Reed Me : AdventureWorks

It’s been real and it’s been fun...

reedme — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 01:23:35 GMT

I’ve really enjoyed my ~3.5 years here at Microsoft, especially the last year and a quarter inside SQL Server. Microsoft’s a great company that really takes good care of its employees and their families.

It’s with some sadness that I leave all my friends in Building 35 next week (and some of y’all over in Building 34, too -- heh), especially with all the cool stuff coming soon with Kilimanjaro. I’ve learned a lot from y’all. Katmai was a definitely a fun climb (even though I missed the first two years)!

To whomever takes over my job, here’s one article I wish I would’ve rediscovered and reread a year ago: How to be a program manager (Joel on Software)

I’m not going far, though. You’d think that Building 36 would be right next door, but... it’s not. You’ll have to walk a little bit further up the street past the convention center, but we can still do lunch from time to time. Office looks to a cool place to play as an architect, and I’m looking forward to the work!

Since I’m heading back into the wonderful world of operations, you’ll still get the occasional SQL Server bit from me, and I’ll probably mix in some SCOM, since that looks to be the first big project.

This week, I’m wrapping up my contributions to Samples Refresh 2 and working on transition planning for whoever takes over the samples reins next in SQL Server.

Error code 2738 when installing AdventureWorks.

reedme — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 21:42:41 GMT

This is in the wiki FAQ, but not everybody reads the documentation and my experience is that Live.com doesn’t index the CodePlex wiki nearly as well as the MSDN blogs... Anyway, our current dependency on a VB Script custom action in our WiX-based installers means that your target for installing AdventureWorks needs to have VB Script enabled. We’re looking to change that in the future, but for now...

Question: When I start the installer (MSI), I get: "The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 2738."

Answer: This is a usually a sign that VB Script has been disabled in your o/s; it can usually be fixed by re-registering VB Script as follows:

Open command window (CMD) as Administrator.

cd %windir%\System32

regsvr32 vbscript.dll

This is also my first test of the Twitter Notify plug-in for Live Writer. Joy to the whirled.

Thanks, Brian! A couple minor nits to pick, though.

reedme — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 19:12:01 GMT

Brian, I'm glad y'all are doing videos like this for SQL School!! I realize that you probably recorded this last year; however, the details (specifically of download file selection on CodePlex) in that video about AdventureWorks for SQL Server 2008 have been out of date since October 2008. ;-) We shipped Samples Refresh 1 on Halloween which greatly simplified the entire experience.

Samples Refresh 2 will ship in the second quarter of this calendar, and will consist primarily of bug fixes.

Also, a minor clarification, most of the Books Online examples for SQL Server 2008 still use the original AdventureWorks databases (which is why we ship both versions together for Katmai). For the most part, only the BOL topics which need new features like FILESTREAM, geography, HierarchyID, etc, were updated to use the AdventureWorks2008 family of databases.

Installing Sample 2008 Databases - SQL School Videos - SQL Server Central

We're definitely working to streamline the AdventureWorksKilimanjaro experience, and we're planning to only ship one year-model family of databases for SQL Server Kilimanjaro.

SQL RSS code review coming up.

reedme — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 19:37:36 GMT

If you haven’t checked out this project, give it a look. We’re having an MVP code review in about a week.

Forum discussion

CodePlex project

Please file your bugs and suggestions as work items on CodePlex.

As always, if you’re interested in being a contributor to this project, let us know!

Sybase loves AdventureWorks2008?

reedme — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 19:24:38 GMT

A SQL Ranger friend of mine in the UK gave me the heads up to this yesterday. (Thanks, Ben!!) Apparently, back in December 2008, Sybase ported some of our samples to SQL Anywhere. Needless to say, I’ve got mixed feelings about Sybase porting AdventureWorks to their platform. Sort of like a cherry-cheese Danish: it’s a pastry and pastries are supposed to taste good, right? But cherries and cheese? Ick. (I’m on a severely calorically restricted diet; sorry for the digression.)

