Today I received this e-mail from Microsoft:
"Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2008 Microsoft® MVP Award! The MVP Award is our way of saying thank you for promoting the spirit of community and enhancing people’s lives and the industry’s success every day. Your extraordinary efforts in Windows Server System - SQL Server technical communities during the past year are greatly appreciated."
I am really honored and want to thank everyone at Microsoft for their enormous support. I see this award as an extra motivation to continue to work hard for the SQL Server community and in particular SQLUG.BE.
See you soon!!
Tuesday, January 01, 2008
Monday, December 17, 2007
SQLUG.BE - next session on SQL Server 2008
Our next SQLUG.BE evening will take place on Thursday, January 17th, 2008. The session will be given by Gunther Beersaerts who will be talking about the new features of Sql Server 2008.
Level: 200 – 300
Depending on the audience, we'll remain high-level (management / decision maker audience) or go more deeper (DBA, Developer or technical BI audience).
Speaker:
Gunther Beersaerts is a Senior Technical Specialist at Microsoft Belgium & Luxembourg.
Agenda:
18:00 - 18:30 Welcome
18:30 - 21:00 Session with pause
21:00 - 22:00 Drink
Abstract:
In this session we will provide an overview of the next release of SQL Server, SQL Server 2008, codenamed "Katmai". The session will cover the core value-proposition, major themes and scenarios, and the specific engine improvements, including the new Management Framework, datatypes (spatial,…), new Reporting Engine, FileStream, etc. We also cover the new development processes being used to build this release, the release timeline and the disclosure calendar.
Level: 200 – 300
Depending on the audience, we'll remain high-level (management / decision maker audience) or go more deeper (DBA, Developer or technical BI audience).
Speaker:
Gunther Beersaerts is a Senior Technical Specialist at Microsoft Belgium & Luxembourg.
Agenda:
18:00 - 18:30 Welcome
18:30 - 21:00 Session with pause
21:00 - 22:00 Drink
Full details and free registration can be found here.
Chopsticks, Technet Evening on HA and the 1 Euro SAN
Microsoft Belux recently launched MSDN Chopsticks and Technet Chopsticks. These community focused websites are some kind of a Youtube with technical content. The sites already contain quite a few interesting videos. The videos are webcasts, funcasts, demos, and complete sessions.
My Technet Evening on high availability in SQL Server 2005 was recorded and is now available online, including the demo with the 1 Euro SAN.
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
AITScripts - Nice bunch of Scripts
Nice bunch of DBA related scripts ... written by the folks of the Database Operations team at Microsoft.
Download here.
SQLBackupAll – Performs Full database backup for non-excluded databases by SQL native or Litespeed backup commands. The job has parameters to specify the desired backup location and compress (SQL Litespeed backup) or nocompress (SQL native backup) , whether to backup or not to backup read only database etc.
SQLBackupDiffAll - Performs Differential database backup for non-excluded databases by SQL native or Litespeed backup commands. This job is disabled by default. This can be enabled based on the customer’s needs for the recovery requirements.
SQLBackupTranAll – Performs Transaction Log backup for non-excluded databases by SQL native or Litespeed backup commands. The job has parameters to specify the desired backup location and compress (SQL Litespeed backup) or nocompress (SQL native backup)
SQLBackupChecker – Checks for backups that have not occurred in more than the specified number of hours in the job. There is a parameter to specify the desired number of hours to specify for the alert.
SQLDBCCAll - Performs database consistency checks on all system and user databases.
SQLIndexDefragAll – Performs Index defrag maintenance for non-excluded SQL 2000 databases. This job is disabled by default. It can be enabled based on the customer’s needs. This job helps to run the index defrag for all the databases in the SQL instance or any particular database or any particular table in a database.
SQLUpdateStatistics - Runs Update Statistics maintenance for non-excluded databases.
This job is disabled by default. This job is disabled by default. It can be enabled based on the customer’s needs. This job helps to run the update statistics for all the databases in the SQL instance or any particular database or any particular table in a database.
SQLCleanupMsdbBackupHistory – Cleans up the backup history information from msdb database.
SQLCycleErrorLog - Cycle the SQL Error log periodically so the size is manageable for viewing through SQL tools.
Download here.
SQLBackupAll – Performs Full database backup for non-excluded databases by SQL native or Litespeed backup commands. The job has parameters to specify the desired backup location and compress (SQL Litespeed backup) or nocompress (SQL native backup) , whether to backup or not to backup read only database etc.
