Rob Farley : community, sql

T-SQL Tuesday #003 (Relationships): The round-up

Rob Farley — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 05:45:00 GMT

Lots of blog posts for this month, for the first T-SQL Tuesday to leave the safe-haven of Adam Machanic’s blog. Some people obviously missed out, probably because they don’t read this blog, but I guess that’s the nature of the meme. I don’t know who is hosting next month yet, but I’ll be looking out for Adam to post something about it in early March.

All the posts had to appear as trackbacks or comments on the invitation to participate, but this post is a short summary for posterity.

As the second week of February involves Valentine’s Day (and a few days earlier, my wedding anniversary), I thought the topic of Relationships would be a nice one for this event. There was a good range of topics too, which I have ordered by the type of relationships chosen.

Special mention:

It wasn't quite on the right day, but a big congratulations to Michelle Ufford who almost managed to time the birth of her new baby Chloe for T-SQL Tuesday.

We have “purely technical” posts:

Brad Schulz is keeping the bar way too high, and if you haven’t read his pieces from previous Tuesdays, then I recommend you go through the history of posts on his blog. This month he has written a letter of disappointment to the FROM clause. At some point Brad will likely be asked to compile these posts into a book, but until that happens, you’ll have to follow the link to his blog. It’s entertaining, but still fits in the “purely technical” category.

John Dunleavy demonstrated (complete with screenshots – something I should put more of in my posts) how foreign keys can be made so easily using the Diagram part of Management Studio. It’s not something I do much of, but I have to admit that reading posts like John’s can often inspire me to changing my ways.

Bryan Smith also talked about database diagrams, and how they can be used to discover relationships in a system.

Michael Coles officially missed the deadline, but I’m going to link to him anyway, demonstrating a nice trick for creating a Product aggregate based on the relationship between a number and its logarithm.

Allen White wrote about the fact that any RDBMS should have relationships to really be considered relational. Great reminder of some of the basics.

Marco Russo timed a piece on relating tables in DAX amazingly well, and only realised that it qualified for T-SQL Tuesday after he had initially posted it. Useful piece, which will appear in search engine results for years to come I’m sure.

Rob Farley wrote a pile of rubbish… hey, that’s me! I wrote about the importance of relationships in a database system to help the Query Optimizer do its job. I also surmised that Foreign Keys using candidate keys (rather than the primary key) might help many queries do away with needing joins. If you have thoughts on that I’d still like to hear them.

Some posts that were about less technical relationships:

Jen McCown wrote about how she left her husband Sean, in a piece called ‘I love you, I quit’. Actually, she was just leaving a job, but it’s a nice piece about the degradation of a employer-employee relationship. It rings too true for all of us I think, and I hope that as an employer I manage to ‘keep the mystery’ for my employees to stop them going through that same experience.

Jason Brimhall wrote about some of the different relationships in his life, particularly how he wants to make sure that the Parent-Child relationship in his life doesn’t become a Foreign relationship. Nicely done Jason.

Allen Kinsel recommends that relationships with professional organisations can be deepened, and that this can be very beneficial. I’m sure he’s right. I have a tendency to get extra-involved in groups, and I hope Allen’s sentiments are heard by many.

The link to Steve Jones’ article must’ve changed. The link that I followed today didn’t work, even though I’d read it successfully a couple of days ago. Still, I managed to find it, and I can thoroughly recommend reading about the relationships between Steve and his colleagues. He’s most definitely correct in pointing out that any effort in developing personal relationships with your colleagues will help you get things done!

And some “combination” posts:

Mike Walsh provided the first piece of the day, with an excellent run down of various types of relationships that are important, including a recommendation to read up on database design. Great advice, Mike. Thanks.

With Kalen Delaney’s post we almost got two for the price of one. A brilliant prelude talking about some of the personal relationships that have enhanced her SQL career, followed up by covering how foreign key relationships have developed through the versions of SQL Server. Kalen’s blog posts are always worth reading, as I’m sure everyone who is reading this post appreciates.

Stuart Ainsworth’s piece was on Maslow, drawing parallels between the hierarchy of needs of a person with the hierarchy of needs of a database system. It’s thought-provoking, and something that I feel could be made into a poster for database developers’ walls.

