.

  - by Phil Factor

  p.MsoNormal {margin-top:0cm; margin-right:0cm; margin-bottom:10.0pt; margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; } Nearly nine years ago, Mike Rorke of the SQL Server 2005 XML team blogged ‘Querying Over Constructed XML Using Sub-queries’. I remember reading it at the time without being able to think of a use for what he was demonstrating. Just a few weeks ago, whilst preparing my article on searching strings, I got out my trusty function for splitting strings into words and something reminded me of the old blog. I’d been trying to think of a way of using XML to split strings reliably into words. The routine I devised turned out to be slightly slower than the iterative word chop I’ve always used in the past, so I didn’t publish it. It was then I suddenly remembered the old routine. Here is my version of it. I’ve unwrapped it from its obvious home in a function or procedure just so it is easy to appreciate. What it does is to chop a text string into individual words using XQuery and the good old nodes() method. I’ve benchmarked it and it is quicker than any of the SQL ways of doing it that I know about. Obviously, you can’t use the trick I described here to do it, because it is awkward to use REPLACE() on 1…n characters of whitespace. I’ll carry on using my iterative function since it is able to tell me the location of each word as a character-offset from the start, and also because this method leaves punctuation in (removing it takes time!). However, I can see other uses for this in passing lists as input or output parameters, or as return values.   if exists (Select * from sys.xml_schema_collections where name like 'WordList')   drop XML SCHEMA COLLECTION WordList go create xml schema collection WordList as ' <xs:schema xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"> <xs:element name="words">        <xs:simpleType>               <xs:list itemType="xs:string" />        </xs:simpleType> </xs:element> </xs:schema>'   go   DECLARE @string VARCHAR(MAX) –we'll get some sample data from the great Ogden Nash Select @String='This is a song to celebrate banks, Because they are full of money and you go into them and all you hear is clinks and clanks, Or maybe a sound like the wind in the trees on the hills, Which is the rustling of the thousand dollar bills. Most bankers dwell in marble halls, Which they get to dwell in because they encourage deposits and discourage withdrawals, And particularly because they all observe one rule which woe betides the banker who fails to heed it, Which is you must never lend any money to anybody unless they don''t need it. I know you, you cautious conservative banks! If people are worried about their rent it is your duty to deny them the loan of one nickel, yes, even one copper engraving of the martyred son of the late Nancy Hanks; Yes, if they request fifty dollars to pay for a baby you must look at them like Tarzan looking at an uppity ape in the jungle, And tell them what do they think a bank is, anyhow, they had better go get the money from their wife''s aunt or ungle. But suppose people come in and they have a million and they want another million to pile on top of it, Why, you brim with the milk of human kindness and you urge them to accept every drop of it, And you lend them the million so then they have two million and this gives them the idea that they would be better off with four, So they already have two million as security so you have no hesitation in lending them two more, And all the vice-presidents nod their heads in rhythm, And the only question asked is do the borrowers want the money sent or do they want to take it withm. Because I think they deserve our appreciation and thanks, the jackasses who go around saying that health and happi- ness are everything and money isn''t essential, Because as soon as they have to borrow some unimportant money to maintain their health and happiness they starve to death so they can''t go around any more sneering at good old money, which is nothing short of providential. '   –we now turn it into XML declare @xml_data xml(WordList)  set @xml_data='<words>'+ replace(@string,'&', '&amp;')+'</words>'    select T.ref.value('.', 'nvarchar(100)')  from (Select @xml_data.query('                      for $i in data(/words) return                      element li { $i }               '))  A(list) cross apply A.List.nodes('/li') T(ref)     …which gives (truncated, of course)…

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• Taking our Friendships to the next level.

  - by RedAndTheCommunity

  Red Gate have been running the Friends of Red Gate program for years now, and over that time we've built some great relationships with some truly awesome members of the SQL and .NET communities. When I took over the running of the program from Annabel in 2011, I was overwhelmed by the enthusiasm and commitment of our Friends. There were just so many of them, however, that it was hard to make the most of the relationships we had with people, and I wanted to fix that. I decided to survey all our Friends, to find out what they wanted to get out of, and put into, being in the Friends of Red Gate (FoRG) program. From the results of that survey, I identified 30 FoRGs that were really willing and able to go that step further to help Red Gate improve their tools, improve their relationship with the community, and improve the Friends of Red Gate program. Those 30 Friends of Red Gate have been awarded 'FoRG+' status. That means they'll: Have a closer relationship with the product teams, by getting involved in projects Have even more access to the inside track about the tools they're interested in Get the opportunity to come visit us at the Red Gate office and really influence the development of the tools. Plus more, depending on how the individual FoRG+ wants to work with us. This doesn't mean I've forgotten our other Friends; I'm working on ways to improve their experience of the Friends of Red Gate program. I'll write about them in another post. If you're an existing Friend of Red Gate, and you're interested in finding out how to get involved in the FoRG+ program, then I'd love to chat to you. For anyone that's interested in joining the Friend of Red Gate program, take a look at the web page dedicated to the program, and get in touch at [email protected] to be put on the waiting list for our 2013 program.

