Monday, November 17, 2008

11/17/2008 1:43:39 PM UTC  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  | 
 Saturday, November 15, 2008



.NetFoundry has been welcomed to become as SQLPASS Dubai, UAE chapter.

Now .NetFoundry can work both with INETA and SQLPASS to build greater SQL Server Professional Community, being part of both organization means best of both worlds, more or less this is a great chance for the community to get support from product and content perspective.

I strongly recommend you to join the community, we are here to help you out whether you are developer or IT Pro working with SQL Server in any way either through development perspective or from administration and or infrastructure, come and share your ideas, problems, case studies and we will help you internally and if not possible then through Product Teams.

Let's fuel the technology with your ideas and creativity.

Bandagi!

News | PASS
11/15/2008 11:24:35 AM UTC  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  | 
 Tuesday, November 11, 2008

There are 14 Technical and 3 Virtual Tracks at this Tech·Ed EMEA 2008 Developers, designed to help find the technical content best suited as per needs. A virtual track is a collection of technical content that spans several tracks, but has a common theme.

Across these 17 tracks explore the latest content with a choice of more than 300 Breakout and Interactive Sessions, a range of great Product Demos, Self Paced Hands-on Labs and more!

The tracks are designed as a navigational tool to help everyone to find the sessions and labs best suited to your needs

https://emea.msteched.com/dev/public/tracks.aspx

Wait for more great contents.

Bandagi!

11/11/2008 8:14:48 PM UTC  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  | 
 Monday, November 10, 2008

Over 3,200 people came to Barcelona to be a part of Tech·Ed EMEA Developers - wow, wow, wow.

For your five days in Barcelona, there are opportunities to engage in hundreds of learning opportunities, whether it's meeting one-on-one or in small groups with Microsoft product team members, meeting Microsoft MVPs and latest solutions and technologies.

Key Speakers

Jason Zander - General Manager Visual Studio Team, Developer Division, Microsoft Corporation. He s one of the person at Microsoft whom I want to see action and fortunately he delivered the KeyNote. In his KeyNote he speaks about Visual Studio 2010, the next release of the market leading Visual Studio toolset. This release delivers advances through the following focus areas: riding the next-generation platform wave, inspiring developer delight, enabling emerging trends such as cloud computing, and democratizing application life-cycle management (ALM). In his keynote, Jason talks about what the team is doing as the leader of the Visual Studio division at Microsoft to make a developer’s job easier with this release and provide extensive examples with Visual Studio 2010 demonstrations.

Pat Helland
Partner Architect, .NET Development Platform, Microsoft. I really enjoyed listening up the KeyNote from Pat, great enthusiasm, passion and convincing style. Pat started with the background of  Data centers, where they have consumed 1.5% of the total electricity in the US in 2006 and are on track to double as a percentage every five years.  It is about 2% of the US total in 2008.  Western Europe’s use is increasing at a slightly faster rate (from a slightly lower base percentage).  The consumption of electricity within data centers is of significant financial and environmental importance.

    * Where the heck is all this power going?
    * Why is the electrical load increasing so much?
    * What can be done about it?

This talk will examine both traditional and emerging data center designs.  We will start by examining how a data center is laid out, constructed, and managed.  We will show two emerging trends:  the change to designing data centers for the optimization of power and the emergence of new economies of scale in data centers which is contributing to the drive towards cloud computing.  Microsoft is actively moving to compete in the space of cloud computing as we are seeing at the PDC (Professional Developers Conference) a few weeks before Tech·Ed EMEA Developer.

Next, we will examine the sources of waste in the system today and examine why so many of our resources are underutilized.  Because we are reluctant to share computing resources, they are left idle much of the time.  Why is this currently the dominant choice?  What can be done in the design of applications, systems, and data centers to make them more green (both carbon and cash)?  What can developers do to make a difference?

Moving further there are amazing and stunning Developer Tracks that I will write in a different post.


Bandagi!

