Niels SQL Server Blog

Stream and Complex Event Processing from a Relational Guy’s Eye (StreamInsight Series)

2009-09-18T22:17:00Z

This is the first in (hopefully) a series of blog posts where I will be looking into Microsoft’s new technology for Complex Event Processing (CEP); StreamInsight (SI). This post is an overview of the problem domain that Microsoft tries to target SI at. As I am a relational database guy at heart, I look at it from a relational guy’s perspective. [Read more ...]

Resources for StreamInsight and CEP

2009-09-05T12:36:00Z

I thought I’d make a short post about various resources (mostly blogs), that cover Complex Event Processing and StreamInsight. So, without further ado, resources for CEP and StreamInsight ... [read more here]

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Deployment of Assemblies to SQLCLR

2009-08-29T20:22:00Z

~~New blogpost at: http://www.sqldevelop.com/blog/deployment-of-assemblies-to-sqlclr/~~

New article at: http://www.sqldevelop.com/visual-studio-and-deployment-of-sqlclr-assemblies/

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Updated: Changed the URL to the correct address for the article

StreamInsight and SQL Server

2009-08-26T20:06:00Z

New blogpost at: http://www.sqldevelop.com/blog/streaminsight-and-sql-server/

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StreamInsight and Notification Services

2009-08-23T19:50:00Z

New blogpost at: http://www.sqldevelop.com/blog/streaminsight-and-notification-services/

StreamInsight Stuff

2009-08-22T23:09:00Z

New blog post at: http://www.sqldevelop.com/blog/streaminsight-stuff/

Hello World

2009-08-22T19:35:00Z

New blogpost at: http://www.sqldevelop.com/blog

Niels

Debugging in SQL Server 2008

2008-07-16T16:44:00Z

As good as SQL 2005 was (well, still are), one disappointment was that you needed Visual Studio if you wanted to debug your stored procedures. Seriously, what was MS thinking when they did that, especially as in SQL 2000, Query Analyzer had debug capabilities?!!

Anyway, today I am playing around, errm - doing serious stuff in the RC0 release of SQL Server 2008, and just by coincidence notice that there is a debug menu entry in the toolbar(how blind can one be - I must have been looking at that toolbar quite a few times). So I wrote some T-SQL code, put in a couple of breakpoint and hit Alt + F5, and lo and behold - my bp’s were hit and I could step through the code. I then wrote a very basic stored proc, wrote some code that called the proc, put a bp at the call into the proc and executed. When the execution stopped at the bp I hit F11 and I stepped into the proc - WoHoo!!! Call me sad, but stuff like this make me happy!!

Now, let’s hope that MS will keep this feature in and not pull it at the last minute - anyone remember the XQuery designer in one of the very early SQL 2005 beta’s??

SqlClrProject version 2.6 Released

2008-02-27T09:59:00Z

I have just released a new version - 2.6 - of the deployment tool for SQLCLR assemblies. It is a minor release, but it implements some changes that are fundamental for coming versions and also fixes a couple of minor bugs.

The download page for it is here, and if you want general information about what the SqlClr project is, you should go here.

SQL Server 2008 February CTP Available

2008-02-20T09:51:00Z

Euan posted late yesterday evening that SQL Server 2008 February CTP (CTP 6) has been released. Grab it from here (one of the pages are dated November 2007, but the link will take you to the correct download).

Update of SQLCLRProject

2008-01-30T08:11:00Z

I’ve had some feed-back about SQLCLRProject (thanks Doug et al!), and based on that fixed some issues.

Read all about it, and get the updates on the download page.

As always, comments and suggestions for improvements are very welcome!!

Niels

Like Phoenix Rising ... or New Version of SQLCLRProjct

2008-01-14T15:37:00Z

Hi everyone, it’s been a while (shame one me!)!!

As some of you may know, back in the days I developed a tool for deploying .NET assemblies to SQL Server 2005 (or, as it was called then, Yukon). Initially it was just a tool used from the command line. As time went by, it evolved into a project named SQLCLRProject, consisting of the command line tool (YukonDeploy), a stand-alone front-end GUI, DeployProperties, and an add-in (with project and item-templates) for Visual Studio, DeployAddIn.

The latest release of SQLCLRProject was back in February 2006 (wow, that was a long time ago ) , and up until a month or so, nothing much was done to it. I used it whenever I did any SQLCLR work and I know other developers were using it as well. Anyway, a while back I started receiving emails from people wondering if I could fix some “undocumented features” and/or implement some new features.

So, I decided to resurrect the project and the last weeks I have been working on fixing the issues and adding some more features. I’m fairly happy with it as it is right now, and today I release version 2.5. The download page for it is here.