SQLBackupDiffAll - Performs Differential database backup for non-excluded databases by SQL native or Litespeed backup commands. This job is disabled by default. This can be enabled based on the customer’s needs for the recovery requirements.
SQLBackupTranAll – Performs Transaction Log backup for non-excluded databases by SQL native or Litespeed backup commands. The job has parameters to specify the desired backup location and compress (SQL Litespeed backup) or nocompress (SQL native backup)
SQLBackupChecker – Checks for backups that have not occurred in more than the specified number of hours in the job. There is a parameter to specify the desired number of hours to specify for the alert.
SQLDBCCAll - Performs database consistency checks on all system and user databases.
SQLIndexDefragAll – Performs Index defrag maintenance for non-excluded SQL 2000 databases. This job is disabled by default. It can be enabled based on the customer’s needs. This job helps to run the index defrag for all the databases in the SQL instance or any particular database or any particular table in a database.
SQLUpdateStatistics - Runs Update Statistics maintenance for non-excluded databases.
This job is disabled by default. This job is disabled by default. It can be enabled based on the customer’s needs. This job helps to run the update statistics for all the databases in the SQL instance or any particular database or any particular table in a database.
SQLCleanupMsdbBackupHistory – Cleans up the backup history information from msdb database.
SQLCycleErrorLog - Cycle the SQL Error log periodically so the size is manageable for viewing through SQL tools.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
SQL Server 2008 - Virtual Labs
Get a jumpstart on SQL Server 2008 with those virtual labs:
TechNet Virtual Lab: Administering Servers by Using Declarative Management Framework (DMF) Policies
TechNet Virtual Lab: Authoring Reports Using SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services
TechNet Virtual Lab: Implementing Change Data Capture (CDC) in SQL Server 2008
TechNet Virtual Lab: Learn How to Build Occasionally Connected Applications with SQL Server 2008
TechNet Virtual Lab: What's new in SQL Server 2008 for Database Administrators
Monday, November 19, 2007
SQL Stuff at Tech Ed IT Forum
I had some other stuff to do, so I didn't make to TechEd this year. Fortunately Peter made an excellent review on TechEd IT Forum.
Looking forward the hear Peter's review on Day 5 ;-) See you Thursday!!
Looking forward the hear Peter's review on Day 5 ;-) See you Thursday!!
SQL Server 2008 - November CTP (5) released
Today Microsoft released CTP 5 aka The November CTP of SQL Server. This release is a major step forward and includes 18 major improvements:
Yoohoo, Intellisense is back and the stand alone Report Designer got a major GUI upgrade!!
- Data Collection and Performance Warehouse for Relational Engine
- Service Broker Enhancements
- Registered Servers Enhancements
- Synchronous net-changes change tracking for SQL Server
- T-SQL IntelliSense
- Declarative Management Framework (DMF) Enhancements
- Geo-spatial Support
- Analysis Services Query and Writeback Performance
- Robust Report Server Platform
- Integration Services - Lookup Enhancements
- Analysis Services MDX Query Optimizer - Block Computation
- Analysis Services Aggregation Design
- Analysis Services Cube Design
- Reporting Services Scale Engine
- Transparent Data Encryption
- Resource Governor - Limit Specification
- Backup Compression
- Plan Freezing
- Fully Parallel Plans Scale on Partitioned Tables
Yoohoo, Intellisense is back and the stand alone Report Designer got a major GUI upgrade!!
You can read the details in the "What's new" doc for the November CTP.
Download it here.Sunday, November 18, 2007
BIDS Helper 1.2 released
The great developers of BIDS Helper released an updated version of my favorite add-on for SQL Server BI development. Version 1.2 includes 21 (!!) add-ons, including 5 new ones focusing on Integration Services.
This is the version 1.2 features list:
This is the version 1.2 features list:
- Analysis Services
- Aggregation Manager
- Calculation Helpers
- Column Usage Reports
- Delete Unused Aggregations
- Deploy Aggregation Designs
- Deploy MDX Script
- Dimension Health Check
- Dimension Optimization Report
- Measure Group Health Check
- Printer Friendly Dimension Usage
- Tri-State Perspectives
- Show Extra Properties
- Update Estimated Counts
- Validate Aggregations
- Visualize Attribute Lattice
- Integration Services
- Create Fixed Width Columns
- dtsConfig File Formatter
- Expression and Configuration Highlighter
- Expression List
- Smart Diff
- General
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
TechNet Evening: High Availability in SQL Server 2005 - Delivering 99.999 % uptime
On December 5th, I will be presenting a Microsoft Technet Evening on High Availability in SQL Server.
