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Celebrating July 4th

Andy Warren — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 05:14:00 GMT

I try to limit the number of truly off topic posts I do, but today is a special day in the US and one that still gets most of the recognition it deserves. Take a minute and re-read the Declaration of Independence and think about what's happened since that day.

SQL Injection Combat

dbenoit — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 20:15:00 GMT

Read a couple of blog posts about some fairly recent SQL Injection attacks (03 /08);

http://blogs.technet.com/swi/archive/2008/05/29/sql-injection-attack.aspx

http://blogs.technet.com/neilcar/archive/2008/03/15/anatomy-of-a-sql-injection-incident-part-2-meat.aspx

Amazing to me how much of this is still going on and how there is still a lack of consideration for coding standards to prevent these things from happening. Nice to know that MS has just released some tools to help DB Admins and Web Admins to combat this. Seems like they too see this is a major battle ground and are taking steps to ensure that we have the tools necessary to make sure they can't happen.

http://blogs.technet.com/swi/archive/2008/06/24/new-tools-to-block-and-eradicate-sql-injection.aspx

It appears that MS has teamed up with HP to generate a tool called Scrawlr which "...will crawl a website, simultaneously analyzing the parameters of each individual web page for SQL Injection vulnerabilities. Scrawlr uses some of the same technology found in HP WebInspect but has been built to focus only on SQL Injection vulnerabilities. This will allow an IT/DB admin to easily find vulnerabilities similar to the ones that have been used to compromise sites in recent attacks."

The tool can be downloaded at https://download.spidynamics.com/Products/scrawlr/ and you can read additional information about this tool as well as others on the blog post mentioned above.

Reading all this information reminds me that I need to stay up on security. Sounds like a silly statement even after all that has gone on with SQL Injections but it is a tendency to get sidetracked away from things like security as so many other pressing topics come up during our week.

Midlands PASS Meeting - July 17 - SQL Server MVP John Welch

bkelley — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 16:06:00 GMT

The Midlands PASS Chapter hosts:

SQL Server MVP John Welch

July 17, 2008 at Training Concepts

The Midlands PASS chapter will hold a special meeting on Thursday, July 17, 2008, to host SQL Server MVP John Welch. John will be giving a presentation on SQL Server Integration Services. The meeting will once again be held at Training Concepts off of Berryhill Road. We will begin our meet and greet time at 6:15 PM as usual and start the presentation between 6:30 and 6:45 PM. I will send out an agenda next week.

Please feel free to forward this to anyone who you think would be interested in attending. If you plan on attending, please RSVP as soon as possible so we can ensure we have enough space and food. If you have time to help with setup, please email me and we’ll plug you in!

Abstract:

One of the common issues encountered with SSIS is deploying configurations for multiple environments. During this session, 2 patterns for handling configurations in SSIS will be covered. a simple pattern that handles most cases, to a very flexible pattern that covers most complex scenarios. Learning and using these patterns will allow SSIS developers to more easily deploy packages between environments, and leverage a single point of configuration in each environment.

Bio:

John Welch is Chief Architect with Mariner, a consulting firm specializing in enterprise reporting & analytics, data warehousing and performance management solutions. John has been working with business intelligence and data warehousing technologies for 6 years, with a focus on Microsoft products in heterogeneous environments. He is a Microsoft Most Valued Professional (MVP), an award given due to his commitment to sharing his knowledge with the IT community. John is an experienced speaker, having given presentations at Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) conferences, Software Development West (SD West), Software Management Conference (ASM/SM), and others. John has also been published in DM Review, SQL Server Professional, and XML Developer.

INETA Champs Program

Andy Warren — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 05:02:00 GMT

My friend Shawn Weiseld posted a note about the new INETA Champs Program. Looks interesting and is a nice step in the right direction for growing local communities. The part I'm not thrilled with is the self-nomination. It's probably a fatal character flaw, but I'm just not a huge fan of self promotion though I get that a certain amount of it is required to succeed. I'd like to see them survey the groups, audit the meetings in light weight way, reward those that create new groups that last at least a year, have regular meetings, grow attendance and the mailing list, and that satisfy the members.

