Ed Vassie, the creator of FineBuild, has revised and improved the tools since I last wrote about it.  Ed has naturally added a number of bug fixes and documentation improvements. Several new features… [READ MORE]

The Internet doesn’t forget either.  Recommendations that were once helpful, if not outright essential, now are neutral or even downright bad. So now, whenever I put together new presentations, I always spend a lot of time in research, reassessing my knowledge on the topic.  (That doesn’t mean that I’ll extemporaneously say it wrong, because I speak in an off-the-cuff and rapid style. But at least my notes are usually correct).

Case In Point

Take backup and recovery (B&R), for example.  I’ve been writing about and performing B&R for years.  I’m even part of the team that builds the most popular B&R tool in the SQL Server space.  It’s an extremely important part of what I do.  And yet, even after spending a couple days re-researching topics (yet again), I still manage to get a few of the more specific details wrong because of changes over the years in the feature set.  How so?

During an Expert’s Perspective webcast last week (and available on-demand) covering the top backup and recovery mistakes on Microsoft SQL Server, I mis-explained the details concerning how SQL Server performs a differential backup.  A very clever SC on our team who was also attending the webcast pointed out to me after the session that I’d described differentials working at an 8k page-level when, in fact, they work at the extend-level (that’s a block of eight 8k pages). #FACEPALM!

When describing the differential backup I said that a bit was flipped on each page header and SQL Server would only back up those pages. Instead, whenever a page is changed a bit is recorded on the differential change map (1bit per extent), the backup process then queries these map pages and backs up those extents that have been marked as changed.

• Watch the on-demand video of Performance Tuning SQL Server for Backups and Restores, with me, Iain Kick, and Brent Ozar (blog | twitter). Free, but registration required.
• Watch the on-demand video of Ten Incredibly Painful SQL Server Backup and Recovery Mistakes, with me and David Gugick.

The Research Reveals

The cool revelation here is not that I can admit my mistakes.  The take-away from this blog post are all the great articles I read writing my latest slide deck.  These blogs and articles were so good that I needed to spread the word.  Add these to your must read list:

Virtual Log Files must be tamed!

• Performance impact: a large number of virtual log files Part I and Part II by one of my favorite not-so-prolific bloggers, Linchi Shea (blog). The thing I love about Linchi’s content is its rich benchmarking information.  Few SQL Server experts out there routinely test the behavior and performance of specific SQL Server features like Linchi does.
• Slow recovery times and slow performance due to large numbers of Virtual Log Files, by Graham Kent (blog) of Microsoft Sweden, shows that VLFs impact not only the processing time of transactions but also B&R processes.
• Lots of VLFs are Bad, by Tony Rogerson (blog | twitter), was the article that first got me interested in this behavior.

Backup and Recovery Myth Busting

• Breaking the Backup Chain – Redux (Or ‘Eating Crow’), by Michael K. Campbell (blog), shows that out-of-band database backups break differentials not transaction log backups.
• Backup with COPY_ONLY, How to Avoid Breaking the Backup Chain, by the eminent Paul Randal (blog | twitter), uses clear writing and first-class demos to illustrate the principle of breaking backup chains in Microsoft SQL Server.  Other great blogs of a related nature from Paul include:
• Debunking a Couple Myths around Full Backup
• The Importance of Validating Backups
• 30 Backup Myths

Other Good Sources

And just in case you need a refreshing in the basics of SQL Server backup and recovery, check these out:

• Backup best practices from Brent Ozar
• Backup 101 – recovery models and transaction log management

For my test, I grabbed a simple CSV data file containing the following data:
City,User_ID,Name,Street_Address,Status
“Dallas”,47,”Janet Fuller”,”445 Upland Pl.”,”Trial”
“Lyon”,38,”Andrew Heiniger”,”347 College Av.”,”Active”
“Dallas”,43,”Susanne Smith”,”2 Upland Pl.”,”Active”
“Berne”,22,”Bill Ott”,”250 – 20th Ave.”,”Active”
“Boston”,32,”Michael Ott”,”339 College Av.”,”Trial”
“New York”,41,”Bill King”,”546 College Av.”,”Deleted”
“Oslo”,45,”Janet May”,”396 Seventh Av.”,”Active”
As you can see from the diagram below, the import of the data to create a schema was not difficult at all:
Once the schema is configured, I can create the following simple data flow to move data from my CSV input file to my target table in SQL Server:

While there are other tools available for performing similar tasks, CSVexpress makes it very simple and intuitive.  However, as I mentioned earlier, where it starts getting really interesting is when you need to pre-process and clean-up the data prior to loading it.   Whether it involves enriching the data from external data sources or web services, or identifying and repairing bad data, CSVexpress maintains a simple interface for all of that.  
The best part – it’s all free of charge.  The version you can download from www.csvexpress.com is expressor’s free Community Edition.  expressor also offers a licensed Desktop and Standard Edition with even more advanced features, which are available for a 30-day trial.   As a matter of fact, at the end of November, expressor will be introducing Salesforce support into their commercial editions and CSVexpress will feature a 30-day trial version.  You will be able to load Salesforce just as easily as if loading to SQL Server, or download your Salesforce contact, lead, and opportunity data and transform it before generating the right CSV output file (or files) that meets your daily, weekly, and monthly Excel reporting and analysis needs.  Now that’s easy!

