Whoever starts their career in any domain/technology, initially they will have two faces.

First face of an employee is to take care of his/him family & family related commitments and the second
face of him/her is to fulfill the expectation of the Organization they work.

But third and forth faces… Read more

You should be documenting your day, your week, your month, on a regular basis. Take a few minutes when you accomplish something and make a blog entry. This is a great way for you to keep track of what you’ve accomplished during the year, and be ready to talk about… Read more

All the videos for this popular conference are online or will be soon (48 of them). Take a look at the recorded sessions at http://sqlbits.com/content/Event9.  All are free to watch!  The one’s on my list to watch (because I’m interested in SQL Server 2012/Data Warehouse/SSAS):

• Basic BISM
• Handling Advanced…

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When you’re developing new Transact-SQL code or modifying some existing code, do you just launch directly into programming?

I know that I did just that, for years.  It wasn’t until I was trying to performance tune some existing code that I realized I hadn’t actually taken caching of data and… Read more

Today we have a guest post from Steve Jones.

I survived SQL in the City in LA, and thanks to everyone that came. Alien Brad looked normal, but it also appears that he’s learned to imitate humans. Or maybe Brad escaped and made his way to LA. I’m not… Read more

Be Part Of The Solution, Not The Problem

<disclaimer >

Now that BoD season is in full swing and I’m not running for the board I am going to cover the candidates I think would be good for the BoD. Make no mistake about it, these are endorsements. I have… Read more

Managing SQL Server in a Virtual World Notes (View Complete Slide Show)
Hosted by MVP Kevin Kline, Quest Software
Guest presenter Jason Hall, SQL Server consultant to Quest software

How to optimize your SQL Server licensing with VMware, since most SQL VMs are on VMware ESX platform: http://communities.vmware.com/message/1075017 Read more

Yes, I know you just got back from the 2011 Summit.  Kinda like I just got back from vacation.  But that doesn’t mean I haven’t already started thinking about my next vacation.  And you should be thinking about next year’s summit.  Why?  Because until November 15, 2011, you can register Read more

Here’s one that I haven’t run into before. A colleague scheduled a meeting with someone else in the organization to work through a problem that keeps coming up and seems to be of those problems where everyone wants someone else to do the work. The other person declined the meeting… Read more

Today, we have a special Halloween edition.  For me, Halloween and computer geek go quite well together.  And thinking about it, I wanted to try to better understand if there was a correlation.  As a DBA, have you wondered the same thing?

Well, I have a short list of five… Read more

Those who are fan of Glenn Berry’s DMV queries would have come across below query at-least once.

-- Hardware information from SQL Server 2008

-- (Cannot distinguish between HT and multi-core)

SELECT cpu_count AS [Logical CPU Count], hyperthread_ratio AS [Hyperthread Ratio],

cpu_count/hyperthread_ratio AS [Physical CPU Count] Read more

Over time, similar reports may be designed from variations of common queries and datasets.  Creating one report to meet all these requirements can minimize development time and maintenance overhead.  By evaluating existing reports and making modifications, future requirements can be met without creating yet another report.  Parameters and expressions may… Read more

Database users can become orphaned for a few reasons. For example, a database restore to another instance or deleting the corresponding SQL login would have the effect of leaving a database user orphaned. Development/testing SQL servers may also experience this due to the number of ad-hoc updates that may occur… Read more

After spending some time looking at SQL Server 2012 CTP3, it appears as if Transactional Publication with Updatable Subscriptions will officially be removed in SQL Server 2012.  According to Books Online, Microsoft is recommending that users switch to Peer-to-Peer Replication instead.  This is a shame considering Peer-to-Peer is an… Read more

After spending some time looking at SQL Server 2012 CTP3, it appears as if Transactional Publication with Updatable Subscriptions will officially be deprecated in SQL Server 2012.  According to Books Online, Microsoft is recommending that users switch to Peer-to-Peer Replication instead.  This is a shame considering Peer-to-Peer is an… Read more

With some calculated members in MDX it only makes sense to see the calculation if a certain Hierarchy is used.

For example:

Aggregate(YTD([Date].[Calendar].CurrentMember),[Internet Sales Amount])

This calculation only works in the Date.Calendar Hierarchy. I wanted to show the end users a message informing them about this and hide the calculation… Read more

Another must read white-paper: Analysis Services 2008 R2 Performance Guide.

This white paper describes how business intelligence developers can apply query and processing performance-tuning techniques to their Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Analysis Services OLAP solutions.  It applies to SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008, and SQL Server 2008… Read more

Recently I had to convert a stand alone report into a sub-report. That report was very simple… it had two date parameters , a data set displayed in a tablix,  NoRowsMessage was enabled on the tablix to display a message when the data set returns empty row.

This report feature,… Read more

I was in a meeting a few weeks ago, deadlines looming and everyone feeling the stress some. We hit a couple minute pause and one of the guys in the room (a serious type most of the time) out of nowhere mentions that he finds watching Bob Ross on TV… Read more

I know that this subject has been blogged about numerous times but I thought I'd post an alternative way of shredding a comma separated string to a table that I come up with today, albeit with help from the very clever Itzik Ban-Gan cross join nested CTE that many of… Read more