Marcelo's WebLog : SQL

Problems when installing SQL Server 2005 on an upgraded Windows XP SP3 with MSXML6 SP2

marcelolr — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

As mentioned in the SQL Server Support Blog, you may find an issue installing SQL Server 2005 if you install MSXML Core Services 6.0 Service Pack 2 on Windows XP SP2, then upgrade to Windows XP SP3, then try the SQL install.

Check out that post for more details, along with the KB for the problem.

SQL Server 2008 SP1 Available

marcelolr — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 00:00:00 GMT

I know, I know - two announcements in a row? What's happening to this blog?

This is big enough to warrant it though - SP1 is now available, and if you're using SQL 2008, you definitely want to look into this. No fancy new features, you'll get "it's just better" goodness, so no reason to shy away.

Enjoy!

MSDN on Azure, Oslo and SQL Data Services

marcelolr — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

If you're following the PDC announcements, new, good things are coming for developers and business... MSDN is already showing some topics to get you started.

Azure Services Platform. Includes Windows Azure SDK, Live Services SDK, Microsoft .NET Services Nov 2008 CTP and SQL Services (more on that in a bit).

Microsoft Modeling Platform (code named "Oslo"). You could do worse than starting from the Frequently Asked Questions.

And finally, if you're reading this blog, I'm certain data is near and dear to your heart. The docs are available for in all their glory for you to consider SQL Data Services (SDS). The Overview is the place to start if you're wondering what you might get out of the SDS.

Enjoy the learning!

Microsoft SQLXML 4.0 SP1 Released

marcelolr — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 02:58:00 GMT

As announced in the Data Platform Insider, the SQL Server 2008 Feature Pack has been released. This includes SQLXML 4.0 SP1, which provides support for the new date/time data types - some of the work that my team has been doing lately, all in the spirit of XML goodness.

Enjoy!

XML building blocks

marcelolr — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 02:00:00 GMT

What are some good XML specifications to get acquainted with? Here are the ones I find myself referring people to the most.

Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Fourth Edition). Close to a must-read, although XML basics are simple enough that it's often not necessary. Great to refer back to refresh whitespace and newline handling and which characters are allowed where.
Namespaces in XML 1.0 (Second Edition). A must-read these days, as namespaces proved wildly popular and show up everywhere.
XML Base. Very useful, especially with documents served over the Internet.
XML Schema Part 0: Primer. Grok XSD.
XML Schema Part 1: Structures. How to put schemas together.
XML Schema Part 2: Datatypes. Again, this one proved popular beyond schema definitions, and is used to annotate typed XML in a bunch of other technologies.
XSL Transformations (XSLT). Useful to go over once to play with a processor for a while, but the stuff I usually look up to answer questions is more often the next.
XML Path Language (XPath). Again, another wildly popular building block, used to select, shred and transform documents the world over.
XQuery 1.0: An XML Query Language. To be honest, I typically need this in the context of SQL Server, so I go to the highly awesome Books Online more often than not.

And there you go. File them away in a little "XML" folder in your favorites, and see how often to go back to them when you're working with XML-centric projects.

Enjoy!

SQL Server Videos

marcelolr — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 02:00:00 GMT

Yes, it seems like short instructional videos are all the rage, everywhere. It's been growing for a while, of course.

Still, I was happily surprised when I came across http://www.sqlservervideos.com/ today - that's a pretty specialized website! I'm looking forward to seeing what will be coming up, especially anything that shows off the new SQL Server 2008 functionality. Particularly nice is the thought put into the browsing categories - series, coverage, skill level, audience, tags and date.

All in all, a very promising way of spending my lunchtime at my desk.

Enjoy!

Welcome SQL Server 2008 to the world!

marcelolr — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 21:08:00 GMT

Yes, it's available now, in all its yummy-licious editions.

If you can't wait for your IT department to upgrade, you can always start building desktop / mobile applications with the free Express or Compact editions.

Enjoy!

SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP now available

marcelolr — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 02:20:00 GMT

Yay for interoperability!

If you've got systems running PHP, you can now connect them to SQL Server 2005 with the PHP driver available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=61BF87E0-D031-466B-B09A-6597C21A2E2A&displaylang=en.

Enjoy!

Steve Lasker on Stored Procedures, SQL Server Express and SQL Server Compact

marcelolr — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 22:24:00 GMT

Steve Lasker has some very good explanations on the thinking and the trade-offs behind SQL Server Express and SQL Server Compact in this post.

If you haven't kept pace with the free Express and Compact editions of SQL Server, you really are missing out. Check them out!

SQL Server User Education Blog

marcelolr — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 19:30:00 GMT

Not too long ago, I happened to write a post mentioning how good SQL Books Online is. Well, turns out that just today I discovered that the SQL Server User Education team has its own blog.

Well, one of the highly nifty things they've already posted is this Scoped Search for Books Online. Very much worth bookmarking when you're looking for database topics - consider these results vs. these results.

Database Design Books

marcelolr — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 03:39:00 GMT

A few days ago a friend of mine asked for some books I could recommend about developing databases. This is my personal list based on personal likes – to be extra clear, this is not an endorsement from my employer.

An Introduction to Database Systems, by C.J. Date. A great book that covers all sorts of topics on how to think about databases - essential stuff, in my opinion.
Inside SQL Server (2000 or 2005, both great). Great in-depth discussion of how a real DBMS works.
Books Online. OK, so this isn’t a “real” book, in the sense that it doesn't require killing trees. While going through all topics will certainly take some time, there is a lot of good information to be found, especially to discover options and considerations to bear in mind as you go. That is, you won’t necessarily need to know the information that’s there, but it’s great to have somewhere in the back of your mind the knowledge that the information exists.

