.NET From India

Microsoft BI – ‘hard to beat pricewise’ – Forrester

A recent Forrester Report on the BI space puts Microsoft BI on the leaders quadrant and also says the value of Microsoft BI is ‘hard to beat pricewise’.

I have been seeing an increasing trend among customers in adopting Microsoft BI over the past year or so and this seems to be led strongly from two fronts:

1. Price – Since the price of most of the elements required for BI is encapsulated in things that most enterprises already have (SQL Server, SharePoint (for PPS) and Office (Excel+PowerPivot).

2. New UI power in PowerPivot and SharePoint PPS services seem to also add to the overall trend.

(Source : http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ragnarh/archive/2010/10/26/forrester-research-calls-microsoft-s-business-intelligence-value-proposition-hard-to-beat-pricewise.aspx)

Intellisense in SQL Management Studio 2008

I have started playing around a little bit more seriously with SQL 2008. One of the cool features of the new SQL Management Studio is the support for intellisense for the TSQL you type in the Query window. This is really good as it even picks up the tables and related structures based on the database you are working on and can save you a lot of keystrokes, especially if you are doing stored procs.

The problem is that this intellisense data seems to be built and cached. So it is no problem if you are working with an existing database, but is a real PIA if you are in the initial stage. This is when you are creating tables and then maybe renaming columns, table and generally changing things as you go. Because, when you change a table design, the intellisense cache does not seem to update itself.

So I did some searching and came upon Dan's post, Refreshing the IntelliSense Cache.

So if you find something wrong or missing with the options avbl in intellisense try Ctrl+Shift+R..:)

SQL 2008 - New Features for DW

Found this technet article that gives an overview of new SQL 2008 features that will help with your Data Warehousing activities.

Introduction to New Data Warehouse Scalability Features in SQL Server 2008

This is quite old, but could be useful if you are looking at upgrading your SQL 2005 skills.

SQL 2008 - Table Var as Parameters

Passing a number of rows into a stored proc is always a problem. This article talks about the new Table Valued Parameters that is a new feature of SQL Server 2008.

Interesting what you could do with this. Can help create more performant applications...

Learning SQL 2008

If you want to learn what is new in SQL 2008, MS learning has a couple of free trainings that could help you.

What's New in Microsoft SQL Server 2008

Note: You need an understanding of either SQL 2000/2005 for this to be useful

Certification Tips

Came across a set of tips on taking Microsoft certifications at SQL Server Central.

Though it is aimed at the SQL Server exams, most of the tips are really common to any of the certifications. Just replace SQL Server with <your product of choice> :)

Link to Article: Certification Rumors and Tips

Different Int types in SQL Server

I was just catching up with mails and newsletters that had filled my inbox during my recent travel.

This article on the different Int types in SQL Sever caught my eye.

The most surprising part of the whole article is on that there is near enough no performance difference between these type, if you ignore the network. With storage being so cheap now, it usually is of negligible importance to save on storage space, but the no performance impact part was unexpected.

Next Business Day

One of the things you will have to do for almost every enterprise application is to find the next business day. So you have to skip over weekends and holiday. The complexity comes when you start looking at the regional aspects of weekends and holidays.

Rob Scholl has put up an article at SQLServer Central that looks at a recursive function to arrive at this information.

Think before Creating that Lookup Table...

An interesting article at SQLServerCentral on the so called all-in-one Lookup tables.

I agree 100% with the author. I have seen the kind of confusion that one of these table can create. Once people know that there is this thing, every type of code will start getting into it as people like to reuse exisiting facilities, instead of re-inventing the wheel (by creating a new table).

But in real life, I find almost every project lands up with atleast one of these tables.

ODBC Manager error during SQL 2005 setup

I am upgrading my laptop to VS Beta 2 over the weekend. So after a full clean up I started installing the April CTP of SQL Server 2005. And almost at the fag end of the database server install, I get this strange ODBC error: "[Microsoft][ODBC Driver Manager] Data source name not found and no default driver specified".

Two install trys later a bit of googling landed me at Feb CTP fails during setup with "setup could not connect to the database for server configuration".

Well that solved it. But the strange thing is that the blog issue is fixed for the next release, but the April CTP still seems to have that problem!!