Missing Me ???

Ok !!! I know I have broken the rule ... I should be blogging more often and not let the blog die down ...

But I am back now !!!

To update you on what's been happening in my life  :

I have joined the corp as a Senior App Developer and would be working out of Hyderabad, India. Moved to Hyderabad a few days ago and am finding it a really cool place.

I will be working on SQL Server 2005 and hope to blog about my experiences soon ( I think I have identified a bug but need to relplicate it across another machine / check the bug database ) before I submit it to the SQL Server Dev Team.

Once again ... I hope not to disappear again into the mist ... and will keep updating the blog.

My Bad !!!!

Hey Rob ...

Thanks for correcting that mistake of mine ....

Apologies for not testing my code to the extent that I should have done  .....

Please take a look at your First and Last Day of a Quarter example.
ARTICLE: http://www.sqljunkies.com/Article/6676BEAE-1967-402D-9578-9A1C7FD826E5.scuk

 DECLARE @Date datetime SET @Date = '10/21/04'
 --First Day of the Quarter
   SELECT DATEADD(qq, DATEPART(qq, @Date), DATEADD(dd, -(DATEPART(dy, @Date) - 1), @Date)) [First Day of the Quarter - INCORRECT],
          DATEADD(qq, DATEPART(qq, @Date) - 1, DATEADD(dd, -(DATEPART(dy, @Date) - 1), @Date)) [First Day of the Quarter - CORRECTED]
   PRINT ''
 --Last Day of the Quarter
   SELECT DATEADD(qq, DATEPART(qq, @Date) + 1, DATEADD(dd, -(DATEPART(dy, @Date)), @Date)) [Last Day of the Quarter - INCORRECT],
          DATEADD(qq, DATEPART(qq, @Date), DATEADD(dd, -(DATEPART(dy, @Date) + 0), @Date)) [Last Day of the Quarter - CORRECTED]
   PRINT ''

 Excellent article; keep up the good work.

 Rob

MDX Query generator tool

Though the guys at microsoft may not have projected it as such, but I find Excel 2002/2003 Add-in for SQL Server Analysis Services a great way to generate MDX queries.

Getting MDX to get specific result sets for reports sometimes gets to be a tricky thing ... this add in solves the problem for you ... here's a screen-shot.

Also .. would just like to know .. if you are a regular reader of my blog ... other than the two I know I have 

If yes ... please leave a comment below !!!

Oracle buys Peoplesoft !!!

As per this news ... with PeopleSoft's board of directors approving the $10.3 billion takeover deal with Oracle.

I had been expecting this to happen for a long, long time ...

Webcast - MSDN Webcast: Introducing the New SQL Server Management Studio

Have been sitting in the office at 3:13 in the night just to listen to the latest about Yukon straight  from the SQL Server Team. So far as I can see, both the webcasts have been full house and the team is being innundated with queries.

Bill Ramos will be putting out the queries on his blog ... so be on the lookout for a really long post from him soon ...

Have been learning a lot about the new tools from his webcasts, things I never knew we could do ...

Thanks Bill ... you ve increased my productivity a lot today !!!

Weblogs on my site are finally up !!!

Finally managed to set up the aggregate page on my site up and running ... :)

Currently I am hosting two weblogs ... i.e Harshal and me .

The new url for our blogs is

RSS      :- http://sqlserverarena.com/weblog/sqldude/Rss.aspx

RSS     :- http://sqlserverarena.com/weblog/enigma/Rss.aspx

A Wish Fulfilled !!!

SQL 2005 Webcasts

SQL Server 2005 Webcasts The Microsoft SQL product team is hosting special week of live MSDN Webcasts to provide you a sneak peak at what Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Beta 2 has in store for the future database development. SQL Server 2005 offers a new paradigm for database development that integrates SQL Server and the CLR to provide several major benefits including enhanced programming mode, enhanced safety and security, user defined types and aggregates, and a common development environment, where database development is integrated into the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 development environment. Bonus: Attend a live webcast in this series during the month of January and you will receive a SQL Server 2005 developer resource kit. Additionally, you could qualify for a Microsoft T-shirt or an Xbox System! See official rules for more details.

Registered for all ... its going to be one hell of a week .... work during the day and webcasts all night !!!

A shout out to all the guys at Redmond ... “Can we have some webcasts targetted towards Indian/Asian developers ???”. 

I mean ... we would also like to interact with the SQL Server Team ... but the difficult timings always make it a hell to attend such webcasts. This was the only reason I had to miss out on the 64 Bit webcast series and I am sure there are a lot of other guys here who did too.

My suggestion would be that some webcasts be made after  6:30 pm  PST which would correspond with a morning time in Asian places and thus would be more targetted towards a Asian audience. Hope someone listens out to this !!!

