O’Reilly Media on Facebook is a place for for anyone who is a fan of O’Reilly, whether you’ve been following their books, conferences, webcasts, and more since the very beginning or you recently jumped onto the bandwagon.
I really enjoy the newsletters and blogs from O’Reilly’s various channels, especially Tim O’Reilly’s commentary.
SQL in a Nutshell, now in it's 3rd Edition
And, of course, there’s my book – SQL in a Nutshell – published by O’Reilly for your consideration. This book provides a complete reference of the latest release of the ANSI SQL standard, as well as full coverage of support for the ANSI standard from the biggest database vendors – Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.
Toad for SQL Server Wins Best of TechEd 2010 in the Database Development Category
Toad and I go way back. I first started with Toad as a user on the Oracle DBMS back in the early 1990′s. When I started at Quest Software back on January 2nd of 2002, one of the first products I tackled as a SQL Server product architect was Toad. How do we make this very popular Oracle product one that users in the SQL Server world will love too? And this challenge was made that much harder by the fact that Microsoft SQL Server ships with fantastic tools right there in the box. I haven’t worked directly on Toad for many years now, but the tool marches on with new features and capabilities that push the envelop with each new release.
L to R: Jason Hall, Qsft head of SC's; David Gugick, director of Architecture; and me
Want to try Toad for SQL Server for free?
The 5.0 version of Toad for SQL Server that we showed at TechEd is the latest beta, available at ToadWorld.com (build 387 at the time of this writing). It can coexist with Toad for SQL Server version 4.6, if you’re already using it. The beta is quite stable and has a bevy of new features, including:
SQL Azure support for most modules including data compare and schema compare, including comparing regular SQL Servers to SQL Azure and back, also with Firewall management (under Server Security properties panel).
Much improved code completion that’s faster and allows for column selection, multi-table selection, with tooltips for parameters. Don’t forget, all of these features work on SQL Server 2000, 2005, 2008, and 2008 R2.
Updated Schema Compare with better exposed snapshots.
Group Execute enhancements that include database-level selection so you can execute across databases, an option to only show selected servers/databases, option to merge results (or not), improved merging, etc.
New Idle Connection Timeout – to close connections after a period of inactivity.
Result Set Pinning.
Improved Trace support with features like Import Trace File to Table and Open in Profiler capabilities.
New Debug Trace – traces all activity occurring inside of Toad, including storing all variable info in a replayable file.
Twitter Integration (under the View – Collaboration panel) with Yammer integration coming in a future beta release.
You can also see a lot more details about the tool here. And my long-standing offer still stands. If you want to try Toad for SQL Server or its brethren (such as Toad for Data Analysts, Toad Data Modeler, or Benchmark Factory), drop me an email and I’ll get a long-term license key straight over to you.
But wait, there’s more!
There are so many great resources for you to tap into. And best of all, they’re all free! Check these out:
In this white paper, renowned Oracle PL/SQL expert and fellow O’Reilly author Steven Feuerstein provides dev managers with guidance on how to help developers write the best software possible.
Live Product Demo:Toad® Data Modeler
Date: Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Time: 11:00 a.m. PT / 2:00 p.m. ET
Before I jump onto the Goals and Themeword meme started by my buddy, Thomas LaRock (blog | twitter), I decided I’d spend a few minutes looking back on both the year 2009. (From a personal standpoint, the 00′s were my most difficult decade yet. Major problems of every stripe beset me on all sides and with alarming frequency throughout the decade. I was all “Good Riddance” and “Don’t let the door hit y’ass on the way out, 2009!” as the ball dropped in Times Square.)
Rather than spend a lot of time cooking up my own top 10 lists, I reckoned (that’s Southern for “thought”, btw) I’d recap a few others top X lists that are in the ballpark of my own personal opinion. I couldn’t resist putting together my own list at the end, which I’d love to hear your thoughts on. In addition, I want to hear about your Top 10 (or 5 or 3) for 2009!
Their Lists
Time Magazine’s list of Top 10 of Everything 2009 was a pretty good recap for the year on big ol’ cultural touch points like movies and music. I found at least one thing to agree with in each of their pop culture lists: movies – The Hurt Locker – check; TV shows – my personal favorite for its brilliant cohesive multiyear storyline and excellent character studies, Lost – check; album – I and Love and You by the Avett Brothers – check; books (sigh – if only I had more time) included the wonderful The Age of Wonders by Richard Holmes.
