blogs.conchango.com

SSIS uses absolute paths to point to objects on the file system. What does that mean? In short it means that in order to point to a file I would have to use the full absolute path, I couldn't give a path that is relative to where the packages resides. A common complaint about SSIS is that it does not allow the use of relative paths. The most ...

The 2008 Formula One season began yesterday with a pretty dramatic Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne. One of the innovations of this year's championship is the new standard Engine Control Unit (ECU), which removes driver aids like traction control and engine braking. Recently I've been working on a project with McLaren Electronic Systems (MES) - ...

This one is a bit surprising. Assume you have a cold SQL Server which you have just re-booted.  The buffer cache is empty and lots of I/O requests are going to be physical. Boo! Hiss!  Down with physical I/O. Well help is at hand (if you are using SQL Server Enterprise Edition). Ramp-up is the process of converting your I/O's from page ...

Are you using multiple files? Are you set up for proportional fill? Is it a warehouse?  Are you concerned about extent fragmentation? You should be.  Extent fragmentation upsets your lovely read-ahead and results in smaller I/O. Let me explain.  When SQL Server allocates - it does so on a one extent at a time.  If multiple ...

I thought it might be fun to do series of posts on features that are exclusive to enterprise edition but that aren't significant enough in their own right to make it on to the big ticket list.  Sometimes people balk at shelling out for SQL Server Enterprise Edition without realising on what they are missing out.  So my objective is to ...

Whilst at SQLBits I heard a rather shocking statement: Over 80% of the worlds SQL Server instances are still using SQL Server 2000.  I say statement because I have had a little trawl round the web and I couldn't find anything to back this number up (or what it included or excluded e.g. MSDE could weigh heavily into this number). However, I ...

OK, as a follow-up to my last post I've now taken the time to read the SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) whitepaper and have managed to discern some interesting information. I figured I'd stick it up here for reference.   Administration Customers will be billed by account and each account will be accessed using a Windows Live ID The ...

I don't care what any of you say, by far the most exciting announcement from today's MIX08 keynote was SQL Server Data Services (SSDS). [OK, I admit I may be in a minority on this one and I strongly suspect my colleagues in Conchango's Interactive Media team will disagree but hey, this is my blog and I'll say what I like :)] I won't go into ...

First of all I'd like to assure non-developers accidentally reading this post that it has nothing to do with lysergic acid diethylamide, an A-class substance commonly known as LSD or ''acid''. It's all about ACID properties of database transactions in general (boring stuff), and the ''I'' property and scalability in particular. Now that we ...

Saturday March 01 2008 was the second SQLBits conference.  This is not an ordinary conference - it's a community conference created by some of the UK's leading SQL Server practitioners. Tony, Simon, Allan, Darren, Martin & Chris put an amazing amount of effort in to organising the event and I think the result was there for all to ...