Enjoy Every Sandwich

The top 10 TechEd 2005 Sessions I'm looking forward too...

1. DAT384 - Together at Last: Combining XML and Relational Data in SQL Server 2005 with Michael Rys. First thing Friday morning too. A can't miss -- at least for me.
2. DAT400 - SQLCLR vs. T-SQL: Best Practices for Development in the Database on Thursday morning. DevelopMentor's own Bob Beauchemin presenting.
3. BOF015 - XSLT2, XQuery and Saxon.Net, Tuesday night. This is being setup by none other than DonXML himself, so it should be darned lively.
4. DAT470 - Service-Oriented Data Architecture (SODA): How SQL Server 2005 Fits into the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) World. This may be early Wednesday morning, but it looks like its going to be one of the better talks of the show.
5. DAT300 - SQLCLR Internals: SQL Server 2005 as a CLR Runtime Host on Tuesday afternoon
6. DAT383 - SQL Profiler for the Developer on Tuesday morning
7. DBA305 - Understanding Index Usage and Indexing Best Practices in SQL Server 2005 on Monday afternoon
8. DAT320 - Integrated Innovation: Using ADO.NET 2.0 with SQL Server 2005 on Tuesday evening
9. DBA417 - Maximizing Query Performance in SQL Server 2000. Too bad this has to be so late on Friday causing a lot of folks who would benefit from it missing it.
10. GNL012 - Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office: Outlook Add-in support. Okay, so, any chance to John Durant talk is interesting in an of itself, but this sounds too good to pass up. And its over lunch, so nothing should be stale.

posted Monday, May 09, 2005 9:24 AM by ktegels

Upcoming local and national events, May/June 2005 edition

Following is a list of Omaha local events in May and June for us .NET and SQL Server folks.

Here’s the list of national events that I will be speaking at or attending. Love to see you there!

It looks like I’ll be in Redmond the week of June 26^th to teach a private class, but if  you’re in the area, I should have some free to time visit the Tap Room in Bellevue.

Also note that on June 2, I’ll be doing a webcast for the SQL Server Worldwide Users’ Group on the XML features of SQL Server 2005. Details soon.

posted Monday, May 09, 2005 9:06 AM by ktegels

FOR XML PATH article now available on SSWUG

The latest installment of “Alter View, Create Function” is up for reading enjoyment at:

http://www.sswug.org/see/23158

This is a longer article talking about how to use the new FOR XML PATH option in SQL Server 2005.

posted Monday, May 09, 2005 8:34 AM by ktegels

Roadshows, WITH XMLNAMESPACES and using SQL Server 2000 for ASP.NET State storage

Wow, has it really been that long since I last blogged? I guess I’ve been busier than I thought. Week before last, I was on the road doing the SQL Server Magazine Get Ready for SQL Server 2005 roadshow events in Anaheim and San Francisco. It has been nice to be home this last week, but more on that later.

The group in Anaheim was great fun and really got me charged up about the talk. There must be something about being that close to Disney land, I guess. Got to chat with Tom Rizzo for a while about “the good old days” of ActiveMessaging – after all, who could forget Tom’s book on Exchange and Outlook?  (http://www.bookpool.com/ss?qs=0735614644.)

One of the questions I got asked after the XML talk in Anahiem particularly stands out: how you write a FOR XML query that emits a default namespace for instance? Turns out that in SQL Server 2000, there isn’t functionality to do that, but in SQL Server 2005 – starting with the April 2005 CTP – Microsoft has added a new way to do that. Here’s a little example:

use adventureworks
go
declare @x xml;
with xmlnamespaces (default 'http://staff.develop.com/ktegels/examples/stores')
select @x = (select s.CustomerID as '@customerID'
, s.name as 'name'
from sales.store s
order by s.name
for xml path('store'),root('stores'))
select @x.value(
'declare default element namespace "http://staff.develop.com/ktegels/examples/stores";
count(/stores/store)','int')

Okay, so, yes, that just a fancy way of doing:

select count(*) from sales.stores

But I think you get the idea. Thanks to Michael Rys (http://sqljunkies.com/WebLog/mrys/archive/2005/04/18/12108.aspx) for pointing this out.

San Francisco was also fun because we had lively group that wasn’t afraid to ask questions. It was great to share the stage with Euan Garden too. The night before the event, Dave DuVarney from Hitachi Consulting, Wes Brown from Imceda and I hopped on the cable car for a trip down to the Warf. We had dinner the Franciscan which has a better view than food IMHO. I also got to chat with Partner Account Manager from Cizer about their Report Services toolkit (http://www.cizer.com/PortalCSVS/DesktopDefault.aspx?tabindex=1&tabid=11). Folks – seriously – if you’ve not seen this yet and do a lot of reporting work, I think you are missing out. It is a bit like Report Builder that we see with SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services, but done today and it works with the standard SKU of SQL Server.

Last week I got back to Omaha and got to visit a client building a pretty good scale website. They decided to use SQL Server 2000 as the state store. Normally, this makes a lot of sense when need to have highly durable session states. However, there are a couple of KB articles I’d point you if you looking at doing millions of hits per day with such a configuration:

• One big thing to keep in mind is that if you are using SQL Server as the session state store in a default configuration, you might want to go increase the size of TempDB immediately since, as Dino Esposito points out in “Underpinnings of the Session State Implementation in ASP.NET” (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnaspp/html/ASPNetSessionState.asp), that’s where the state store tables are kept. In a normal install of SQL Server, this database is fairly small and doesn’t grow much per increment. Under heavy load, you might see the size of this database constantly ratcheting up which can seriously impair performance.
• Bottlenecking under load with SQL Server Session state at http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;820782
• sqlCommandTimeout at http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;842044

posted Monday, May 09, 2005 7:00 AM by ktegels