“Login failed for user ‘<user_name>’. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 18456)”.

The challenge when troubleshooting this error message is that you may have a problem with SQL Server or you may have a problem with Active Directory or Kerberos, if you’re using one of those authentication technologies.

A False Trail

When times are good, and you’re able to make a connection, you can always query sys.dm_exec_connections, to see how you’re connecting, for example, using NTLM rather than Kerberos.  But that doesn’t help us when we can’t connect to the server at all.

In other situations, your problem might be caused by duplicate SPMs in Active Directory.  MVP Russell Fields documented a nice solution for ridding Active Directory of duplicate SPNs here.  Microsoft Support also mentions some troubleshooting steps forauthentication problems here.  Ok, that helps. But it’s not my solution. 

MVPs to the Rescue

Fortunately, my MVP buddies Edwin Sarmiento (blog | twitter) of Canada and Bitemo Erik Gergely (blog) of Hungaria had already discussed and solved the problem for me!

Something Erik pointed out, but hadn’t occurred to me at first, is that if you’re getting this SQL Server error message then you’ve actually reached the server and probably aren’t having a full disconnect error.  The second thing that Erik pointed out is the importance of the state element of this error message.  A lot of the time, you can simply ignore the
state element of an error message.  But not this time.  As it turns out, state is the key to solving the problem.  For example, a state of 18 indicates that the password must be changed.

Microsoft provides a pretty good description of the states of error 18456 here, but it leaves out a few things.  (You’ll get more useful info if you read all of the comments too).  But
again, Erik comes to the rescue by providing a complete and concise list of error 18456 states here.

Microsoft Improves the Documentation

Even better for all troubleshooting situation involving state information, Microsoft has now added state descriptions for errors in Books Online, including error 18456.  When you look in your SQL Server error log, you see the state of the error and be able to make an accurate deduction about  the nature of the error!

Hope this helps,

-Kev

-Follow me on Twitter

[READ MORE ON DATABASE TRENDS & APPLICATIONS ]

Here’s a run-down of several useful documents and downloads to improve overall operation performance for those of you in a Microsoft-centric IT organization:

Microsoft Operations Framework

Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) version 4.0 guide is practical guidance for IT organizations. With the release of version 4.0, MOF now reflects a single, comprehensive IT service lifecycle—it helps IT professionals connect service management principles to everyday IT tasks and activities and ensures alignment between IT and the business.

Infrastructure Planning and Design

The Infrastructure Planning and Design (IPD) guides are the next version of Windows Server System Reference Architecture. The guides in this series help clarify and streamline design processes for Microsoft infrastructure technologies, with each guide addressing a unique infrastructure technology or scenario.

Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer 2.2 (for IT Professionals)

The Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer provides a streamlined method to identify missing security updates and common security misconfigurations. MBSA 2.2 is a minor upgrade correct minor issues and add optional catalog support.

Security Compliance Manager

The Microsoft Security Compliance Manager provides centralized security baseline management features, a baseline portfolio, customization capabilities, and security baseline export flexibility to accelerate your organization’s ability to efficiently manage the security and compliance process for the most widely used Microsoft technologies.

If you’d rather not read my entire previous article – quick recap, expressor Studio uses “semantic types” to manage and abstract mappings between sources and targets. In essence, these types are used for describing data in terms that humans can understand—instead of describing data in terms that computers can understand. The idea of semantic abstraction is quite intriguing and it gave me an excuse to use data from data.gov to build a quick demo. You can download the complete data set I used from the following location: International Statistics.  (Note: I have this dream that I’m going to someday download all of this free statistical data sets, build a bunch of amazing and high-value analytics, and make a mint.  If, instead, YOU do all of those things, then please pay to send at least one of my seven kids to college in repayment for the inspiration.  I’m not kidding.  I have SEVEN kids. God help me).

The federal government, to their credit, has made great progress in making data available.  However, there is a big difference between accessing data and understanding data. When I first looked at one of the data files I downloaded, I figured it was going to take me years to decrypt the field names. Luckily, I did notice an Excel file with field names and descriptions. Seriously, there are single letter field names in these files where the field name “G” has a description of “Age group indicator” (Oh Wow).  See the figure below.

