October 2007 - Technical Rollup Mail - SQL
News
SQL Server 2008 Solutions – Your Data, Any Place, Any Time
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 provides a trusted, productive, and intelligent data platform that enables you to run your most demanding mission critical applications, reduce time and cost of development and management of applications, and deliver actionable insight to your entire organization.
https://www.microsoft.com/sql/2008/default.mspx
SQL Server 2008 Solutions – Redefining Pervasive Insight
SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence platform provides a scalable BI platform optimized for data integration, reporting, and analysis enabling organizations to deliver intelligence where users want it.
https://www.microsoft.com/sql/2008/solutions/bi.mspx
Welcome to the Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference 2007 Website
Microsoft is pleased to announce the 2007 Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference to be held from October 29th through November 2nd, 2007 at the Microsoft Conference Center on the Microsoft Campus in Redmond, WA. During 4 days of breakout sessions, chalk talk discussions, hands-on-labs, peer networking, and social events you will learn about both Microsoft’s current portfolio and long-term strategy for SOA & Business Process initiatives. Whether you are a developer, architect, or business decision maker we will have something for you with tracks spanning technology, architecture, and business value topics.
https://www.mssoaandbpconference.com/
SQL Server 2005 is the Data Platform Leader
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is a comprehensive, integrated data management and analysis software that enables organizations to reliably manage mission-critical information and confidently run today’s increasingly complex business applications. SQL Server 2005 allows companies to gain greater insight from their business information and achieve faster results for a competitive advantage.
https://www.microsoft.com/sql/prodinfo/overview/default.mspx
Documents
Scale-Out Querying with Analysis Services Using SAN Snapshots
This SQL Server Best Practices white paper describes the use of virtual copy SAN snapshots in a load-balanced scalable querying environment for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services to increase the number of concurrent queries to Analysis Services servers with a rapid response time per query. Load-balanced querying distributes the load of all queries among the available servers. The use of the virtual copy SAN snapshots eliminates the need to copy data between an Analysis Services processing server and one or more dedicated Analysis Services query servers. This paper supplements the Scale-Out Querying with Analysis Services white paper.
National Aquarium Case Study
The National Aquarium in Baltimore had 16,000 animals, 2.2 million gallons of water—and too much data. At least, too much for it was locked away in isolated databases, where it was inaccessible and unable to be used for timely decision making. Now, by using Microsoft Business Intelligence, all-important attendance data is available in near real time rather than after a week’s delay, so it can be used to make marketing decisions that enhance attendance. A range of key performance indicators is immediately accessible to staff through business scorecards, with drill-down reports just a click away. Staff members regain up to 30 percent of their time by not having to create reports manually. And the solution can be easily extended to provide new analysis capabilities to functions and departments throughout the organization.
Hewlett Packard Case Study
This case study discusses how Microsoft technology is helping HP consolidate its online storefront presence. It is also helping the company capture more revenue per order; the company estimates that the new solution has increased revenues on logistical services by about 14 percent per order. Customer service is also streamlined through the changes to real-world business processes.
Kopitiam Group Case Study
To support an aggressive expansion strategy the Kopitiam Group's IT department selected Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft SQL Server 2000 operating system to improve its operations and provide quality, innovative service to increase customer satisfaction, productivity and profitability.
Empowering Enterprise Solutions with SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition
This whitepaper describes how Microsoft’s scalable and integrated database platform can help companies of all sizes securely store and manage ever-increasing amounts of data from disparate sources. Microsoft's solution can also help ensure that business-critical systems and applications stay up and running.
Reducing Costs through Better Data Management
Discover how you can gain faster results, generate better decisions on a proven, enterprise strength, high performance database and analysis platform with lower total cost of ownership by downloading this brochure on Microsoft Data Management.
High Performance Data Warehouse with SQL Server 2005
This document discusses things to consider when architecting a large, high-performance relational data warehouse, especially one that is host to unpredictable ad hoc queries. The discussion includes some of the new features of SQL Server 2005 and considerations to take into account when using these features. It also includes methodologies for creating and storing pre-aggregated result sets to facilitate mainstream queries and reports.
