CREATE BLOG dbo.SqlServer

I caught this link today on digg and thought I'd share for anyone who's not a regular digger. I went to the Salary Search Engine, search for "SQL Server DBA" and input my zip code, and it brought back what I think was a very reasonable salary. I tried a few varieties: "sql server dba", "sql server developer", "web developer" and they all worked. The salaries tended to be on the high side - definitely not the average in my experience for my zip - but still a nice place to see if you are getting paid what you're worth!

http://www.indeed.com/salary

I bit the bullet and "upgraded" to Office 2007 Beta 2 yesterday. It's fine - the pretty colors are nice - but now my spam blocking tool doesn't work. I've used SpamBayes for a few years and it's an amazing spam-eating monster. I love(d) it. Unfortunately the spam filters in Outlook 2007 are not nearly as smart and, worst of all, there is no way to "train" them. Another annoyance is that, if I have 50 messages that I want to mark as spam, I have to right click each message individually and click, "Junk Mail -> Add sender to Blocked Senders". Arrgggghhhhh...

Does anyone have a suggestion for spam blocking in Outlook 2007? Whether it's freeware or buyware, I don't care. I check 25 email addresses a day including several catch-all accounts and, if Outlook 2007 can't keep up, I'll have to go back to Outlook 2003 until a new version of Spambayes comes out.

Help!

EDIT: After I posted this, I found Chris Pirillo's "65 Reasons Outlook 2007 Will Suck". I don't care about all the items on his list but I particularly echo his sentiments for #30. My "Block ed Senders List" will be over 1GB by the end of the year if I right clicked on every stupid spam message and blocked the sender lol.

It just seems that Outlook 2007 has no real improvements over Outlook 2003 regarding spam filtering for me.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/

So Mary Jo Foley, long-time MicrosoftWatch-er, has moved her blog and left MicrosoftWatch.com. Check out her new address: Mary Jo Foley

I always forget about this until I have to work with data in the month of September...

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Microsoft SQL Server does not think 'Sept 6, 2006' is a date and, if you try to say WHERE TheDate >= 'Sept 6, 2006', it says:

Msg 241, Level 16, State 1, Line 1
Conversion failed when converting datetime from character string.

Try it:

SELECT CAST('Sept 6, 2006' AS DATETIME) -- fails with syntax error

SELECT CAST('Sep 6, 2006' AS DATETIME) -- succeeds

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Will you remember next year? I hope I do!

http://www.scalabilityexperts.com/default.asp?acti... - Matt Collins from Scalability Experts has posted an update to the SSUA - their SQL Server 2005 Upgrade Assistant. I've worked with it a it and it's a pretty nifty tool. You wire up Profiler to your SQL Server 2000 instance and create a workload file. Once you have the workload file, you can use the SSUA to identify "issues".

 

Link to LearnWindows2003.com - Windows 2003 Training and Tutorials ON VIDEO, Windows Server 2003 Video Training, Free Windows 2003 Server Videos

 

Testing from live Writer...

I thought David Findley's Microsoft Product Name Generator was brilliant so I thought I'd have a little fun with a SQL Server Product Name Generator :)

<script>
var trm = new Array("Web ", "XML ", "Document ", "Event ", "Analytical ", "High Availability", "Clustering "
, "Transaction ", "Performance ", "Optimization ", "Database Engine ", "Mobile ", "Replication ") ;

var sfx = new Array("", "Team Suite", "Developer", "Everywhere", "Express ", "Standard ", "Enterprise ");

function pick(ar) { return ar[Math.round((ar.length-1)*Math.random())]; }

function getProductName() {
var name = "";

name += "SQL Server ";
name += pick(trm);
name += "Services ";
name += pick(sfx);
name += " Edition";

var p = document.getElementById("p");
p.innerHTML = name;
}
</script>

<A href="#" onclick="getProductName()">Get Product Name</a>: <b><span id="p"></span></b>

Load the above javascript code into a text editor, save it as .html, and load it into a browser :)

I'd love to show it here but Blogger doesn't let me post a script tag :(

Currently, in the RTM and SP1 versions of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), there is no GUI way to view sys.messages (formerly sysmessages) that are stored in the master database. If you want to view the messages, you have two choices - one "old" and one "new". The "old" way is to keep writing this code:

SELECT * FROM master.dbo.sysmessages

The "new" way is to use the catalog view "sys.messages":

SELECT * FROM sys.messages; -- no need to write master.sys.messages

In SQL Server 2000 and 7.0's Enterprise Manager, we could easily view the messages with the GUI. While it wasn't way I preferred to do it, the one advantage was that you could easily see whether or not the error message was logged to the Windows Event Log. The catalog view in SQL Server 2005 gives us the is_event_logged column for this information.

Anyway, I far prefer the new catalog view to the old sysmessages table query simply because everything is right there for you to see - the language, the alert logging info, etc. Here's a helpful query to show you the various languages that SQL Server stores (or can store) error messages:

SELECT *
FROM sys.messages m JOIN sys.syslanguages l
ON m.language_id = l.msglangid
WHERE m.message_id = 3043

I find it strange that it is language_id in sys.messages, the new catalog view, but it is msglangid in sys.syslanguages (also a new catalog view). Oh well!