In summary

I’d like to thank everyone who has taken part, and for Adam for having introduced the T-SQL Tuesday concept to us. Keep your eye on his blog to find out what’s going on next month. If your name isn’t listed here, then I encourage you to write something for March.

Also remember that lots of these people are on Twitter and are very much followable. Look at the hashtag #tsql2sday for related posts, and make sure you follow the people who post blogs for these events.

Invitation for T-SQL Tuesday #003: Relationships

Rob Farley — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 01:39:00 GMT

It’s time for the third of Adam Machanic’s T-SQL Tuesdays, and this time, I’m the host. The first one, last December was on the topic of date/time, and the second was on Puzzling Situations. Check them both out, along with the round-ups that Adam wrote about them. Lots of great topics, which is starting to make me anticipate the content that comes out on the second Tuesday of each month.

As an early volunteer to host, I have been given the honour of being the first person chosen to host one. I’d like to claim that this implies some sort of special relationship between myself and the SQL community as a whole, but it’s actually just a “first-in, best dressed” policy – although the ‘best dressed’ analogy is lost on me.

Theme

Valentine’s Day is coming up. Hopefully I don’t need to tell you that it’s on February 14th, but if you’ve read this far into the post then perhaps you’re involved with databases for some reason and may need reminding. Shopping centres around the world have signs up reminding us to buy flowers for our loved ones, but I know many people in IT circles who don’t tend to go to such places, lurking in dark corners of houses until all hours of the night, surviving on pizza. Hopefully this theme will not only prompt some interesting posts, but also prompt people to go out and invest in the meaningful relationships in their own lives. Actually, if you don’t know that Valentine’s Day is February 14th, I’m guessing you don’t have anyone in your life worth buying for. ;)

For me, Valentine’s Day is only three days after my wedding anniversary, so I can’t forget either – as if I would.

So the theme for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday is Relationships.

There are a massive number of options you could go with for this theme. You could talk about Foreign Keys in the relational world. You could wax lyrical about the benefits of attribute relationships in cube design. You could write a poem for your loved one, apologising for all those hours spent in front of a Management Studio window, trying to tune a query, rather than tuning your guitar to serenade her.

Other ideas include: Relationships between Devs & DBAs, Clients & Vendors, Entities, data types, concepts (eg: Report Model & Cube), and more… if you’re struggling to think of something, drop me a line (twitter, Msgr, email, whatever – a list of contact options is over on the left) and I can help.

But so long as you can loosely tie your post to both the theme and some aspect of SQL Server, that’s fine. Be creative, informative, reflective, and hopefully relevant.

Rules

Please note that the time zone for this Tuesday is UTC. For me, that means between 10:30am Tuesday and 10:30am Wednesday. For you, it might mean some time on Monday afternoon to some time on Tuesday afternoon. If you’re lucky (read ‘English’), then you can publish your post any time on Tuesday. It’s about when it’s published though, not when you write it. I encourage you to write your post in advance, in case you’re busy on the day.

So the rules are:

Your post must go live after 00:00:00 UTC on Tuesday, February 9, 2010, but before 00:00:00 UTC on Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Your post must link back to this one, and it's recommended that you clearly identify the post as a T-SQL Tuesday post
You are responsible for ensuring that a trackback or comment appears here so that I can find the posts

Follow the rules, and your post will be included in the roundup to be posted on a day or two later. Don't follow the rules, and it won't show up there. Simple as that!

Twitter

Follow the event on Twitter by watching for the #TSQL2sDay hash tag. (The ‘2’ refers to the fact that it’s the second Tuesday of the month, and nothing to do with the pronunciation of the word, which is more like “Choose-day” where I come from.)

Additional Notes

Please make sure you put a link in your post to this one, and post a comment here if the trackback doesn’t appear. I normally moderate comments to my blog (to avoid spam), but may consider changing that policy for 24 hours next week. I have noticed people trying to take part, but failing to make sure that a trackback/comment has appeared. So please check this.

Please check the time zone. It’s something that we’re used to here in Australia, but I know a few people missed out last month not realising that the event had shifted to UTC.

