Polish SQL Server User Group has won a drawing after filling Culminis survey. The prize is $250. We are going to spend it for books I guess. First try and first win! We definitely should try again :-)

Today I attended the BI Day conference organized by Microsoft. The whole event was a success as I understand meeting some nice people and having a good time on technical sessions. This time I was rather disappointed with our local speaker but everything was leveled up by three sessions of Davide Mauri (SQL Server MVP, Solid Quality Mentors). Davide was talking about not very common aspects of SSIS and SSRS 2005. He also had a session about new BI features in SQL Server 2008. I hope to see people like Davide on Polish conferences as they produce not as many slides and provide many real life demos. We exchanged our experiences on leading the user groups in Poland and Italy too.

I've decided to move my technical blog to http://zine.net.pl/blogs/sqlgeek/default.aspx. SQLGEEK is the codename of my new blog. Spaces.live will remain my blog on PLSSUG and non-technical stuff. Two blogs? Why not! Oh, and one more thing, SQLGEEK is going to be written in Polish.

Several days ago I joined a program called "Friend of Red Gate". This is a community related program founded by Red Gate Software. By becoming a member of the program you get full NFR licence for every single Red Gate product and also you get one year free upgrade opportunities. This is really good idea by Red Gate.

One of the first applications I have looked into is SQL Prompt 3 (3.6.0 prcisely). This powerful tool adds intellisense and code snippets to QA and/or SSMS (also SSMS Express) and/or VS2005. I must say Red Gate has made a big step forward with this tool. Last time when I tried previous version SQL Prompt against my database (over 80k objects) the tool failed. This version performs much better. 

After about 5-10 minutes of collecting my database metadata (meanwhile I could work with SSMS with no noticeable performance issues) it created its own file with the snapshot of the object list. When I started SSMS again the list was taken from the file and the differences only were loaded so I had object names intellisensed immediately.

The second thing is that Red Gate's tool supports JOINs as I always wanted it to support. Just write your tables and the tool will give you a list of potential joining conditions. Moreover, you can set the options how the tool will guess the joining conditions (data types, column names, foreign key parts).

The other features I like in SQL Prompt are: keywords uppercasing, ability to add custom code snippets, setting connections to ignore, star wildcard expanding.

Generally speaking - this version of the tool seems to be much better than the prevoius one. It works quicker, offers more options, has more intelligence and more sense than before. If you really need intellisense in SSMS or QA then SQL Prompt is what you can try! 

Below is a little screenshot of SQL Prompt in action.

More about SQL Prompt on www.red-gate.com

Polish SQL Server User Group is still growing! It has over 60 members registered. And this week two companies - Red Gate Software and Bonair S.A.. - joined the "firends of PLSSUG" list. We hope that with their help our group will have more power to create really strong, countrywide community.

Visit PLSSUG website

Yesterday I got a new book from MS Press - "Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Query Tuning and Optimization" edited by Kalen Delaney (written by Kalen and well known SQL guys: Adam Machanic, Ron Talmage, Lubor Kollar, Sunil Agarwal and Craig Freedman). The very first look tells me that this is going to be a fascinating book. I am going to read the book ASAP and let you know if it is really as good as I suppose.

At last! IT Forum calendar is available. I could sit down and choose the sessions suitable for me. And my draft calendar looks like below.

Monday, 12 November 2007

DAT201 - An Overview of the Next Release of Microsoft SQL Server (Francois Ajenstat)
DAT202 - Introducing SQL Server 2008 Resource Governor (Boris Baryshnikov)

Tuesday, 13 November 2007

DAT03-ILL - SQL Server Always On Technologies Instructor-Led Lab: Part 1 - Database Mirroring (Kimberly Tripp, Paul S. Randal)
DAT307 - SQL Performance Query Tips and Techniques (Bob Beauchemin)
DAT305 - Secrets to Fast Detection and Recovery from Database Corruptions (Paul S. Randal)
SPN206 - Microsoft SQL Server 2005: Server and Storage Performance (Jerome Mas, Christophe Dubois)
DAT04-ILL - SQL Server Always On Technologies Instructor-Led Lab: Part 2 - Database Snapshots (Kimberly Tripp, Paul S. Randal)

Wednesday, 14 November 2007

DAT04-IS - New T-SQL Programmability Features in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 (Bob Beauchemin)
DAT206 - Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Security Best Practices (Al Comeau)
DAT309 - Predictive Analysis for Everyone with SQL Server and Office (Donald Farmer)
DAT310 - SQL Server 2008 – Enhancement for the Relational Data Warehouse (Steffen Krause)
DAT01-IS - SQL Server Upgrade Best Practices, Tips, and Tricks (Kimberly Tripp, Paul S. Randal)

Thursday, 15 November 2007

DAT05-ILL - SQL Server Always On Technologies Instructor-Led Lab: Part 3 - Online Operations (Kimberly Tripp, Paul S. Randal)
DAT07-IS - DBCC Internals (Paul S. Randal)
DAT301 - SQL Server Indexing - Unraveling the Unknown (Kimberly Tripp)
DAT02-IS - SQL Server 2005 Database Mirroring: Setup to Implementation to Monitoring (Kimberly Tripp, Paul S. Randal)
SEC313 - Dive Deeper Inside Windows Server 2008 Security – Keeping the Bad Guys Out! (Andy Malone)

