I had the pleasure to attend the SharePoint Saturday (SPS) conference on April 12th at the Microsoft Office in Cambridge, Boston MA. I am truly interested and passionate about MS SQL Server developer products (SSDT, SSIS, SSAS, SSRS); However, I do support SharePoint at my day job. This was a great opportunity to learn more about how to configure SQL Server for SharePoint. There were a handful of sessions on MS BI products deployed in a SharePoint environment. Here is a list of sessions that I attended and really liked.…
Category: Other
These are articles that do not fit into a specific technical category.
2014 Goal Statement
I just finished blog entry two hundred seventy in December 2013. It is quite an accomplishment since it takes one or two hours to research and design to compose an good article. I figured it was time to reset my goals for the upcoming year. Here is what I am planning for this year. 1 – Have answered a total of 400 questions at Stack Overflow. My total right now is 188 answers. That means I need to respond 212 times in the next year. 2 – Have completed a…
Pragmatic Works – Performance Tuning
I had the opportunity last week to attend the SQL Server Performance Tuning Workshop by Pragmatic Works Learning Center. I definitely recommend this workshop. This is the second class I have taken at the Microsoft New England Research and Development Center located in Cambridge, MA. It is conveniently located right off the Kendall station stop on the Massachusetts Transit Bay Authority (MBTA) Red Line. The main instructor for the class was Bradley Ball aka SQLBalls. He was a very likable speaker possessing good presentation skills as well as a wealth…
TSQL Programming with SSMS
Most of the articles that I presented so far for database development have been centered around the exact Microsoft T-SQL syntax to perform a certain operation. At the University of Rhode Island, I learnt how to program in Pascal before typing in my first ANSI SQL statement. In short, I will always be some type of developer in my heart. However, many people do not come from a computer science and math background. The SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) has menus and dialog boxes to achieve many of the same…
Using Password Safe
One of the daily tasks of a database administrator is the granting and the maintaining of access to the fleet of databases under your charge. It is important to to keep track of all the system administrator accounts and passwords as well as any application ones requested by developers or end users. Another important aspect of security is making sure that passwords are strong enough to meet your companies audit requirements. Why even use a password if it can be easily hacked? Today, I want to go review how the…
2013 Goal Statement
I just finished blog entry one hundred yesterday. It is quite an accomplishment since it takes one to two hours to research, design, and compose an article. I figured it was time to reset my goals for the upcoming year. In the next thirteen months, I will be focusing on the Microsoft SQL Server Stack: Database Engine, Integration Services, Reporting Services and Analysis Services. I will of course throw an article off topic from time to time when it suits me. During this time I also want to update my…
Virtual Box – FTP Server Settings
I am continuing work on PROJECT ALPHA which is chartered to create a test environment for a PERL based Etract Translate and Load (ETL) solution. If you have correctly followed the previous Oracle Virtual Box articles, a working guest image of Windows 2008 Server now exists with the IIS 7.0 Web server role installed. Today, we are going to concentrate on configuring the FTP server. A local windows user account will have a home directory containing the test data file for the Perl program. The series of screen shots below…
Virtual Box – Windows Server Creation
Today, I am continuing working on PROJECT ALPHA. The project is chartered to create a test environment for developing a PERL based Etract Translate and Load (ETL) solution. I am assuming that you have correctly followed all Oracle Virtual Box – VHD Creation steps that we did last time. The installation ISO is listed as a bootable drive and will kick off when the Virtual Image is started. The series of screen shots below will walk you through installing Windows 2008 Server on the new virtual hard disk (VHD). Step…
Virtual Box – VHD Creation
Today, I am continuing working on PROJECT ALPHA. The project is chartered to create a test environment for developing a PERL based Etract Translate and Load (ETL) solution. One requirement of the project is to have a FTP server to stage test files. Window 2008 R2 Server comes with Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.5. As part of the installable server role, we can select the FTP options to meet our requirements. There are many virtual machine vendors of the market: Microsoft Virtual PC, VMWare Player, Citrix XenServer and Oracle Virtual…
Virtual Box – Know your hardware
Before today, I have written many articles that were concentrated on one topic in SQL Server or Perl or Visual Basic. Starting today, I am going to kick off a full blown development exercise named PROJECT ALPHA. The purpose of this project is to create a test environment for developing a PERL based Extract Translate and Load (ETL) solution. The following is a list of business requirements for this ETL project. A runnng trace file will be created in the LOGS directory. Connect to an FTP server using basic authentication.…