Let Adam Machanic know if you want to host. You can contact him in a variety of ways, as he mentioned last time. To host, you must have participated in two previous T-SQL Tuesday events, and your blog must have had at least one post a month for the prior six months. Let him know you’re keen even if you don’t meet these criteria, as I believe there’s a list, and you might be able to get those blog posts sorted before your turn is up. When I volunteered to host, I hadn’t participated in any yet…

If you want to host but don’t have the faintest clue on what topic to use, ask Adam for some ideas. I’ve suggested a few to him, and I think he’s putting a list together to maintain the longevity of all this. Similarly, let him know if you have some ideas – you might suggest something that catches people’s imagination like never before.

Feel free to contact Adam or myself if you have any comments or ideas for all this. I’ll probably refer you to Adam if it’s a general thing, or happily do my best to answer you if it’s about this month’s event in particular.

Have lots of fun! I look forward to reading your posts!

Edited: The round-up is at http://msmvps.com/blogs/robfarley/archive/2010/02/13/t-sql-tuesday-003-relationships-the-round-up.aspx

Useful SQL Question and Answer sites

Rob Farley — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 05:14:00 GMT

There are so many places to ask a question these days. I get plenty of questions via MSN Msgr and email, and do my best to answer those of course. But there are many others too. I figured I’d list some of the ones that I frequent, and challenge some of the readers here to check some of them out.

The MSDN Forums are terrific. Lots of really good people hang out there, including many Microsoft staff. They’re effectively the new version of the public newsgroups. It’s definitely worth asking (and answering) questions here, and I should probably choose this option more for answering questions myself.

Experts-Exchange is a much-maligned site, largely because to ask questions you need to have points. You can get points through a paid subscription, but you can also get points by answering questions. If you answer just a few questions each month, you can become a recognised Expert on the site, which lets you ask as many questions as you like, and also gives you the option of a “ad-free” environment. Many people still joke about the way that the site reads if you ignore the hyphen, but if you are an expert, this site is definitely worth hanging out on. You can register for free (getting you no points to ask questions until you’ve started answering them) at http://www.experts-exchange.com/registerFree2.jsp, so why not go there and register, so that you can start answering questions. They have a facility so that Designated Experts can get emails for neglected questions, giving you a much better chance of an answer than many other sites around. (Note – if you are a SQL MVP, or a MS employee, and you want to be fast-tracked into receiving the Neglected Questions notices, drop me a line and I’ll see what I can do for you)

Stack Overflow is a current favourite amongst many, because of the number of people that seem to frequent the site. It’s clean (very few adverts hanging around), and people seem to rush to answer questions as soon as possible. From a purely SQL perspective, I find that there is too much weighting on the iterative languages there, so many of the SQL responses seem to be provided by people who aren’t really SQL specialists. But it doesn’t mean that you won’t pick up some good tips there. I got started there by answering a question that has even ended up in the source for the site – which I’m still hoping will reach the magical “100 up-votes”, and I’ve continued to keep my eye out for questions there that need answering.

Server Fault is the system administrator cousin to Stack Overflow. If you have DBA-style questions rather than developer-style, then this site is very useful.

Using the same interface as Stack Overflow and Server Fault, but purely focussed on SQL Server is Ask SCC, run by the guys from sqlservercentral.com. It’s a new players on the scene, but I think will turn into a very useful site. The Stack Overflow engine isn’t bad at all, and the quality of answer at Ask SCC is excellent. I would love to see more people hang out there, as it serves a useful market for SQL specialists. At the moment it doesn’t do much traffic, but many of the people there are good SQL experts, and I’m convinced that you’ll get an excellent answer if you ask a question there. At the moment it doesn’t seem to be collecting poor answers as much as many of the other sites, so the ratio of good answers to poor ones puts you in a good position as an asker. I’ve posted my Ask SCC and Stack Overflow ‘flairs’ here, so that you can compare the two. If the numbers on the Ask SCC one have reached as high as the Stack Overflow one, then you’ll have a good indication that the traffic on Ask SCC has increased nicely.

In many ways, I tend to find that my efforts are focussed more on the questions that aren’t getting answered, rather than trying to catch the newest questions. On many of these sites, I’d rather find the one that the asker has had trouble with, hoping to provide the elusive answer rather than the obvious one. That question that got me started on Stack Overflow was an exception because I didn’t feel like any of the previous answers had really solved the question properly, but on the whole, my approach to Stack Overflow doesn’t really fit with most of the answerers on the site. I like EE because there really seems to be a focus on getting those elusive answers for people, and I know that Microsoft really focuses on getting answered questions sorted on their forums.