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• What's New in Code Access Security in .NET Framework 4.0 - Part I

  The Code Access Security model has been completely redesigned in the .NET Framework 4.0, to the point where CAS policies have been completely removed, and everything now works through Level2 Security Transparency. Confused? Not for long. Matteo Slaviero, a .NET security expert, brings us up to speed.

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• Pidgin unable to connect to GTalk

  - by user42933

  I can't believe I'm raising this question after years, but after a fresh installation of Ubuntu 12.10, I'm unable to connect Pidgin to Google Talk. I use a Google Apps domain name, and the settings that I'm using are : Protocol : XMPP Username : **** Domain : ********.com Resource : Home In the advanced tab, Connection security : Require encryption. UNCHECK Allow plaintext auth over unencrypted steams Connect port : 5222 Connect sever : talk.google.com File transfer proxies : proxy.eu.jabber.org Bosh URL : (blank) In the proxy tab, No proxy. I had used these same settings on 12.04 and it had worked like a charm. Any help will be appreciated.

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• Exploring SQL Server table metadata with SSMS and TSQL

  Phil shows how to start squeezing powerful magic from SSMS for doing a detailed exploration of the metadata of your routines and tables, in this third part to his series on exploring your database schema with SQL.

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• Network Administrators Past, Present, and Future

  Even in the short time that PCs have been signficantly networked, what it means to be a SysAdmin has changed dramatically. From the first LAN parties to the lumbering infrastructures of today, the role of SysAdmin has evolved and adapted to the shifting needs of users and corporations alike. Brien Posey has been on the front line of it all, and considers the future of this thus-far essential IT role.

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• What Counts for A DBA - Logic

  - by drsql

  "There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who will always wonder why there are only two items in my list and those who will figured it out the first time they saw this very old joke."  Those readers who will give up immediately and get frustrated with me for not explaining it to them are not likely going to be great technical professionals of any sort, much less a programmer or administrator who will be constantly dealing with the common failures that make up a DBA's day.  Many of these people will stare at this like a dog staring at a traffic signal and still have no more idea of how to decipher the riddle. Without explanation they will give up, call the joke "stupid" and, feeling quite superior, walk away indignantly to their job likely flipping patties of meat-by-product. As a data professional or any programmer who has strayed  to this very data-oriented blog, you would, if you are worth your weight in air, either have recognized immediately what was going on, or felt a bit ignorant.  Your friends are chuckling over the joke, but why is it funny? Unfortunately you left your smartphone at home on the dresser because you were up late last night programming and were running late to work (again), so you will either have to fake a laugh or figure it out.  Digging through the joke, you figure out that the word "two" is the most important part, since initially the joke mentioned 10. Hmm, why did they spell out two, but not ten? Maybe 10 could be interpreted a different way?  As a DBA, this sort of logic comes into play every day, and sometimes it doesn't involve nerdy riddles or Star Wars folklore.  When you turn on your computer and get the dreaded blue screen of death, you don't immediately cry to the help desk and sit on your thumbs and whine about not being able to work. Do that and your co-workers will question your nerd-hood; I know I certainly would. You figure out the problem, and when you have it narrowed down, you call the help desk and tell them what the problem is, usually having to explain that yes, you did in fact try to reboot before calling.  Of course, sometimes humility does come in to play when you reach the end of your abilities, but the ‘end of abilities’ is not something any of us recognize readily. It is handy to have the ability to use logic to solve uncommon problems: It becomes especially useful when you are trying to solve a data-related problem such as a query performance issue, and the way that you approach things will tell your coworkers a great deal about your abilities.  The novice is likely to immediately take the approach of  trying to add more indexes or blaming the hardware. As you become more and more experienced, it becomes increasingly obvious that performance issues are a very complex topic. A query may be slow for a myriad of reasons, from concurrency issues, a poor query plan because of a parameter value (like parameter sniffing,) poor coding standards, or just because it is a complex query that is going to be slow sometimes. Some queries that you will deal with may have twenty joins and hundreds of search criteria, and it can take a lot of thought to determine what is going on.  You can usually figure out the problem to almost any query by using basic knowledge of how joins and queries work, together with the help of such things as the query plan, profiler or monitoring tools.  It is not unlikely that it can take a full day’s work to understand some queries, breaking them down into smaller queries to find a very tiny problem. Not every time will you actually find the problem, and it is part of the process to occasionally admit that the problem is random, and everything works fine now.  Sometimes, it is necessary to realize that a problem is outside of your current knowledge, and admit temporary defeat: You can, at least, narrow down the source of the problem by looking logically at all of the possible solutions. By doing this, you can satisfy your curiosity and learn more about what the actual problem was. For example, in the joke, had you never been exposed to the concept of binary numbers, there is no way you could have known that binary - 10 = decimal - 2, but you could have logically come to the conclusion that 10 must not mean ten in the context of the joke, and at that point you are that much closer to getting the joke and at least won't feel so ignorant.