Session Abstract:
SQL Server 2005 is designed to reduce both planned and unplanned downtime, provide solutions for disaster recovery, and provide greater system availability to database users through High Availability technologies. In this presentation Frederik will discuss various features (including Failover Clustering, Database Mirroring, Log Shipping, and Peer-to-Peer Replication) of SQL Server which help you meet your 99.999% uptime SLAs.
To finish off, we will have a sneak preview on the new high availability features of the upcoming SQL Server 2008.
Frederik Vandeputte is a Senior Consultant and trainer for Kohera, the Microsoft SQL Server/Business Intelligence Competence Center of the Cronos Group. Frederik is the Vice-President and co-founder of the Belgian SQL Server User Group (SQLUG.BE).
Free registration here.
Session Abstract:
SQL Server 2005 is designed to reduce both planned and unplanned downtime, provide solutions for disaster recovery, and provide greater system availability to database users through High Availability technologies. In this presentation Frederik will discuss various features (including Failover Clustering, Database Mirroring, Log Shipping, and Peer-to-Peer Replication) of SQL Server which help you meet your 99.999% uptime SLAs.
To finish off, we will have a sneak preview on the new high availability features of the upcoming SQL Server 2008.
Frederik Vandeputte is a Senior Consultant and trainer for Kohera, the Microsoft SQL Server/Business Intelligence Competence Center of the Cronos Group. Frederik is the Vice-President and co-founder of the Belgian SQL Server User Group (SQLUG.BE).
Free registration here.
Monday, October 22, 2007
Next SQLUG.BE Session on Reporting Services
On November, 22nd we are organizing our next SQLUG.BE event. Marc Martens will talk about Reporting Services.
Reporting Services is Microsoft's server based reporting solution that is delivered together with SQL Server 2005. In this session you will learn how to create a report, deploy and manage it. Also covered is how you can use Reporting Services to control the load on your source system when running a report. If there is time left we will shown how to write custom extensions for your reports.
Prepare yourself for a long night. First we have the session, afterwards we are offered a guided tour in "Huis van de Toekomst". Doors will be closed far after 22:00 hour.
The starting hour will be 18:30, doors open from 18:00 hour.
The event will take place in Huis van de Toekomst
Indringingsweg 1
B-1800 Vilvoorde
Registration is needed and seats limited, so hurry up. You can register here.
Thursday, August 02, 2007
SQL Server 2008 - White Papers
Microsoft released a first bunch of SQL Server 2008 whitepapers.
Happy reading ...
Happy reading ...
SQL Server 2008 Overview Whitepapers
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
July CTP of SQL Server 2008 released
As expected, Micosoft released the July CTP of SQL Server 2008. The new download is available on the Connect website. This new CTP contains quite a bunch of nice features; including new datatypes and a first public release of TABLIX. See the full list below and in the updated Improvement Pillars. There is also a series of webcasts on the new features.
Analysis Services Time Series
This improvement adds a new time series forecasting algorithm (ARIMA: Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average) to the data mining algorithm suite that provides more stable long term predictions.
Enterprise Reporting Engine
Improvements represent the two major infrastructure changes for Reporting Services. Reporting Services enhances the processing engine and rendering extensions to enable new functionality, such as Tablix support, and scalability as well as remove the dependency on IIS. Additionally, new report designer and configuration tool are provided that improve usability and workflow for RS customers.
T-SQL Improvements
Object Dependencies: The object dependencies improvement provides reliable discovery of dependencies between objects through newly introduced catalog view and dynamic management functions. Dependency information is always up-to-date for both schema-bound and non-schema-bound objects. Dependencies are tracked for stored procedures, tables, views, functions, triggers, user-defined types, XML schema-collections, and more.
Database Mirroring Enhancements
SQL Server 2008 builds upon the momentum of SQL Server 2005 by providing a more reliable platform with enhanced database mirroring:
Extended Events
SQL Server Extended Events is a general event-handling system for server systems. The Extended Events infrastructure supports the correlation of data from SQL Server, and under certain conditions, the correlation of data from the operating system and database applications. In the latter case, Extended Events output must be directed to Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) in order to correlate the event data with operating system or application event data.
