It's Friday - time for the quote of the day: "We think in generalities, but we live in detail." - Alfred North Whitehead

Sometimes you want to edit data directly in a table (often a very bad idea!). In Enterprise Manager (SQL2K) and SQL Server Management Studio (SQL2K5) you right-click a table and select "Open Table" from the menu. That brings back ALL of the rows in the table, and you edit them that way. This has a bad habit of locking tables while all that happens.

So in SSMS 2K8, we added two menu items - "Edit Top 200 Rows" and "Select Top 1000 Rows". Now you can edit just a few at a time or view them. By the way, these numbers are a value you can set in the Tools | Options menu.

When I first started at Microsoft, I worked a couple of projects with the SQL Server Security team - and I really enjoyed that group. They are a very smart, fun group of folks to hang around with. Plus, they are really good at math!

Anyway, they wrote some whitepapers recently that are a great set of links to have:

• Engine Separation of Duties for the Application Developer - discusses how to build applications that support role separation.
• Database Encryption in SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition - in depth treatise on Transparent Database Encryption.
• Cryptography in SQL Server - Survery of all the cryptography features in SQL Server 2008.

I'll be presenting at lots of conferences soon - SQL Saturday in Olympia Washington, several webcasts, TechEd Brazil and then TechEd Europe in Barcelona.

But I'll also be presenting at one of the biggest SQL-Geekfests there is - SQL PASS. I'll be doing a series on PowerShell and SQL Server, and I'm also doing a pre-conference session on High-Availability and Disaster Recovery (HADR). We'll start at about the 200 level and by the end of 6 hours, we'll go all the way through the 400-level stuff, and at the end we'll show you how to set up you own HADR system using only Virtual Machines! Hey, nothing better than saving a few thousand dollars by not having to by a SAN. I'll also have the team there that actually writes the code for HA - you can ping them with questions, and they even have a few questions for you for the next generation of HA in SQL Server. You'll be able to directly affect what we do with the product.

I'll chat about the other presentations in the next few days, but definitely get registered for the PASS pre-con today: http://summit2008.sqlpass.org/precon-buck-woody.html

I mentioned the other day that I'm teaching a college course at the University of Washington, and as part of that we're doing a complete database project from requirements gathering to a completed database with all its objects. The students have done a great job on the requirements "probing questions" section, and it brought up a design question. How much should the database designer know about the business to guide them in helping design the database?

There is a school of thought that says the Business or the Business Analyst should know what the organization does and the technical staff should focus on the technology, not the business side of things. That may be fine for some groups, but for the data tier I disagree. I think the database designer should learn as much as time permits about the business and process flow through tthe company. If they don't, they have to live with the design changes later anyway. It just makes for a smoother process for the technical staff to "reach out" a little to the business.

Hey - us DBAs don't have enough to do anyway, correct? :)

We got an e-mail the other day from a DBA who said he didn’t see the need for PowerShell for SQL Server. He thought our time might have been spent better elsewhere. I’ll restate the reply I gave him below, but it brings up an interesting point – when we make decisions, some folks are happy, others are not, and still others are a little confused! I’ll let you take a look at the reply and see what you think. By the way, at the end I’ll include a link to someone else who buys off on the feature:

Hello there –

My name is Buck Woody, and I’ve been a DBA for a really long time. I’ve seen just tons of technologies come and go for managing or working with database technologies. My life up until a couple of years ago was in multiple-vendor environments, from Oracle to SQL Server to DB2 and even a little MySQL thrown in for luck.  The primary tools I used for all that were a lot of custom scripting in Perl and HTML for reports.

I joined Microsoft two years ago and a few months ago joined the Manageability team. When I heard about PowerShell (not the SQL Provider for it) I thought the same as you – I have vbscript, Perl and all that – yawn.  But I started playing around with it, and I warmed up a little. It was interesting to have a shell that also was a scripting language. And it opened up all the .NET stuff, and while I’m an admin and not a developer, it was interesting to be able to code a little here and there.

The key concept is that you can treat objects like the registry as if it were a file system, using CD and DIR, but you’re also able to sling some pretty interesting code around as well. When we created PowerShell for SQL Server, I started playing with that.

There are some interesting things you get with this provider. One is that the database objects are treated like a drive. So what? Well, you can, for instance, in just a single line DIR the top tables by rowcount (or size if that’s what you want), send that to a sort mechanism, output that to an HTML file, and save it out to Excel all at the same time. And it’s easy enough so that I don’t have to program to do that. I could also find out the databases that haven’t been backed up, send that to a report, and then back them up to a drive that has enough space. Also without code.

