It’s 4 PM; do you know what’s in your filegroups? I found myself having this inner monologue the other day after I pushed a database form dev to test. On the dev server I had split the database into two filegroups, one to store the data for the staging tables, and one to store the data for the end results. The files essentially looked like this: I realized that I hadn’t generated the file groups or extra files on the second server. I created them and then used this query to find out where the tables and indexes were:

The Apache web server comes with something called Apache Module mod_status installed From the Apache site: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_status.html The Status module allows a server administrator to find out how well their server is performing. A HTML page is presented that gives the current server statistics in an easily readable form. If required this page can be made to automatically refresh (given a compatible browser). Another page gives a simple machine-readable list of the current server state.

This came up a couple of days ago, a person created a User-Defined Table Type and then used the regular db_datawriter/db_datareader account to use this User-Defined Table Type and he would get the following error **Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Line 9 The EXECUTE permission was denied on the object ‘SysObjectsCount’, database ’testTVP’, schema ‘dbo’.** Let’s take a look at how to give permissions because if you do the following

In my previous post I wass looking for the Data Sources and Data Source Views in SSIS 2012 projects. As Carla Sabotta (site|twitter) mentioned in the comments you can change the deployment model of your project so the Data Sources folder will reappear. To do this right click the project in Solution Explorer and choose for “Convert to Package Deployment Model”: After this a warning will appear that you won’t be able to convert to the Package Deployment Model if you are using new features. So when I try to convert the package I created in my previous post I get a nice error report and clicking on the details I get the exact error why my project couldn’t be converted:

Column names and table names should not use reserved keywords in your database. You can use reserved keywords because SQL Server will allow it. However, this should not be done because it makes writing and reading queries more difficult. When you use a reserved keyword for a column or table name, you need to use [square brackets] around the name. The following query compares your column names against a list of identified keywords. Some of the keywords are SQL Server reserved words, some are ODBC reserved words, and the rest are future reserved words.

While I’m still preparing to teach a MS6235A SSIS training I use a SQL 2012 RTM environment to test the demo’s. One of the demo’s is to show how a Connection Manager is made based on a Data Source View. In BIDS 2008 the Data Sources and Data Source Views are found in the Solution Explorer: To create a new Data Source you right click on the Data Source folder and follow the wizard:

I’m preparing my demo’s for a MS6235A SSIS training I will be teaching in a couple of days. In one of the demo’s I just copy a SSIS package from the file system to SQL Server using the DTUtil from the command prompt with this command: DTUTIL /FILE <Path to package>.dtsx /COPY SQL;<Packagename> As expected this works like a charm: But on my demo machine I had a PowerShell window open and started from there. I first tried if the DTUtil command is recognized:

This month's #Meme15 topic is on Facebook and people balance mixing family, friends, peers and co-workers. I think the best way for me to answer the question of how I balance mixing family, friends, peers and co-workers, is to talk my history with Facebook. Many years prior to joining Facebook, I moved from Canada to the Minneapolis, MN area. In 2007 I joined MySpace because most of my of American friends were on it. At the same time, I kept getting e-mails from friends back in Canada to join Facebook. On April 18th of 2007, I finally caved to them and joined Facebook.

As I noted previously, I have moved from the world of development over to the world of project management (among other things). And, as I continue to learn and hone my skills in this new world, I will post my thoughts, experiences and observations here. My first project was a small project with one of the developers on my team. Essentially, we needed to tweak an existing application to take into account a new process that had been implemented recently so that it would handle the new format of the data. So, along that line, I did what I have always done in situations like this. I scoped out the requirements from the user end and then mapped out a solution before taking it over to the developer. A fairly straightforward process with which I am familiar and should have enabled me to hand it over to him without any major issues. The solution that I had mapped out was how I would do it if I were developing it. The problem, of course, is that I was not developing it and instead of being able to hand over a set of guidelines that accurately explained the issue while giving the developer the leeway to implement a solution to the best of his skills, I was dictating how he should do his job. I realized it midway through my first meeting with the developer when we were reviewing my documentation to ensure that he understood the requirements. And as soon as I realized it, I recalled my own feelings in the past when I had been the developer in that situation. “Tell me the problem and what needs to happen and then I will fix it!” Instead, I was doing what had been done to me by other project managers and analysts in the past.

As I left college, I believed that projects would be clearly defined in a functional specification (despite my actual experience up to that point). The grand purpose of the project would be detailed, the goals and assumptions would be written and indexed, and the expectations for uptime, performance, and similar non-functional requirements would be included. In short, I would know exactly what needed to be produced in order to call the project “complete”.