11/10/2008 7:37:20 PM UTC  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  | 
 Friday, November 07, 2008

 

Ever running on low memory wont mean you can't run Internet Explorer, "Start without Add-ons" will give help you in running Internet Explorer but it comes with a price?

If you run without add-ons options Internet Explorer will skip all the add-ons while loading in memory.

Try on and feel the difference.

Bandagi!

11/7/2008 4:56:35 PM UTC  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  | 
 Sunday, November 02, 2008
This post is in response to Top 10 Things I Hate About SQL Server found at http://weblogs.sqlteam.com/jeffs/archive/2005/05/24/5248.aspx

1. SQL is too complicated!

This comment doesn't make a lot of sense. If you design your database to be properly NORMALIZED, you wouldn't be storing "JAN, FEB, MAR" in one column. Learn how to NORMALIZE your tables and it will make your life a lot easier.

MS didn't make this complicated. It's a standard, mathematically-proven concept that has been around since Dr. Codd introduced the Relational Model.

2. Datatype conversions!

Using VARCHAR for everything is very poor strategy. If you have a column that's supposed to hold only INTEGER values, but use a VARCHAR, how do you keep people from entering "ZDFGEH34" in it?

Different Data Types and conversions are a standard in any language. Additionally, SQL Server has some implicit conversions; although it's best to tell SQL Server exactly what you want. After all, you probably learned a long time ago that computers can only do *exactly* what you tell them to do. They used to call it "GIGO" - Garbage In, Garbage Out.

By the way, what do you get when you add "A" and "1"? Is it "B"? Or is it "A1"? Probably depends on whether you're using your VARCHARs to represent hexadecimal numbers or hard text. Unfortunately SQL is only as smart as the developer. For every person who wants "12" + "5" to equal "17", there is someone else who just wants to concatenate the strings.

3. Uh .... Formatting?

Uh... If you haven't figured it out yet, SQL Server is not a presentation platform. It is a data storage and retrieval platform; what we often refer to in the biz as the "back end". You can write functions to do the formatting for you, or you can do it on the "front end", as God and ANSI intended. After all, if your SQL Server is located on a box in the next state, how do you properly right-justify or center the data using a non-fixed-width font at the server? Keep in mind that your SQL Server might have different display settings than your workstation. Are you going to pass in the various required hardware settings with each query? Query Analyzer is a developer's tool, not an end-user database access application. (REF: "front end", "back end")

4. Sorting?

Really simple. Add an "ORDER BY" clause to your orders. If you want SQL Server to *know* that results are to be sorted by Last Name/First Name without telling it, set up a CLUSTERED INDEX. Otherwise, how will the next user get a result set ordered by ADDRESS? Work location? Date of Birth??? Unfortunately having the options to bring the data back in ANY ORDER means you have to actually type in "ORDER BY Lastname, Firstname". P.S. - You can copy and paste the ORDER BY clause I just gave you to avoid all that tedious typing.

Oh yeah, that months out of order thing is one of those great benefits of storing ALL your data as VARCHARs instead of doing it the RIGHT WAY.

5. The IN() operator never works!

IN works just fine. It does not split up lists, like it appears you want. There are plenty of ways to do that though; if you PROPERLY NORMALIZE your data that is. But it sounds like that's not really an option for you anyway.

6. Foreign Keys Constraints !

It's called DRI (Data Referential Integrity), and it's built into SQL Server.

7. Primary Keys don't work!

LMMFAO. You need to use the NATURAL KEY, which would be StateName or StateAbbreviation in your "tblStatesTable" (REF: Redundant Department of Redundancy). Set your PRIMARY KEY on the NATURAL KEY. Study up on the differences between NATURAL and SURROGATE KEYS.

8. S-Q-L is S-L-O-W !!!

LMMFATFO. It's SLOW because you're using LIKE '%JAN%' in your query. It's SLOW because the WHERE clause below cannot use an INDEX. It's SLOW because you did not properly NORMALIZE your data.