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Technorati Tags: Error, SQL Error, SQL Server Error, SQL Server 2005, SQL Server, Microsoft SQL Server

SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) is missing, IMO, macro ability like we have (and have had) in Visual Studio. Oversight? I don't know but it's needed.

One thing you can do to automate SSMS is to use its command line switches. For example, I modified my shortcut to SSMS to include the -S switch. When I launch SSMS now, it doesn't ask which server to connect to; it auto-connects (using Windows Authentication) to the server.

Another one I like is the -nosplash.

To do this on your box, all you have to do is to locate the SSMS icon, right click on it and select "Properties", then append -S <server name> -nosplash

If you mess up, no problem. You'll receive a prompt with the correct switches and their meanings.

One thing: make sure you have a space between -S and your server name. I don't know whether it's a bug or what but it's certainly inconguous with other SQL Server command-line tools...

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Technorati Tags: SSMS, Management Studio, SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Server 2005, SQL Server, Microsoft SQL Server

Just sharing some links:

Awesome picture of the Moon'

Interesting story about dolphins.

Just sharing :)

If this is true, it makes the Bush/NSA wiretaps look childish. I hope it isn't true - someone please post and tell me it's all propaganda from Yahoo! :)

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Technorati Tags: Google, Whigham, Privacy Act, Privacy

I was trying to connect, across the web, to a SQL Server 2005 instance today and got this error message: "provider: TCP Provider, error 0 - A socket operation was attempted to an unreachable host. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error 10065)". I've been having troubles connecting to this host using ADO.NET - getting instant timeout errors - and I think this is related.

Has anyone seen this? I'm wondering whether or not this server is being over-used. I'm remoting in as just a regular user so I can't get sysadmin-level counters so I don't know what it is...

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Technorati Tags: error, TCP, SQL Server 2005, SQL Server, Microsoft SQL Server

Let me dump this - SQL Server 2005 Failover Clustering White Paper from microsoft.com at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=818234dc-a17b-4f09-b282-c6830fead499&displaylang=en. So sweet! Thank you, msft!!!!

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Technorati Tags: clustering, cluster, SQL Server, SQL Server 2005, SQL Server Clustering, Microsoft SQL Server

I was playing with the BPA the other, Microsoft's Best Practices Analyzer for SQL Server 2000, on a client database and I noticed this warning:

One or more objects is using SELECT * syntax! It is recommended to provide explicit column lists rather than relying on expansion of '*'. A future version of SQL Server will disallow usage of '*' in functions and views.

Holy smokes - I don't know a single developer, good or bad, who doesn't need to use this from time to time yet MSFT is threatening to take it away? What bollocks, to borrow an Engish term that's not quite as offensive as the word I actually wanted to type. Who the heck is MSFT to tell me whether I can program using SELECT * or not?

Leave me alone, Microsoft, and let me code the way that I want to. I mean, of course SELECT columnName1, columnName2, etc... is a better way to code but it's just so laborious to require us to code that way every single time - so unpractical. I write lots and lots of stored procs/views/functions built on system/catalog/dynamic-management views and, for the most part, I use SELECT * because it's more maintanable. If MSFT changes the columns, pshaw - what do I care? SELECT * covers me. Take away SELECT * and I'm left changing my code with every hotfix and service pack.

Arrrgghhhhhhhhhh........................ Leave me alone and let me code.

In peace.

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Technorati Tags: Scott Whigham, Whigham, SQL Server, SQL Server 2005, SQL Server, Microsoft SQL Server

Even long time DBAs have to work hard at learning all the ins and outs of the new replication paradigms in SQL Server 2005. One new model is "Peer to Peer Replication" which is really based on transactional.

This article - http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issues/2006/07/InsideMSFT/default.aspx - talks about how Peer-to-Peer replication with SQL Server 2005 is used internally at Microsoft to implement a type of SQL Server load balancing. An interesting read...

Another good article is here: The Growing Importance of Peer to Peer Replication.

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Technorati Tags: Load Balancing, replication, SQL Server, SQL Server 2005, SQL Server, Microsoft SQL Server

1. Delete the original ...\SQL Server x86\Tools\Setup\SqlServer2K5_BOL.msi

2. Rename the downloaded SqlServer2K5_BOL_Jul2006_v2.msi (or whatever the latest version is) to SqlServer2K5_BOL.msi and copy it to the ...\SQL Server x86\Tools\Setup folder.

3. Run setup.

Thanks to John Paul Cook, a SQL Server MVP out of Houston, TX, for pointing this out. John Paul Cook always has interesting articles/ideas about SQL Server - I suggest you Google his name and read some of his articles.

Thanks, John :)

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Technorati Tags: John Paul Cook, slipstream, SQL Server, SQL Server 2005, Books Online, Microsoft SQL Server