My challenge to you is to give back to the community this Christmas. Make it a resolution for 2010 if you will. Why not try to answer a question every week? And better still, make it one that everyone else has had trouble answering. Go to the lists of unanswered questions, and help someone out. Next time it might be you asking, and you’ll hope that someone takes the time to find your elusive question.

Plus, you might learn something!

StreamInsight talk coming up at SQLBits

Rob Farley — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:47:24 GMT

My talk on StreamInsight is up next. I’ll try to blog more about that later. For now, I want to mention more about SQLBits itself. This is by far the largest SQL-only conference I’ve attended (I haven’t been to SQL-PASS yet), and it’s great to be involved.

Yesterday I had an all-day seminar about the new items for Developers in SQL 2008. It was a good time – the delegates responded very positively, and many of them have caught up with me since.

But for me, the conference is being a great way of catching up with (and meeting for the first time) a bunch of SQL people that I rarely see. I’ve met people that lived only a few miles from where I grew up, and people that read my blog (Hi!), discovered people who have connections to Adelaide, and even found that my Adelaide friend Martin Cairney (who is also here) has a strange connection to Donald Farmer (of Microsoft), that their parents shared a back fence or something… Now Trevor Dwyer tells me a colleague of his knows me from somewhere… the world is very small here.

My StreamInsight talk will be interesting I hope. I have some stuff to show off, and I plan to involve the audience a little as well. If you’re at SQLBits and feel like being involved in an interactive session, then definitely come along. I want to hear from people in the audience who have dabbled with StreamInsight and also other vendors’ Complex Event Processing offerings. This is a brand new technology from Microsoft, and there will be a large range of adoption levels in the room.

More SQL Conferences coming up, including SQL Bits and SQL Down Under

Rob Farley — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 12:06:33 GMT

I know I won’t be there, as I’m a million miles away in Australia, but being from the UK myself, I always have an interest in the UK SQL community and in particular, events like SQL Bits.

This is the fifth SQL Bits conference, and they keep getting larger and larger. I’ve heard it’s now the largest SQL-focussed event in Europe. It’s going to be in South Wales (that’s OLD South Wales, not New South Wales), in November. I’m sure the area is lovely, good beaches ‘n all that… but considering it’s late November in Wales, I think you’ll be going for the SQL content, not the scenery.

Of course, if you are in New South Wales, then you ought to be thinking slightly earlier, in particular, the second weekend in October. The third SQL Code Camp is being held in Wagga, with many regular speakers (like myself) and quite a few new ones too.

These two events are clearly the significant SQL events in the last quarter of the year. I’m sure no-one cares about SQL PASS, after all. (I do wish I was going to this one, but I won’t be. I plan to go one year, but I was in the US that week last year, and I don’t plan to be away from home for two birthdays in a row. Maybe next year. It is the biggest SQL event in the world, with great speakers from everywhere, including many good friends of mine.)

No matter where you are in the world, there are SQL events that you should be going to. Professional development is really important for your career, and you shouldn’t neglect it. That being said, make sure you find me at TechEd Australia.

Things You Know Now

Rob Farley — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 23:44:00 GMT

This blog meme is doing the rounds… I’ve been tagged at least twice now (Jason Strate and Greg Linwood), so I suppose subconsciously I’ve been thinking about this stuff for a few weeks already.

Since I do a lot of training, I tend to explain these things to my students anyway. I have a lot of opportunity to stand up in front of people and tell them important stuff – so this kind of thing definitely comes up now and then.

Things I wish I had known years ago (career-wise that I would teach new people in the SQL field)

The Importance of technical communities

I remember when Craig Bailey wrote about his ideal role. It wasn’t new stuff – I had heard it all before, but it certainly got me thinking about how people can influence where they are in that Venn diagram. For Craig, he wanted his ideal role to be a job that he was good at and that he enjoyed. Obviously to be a job, someone has to be prepared to pay him sufficiently too.

Being good at something you enjoy isn’t hard, and you can invest your own time (outside of the job that you don’t enjoy) developing your skills. For people in IT, I suggest they pick a particular area they find interesting, and start getting their skills up. If they can become expert-level in that area, then great.

