March, 2009

Attn People doing business in California, Sales tax goes up tomorrow

If your company does business in the state of California then don’t forget to change the sales tax rate in your shopping carts tomorrow.

That’s right, tomorrow the state of California will be playing the worlds worst April Fools Day prank.  We will be increasing our state sales tax by 1% tomorrow April 1, 2009.  Depending on the county you live in sales tax could now be as high as 10% as some counties are also increasing the county sales tax as well.

At this point I’m betting my boss is pretty happy that we finished the purchase of our new SAN and servers in March (a blog post about the project will be later).  The increased rate of a $700k (US) purchase would be another $7000 (US) to the state goverment.

If you don’t collect enough sales tax, you still have to pay the correct amount to the state, so that extra money that you don’t collect could eat into the bottom line pretty quickly.

Denny

SQL 2008 Clusters require treaking to make SQL Dumpter work

If you don’t already read the CSS teams blog, I suggest that you do.  A little while ago they posted a blog post about how the SQL Dumper utility wouldn’t work in a SQL Server 2008 Clustered Installation.

This should be considdered mandatory reading for anyone with a SQL Server 2008 install in a cluster.

Denny

Article: Testing a SQL Server environment before an upgrade

I just published another article up on SearchSQLServer.com.  This one is entitled Testing a SQL Server environment before an upgrade.  In it I talk about some successes and some failures that I’ve seen when upgrading SQL Server versions and how the failures could have been avoided.

Did you know?

Hopefully you have seen one of the “Did you know” videos that are on the web.  If you haven’t I highly recommend that you do.  I’ve included the four versions which I’ve found below.

I’ve found these videos quite interesting to watch, especially as you watch the different versions and see the numbers being updated and changing over time.  After you watch theses I invite you to talk with people about the message that you got from these videos.  I look forward to your comments either here, on Twitter, via email, or in person.

For those that don’t know the first of these videos was created by Karl Fisch for use at a beginning of the school year meeting.  You can read up more about Karl on his site and more about Shift Happens.

The original (which I uploaded to YouTube to make it easier to view).  In this video he refers to AHS which is the school he teaches at, or at least he did at that time.

To this 4 minute and 55 second version.

To this 2007 version which is 8 minutes and 19 seconds long.

To the most recent 2008 version which is 5 minutes and 16 seconds long.

UPDATE: (Yeah I know 4 minutes after I published the origional)

Some other video’s by the same group of teachers.  The first is What If

And the second is 2020 Vision

Viewing the domain groups that are used to get into SQL

Last week Linchi Shea wrote a posted a blog entry entitled “How does that AD user account get access to the database?“.  In it Linchi shows a method of finding out the domain groups that a SQL Server user uses to access the database.

There is however an easier, method you can use.

There is a system extended stored procedure called xp_logininfo.  Microsoft was even kind enough to document the procedure for us.  You can use this procedure to see what group a use belongs to, or what users are in a domain group, all from T/SQL.

For example, on my sandbox instance if I run

I get a result set which says that I gained my access to the SQL Server via the “BUILTIN\Administrators” group.

This is a nice quick and easy method to see what domain group a user used to access the SQL Server.

Denny

Making SSMS Beep

Today I read a post from my good friend Colin Stasiuk (aka @BenchmarkIT) where he talked about making SSMS beep when a query has completed.

I didn’t know this was such a well guarded secret.  Which leads me to a story to share.  I had a supervisor (Ed) back at EarthLink who made it a point to have story time during his pre-shift meetings, those were the best days to be working.  I remember that Ed was on vacation once and our assistant supervisor Dennis was running the team.  Well instead of telling us a story, he brought in a kids picture book to read to us.  It was awesome, there were about 80-90 tech support reps all sitting in the break room hanging on every word from a book for 2 year olds.  Funniest sight ever.

But that’s a whole different story than the one I wanted to share.

One one particularly long night at EarthLink, back in 2001 or so (I was using SQL 2000 at the time), I had a lot of database data changes to make (I have no idea why at this point).  Probably business rules had changes so data needed to be changed, and indexes needed to be changed, or something.  Needless to say SQL was going to be running queries all night long.

Well, having already worked 12-16 hours that day, I didn’t really want to stay up all night watching SQL run.  So I cranked up the speakers on the PC as load as they would go (I had some nice speakers so they got loud), and set Windows to as load as it would go (I’m a heavy sleeper) and started the first of the T/SQL Scripts.  I promptly curled up on the floor with my pillow and blanket that I had brought in and went to sleep.  About three hours later I was woken up by the loudest “Windows ping” ever.  It really scared the crap out of me, but it did the job.  I checked what ever it was that needed checked and started the next script.

This happened probably three or four times through out the night.  The next morning I took a shower (we had showers on site for just such nights), and changed my clothes (my wife was kind enough to bring me a change of clothes before she went to bed) and went on with my new work day, after technically pulling an all nighter that I slept through about 99% of.

If only all, all nighters were that easy.

Denny

So really, how many clustered indexes can I create on a table?

This used to be a very easy question to answer as the answer was 1. However these days, with some creativity you can get some extra ones.

Continued »

What does the community want to see at PASS?

So, as you may have heard the SQL PASS 2009 Call for Speakers has gone out.  I’ve submitted a couple of sessions already, but I was hoping to get some feedback from the community at large about what you think I should submit topics on.

I’ve submitted a couple of SQL Service Broker sessions, as well as a session on Storage, and a session on planning a database migration.  I’ve got all sorts of stuff that I could submit, but if no one is interested in it, then there isn’t much point on trying to present those topics.

So I pose this question to you: If you were going to the PASS Summit this year in Seattle what would you like to see presentations on?  Should I leave these sessions up there, or replace them with others?

If you don’t have an account on this site feel free to respond to me on Twitter, my username is @mrdenny.

Denny

Slide Decks and Sample code from Quest Day with the Experts

The slide decks and sample code that Brent and I presented with have been uploaded.  The recordings have to be edited down, as Live Meeting uses a single large recording, and no one wants to sit through a 5 hour recording, so it’s being broken down into smaller chunks.

The slide decks are hosted via Slide Share and the sample code from my presentation is up on the SQLServerPedia.com servers.

Denny

Slide Deck for LA SQL User Group Meeting

For anyone that will be attending this weeks LA SQL User Group Meeting over at UCLA, here is the slide deck that I’ll be presenting from.  Feel free to check it out in advance.  If you aren’t attending and have questions feel free to post them here and I’ll get them answered for you as quickly as I can.

See you there.

Denny