• Founded SQLFriends
  • 3 successful events in Chicago
  • 2 successful events in Minneapolis
• Organized free hands-on labs for students during Chicago SQLSaturday
• More speaking – SQLSaturdays in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Indiana
• Became co-president of the Chi-SSUG

Throughout this year I’ve been very blessed to develop some close friendships within the SQL Community that I don’t take for granted. So thanks to everyone who invited or at least put up with me.

However the changes aren’t done yet. I began my career at Magenic in March of 2007 and after almost 6 years of employment I have decided it’s time for a change. I came to Magenic looking for new technological as well as business challenges and Magenic did not disappoint. I cannot state enough how much I have enjoyed both professionally as well as personally my time at Magenic.. I have no problem recommending it as a place of employment and hope to maintain many of the relationships that I made while employed there. In fact this was a very difficult decision to make primarily due to the people and the Magenic “family”. However effective Friday, January 4, I resigned.

A New Chapter

Beginning on Monday, January 7, I began work at Huron Consulting Group, specifically as a Database Solutions Architect within the Legal Practice working on Electronic Discovery Solutions. What is E-Discovery?  Imagine party A has a legal matter against party B, such as a lawsuit. Once the framework for that legal matter is decided upon, there is a process of discovery. This is basically a phase where both parties share information about the legal matter. Now the process of “discovering” that information to share can be fairly complex, time-consuming and expensive. Imagine all your company’s data – email, server shares, server logs, laptop hard drives, desktop hard drives, etc. – something and usually someone, must go through the data to see what needs to be shared.

There are certainly some very difficult challenges such as using technology to reduce the amount of documents that need to be reviewed by a lawyer – through identifying and removing duplicates along with keyword and semantic analysis. Once it’s reviewed by a lawyer, that lawyer will mark up the document in a number of different ways to indicate it should be shared, redacted or other things. So we are talking about large amounts of data, data movements, reports and analytics – both to fulfill the client needs as well as what’s behind the process for Huron to determine things like capacity, velocity, cost and other metrics to drive their our business. I’m excited about this move as I’m expecting this will provide many challenges and opportunities to learn.

Here’s to a new year, a new chapter and a new challenge.

The post Time for a Change appeared first on Aaron Lowe.

Comparison Summary

This is a summary of the functionality and behavior of the different object types. Note that global temporary tables aren’t included, because typically you use those for different purposes than the other types of temporary objects. You might find this table handy as a reference when you need to choose the appropriate temporary object type for a given task.

Temp tables can be altered with DDL statements but table variables can’t (so you cannot create a non-clustered index on a table variable for example). That makes every table variable a heap, or at best a table with a single, clustered index and every table variable access a table scan (or clustered index scan, which is essentially the same thing).

SQL Server creates statistics for temp tables, so the query optimizer can choose different plans for data involving temp tables. However, SQL Server does not create statistics on columns in table variables (So, the only way to access data in a table variable is through a table scan).

Now go read Paul White’s (b | t) post on Temporary Tables in Stored Procedures

The post Temp Table vs. Table Variable appeared first on Aaron Lowe.

As I said I was leaning towards table partitioning while Brent was leaning towards partitioned views.  My argument was for referential integrity while Brent’s was ability of schema changes.  Well turns out that Brent won (big surprise huh?) however not for any of the reasons listed.  The reason we went Partitioned Views is that once that is in place we can then implement table partitioning on the individual tables.  Combining these two techniques can be very powerful (if done correctly that is).  If we went straight to table partitioning, we would be limited in our future potential in this regards.

So lesson of the day is when looking and planning architecture – think, whiteboard and then think some more – do not just open up SSMS and start typing code.

The post Table Partitioning vs. Partitioned Views appeared first on Aaron Lowe.

Instead these three posts are about Visual Studio Project Configurations and how they work (or don’t work) with SSIS.