The next problem though, is moving that skill into something that lets you can earn money. Community can help that. Community can help you develop your skills, because you’re spending time with other people in your field. But as you become an expert, presenting at community events, developing a profile, you find yourself being differentiated from the rest. If nothing else, people know you have presentation skills. Every presentation can become like a job interview – showing your skills and ability to communicate information to clients, colleagues, whoever.

Presenting isn’t easy, but there are plenty of other communities that can help develop those skills. You can get along to a ToastMasters group, or offer to do presentations in a group to which you already belong.

You might be the best in the world at what you do – but you need to get out there. I enjoy the technical communities, and run the Adelaide SQL Server User Group because I enjoy it. But I can’t deny that it’s been useful for my career. Now, I’m wishing that I had got involved many years ago.

Enjoy public speaking

According to the old saying, more people are afraid of public speaking than death (so at a funeral, they’d rather be in the coffin than giving the eulogy). But it’s a useful skill to have, so learn to enjoy it.

Keep in touch with old friends

This isn’t quite so career-related, but is actually very important for your career nonetheless.

There are people that I haven’t seen in years, who I have no idea how to contact. Facebook (and the internet in general) has proved very useful for that, but still there are many people that I wish I could find. Most of them are just people I would like to spend time with now and then, but some are people that I’d happily offer to do some work for. And perhaps some of them would contact me to do some consulting if they knew how to reach me (clue, there’s contact information to the side of my blog site!).

Far too many people fall out our lives, and it’s sad. I’m still not great at it, but I do think I should take the time to write people letters now and then (emails, Facebook comments, Instant Messages are all fine too – I’m just talking about touching base to keep the contact there).

Certifications aren’t worth studying for (but they are worth taking)

I used to study for exams. I first became a Microsoft Certified Professional back in 1998, passing an exam called “Architecture I”. Since then I’ve passed over 30 exams, and earned plenty of certifications. But a few years ago I worked out at that it’s just not worth studying for these things.

A MCP exam is not like high school or university. If you fail, you can just try again. Fails don’t appear on your transcript, only the passes do. It’s like your driving test – if you fail, you just try again. Once you pass, you get access to the roads like everyone else.

If you spend weeks studying for a MCP exam, you probably won’t even improve your chances of passing – you’ll just be spending precious family time trying to learn those things to get you past the line. You might even start losing sleep over it.

Nowadays, I tell my students (and myself) to care less. Plenty of people say “No, you don’t understand – I can’t fail at anything.”, and I understand that. I’m not particularly good with failure either. But I’ve learned to not care so much. I don’t want to waste time sitting an exam only find that I fail (or spend $180 on the privilege), but I also don’t want to waste time studying for an exam that I could probably pass anyway. With the Second Shot offer that is often around you’ve paid for two attempts, so go into the first one blind.

The amount of time you invest in getting a certification is largely the study time. So if you can reduce that, the certification becomes a lot cheaper – in which case, it’s probably worth taking the few hours to give it a try. If you do fail, you know you have a weak area, so you can improve that with study – just don’t bother studying before the first try.

[Edited: I should make it very clear that I definitely approve of learning new skills, and preparation for an exam is a great prompt for this learning. Better still is learning for the sake of getting those new skills, with the focus being an upcoming project or new role. My advice above is focussed on people who have the skills necessary to pass an exam.]

Reading execution plans, and understanding indexes

I’ve always been good at solving problems with T-SQL (or PL/SQL for that matter) – I just took to it naturally when I got into databases. But it took me several years to actual venture into understanding what the query is actually doing when it runs. Now, I look at the execution plan for every query I write, as default behaviour, and I consider the indexes that I want up front.

Perhaps it’s because I was a programmer first, but I had always trusted the compiler to do things the right way. I had looked a bit past my code when studying Prolog at university, but it took me a long time to make that my default behaviour.

So when I find people who are just getting into T-SQL, I encourage them to look at the execution plans, and start getting a feel for what’s going on behind the scenes. You can often improve a query without looking at the execution plan, but if you want to write really good T-SQL and have well-performing queries, you need to make the execution plan part of the process.

