The SQL UPDATE Statement

Just an FYI tonight is the monthly Tampa Bay SQL Server BI User Group meeting. Tonight’s presentation will be by our fearless leader Rob Hatton on Creating Slowly Changing Dimensions.

The meeting will begin at 6:30 PM in the new Microsoft Office at:

5426 Bay Center Drive
Suite 700
Tampa, FL 33609

Our sponsor this month is Steve Turner (Twitter) of T2 Software Services.

T2 Software Services offers a wide range of people services to its Clients through:

·Consulting Services – IT Supplemental Staffing (Staff Augmentation)

·Project Outsourcing – With full Project Management & Responsibility

·Placement Services – Direct Placement (Contingency Search)

As per my new modus operandi, I will give a follow up post on the meeting in the next couple of days. See you there!

So in my first post I explained that my moniker was inspired by the rubber chicken hanging on the wall in my cube. After realizing that he’s now become an integral part of the office in that we all squeeze him whenever something breaks its time he had a name. That’s where you guys come in!

My chicken needs a name. Anything. SQL-related is cool but it doesn’t really matter as long as its befitting its awesomeness. After all entries are in we here in the office will go over the entries and decide a winner. Unfortunately I don’t have the backing of Godaddy.com on this one like the SQL Rap Contest so sadly I don’t have any prizes, just bragging rights. I’ll set the deadline to two weeks from today (Friday June 12th). Feel free to submit entries here on this blog or DM them to me on Twitter.

Today was Quest Software’s bi-weekly Pain-of-the-Week webcast and this week’s topic was Getting Started with SQL Server Management Studio. We were lucky enough to have not one, but two SQL rock stars presenting today in Brent Ozar (Blog | Twitter) and Michelle Ufford (Blog | Twitter).

Brent kicked it off with a quick intro and then handed it over to Michelle to walk us through the basics such as creating a database, adding tables/columns/objects/etc as well as going through all the options available such as creating Maintenance Plans, creating backups from within SSMS, and the SQL Server Agent. They even demoed some of the nice little tools available in the latest SSMS such as activity monitor and the built-in reports. A question was raised about if the new SSMS offered a view equivalent to the taskpad view in SQL 2000 Enterprise Manager and the answer is…kind of. If you’re using SSMS 2008 (which you should be since you can install it without having to have a SQL 2008 instance) that view has been replaced by the built-in reports. You can access the reports by right-clicking your Instance or even a database itself, go to Reports, go to Standard Reports and select which report you’d like to view. And like we learned yesterday, some of these reports come from our default trace! Another fun tidbit of information learned from this presentation was that if you choose to (granted this isn’t recommended) right-click a table and select the Edit Top 200 records, it opens the records in an Access-like grid and allows you to change data directly. But this is cool and useful, why isn’t it recommended? Well when you open records like this it puts a lock on those records so nobody else can get to them. So in a production environment clearly this is a no-no but at least you know the feature’s there. For the record the recommended method would be to do something like this:

UPDATE table_nameSET column1=value, column2=value2,...WHERE some_column=some_value

After Michelle wrapped up our tour of SSMS, Brent then gave us a quick tour of Quest Software’s Toad for SQL Server product. This is a pretty slick product that is aimed towards the development community. It gives you basically the same things as SSMS for the most part but it also gives you so much more. For instance you are able to do a query and re-sort your results using column sorting as you would in Excel (i.e. click column name to change order). You can also do filtering via this method as well. What’s the big deal about this? Well every time you change your ordering you don’t have to make a roundtrip to the server to re-query your data, it holds everything locally so its speedy. This is where Borat pops up and says “very niiiiiiiiice”. There was also some slick thing it did with pivots but that was the point where my desktop froze so all I got was audio from the phone call, though the people commenting on Twitter seemed to like…whatever it is it did. But don’t take my word for it, try it out yourself and go download a 30-day demo of the product at Quest’s website!

That pretty much summed up the webcast this week! They’ll be doing a follow-up webcast on June 11th with more advanced tips as well. you can register for that webcast here. If this post didn’t quite do it for you, you can catch all POTW webcasts on-demand over at Quest’s website. Today’s presentation should be up in a few days.

Today during lunch was the monthly PASS webcast for the Database Administration SIG. This month’s topic was understanding the default trace and was presented by Jonathan Kehayias (BLOG Twitter). Jonathan did a great job as he very clearly explained the nuances of the default trace (i.e. what it really is, how you query it, what’s it do, etc.).

The presentation files are available at his blog. If you get a chance definitely check out the on-demand replay which should be available next week. On a side note this is my second or third one of these I’ve attended and I absolutely love it! I think PASS is doing a great job providing this sort of on-going training for the community and I also tip my hat to people like Jonathan who are willing to take time out of their day to present.