So what has been done:

The project has now it’s own web-pages, so I have a place to point people to when explaining what SQLCLRProject is.
- main page
- download page.
The Visual Studio add-in (and templates) supports both VS 2005 as well as VS 2008
The VS add-in (as well as the other tools) supports both SQL Server 2005 as well as SQL Server 2008 (Katmai).
The previous version of the tool allowed you to re-deploy a UDT without manually dropping tables with columns based on the UDT. The tool either dropped the whole table or just the column (based on a configurable setting), before re-deploying. In this version the choice is as before to either to drop the whole table or the column. However if choosing to drop the column:
- first the table is altered and a new column is added (varchar(max) or varbinary(max) - also based on a configurable setting),
- then the data from the original column is copied over to the new column
- finally the original column is dropped.
In T-SQL we have the notion of procedure parameters with default values. In .NET we don’t have anything similar (well, VB.NET has optional parameters, but that is a compiler hack). The tool now allows you to, by using an attribute, defining parameters in your .NET code that will be created as T-SQL object with default values.
Fixed a bug where the add-in for VS could not handle project with white spaces in the path.

So, if you are interested, go to here to read more about SQLCLRProject and if you want to download; the download page is here.

Comments etc are always welcome, post a comment here (or on the main page) or drop me an email.

Niels

Rebooting the Blog

2006-08-21T07:42:00Z

I’ve been blogging on and off (mosly off) for a couple of years now, and blogging has been trying to quit smoking - but the opposite: you keep it up (blogging) for a while but then you fall back into the old habits (not blogging).

I have decided to give it a final go; I’ll try to blog with some frequency, if I can not do that for a sustained period I have told myself to give it up totally. In conjunction with trying to get back to blogging I have also decided to move to a wordpress.com hosted blog. For a little while I may do some cross-posting to here, but I suggest that you go over to my wordpress blog.

In this blog I’ll cover (as before) topics regarding databases (SQL Server in general), data access technologies (ADO.NET, LINQ etc). As I have recently switched to Mac and OSX I may also write about the experiences switching to Mac after having been a Windows user for a looooooong time.

I’ll try and do a re-direction of the feed from here to the new feed at wordpress, but I can not guarantee that I will succeed in doing that, so if you are interested in my rants please re-subscribe at: http://nielsb.wordpress.com/feed.

The Devil Wears Skates ...

2006-05-13T13:22:00Z

..... the hell has frozen over. What am I on about?

I wrote in my earlier post today that I was checking out a new blog client, and that the reason for it would become clear in a future post - well this is it. I have trough out my whole computing life been a Microsoft/Windows guy through and through. I started way back in the Windows 1.0 days and I have been faithful ever since.

Actually that is a lie, I had a fling with Red hat Linux for two days - but that is all. It has been Microsoft and Windows for me. I have been beta testing all the various Windows releases, and I must say I have been fairly happy with them all (well, I don't know about Windows Bob), and have used them in production way before they've RTM:ed.

Until now that is, and Vista. When I first heard about Longhorn, I was really, really excited and thought this was going to be great - that was PDC 2003 BTW. Well, we know what happened, but I was still excited and looked forward to the beta cycle for the "new" Longhorn - Vista.

For each beta release I have installed it, tried to work with it and as quickly un-installed it. For me Vista is almost the new Bob! Its is fancy window dressing, but not much more. And most of the added features of Vista can be had with other OS:es. One huge difference is that, especially when it comes to security features, they are usable in other OS:es compared to Vista.

Now, here's the part why hell has frozen over; I have switched to OSX. Ever since Apple decided to go Intel, I have glanced towards the Apple space. I guess what pushed me over was Parallels. As I still make my living teaching in the Windows space, I can now have the best of both worlds, running OSX as my host and Windows virtual machines. For the last couple of weeks. I have used OSX for a while now, and I must say it is a really nice OS (heck, any OS that includes Emacs must be OK). I have had surprisingly few issues, it just works.

So, there we go. I will undoubtedly install Vista, at least on a VM, cause Vista will have some really nice features that I am extremely interested in; the transactional filesystem to mention one - but for now my main OS is OSX.

Updated Version of SqlClrProject

2006-01-10T02:15:00Z

Back in December (26:th to be exact) I released a new version of the SqlClrProject and wrote about it here [0].

One drawback of the deployment functionality was that you could only deploy locally as the deployment process used the CREATE ASSEMBLY based on the location of the assembly; i.e. CREATE ASSEMBLY myasm FROM 'path_to_dll'.

Well, this is now fixed, as I have chenged the code so it now uses the binary representation of the assembly. You who know your CREATE ASSEMBLY stuff may think "what about dependent assemblies?" as dependent assemblies are not automatically deployed when using the binary representation. Well, the code handles that as well, it uses reflection to see what the dependent assemblies are and retrieves the binary representation of those as well during deployment.

So if you have installed the original SqlClrProject which was available from here [1], there is now an update here [2]. Download the update, un-zip and follow the readme.txt. The original download has now been updated as well, so if you haven't retrived it yet, go and get it [3].

[0]: http://staff.develop.com/nielsb/PermaLink,guid,200487e5-f2e2-449c-8a3f-ee28e6aa8735.aspx

[1]: http://staff.develop.com/nielsb/code/DeployPropAndAddIn.zip

[2]: http://staff.develop.com/nielsb/code/yukondeployupdate.zip

[3]: http://staff.develop.com/nielsb/code/DeployPropAndAddIn.zip