At the moment I’m working on extending OrcaMDF Studio to not only list base tables, DMVs and tables, but also stored procedures. That’s easy enough, we just need to query sys.procedures – or that is, the sys.sysschobjs base table, since the sys.procedures DMV isn’t available when SQL Server isn’t running.
I’ve been to Slovenia many times, though only recently in a professional context, as I presented at NT Konferenca earlier this year. Several times, and from multiple people, I’ve heard about a local conference named Bleeding Edge, and how it was put together with nothing but level 400+ content with top quality speakers.
I’m really lagging behind on my blogging – life is busy as the moment! Just a couple of weeks ago I presented my Revealing the Magic session at the Norwegian Developers Conference in Oslo. I was quite excited to give my SQL Server oriented session to a crowd of developers – a 500 level session, at SQL Server events that is.
I presented two sessions at this years NT Konferenca. It was my first NTK, and what an NTK it was! I’m really hoping I’ll be back to present again – I’ve been to Slovenia many times before on non-technical visits, and now I’ve been able to confirm that they sure know how to run their conferences and cater for the attendees and speakers :)
Yesterday I presented at Community Day. As promised, you can download my slide deck here:
As usual, I had a wonderful time at SQLBits X in London. Unfortunately I didn’t arrive until late Friday afternoon since I was flying in at the last minute from SQLConnections. I did however make it to the fabulous party and managed to get in bed early enough so I could be ready for my presentation on Saturday.
I presented my “Optimizing Storage and Performance Using Page and Row Compression” presentation today here at SQLConnections. Overall I think it went alright, even though I had to speed up a bit at the end due to lack of time – I really hope I’ll be able to get a 75 minute slot next time :)
Just before departing for SQLConnections in Vegas and SQLBits in London, I got notified that I’ve been selected for two presentations at the Norwegian Developers Conference in Oslo, June 6-8th!
While implementing compression support for OrcaMDF, it stumped me when I discovered that integers (including datetime, money and all other type based on integers) were stored in big endian. As all other integers are stored in little endian and I couldn’t see why they’d want to change it, I assumed it must’ve been due to using different libraries or something to that extent.
I’ve done it myself, worried about what to do when I exhausted my bigint identity value. I was worried that part of the LSN being a bigint – what would happen when it ran out? Would it perform an integer overflow? The answer? Worrying about exhausting the range of a bigint is not something you should spend time on. Allow me to elaborate.
I’ve previously written on why I don’t want to rely on third party GUIs for managing my AWS services. Assuming I’ll be interacting with AWS through the SDK later on, I much prefer doing the initial setup using the SDK as well, to ensure I fully understand what I’ve done. In previous posts, I’ve shown full console application examples on how to use the SDK for various tasks; however, creating a console application project, compiling and running it can be kind of cumbersome, especially if you’re just doing some quick testing or API exploration.
So what’s a multiplexer you ask? A multiplexer is an integrated circuit that takes a number of inputs and outputs a smaller number of outputs. In this case we’re aiming at creating a 4-to-1 multiplexer. As the name implies, it takes four inputs and outputs exactly one output, determined by a select input. Depending on the number of input lines, one or more select lines may be required. For 2n input lines, n select lines are needed. In hardware terms, this is basically the simplest of switches.
After two months of on and off work, I finally merged the OrcaMDF compression branch into master. This means OrcaMDF now officially supports data row compression!
Most people can do simple decimal addition in their heads, and even advanced addition using common rules like carrying. Here’s how we’d add 6 + 7:
Several times a day I’d get an error report email noting that the following exception had occurred in our ASP.NET 4.0 application:
While working on row compression support for OrcaMDF, I ran into some challenges when trying to parse integers. Contrary to normal non-compressed integer storage, these are all variable width – meaning an integer with a value of 50 will only take up one byte, instead of the usual four. That wasn’t new though, seeing as vardecimals are also stored as variable width. What is different however is the way the numbers are stored on disk. Note that while I was only implementing row compression, the integer compression used in page compression is exactly the same, so this goes for both types of compression.
SQLBits X is coming up soon, and by the looks of it, it’ll feature a full house of excited attendees:
Every night at around 2AM I get an email from my best friend, confirming that she’s OK. It usually looks something like this:
Having presented at Miracle Open World back to back in 2010 and 2011, I’m excited to announce I’ll also be present in 2012! Not only will I be presenting, I’ll be presenting a full day track.