Defragmenting indexes in SQL Server 2005

Defragmenting indexes in SQL Server 2005: "To defragment your indexes, we now use ALTER INDEX in SQL Server 2005 rather than DBCC DBREINDEX and DBCC INDEXDEFRAG, which have both been deprecated in 2005."

Microsoft OLAP by Mosha Pasumansky : OLAP Market Shares for 2006 - Microsoft is clear leader

Microsoft OLAP by Mosha Pasumansky : OLAP Market Shares for 2006 - Microsoft is clear leader: "Nigel Pendse published his analysis for the OLAP market shares in 2006. The market overall grew at about 16%, but Microsoft OLAP again grew faster than the market. This time much faster - at about 30%, and as a result the Microsoft's share jumped up 4 points, (while pretty much everybody else lost market share, except for Microstrategy and Applix). Microsoft's numbers include all OLAP related income, such as portion of Excel's PivotTable and Business Scorecard Manager, but it is clear, that the main contributor behind such phenomenal growth was Analysis Services 2005. Released just before 2006 started, quickly followed by SP1 in April 2006 which fixed many known issues that were too risky to squeeze before RTM. In fact, work on SP1 started as early as August 2005, couple of month before AS2005 was even launched. Therefore it was SP2, (released 4 days ago), which provided the fixes for the previously unknown real-world problems encountered by the customers - both performance and functionality wise. Additionally, SP2 truly enabled Excel 2007 . So with AS2005 SP2 I feel really good about Analysis Services. Of course, there still will be some problems, and there will be fixes for them, and eventually sometime there will be SP3, but AS2005 SP2 is a mature, solid and proven piece of technology, and I expect it to do very well in 2007. "

Social SQL with FQL: the Facebook Query Language

"FQL" - this is cool stuff!

ProgrammableWeb.com » Blog Archive » Social SQL with FQL: the Facebook Query Language: "SQL is going social with Facebook’s newly announced data access mechanism the Facebook Query Language. What is it? From their site:

Last week we released a whole new version of Platform. On the surface it may look similar to the old version, but under the hood it is a totally new implementation. And, starting today you can enjoy the benefits of that new implementation by getting direct access to a more powerful, flexible way of accessing Facebook data - a query language we call FQL…

FQL is a way to query the same Facebook data you can access through the other API functions, but with a SQL-style interface. In fact, many of the normal API calls are simple wrappers for FQL queries. All of the usual privacy checks are still applied. A typical query looks something like this:
SELECT name, pic FROM user WHERE uid=211031 OR uid=4801660 "

Database Mail on a cluster

Database Mail on a cluster: "If you are unable to get Database Mail to send e-mails when the SQL Server 2005 instance is on a cluster, try adding an alias for the virtual server. You can easily add aliases using the SQL Server Configuration Manager tool."

SQL Server 2005 Dedicated Administrator Connection

SQL Server 2005 Dedicated Administrator Connection: "This is a special diagnostic connection which is used by DBA's to troubleshoot a server when the server is refusing other connections
for whatever reason.
DAC can be created with SqlCmd utility or in SSMS with admin:instance_name."

How to Downgrade a Database from SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2000

How to Downgrade a Database from SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2000: "I've seen this question pop up here, and i think it's usefull to post it here, since not every one reads the forums (you should! :))
We'll in this thread at the end of the first page there's a procedure on how to downgrade a db from SQL Server 2k5 to SQL server 2000.
Enjoy it."

Microsoft releases SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2

Microsoft releases SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2: "Microsoft said it will allow unlimited virtual instances of the SQL Server SP2 database to run on servers that are fully licensed for SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition. "

Chris Webb's BI Blog: SQL Server Best Practices Analyzer CTP

Chris Webb's BI Blog: SQL Server Best Practices Analyzer CTP: "I've just downloaded the CTP of the SQL Server Best Practices Analyzer (see Paul Mestemaker's post here http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlrem/archive/2007/02/21/SQL-2005-BPA-Feb-CTP-released.aspx for more details) and, shock horror, it analyses Analysis Services databases and Integration Services packages too! The advice it gives is quite sensible - things like 'set up attribute relationships' and 'put distinct count measures in their own measure group' - so it's definitely worth checking out. "

Business Intelligence Review

Business Intelligence Review: "As businesses build these capabilities, one of the biggest challenges they face is the quality of the underlying data - a problem that costs companies worldwide billions every year. In February 2005, the research firm Forrester said 30 percent of the respondents to its latest data warehousing technology survey had actually missed deadlines in closing financial books and related statutory reporting due to information and data quality issues.3"

Business Intelligence Review

Business Intelligence Review: "But it is safe to say that much of the data community prefers to steer wide of the process topic by and large. The biggest conferences are still largely data-centric, and the largest market research firm we know still segregates its BI and process events. Now that the weaknesses of tactical and operational business intelligence have been exposed, that mistake may not last long into the future."

MySQL Podcasts

Leave it to MySQL to support these over Oracle and Microsoft... good stuff here, including security, clustering, and other things. Here;s my favorite:

Technocation - Podcasts: "OurSQL Episode 2: Wild Performance Tips 88 "

Tyro Trader: views of a market student: Google smackdown!

Haven't written anything about IM bots in oh, about a year, but ran across this and it is quite nice. Google "gets it," and I'm continually impressed.