Case Study: Crossmark: Three Terabyte Data Warehouse Set for Growth with SQL Server 2005
Based in Plano, Texas, CROSSMARK serves some of the biggest names in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry. It assists CPG manufacturers in making sure that products are in stock, properly displayed, and priced correctly. As CROSSMARK planned for its biweekly feeds into its data warehouse to grow to 4 billion rows, it needed a robust extract, transform, and load (ETL) solution and a powerful reporting environment. CROSSMARK upgraded its data warehouse using Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 running on Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 Enterprise Edition. The solution uses SQL Server 2005 Integration Services for ETL and SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services.
EMEA Case Study Resources
Word documents and PowerPoint presentations for GCRP
SQL Server 2008 Manageability
Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2008 builds on the management capabilities of previous versions and provides a variety of tools and frameworks to help you manage your enterprise data environment. The comprehensive management automation capabilities of SQL Server 2008 reduce the administrative overhead that is required to maintain data services and ensure compliance with change management policies. A new end-to-end performance monitoring and analysis suite helps you to optimize the responsiveness and scalability of your SQL Server services across the enterprise, and the scalable management interfaces and tools help you to reduce server management effort and focus on higher value activities.
https://www.microsoft.com/sql/techinfo/whitepapers/sql_2008_manageability.mspx
SQL Server 2008 Performance and Scale
Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2008 incorporates the tools and technologies that are necessary to implement relational databases, reporting systems, and data warehouses of enterprise scale, and provides optimal performance and responsiveness. With SQL Server 2008, you can take advantage of the latest hardware technologies while scaling up your servers to support server consolidation. SQL Server 2008 also enables you to scale out your largest data solutions.
https://www.microsoft.com/sql/techinfo/whitepapers/sql_2008_perfandscale.mspx
Delivering Location Intelligence with Spatial Data
The growing ability of businesses and consumers to quickly absorb large volumes of data, together with the increased availability of digital maps and spatially-enabled applications has created an unprecedented opportunity to incorporate geographic factors into decision making processes and analysis. The new spatial support in Microsoft SQL Server™ 2008 can help you to make better decisions through visual analysis of location data that can be stored and manipulated in a SQL Server database.
https://www.microsoft.com/sql/techinfo/whitepapers/spatialdata.mspx
Reporting Services in SQL Server 2008
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services provides a complete server-based platform that is designed to support a wide variety of reporting needs including managed enterprise reporting, ad-hoc reporting, embedded reporting, and web based reporting to enable organizations to deliver relevant information where needed across the entire enterprise. Reporting Services 2008 provides the tools and features necessary to author a variety of richly formatted reports from a wide range of data sources and provides a comprehensive set of familiar tools used to manage and secure an enterprise reporting solution.
https://www.microsoft.com/sql/techinfo/whitepapers/sql_2008_ssrs.mspx
What's New for XML in SQL Server 2008
Microsoft introduced XML-related capabilities in Microsoft SQL Server 2000 with the FOR XML and OPENXML Transact-SQL keywords, which enabled developers to write Transact-SQL code to retrieve a query result as a stream of XML, and to shred an XML document into a rowset. SQL Server 2005 extended these XML capabilities significantly with the introduction of a native xml data type that supports XSD schema validation, XQuery-based operations, and XML indexing. SQL Server 2008 builds on the XML capabilities of previous releases and provides enhancements to meet the challenges that customers have faced when storing and manipulating XML data in the database.
https://www.microsoft.com/sql/techinfo/whitepapers/sql_2008_xml.mspx
Managing Unstructured Data with SQL Server 2008
The proliferation of digital content has significant implications for the way in which organizations store and access business data. Increasingly, databases that are at the core of business applications must be integrated with unstructured data in the form of documents, images, video content, and other multimedia formats. Organizations increasingly need to be able to store and manage digital data of all formats in order to manage the information lifecycle, meet compliance requirements, and implement content management solutions.
https://www.microsoft.com/sql/techinfo/whitepapers/sql_2008_unstructured.mspx
Downloads
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 CTP 4
SQL Server 2008, the next release of Microsoft SQL Server, will provide a comprehensive data platform that is more secure, reliable, manageable and scalable for your mission critical applications, while enabling developers to create new applications that can store and consume any type of data on any device, and enabling all your users to make informed decisions with relevant insights.