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• The five steps of business intelligence adoption: where are you?

  - by Red Gate Software BI Tools Team

  When I was in Orlando and New York last month, I spoke to a lot of business intelligence users. What they told me suggested a path of BI adoption. The user’s place on the path depends on the size and sophistication of their organisation. Step 1: A company with a database of customer transactions will often want to examine particular data, like revenue and unit sales over the last period for each product and territory. To do this, they probably use simple SQL queries or stored procedures to produce data on demand. Step 2: The results from step one are saved in an Excel document, so business users can analyse them with filters or pivot tables. Alternatively, SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) might be used to generate a report of the SQL query for display on an intranet page. Step 3: If these queries are run frequently, or business users want to explore data from multiple sources more freely, it may become necessary to create a new database structured for analysis rather than CRUD (create, retrieve, update, and delete). For example, data from more than one system — plus external information — may be incorporated into a data warehouse. This can become ‘one source of truth’ for the business’s operational activities. The warehouse will probably have a simple ‘star’ schema, with fact tables representing the measures to be analysed (e.g. unit sales, revenue) and dimension tables defining how this data is aggregated (e.g. by time, region or product). Reports can be generated from the warehouse with Excel, SSRS or other tools. Step 4: Not too long ago, Microsoft introduced an Excel plug-in, PowerPivot, which allows users to bring larger volumes of data into Excel documents and create links between multiple tables.  These BISM Tabular documents can be created by the database owners or other expert Excel users and viewed by anyone with Excel PowerPivot. Sometimes, business users may use PowerPivot to create reports directly from the primary database, bypassing the need for a data warehouse. This can introduce problems when there are misunderstandings of the database structure or no single ‘source of truth’ for key data. Step 5: Steps three or four are often enough to satisfy business intelligence needs, especially if users are sophisticated enough to work with the warehouse in Excel or SSRS. However, sometimes the relationships between data are too complex or the queries which aggregate across periods, regions etc are too slow. In these cases, it can be necessary to formalise how the data is analysed and pre-build some of the aggregations. To do this, a business intelligence professional will typically use SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) to create a multidimensional model — or “cube” — that more simply represents key measures and aggregates them across specified dimensions. Step five is where our tool, SSAS Compare, becomes useful, as it helps review and deploy changes from development to production. For us at Red Gate, the primary value of SSAS Compare is to establish a dialog with BI users, so we can develop a portfolio of products that support creation and deployment across a range of report and model types. For example, PowerPivot and the new BISM Tabular model create a potential customer base for tools that extend beyond BI professionals. We’re interested in learning where people are in this story, so we’ve created a six-question survey to find out. Whether you’re at step one or step five, we’d love to know how you use BI so we can decide how to build tools that solve your problems. So if you have a sixty seconds to spare, tell us on the survey!

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• Microsoft Access as a Weapon of War

  - by Damon

  A while ago (probably a decade ago, actually) I saw a report on a tracking system maintained by a U.S. Army artillery control unit.  This system was capable of maintaining a bearing on various units in the field to help avoid friendly fire.  I consider the U.S. Army to be the most technologically advanced fighting force on Earth, but to my terror I saw something on the title bar of an application displayed on a laptop behind one of the soldiers they were interviewing: Tracking.mdb Oh yes.  Microsoft Office Suite had made it onto the battlefield.  My hope is that it was just running as a front-end for a more proficient database (no offense Access people), or that the soldier was tracking something else like KP duty or fantasy football scores.  But I could also see the corporate equivalent of a pointy-haired boss walking into a cube and asking someone who had piddled with Access to build a database for HR forms.  Except this pointy-haired boss would have been a general, the cube would have been a tank, and the HR forms would have been targets that, if something went amiss, would have been hit by a 500lb artillery round. Hope that solider could write a good query :)

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