Just for comparison, pull out a phone book, and locate every last name entry that begins with "JOH" (i.e., "JOH%"). Now locate every last name entry that has "TL" anywhere in it (i.e., "%TL%"). Which one will take you longer? SQL Server is only as smart as the developer.

This is all the more ridiculous because you name your tables "tblTable" (how redundantly redundant) and your columns tblTable_colMonthList (extreme, over-the-top, excessive redundantly redundant redundancy).

9. Cryptic Error Messages!

That means that you don't have an Order in the Orders table to match the row you're trying to put into the Order Details table. Really simple stuff. Your GROUP BY problem is caused because you're using aggregate functions and not specifying the correct columns in the GROUP BY. The Error Messages are for Developers, and they make perfect sense; although you could always make your own error messages. Look it up in Books Online sometime.

You're trying to truncate tables in the MASTER database? Are you on medication?? Bill Gates could probably afford to buy bad developers brain transplants; but why in the world would he?

10. Table and Column referencing!

Look up Dynamic SQL sometime. It's called sp_executesql or EXEC. There are a bazillion ways to dynamically build SQL statements, but they're very dangerous. I'd be wary of letting anyone who TRUNCATES Master database system tables write dynamic SQL against my databases. Geez.

INSERT works just fine. And you can modify the design of your tables with ALTER TABLE. But then again if you need to dynamically alter your tables it's a pretty good sign that you don't know what the heck you're doing anyway. A properly NORMALIZED database makes SELECTING the data easier, and alleviates the need for DYNAMIC SQL. SQL Server doesn't really need to address this, since Database Design 101 usually does a pretty good job of addressing it. For those who didn't sleep through it anyway.

11/2/2008 7:16:57 PM UTC  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  | 
 Friday, October 31, 2008

PASS Community Summit 2008 Bulletin
     

Looking for ROI Justification to Attend PASS Summit 2008?

Look no further. This is the one SQL Server event you simply can't afford to miss. We've assembled a list of ideas that you can customize in order to justify the cost to your manager.

REGISTER NOW

With three days of proven best practices, how-tos, and practical training to make you and your teams successful with SQL Server you simply need to attend. Our action-packed agenda includes:

Face-to-face interaction with over 300 Microsoft SQL Server development team members

Best Practices for using SQL Server directly from the Microsoft Customer Advisory Team

Over 150 technical sessions, including 14 pre-conference sessions and 29 hands-on-labs

And so much more.

Join your SQL Server colleagues and register now.

PASS Summit 2008
Nov 18-21, Seattle WA
$1,595 until November 18

Extended Hotel Discounts
Have a better Summit experience and stay at the center of activity. Contact the hotels below to access the best rates in Seattle.

Red Lion Hotel
$179/night
Call 206-971-8091
Email Red Lion hotel
(mention PASS Summit)

Renaissance Seattle
$185/night
Call 206-583-0300
Reserve online
(use code SQLSQLA)

The Westin Seattle
$195/night
Call 206-728-1000 x5533
Email Westin hotel
(mention PASS Summit)

 

dell
Microsoft VMWare

   


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10/31/2008 2:25:50 PM UTC  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  | 
 Thursday, October 30, 2008

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Technology is moving into the next era. Are you ready to take the leap with us?

At IT Evolution 08, join us as we unveil the latest technologies that could help change the very DNA of your IT department.

Get a front row seat as we unveil technologies like Hyper-V, App-V and Virtual Machine Manager that will help you ride the hottest trend in IT today - Virtualization. Learn how the new SQL Server 2008 will help you manage any data, any place, any time. See how Visual Studio 2008 provides the most productive developer experience and learn how you can deliver the next generation of rich interactive applications with Silverlight.

 

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City

Date

Abu Dhabi

Tue Nov 4th

Bahrain

Sun Nov 9th

Oman

Sat Nov 15th

Qatar

Wed Nov 19th

Dubai

Sun Nov 23rd

Kuwait

Wed Nov 26th

 

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10/30/2008 1:08:00 PM UTC  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  |