Today, Red Gate announced a new product in beta testing, SQL Index Manager. The new tool will be used to analyze and recommend solutions to index fragmentation on a SQL Server Instance. The first thing you may ask yourself is: another tool to fix fragmentation? There are quite a few index scripts and tools out there to handle fragmentation. Take a look at Michelle Ufford’s index maintenance script. I’ve used Michelle’s script for quite some time now and it is really stable and does a great job.
This is an archive of the posts published to LessThanDot from 2008 to 2018, over a decade of useful content. While we're no longer adding new content, we still receive a lot of visitors and wanted to make sure the content didn't disappear forever.
Developing SSIS is only as restricting and time consuming as the development studio in which we are forced to develop in. With SQL Server 2012, Visual Studio 2010 shell has been adopted. This has been a long winded complaint from the community – having to install BIDS 2008 and also Visual Studio 2010 on most development machines. Well, that isn’t a complaint any longer. I never had much of a problem with the two installs, side-by-side. In fact, in most cases, as a consultant, I have to have both full versions of 2008 and 2010 installed anyhow. Let’s not go there though. The problem has been solved thanks to the SQL Server Product Teams and we now have one ruling development platform.
In my Are you ready for SQL Server 2012 or are you still partying like it is 1999? post, I wrote about how you should start using SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 functionality now in order to prepare for SQL Server 2012. I still see tons of code that is written in the pre 2005 style and people still keep using those functions, procs and statements even though SQL Server 2005 and 2008 have much better functionality.
Last year I set out to get SQL Saturday in Wisconsin organized. It was a goal of mine that I really wanted to achieve. Alas, time and other things got in the way of me doing that on my own. Conflicts with other SQL Saturdays, working on a few books, and then venue issues put the task to the side. Organizing something like a SQL Saturday alone with a large market to cater to is next to exhausting. I learned that very quickly. I should have known this from helping on the last two SQL Saturdays in Chicago. What can I say? Sometimes I try to do more than 5-hour energy drinks can allow me to do.
On occasion, with a landscape that consists of multiple SQL Server Instances, we find the need to pull information from all of them, work with that information, and then load that information into a repository or warehouse-type reporting destination. This type of scenario is well-designed for creating multiple SSIS packages to do distinct tasks. This way, each package becomes a reusable object and more valuable to the entire scheme of your SSIS development tasks.
In my Are you ready for SQL Server 2012 or are you still partying like it is 1999? post, I wrote about how you should start using SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 functionality now in order to prepare for SQL Server 2012. I still see tons of code that is written in the pre 2005 style and people still keep using those functions, procs and statements even though SQL Server 2005 and 2008 have much better functionality.
In this short blog post I would like to share a script I wrote yesterday as an answer to this MSDN thread to find maximum length of data in every column of a table passed as a parameter. Some notes for the script: LEN function can be used with many SQL Server types excluding text and new types such as Geography or HierarchyID. I added exclusion of these types directly in the query, there may be some other types which need to be also excluded.
Using the new feature Shared Connection Managers is a great step in the direction of making development more efficient and manageable. This is a new feature in SQL Server 2012 SSIS and a welcome one. Shared Connection Managers are created for each project in SQL Server Data Tools. Each connection is then available to any package that is contained in that project. The first performance gain is in development. Prior to this change, when developing groups of SSIS packages, connections were contained within each package. This meant for a person creating multiple packages to work together, the connections needed to be recreated in each package. We can see the impact that this change can have on development efficiency right away.
In my Are you ready for SQL Server 2012 or are you still partying like it is 1999? post, I wrote about how you should start using SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 functionality now in order to prepare for SQL Server 2012. I still see tons of code that is written in the pre 2005 style and people still keep using those functions, procs and statements even though SQL Server 2005 and 2008 have much better functionality.
Introduction Today I had some free time and decided to write another Android application. I didn’t really know what to write until I noticed the new podcast from Scot Hanselman featuring Scott Reynolds. So I thought it would be fun to write an app for the Hanselminutes podcast series, just because I can. Before you ask, Yes the source is available on Github. The now What does the application do for now.