I think those things are important because otherwise it runs the risk of becoming one more cred everyone is chasing, soon we'll have Solitaire user groups!

Seriously, I hope they'll publish some guidelines. It should certainly be subjective to a degree, but at least setting a minimum level will in turn drive more effort back into the local communities. I'd also like to see this become an award where if you win one year, you're ineligible for the next 1-2 years.

Keep growing INETA!

Is This a DBA Skill?

Steve Jones — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 19:47:00 GMT

I saw an interesting note about how Intel is warning developers that they need to learn to program with multiple cores. They're saying 100 cores on a chip isn't far away. I'm sure there's a lot of truth here and it worries me. I think we'll see some really poorly build applications as most programmers struggle here. It's probably similar to what we saw when people tried to move from a command line / DOS environment to an event driven model like Windows. I know I had issues learning some concepts there.

I'm wondering how much this would apply to DBAs, however. We have an OS (SQLOS) on top of another OS, and together, these two systems need to manage the parallelism and threads we use. In most cases, we don't care about threads, though in SQL we sometimes want to limit things.

Moving to a parallel, multi-threaded world will be tough. I struggled in college and barely understood some of the concepts, though to be fair, there weren't a lot of places to practice and it seemed to be a very specialized skill I didn't want. Now I wish I'd done a little more work, but perhaps it doesn't matter. I can go on writing my SQL queries and let the SQL Server platform manage the cores.

One More MVP (Doh!)

Steve Jones — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 19:37:00 GMT

As expected, I forgot someone again in my MVP announcement. Last time I announced Kathi Kellenberger and Andy Leonard, forgetting Jacob Sebastian. This time I announced Michael Coles and Jeff Moden, but forgot Gail Shaw! MS doesn't make it easy to figure out who's renewed, so I kind of depended on somone to ping me, which Michael and Jeff did.

I've corresponded with Gail for a few years, and finally met her at the PASS conference in Denver last year. She's a great SQL wizard and has really helped site grow over the years.

Congrats! and apologies.

Replication Error "memory mapped file read failed"

jeffrey yao — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 06:12:00 GMT

I was fighting an error that was very rare to appear. I originally put a post on a MS forum

http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.sqlserver.replication&tid=57229124-0a5a-4ec3-9055-a06b7869b872&cat=&lang=&cr=&sloc=&p=1

The issue has delayed our project (with hundreds of people for the project) for one day, the pressure on me is intense, to say the least. Fortunately after 36 hrs (5 hrs sleep included ), the issue is finally solved.

Simple background introudction

Environment: SQL Server 2K5 EE (CU8 applied) + Win 2K3 SP1

Our replication is of transactional type, and one publication with 5 articles has one "push" subscription. One article, let's call it MyTable has 29 million records.

Publisher and Distributor is on the same box, while subscriber is on another box. The network share used in the replication is called \\MyServer\ReplData

After replication set up, I start the subscription re-init with a new snapshot generated. However I keep getting errors in the replication monitor when the distribution agent (referred to DA hereafter ) tries to replicate MyTable over to the subcriber. When DA tries to read the snapshot-generated files for MyTable, at some time, it always compains and gives out the following error msg.

The process could not bulk copy into table '"dbo"."MyTable"'. (Source:
MSSQL_REPL, Error number: MSSQL_REPL20037)
Get help: http://help/MSSQL_REPL20037

memory mapped file read failed

To obtain an error file with details on the errors encountered when
initializing the subscribing table, execute the bcp command that appears
below. Consult the BOL for more information on the bcp utility and its
supported options. (Source: MSSQLServer, Error number: 20253)

So initial thoughts / guesses were:

(1) the replication is not set up correctly ?

