Pythian Group

The one million dollar question we get asked by clients…

“Why should we upgrade to the next version of SQL Server?”

The process of upgrading SQL Server is usually time consuming, costs money and requires availability of human resources. If you don’t see the immediate need…

Why bother?! Before deciding on upgrading, you should be aware of the new features and make sure you will really benefit by the upgrade. From our experience at Pythian with dozens of clients and hundreds of environments, what could be worth upgrading to SQL Server 2012? Read the rest of this entry . . .

As you may remember, recently I took the fancy to implement a TAP emitter in SQLite. SQLite’s extension framework makes the task fairly easy, but working in C for the first time in, oh God…, let’s just say a long time made me realize how rusty my low-level language skills are. String manipulations are especialy brutal after years of Perl. Allocate memory, stitch things together, don’t forget to free the memory afterward. Lather, rince, repeat. Blergh. At some point I found myself waving my hands at the ceiling and wishing aloud that I could use Perl from within SQLite.

And then I froze…

The extension system is good for anything written in C. So, in theory, I could — probably shouldn’t — but I could write a thin wrapper for a Perl interpreter.

At that point, I had no choice. The idea was so preposterous, I had to try it.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

I recently worked on a case where Service Pack 2 for SQL 2008 clustered instance failed with this error (Summary.txt)

Overall summary:
  Final result:                  The patch installer has failed to update the shared features. To determine the reason for failure, review the log files.
  Exit code (Decimal):           -2068709375
  Exit facility code:            1202
  Exit error code:               1
  Exit message:                  The directory 'S:\Bits\SP2\' doesn't exist.
  Start time:                    2012-02-03 08:02:17
  End time:                      2012-02-03 08:02:55
  Requested action:              Patch

Read the rest of this entry . . .

Today we have an alert from one of the client server about blocking, I have immediately start looking at it using below statement

SELECT * FROM
MASTER..SYSPROCESSES
WHERE BLOCKED != 0;

Read the rest of this entry . . .

1. Datacentre Edition is no longer available as a MS SQL Server 2012 RC0 candidate, Read More
2. MS SQL Server 2012 RC0 includes new edition – SQL Server Business Intelligence, Read More
3. Service Pack 1 is the minimum requirement for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 operating systems, Read more
4. Data Quality Services can be installed using SQL Server 2012 RC0 Setup, Read more
5. Product update is the new feature available with MS SQL Server 2012 RC0, this will integrate latest update with main product including MS Update, WSUS, local folder or UNC. This feature is an extension to Slipstream Functionality which was available in SQL Server 2008 PCU1. We can use command prompt or configuration file to override default values to find updates by specifying values for UpdateSource parameter, Read more
6. We can now install MS SQL Server on Windows Server 2008 R2 Core SP1, not all features are supported though, Read more
7. SQL Server Data Tools (formerly, BIDS) is now part of setup, with this we can carry out all database design work, and can build solutions for SSAS, SSRS and SSIS. Read more
8. Now, Support for SQL Server multi-subnet clustering included, Read more
9. Databases (systems and users) can now be on UNC path, we may need to make sure that proper NTFS and File Share permissions are assigned, Read more
10. Local disk can be used for Tempdb in cluster, Read more
11. Built-in Administrator and Local system account will not be part of sysadmin role
12. Itanium editions are no longer supported

– Hemantgiri S. Goswami

If you do any performance tuning , and everyone do some day, then you’ll come to a point where you want to know if your tables have sufficient indexes to serve the queries fast.

Starting with SQL server 2005 , engine tracks indexes usage , through query optimizer, and can now determine if a query can benefit from adding indexes; this information can be identified using few Dynamic Management Views (DMV) including

sys.dm_db_missing_index_details
sys.dm_db_missing_index_group_stats
sys.dm_db_missing_index_groups
sys.dm_db_missing_index_columns

You can determine an ***estimate*** of the number of missing indexes per database by running following query

SELECT DB_NAME(database_id) Database_name
, count(*) No_Missing_indexes
FROM sys.dm_db_missing_index_details
GROUP BY DB_NAME(database_id)
ORDER BY count(*) DESC;

One important fact is that missing Indexes DMVs can track a maximum of 500 indexes so if you have many databases with many active tables then there’s a chance not all of the info will be present.

I’ve seen plenty are useful queries about creating statements to create these missing indexes but they just give vague names to indexes ,based on sys.dm_db_missing_index_groups fields.

Since it’s a very good practice to standardize your objects’ names , the following query will give names to indexes in following format Read the rest of this entry . . .

PYTHIAN NEWS UPDATE

For the second year in a row, Pythian is proud to be named to the prestigious Profit 200 Ranking of Canada’s Fastest Growing Companies.

Ranking Canada’s Fastest-Growing Companies by five-year revenue growth, the PROFIT 200 profiles the country’s most successful growth companies. Published in the Summer issue of PROFIT and online at PROFITguide.com, the PROFIT 200 is Canada’s largest annual celebration of entrepreneurial achievement.

Pythian is also happy to announce the official opening of our Toronto, Canada office and the expansion of our local GTA team to include Regional Sales Director, Colin Thompson (previously with Oracle).

Look for the Pythian team at one of the following popular database industry events in Q2, 2011.

We’d like to hear from you. If you have any feedback on our sessions, please send your comments directly to the speaker, or to Vanessa Simmons, Pythian Director of Marketing.

Follow this link to sign up to receive notice of future speaking engagements, webinars or Pythian news.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

A few days ago I learned about this year’s NoCOUG SQL Challenge and decided to to put the gray matter between my ears to work. I’ve been teaching a MySQL course this week and my first impulse was to use my MySQL VM to test my solution attempts. However, I eventually decided to use Recursive Subquery Factoring to solve the proposed problem and had to switch to an Oracle 11gR2, since it’s the only database that implements this feature that I know how to use (are there any others?).

I was happy with my solution, but frustrated that I couldn’t run it on MySQL. So I decided to try to make it somehow work on MySQL.
Read the rest of this entry . . .