As SQL Server 2008 and SQL Anywhere 11 are two very different database solutions, the ‘AdventureWorks2008’ database will appear slightly different, and offer a few functional differences. These incongruities are the result of different feature sets, which are intrinsic to each database’s design. AdventureWorks2008 Sample Database for SQL Anywhere Download: Mobile Enterprise, Database Management iAnywhere - Sybase Inc

We license AdventureWorks under the Ms-PL, so anybody’s welcome to do whatever they want with our code. It’s out there for learning purposes. Sybase seems to have learned that SQL Anywhere 11 doesn’t do a lot of the really cool things that SQL Server 2008 does! They only ported the OLTP database – I wonder why they ignored DW and LT??

The Sybase port of AdventureWorks2008 drops the following features:

They dropped all the spatial columns because SQL Anywhere doesn’t have a geography type.
They dropped Try/Catch error handling in all stored procedures, since they can’t do that.
They dropped DDL triggers, because SQL Anywhere doesn’t have them.
They dropped all stored procedures with recursive queries, because they don’t support them.
They dropped all Full Text indexes and queries, since SQL Anywhere doesn’t do that, either, I guess.
They dropped or modified all tables with HierarchyID columns, because they don’t have that data type.
They dropped all the tables with XML data, or omitted the XML columns, because they don’t support the same XML query lingo and have no XML index support.
They dropped all the indexed views, because SQL Anywhere doesn’t do that,either.
They dropped all the views that use PIVOT, because (guess what?) they don’t have that keyword.
They had to modify a bunch of stored procedures because they don’t support EXECUTE AS CALLER. (Did I mention that they had to drop all the Try/Catch support, too?)
They had to emasculate most of the trigger functionality (not counting the DDL triggers they had to drop outright), because they don’t support those features. Such as dropping Try/Catch support to throw exceptions instead of logging and always updating certain columns (even when not appropriate for the business rules):

HumanResources.dEmployee
Person.iuPerson
Production.iWorker
Production.uWorkOrder
Purchasing.iPurchaseOrderDetail
Purchasing.uPurchaseOrderHeader
Purchasing.uPurchaseOrderDetail
Purchasing.uPurchaseOrderHeader
Purchasing.dVendor
Sales.iduSalesOrderDetail
Sales.uSalesOrderHeader

They had to truncate all the binary image columns to 32,767 bytes (which will break all the ones bigger than that) because SQL Anywhere doesn’t have a large binary type apparently. Whoops!

Anyway, I don’t have a SQL Anywhere installation to try it out on, but that list from their own website reads (to me) like a list of reasons to use SQL Server 2008 instead. It looks like they ported our .NET samples for AdventureWorks2008, too, so I have to wonder if they’re equally limited as the AdventureWorks2008 port?

I do hope that SQL Anywhere customers do get some benefit out of using the port of our sample OLTP database (or switch to SQL Server 2008 where they can get the full functionality of AdventureWorks2008). I’d also like to invite Oracle and DB2 to port AdventureWorks2008 to their platforms so that the world can see how much of our feature set they don’t support, either. Heh.

Tweeting AdventureWorks?

reedme — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 03:34:09 GMT

Earlier this week, the gravitational pull of Twitter got the better of me. Jimmy May emailed me that Paul Nielsen was trying to sort out the gender of the fictitious IT Manager of AdventureWorks (Jean Trenary) for the next edition of the SQL Server Bible and was tweeting on the subject. One thing led to another. (Doesn’t it always?)

I vaguely recall signing up for Twitter as “reedme” but twitter doesn’t seem interested in sending me a forgotten password for that user name... so I reverted to an older, darker user name for tweeting: DarthReed. Just so you know. More useless information is now available on the web with even greater frequency.

Anyway, here are the queries for anybody else who cares. First for the old school AdventureWorks OLTP database (with thanks to Gail in UE for writing the first one):

USE AdventureWorks
GO
SELECT c.FirstName , c.LastName, e.Title, e.Gender
FROM HumanResources.Employee as e
JOIN Person.Contact AS c ON e.ContactID = c.ContactID
WHERE LastName = 'Trenary'
GO

And then my “port” for the AdventureWorks2008 OLTP database (will like be the same for AdventureWorksKilimanjaro):

USE AdventureWorks2008
GO
SELECT c.FirstName , c.LastName, e.JobTitle, e.Gender
FROM HumanResources.Employee as e
JOIN Person.Person AS c ON e.BusinessEntityID = c.BusinessEntityID
WHERE LastName = 'Trenary'
GO

If my adventures in Twitter last beyond the end of my “trial month”, I’ll have to break down and figure out how to feed them into the sidebar of the blog.

