Reed Me : SQL Server

Log Shipping + Database Snapshots == Bummer, dude!!

reedme — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 18:29:47 GMT

So, like most funny stories (involving me), this one starts with “Yesterday, I had this bright idea...” and goes downhill from there.

Database mirroring is great. Full stop. But there’s this one little catch: it can only have a single mirror copy of the principal. Awesome for HA, but not so good for scale out.

Because database mirroring with SQL Server 2005 and 2008 makes available this great way to leverage your failover partner database for reporting purposes (to get some value out of your high availability solution besides insurance and a good night’s sleep) using database snapshots... well, you just had the same idea that I did, right?

It only seemed logical that log shipping would allow for the same AND allow for multiple target servers/databases, right?

Not so much.

With 2005, the log shipping target in a warm standby mode is in a perpetually restoring state (sort of like a mirror copy, eh? *grumble*), but you can’t take a snap of a database in restoring mode. Of course, I tried it. Wouldn’t you?

And even though Katmai exposes the feature in the UI now that allows for a log shipping target database to be online and query-able in read-only mode (if memory serves, you could do it the “hard way” in Yukon), it’s not possible to take a database snap shot of it... because it’s read-only. Did you know that creating a database snapshot actually modifies the database being snapped? I’d never thought about it. And now I know the answer!

The error message when creating the snap of a read-only database isn’t intuitive, either (if you read from the bottom up – the first one’s pretty clear – don’t ask): “A database snapshot cannot be created because it failed to start.” Huh?

Read-only standby mode shows some promised BUT you’ve got to close all open connections to the database and put it in a restoring mode in order to restore future tran log backups to it as part of your log shipping. Doh!

Needless to say, it would be pretty handy [if this worked] for a scale out scenario where I need to keep, oh, say, 44 copies of the same database continuously in sync AND available 100% of the time for customers to query, but nooo... It couldn’t possibly be that simple.

But you know, I probably wouldn’t be happy (or have a fun job) if it was that simple. Heh. Besides, not I get to go Visio up a more complicated solution, right?

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.

Awww, aren’t they just so cute?!

reedme — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 23:19:53 GMT

Look at all of them fixin’ to jump in the pool! Heh.

Not to minimize the difficulty that they’re embarking on, what with a 20% pass rate and all, but it’s great to see more people diving into the deep end of the SQL Server pool. Let’s hope as many Certified Masters as possible emerge from the other end of this rotation!

We had 17 victims, er attendees show up bright eyed and bushy tailed, ready to take on the most challenging training available on the SQL Platform.
The Master Blog : Gentlemen (and Ladies) START YOUR ENGINES!!!

Good luck, folks. Study hard!!

If you absolutely must call a WCF service from inside your database, here’s how you do it...

reedme — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 02:02:09 GMT

When I was an operations DBA, this would probably fall into the category of “just because you can do something, doesn’t mean that you should”:

Call a WCF Service from SQLCLR (by Niels Berglund)

However, there are probably a couple of good scenarios where I might advocate for doing just this in future projects, especially if the customers have experienced DBAs and don’t have an existing middle tier admin group. (They exist. I consulted for a couple.)

I’m encouraging Niels to formalize this a bit and put in CodePlex or Code Gallery.

Cool stuff!

Updated Books Online (January 2009)

reedme — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 20:21:52 GMT

I’m a couple days behind in, well, everything, not just my inbox. What can I say? It finally warmed up enough to get back on the motorcycle...

Updated BOL for January 2009 are out there now!

MSDN

Download Center (MSI)

Get yours while supplies last. Heh.

Samples forum consolidation.

reedme — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 01:12:37 GMT

Until today, all of the various SQL Server community and samples projects each had their own discussion board on CodePlex. In the interests of simplification that our customers have asked for in our samples experience, we’re consolidating all of those disparate discussion locations to one MSDN forum on the new forum platform.

Microsoft SQL Server Community & Samples Forum

Today and tomorrow, we’ll be closing up the discussion boards on CodePlex and linking those projects to the new forum.

If you’ve got specific questions about community and samples projects or are looking for people or projects to participate with, now you’ve got one place to do just that!

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.

DTLoggedExec updated for the new year (and more).

reedme — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 23:11:43 GMT

Davide describes it best in his own words: What is DTLoggedExec?

If I were a full-time ETL developer or an operations DBA, this is definitely a tool I’d be using every day.

Grab yours today from CodePlex: http://www.codeplex.com/DTLoggedExec/

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!!

Who are you and what do you want with my data?

reedme — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 20:04:51 GMT

If you’ve got data, there are probably people who want to use it, analyze it, do things with it... that you never imagined and possibly don’t want them to. “Those people” might even be government agents. Who can put you in jail. If you’re not careful with your data.

Do you have a plan for data governance and regulatory compliance?

We’d like to help.

Brent says: As somebody who’s gone through the whitepaper start to finish (with a lot of guidance from JC’s team) I can tell you that this is really good stuff. If you work for a public company subject to regulations, if you work with sensitive financial data, or if you work with health care data, you need to read this doc. New SQL Server 2008 Compliance Guide

Are you the Gate Keeper? Are you the Key Master? Or is there only Zhoul?

p.s. SCAN and SQL PASS have been a great week so far. It’s good to meet a lot of you in person. Come by the product pavilion and the Ask-the-Experts table and say howdy. I’ll be one of the 300 people wearing a brown shirt. Heh.

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.

Get your beta on! SQL Server 2005 SP3 Beta

reedme — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 21:07:31 GMT

No new features. Lots of good fixes rolled up in one package.

Download details: SQL Server 2005 SP3 Beta

We don’t call them “service packs” inside SQL Server anymore, but it would seem that a lot of people have a Linus’ blanket reaction to the term, so we’ll call it SP3 to make everyone happy.

Enjoy!

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!

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*