Does a .Net component for this exist ??

Am seaching for a dot net component that can display the dimensions of a cube in the same way as the Analysis server (like shown above).

Does anyone know of any such component ?

Where did my data go ???

How many times has this happened to you ??

Brett has come up with a great script to solve your problems .... you can find it here .

Create Default deprecated ???

As the SQL Server 2005 Beta 2 documentation says

“Create default will be removed in a future version of SQL Server”.

What I am confused about is why this is being done ? It was a good way to set default values which could be associated across the database for data consistency.

I had just dicovered this wonderful command and now its going away :( ...

Any explanations, guys ???

SQL !!!

Thanks to Lou Schilling for pointing me back to why I originally started blogging on SQL Junkies. I started with the intention of talking about SQL and sharing whatever little knowledge I had, but somewhere down the line I deviated and started blogging about whatever I found interesting. I agree, that this one of the best sites for SQL related stuff , we should keep our personal rants to a minimum.

Ok!! Back to talking about SQL ...

One of the latest discoveries I have made (at least it was a discovery for me ...) is

1 Gmail Invite to be given out

I have got a gmail invite to give out and am willing to give it out to the person who submits the most innovative use of T-SQL language.

Mail me at sqlapostle@gmail.com

SQL Server inaccessible after installing Win XP SP2

I was thrilled to get my hands on the Win XP SP2 . Installed it yesterday night and first thing in the morning, my team members come up to me saying that they cannot access SQL Server 2005 instance on my machine (my machine doubles up as the test server for MS SQL Server 2005). Checked whether the service was running and it was ... thought about SP2 breaking the SQL Server installation.

Was going to uninstall and install the Yukon Bits again , when I came across an article somewhere which pointed out that SP2 caused problems with some 50 programs and SQL Server being one of them. It also said some thing about the XP firewall system. Checked out and found that the Firewall did not grant access to SQL Server from across network. It did not even feature SQL server in the list of programs that it shows and so I had to go and grant access to sqlserver.exe from the SQL server directory.

Phew !!! Just about prevented another 4 hours of work uninstalling and reinstalling SQL Server 2005 bits.

Article Published

Date & Time Manipulation on SQL Server 2000

My article on Date & Time Manipulation on SQL Server 2000 has been published on SQLJunkies. Please feel free to discuss and comment about it here.

New Group for SQL Server DBA's

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/MSSQLServerDBA

Yeah ... I know !!! There are too many groups existing all over the internet ... but adding another one wont make much of a difference

Asking all SQL Server DBA's to join in ... I will be keeping the membership open for five days and after that it will be moderator approved. I would like to create a like minded community where we can all talk about SQL Server 2005 and how to work our way towards it .... or in other words ... as put very well by Kent ... We must bridge Yukon together 

KENT ... i hope you will be the first one to join ...

	Subscribe to SQL Server DBA
	Email:
	Browse Archives at groups-beta.google.com

Another SQL Blogger arrives

Another SQL Blogger Arrives

A good friend of mine, and a fellow SQL DBA, Amit Jethva has joined the community of bloggers at SQL Junkies.

http://sqljunkies.com/WebLog/amitjethva/Rss.aspx

Welcome Amit, Hoping for some nice insightful posts from you ...

Page Allocation Error - SQL Server

Harshal, a friend of mine just had an error where he was not able to increase the size of database and the server gave an error  .

Could not allocate new page for database 'rough'. There are no more pages available in filegroup PRIMARY. Space can be created by dropping objects, adding additional files, or allowing file growth

Error 5149: MODIFY FILE encountered operating system error 112(There is not enough space on the disk.) while attempting to expand the physical file

The disk had ample free space but it seemed like SQL Server was not able to see it. While troubleshooting this, the magic figure of 4095 MB (2³² bytes minus 1 byte)pointed me to the solution from long ago from the days of FAT16 and FAT32 filesystems.

The solution for the benefit of anybody who might encounter such a problem is :

FAT32 does not support files greater than 4 GB.

So convert your disk to NTFS, if you need files greater than 4 GB.

PS : I am still waiting for a confirmation of the solution ... but I am willing to bet on this solution ...

Need feedback for an Article ???

Have been working on an article on datetime datatype and its manipulation to achieve desired results. Need feedback on what kind of problems are common with developers ...

Few I have identified as per my experience in various forums ..

Getting only date/time part from a datetime column

Errors converting from varchar to datetime.

What are the common problems that you encounter ??? Leave your comments and I will try to address as many of the problems as possible in the article ...

Analysis Server / BI

Duncan has a nice blog about BI / Analysis Services :

http://duncanlamb.blogspot.com/

Subscribed ...