Performance Data Collection
Collect data from various sources in SQL Server and OS to help with performance troubleshooting and server maintenance. With this improvement, organizations improve their analysis of common performance issues:
Improved XML Support
To leverages the new date and time types, SQL Server’s XML Schema collection now provides full support for the xs:date, xs:time and xs:dateTime data types. Support for union types is also enhanced by returning correct results for “instance of” queries when union types are involved, and adding support for lists of unions and unions of lists constructs in XML Schemas.
DATE/TIME Data Types
SQL Server 2008 introduces new date and time data types. The new data types enable applications to have separate date and time types, larger year ranges for date value, larger fractional seconds precision for time value, time-zone offset aware datetime type that containing date, time and time zone offset portion, user defined option on fractional seconds precision of time related types and datetime2 and datetimeoffset provide standards conformant semantics. Along with the T-SQL support on the new types, both native (ODBC, OLEDB) and managed (SqlClient) providers also provide the full support through the client driver APIs.
Large User-Defined Types Improvement
Large user-defined types allows users to expand the size of defined data types by eliminating the 8‑KB limit.
ORDPATH Improvement
ORDPATH improvement provides an important new functionality to our customers who use hierarchical data. It provides a superior way of modeling hierarchies in SQL Server by introducing the HierarchyID system data type and corresponding built-in methods which are designed to make it easier to store, query and operate hierarchical data. HierarchyID is also optimized for representing trees, the most common type of hierarchical data.
Analysis Services Time Series
This improvement adds a new time series forecasting algorithm (ARIMA: Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average) to the data mining algorithm suite that provides more stable long term predictions.
Enterprise Reporting Engine
Improvements represent the two major infrastructure changes for Reporting Services. Reporting Services enhances the processing engine and rendering extensions to enable new functionality, such as Tablix support, and scalability as well as remove the dependency on IIS. Additionally, new report designer and configuration tool are provided that improve usability and workflow for RS customers.
T-SQL Improvements
Object Dependencies: The object dependencies improvement provides reliable discovery of dependencies between objects through newly introduced catalog view and dynamic management functions. Dependency information is always up-to-date for both schema-bound and non-schema-bound objects. Dependencies are tracked for stored procedures, tables, views, functions, triggers, user-defined types, XML schema-collections, and more.
Database Mirroring Enhancements
SQL Server 2008 builds upon the momentum of SQL Server 2005 by providing a more reliable platform with enhanced database mirroring:
- Automatic bad page repair – allows the principal and mirror machines to transparently recover from 823/824 types of data page errors by requesting a fresh copy of the corrupted page from the mirroring partner.
- Log stream compression – compression of the outgoing log stream in order to minimize the network bandwidth used by database mirroring.
- Miscellaneous performance enhancements:
- using asynchronous log write requests on the mirror in order to shorten the log write time and thus speed-up the commit acknowledgement.
- better utilization of the mirroring log send buffers in order to pack multiple smaller log blocks into a single network send.
- Supportability and diagnosability improvements:
- additional performance counters to allow for more granular accounting of the time spent across the different stages of the DBM log processing.
- new DMVs and extensions of existing views in order to expose additional information about the mirroring sessions.
Extended Events
SQL Server Extended Events is a general event-handling system for server systems. The Extended Events infrastructure supports the correlation of data from SQL Server, and under certain conditions, the correlation of data from the operating system and database applications. In the latter case, Extended Events output must be directed to Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) in order to correlate the event data with operating system or application event data.
Performance Data Collection
Collect data from various sources in SQL Server and OS to help with performance troubleshooting and server maintenance. With this improvement, organizations improve their analysis of common performance issues:
- Define what data is collected and organize the collection into collection sets
- Start/stop/manipulate collection sets programmatically (T-SQL and .NET API)
- Define where data is stored (relational database)
- View data through reports in SQL Server Management Studio.
- Provide platform to plug in more data collectors in the future.
Improved XML Support
To leverages the new date and time types, SQL Server’s XML Schema collection now provides full support for the xs:date, xs:time and xs:dateTime data types. Support for union types is also enhanced by returning correct results for “instance of” queries when union types are involved, and adding support for lists of unions and unions of lists constructs in XML Schemas.
DATE/TIME Data Types
SQL Server 2008 introduces new date and time data types. The new data types enable applications to have separate date and time types, larger year ranges for date value, larger fractional seconds precision for time value, time-zone offset aware datetime type that containing date, time and time zone offset portion, user defined option on fractional seconds precision of time related types and datetime2 and datetimeoffset provide standards conformant semantics. Along with the T-SQL support on the new types, both native (ODBC, OLEDB) and managed (SqlClient) providers also provide the full support through the client driver APIs.
