If you want an quick way to gauge how secure your passwords are this might help.  It's a quick and dirty sql query and ssis data profile task.

I saw a Blog post by Grant Fritchey (Blog | Twitter) a couple days ago on using Geospatial data in SSRS 2008 R2.  I think this is incredibly cool and it reminded me of something I wanted to share about my own recent experiences with geospatial data.  My company recently decided (or rather, decided again, for about the 50th time) that it wanted to do geospatial reporting on all its customers/sites etc.  We have a good number of them geocoded in the system with lat/long points, but we don't have any data for things like state/county barriers etc.  I didn't think there was any way that kind of information would be available online... but I was wrong.  The US Census Bureau offers up this information in files that you can download and load onto your SQL Server. 

Getting...

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This is a bit later than usual as the meeting was a week ago now, but I wanted to post it anyways to thank SCSUG member Don King for stepping in on short notice to fill a hole in our speaker schedule.  Even though he didn't have a lot of notice, Don was able to put together an excellent presentation on EFD devices and how they can benefit your company.  The attendance was down a bit this month, but I believe that to be mainly a factor of TechEd going on at the same time.

Don talked about how EFD's (Enterprise Flash Drives) differed from common SSD's (Solid State Drives) that you would buy for your home computer and cited real life examples of the performance gains he had seen in a large scale deployment.  He also debunked several of the myths surrounding using Solid State devices in a production server.  Following his presentation, there were a few questions on File Deduplication; and even though it was not part of his planned presentation, he switched over to the white board to explain how that process...

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Another quarter gone, and unfortunately I’m still looking about the same on goal progress.  Still looking good on Blog posts and networking, still a bit behind on forum posts and still abysmally behind on the Learning goals. 

On the bright side, the learning goals are something that I can knock out in the last month of the year if it really comes down to it. 

 



In this edition of T-SQL Tuesday, Jorge Segarra (Blog | Twitter) asks us what our favorite new feature of SQL 2008 or 2008 R2 is.  I've decided to focus on the T-SQL and query writing enhancements of 2008.  Before I do so though, let me preface this by noting that in no way do I believe these changes are the biggest improvements or best new things in SQL 2008, but things like Data compression are bound to be covered by several others.  Also, while...

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Recently on the SSC forums, someone asked about how to measure the money in an actual dollar figure that they have saved the company with their performance tuning.  I've often struggled with this myself, and so I started thinking about it a bit deeper.  I started to respond in the thread; then decided I was going to be a bit too long winded so I moved it here.   The following are some of my thoughts/opinions on the subject.

I think everyone will agree that it's probably not worth the time to optimize a report that runs once a month at 3 AM on a Saturday to go from 10 minutes to 2 minutes.  Most people would also agree that it's worth optimizing a query that users have to wait on nonstop all day long to take it from 5 seconds to 2 seconds (or even 4.5 seconds depending on the amount of time it'd take to accomplish that change, 10% is still pretty huge for something being used constantly).  For the latter, you can probably take the improvement percentage and multiply it by the salaries of all those affected...

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Glenn Berry (Blog) writes a lot of queries to extract information from the system DMV’s.  One of them in particular I found extremely helpful in fixing some of the issues in my system.  I took his query (the CTE at the top) and added some text manipulation to actually generate the create statements for you to save you some time.  I had much grander plans for this, but unfortunately I’ve been meaning to post this for over a month now and simply haven’t had time to get back to it, so rather than just let it go by the wayside and never post it, I figured I’d just post what I had now and then possibly post an update sometime in the future if I ever finish it. 



A couple of the known problems right now are: 



Index names could already be taken, there’s nothing here that checks to make sure they are unique based on other indexes in your database.

No compression options are taken into...

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