April 27, 2010, 4:34 pm
Girl Property Surrounded by Geek Objects
I’ve just started watching The Big Bang Theory so I figured I’d borrow a naming convention from their episodes with this blog post. This is a quick post as the problem itself is small and doesn’t have an application (yet).
A co-worker of mine was asked by a higher-up about possibly creating an in-house iPhone application that displays information from an existing SQL Server database. He is currently dabbling in iPhone development and he found that querying SQL Server directly was going to be a bit of a pain so he asked me if we could access the data via other (read also: easier) means such as reading from a data dump file that is in XML format. This limitation comes from the fact that there are no native API’s for Microsoft SQL in Cocoa. As a production DBA seeing anything involving XML gives me the heebie jeebies and I rely on the kindness of strangers, Scarlett O’Hara-style, to help me bridge my ignorance gap. So first thing I needed to find out was what was the easiest way to translate SQL Server data into XML. Now, I’m not completely dense and I know that from SQL Server 2005 and higher there were “a lot of things” put into the product that helped in the XML space but this particular server I am connecting to is SQL 2000 (ewww I know) and I wasn’t sure if it even handled XML the way I needed. I turned on the SQL Bat-signal and asked my Twitter folks to enlighten me on this enigma.
Continue reading ‘The PowerShell and XML Corollary’ »
April 22, 2010, 11:45 am
Last weekend I had the distinguished pleasure of attending Chicago’s very first SQLSaturday event. Before I begin my recap I’d like to again give a HUGE thanks the organizers of the event: Wendy Pastrick (Blog | Twitter), Aaron Lowe (Blog | Twitter) and Ted Krueger (Blog | Twitter) as well as all of the awesome volunteers that helped out.
My wife Jessica (Blog | Twitter) and I arrived into Chicago Friday afternoon. We had time to catch a bite at Grand Lux Cafe with some friends and my sister. Pretty nice place, kind of like a Cheesecake Factory but a little better. My wife’s a foodie so she was loving it! After lunch I got the pleasure of meeting Brent Ozar (Blog | Twitter), Jeremiah Peschka (Blog | Twitter) and Jeremiah’s friend John Jakubowski (Blog | Twitter) as they picked me up and we headed out to the ‘Burbs for the speaker’s dinner. We had plenty of time in car to talk about all things geek such as NoSQL, Ruby on Rails, PASS and a few other choice subjects not fit for print. Let’s just say I learned some strip clubs in Ohio have free steaks for lunch.
Continue reading ‘SQLSaturday 31 Chicago: Recap’ »
April 15, 2010, 9:22 am
R2 is ready to roll!
As expected, Brent “Master” Ozar (Blog | Twitter) already scooped the story, but it never hurts to help seed Boogle searches for “SQL Server 2008 R2 release date”. Well now it’s official: May 21, 2010.
Recently I had the pleasure of going up to Microsoft for an R2 event with Donald Farmer (Blog | Twitter) which I’ll be blogging about soon. At this event they did an overview of the new R2 features and got our thoughts about it. Personally, I think PowerPivot is a really awesome tool that will really help put the power of business intelligence in the end user’s hands in an easy way. Another feature that I get more excited about the more I learn about it is the new StreamInsight feature. I’d still like to test it some and read more about it but I can see some very cool things coming out of that feature.
Update via Brent’s site (reposted with permission):
Update: maybe not May 21. I’m hearing secondhand (nothing NDA) that either the audience heard the dates wrong, or Microsoft announced it wrong. I’m showing a couple of tweets below from audience members to support that it was probably the latter.
May 21?
And:
May 21?
Who’s the source, Luke?
I sense a disturbance in the release date
More news as it happens.
April 14, 2010, 1:27 pm
In the first part of this week’s documentation series we covered documentation in the traditional sense. In today’s lesson we’re going to talk about a new avenue which many are using as a sort of documentation repository and that is the personal tech blog.
Now I could use this lesson as an entire post on how to get started blogging but I won’t. Instead I will re-direct you to professor Brent Ozar’s series on How to Start a Blog. Consider that your homework assignment for this class. So if I’m not going to talk about starting a blog then what are we going to discuss? How about the significance of blogging or writing for your own personal development and growth? I’m very fortunate in that I have managed to have Tom LaRock (Blog | Twitter) as part of the faculty and this semester he is playing the role of DBA Coach and he touches on some of these points in this week’s lesson as well.
Continue reading ‘Creative Writing Pt II: Blogging’ »
April 13, 2010, 11:52 am
Thanks to Andy Warren (Blog | Twitter) for keeping the community abreast of these things by blogging about their availability. That being said since the community clamored about transparency during the last elections I think it’s time we took advantage of that fact. My plan, and I propose if you write a SQL-centric blog you try it out yourself as well, is to read over the meeting minutes every month and give my take on what I’m seeing come out of them. I’d like to warn you that I may say some things that may or may not make friends but that’s what transparency is all about, right? PASS is for the people, by the people and we really should have a hand in how the organization is run. So that being said, let’s get to the fun part. Now while I do go over points I still highly recommend you read the minutes for yourself as I don’t want your views skewed simply from my points. Again, read the minutes and make your own judgements:
Continue reading ‘PASS Board March Meeting Minutes Review’ »