The significance of BI to businesses

I was involved in data warehouses in some of my first projects when I left university, I just didn’t realise at the time. I first got involved in SQL Server in version 6.0, and quite early on I migrated a system to 6.5, and created a data warehouse to allow for various reports. In hindsight, I was making a data warehouse. I had an ETL process, calculated aggregates, considered the dimensions and granularity, all that. But it wasn’t called a data warehouse, and I only realised a few years later that it really was one.

If I had’ve realised, then I’m sure I would’ve jumped into the BI space much earlier. Companies love BI – it’s one of the most empowering areas of database technology for any business.

I’ve picked a few things here – and I hope people somehow get some benefit from reading it. I have put it in my ‘must read’ list to find other people’s responses, because I’m sure there are things that I’m still to learn.

Tagging some other people: Simon Sabin, Jamie Thomson, Deepak Kapoor, Grant Paisley

A reason to visit Manchester

Rob Farley — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 00:27:58 GMT

I shouldn’t knock Manchester – I’m sure it’s a great place. Being from the London area though, I’ve always had to find reasons to consider visiting Manchester. Now that I’m living in Australia, finding reasons to go is even harder.

Manchester’s stock has risen recently, joining the ranks of Reading, Birmingham and Hatfield to host a SQLBits conference. Definitely a trip worth making if you’re in the UK. It’s on the last Saturday of March.

Registrations are now open, so get along to the site and plan to be at this event. One day I’ll end up being in the country on the right day and make it to one of these events.

The guys behind this event are all good guys, and the content will be very high quality again (and even more sessions - the number of sessions has increased by about 50%). The last event had nearly three hundred people attend, and this one event has over three hundred registered so far.

Lots more information (including registration) at: http://sqlbits.com – or on Simon Sabin’s blog.

Jamie’s SQLMesh

Rob Farley — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 22:27:16 GMT

Jamie Thomson is a useful guy. He’s a SQL MVP, generally considered one of the world’s authorities in Integration Services (SSIS), but also very keen on the Live space.

So it makes sense that he’s now combining the two – he’s gone and created a Code Repository on Live Mesh. Seems very useful, and I’m feeling like I need to keep my eyes open for things that I think are worthy of upload. Why not do the same? The more people involved (currently it’s about 40), the stronger the repository will be!

Check out Jamie’s post to learn more, and drop him a line to get an invite.

Presenting at ADNUG this week

Rob Farley — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 10:03:41 GMT

I haven't been to ADNUG for a while. I love that the group is there, but over the past year or more, I haven't prioritised getting to the meetings. I've been to meetings of equivalent groups in Melbourne and Sydney, but not to the Adelaide .Net Group for a while.

But this week I will! I've offered to be a stand-in presenter, and will present a few tips around T-SQL. I'm presenting a similar talk in Wagga this coming weekend, so it'll give me a chance to work out my talk in advance. I regularly present and teach T-SQL things, so I'll be picking a few of the more useful suggestions (particularly those that get a good response from the audience), and showing some of them. People who at one of my recent presentations may have heard bits before, but definitely not all of them.

Improving Your T-SQL Arsenal - slides

Rob Farley — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 03:46:16 GMT

I've given this presentation a couple of times at user-groups now - last week in Adelaide, and this week in Melbourne. I posted the scripts to my blog recently, making them available to people who heard this talk at TechEd Australia at the start of the month, so now I've got around to uploading the slide deck as well.

I actually plan to blog about many of the tips too, so watch for that over the next month or so. I'll try to do at least one a week for a while, if not more. Obviously some will become longer articles, while some will be quite short. Much of the material gets covered my Advanced T-SQL Querying and Reporting course too - so feel free to check that out some time if you can.

SQL and Virtual Earth

Rob Farley — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 09:07:11 GMT

A while back I was talking to Bronwen Zande, of Brisbane-based SoulSolutions and GeekGirlBlogs.

Anyway, she and her partner John are big fans of Virtual Earth. As it's well publicised that SQL Server 2008 will have new spatial types, including fancy ways of integrating with Virtual Earth, I asked her if they were planning a tour of the Australian SQL Server User Groups to demonstrate how this could work. I figure this is something that few SQL Server people will do much investigation into, but may well be asked about by developers who are keen to find out what's possible.

