December 2007 - Posts

• Beyond Relational ???

  Dejan Sarka has a thought provoking post about Microsoft’s use of the term “beyond relational” to describe the new Katmai data types such as spatial or file stream. from his post… I would simply say that the people that use the "beyond relational" expression Read More... Posted Saturday, December 29, 2007 12:11 PM by Paul Nielsen | 49 Comments Filed under: Katmai, Beyond Relational

• OT: Jan 1 - New TSA Lithium Battery Rules

  The TSA today issued new rules concerning Lithium batteries. Spare batteries prohibited in checked baggage, limited in carry-on baggage measured by the aggregate Lithium in grams, or by the total watt hours, and by how they packaged. I've been packaging Read More... Posted Friday, December 28, 2007 10:20 PM by Paul Nielsen | 0 Comments

• SQL Myths

  It’s amazing what people believe. Here are some SQL beliefs or strange ideas that I’ve encountered in the past year. · The column order isn’t important, so long as the column is in the index anywhere, SQL Server can use that column to optimize a where Read More... Posted Friday, December 28, 2007 6:17 PM by Paul Nielsen | 33 Comments Filed under: SQL Myths

• OT: Cool Tech Links

  Here are three links I recently found that Rock! Three, no Four, Programmer Virtues . StufBak tags for your Tech Gear. Johnny Chung's Amazing head-tracking 3D interface using Wiimote. Watch the third demo. Imagine navigating queries, data, and cubes and Read More... Posted Monday, December 24, 2007 10:32 AM by Paul Nielsen | 0 Comments Filed under: fun

• Free Instant SQL Formatter

  About a year ago a client showed this website to me. I saved it to my favorites and just now rediscovered this little gem from Gudu soaftware, Instant SQL Formatter . They have a free add-in version for Management Studio (but I haven't tested it.) Read More... Posted Sunday, December 23, 2007 3:16 PM by Paul Nielsen | 5 Comments

• World of Warcraft / SQL Server

  The World of SQL Server is a bit like Blizzard’s MMORPG, World of Warcarft. If you haven’t played World of Warcraft, it’s a complete virtual alternate world. In both worlds… · you can specialize (e.g. warrior) or be a generalist (e.g. druid) · you can Read More... Posted Saturday, December 22, 2007 12:24 PM by Paul Nielsen | 1 Comments Filed under: fun

• A funny thing happened on the way to the database

  A funny thing happened the other day. I was running 64-bit Dev edition on my 4Gb Vista 64-bit notebook. SQL Server was set to 1Gb RAM and I was running 10 scripts each continually inserting a new randomly generated person into a table. The goal was to Read More... Posted Friday, December 14, 2007 11:20 AM by Paul Nielsen | 2 Comments Filed under: Memory, blunders, fun

• 10 lessons from 35K tps

  I’ve spent the last 6 months on a contract designing and developing a high transaction database – a couple orders of magnitude higher than the average OLTP SQL Server database. The SLA specified a hard transaction duration and the primary fetch feature Read More... Posted Wednesday, December 12, 2007 11:29 PM by Paul Nielsen | 39 Comments Filed under: performance, Agile, CLR, tps, Upsert

• What’s wrong with SELECT * ?

  As an interview question this one reveals the mindset of the person. “Returns more columns than needed – wastes resources” He’s concerned about the network/systems. “If you add a column it might break the app” He’s a developer. “It compromises the extensibility Read More... Posted Wednesday, December 12, 2007 2:21 PM by Paul Nielsen | 21 Comments Filed under: interview

• Nordic User UI Screencast (open source)

  I've posted a screencast (7:52) of an early version of the Nordic end-user UI being written by Gary Lail in C#.net. update to the post… Version 2 of the Nordic (New O/R Design) API is an open source license project that uses T-SQL code generation to build Read More... Posted Tuesday, December 11, 2007 9:51 PM by Paul Nielsen | 1 Comments Filed under: Screencast, Nordic O/R dbms

• 15 shopping days left at ALFKI

  I'm kicking off the next round of the SQL Server Bible series for Wiley. For the past two versions I used my own custom sample databases and skipped the MSFT sample databases (even though I feel that ALFKI's a friend and I'd love to shop there someday.) Read More... Posted Monday, December 10, 2007 12:52 PM by Paul Nielsen | 7 Comments Filed under: Northwind, samples, books

• Cumulative Totals Screencast

  Prompted by a daily "SQL Tip" email a few days ago that recommended the correlated subquery to solve the cumulative total problem, this 5 minute screencast (5:02) demonstrates that the cursor solution indeed out-scales the set-based correlated subquery Read More... Posted Thursday, December 06, 2007 6:49 PM by Paul Nielsen | 19 Comments Filed under: performance, Screencast, cumulative totals, cursors, T-SQL

• SQLTeach – Vancouver – PASS Board Report

  I'm writing this at 39K feet on a United 757 flying home to Denver. This week was SQLTeach in Vancouver followed by the PASS Board meeting in Redmond. SQLTeach is a smaller (400-500 attendees fits in a hotel) developer/SQL conference organized by Jean-Rene Read More... Posted Saturday, December 01, 2007 8:55 AM by Paul Nielsen | 2 Comments Filed under: Conference, Community