I read a lot of blog posts - a LOT.  Sometimes it’s interesting to sit back and evaluate all of the reading that I’m doing to try to glean ways of improving my efficiency.  One thing that has enormously improved my efficiency is installing a Google plug-in RSS reader.  Now, all the blogs that I read come into one sidebar where I can easily keep track of what’s new. 

So here are some of the posts I’ve been reading in the last couple days primarily covering SQL Server and also my other interests to a lesser degree:

http://sqlcat.com/whitepapers/default.aspx - The SQL CAT (Customer Advisory Team) are simply awesome.

http://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/bobb/2008/03/04/FeatureSynergyInSQLServer2008.aspx - Bob Beauchemin’s blog is always a wonderful site for great new information.  This particular article talks about the interplay of PowerShell and SSMS, which I’m trying to get up to speed on.

http://blogs.msdn.com/dtjones/archive/2008/03/07/getting-started-with-powershell.aspx - Dan Jone’s nice entry on getting started with PowerShell.

http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/ssqanet/archive/2008/03/04/pre-order-the-kalen-delaney-sql-server-internals-course-on-dvd.aspx - Kalen has been an expert in SQL Server since before it was a Microsoft product.  This DVD is very much worth it.  It’s actually really cheap considering how much information it contains.

http://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/paul/2008/03/05/TechNetRadioInterviewWithPaulAndKimberlyOnSQLServer2008Part1.aspx - Kimberly Tripp was the first person I ever took a SQL Server class from.  Her content has always been top-tier and now that she and Paul are working together, it’s only gotten better.

http://blogs.msdn.com/psssql/archive/2008/03/05/how-it-works-sqliosim-checksums.aspx - SQLIOSim is very useful for stress testing, but notoriously hard to interpret the results. (I wrote about this free tool some months ago in my SQL Server Magazine column, Tool Time.)  This blog post from the PSS team helps you decifer checksum error messages that might appear in the SQLIOSim log.

http://blogs.msdn.com/benjones/archive/2008/03/05/store-your-data-in-the-cloud.aspx - Okay, so Microsoft has plans to allow you to host your SQL Server data in the cloud.  That means that small businesses (or small teams inside of big businesses) can easily pop up SQL Server without the infrastructure or management headaches.  I’m not sure how much traction this will get, but it shows that Microsoft now considers Google to be its biggest competitor IMO.

http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlperf/ - I was intrigued by a posting from the SQL Server Performance Engineering team that not only did SQL Server 2008 launch at February party for Windows 2008 and Visual Studio 2008, it launched with exceptionally good TPC-E numbers.  This surprised me because, afaik, there’s still a lot of debug code in the CTPs.  I know this because my own TPC-C test were disappointing.  So I was wondering what the secret sauce was so that they could post strong numbers with a straight face.  I haven’t yet read the TPC disclaimers, but rest assured that I will soon.

http://blogs.technet.com/wardpond/archive/2008/03/06/are-you-paying-to-read-this-post-you-don-t-have-to.aspx - I like to keep up with what Ward Pond is up to and, at the moment, he’s ticked off at a variety of websites that are aggregators for other people’s content, including his own.  These websites charge monthly fees, but often create very little of their own content, instead repackaging what other people have written.  This is what my Google RSS reader does for free.

https://blogs.msdn.com/sqlserverstorageengine/archive/2007/02/14/wow-lots-of-blogs-from-the-sql-product-team.aspx - I always go back to this web page from time to time to make sure that I’m checking in on all of the SQL Server team blogs.  Right now, I’m making sure that all of the blogs with RSS feeds are in my reader so that I don’t have to go out and pull down their latest postings manually.

http://statisticsio.com/ - This is a new (to me at least) blog from Jason Massie that I found to be fun and interesting. I think the SQL All Stars competition is what caught my eye.

http://searchsqlserver.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid87_gci1296396,00.html?track=sy200&asrc=RSS_RSS-3_200 - I feel like I never seem to know enough about how the SQL language and XML interact on SQL Server.  This is a good article by Michelle Gutzait examining XML on SQL Server, compared to simply using VARCHAR(MAX).

http://benchmarkfactory.inside.quest.com/index.jspa - I use Benchmark Factory (from my employer, Quest Software) to do my large-scale SQL Server testing.  I was on the discussion forum reading some tips for doing a 3000 concurrent user TPC-C test.

And now for something completely different, I’m a big fan of the book Freakonomics and the accompanying blog hosted by the New York Times.  In this book (and on their blog), the authors look to interprete the data as it really is, rather than the data as we wish it meant.  The results are sometimes shocking and always interesting (social conservatives beware).  In this particular blog post (http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/when-journalists-gripe/), they point to a website where journalists gripe about being a journalist.  I was interested in this because I think old world journalists today are what icemen were in the 1920’s, on the verge of extinction.  So I’m curious to see what’s happening in their world.

I’m also very concerned about the current state of the economy, which has been brewing for quite a long time now, and the dire straights we’re now in:

http://dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/3/7/63218/05713/729/471169
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iwL8pyStPKCF3LSCswXmM4jrhyygD8V8724G0
http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN2862827920080229
http://www.fool.com/investing/value/2008/03/03/its-so-much-worse-than-you-think.aspx

I hope you find one or two of these posts of value, as I did.

Enjoy,

-Kev

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I’m not sure whether I should be suprised, disturbed, or complacent.  But this morning, I was greeted by a couple major acquisitions in our overall market segment of Database and Application systems.