Tyro Trader: views of a market student: Google smackdown!: "Yet again, I'm blown away by how easy it is to work with Google! I've written code to tie into blogger.com and to Google Calendar and so I was already impressed. I decided to add alerts via Google Talk in case I'm not sitting at my desk and it was even easier than I could have guessed:


GoogleTalkConnection con = new GoogleTalkConnection();con.login('joesmith', 'password');con.createChat('maryjane@gmail.com') .sendMessage('Howdy!');

That's it! Incredible."

Mastering Enterprise BI: Time Intelligence Pt. I

Mastering Enterprise BI: Time Intelligence Pt. I: "As I stated in my article Introduction to SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services: Handling Time Dimensions, it is a rare thing to encounter an instance of an OLAP cube that does not require a Time dimension. Throughout years of business intelligence consulting, I have only witnessed this scenario a handful of times within a production environment. Although there often seems to be no shortage of people to argue any side of any statement, few of us would disagree that the measurement of activity over time - and, hence, the Time dimension that supports this capability - is important to both analysis and operational management in general."

Massive Insider Breach At DuPont - News by InformationWeek

Do you track who the most active database users are?

Massive Insider Breach At DuPont - News by InformationWeek: "Gary Min worked as a research chemist for DuPont for 10 years before accepting a job with DuPont competitor Victrex PLC in Asia in October 2005. Between August and December of that year, Min downloaded 22,000 sensitive documents and viewed 16,706 more in the company's electronic library, making him the most active user of that database in the company, according to prosecutors. "

"While many companies worry about departed employees stealing intellectual property through some sort of back door planted in their IT systems, 75% of the intellectual property thefts studied between 1996 and 2002 by the U.S. Secret Service and Carnegie Mellon's CERT program were committed by current employees, says Dawn Cappelli, a senior member of the technical staff at the CERT Program at Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute. Of those current employees committing intellectual property thefts, 45% had already accepted a job offer with another company. "In between the time they have another offer and the time they leave is when they take the information," she says.

The best way to guard against insider breaches is for companies to monitor database and network access for unusual activity and set thresholds that represent acceptable use for different users. If an employee starts downloading thousands of documents, and this is unusual for the job designation, this should automatically trip red flags to an administrator or manager. "

Getting Real: Free Web 2.0 Book

37 Signals has released a book that is a collection of essays about starting and running a Web 2.0 company. There are some gems in here, and it is worth browsing if you have any interest. The also sell PDF and paperbacks, but the content is available online for free.

Getting Real: "Getting Real
Here are the 16 chapters and 91 essays that make up the book."

Better Decision-Making: How Smart Companies Win with Performance Management

Better Decision-Making: How Smart Companies Win with Performance Management: "How to Win in an Uncertain Economy "

SQL 2005 Maintenance Wizard Part 1

SQL 2005 Maintenance Wizard Part 1: "There are a number of database housekeeping tasks that should be done on a regular basis to insure SQL performance and data integrity are optimized. Backing up the database, reorganizing data and index files, compressing the data file, updating the index statistics, and performing consistence checks are a few examples. All of these tasks can be executed using TSQL commands. However, SQL 2005 includes a graphical wizard (Maintenance Plan Wizard) that makes selecting these tasks and their options easy. In addition, the wizard will roll all of your selected tasks into a reusable and customizable package. "

Blogarithms » Amazon for Infrastructure-on-Demand

Anyone who reads this blog know how cool I think Amazon web services are... here is a detailed, yet very cool example, with a diagram, of a website using all three.

Spend time on this if you want to know some of the future of computing...

Blogarithms » Amazon for Infrastructure-on-Demand: "The buzz is building around Amazon Web Services as an application platform. Don MacAskill has been using AWS’ S3 storage service for SmugMug, and according to Jeremy Zawodny, will be talking about it at this year’s ETech conference. Jeremy and others have been experimenting with S3 as storage backup for desktop and laptop systems. Even Dave Winer is experimenting with S3."

Data Stewards

Data Stewards: "What is the role of a data steward?"

What is Really Behind the Success of Data Warehouse Appliances?

What is Really Behind the Success of Data Warehouse Appliances?: "Over the past four years, data warehouse appliances have become a disruptive force in the data warehousing market, increasingly displacing systems built on traditional computing architectures. The market is characterized by tremendous growth, projected to increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 70 percent through 2010, and its success is borne out by large brand-name companies worldwide, now numbering well over 100, who are implementing data warehouse appliances as a key component of their strategic business intelligence initiatives.1 According to Gartner, data warehouse appliances are projected for mainstream market adoption within two to five years. 2

But what is behind all this growth? Why are data warehouse appliances consistently able to outperform general-purpose systems to uncover deeply buried customer and operational trends? What accounts for their low total cost of ownership and ease of use in the data center?"

Chris Webb's BI Blog: Analysis Services 2005 Performance Guide

Chris Webb's BI Blog: Analysis Services 2005 Performance Guide: "The AS2005 Performance Guide is available for download here: "

24/7 Wall St.: MySQL IPO May Be In The Works

Any DBA out there will want a few shares of this... even it's just for kicks :) Be on the lookout.

24/7 Wall St.: MySQL IPO May Be In The Works: "MySQL is one of the companies we have had on the IPO-radar for some time, and even if this will take until the end of the year it is one to watch ahead of time."