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

System Views, or "Who's connected to my database?"

marcelolr — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 22:07:00 GMT

The other day I was trying to drop a database, but I was getting an error because it was in use. Given that I was the only user of the database, I was a bit puzzled... I had a number of programs running, and I wasn't sure which one might be holding on to a collection.

Enter System Views, and more specifically, one particular dynamic management one: sys.dm_exec_connections. This little beauty has a wealth of information (Joe Sack mentions a few interesting uses), but you can get oh-so-much goodness with a few simple joins. Eventually, this is the query I ended up using (notice that some lines are commented out, you can uncomment them to get some additional details that might also come in handy).

select
dec.connect_time,
-- dec.net_transport, dec.protocol_type,
dec.auth_scheme,
-- dec.num_reads, dec.num_writes, dec.last_read, dec.last_write,
-- dec.client_net_address, dec.client_tcp_port,
e.name,
dest.text,
-- des.session_id,
des.host_name, des.program_name, des.host_process_id, des.login_name, des.status
from sys.dm_exec_connections as dec
left join sys.endpoints as e on dec.endpoint_id = e.endpoint_id
cross apply sys.dm_exec_sql_text(dec.most_recent_sql_handle) as dest
left join sys.dm_exec_sessions as des on dec.session_id = des.session_id

So, what are some of the interesting things you get with this?

connect_time: when did the connection take place?
auth_scheme: what authorization was used? (eg: NTLM)
name: this is the endpoint name, which condenses a bunch of human-readable information (eg, 'TSQL Named Pipes')
text: this is the text for the last query executed (eg, 'SELECT * FROM somewhere'). Notice the use of sys.dm_exec_sql_text, a table-valued function.
host_name: machine name.
program_name: name of the program running the connection; you may need to tweak your connection strings to get the value you want from this.
host_process_id: ID of the process - awesome to really track down which program is holding on to the connection.
login_name: name of the user logged in, in my case with NTLM, it's in domain\user format.
status: whether something is running, or whether the connection is just waiting for something (a few additional states are also available)

If you have a few minutes, it's very much worth it to look at the system views and what they have to offer. They have great potential for helping you monitor work and diagnose problems in an automated manner.

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. Use of included script samples are subject to the terms specified at http://www.microsoft.com/info/cpyright.htm.

VS 2008 Beta 2 available

marcelolr — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 19:12:00 GMT

The announcement is right here. ScottGu has a recap of the articles he's posted so far here.

For those who fell like they can't wait for the download, the "What's New" page is available on MSDN here. As you can see, there's a lot of developer love in this product.

Some of the highlights that I'm personally excited about: Intellisense for JScript, the WPF designer, multitargeting (writing for different .NET Framework versions), the O/R designer, the improved DataSet designer, SQL Server Compact 3.5, and of course, LINQ. And, if I may add one more thing, where would we be without our debugger?

So many great user experiences to build, so little time...

Vardecimal whitepaper available

marcelolr — Tue, 29 May 2007 22:48:00 GMT

Big decimals getting you down? Vardecimal is coming to town!

OK, I couldn't come up with a smarter way to begin this post. But if you have I/O bound operation in SQL Server in tables with many decimal/numeric values, you owe it to yourself to read the recently posted Reducing Database Size by Using Vardecimal Storage Format whitepaper.

Using DataView.Sort

marcelolr — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 01:09:00 GMT

After my DataView.RowFilter post, the next obvious step is of course a short post on using the DataView.Sort property. This property is simpler, as it simply takes column names, with a possible ASC or DESC modifier. You cannot use expressions directly in the Sort property, although you can use expression columns (see the sample below).

To give this a try, build it with the referenced command line (assuming you save this to dv.cs), and run it with dv.exe. Here are some interesting values to try:

Name
Name, ID
Name, ID DESC
ID * 2 (will display an error message)
DoubleID (works fine)

dv.cs

// %windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\csc.exe dv.cs

using System;
using System.Data;
using System.Windows.Forms;

namespace NS
{
    public class DoIt
    {
        [STAThread]
        public static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            DataTable table = new DataTable();
            table.Columns.Add(new DataColumn("ID", typeof(int)));
            table.Columns.Add(new DataColumn("Name", typeof(string)));
            table.Columns.Add(new DataColumn("Date", typeof(DateTime)));
            table.Columns.Add(new DataColumn("DoubleID", typeof(int), "ID * 2"));
            table.Rows.Add(new object[] { 1, "Charlie", DateTime.Now });
            table.Rows.Add(new object[] { 2, "Candy", DateTime.Now.AddHours(2) });
            table.Rows.Add(new object[] { 3, "Candy", DateTime.Now.AddHours(4) });

            DataView dv = new DataView(table);

            DataGridView view = new DataGridView();
            view.DataSource = dv;
            view.Dock = DockStyle.Fill;

            Form form = new Form();
            form.Text = "DataView Sort Sample";

            Label label = new Label();
            label.Dock = DockStyle.Bottom;

            TextBox box = new TextBox();
            box.Dock = DockStyle.Top;
            box.TextChanged += delegate {
                try
                {
                    dv.Sort = box.Text;
                    label.Text = "";
                }
                catch(Exception exception)
                {
                    label.Text = exception.Message;
                }
            };

            form.Controls.Add(view);
            form.Controls.Add(box);
            form.Controls.Add(label);

            Application.Run(form);
        }
    }
}