Have You Watched The SQL Server Show Yet?
SelectViews posted on Friday – here are the show notes; Software as a Service Issues, SQL Server Data Archive Challenge, Linking Access Tables to SQL Server. Also, BookLooks – Apress TSQL Recipes, the 60-Second SQL Server Tip of the Day and Much More. (Don’t forget the SQL Server Challenge – we’re looking to get as many ideas as possible…)
Featured Article(s)
Performance Tuning for the Overworked DB2 Part 2: That Pesky I/O Bottleneck
If you’ve got performance triage on your hands, as you learned in my last article, you look at I/O, memory, and CPU. In this article, the most serious and most difficult to solve of those culprits is I/O: the focus of this article.
Running scripts and queries on multiple databases and servers
If you are managing multiple databases or SQL Servers and instances, then in many cases it is necessary to execute multiple change scripts or administration code on groups of databases across SQL instances. Also, to check the status of servers and databases in the network we often need to collect data and query multiple servers to get performance metrics, job status, or any other info. If you are looking for an agile solution to help with all the above – check out SQL Farm Combine to see how distributed querying and deployments can be achieved in one click.
Webcast Infrastructure Optimization for Mission-Critical SQL Server
For SQL Server, the difference between an optimized infrastructure and a disjointed one is the difference between spending nights and weekends reacting to changes in your IT requirements versus being in control of your IT environment and a proactive strategic partner with your business units. When it comes to maintenance and management requirements, capacity changes and service availability, IT organizations can realize tremendous gains by uniting and optimizing the infrastructure components they already own. In this HP-sponsored webcast, you’ll learn techniques to eradicate server sprawl, slash overhead and find dramatic improvements in management and availability for even your most mission-critical SQL Server environments.
> Register Now
> October 10, 2007 at 12:00pm Noon Pacific
Columnar Databases, and Database Changes in General
A bit ago I asked about your thoughts about new database formats. Between that editorial, the follow-on posts and some articles that hit the site at the same time, you can quickly tell this is a charged issue. There are a lot of people very concerned that you get all of the information you possibly can about these "new" systems. Find out about key uptime requirements and stats, support, etc. Find out what it does to your applications… Some that wrote with concerns had biases (they worked for companies selling competing products) and some did not. Interestingly, the questions suggested were the same, which hints that the biases in the first group were possibly well founded and not merely based on competitive issues.
Do your own due diligence. It’s what they say about stocks, it’s true for databases too. Your risk tolerance may vary from others, make sure you know what you’re looking to achieve and how you’ll get there from here.
All that aside, there are people using some of these new databases (or new to the general database user population) successfully. Putting aside the blogs and people just talking about doing it, I wanted to pass along a success with one of these approaches – ironically, they’re doing the new "thing," but within SQL Server.
From James: "We’ve moved to a combined object / columnar / relational model recently for a number of reasons. We are, however, doing all of this in SQL Server 2005. We use our own custom framework and an abstraction layer to manage the objects and the columnar database data (exposed in internal XML). One of the primary reasons for this was a greatly simplified maintenance and upgrade model we have been able to deploy.
Our framework is managed with a very few stored procedures and associated web methods within a couple of web services. The columnar data approach is really handy for coping with widely varying sets of data being imported into a typical warehouse and the object model has really improved the management and support of our code overall.
For us, the reality was that we were driven to this approach to ensure we stay at the leading edge of what can be done with database environments in order to build and support customer data warehouses and associated applications. We are now actively upgrading the same environment to SQL 2008 with good results."
Featured White Paper(s)
Web Services: The Executive’s Guide
An introduction to the fundamentals of Web Services from the business management perspective. Light in jargon and rich in con… (read more)
Common Table Expressions
Common Table Expressions(CTEs) are new to SQL Server 2005. CTEs are defined in the ANSI SQL-99 standard. We need to begin lea… (read more)
The Top Five Reasons To Consider an Embedded Database for Your Next Project
There are numerous business benefits of using embedded databases during the lifecycle of business application development. Th… (read more)
Data Privacy Compliance in the Application Testing Environment – Data Masking and Transformation for Privacy Compliance
News of high-profile data breaches has increased awareness and heightened the need to protect data privacy in the more vulner… (read more)