(2) the created file by snapshot agent is not right ?

(3) the folder \\MyServer\ReplData is corrupt ?

(4) the OS memory is corrupt (we have 32 GB on each server) ?

So I have tried various ways, including:

1. Delete MyTable in the publication, and then do a subscription re-init with a new snapshot, when the publication works fine, add back MyTable to the publication and then do a subscription re-init with a new snapshot again to address concern (1)

2. Delete everything in \\MyServer\ReplData, and then restart the snapshot for the publication to address concern (2)

3. Change the network shared folder from its original drive D: to a new drive E: to address concern (3)

4. Reboot the all servers involved in the replication to address the potential OS memory issue to address conern (4)

The error still comes out when DA is trying to replicate MyTable.

Ok, what can be wrong? Yes, I have some other candidates for concern

(5) MyTable corrupts and thus snapshot agent generates some bad files based on the corrupt MyTable ?

(6) Push subscription does not work for MyTable ?

(7) MyTable does not work in a publication when the publication has more than one article?

So let's do something to address these new concerns

5, Run dbcc checktable on MyTable, but there is no error msg reported

6, Drop the subscription, and then recreate a new "Pull" type subscription, Do a subscription re-init with a new snapshot

7. Remove MyTable from its original publication, and then create a new publication which contains one and only one article, i.e. MyTable. Do a subscription re-init with a new snapshot

However the error still appears when DA tries to replication MyTable.

However during these tests, I found that the error always occurs when DA tries to read a specific file (generated by snapshot agent in \\MyServer\ReplData), let's call this file MyTable_File_7.

Now I guess this MyTable_File_7 may contain some row data that DA cannot read after the file was loaded into memory, and thus "memory mapped file read failed"? My logic is that you can corrupt a text file by inserting a EOF in middle of the text file, so if MyTable_File_7 has some weird binary code in it, the file may be corrupted logically.

So I decide to output MyTable to a new table by running

select * into dbo.MyTable_2 from dbo.MyTable

then create a PK for MyTable_2 and then use this new table to replace MyTable in the publication. And the result is :

I Succeeded !!

How excited I am, now what I need to do is:

Truncate table dbo.MyTable

Insert into dbo.MyTable select * from dbo.MyTable2

and then remove MyTable_2 from the publication and replace it with MyTable, and do a subscription re-init. After another 30 min waiting, what? The error comes again? ! ! Come on !!

I cannot believe it. But the success of MyTable2 leads me to believe something must be wrong with the data in MyTable, and doing table truncate may actually only release the pages/extents that the table occupies, and then the insertion will probably re-use those occupied extents again. At this moment, I think the hard-disk may have some bad spots which MyTable may happen to use. So I did another way,

drop table dbo.MyTable -- this is to ensure all GAM, SGAM, PFS aer totally cleaned regarding this table

Create table dbo.MyTable (....)

Insert into dbo.MyTable select * from dbo.MyTable2

Now add MyTable back to the publication and do a subscription re-init.

Finally, it is successful !

The possible reason: some bad tracks on the hard-disk.

Our system adimin group is now involved in checking whether there is anything wrong with the hard-disk drives.

Growing New Speakers/How to Go National/PASS Needs a Policy

Andy Warren — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 05:32:00 GMT

I commented in an earlier post about the challenges PASS has in trying to select a 100 or so speakers out of a set of applicants 2-3 times that size. I've run into a couple people since then that have asked for help/ideas on how to make it to the national level. Please note that I don't have any inside track here, these are general observations that may or may not work for PASS or any other national event:

