May 2007 - Posts
Here we are starting to see information on Katmai and I'm just getting around to an article comparing SQL 2005 and 2000. I had someone post a question a month or so ago and I couldn't find a good answer. So I created one.
As I was going through it, it seemed that there were so many differences that it would be an unreadable, 10 page article. So I did the admnistrator differences and now am working on the developer ones. But as I do, it seems that there's really two other articles here: the BI differences and the security differences.
I'm not sure if I'll do those, but it probably makes sense. I've put this one off a little because it's a bunch of work, but it's something I want to get done.
Especially after talking with one of the SQL Rangers, who told me that the core engine is pretty much the same. I'm not sure I agree, but it's an interesting thing to see.
It's been an interestng week here at the Microsoft BI Conference in Seattle and a first for me happened this morning. I was going over to the Steve Ballmer keynote and I got told "press" wasn't allowed in the session. So a young lady picked me out of the stream of people and turned me away.
I wasn't terribly thrilled to see Ballmer, but now I'm intrigued to know what he has to say. I can't really imagine what he wants to put out there that they'd want to keep from the press, but who knows.
It's been an interesting week and there are a couple of things that I take away from this conference. First that BI is mostly reporting. It's a way of letting users move around, drill into, customize, quickly change, etc. their reports, but it's mostly about getting timely reports to someone so they can make a more informed (and hopefully better) decision.
The second is that the business buy-in and work with the BI team is as critical as the technical skills. Having a big supported and lots of business resources is important to a successful project, and I was interested to see how much focus there was this week on the business side of BI.
I know writing and working on SQL Server is hard. It's a huge project and just managing that is hard. Andy and I argue about this all the time when we find things wrong. My feeling is that once a single person can't keep the entire project organized themselves, it gets out of control and you get inconsistencies. So I sympathize with bugs that get out and I can understand how they do.
I even can get that sometimes you'll get a programmer that takes a short cut and then the worst QA guy, or a guy not paying attention is assigned to test it and doesn't. Or doesn't do it well and then one of us finds the issue. So for the most part I can live with and understand the bugs that arrive in the product. While I wasn't happy with the maintenance plan bugs in SP2, I could understand how they got through.
Andy says that Microsoft has a huge advantage though: they have tons of resources (people and money) to throw at the problem. That's true and you'd expect less mistakes from them, but they also have a much larger scale of places and places the product has to work, so I can understand that they tend to cancel each other out somewhat.
But some things are extremely shoddy programming.
I saw this
entry by Tony Rogerson and this is just plain shoddy programming. It's just piss poor, unacceptable, crappy stuff I expect from less professional programmers. Limiting a server name to 30 characters?
That's just dumb.
I know they probably needed some limit. After all you'd be declaring some array and want to size to at some length, but 30 characters? That's just poor judgement by someone in the real world assuming that everyone uses short server names. Even if they found the longest server name at MS was 20 characters, make it bigger than 30. If you stopped at 99, or even 50, I could understand, but 30 seems too short.
This is another one I think MS should apologize for.
Despite being without power for a few days, a hectic scramble at work to get things done, and kids off from school, I managed to take and pass the 70-431 exam last Friday. I had the book from Jordan and whoever (Sybex) that covered the exam and I spent a couple hours Friday at lunch flipping through it, trying to be sure I had an idea of what was covered, but I didn't really get any studying done. I was counting on the experience of working with and reading about SQL Server 2005 to get me through. I actually had exam insurance, so I wasn't too worried, but still, I wanted to do well.
So the first part of the exam, 30 some questions, were the standard multiple choice questions I've seen on many exams. They were all over the board, covering everything from Performance monitoring to replication to service broker. I thought the questions were pretty hard, so you really needed to have spent some time on the product.
The second part of the exam was a simulation, with actually screen shots of dialogs or SSMS that responded to clicks. You could click on certain areas and had to solve a problem. Like delete a user that owned a schema, or add a linked server, etc. A few of the items I wasn't sure how to solve, but enough of the product was limited in its functionality that I muddled through. Or must have because...
I passed!!!!!
I'm not an MCITP in both the Database Developer and Database Administration categories.
Now we'll see if I get my free Tech Net. I also have 25% off another exam, so I'm considering the basic BI exam.