Now with more open and soon with more source!

reedme — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 22:24:56 GMT

Over the holidays, the SQL Server community & samples test team in China has been migrating all of our open product samples bugs out of our internal VSTS bug tracking database and into the VSTS database which backs the CodePlex TFS system. There are some non-bug work items which will be migrated (mostly related to the AdventureWorksKilimanjaro improvement) after the 1st of the year.

If you want to see new stuff from the community & samples team (create a work item on CodePlex!) or increase the likelihood that we’ll fix your pet bug with one of the samples, vote on the one(s) that you want fixed most and help us prioritize.

CodePlex Project Work Items for SQL Server Product Samples

Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Analysis Services

Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Data Programming

Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Database

Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: End to End

Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Engine

Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Integration Services

Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Replication

Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Reporting Services

Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Scripts

Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Service Broker

Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: XML

In other news, we will be migrating all of the product samples discussion forums to the new MSDN forums platform in January in a single consolidated place to chat about SQL Server community and samples projects.

I’ll be in use-it-or-lose vacation territory this afternoon, hence you may or may not hear from me again until after New Year’s. If not, I wish y’all a merry New Year!!

AdventureWorks2010, anyone?

reedme — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 00:10:31 GMT

We’re doing planning work for SQL Server Kilimanjaro and the next SQL Server wave that follows it, which means product samples, community projects and AdventureWorks. Some people have suggested doing away with AdventureWorks in favor of something new, but I don’t see that happening... unless there is an enormous groundswell from the community on the subject. You decide.

As it is, about the only thing that we’ve “settled on” so far is that the schema will be based on AdventureWorks2008 and the working name of the database will be AdventureWorks2010. [Maybe it shows my age, but 2010 still feels like it’s a long way off… not just a short year and couple months.] Yeah, we’re decoupling a bit from the SQL Server release vehicle(s) so that we can rev AdventureWorks as needed instead of only at specific release milestones.

Anyway, we’re committed to being more open about our plans for AdventureWorks and our other open source projects. So come see what we’re working on, vote on the work items that are there, propose new work items if there’s something else that you’d like to see us do with the samples databases.

AdventureWorks Issue Tracker

Over the coming weeks, we’re planning to move all of our day2day source control management for all SQL Server product samples and community projects to CodePlex, so look for more activity and more regular activity than you’ve seen in the past.

Simplifying AdventureWorks setup

reedme — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 00:28:11 GMT

FYI, we’re actively working on improving the setup experience for the SQL Server 2008 sample databases (aka AdventureWorks). We’ve heard your feedback and we’re acting on it. Here are some of the salient points you’ll see for the Halloween update (Samples Refresh 1):

Fewer selections to make to choose the appropriate download.
All the AdventureWorks databases (both versions) in one small package.
Streamlined automatic deployment of databases to your local instance.

Here’s a visual comparison of what the release page may look like the next time you download AdventureWorks:

Some potential future improvements that we’re considering for the next refresh of SQL Server 2008 samples:

Individual selection of the databases to install.
Automated deployment of Analysis Services cubes.
A ClickOnce SQL Server Community Samples browser application.

As always, we value your feedback and want to hear it, good and bad. After all, we’re building these things for you! If they’re not what you want/need, tell us what you do want/need!! That’s why we’re in the process of moving all of our community and samples work items out into the open on CodePlex. Create one and tell us what you want to see us working on!

More AdventureWorks in the blogosphere...

reedme — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 02:33:16 GMT

Thanks for the plug, Stuart!

Installing the AdventureWorks Sample Databases (Stuart Cox’s Tech Punch)

We’re working on simplifying the setup experience for AdventureWorks in time for Halloween, but we appreciate the assist!

SQL Server Samples in the News and Print

reedme — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 02:15:35 GMT

The humorous old adage (which my friends in PR righteously deplore) is that "There's no such thing as bad press, as long as they spell your name right."

SQL Server 2008: First Impressions

Desperately Seeking Samples

SQL Server 2008 Transact-SQL Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (Recipes: a Problem-Solution Approach)

You be the judge.

Which reminds me to remind you: If you’ve got good things to say about SQL Server Samples™ and/or AdventureWorks, I'm your guy and I want to hear from you!! If you've got bi-, er, complaints about them, then... well, I'm your guy, too, and believe it or not, I want to hear that not so shiny stuff, too.

