Programmer's Edge

I have decided to consolidate the presentations from all the events this week in a single post. That way it makes it easier for me and you to get what you need.

Thanks to everyone whom attended. Looks like we got great feedback. Sorry to everyone that attended my events as I was ill and the combination of NyQuil/DayQuil made me a little loopy:) But I think that everyone seemed to be really excited about the technology. If you want to see more then just ask ole Dave L. at the .NET Group or John M. of IndyPASS to hit me up for a specific topic one of these months. I am always willing to oblige if I have the time.

Additionally, I want to remind people that I will be speaking at the Louisville SQL Saturday. So go onto the SQL Saturday site here to sign up.

These files are from the following presentations. The titles link to the files

IndyPASS:

Database Normalization 

Presented By: Arie Jones, Perpetual Technologies, Inc.

If you’ve been in the DBA role for any amount of time then you have probably heard about normalization. Perhaps someone’s asked you "Is that database normalized?" or maybe you’ve always put your databases in “3rd Normal Form”. Normalization is often brushed aside as a luxury that only academics have time for. However, knowing the principles of normalization and applying them to your daily database design tasks is something that should be taken seriously as it could drastically affect the performance of your system.

PTI’s 2nd Annual Back to School with Microsoft and Oracle:

SQL Server for the Oracle DBA

Increasingly in today’s budget constrained climate a lot of DBAs are being politely asked to assume tasks that were previously left to other entities. One increasing demand on today’s DBA is the need for them to transcend a single database platform and instead manage 2 or more different implementations. In this presentation we will run through the SQL Server 2008 implementation and feature set with an eye toward the Oracle DBA in an attempt to make the transition smoother. Giving tip and tricks along the way that will enable you to actively participate in the management of these data assets with confidence.

Entity Framework 4.0

Microsoft is getting ready to release VS 2010 here in the near future and there are a lot of interesting things coming up with the Entity Framework that you will not want to miss. We’ll be working with the VS Beta’s to delve into the changes that are happening in respect to the Entity Framework and talking about what possible things are in store for the future as well.

Silverlight 3.0

If you’ve been interested in learning Silverlight but don’t know where to start then this would be the place for you. We’ll discuss some of the basics of Silverlight such as XAML, controls, data binding, and styles. Additionally, we’ll discuss of the more interesting features of Silverlight 3 that ,for example, allow applications to run out of the browser. Cool things for everyone!

Cheers,
AJ

I recently ran into a bug issue here recently when I had to update a server name on a database box running SQL Server 2008. I updated the server name and then set SQL Server to run under the new name as well and restarted the system.

The strange thing was that I went to immediately run one of the maintenance plans to get backups of the database system….it failed. Hhhhmmmm,interesting. Why would it fail now? The error log said that the problem stemmed from the Local Server Connection being unrecognized.

Normally, when you create a maintenance task within the instance there is a connection that is set up automatically set to the local instance like shown below.

This is supposed to make it easier when setting up the jobs and moving it between servers. Since it is set to localhost then it wouldn’t have to be updated or anything. So why is this one different?

After some thinking, I went and looked at the maintenance plan local server connection value. There is where I found the answer. The local server connection showed something similar to below.

The localhost connection was actually a named connection. The thing is that if I create another job on the SQL Server 2008 instance it does not replace localhost with the server name. So this isn’t a bug with SQL Server 2008 maintenance plans. However, this machine was upgraded from SQL Server 2005 a couple of months back. …Doing some quick investigating using a SQL Server  2005 machine I had handy I confirmed this to be the case. Unfortunately, after messing around with it for a little while I also found out that it appears the only way around it is to delete the job and recreate it. Bummer.

So if you are upgrading from SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2008 this may be one of the things you have to watch out for. It won’t necessarily stop you from upgrading right away as the it appears that the process will update the name of the connection when upgrading. However, if the name is changed from the original server name…..that is where it will bite you.

Hopefully, this saves you a little bit of time if you run into this issue.

Cheers,

AJ