This is day 3 of my training. It will be a scorching 100 degrees in NYC today so I will not each lunch in Bryant Park today. Auto Expand This is what is knows as autogrow in SQL Server. by default Sybase does not have this turned on, as a matter of fact, you have to run a script that is shipped with the product in order to create the stored procedures that will make it possible for you to use this feature. It seems that within the Sybase crowd, if it is a old school DBA then they don’t like feature, if it is a new DBA they love it because they have to do less.

Seriously, stop moving my buttons. I hate it when I get a new piece of software comes out and all they really did was move everything around so people would think it warrants a new major release. Probably it also did warrant that but it would be something major that has changed under the covers. And to make sure people notice and buy their new product they just move things around.

This is day 2 of my Sybase training. I forgot to mention yesterday, half of the people are in this class because the Sybase DBA quit, another thing that was said yesterday was to never say the O word (O like in Oracle). Today we continued with configurations. Sybase has something called a data cache, you can have more than 1 cache. to increase the default data cache to 100MB you would issue the following command

Introduction We all know string concatenation is bad when working with SQL-statements because of the sql-injection that can occur. So we avoid that by using parameters. But string concatenation is bad in all your code because of the immutability of strings. You can avoid those bad things by using String.Format or StringBuilder. But it ain’t all that simple why and when you want and need to use either of the two. After all readibility and maintainability are rarely a consideration for the two.

This whole week I am in Sybase training in NYC. I will write down short posts of mostly differences between Sybase and SQL Server each day and also what I have learned. First here is the awesome view from the Sybase office in the Grace building in New York City on the 32 floor

Are you busy this Saturday, June 11, 2011? If not, head out to SQL Saturday #75 in Columbus, OH! What will you get? FREE training: 20 sessions from fellow SQL Server professionals, covering everything from baselines to Powershell to MDX. (Check out the full schedule here.) Networking. (View the attendees here.) A chance to interact with great vendors. (Check out this sponsor list!) And…me! I’ll be attending, and presenting “Reporting Services 201: From Basic To WOW!” I love this session. I get to show you how to take a basic Reporting Services report and make it pop with things like NoRows, tablix and charts. This is always an interactive session, with lots of questions, answers and exploration.

One of the highlights of my year so far was being accepted to speak for the SQL Saturday in Pensacola #77. This particular SQL Saturday took my attention because of the feedback I had heard from the previous events held in Pensacola. Along with the great feedback and turnout that this SQL Saturday draws, there are many of my friends in the community that are in the area as well as traveling to the state of Florida to also organize, volunteer and present. Karla Landrum (Blog | Twitter), Rodney Landrum (TSEQUEL), Aaron Nelson (Blog | Twitter) and his daughter Dorothy and others I know personally. The added bonus to the area was the opportunity to meet people like Audrey Hammonds (Blog | Twitter) (awesome tattoo!), Eric Wisdahl (Blog | Twitter) (gave me great suggestions on my demos and great conversations), Tim Radney (Blog | Twitter) (The look on his wife’s face when she saw the tattoo), Steve Jones (Blog | Twitter) and so many other great presences in the community.

I had an interesting problem tonight. The symptoms were; after completely uninstalling SQL Server 2000, 2005, 2008 and 2008 R2 from a machine, running the setup to install a new instance would start fine but soon after running, disappear and seem to hang in the task manager. This was for installing SQL Server 2008 R2 (all editions) Previous installations uninstalled from ARP (Add/Remove Programs) New installation started from the SQL Server 2008 R2 media and goes through the product key input and setup files steps. Then the actual installer is launched that allows the configuration of the new instance to be installed. This installer never actually comes up though. The Setup100.exe which sits behind the 2008 R2 installation stalls in the processes and never appears.

A recent MSDN thread presented a very interesting problem – find duplicates based on any 4 of the 5 columns and eliminate the duplicates. Here is the data table we will be working with: CREATE TABLE tblTEST ( ID INT UNIQUE NOT NULL, FirstColumn VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL, SecondColumn VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL, ThirdColumn VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL, FourthColumn VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL, FifthColumn VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL ) INSERT INTO tblTEST (ID, FirstColumn, SecondColumn, ThirdColumn, FourthColumn, FifthColumn) VALUES (1,'value1','value2','value3','value4','value5'), (2,'value2','value3','value4','value5','value6'), (3,'value1','value4','value5','value8','value9'), (4,'value1','value2','value7','value8','value9'), (5,'value3','value4','value5','value6','value7'), (6,'value1','value2','value9','value4','value5'), (7,'value2','value3','value4','value5','value11'), (8,'value4','value5','value3','value9','value1') Our test table:

I picked up the book Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science because I wanted to learn more about Richard Feynman and what he accomplished. Even though it is not a computer book, I decided to still review the book here because most scientists use computers. The book is written in a clear format and all the technical stuff is explained in laymen terms. You don’t have to be a science superhero to understand the material in this book. Here is for example something that most people won’t understand