April 2009 - Posts

• Timely reminder to avoid early filtering on resource usage when profiling SQL

  I'm back in Melbourne doing some performance-tuning work this week. Yesterday's issue ended up being a caching problem in middle-tier code. These issues are surprisingly common. The symptoms were hundreds of thousands of calls to a particular stored proc Read More... Posted Wednesday, April 22, 2009 12:45 PM by Greg Low | 5 Comments

• How important is extensibility for SQL Server?

  One of the things that has always surprised me with SQL Server is the lack of extensibility points. In fact, the team seems to go out of their way to remove or avoid them. SQL Server Management Studio is an obvious example but I see it as a much deeper Read More... Posted Saturday, April 18, 2009 11:07 AM by Greg Low | 5 Comments

• No Microsoft BI Conference this year, SQL PASS Summit is the place to be, Call for speakers extended

  Microsoft have announced that they won't be running a BI conference as a separate event this year and that they will be supporting the SQL PASS summit as one of their key BI events for the year. Because of that, PASS has extended the call for speakers Read More... Posted Friday, April 10, 2009 9:28 AM by Greg Low | 1 Comments

• SQL Server 2008 SP1 is out: Now another adoption blocker is gone

  There seems to be a concept that no-one should install a new version of SQL Server until at least one service pack has been released for it. I've never ascribed to that thinking. I find it amusing that customers who would not install the RTM version of Read More... Posted Wednesday, April 08, 2009 3:31 PM by Greg Low | 0 Comments

• SQL Down Under shows now all "levelated"

  Hi Folks, I mentioned in a blog post a little while ago that we'd installed a copy of Levelator and started working through all the SQL Down Under shows to even out the volume of the speaker's voices. Mai has been working hard with that for some time Read More... Posted Sunday, April 05, 2009 5:53 PM by Greg Low | 1 Comments