Lo and behold, I guess things are happening, because they're on their way! In Adelaide, this meeting will be on January 10th, our usual time-slot on the second Thursday of the month, and there are other events happening around the country too. All this despite the fact that the latest publicly available version (July still) of SQL Server 2008 doesn't have the spatial types in it. Hopefully by then something will be available for us to check out the demos. Keep your eye on https://connect.microsoft.com/sql for news on that.

SQL Down Under talks, and England wins

Rob Farley — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 00:21:22 GMT

This weekend is getting better and better. With England winning in both the football and the rugby, my mood is pretty good anyway - despite having to give the first presentation of Sunday morning at the SQL Down Under Code Camp. The local TV channel sent cameras just after I finished, so I think I managed to avoid having my presentation on the local news. At least, I hope they came just after I finished... otherwise I didn't notice them lurking in the corner.

I taught the crowd about MERGE & Table-Valued Parameters, and got good feedback from various members of the audience. Hopefully people will be able to take the content and use it to try things out in SQL2008 when they get back to the real world.

Now, Grant Paisley is presenting about Analysis Services Best Practices. I've heard Grant give this talk before, but it's still good. With Darren Gosbell, Greg Linwood and Kevin Kline still to come today, it's going to be good. Poor France though... with Scotland beating the Ukraine in their Euro 2008 qualifiers, Les Blues need to win both their remaining matches to qualify for the tournament, and Scotland probably only need to a draw against Italy to go through.

SQL Down Under Code Camp begins

Rob Farley — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 00:27:06 GMT

Two days of intensive SQL Server training, thanks to experts from around Australia and Kevin Kline from the US. All the Australian SQL Server MVPs are coming (five here so far, two more coming soon).

The coffee is great (thanks Peter), the company is great, and there are so many more people here (than last year) because there is also a Security Camp on at the same time. All the user-group leads are here, including Perth and the new Hobart group (Jason Cook's getting this going), which means every Australian state is represented.

I'm sure other people will be blogging about this too, so keep your eye out for them. I'll try to blog more later on today.

User Group meeting with Christine Bishop

Rob Farley — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 02:04:01 GMT

Yesterday we had Christine Bishop come to Adelaide. She's the Product Marketing Manager for SQL Server and BI for Microsoft Australia. That makes her handy to know if you're in the SQL space, and we had a nice crowd come along to the user group to meet her.

One thing that made this meeting different to the usual is that Christine isn't overly technical. She's not bad, but compared to the people in the crowd listening to her, she would've been in the less technical half. Normally we'd have some in depth technical session, showing people how to do particular things, but this time we looked more at the business side of things.

Feedback was good, and for those people looking for something a little more technical I demonstrated a quick point about SSIS and one about the use of row_number() to make sure that only the three most recent records for each category were stored in a table. I might post about these more another time.

Free SQL training at events in the UK and Australia

Rob Farley — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 12:42:56 GMT

...and I'm not even referring to the User Groups which run regularly. The ones I'm referring to are SQLBits and the SQL Down Under Code Camp.

SQLBits was in the UK last weekend, and was a massive success. I would've loved to have been able to attend, but it's a bit far to travel (I guess about 12000 miles). They had over three hundred attend, which is fantastic! Adelaide User Group regular Martin Cairney was there, and presented the talk he gave in Adelaide earlier this year. It seems to have been received well.

And this coming weekend is the SQL Down Under Code Camp in Wagga Wagga. It should be a great event, with well over a hundred people there. If you're able to get to Wagga, I thoroughly recommend it.

PASS one day

Rob Farley — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 23:38:02 GMT

This is not a review of day one of the PASS conference. It's a hope that one day I'll be able to make it to a big PASS conference. PASS is the Professional Association for SQL Server, and every year they have a large conference. This year's has been in Denver this week, and many of my SQL MVP friends are there - including Australians Peter Ward and Greg Low.

If you're in the SQL Server space, and can easily make it to a PASS Conference, I encourage you to go. There will be plenty of stuff to learn, I'm sure. This is the third best SQL event of the year, after the Adelaide SQL Server User Group meetings and SQL Down Under Code Camp. ;)

My favourite thing about SQL Server 2008

Rob Farley — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 05:35:48 GMT

A few people have asked me what my favourite thing is in SQL Server 2008 ("Katmai"). But my favourite thing isn't actually a feature at all, it's a mindset that Microsoft are taking with it.