We will be hosting MVPs and other SQL PASS attendees for breakfast specifically to get YOUR input about SQL Server community and samples projects. If you're going to be attending SQL PASS this year (they've even got a shiny new website!), let me know so that I can make sure that you get an invite to the samples breakfast (I'm buyin').

<insert_jedi_mind_trick>You will attend SQL PASS this year.</insert_jedi_mind_trick>

If that didn't work and you're still not going to be attending SQL PASS, please let us know what you want to see new or changed from We the Community (yes, that includes you, because I'm not doin' it all alone). The best way to do that is to create a work item here for samples generally or here for AdventureWorks and other sample databases.

p.s. Thanks, William, Michelle and Joseph!!

p.p.s. Lovin' the new Windows Live Writer Beta. Of course, this is just my first post with it. The new preview is awesome. I just wish I could publish from OneNote through Live Writer in some for or fashion other than cut-n-paste… *hint* (Yes, I've tried the blog-from-Word option. It no formattie correctlie when posting to Community Server.) Of course, I can't find the Format Painter in OneNote and Live Writer draft posts are difficult to sync in between different workstations, so… Win some, lose some. I wish I could win more. *pout*

Searching for Mexican Food... on CodePlex?

reedme — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 02:11:44 GMT

Tagging is all fun and games until somebody gets hurt, right? Actually, like so-called Google-bombing, it can be pretty funny.

Have you ever been guilty of surfing while hungry? It appears that somebody was pretty hungry while they were wandering around CodePlex looking for something. No idea what. But two projects have been tagged on CodePlex as "Mexican Food," including the AJAX.NET toolkit and the AdventureWorks sample databases.

Searching CodePlex for Mexican Food

I only noticed because I own the AdventureWorks project... and apparently I needed a good laugh today. Thank you, Anonymous Tagger Person, for the laugh.

SQL Server 2008 RTM samples are up on CodePlex now.

reedme — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 08:13:29 GMT

A little snafu delayed things, but they're all signed, sealed and delivered now. I only had to skip a little of the launch party to get them out the door...

Microsoft SQL Server Community & Samples - Release: SQL Server 2008 RTM

Enjoy!

I was right: I was wrong. 15% was too much.

reedme — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:34:56 GMT

One of the shiny new features added to Management Studio for 2008 allows you to plot spatial data for any table that has geography or geometry data in the new spatial types. This comes in pretty handy for doing quick visual inspection of small spatial data sets... and it turns out that my early suspicion was correct.

In retrospect, 15% might be a bit too much potential randomness.
Reed Me : Geocoding semi-imaginary data points

Bonnie noticed that the variation much to wide and sent me back to the drawing board. The state of Washington addresses alone turned into a rectangular noise pattern. Whoops. I'm still learning my way around, but even I know that Lynnwood is *not* east of Redmond. Doh! (Sorry, Weird Al. We feex dat!)

We're going to fiddle with some parameters, but it looks like 0.15% (0.0015) might give us an OK seeming distribution of semi-imaginary addresses around the postal code center without putting Yakima addresses in the Pacific Ocean.

A big thanks to the improvement team for getting this cool tool into SQL Server 2008, especially Ivor, for prodding me to take another look at the AdventureWorks2008 data.

Cool (Free, Open) Tools: SQL RSS

reedme — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 23:15:40 GMT

Even if nobody has asked you for an RSS feed of data in one or more of your databases, it won't be long before they do! When they do, you can grab this configurable, easy to use data-driven RSS feed widget.

A couple ideas for using this application:

Business intelligence updates delivered to Microsoft Outlook 2007 for management.
Proactive application event logs to your Vista Sidebar news gadget FTW!

I'm sure you can think of more... Check it out!

SQL RSS on CodePlex.com (Microsoft SQL Server Community & Samples)

It's also a great way to get a solid introduction to these technologies:

Change Data Tracking (CDT) feature of SQL Server 2008
SQL Server Reporting Services
The syndication feed feature of WCF
LINQ to XML
ADO.NET

Join us!
This project is a bit different than other SQL Server-sponsored projects. We want YOU to contribute to it. We are actively seeking other people (i.e. not on my team) to enhance and grow this project. Whether you work for Microsoft or not, let us know if you'd like to help!