Have documented experience doing technical speaking and ideally it goes beyond your local user group. Drive to another group to present (to strangers) and show that you're willing to put in some effort. Do a SQLSaturday, a Code Camp, or event a .Net user group meeting. The more the better.
Be reasonably polished. Remember that most people will rate you well if you talk about any sexy topic (defined in our context as performance tuning, new features, etc), far fewer rate you on your presentation skills unless you really do badly. Find the best speaker you know and ask them to evaluate you.
Submit at least two and preferably three abstracts. That shows you're interested and gives the people building the agenda more chances to find a way to fit you in.
If you submitted abstracts and didn't make the cut, look at the final schedule - did you pick a topic that was also submitted by someone with a 'bigger name'? Rewrite your abstracts right now in view of the final schedule so that each would clearly fit in and not duplicate/conflict with anything selected.
Prove your technical creds by participating in online discussions and writing articles - something deeper than a blog post.
Make yourself visible to the people that are running the event/selecting the speakers. Comment on something they wrote, volunteer to help at the conference, invite them to speak at your user group. Politics? Absolutely, but of the practical kind. We tend to go with people we know over people we don't. Of course you can do this the wrong way and look self serving - work on your karma.
Consider sending in a 5 minute video that shows your speaking skills/style

On the other side of the fence at this point the formula for becoming rich and famous is fairly well known which really increases the number of people seeking relatively few slots. If I were building the agenda I'd be looking for:

A good percentage of repeat speakers that I know did well at my event (and are likely to do so again)
People that appear to be experts in a given area; I say appear, but let's define it as having published numerous articles/whitepapers on the subject, having written a book on it, or are otherwise known for it
People with a decent amount of speaking experience - first time speaking at the event is ok, just not the first time speaking
I'd be throwing out people with less than 3 (and preferably 5) years experience in the field. Yes, some of them with 1 years experience might be smarter than the rest, but thats the exception.
I'd also exclude anyone that didn't appear to be paying their dues by contributing at least locally to the profession.
Some new faces each year so that the event doesn't become stale

I think PASS would serve the audience well by publishing some guidelines about how to get on the agenda and how it's set. At the least I think they should limit every speaker to one session, and require repeat speakers to sit out every third year to make room for someone new (someone suggested that this might irritate the top speakers so that they don't want to return - I have to think that would be rare, but if they are that up tight that they don't see the overall value, we don't need them anyway!).

New MVPs

Steve Jones — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 03:50:00 GMT

Today's the day that new MVPs are notified for Q3 and two longtime community members, Jeff Moden and Michael Coles, were awarded. I didn't see announcements on who dropped off, but I know of three people I see in the community often that are new.

Jeff has answered so many questions, and provided some great advice, in addition to quite a few articles, so I'm not surprised that he got it. I nominated him and definitely think he's an MVP in the SQL community.

Michael has written quite a few articles for me and worked on 2 or 3 books in the last year, so I'm not surprised at his award either. He's a smart guy in NYC that's taught me a few things along the way.

I'm up for renewal in Jan and I have no idea if I'd get it again. I have to just do my thing and see what happens.

Quick and Dirty Code Compare

Andy Warren — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 05:22:00 GMT

MS Word 2007 (and probably earlier versions) have the ability to do a basic document compare, useful if you're at a location that doesn't have more advanced comparison tools for TSQL. Just load your scripts into separate Word documents, click on the View ribbon, then click on View Side by Side. I know there are a lot of tools (free) that will do text file comparisons which accomplish the same or better, but that requires internet access, file download and perhaps getting by domain security, etc. Maybe one day it will help you when you're in a hurry.

Slacking and data quality (in that order)

Tim Mitchell — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 03:10:00 GMT

Well, I almost missed blogging for the entire month of June. I'm sure that this fact didn't go unnoticed by both of the people who read my blog... I'm working on a major data conversion and am in a mad dash to finish converting and validating years of healthcare and financial data, and unfortunately my free time (including the time allocated for blogging) has been scarce. The good news is that the project - at least the data conversion piece - will be over in late September and perhaps life will return to some semblance of normalcy.

