SimonS' SQL Server Stuff

SSIS Dates aren't very precise

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I'm implementing some SSIS packages at the moment and started looking at logging with the event handlers. I simply wanted task start and end times etc and so used the start time system variables.

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Full text thesaurus files bug in documentation

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I don't normally blog about documentation errors generally because they're often not that major however this one is fundamental what is being explained.

This is the page online http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/7f5424a4-a72c-44dc-b455-786a12767c99.aspx It talks about creating new thesaurus files. Unfortunately the XML example is wrong. When I looked at it intially I was suprised because the diacritics element wasn't valid XML. Well looking at the examples in the <SQL install folder>/FTData/ts????.xml you can see that the example in the documentation is wrong.

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XmlTextWriter produces processing instruction

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This week I've been producing XML Thesaurus files for SQL Server. The prupose is to enable spell checking in full text. The thesaurus file is an XML file wih a defined schema, I was creating the file with an XmlTextWriter but couldn't for hte life of me get it to load.

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How to get the name of the day of date

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Do you have a date and you want the day of the week but not the number but the name i.e. Monday, Tuesday etc. Well there are two functions that you can use with dates that can be used to extract a part of the date. One function returns the number and one returns text version. The functions are DATEPART and DATENAME respectively.

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Whats in a BOL link?

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In using BOLyou will have noticed that the links in BOL contain some lovely guids. I often want to reference BOL in documents, forum posts etc but was concerned that the guids might change. So I asked Alan Brewer whether they change or not. He gave me a great response which I've got his permission to publish here.

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Data Dude : Database Documentor

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If you want to document your database you've got to see Gert Drapers on Channel9. Data Dude is answering so many of those questions/challenges I've been trying to solve for database builds over the past decade. I am so pleased to see the database references in the service release and the dependecy tool just rocks.

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How big is your procedure cache?

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There have been continuing reports by most people I speak to about theire procedure cache becoming huge. Especially on 64 bit systems with lots of memory. Memory that you want for your data.

The issue is due to the storinging of compiled adhoc plans. They just aren't getting aged out of the cache.

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PDF 64 bit iFilter at last

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If you use full text and wat to index pdf documents you might have found you run into problems on a 64 bit machine. This is because there is no 64 bit iFilter for pdfs. The iFiliter is the bit of code that interprets the code and spits out the information for the search service (full text) to use to generate its indexes.

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SSIS - Viewing packages in Management Studio

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Its odd how you often find things out by accident.

Yesterday I was copying a dts package into a folder on my server and for some reason the drop didn't drop. When I then switched to management studio and XP finally decided to drop the file it did it in the management studio work space.

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How to speed up partition merging

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The key to performance with partition management is to deal with empty partitions. That way all you have is meta data changes and no data has to be copied.

We recently encountered a situation where we had two partitions and wanted to merge them. In a merge you have 3 boundaries the left one, the middle one and the right one. In doing a merge you are going to get rid of the middle one and have 1 partition that is bounded by the left and right values. The partition on the left of the middle boundary was empty and the one on the right wasn't. We were using RIGHT partitioning so the partition value for the middle boundary was included in the RIGHT hand partition. We expected this to be very quick. The engine you take the RIGHT hand partition and use it for the new partition.

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SQL Server - TCP/IP Ports

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Personally I think networks are a black art, I think there are probably less network admins that there are DBAs in the world. As for diagnostics and tools for network configuration, as a SQL Server person I feel I now know what its like configuring and running Oracle.

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