It’s stuff like this that reminds me why we have data quality and master data management tools.  Ok, back to expressor Studio. I quickly mapped a couple of files into expressor Studio using their “Read File” operator. It was fairly simple and easy to use. My data included files with country area information, population, and gender information by year. Once I mapped these files I quickly wanted to shed the default cryptic, nay, nonsensical names. I could have just renamed the fields when I initially mapped them into the system but that would mean I would have to manage the names in three separate locations. Bah! It made more sense to create a common semantic type and reuse it across all three files.

There are two flavors of semantic types within expressor Studio to handle your mappings, atomic types or composite types. An atomic type is simply a single field name whereas a composite type is a combination of one more atomic types. Since the data files had many common fields, I decided to create a core set of atomic types that I could then roll up into composite types based on the files I was mapping. This kept the mappings simple and easy to understand and most importantly the whole exercise took about 5 minutes. Once the types were created I simply mapped the cryptic names from the files to the business friendly names in my semantic type.  (I can’t even begin to imagine how long this would’ve taken to build using native tools, but certainly not 5 minutes).

Now I was ready to move my data. I took the data from three files and combined them into one master dataset. From there, my international statistics from Data.Gov were pumped right into my waiting SQL Server database.  Note that I could’ve used Excel or just about any other database as my target instead of SQL Server.

Now, you might be saying to yourself “That looks easy because you read all the help files first.”  Actually, no.  In fact, some of my buddies like to lovingly tell me to “RTFM” from time to time.  It’s not that it offends my masculinity to read a manual.  I just usually like to have a go first and then, if needed, go back to the manual.  In fact, all I really used was this 5-minute demo video that in noticed when I was downloading the tool.

If you’re tackling ETL and you want it fast and easy, then you might want to check out their website, www.expressor-software.com, to learn more about the expressor company and products.

Enjoy!

-Kev

P.S. Follow me on Twitter!

This white paper addresses methods for successfully managing today’s complex heterogeneous database infrastructures. Topics discussed include: balancing key business metrics, understanding challenges to the DBA, and managing multiple database platforms (i.e. Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, Sybase) simultaneously.

Enjoy,

-Kev

P.S. Follow me on Twitter!

-=-=-=-

Come join me on Tuesday, August 2, 2011 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM EDT for a free webcast covering the internals and architecture of Microsoft SQL Server.  It’s not everyday that a dry topic like this is presented in a fun and easy to understand format, so get in while the gettin’ is good.  :^)

Registration is free, thanks to the fine folks at Pragmatic Works.

REGISTER HERE

And don’t forget to check out all of Pragmatic Works’ other free webcasts.  It’s great stuff and it’s FREE!

Enjoy,

-Kev

Follow me on Twitter

So I’m going to start sharing what I’m reading at least once per week, partly so that I don’t firehose too many reading links directly into your brain (where I to do it say once per month) and partly to solidify in my own mind the information that I’m reviewing. So here are a few good links for the seven days leading up to July 22, 2001:

• Microsoft and Whitehouse partnership on BigData: BigData isn’t a particularly new concept.  But I was intrigued to learn that the National Science Foundation, Microsoft, and 13 other teams were partnering on developing better BigData analytics for lots of government data from activities such as healthcare, economic development, education, transportation, and the power grid.  Cools stuff!  Plus, Microsoft has developed a new tool called Project Daytona to better harness the power of the cloud, in general, and Windows Azure, specifically.
• While we’re on the topic of Federal IT in the Cloud be sure to read this linked article from ComputerWorld.  Say what you will about our government, but putting government IT in the cloud and increasing both its transparency and availability will make a huge difference in how the Federal government will be able to service the public.  We’re talking as big a difference as corporations experienced between the “catalog on the web” experience of the 1990′s to the Web2.0 experience of today.
• If you’re the social media type, give this article a read discussing the Power of Hashtags in Social Media.
• The Register, of the UK, whose tagline is “Biting the hand that feeds IT” has a great article on a spat over database technologies between the IT sage Michael Stonebreaker and Google.  It’s a great read if for no other reason than to prove that databases are worth fighting over.
• And if you think Microsoft is still towing the relational database barge without thinking about other technologies, you need to read up on Projects Dryad and Daytona.
• Finally, I’m still getting lots of questions about when and where to limit SQL Server’s Max Degrees of Parallelism.  Be sure to read Microsoft’s Recommendations and Guidelines for ‘max degree of parallelism’ configuration option here.

And just because so many of us in IT are closet or former musicians, there’s Live Guitar Lessons with Steven Krenz, sponsored by my hometown boyz at Gibson Guitar.

Got a favorite article or tool tip? Let me know!  Enjoy,

-Kev

Follow me on Twitter.