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 JDBC Driver 1.2 Community Technology Preview August 2007
In its continued commitment to interoperability, Microsoft has released a new Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) driver with SQL Server 2005. The SQL Server 2005 JDBC Driver 1.2 CTP August 2007 download is available to all SQL Server users at no additional charge, and provides access to SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005 from any Java application, application server, or Java-enabled applet. This is a Type 4 JDBC driver that provides database connectivity through the standard JDBC application program interfaces (APIs) available in J2EE (Java2 Enterprise Edition). This release of the JDBC Driver is JDBC 3.0 compliant and runs on the Java Development Kit (JDK) version 1.4 and higher. It has been tested against all major application servers including BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, JBoss, and Sun.
SC Ops Mgr 2007 Resource Kit – Active Directory Integration Sample Script
A sample script that enables you to extract a list of computer names from your custom SQL Server database and add them to an Active Directory security group. The security group can then be referenced in the Agent Assignment and Failover Wizard to automate agent assignments to Management Servers.
1. Queries customer SQL asset database.
2. Populates custom security group with computer accounts of computers returned by the SQL query.
Microsoft Codename "Astoria" - Sept 2007 Community Technology Preview
The goal of Microsoft Codename Astoria is to enable applications to expose data as a data service that can be consumed by web clients within corporate networks and across the internet. The data service is reachable over regular HTTP requests, and standard HTTP verbs such as GET, POST, PUT and DELETE are used to perform operations against the service.
The payload format for the data exchanged with the service can be controlled by the client and all options are simple, open formats such as plan XML and JSON. The use of web-friendly technologies make it ideal as a data back-end for AJAX-style applications, Rich Interactive Applications and other applications that need to operate against data that is across the web.
https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0fa1413c-cb55-4577-960e-0f3491847f58&DisplayLang=en
.NET Rocks! - Donald Farmer on Data Mining
Donald Farmer has worked in the Microsoft Business Intelligence team for 6 years. He has worked on both the Analysis Services and Integration Services product teams. Donald is now Principal Program Manager for SQL Server Data Mining, working to build a seamless integration of predictive and exploratory analytics with the Microsoft business intelligence offering. Mr. Farmer is a popular speaker at international events for both business and technical audiences, with a wide range of interests including data integration, information quality, metadata intelligence, master data management and predictive analytics. He is the author of a number of books and articles. Prior to joining Microsoft, Donald worked not only in business intelligence but in fields as varied as medieval archaeology and fish-farming.
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 JDBC Driver 1.1
In its continued commitment to interoperability, Microsoft provides a Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) driver for use with SQL Server 2005. The SQL Server 2005 JDBC Driver is available to all SQL Server users at no additional charge, and provides access to SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005 from any Java application, application server, or Java-enabled applet. This driver is a Type 4 JDBC driver that provides database connectivity through the standard JDBC application program interfaces (APIs) available in J2EE (Java2 Enterprise Edition). SQL Server 2005 JDBC Driver 1.1 is JDBC 3.0 compliant and runs on the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) version 1.4 and later versions. It has been tested against all major application servers, including BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, JBoss, and Sun.
Events / WebCasts
SQL 2005 Webcasts and Virtual Labs
SQL Server 2005 is data management and analysis software that delivers enhanced security, availability, and scalability to mission-critical data applications—while making them easier to develop, deploy, and manage. Choose from a wide range of live and on-demand webcasts. Or take part in a virtual lab, which allows you to cut your teeth on the new platform by experimenting with its different capabilities.
Tuesday Teasers Webcast Series - Windows Server 2008 – Tuesday, October 02, 2007 9:00 AM Central Time (US & Canada)
Please join Microsoft and our strategic partners each Tuesday for a weekly series of webcasts which will provide an overview of some of the new and exciting products and technologies set to be released for the coming year. In this series, you will hear from experts about how these new products can be leveraged in your enterprise to deliver great value within the Microsoft Optimization Models.
Tuesday Teasers Webcast Series - Windows Server 2008
Tuesday Teasers Webcast Series - SQL Server 2008 – Tuesday, October 09, 2007 9:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada)
Please join Microsoft and our strategic partners each Tuesday for a weekly series of webcasts which will provide an overview of some of the new and exciting products and technologies set to be released for the coming year. In this series, you will hear from experts about how these new products can be leveraged in your enterprise to deliver great value within the Microsoft Optimization Models.