This mindset is "We will only put features into the CTPs once they are basically complete - including the documentation." And this makes me say "Wow!".

One of the problems with all beta software is the stuff that's in there that just isn't finished yet. You try to use some feature, and it doesn't work. Or worse, something dies because you tried it. It's these scenarios that stop people trying out betas, and seeing people using the previous version still nearly two years after release (It's now over 21 months since SQL 2005 was released).

Not the case with SQL Server 2008 though. Functionality may be limited, but hopefully new features should be both stable and documented when they appear. So now because this is the case, people should be able to port their systems over before release, confident that features won't be changing significantly between that time and RTM.

This week at my user-group I'm giving a talk on MERGE & TVPs. Two essentially different topics, but ones that compliment each other nicely. I think people will be leaving this meeting picturing places in their code where they want to refactor it to take advantage of these new features.

Code Camps galore

Rob Farley — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 10:32:28 GMT

We all know that Adelaide hosted Code Camp SA recently - it was a great success, and some people even wished I was there!

TechEd is coming up of course, but now there are two code camps scheduled for October, on the same weekend (13-14) and at the same venue! Yes, that place is Wagga Wagga - one Wagga for each event.

Firstly, and most importantly I'm sure, is the second SQL Down Under Code Camp. But the other one is the Security Camp Oz. With me doing the SQL Security talk at TechEd this year, I'm sure I'll have a good reason to attend both!

Also in October, but the weekend before, and in the UK, the SQL community is hosting SQLBits. These guys have three streams (Dev, DBA, BI), and promises to be a fantastic event. I only wish I could be there. I'm sure Tony, Simon, Jamie, Jasper and Chris will do a fantastic job.

Seems wherever you are, October will be a big month for training.

Darren Gosbell in Adelaide on July 12th

Rob Farley — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 08:03:02 GMT

What a great week for Adelaide having Australian SQL MVPs presenting! Code Camp SA on the weekend of July 7th and 8th features the Gregs (Linwood and Low), and BI expert Darren Gosbell will be coming to speak to the Adelaide SQL Server User Group the following Thursday. He'll be presenting about MDX, which is a topic that a few people have asked about in recent months. It should be great, and I only wish I could be there myself. I will put the event on the website just as soon as I have an abstract from him. Many thanks to his employer, James and Monroe, for sending him across for this.

If you're reading this and wondering how to find out more, go to the sqlserver.org.au site, register, and say you're from Adelaide. Then you'll be on my mailing list and will find out all about our upcoming events. Our meetings are on the second Thursday of the month (although in August we'll pick a different day, that doesn't clash with TechEd), in the building that used to be called the Santos Building.

70-431 exam tips, and congrats to Jos Verbaken - MCTS

Rob Farley — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 07:08:57 GMT

Jos Verbaken was a student of mine a few weeks ago. He lives in Ballarat, and is known around the Melbourne SQL Server User Group circles. He did the 5-day course 2780 - Maintaining a Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Database. During the course, I encouraged the students to sit the exam 70-431, which the exam I wrote simulation questions for, and the exam which is half covered by the content in Course 2780 (the other half being from the 'Implementing' course 2779).

I did my standard trick of telling the students to take a chance on the exam without studying - just to find out what to expect from the exam, and to see which areas you feel you need to learn. Without the stress of feeling you have to pass, people are often more likely to get through it. Also, as the exams are designed to test your ability in the area, not just your ability to learn to pass the exam, you shouldn't have to study much. Most of all, the Microsoft certification exams are not like exams at university or high-school - you can try multiple times.

With 70-431, there are many simulation questions. The only real way you can learn about these is to use them. It's the best argument for doing a course as part of your study, because you get to use labs which cover lots of the GUI ways of doing things. I suppose maybe it helps being taught by someone who wrote the content, although I'm not about to give any hints about what you might need to know about to pass the exam. My biggest hint really is to just try it. Worst case you spend A$180 / US$125 and come out with a bunch of ideas about what you should spend time learning.

Of course, Jos didn't need to worry at all. He tried the exam recently and passed. That makes him a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist in the area of SQL Server 2005. Well done, mate!

My good friend Mitch Wheat (in Perth) passed some exams recently too, and is now an MCPD at least twice over. Thoroughly deserved, Mitch!