Let me know what you think.  Accurate and informative? Or marketing fluff?

Thanks,

-Kevin

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System Center: Service Manager

System Center: Operations Manager

System Center: Virtual Machine Manager

System Center: Orchestrator

System Center: Data Protection Manager

And, as always, I’m interested in your feedback. Tell me what you think!

Enjoy,

-Kevin

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SQL Server comes with a wide array of tools for monitoring your environment. There are logs and traces that provide information when errors occur, but these are often used passively to react to events that have already occurred.  There’s PerfMon, and Profiler, and loads of Dynamic Management Views to check.  But where to look?

As database administrators (DBA), we need to monitor our environments proactively and create solutions as issues arise. In this white paper, we will look at a couple technologies – event notifications and extended events – that can help you achieve these goals. With these two features, we’ll look at the error log and deadlocks, and demonstrate how you can get relevant information delivered as it occurs. We’ll also look at ways that run-time errors can be captured and used to help reduce the amount of time required to investigate issues.

This white paper, written by SQL Server MVP Jason Strate (blog | twitter), is a free download but does require a registration.

And, as always, I enjoy your feedback.  Thanks!

-Kev

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I can’t really do effective development on my little dev laptop because our production SQL Server database is 15 gazillionbytes, way too big for my workstation.  What’s a uber-nerd to do? 

Well, maybe they didn’t use the word “uber-nerd”.  But you get my drift, right?  The production database is really, really big – unmanageably big for keeping a local copy.  So that means the dev either has to create a metadata-only version of the database, which won’t produce realistic query plans, or somehow crush their laptop under 15 gazillionbytes of MDF and LDF files.

Actually, you have a better alternative – a clone database, sometimes called a shell database.  Here’s how I described a cloned database a few years ago here in my Tool Time column for SQL Server Pro Magazine:

In effect, a cloned database includes all of the schema objects of the database (e.g., tables, views, stored procedures), as well as the statistics and histograms (the so-called “statistics blob”). This metadata is quite small by volume but can tell you what estimated query plans look like outside of a large production environment and how those estimated query plans might change when SQL Server is upgraded. Cloned databases are especially useful when the data is confidential, classified, or subject to privacy laws.

The article gives you all the detail you need to effectively and quickly create a small version of a big, ol’ production database that produces the same query execution plans as you’d get on the prod server.

If you’re struggling with doing development on a big SQL Server database, learn the ropes on cloned databases asap!  You’ll be glad you did.

Enjoy!

-Kev

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The TechNet Wiki covers Microsoft technologies from writers throughout the community for use by the community. As with all wikis, this grassroots effort needs your help.

Microsoft is encouraging everyone to contribute the effort – all you have to do is join. So start a whole new article, add your knowledge or draw from your experience to improve an existing article. You can start small or large… Join in at http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/ or simply use the wiki as a new resource to answer your tough technology questions.

Enjoy,

-Kev

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HP and Microsoft engineering teams have worked together to create a reference architecture to Accelerate Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) database workloads with a fully-flash based HP/Microsoft architecture and achieve significant performance increases, simplified database manageability, and industry leading TCO.

The details come in a torrent after that leading paragraph with lots of pretty pictures and charts to help explain.  This is great stuff, especially for competitive platforms such as Oracle Exadata.

Read more about the new HP High Performance Reference Architecture for SQL Server 2012 here.

And just out of curiousity, are any of you using high performance architectures such as Oracle Exadata, IBM Netezza, or Teradata?  I’d love to hear your feedback, questions, and comments.

Enjoy,

-Kev

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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!

[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

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