DATA STRATEGY INTRODUCTION

A Chief Financial Officer (CFO) was approached by the CEO and asked for an accounting of the company’s financial assets. The CFO gave a vague response indicating a lack of knowledge of the corporate bank accounts, had little idea what was in each account, and had no idea about the status of accounts receivable. The Board of Directors asked the CEO about the intended use of the corporate assets and were told “there is no plan for their use.” The CFO and the CEO were soon pursuing new personal interests.

TACKLING DATA MODELERS' TOUGHEST CHALLENGE

Recently, I began a Data Modeling “Master Class” by asking participants to nominate the toughest challenges facing them in their professional work. Virtually all the responses were about “soft” or “political” issues: persuading project teams to include a data modeling phase, negotiating territory with database technicians, gaining access to business people, and, of course, staying employed. No mention of normalization, star schemas, time-dependent data, exploiting new DBMS features, choice of language or indeed anything remotely technical

ENTERPRISE METADATA FRAMEWORK

Over the past few years, I’ve had the opportunity to discuss enterprise metadata to a wide variety of audiences and much of this conversation is captured in this “Best Practices” implementation framework. The model has evolved over the past few years as our program continues to do the same. Of course, this summary can only be a few pages long so the depth of the content here will be a tad shallow but you should be able to get the basics from the diagram and the description that follows. Figure 1 provides the new framework and the content follows to describe each section.

Processing XML Showplans Using SQLCLR in SQL Server 2005

Build an application to extract a query's estimated execution cost from its XML showplan. Users can submit only those queries costing less than a predetermined threshold to a server running SQL Server 2005, thereby ensuring it is not overloaded with costly, long-running queries.

An interview with Ken Henderson

I have never met Ken Henderson, but I have followed his career, read his books, and even reviewed one or two of them for Dr. Dobb’s Journal. When I first saw Ken’s The Guru’s Guide to Transact SQL I almost did not pick it up. As a general rule, I don’t pick up the guru’s guide to anything. I’m glad I overcame this, since the book is little short of amazing.

Ken surprised me again with his latest book, The Guru’s Guide to SQL Server Architecture and Internals . About 400 pages into it, I was impressed by the introduction to what is involved in creating a server-based application, but wondered about its inclusion in a SQL Server book. The next 400 pages made it clear that understanding how servers work on Windows is critical to understanding the implications of how SQL Server runs.

BUSINESS METADATA: HOW TO WRITE DEFINITIONS

Many errors and accidents are made/caused by misunderstandings of the meanings of terms used.

How many times have you been in a meeting when the words you heard being said did not match what you thought they were?

Many business decisions are made (and later regretted) due to a misunderstanding of the data, and what the data element used in a report is signifying. Some of these accidents and misunderstandings are large enough to be reported in the media. In prior papers I refer to the Mars Lander episode, where the unit of measure was assumed and not made explicit, miscalculations were made and the equipment was lost. Our businesses are filled with many such examples, although not as costly perhaps, are still quite impactful to the business.

Detecting and Resolving Stalled and Stuck I/O Issues in SQL Server 200

Guest columnist Robert Dorr explores how the reporting tool in SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 4 significantly reduces the time it takes to identify and determine the underlying causes of stalled and stuck I/O operations.

SQL Server OLTP vs. data warehouse performance tuning

SQL Server delivers a number of functions for small to large organizations with needs ranging from internally developed applications to third-party off-the-shelf software. With all systems, data collection, entry and analysis at some level is required to meet organizational needs.

As user demands and the volume of data increase, it is imperative that all systems are properly configured and tuned based on the processing needs to meet the organizational requirements. This article will discuss two broad categories of SQL Server processing -- online transaction processing (OLTP) and data warehouses -- and will outline performance-tuning tips for each platform.

SQL Server 2005 - Setup and Deployment

So far, in our series of articles, we have presented the most significant new and enhanced features available in Microsoft's SQL Server 2005 Beta 2, but neglected to provide you with information regarding its installation. While it is more than likely that, by now, you already have accomplished this entirely on your own, we suspect that you still should be able to benefit from a more in-depth analysis of the setup process. Explaining improvements in its design and implementation is the primary purpose of this article.

How to Pass Access Data Across the Web

The solution described below should probably not be considered a "best practice" but it works. It came to life as I was pondering the following conundrum: How can I pass a little bit of data from an internal Access application behind a firewall out to a public web site in real time?