Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • A Learning Experiment at SQL Saturday #187– Richmond

    dbateamlogoIn a little over a week, SQL Saturday #187 takes place in Richmond, VA. I’m looking forward to going back as I attended school not too far from there (Charlottesville), and even worked on the West side of Richmond for a time. My brother lives in MD and my mother in Virginia Beach, so it’s a good time for an extended weekend visiting family.

    However I’m also extending my trip before the weekend. Red Gate Software is experimenting with a short learning seminar on Friday. After last year’s SQL in the City, large events with hundreds of people, we’re trying something new again this year. We have a free half day set of talks scheduled on Friday, from 1-5, given by Grant Fritchey and myself. We’ll each give two talks, with networking time in between. We are planning on covering four topics:

    • Core Monitoring
    • SQL Server Backup
    • Database Corruption
    • Indexing

    It will be an interesting day as Grant and I have been working on our talks, trying to make them interesting to the attendees. We are linking the content to Red Gate tools, but don’t worry, these aren’t infomercials. We are delivering valuable information to help you in your job, whether you use Red Gate tools or not.

    Afterwards we’ll have a short happy hour as well before we start prepping for the Saturday event.

    You can register today, and there are still a few slots left, but this will be a small event, so my apologies if you can’t get in.

    Saturday is the SQL Saturday event at the University of Richmond campus. There’s a great lineup of speakers from the Virginia area and beyond for you. If you can come, it’s a free day of SQL Server information and training with tons of networking opportunities.

    Come join me if you can.

  • Speaking – Slide Design

    I’m not sure I love this advice on slide design, but some of it makes sense. Much too often I see people putting lots of information on slide decks, as though readers will be studying the slides. I am working to reduce the amount of letters or “data” on each slide, and increase the information by making things simpler and hoping people will pay attention to me.

    I’m not sure what I would do differently, but I am moving towards more pictures, and less words. The presentation is to hear me speak, not a talking textbook.

    I should write a little about what I am doing differently, and showcase how I’ve reduced the data on some slides. However I’m curious. Do you think the slides matter? Do you refer to them later for information? Or do you want them to highlight things I talk about to keep you on track and give you an idea of what I am teaching?

  • Off to Redmond

    Actually I’m off to Bellevue this week for the annual MVP Summit that Microsoft puts on each year. This is a conference, with over 1000 MVPs attending where we get the chance to hear presentations and interact with the developers in our particular areas. I’ll be in downtown Bellevue for a few days this week, hopefully learning more about how SQL Server works and getting an idea on the directions the product will take in the next year or two. With all the attention on Azure, and work continuing on the next boxed version of SQL Server, I’m looking forward to many of the sessions.]

    As with most of the MVP events I attend, I can’t talk about much that goes on. We are under strict NDAs and until Microsoft decides to release something publicly, I won’t be writing.

    However I will be getting prepared to talk about things when they come out, along with many other MVPs. Hopefully it won’t be too long before we can disclose information to you that will make your jobs easier.

  • Inserting Binary Data

    There are a number of articles on dealing with the insertion of binary data into SQL Server using BULK INSERT, OPENROWSET, and even Java. However I saw someone asking recently how to insert data dynamically and thought that was an interesting question.

    If you are working with some front end language, this is easy with the various ODBC/OLEDB/ADO/etc interfaces into SQL Server. These languages allow you to specify parameters as a binary stream.

    However if you need to insert this data in T-SQL, what can you do? I know that there is a CAST function and that should work with varbinary. Let’s test something:

    CREATE TABLE Binarytest
( id INT
, note VARBINARY(500)
)
;
INSERT BinaryTest SELECT 1, CAST( 'A' AS VARBINARY)

SELECT note, CAST( note AS VARCHAR) FROM BinaryTest

    This returns:

    binary1

    I also know that I can directly take binary data in SQL Server and work with it, as long as I specify it’s binary. So I can do this:

    INSERT BinaryTest SELECT 1, 0x41

    If I now query my table, I get:

    binary2

    Not the easiest format to work with, but if I construct binary data somehow, I can work with it in T-SQL if I need it.