Lifehacker’s Top 5 Hive Topics of 2009 is a very interesting list covering lots of topics and pointing out a lot of interesting tools that I hadn’t encountered before. My personal favorite among them was the Top 5 Alternative File Copiers, since the Windows Explorer copy feature reminds me of hungrily awaiting my food in the microwave and just as the counter gets to the T-10 countdown, it goes back up to 30, then down to 8, then back up to 42, then down to 14.
I’m not sure if they meant to be funny but Digg’s Top 10 Most Popular Stories of 2009 is hilarious, much in the same way that Brent Ozar (blog | twitter) and I were when we put on an unintentionally hilarious performance at the PASS 2009 Summit Quiz bowl. Go ahead – ask Colin Stasiuk (blog | twitter) what he thought of our performance…
Impressed by Our Quiz Bowl Performance?
Speaking of unintentionally funny, have you seen Yahoo’s Top 10 Searches of 2009? Evidently, the median Internet user (at least from their metrics) is hormone-laden, teenage redneck with a thing for fast cars (Nascar), Hollywood hotties (Megan Fox), and an unassailable but secret love for Mormon-influenced Vampires (Twilight).
My List
I usually try to blog at least once per week and, when I can, even more. I still have this deep down urge to post lots of small blog posts of just a couple paragraphs. But for some reason, I always seem to come out with these big ol’ epistles. Despite my verbosity, y’all still read what I write and for that I’m very thankful. Over the last year, these were my top ten blog posts according to your interest:
Looking for Good DMV Database Admin Queries, where you can find just about every good DMV query ever written except those other really good ones that are posted here in the comments.
Things You Know Now, a semi-successful meme I started where I asked participants to tells us about stuff they’d do differently if they knew it way back in the day.
I excluded a few posts that were numerically in the top ten because, well, they’re my blog posts and I didn’t want them in the top ten. So there! But those that I excluded were things like reposting an interview done by another blogger or maybe a product or book that I plugged for some reason or an other.
I hope you’ve enjoyed my blogging and found it valuable. Tomorrow, I’m jumping on the themeword and goals meme. In fact, I’m crashin’ the party because none of my peeps called on me. [pout]
Please join me for SQL Saturday #21 coming up on Saturday, October 17th. There are over 50 sessions on tap with great speakers from the area and across the nation. Some of the notable speakers include:
Not only do we have SQL Saturday coming up, but Andy & company put together five world class seminars the week leading up to it! Use code “KKLINE” to get a 20% discount if you register for two or more seminars!
Seminars will be held at the Embassy Suites in Altamonte Springs, FL. Each seminar is $149 and includes a full lunch. Seating is limited, register today!
Attendees of my seminar will get a free copy of my book, Database Benchmarking: A Practical Approach for Oracle and SQL Server, plus other free goodies from my employer, Quest Software. As an added note of explanation, Buck’s excellent seminar centers around detecting and troubleshooting performance problems, while my seminar focuses on writing high-performance and highly scalable SQL and Transact-SQL code. Why not sign up for both of them to get comprehensive education on the entire process of writing great code, deploying it, and monitoring it for continued excellent performance?
Finally, I’ll be speaking at user groups in the area leading up to SQL Saturday. If you can join me at my seminar or at SQL Saturday, maybe one of these other events better fits your schedule:
Tuesday, Oct 13, Tampa SQL Server User Group (http://www.tampasql.com)
Wednesday, Oct 14, Orlando SQL Server User Group (http://www.opass.org)
Friday, Oct 15, Jacksonville SQL Server User Group (http://jacksonville.sqlpass.org)
Any IT pro with more than a year or two of experience will have faced the challenges of version control for an application, but what if you have to implement version control for data?
The most common way to tackle this problem is implementing something called “bitemporal data”. Under this method, each row in a table includes the current valid time and the transaction time. Since two distinct time values are stored, we get the term bitemporal.
A great place to start is Adam Machanic‘s excellent article at http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/t-sql-programming/a-primer-on-managing-data-bitemporally/. In addition, I encourage you to check out Adam’s book “Expert SQL Server 2005 Development” at http://www.apress.com/book/view/9781590597293.
In addition, Dejan Sarka pointed out that you can get a very comprehensive information on supporting temporal data from a book entitled “Developing Time-Oriented Database Applications in SQL” by Richard T. Snodgrass. Mr. Snodgrass was so kind to publish the book in PDF format and make it available for free download at http://www.cs.arizona.edu/~rts/publications.html. (Note that the book is quite old now (year 1999), so the T-SQL code does not include any SQL Server 2005 or 2008 enhancements. But the basic SQL is still solid.