The aforementioned project has been an interesting exercise in data quality. The system from which I am extracting data is quite old, in technology years anyway, and the application design lacks some of the keystones of modern systems - not the least of which is relational integrity. The de facto standard for data entry was free text, which made for many (in some cases, tens of thousands) of duplicates. Fortunately, the system to which I am converting has a well designed SQL Server backend, and in spite of a few disagreements, the vendor has been open to modifying the system to suite or needs. As to the quality of our data, I've had lots of opportunities to expand my SSIS skills to gently (most of the time) massage the data into the target system. I've even been able to write some code, which I don't do that much any more, for some advanced text parsing and manipulation.

Once this project is complete, I'll write a more comprehensive - and coherent - post to discuss in more detail my travels through this conversion and some of the data quality lessons I've learned.

Why Format TSQL?

Andy Warren — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 05:17:00 GMT

Recently I had the chance to help a student debug a problem on a production server. It appeared to be failing because duplicate uniqueidentifiers were being created. Thinking that unlikely because the G in GUID stands for global, we dug in but found the code painfully hard to follow due to poor formatting, mainly the indents. She didn't own one of those 'prettifier' tools, so we used my old standby Instant SQL Formatter, an online formatter that does a reasonable job of formatting TSQL at a great price - free! Note: I have no ownership or other interest in the site. Many scoff at making code pretty, but especially with a tool to do it for you it can really make life easier for the next person.

And the answer to the problem? The GUIDS were fine, there was a fall through case that had an incorrect error message, and that in turn was being caused by a data problem.

Volunteering

Andy Warren — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 05:01:00 GMT

Recently I was visiting with an old acquaintance and one of the topics that came up was volunteers. At some point in the past I had said something about volunteers that subsequently proved true (hey, I am right sometimes!) and based on that, he was crowning me the know-all person on volunteers and suggested I write a book about it. I'm a bit more modest and realistic, there's a lot I don't know about volunteers. What I do know I've learned from volunteering here and there as well as learning to use volunteers for oPASS and for SQLSaturday. But the conversation did remind me of one my rules; if you want to know read the book. So I ordered two from Amazon, Volunteers How to Get Them and How to Keep Them, and Volunteers Wanted. Both were good, but I liked Volunteers Wanted better and it's a great value at $10.99.

It's an easy read, but there are a lot of lessons in that little book and the hard part is thinking about all the things you should be doing better as you go. It's obviously written from the perspective of the organization that needs volunteers, but it wouldn't be a bad idea to read it if you were considering volunteering so you have some idea of what drives the process.

Maybe I'll make up a mini poster one of these days, but for now here are my basics for managing volunteers:

Build specific tasks/time frames and then ask for volunteers
Follow up and don't get frustrated if they haven't completed the task, just leave time to reassign or handle yourself
Say thank you often and personally, and make sure the group knows of their efforts

My follow up project is to get someone to read the book and give a 15 min presentation at an upcoming oPASS meeting. That should get some interest in the topic going, and of course point out the flaws with my current efforts to manage/recruit volunteers!

More Kindle

Steve Jones — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 20:55:00 GMT

I'm still on the fence here about a Kindle. I pinged someone that bought one and he said they're returning it. Not that they don't like it, but his wife reads too much now, so she's spending more $$ and they'd like to slow down. Also, he doesn't see enough technical content and the Kindle editions aren't that cheap compared to some full versions.

I worry about reading and spending more myself. I think I'd definitely need some type of budget for the thing. And I worry that I'll find lots of books I'm interested in not on there.

I searched for a few O'Reilly books today to see and couldn't find any, but they sent me this note, which shows they're moving forward. I got a note from Apress as well that they're planning on more Kindle versions.

I'm still not sure it's for me. I'm back to using the library a bit, though our library doesn't have a great selection. I'm also re-reading some older books, so I'm trying not to spend too much. Depending on my Amazon referrals, it's possible that I'll have a decent spend for books. I seem to get about $30 a quarter, so that's not too bad.