Friday, 16 November 2007

DAT205 - The Next Release of Microsoft SQL Server: Manageability Overview (Kimberly Tripp)
MGT324 - How We Built the TechEd IT Forum Infrastructure
DAT304 - Scale-up or Scale-out Microsot SQL Server (Marco Manuello)
DAT401 - Dude, Where Is My Memory? Understanding SQL Server Memory Usage And Management (Maciej Pilecki)

As this is only a draft the calendar above can change. I think I will look for some sessions of Rafal Lukawiecki and I will probably visit hands-on labs. But as you can see IT Forum is full of SQL Server content (dominated by "SQL marriage" - Kimberly Tripp and Paul S. Randal - congratulations, wonder if you talk about SQL at home ;-)). Barcelona, I am ready to go!

There is a new article on Technet Poland website. Damian Widera writes on CLR integration for DBAs. He describes CLR characteristics, CLR objects and their creation, security aspects of CLR, some administrative abilities provided by DMVs and system views, some sample use cases.

SQL Server 2005 CLR integration for DBAs - part I
SQL Server 2005 CLR integration for DBAs - part II

Yesterday there was the first meeting of PLSSUG and Warsaw .NET Group. First we were discussing the tools from Microsoft Expression Studio (this session was prepared by Artur Zarski from Microsoft Poland). Then we discussed some T-SQL codes generated by LINQ (session prepared by Dawid Lazinski from Inspire Tech). The meeting was cool as everyone could speak freely and both sessions were commented live by attendees.

See the pictures taken during the meeting

After rather poor launch ITCore.pl steps forward. The ITCore team is working all the time and the results are already visible. I must say I was pretty amazed when today I found out that several bugs I have reported since 27 of Sept. have beed eliminated. In addition, the team has set up a schedule of further deployment. I think the portal is on its way to become as good as it should be.

ITCore.pl - the newest IT community portal in Poland - was launched on Thursday 27 of September. The portal itself does not look like we all want it. There are still functionalities missing. However, I hope the next weeks / months full of hard work will give us a lot of satisfaction with this place on the web.

Polish SQL Server User Group has its own website: www.plssug.org.pl. The site is build on Google Groups engine as it has all we need to maintain our community. So on the website you will find: information about the group, discussion board, sessions topics, files archive and more. Become a member of PLSSUG and help us in building the strongest SQL Server community in Poland ever!

Polish SQL Server User Group

Warsaw .NET User Group has new website. Acutally it is not a webiste but a discussion group. The community will put there any information on meetings, sessions and other activities. There will be some files for download (presentations, demos, samples....).

Warsaw .NET User Group discussion group

There is an article on Technet Poland website written by Daniel Arak and Lukasz Kieloch. The article refers designing aggregations in SSAS 2005. Both guys have strong BI background as they design, create and deploy large BI solutions for big Polish and European companies. If you work with SSAS you should definitely read the article.

Designing aggregatiions in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 - part I
Designing aggregatiions in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 - part II

On 12 of November I will arrive at Barcelona to attend Teched IT Forum 2007! I have already booked my flight. I will share some flat with nice MCTs from areound the world. This seems to guarantee a very good entertainment everyday after the conference hours ;-)

More on Teched IT Forum 2007

Last week the first part of my article about new database engine features in Katmai CTP 4 was published on Polish Technet website. Click below to read the article.

What's new in SQL Server 2008 July CTP database engine - part I
What's new in SQL Server 2008 July CTP database engine - part II

Several days ago I've been choosen as the editor-in-chief of ITCore.pl. ITCore.pl is going to be the biggest IT community portal in Poland, one of the biggest portals in this part of Europe. This unexpected honor puts some new challenges on my way. Keep your fingers crossed! ITCore.pl goes online on 27th of September.

Damian Widera has written an article on DTA.exe command-line utility. Article is available on Polish Technet website.

Damian Widera on DTA.exe - part I
Damian Widera on DTA.exe - part II

If you perform UNION, EXCEPT or INTERSECT statement it wolud be better to use parethesis to separate each SELECT statement to avoid bad results when you make a mistake in a keyword:

SELECT TOP 1
        name
FROM    sys.objects
EXECPT
SELECT TOP 1
        name
FROM    sys.indexes

What happens when you execute the code above? You will get two result sets because EXECPT will be treaten as a table alias. The remedy is:

(SELECT TOP 1
        name
FROM    sys.objects)
EXECPT
(SELECT TOP 1
        name
FROM    sys.indexes)

Putting SELECT statements into parenthesis will generate an error which is the correct result.

You may also use some additional software to format your query before execution. For example Red Gate SQL Refactor will format the code in a different way if you have a mistake in a keyword.

Credits to Maciej Pilecki who has called my attention to this problem.

Because of my experiences and feelings about RAID-Fs I've registered as a member of BAARF (Battle Against Any Raid F). It's a group of people sharing their dissaproval for using RAID-5 and other RAID-Fs for databases in a funny way :-)

http://www.miracleas.com/BAARF/BAARF_members_sql.php