Bob Duffy's Blobby Blog

I’m just back from the office 2010 roadshow. Phew four cities and six presentations on PowerPivot later back at home with a nice cup of tea and my own bed for the night ;-) A few people asked me how to get hold of the RC0 that I was using on the demo...

I’m talking at the SQL Users group on “SCOM for SQL folk”. this session is based on my experiences with SCOM and working to get the product to do what we need it to do for managing SQL performance. Often as a DBA or SQL consultant, SCOM is “forced upon...

just read an article indicating the some states in the US are making data encryption on disk and on the wire compulsory with some pretty hefty fines (see http://www.sqlmag.com/article/sql-server/A-New-Law-that-Will-Change-the-Way-You-Build-Database-Applications...

The only local opportunity for advanced SQL training with sqlskills (Paul Randal and Kimberly Tripp) is happening in June/July this. As far as I know this will be the only SQL Immersion in Europe this year. If you are a SQL professional, attending a sqlskills...

If you haven’t seen PowerPivot yet, there is a great opportunity at the Office + SharePoint 2010 Roadshow for IT Pros coming to Dublin, Galway, Cork and Belfast. We have been working on making an Irish Centric Demo of PowerPivot along with the great new...

I have been on about four engagements in a row this year where we are looking at SQL performance on VMWare or Hyper-V. Here is a list of common things that you can do with virtualisation that may adversely affect SQL performance. Most of them also apply...

One annoying thing about working with Hyper-V  is you can end up with lots of “hidden” network devices. For example: a) If you installed using a RIS server and legacy NIC b) If you moved a VHD between servers, the NIC gets a new MAC address and device...

One of the current Technical Limitations of PowerPivot for SharePoint is the fact that the PowerPivot Server must be connected to a domain controller for full functionality. My holy grail has been to get PowerPivot Server working quickly in my humble...

The last topic in the series is entitled “SQL 2008 R2 – Next Generation Business Intelligence”. We hope to cover three main improvements in the SQL 2008 R2 release: a) PowerPivot for Excel b) PowerPivot for SharePoint c) Reporting Enhancements As usual...

Data compression in SQL 2008 is best for data warehouses, where they tend to be very IO constrained and can take a wee hit on CPU and latency. So how much space will you save with data compression? Well I just took a sample table from our SCOM data warehouse...

For those of you like me running Hyper-V, there is a VPC with the some of the 2010 “IW” stack loaded: - Domain Controller - MOSS 2010 - office 2010 - SQL 2008 - fast Search - Project server - Communicator I’m going to see how easy it is to put PowerPivot...

One side effect of following the best practices and running SQL Server under a Domain User account is that “Kerberos” authentication may not work due to the fact that the SPN cannot be registered. To step back a bit – what’s an SPN? This is a mapping...

I am playing with System Centre Operations Manager and Config Manager. They all use VBS to determine if SQL Server is present, but often fall foul of a stopped SQL Server service or a different major version (Sql 2008 v Sql 2005)and are very wordy – some...

Rafal Lukewiecki who is a top rated Tech Ed speaker is hosing a whole day BI event at the Burlington Hotel, Dublin on January the 19th. If you want to see some good demos of PowerPivot and other R2 features this is definitely worth a visit. Link is below...

Installing and Configuring PowerPivot has been painful for me – Partly because I managed to dive in and not read the readme.txt and release notes ;-) The three things I did wrong and have learned are: - “Standalone” SharePoint option is not supported...

Registration is still open for SQL Academy on Tuesday 1st December in the usual place (Sandyford, Dublin). For those of you who are new to SQL Academy – the aim is to bring level 300-400 content to SQL professionals in Ireland via half day seminars. The...

On my first week trying to setup PowerPivot I was plagues with an inability to see the sexy new silverlight previews of the mashup’s in SharePoint. The error message was “An Error Occurred while capturing snapshots for this document” To help debug, this...

Using the new “Default Install” option in SQL Server 2008 R2 I managed to get a full instance installed (Tools, Db Engine, SSAS, SSIS) in 18 minutes flat on a Hyper_V guest. Maybe this will become some sort of benchmark test for new servers…

If you are using the new “Gemini Team Site” in SharePoint 2010 (I guess this must be renamed in the Beta-2). You may notice that we can’t add Data Connection Libraries to work with traditional BI sources. This is just because it is not a site feature...

Three common issues integrating office and MOSS when using Server 2008 as a client: 1) Office cannot browse SharePoint 2) Credential Prompts 3) Where has my Network Places Gone   1. Office Cannot Browse SharePoint I’ve seen a few times that office...

Ok, everyone is hopefully aware that Gemini is now renamed to “PowerPivot”. IMO, this technology is set to make a very big impact on the Business Intelligence Industry. Here in Ireland, nice players like Qlikview have been doing very well over traditional...

I’m helping deliver a series of advanced seminars for Microsoft TechNet Ireland. The SQL Academy aims to bring level 300-400 advanced content to practising SQL Server professionals in Ireland with the opportunity to bring any questions to a supposed expert...

For anyone looking to find out how many SQL Servers they have deployed, and gain insight into resources used or performance - here is a selection of tools I have been using a lot on projects. Ok System Centre isn't free, but sometimes I am lucky enough...

Paul Randal and Kimberly Tripp are presenting at the SQL Ireland users group on the 23rd September. They were here last year and it was fully booked, with many people not able to get in, so I'd be very surprised if it wasn't a packed house again. You...

Microsoft's new self service business intelligence platform (project Gemini), is set to revolutionize how Business Intelligence projects are implemented, with many projects choosing a much more agile approach with less formal IT involvement in the modelling...