I think about using a PDA or iTouch to read, but they're just too small screens. And I could see my battery life dying too quickly. The question is will someone do a better e-Reader than the Kindle anytime soon? Their wireless connectivity, to me, means they've beaten Sony pretty well. Even at $60 more. The question is now how quickly they'll add more titles and can they work a deal to lower prices.

SQLSaturday Call for Speakers - Cleveland & Olympia

Andy Warren — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 05:05:00 GMT

Call for speakers is open for SQLSaturday #5 in Olympia, WA on Oct 10 (note that the MS BI conference is in Seattle earlier that week if you're going you might consider staying over a day or two) and for SQLSaturday #6 in Cleveland on Aug 9th. First time events in both cities and they are looking for a good variety of speakers. If you live in the area, or know someone, give them a nudge!

Registration is open for both events, and early registration is open for SQLSaturday #7 in Birmingham, slated for the first week or two of March 2009!

One Note - Part II

Steve Jones — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 17:26:00 GMT

Apparently other people like One Note. Microsoft is using it for learning content, and I think that's a cool idea. I might find some issues with that over time, but at first glance I think it's a good idea.

Employee or 1099?

Andy Warren — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 05:32:00 GMT

My friend Wes Dumey does a lot of work in the business intelligence sector as a contract employee and has a post worth reading called The Great Debate - Employee vs. Consulting. I don't agree with all of his points, but it's an interesting conversation to have. I do agree that too many of us seem overly focused on benefits, rather than just looking at the dollar value of the benefits and adjusting the wage accordingly. For example, I pay about $6k a year for health insurance for my family. It doesn't matter if I make $100k and get free insurance, or make $106k and pay my own, I net the same (assuming benefits are comparable/reasonable). The challenge is that employers have to put everyone in the insurance pool to get the rate, and so as an employee you can't negotiate for that extra $6k easily (and the same for the 401k match). But as a contractor, all doors are open - you just have to understand your own costs, financial goals, market value, and then ask!

I don't want to comment much until Wes does part 2, but I'll finish with this; most of us prefer to be employees for three reasons:

We don't like any level of uncertainty in our lives and are willing to trade some percentage of salary for stability - human!
We like being part of a team - human!
We were never taught to be entreprenuerial - human perhaps, but a bigger failing in the education/mentoring picture

Wes has posted Part 2 before I get could this posted, so I'll wait on his Part 3 to finish my thoughts.

SSWUG Virtual Conference II

kjkellenberger — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:18:00 GMT

Today is day one of the SSWUG SQL Server Virtual Conference II. This has been really fun so far. Our sessions were pre-recorded last month and each one is played three times. The speakers are usually available during the sessions to answer questions by chatting. After the conference the sessions are available for on demand viewing for two weeks. They even have prizes!

At first I wondered how creepy it would be to see and hear my session playing while I answered questions. Maybe because of the jumpstarttv.com videos I have done, it actually is not so bad.

This has been a really fun experience and I can't wait to view some of the other sessions. They are having several other conferences coming up, including the SQL Server III conference and a BI conference. It is a good inexpensive way to get gain some knowledge without leaving your desk!

http://www.vconferenceonline.com/

Microsoft BI Conference Oct 6-8, 2008

Andy Warren — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 05:19:00 GMT

Had missed the announcement, came up in conversation yesterday with a friend, the BI conference will be Oct 6-8 in Seattle, registration is $995 if you register by Aug 8. Not planning to attend, so far I'm still firmly rooted on the conventional DBA side of things.

SQL Server Time-Dates

Ken Kaufman — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 01:09:00 GMT

The other day in our architecture group meeting the question was raised on how SQL Server handled future dates in relation to lights savings time. For example if a play was scheduled in January for a date in July at 1:00 PM would reflect this time or 2:00 PM because of the jump in a hour for day light savings time. This is a common issue with many applications, but not SQL Server. It all relates to the time source the application is getting the time from. Applications use one of two sources the CPU which works on UTC or it uses an OS api which reflects the time zone setup in the OS. Of course you’re simply transferring the burden from one program to the next (OS), but it has its advantage to work off the OS time rather then the CPU, but it also has its disadvantages as well.

