09 December 2011
Strange gotcha with column names
Here's a funny thing I discovered while working with a table I created by importing data from Excel. (I know, I only have myself to blame.) A number of the column names ended up with a trailing space on the end. They were Y/N type columns where the value was either Y or null. I decided to update... Read More...
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07 November 2011
SQL Server 2012 edition comparison details are published
Interesting stuff, particularly if you're doing BI. BISM tabular and Power View will not be in Standard Edition, only in the new - presumably more expensive - Business Intelligence Edition. That kind of makes sense as you need a fairly pricey edition of SharePoint to really get all the benefits,... Read More...
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10 October 2011
Denali Side-by-Side Gotcha
Don't try this at home. I just got my new (new to me anyway) laptop set up nicely and then installed an instance of Denali CTP3 to start exploring. RTFM? Not me! The first thing I thought I'd play with was the tabular model and Project Crescent as this has huge potential for Reporting & BI... Read More...
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25 August 2011
An annoying problem with Nulls
I just lost half an hour of my life which I'll never get back on this. Don't make the same mistake. I extracted some customer details for a mailing (it's OK, they ticked the box that they want to hear about our special offers) but Marketing complained that some of the address data contained... Read More...
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06 June 2011
Failing report subscriptions
We had an interesting problem while I was on holiday. (Why doesn't this stuff ever happen when I'm there?) The sysadmin upgraded our Exchange server to Exchange 2010 and everone's subscriptions stopped. My Subscriptions showed an error message saying that the email address of one of the recipients... Read More...
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20 April 2011
How cool was SQL Bits 8?
The simple answer: very! Thanks very much to everyone who was involved in making it happen - both organisers and speakers. For a bargain price I got a deep dive day on performance monitoring and troubleshooting and two days of a wide variety of subjects. And it's not just people regurgitating Books... Read More...
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26 March 2011
Dates & times: it's worse than I thought
The BBC has a rather sobering article about time zones here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-12849630 . Fascinating stuff that explains how time zones work and how dates and times came to be so complicated. Next time somebody gives you an earful about how your query gave them the wrong data because of... Read More...
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22 March 2011
Transaction log growth in the model database
I had an odd one yesterday. I was sorting out internal fragmentation in our transaction logs (see Kim Tripp's blog http://www.sqlskills.com/BLOGS/KIMBERLY/post/8-Steps-to-better-Transaction-Log-throughput.aspx ) and I noticed that on our core production server the model database transaction log was... Read More...
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09 March 2011
Denali in shock code name change
Did I miss an announcement? I've had an email about a conference where one of the sessions is about a version of SQL Server I'm not familiar with: I checked the conference site and it says Denali there so this isn't a play on words. Sometimes the spellchecker just isn't enough! Read More...
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03 March 2011
Microsoft Business Intelligence Seminar 2011
I was lucky enough to attend the maiden presentation of this at Microsoft Reading yesterday. It was pretty gripping stuff not only because of what was said but also because of what could only be hinted at. Here's what I took away from the day. (Disclaimer: I'm not a BI guru, just a reasonably... Read More...
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