Me, My Database and I

I'm an MVP!

2008-07-02T06:26:00Z

I found out this morning that I've been named a SQL Server MVP (Most Valuable Professional).

For those of you who don't know what the MVP program is, here's a brief overview.

Each quarter, Microsoft selects a group of people across many different technologies to become MVPs. Your selection is based on your community involvement over the past year. Community involvement can include presenting at user group meetings, posting answers to questions on newsgroups, writing articles for online magazines, etc.

My community involvement is primarily through the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS). I currently serve on the Board of Directors and am in charge of two techincal publications - a newsletter that goes out every other week and a magazine that goes out every other month.

Thank you to everyone who has supported my efforts in the community over the years. You'll probably be seeing much more of me out there in the future.

Chuck

SQL Server 2008 RC0

2008-06-13T18:39:00Z

For those of you who haven't heard, RC0 of SQL Server 2008 has been released.

If you have played with any of the CTP releases of SQL Server 2008, you'll notice that there are a few differences in the installer - but not enough to cause you to relearn anything.

I loaded it up on my dev box this week, and I am quite impressed with what I am seeing so far. There's a nice new Activity Monitor that is similar to the default view of the Vista Reliability and Performance Monitor - and it even works against SQL Server 2005 servers.

Over the next couple of months, I'll be writing some fairly detailed blog posts on SQL Server 2008 - each of them based on a different new feature. Keep checking back - I hope to profile at least one new feature every other week.

Chuck

TechEd Developer - Day 3

2008-06-06T20:14:00Z

Another day, more booth duty. I spent a good part of my day working with the VSTS Database Edition team. Great group of people - and they have a great product. It is nice talking to people who have no idea how the product can help them. When they see what it can do, they normally want to get it in place quick.

I also caught a session on a new in-memory distributed caching technology from Microsoft codenamed "Velocity". It is quite impressive. It can actually be an in-memory store for your IIS Session State - and it allows you to move from machine to machine in a web farm without losing your session!

More to come on Day 4!

Chuck

TechEd Developer - Day 2

2008-06-05T20:35:00Z

I spent a bunch of time today in the SQL Server TLC area down on the show floor. I did, however, manage to get away for a great session on Extended Events presented by Bob Beauchemin - who I had dinner with the night before at a great Brazilian steakhouse. It's amazing all that you can do with the extended events architecture.

More to come tomorrow.

TechEd Developer - Day 1

2008-06-03T15:10:00Z

I just got out of the keynote for TechEd Developer. Bill Gates actually opened up for a Q&A session from the floor. Quite impressive.

It was announced that Silverlight 2 Beta 2 will be released by the end of the week, and that you will be able to get a Go-Live license. I know some of my co-workers will be happy about that.

I'm getting ready to go do my first shift in the TLC area. I'll be working the SQL Server area (look for the green). Today I'll be at the Storage demo station. The rest of the week I'll be splitting my time between Storage and Team Edition for Database Professionals. If you're here, stop by and say hi!

That's all for now. I'll have more to report later.

Chuck

TechEd Developer

2008-05-30T21:15:00Z

If you're going to be at TechEd in Orlando next week, stop by and say Hi! I'll be in the Microsoft TLC area over lunch Tuesday through Friday. I'll be helping out the VSTS folks. Hope to see you there.

PASS Call for Presentations - Deadline Extended Again!

2008-04-01T16:39:00Z

Due to technical difficulties, the deadline for submitting abstracts for the 2008 PASS Community Summit has been extended through Monday, April 7, 2008.

If you are interested in submitting an abstract, please do so at http://calltospeakers.sqlpass.org/.

Chuck

PASS Call for Presentations - Deadline Extended!

2008-03-28T16:55:00Z

The deadline for submitting abstracts for the 2008 PASS Community Summit has been extended through Monday, March 31, 2008.

If you were considering submitting an abstract but thought you ran out of time, you now have a few extra days. Let's get those abstracts drawn up while watching basketball this weekend!

Chuck

PASS Call for Presentations

2008-03-27T18:59:00Z

The call for presentations for the 2008 PASS Community Summit closes on Friday, March 28, 2008. If you are interested in submitting an abstract, go to http://calltospeakers.sqlpass.org/.

The PASS Community Summit is a great opportunity to start your career as a conference speaker or to add to your presentation list if you already present at conferences. Please consider submitting an abstract or 6.