Large User-Defined Types Improvement
Large user-defined types allows users to expand the size of defined data types by eliminating the 8‑KB limit.
ORDPATH Improvement
ORDPATH improvement provides an important new functionality to our customers who use hierarchical data. It provides a superior way of modeling hierarchies in SQL Server by introducing the HierarchyID system data type and corresponding built-in methods which are designed to make it easier to store, query and operate hierarchical data. HierarchyID is also optimized for representing trees, the most common type of hierarchical data.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
BIDS Helper - A must have for BI developers
BIDS Helper is a set of Visual Studio.Net add-ins that extend and enhance the functionality of the SQL Server BI Development Studio. The current release (1.1.0.1) containts the following add-ins:
I really like the "Deploy MDX Script" add-in. This feature allows you to right click on a cube in an Analysis Services solution and deploy just the calculation script. This comes in very handing while debugging and testing MDX calculations in offline mode.
It's a open source and available as a free download on CodePlex. Toeltje van de week!!!
I really like the "Deploy MDX Script" add-in. This feature allows you to right click on a cube in an Analysis Services solution and deploy just the calculation script. This comes in very handing while debugging and testing MDX calculations in offline mode.
It's a open source and available as a free download on CodePlex. Toeltje van de week!!!
Friday, July 27, 2007
Rumor: new CTP of SQL Server 2008 coming soon
Rumor has it that a new CTP of SQL Server 2008 is on its way. A recent article on the MCP Magazine mentions the planned +/-60 days release schedule between CTPs. CTP3 aka the June CTP was released on June, 4. The June CTP was nice but lacks a lot of the announced features. So ... looking forward to the new stuff to spend those rainy Belgium summer evenings ;-)
If you wanna get a good overview of the new stuff, check out these resources:
If you wanna get a good overview of the new stuff, check out these resources:
- Bob Beauchemin's list of new features.
- If you have about 1 to 2 hrs to spend: the free online course on SQL Server 2008. It's really good, and for the moment, the best and most (public available) in depth overview available.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Next SQLUG.BE Session on Analysis Services
SQL Internals Viewer
Just discovered a great tool via Kalen Delaney's Blog. This tool gives you a low level graphical view on how data is stored in a database. Toeltje van de week!!!
SQL Internals Viewer is a tool for looking into the SQL Server storage engine and seeing how data is physically allocated, organised and stored.
All sorts of tasks performed by a DBA or developer can benefit greatly from knowledge of what the storage engine is doing and how it works. This tool has been designed to make database internals more accessible.
The Quick Start section gives a guide on how to use SQL Internals Viewer.
The Resources section lists articles and books with information on SQL Server internals.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Office 2007 - mapping the old menus to the ribbon
I really like the ribbon in Office 2007. I think it is a great improvement over the old menus. However, every now and then I get lost in the ribbon and can't seem to find that very nice little menu option. Microsoft released an excellent set of Excel workbooks. The Excel sheets list every single menu option in the old Office applications and their corresponding place in the Office 2007 ribbon.
Nice to see this one in the Help Menu ;-)
| Show the Office Assistant | > | Removed from product |
Bye Bye Clippy :-)
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
SQL Server Launch Date: February 27, 2008
At it's annual Worldwide Partner Conference yesterday, Microsoft announced the release dates for it's next trio of products: Windows 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008. On February 27, 2008, Microsoft will launch these products in Los Angeles with a wave of kickoff events around the world to follow.
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
Try Catch
Bart Bultinck, fellow at SQLUG.BE, and some other top bloggers in the Belgian Blogsphere started the excellent blog site TryCatch.be. Chummy, Kurt Roggen, Peter De Tender, Tom Vandaele, any many more to come are blogging now on this must have RSS feed.
SQL Server 2005 Best Practices Analyzer RTM
Microsoft released a new version of the SQL Server 2005 Best Practices Analyzer (July 2007). "CTP" was dropped from the name, so we are RTM now, I guess.
The SQL Server 2005 Best Practices Analyzer (BPA) gathers data from Microsoft Windows and SQL Server configuration settings. BPA uses a predefined list of SQL Server 2005 recommendations and best practices to determine if there are potential issues in the database environment.
Download here.
The SQL Server 2005 Best Practices Analyzer (BPA) gathers data from Microsoft Windows and SQL Server configuration settings. BPA uses a predefined list of SQL Server 2005 recommendations and best practices to determine if there are potential issues in the database environment.
Download here.
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