1. What are Visual Studio Project Configurations
2. SSIS 2008 Project Configurations
3. SSIS 2012 Project Configurations

As SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) and SSIS 2012 have been promoted and talked about, one of the things that has been mentioned is that SSIS 2012 now works with configurations. Yay. SSDT is now built on Visual Studio 2010 shell (Yes Visual Studio 2012 was just released and no we are never going to get away from running multiple versions of Visual Studio). Here’s the documentation for Visual Studio 2010 Managing Configuration Options.

For those that haven’t seen SSIS 2012 yet, there have been some significant changes. One of the many changes is SSIS packages are managed as a project in what’s called Project Deployment Model (vs. the package deployment model which we have been using – see the comparison here). Within this model there is the ability to set project level options including Project Parameters which allow values to be passed into the project at runtime. This is the replacement for the SSIS runtime configurations we have used.

So first thing is checking BOL see what is mentioned and what is configurable. Surprisingly I was unable to find much of anything about them in BOL. Course searching for combinations of SSIS, SSDT, VS, Environment, Configuration brings back a whole lot of stuff, per the overloaded terms as already stated above.

So what can be configured using Visual Studio Configurations? Turns out that the only thing that works with VS configurations is setting and changing the values of the project parameters within SSDT. Nothing regarding deployment options, build options, logging options, etc. Here are the dialogs:

Selecting the environment in SSDT will only apply these values within the scope of SSDT. This can be useful for validation purposes against different environments or runtime execution, provided it is being executed within SSDT. So how do we manage automated builds? Well we’re back to installing a codeplex project. Take a look at this where Matt Masson (b | t) has provided msbuild support for ispac file. You might see the trend that SSIS build ispac files, while SSDT builds dacpac files (no we don’t have rspac or aspac deployment files, at least not yet).

Overall SSIS 2012 is a huge improvement and personally I have really been enjoying using it, however I must confess to seeing irony in an integration product not being fully integrated within its own development platform. Where’s the continuous integration? Where’s the code analysis? Where’s the unit testing? Where are those things that allow confidence in creating and maintaining quality code? Yes SSIS has automated logging now through the catalog, great it is easier to investigate crap code in production, however where’s the validation prior to release?

I’m not saying these aren’t difficult problems to solve, and I’m a big proponent of code reviews. However I’m going to continue to trumpet how data, arguably one of many companies’ most valuable assets needs to have quality code surrounding it. Until the data tools mature to provide more, we’re going to continue to have issues.

The post SSIS 2012 Project Configurations appeared first on Aaron Lowe.

Magenic BI Summit on Thursday 8/23

This event will provide business-level arguments and strategies for optimizing use of data within the enterprise. Ted Krueger (b | t), Steve Hughes (b | t) and I will be there along with some other local Chicago BI thought leaders in the industry.  Don’t wait, register now!

CodeMastery Chicago on Wednesday 9/12

This event has 2 tracks – one for .NET development and one for Data.  In addition to Ted, Steve and myself we will have Rocky Lhotka (b | t) , James Phillips (t), Anthony Handley (b | t), Corey Miller (b | t), Prasanna Ramkuma (b | t), Sandy Fougerousse (b | t).  That’s an excellent line up if you ask me!  As you can see based on the lineup, this will be a very technical day so come out for a great time! Register here.

SQLFriends Lunch with MVP Jes Borland on Friday 9/21

Come out and have lunch and a great time with Jes and your other SQLFriends. Register here.

redgate SQL in the City on Friday 10/5

This is the second time this event has been in Chicago and I wasn’t able to go last year so I’m not totally sure what to expect.  However can’t argue with the lineup of speakers, so I’m fully expecting a good time. Register here.

SQLSaturdays

• #154 St. Louis 9/15
• #160 Kalamazoo 9/22
• #149 Minnesota 9/29 – I will be presenting here

Don’t forget about the Local User Groups

• Chicago SQL Server User Group – 2nd Thursday of the Month
• Chicago BI User Group – 3rd Tuesday of the Month
• SQLConnections Suburban Chicago – 1st Tuesday of the Month

The post Upcoming Chicago Events! appeared first on Aaron Lowe.