Tuesday Teasers Webcast Series - SQL Server 2008
TechNet Webcast: Advanced Manageability for SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services (Level 300) – Wednesday, October 10, 2007 9:30 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada)
With Microsoft SQL Server 2008 comes the next release of Analysis Services, which offers advanced features for manageability. One such feature is Dynamic Management Views. These views enable the administrator to query for information regarding connections, sessions, and server performance. In this webcast, we introduce these views and drill down into many examples of their usage. Join us to learn not only which views are available, but also how to build effective queries, reports, and even cubes that you can use to understand and monitor the behavior of your Analysis Services servers.
TechNet Webcast: Advanced Manageability for SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services (Level 300)
Podcasts: How Microsoft IT Streamlined the SAP Unicode Conversion Process to Minimize User Impact and Enhance Performance
Join this webcast to find out how Microsoft, like many large organizations, relies on SAP AG enterprise resource planning (ERP) products to manage the day-to-day operations of its business. Newer SAP releases require the use of the Unicode codepage. In an effort to cause the least impact to SAP users and interfaces, minimize downtime, and equal pre-conversion SAP system performance, Microsoft IT developed a process that streamlined the conversion process requirements from one week to 22 hours. Only 15 of those hours were required for the actual conversion process. This process included exporting data through multiple servers, minimizing export and import times, and splitting large tables into as many as 13 packages. As a result, critical import and export times improved, and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 log space requirements were minimized during data imports.
Further on-demand webcasts are available here: https://www.microsoft.com/events/series/technetsqlserver2005.mspx
New KB’s
SQL Server 2000 Standard Edition
You cannot upgrade the named instance of SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine Service Pack 3a that is installed together with Application Center 2000 Service Pack 2 to SQL Server 2000 SP4
https://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=941825
SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition
Some or all SQL Server 2005 services are not listed in SQL Server Configuration Manager, or you receive a "No SQL Server 2005 components were found" error message when you perform operations in SQL Server 2005 Surface Area Configuration
https://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=941823
Error message when you run a distributed query against a loopback linked server in SQL Server 2005: "Transaction context in use by another session" or "MS DTC has cancelled the distributed transaction"
https://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=941152
How to use a stored procedure to monitor traces in SQL Server 2005
https://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=912914
FIX: Transactions that are being committed on the principal server may not be copied to the mirror server when a database mirroring failover occurs in SQL Server 2005
https://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=940961
FIX: On a computer that is running SQL Server 2005 and that has multiple processors, you may receive incorrect results when you run a query that contains an inner join
https://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=935789
FIX: An access violation may occur intermittently when you run an Integration Services package that contains a Data Flow task in SQL Server 2005
https://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=942087
FIX: Some changes from subscribers who use SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition or Web synchronization are not uploaded to the publisher when you use the republishing model in a merge publication in Microsoft SQL Server 2005
https://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=940933
FIX: A memory leak occurs when you call the Initialize method and the Terminate method of the SQLDistribution object in a loop in an application that you develop by using Microsoft ActiveX replication controls in SQL Server 2005
https://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=940719
FIX: An access violation may occur when you run a query that uses a hash join hint in the x64 version of SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2
https://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=937521
FIX: A SQL Server Agent job fails when you run the SQL Server Agent job in the context of a proxy account in SQL Server 2005
https://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=938086
FIX: Error message when you use SQL Native Client to connect to an instance of a principal server in a database mirroring session: "The connection attempted to fail over to a server that does not have a failover partner"
https://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=936179
FIX: Error message when you run a query that references a temporary table in SQL Server 2005: "Internal error. Buffer provided to read column value is too small. Run DBCC CHECKDB to check for any corruption"
https://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=938697
FIX: In a maintenance plan, the databases that you selected are no longer selected when you edit a Back Up Database task in SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2
https://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=938912
FIX: Error message when you run a maintenance plan that contains a Back Up Database task in Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2: "0x80004003: Object reference not set to an instance of an object"
https://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=938913
FIX: Event ID: 21421 occurs when you use the Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 agent to monitor a clustered instance of SQL Server 2005 in a clustered environment
https://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=938911
SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services
FIX: The performance of the MDX queries may be very slow when you run many MDX queries in SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services
https://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=941611
SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services
FIX: The calendar control in a SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services report may display incorrect values
https://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=940382
FIX: The Report Designer or the Report Manager stops responding when you try to export a SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services report to a PDF file or a TIFF file