The other interesting thing is that you can manage not only SQL Server, but Exchange, Windows, and other Microsoft platforms – all from the same shell. And we even included the PowerShell provider as an Agent step type, so you could start up that script on lots of servers at once, on a schedule, and on and on.

Of course – you don’t have to use it. If you like SQLCMD, then there it is. If you like vbscript, there it is. But if you give the PowerShell stuff a shot, you might find it useful – especially if you work with more than just SQL Server like I did. I think as time goes on you’ll see some interesting scripts that are pretty useful, and then it might make more sense.

And here’s another take: http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/database-administration/why-this-sql-server-dba-is-learning-powershell/

While I was at the SSWUG Virtual Conference prep, I did an interview – a very lengthy, hyper-caffeinated one. Not sure how well I came off in it – gosh, do I really sound (and look!) like that? Youch.

There is some useful information in there about how we work at Microsoft. Anyway, judge for yourself:

http://www.sswug.org/sswugtv/seeshow.asp#

Wow - out only a couple of months and already the Books are updated!  Here you go: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=765433F7-0983-4D7A-B628-0A98145BCB97&displaylang=en

We had our “SQL Server 2008 Experience” party yesterday, and this evening I saw that they’ve launched a new site for the product – check it out here: http://www.microsoft.com/sql/experience/

That’s a bold statement, isn’t it? Is it true? I don’t know that you’ll never lose your job as a DBA – I’ve known folks who have – but it seems to me that the data in a company will be there even after the company shrinks, folds, gets bought out and whatever else happens to it. And it seems to me that the Database Administrator is the one closest to the data. So if I were picking a career (and I have), it seems that the DBA role is a pretty good one to bet on.

Now, that doesn’t mean that if you can spell DBA you’ll be instantly hired and never fired. You have to be good at what you do, and work hard at it. This means that during tough times you need to find a way to do two things: be good at your job, and add value to what your company.

How does that relate to manageability in SQL Server? Well, take some time, dig in to whatever version of the software you have, and learn which features can make your system faster/better/cheaper. Then read up on the newer versions, and see if they can make your system faster/better/cheaper. If you do a good job, and add value to your company, you’ll be worth keeping around – no matter what the economy does.

I was working with someone last night on some performance tuning and noticed that they didn't have a specific issue that was causing their system to slow down - it was a combination of things. As we were working, I found a bunch of things that were running on a fixed cycle. A fixed cycle is something that wakes up, runs, and goes back to sleep.

You'll see this if you use a lot of SLEEP or WAITFOR statements in your code and T-SQL, or too many Agent Jobs on tight schedules. While these things aren't bad in themselves, you have to make sure you really need that cycle. In this case, there were event-based actions we set up to accomplish the same thing, and the system picked up some extra CPU cycles and calmed down.

Since - I don't know, forever - my geek friends and I used to share software links every time we ran across them. I found a beauty of a link here: http://blogs.technet.com/blogms/pages/microsoft-free-software.aspx. It's another blog, but they took the time to round up not only SQL Server links but lots of Microsoft Software that you might not be aware of. Enjoy!

The Data Collector feature in SQL Server 2008 is a new way to automate the gathering of any data from SQL Server you want to store historically. Combine that with the Management Data Warehouse and Custom reports, and you have a powerful monitoring and tracking system for multiple servers.

You get three Data Collector Sets out of the box with SQL Server 2008, but you can make your own as well. One way is to right-click a Collection Set and script it to a query window. Make your changes and you're ready to create your own collections.

But there's another way that's even easier. Open Profiler, and create any trace you're interested in. When you're done, just click File | Export and then export the trace as a Collector Set. Open that file and run it - and there you have it!

Many people wait for the “first” service pack of a product to work with it. Well, the CU#1 for SQL Server 2008 is now available. This is a new service model where we get out fixes far faster than a full Service Pack. You should read the article to see if you face any of these issues, and then download the CU if you do. The download link is just there at the top.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/956717/

With all of the hustle of the video shoot on Friday I didn't post the "Quote of the week", so let's do that today.

This is one of my favorite quotes - it's the best way that I've found not only to learn something new but to teach a new concept as well:

"The beginning of wisdom is a definition of terms." - Socrates