Before going into how SQL uses its source, you need to understand how SQL maintains its date. The “datetime” datatype is eight bytes, or 2 ints, divided between date and time. The first int represents the date where the base date is 1900 and increments are set at one day. The second int or four bytes is the time with a base of 12:00 AM, increments are 1/300 of a second. If you want to see how this works run the following queries:

--Convert date to a binary

select convert(varbinary(100), getdate())

--Take the first 8 hex values and convert ensure the "0x" is prefix

select convert(int, 0x00009AC4)

--Do a date diff with 1/1/1900 The dates should be the same

select datediff(day, '1/1/1900', getdate())

Now that we know how data is stored there is the critical nature of what source does sql use. As I said earlier applications can use the converted OS time or do the coversion itself against the cpu’s time that’s using UTC. SQL uses both known as “High Resolution Timer” and “Low Resolution Timer”. The High resolution timer works off the cpu timer or UTC, which SQL queries for internal processes such as workers, locks and data cleanup. The Low resolution timer calls the windows api GetTickCount which returns the OS time. This is used by external functions such as Getdate(). Since these external needs are based on the OS time, there unaffected by changes in day light savings time, all time is still based on delta of midnight as the OS represents the time zone.

This type of tradeoff between High and Low resolution seems to fit most needs, unless you get into time comparisons, such as Dateadd or Datediff functions. These are unaware of day light savings time or UTC, there given a value, and compute the deltas and assume no day light time. As with SQL your application will probably require different time values based on regional time and UTC. SQL provides this functionality in the form of the function getutcdate.

Notes on My Visit to Birmingham SQL Group

Andy Warren — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 05:06:00 GMT

Spent last Tues/Wed in Birmingham, speaking at the user group Tuesday night and then presenting a seminar on Wed. Attendance at the user group was good, about 18, and had really nice participation as I did my standard presentation on transactional replication. They've only been back in business since about the first of the year and are showing good growth under the leadership of John Baldwin and with Barry Ralston & Robert Cain lending their support - especially with regards to finding speakers!

We spent some time Tues & Wed night talking about growing user groups and how SQLSaturday might work with that. Helped a lot that Barry has been to two (#1 and #4) and that Robert was in Orlando for #4 as well, so they have a better picture of how we try to do things and how we differ (slightly, but true) from Code Camps. They've got a lot of stuff to read through and discuss but I'm hopeful they'll be able to schedule one for sometime early next year (rushing is not a good idea).

They treated me well on my visit, including a visit to Dreamland BBQ, a local favorite, and mostly mentioned here because my friends Joe Healy and Wes Dumey love out of the way BBQ places.

XML Puzzle Contest Winners

Mike C — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 23:18:00 GMT

In the last entry I promised to share the answer to the XML puzzle today. Here's a quick recap of the question - SQL 2005 BOL gives the following example of a full-text search XML thesaurus file: <XML ID="Microsoft Search Thesaurus"> <thesaurus xmlns="x-schema:tsSchema.xml"> <diacritics = false/> <expansion> Internet Explorer IE IE5 </expansion> <replacement> <pat>NT5<...(read more)

One Note

Steve Jones — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:23:00 GMT

Lately I've been trying out a few new pieces of software to see how well they work. One is Twitter, and if you're really interested, you can follow me there. A few people do, though I'm not sure why. I follow a few people and might cut my list down at some point. I'm also not sure how much I like it.

The other is One Note, which is a part of Office 2007. When I first saw this a few versions ago, Brian Knight, my former SSC partner, was using it on his tablet PC. It seemed more geared for that form factor, so I hadn't really thought much of it. However at TechEd last week I watched Buck Woody use it and he told me just how valuable it's been for him, so I thought I'd give it a try and see what I think.