First off, Oracle has made another major acquisition, this time of BEA Systems.  BEA is a major provider of JAVA-based middleware technologies and service-oriented architectures (SOA).  This move shores up Oracle’s middleware offering and goes a long way towards giving the 2nd largest software maker a more comprehensive set of product offerings to compete with the largest software maker, Microsoft.  I’m not really surprised by this move and feel like it makes good sense for Oracle to gain ground in this space.  The product lines are complimentary, even synergistic, and the acquisition allows it to gain on competitors like Microsoft and IBM.

In other news, I was a bit more surprised to learn that Sun Microsystems has acquired MySQL in a deal valued at around $1B. MySQL had been a major threat to the low end of the Microsoft SQL Server stack for quite some time.  Even more threatening, imo, was MySQL’s ability to rally a strongly devoted community to help drive the open-source code base.  However, I’m not too sure about this move.  Sun has a wide range of hardware and software products, and has had a rocky road at several points in the past.  Can a company with such a wide, even diffused focus enable a database product to shine?  Tim O’Reilly, one of my heros, seems to think so in his blog commentary.  He believes “The acquisition is also a great fit because Sun has staked its future on open source, releasing its formerly proprietary crown jewels, including Solaris, Java, and the Ultra-Sparc processor design”.  I’ll reserve judgement, personally, on the situation but feel like there’s great opportunity and great risk in this move for MySQL.

If you’re wondering why any of this should matter to a died in the wool SQL Server person, I encourage you to take a look at Linchi Shea’s article on “Checking out the Competition“.  Linchi makes the great point that database platform vendors often try to foist off their latest features as new ideas, when in fact they’ve been around in other products for year.  So it’s always good for a SQL Server person to know what the competition is up to because it makes you a better SQL Server profession. 

And finally, since I’m talking about broad trends, I really enjoyed Shashank Tiwari’s article about dropping backward compatibility.  Although his discussion is about Java, I think he makes a very interesting point - that by carrying very heavy loads of backward compatibility features, we limit or even halt the ability of a product to evolve in directions.  I don’t believe we’ve reached this point with SQL Server yet.  But I feel like we’re starting to see a number of new “dead-end routes” for SQL Server, particularly with CLR and LINQ, that may in the end wind up being evolutionary deadweight for the database platform.  Undoubtedly, CLR has very valuable use-cases and LINQ might too.  But the resistance to these feature sets is quite strong throughout many enterprises, possibly resulting in major areas of investment by the SQL Server development team for what turns out to be, in an evolutionary metaphor, vestigial organs.

Thoughts are welcome!  Cheers,

-Kevin

Technorati Tags: Industry Trends

Dear SQL Server community - have a great holiday (and few days off!).  We’ll be back with more SQL Server database knowledge and answers when you get back!

Cheers, the SQLServerPedia staff!

I was able to post this on my blog on SQLBlog.com as well.  Rod Colledge, out of Oz (that would be Australia), put together a great aggregator for SQL Server related news, whitepapers, articles, etc.  If you want to check it out, go to his site at www.sqlcrunch.com - pretty cool.

Technorati Tags: aggregator, sql server, sqlcrunch

Check out an interview with Kevin Kline where he discusses the evolution of the SQL Server database from its beginnings to where it is now as a dominant presence in business critical IT environments.

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SQL Server, Kevin Kline, PASS, database administration
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Q: Is Sql Server 2000 compatible with Windows Vista. I need to load on my laptop for testing and training porposes.

Iain Kick says: After reading this article on microsoft.com…I think not!  http://www.microsoft.com/sql/howtobuy/sqlonvista.mspx

Question: Is it possible to determine how many rows have been INSERTED into a table from the command line? Basically there will be a table that will have rows added to it throughout the day. I would to do a query on that table to tell me how many rows have been added to it. Is this possible? p.s. It won’t be possible to just have a count on the INSERT when adding rows.

Jason Hall says: There are numerous ways to do this but all involve slightly changing the schema of the database. One way would be to add a datetime column to the table with a default value of getdate(). This will put the inserted datetime into the table and you can then query based on this column to find rows that were inserted. Another option would be to put a trigger on the table that increments a value whenever a row is inserted.

There are many ways to do this but no simple way with a single query.

I would suggest you double-check the documentation on the CASE statement here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa258235(SQL.80).aspx.

Your syntax can be changed to:
CASE WHEN dbo.calmweb_ReceivingPlan_ReceivePIPs_RoundTrip.PIPMaterial IS NOT NULL THEN dbo.calmweb_ReceivingPlan_ReceivePIPs_RoundTrip.PIPMaterial ELSE NULL END AS FirstMat

This is an issue applications programmers often wrestle with, and as you mentioned in the extended question text, using sp_executeSQL or the EXECUTE command is the only way around this.  You might feel, as many of the developers I’ve worked with have felt, that this is a shortcoming of SQL Server (or most other DBMS’s I’ve worked with), but the database engine validating statements before executing them is definitely a plus!

If you use SQL Server 2005, this system procedure can accept up to a 2GB unicode string (nvarchar(max)).  Also, when you use sp_executeSQL, you might see a performance benefit over the EXECUTE command because the actual text of the statement you’re executing won’t change between executions; this means the query optimizer has a higher likelihood of matching the statement in subsequent executions with the first execution plan generated.