Chuck

Upcoming Presentation

2008-03-27T14:30:00Z

If anyone is interested, I will be presenting at the Wisconsin SQL Server User Group meeting in June. The meeting date is Tuesday, June 10, 2008, and it will be held at the Microsoft office in Waukesha, WI. The meeting starts at 4:30 PM, and usually is wrapped up by 6:30 PM (to allow people to make it to the local .NET user group meeting at 7:00 PM).

I'll be presenting on new features in SQL Server 2008. This will be a follow-up to the session in April by James L.

If there are any topics that you would like to see covered, please add them as comments to this post.

See you in June!

Chuck

Hardware - Can't Live With It, Can't Live Without It

2008-03-03T23:10:00Z

Have you ever had one of those days where everything is going great until *kapow* a piece of hardware stops working properly?

I had that happen to me a few weeks ago - twice!

I had planned out a major migration for my Dev/QA/UAT environment. This involved unistalling SQL Server, recarving a bunch of disk, renaming a few servers, changing the domain on a few servers, then restoring all of the backups that I took.

Things were going along quite well until I tried to reboot one of my servers and it wouldn't come back up. We had to have the hardware vendor come in and bring the machine back to life. Luckily, we didn't lose anything but time.

Then, a few hours later, I rebooted a different server and it wouldn't come back up. At this point, I started to question what I was doing to these poor machines. We got the hardware vendor to bring that box back up. Again, we didn't lose anything but time.

Both of these issues were complete flukes. It just so happens that they both happened during the same migration. Frustrating.

But, at least the new environment is up and running!

Chuck

Reporting Services Frustrations

2008-02-25T15:32:00Z

Have you ever been so frustrated with a software installation that you just ended up doing a fresh OS install and starting over?

I got that way last week trying to install Team Foundation Server 2008.

I wanted to install a named instance of SQL Server on my data tier, but Team Foundation Server wasn't too happy with the named instance of Reporting Services. So, I gave up on the named instance and decided to install the default instance.

The problem was that Reporting Services wouldn't uninstall.

Apparently, the Reporting Services uninstall expects the IIS virtual directories to be present so that they can be removed. Since Team Foundation Server configures Reporting Services and I didn't go through that configuration, the virtual directories did not exist. I ended up tweaking the registry to remove the service registration and then deleting the Reporting Services directory from the hard drive.

Not fun, but I hope that others can benefit from my pain!

Chuck

SQL Server 2008 February CTP

2008-02-20T15:18:00Z

Just a quick post to say that the February CTP of SQL Server 2008 has been released. You can download it from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/bb851664.aspx. You will need to subscribe to Microsoft Connect - if you haven't already.

Have fun! I know I will.

Chuck

SQL Server 2008 Features

2008-02-06T18:05:00Z

I've been seriously ramping up on the SQL Server 2008 feature set over the past few weeks, and I'm noticing that there are a ton of new features in the database engine that not a lot of people are talking about. Everyone hears about the biggies - Resource Governor, new Date data types, Spatial data - but there are a few hidden gems that are quite nice. I really like the enhancements to management studio that allow you to set up a configuration server to use as your master repository for your registered server tree. That is going to save us a load of time. The ability to execute a single query against a group of servers and have the results returned in a single grid is also quite nice.

Of all of the new features, I'd list these as my top five (in no particular order):

MERGE
Resource Governor
Intellisense
Management Data Warehouse
Date data types

I'm not saying that these are the best features in the engine, but these are the features that will impact my job the most.

Chuck

Embedded Passwords

2008-01-24T21:55:00Z

Have you ever spent days pounding your head against a wall investigating an issue that has no logical explanation? Then next time this happens, check for a password embedded in whatever it is you are trying to do.

I just got done troubleshooting a SQL Server Agent job that suddenly stopped working. I talked to our networking and system admin folks, but they couldn't find anything that changed. I validated that the account Agent was running under had the appropriate access rights. Then - on a whim - I decided to look closer at the body of the job. One of the steps had a user name and an encrypted password. As it ends up, that password was changed the day the job started failing.

The moral of this story is - if you do need to embed passwords into jobs or applications - make sure that you document where that password is embedded so that - when someone does need to change it - it can be changed in every place where it is used.