And I really like it.

I'm not really someone that likes to change tools that often. It's not that I'm against newer tools, but rather that I've made investments in not only tools, but time in learnign them and building around them and I don't get benefits if I change too often. I also like to have small, lightweight tools I can easily use. Word is cumbersome and causes me issues moving to HTML, so I've stuck with a text editor. Notepad is most of the way there for me (and it's on every machine, but it's not as smooth in HTML, so I've gone with Edit Plus, which has worked well and allows me to have mutliple documents open.

So it's rare I try something and see a chance it will improve things. One Note was one of those things with it's free structured formatting and right away I saw posibilities with it. I have a screen shot attached that shows the basic interface.

There are a few things I like about it, but one of the big things is how easy I can move my notebooks or tabs around. Each tab on the left side is a folder. I like things easily being organized like that. It makes life simple and allows me to easily be sure that things are backed up, but it also allows me to manage sizes of things. Right now Outlook is a pain because everything is in these large files.

The tabs across the top (Editorials, Editorial Polls, ToDo, Meetings, etc) are actually the .one files in the file system. By copying these to my laptop, they appear in my other One Note installation. The right side shows the actual documents. I started putting multiple editorials on one page, but decided to have separate pages, just like a notebook, and it's worked well

I've moved over most of my editorial stuff from a text editor, and this works well since my cut and paste seems to work well into the SSC system. I also have easily been able to move stuff from one machine to another, which is key. It's also a little easier to write in than the HTML text editor I've been using. There are a few things I haven't figured out, like flowing text around pictures, but so far this seems to be working well.

Transparent, Translucent, or Opaque? Whats Your Strategy?

Andy Warren — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 05:36:00 GMT

It's a couple weeks old, but there was a mild blog roar over some comments from Microsoft about wanting to be translucent rather than transparent. I think their reasoning is sound; no company should want or need to disclose the smallest detail about their business, their plans, internal arguments, or their minor failures. Is that imagement management? Sure. Spin control? Not necessarily, but sometimes. Evil? Certainly not!

I used to work for a teleservices company in the IT side, and we bid on a lot of projects - and didn't win them all of course. Would it have helped us - or our potential customers - if we posted every bid and the results? One could argue it might if we won all of them, but short of that, what would prospective customers take away from that list? That we were mildly successful? Hugely successful? Maybe easier to judge if we post the estimated dollar value of each contract? Or would they consider the company to be failing because it won only a small number of bids, not seeing that to win would have required losing money.

What about salaries? Would it help your customers if they knew what everyone made? Or would they be fighting to get the cheapest DBA on staff to work on their project, or arguing that the salary was out of line with local norms.

The blog post was about external communications. There's a different level of communication required for existing customers, for serious partners, and for employees. In all cases translucency is a valid strategy, and more useful than most believe at the team level. Why? Suppose you set up a team blog and update it once a week, putting in the 3 biggest things that happened that week. How often is one of those three going to be negative? One assumes that most teams don't have that many negatives, so each week you get 2 positive things to say, plus a negative that you can partially convert to positive by showing what happened, what went wrong, and what you're doing to fix it. Showing negatives is a great way to earn credibility, but showing positives is a great way to highlight - subtly - your teams achievements. We wouldn't want to announce every time someone came to work late, got a routine raise, injected a minor bug, etc, etc.

If the subject interests you try reading Transparency: How Leaders Create a Culture of Candor, or my article from last year on IT Transparency

Virtual Conference II

kjkellenberger — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 01:59:00 GMT

Check out the SSWUG Virtual Conference next week. Here is a link with more information: http://www.vconferenceonline.com/sswug/demo.asp . The first 200 people who use this code, VIPKK2008DIS, get a discount off the low $100 conference fee.