Good bye

Not sure any words or condolences make an announcement like this any less painful. Families and friends are directly impacted in a negative way when you hear about news like this and I consider all of you as friends and extended family members. I don't even want to think about the anger and disappointment everyone feels over there. To say I am shocked and confused is an understatement.

Playing a blame game of what went wrong and where did it go wrong leaves me with no answers or directions. Its easy to blame it on the current Economy of the USA, and perhaps I have been somewhat blinded by the fact it has not already hit our company. I assumed this was hitting companies much bigger than ourselves that may have been overstaffed to start with. Thinking it was more manufacturing based than educational based. Did not correlate the massive amounts of home forclosures tied to taxes which support the educational world. (90% comes from state taxes). Did not think about the companies and how they pay taxes on profits. Once again, companies all downsizing as there are no profits, hence no taxes paid by companies either. Here is a local story I found online today as well. http://www.waow.com/Global/Story.asp?S=9442775 I heard more about things like this on the news last night. (Keep in mind Wisconsin is only 1 state among many we are infiltrated with). Seems like every night I turn on the news, there is a new local company cutting jobs. Listen to the radio and massive layoffs for other companies forcasting billion dollar losses. Shutting down stores, factories.

I hope our time together would be classified as one of the best experiences in our lives. I hope we have allowed you to become better programmers than when you first started based on the programs you have developed. I hope Suresh and myself will be remembered as one of the best managers you have ever had the ability to work for. Perhaps this is not true with the most recent of events, but I am SO PROUD of the work you have done. As a team, you guys have shown so much growth thru our time together.

Anil, you have been a rock on this team with your programming practices and delivery builds. I think your fundamentals have improved greatly as well as your ability to take complex concepts and ideas (Program Selection on CMT, SystemInfo.dll, Object Oriented Class level project builds) and bring them to life. There is no doubt in my mind that you will go on to bigger and better things in the programming world. You have what it takes to be a great programmer in this world.

Its hard to talk about success when external factors force our working relationships to be closed and terminated. I will never consider the time we spent working together anything less than professional, productive and honorable. I was lucky to be able to work with a staff as great as what you have been. I really do hope you stay in touch and keep me up to date on personal as well as professional experiences in your lives. This is a sad day for Renaissance Learning and one I never want to be part of again. Several at RLI home offices have also been let go and over the next few months, more could happen. Its a scary time that nobody wants any part of. I hear from my grandparents about the Great Depression and how bad it was. Its a different time now, yet watching so many people lose their jobs, even outside of RLI and surrounding communities makes me fear that it will be a long and difficult journey back to where we need to be. I just hope we remember what it took to get us there and all the people that were sacrificed in the process.

Anil, if you ever need a reference, don't be afraid to email me. Currently I check my work email more often than my personal one, but as we have seen, things can change way to quick. So stay in touch to both accounts.

Thank you for everything you have developed for us as its been more than I could have asked for.

Restore a SQL Server 2008 Database into SQL Server 2005

If you've tried to back up a database in SQL Server 2008 and then restore it into SQL Server 2005, you know that the database backups are not backward compatible. However, with SQL Server 2008 Management Studio, you can script data and schemas in SQL Server 2005 mode. This 10-Minute Solution takes you through the steps to back up the Northwind database on SQL Server 2008 and restore it to SQL Server 2005.

Problem
Transferring databases from SQL Server 2008 to SQL Server 2005 is not possible with standard backup and restore facilities.

Solution
Leverage the scripting wizard in SQL Server 2008 to script data as well as schemas in SQL Server 2005 compatibility mode.

Using the "Generate SQL Server Scripts" Wizard
The Northwind database is no longer shipped as part of the SQL Server installation, but you can download it from go.microsoft.com. The data is scripted as INSERT statements.

To create the scripts, you have to run the "Generate SQL Server Scripts" wizard, which you can run within SQL Server Management Studio (once Object Explorer is connected to the appropriate instance) by right clicking on the database and selecting "Tasks –> Generate Scripts."

1. Click "Script all objects in the selected database" (see Figure 2), and then click "Next."

2. Amend the script options: Specifically, set "Script for Server Version" to "SQL Server 2005" and set "Script Data" to "True" (see Figure 3). (SQL Server 2000 is also supported.) If you are putting the database on a new instance for the first time, make sure the "Script Database Create" option is set to "True." Click "Next" when you are happy with the options.

3. Select "Script to file," select the file name, and choose "Single file" and Click "Next" for a summary
4. Now click on "Finish" to get progress messages while the script runs and completes.
If the generation process fails, then you can use the "Report" option to see why.

5. When the scripting is completed, look for the following lines:

CREATE DATABASE [Northwind] ON PRIMARY

(NAME = N'Northwind', FILENAME =
N'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.SQL2008\MSSQL\DATA\northwnd.mdf' ,
SIZE = 3328KB , MAXSIZE = UNLIMITED, FILEGROWTH = 1024KB )

LOG ON

(NAME = N'Northwind_log', FILENAME =
N'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.SQL2008\MSSQL\DATA\northwnd.ldf' ,
SIZE = 1024KB , MAXSIZE = 2048GB , FILEGROWTH = 10%)

GO

You will need to amend the paths to a valid path for the computer on which you are running. You also will need to comment out the following lines like this:


--EXEC sys.sp_db_vardecimal_storage_format N'Northwind', N'ON'
--GO


Once you have made these changes, you can run the script in SQL Server 2005 Management Studio to recreate the database in your development environment. You can now test data against SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2005.

The Inevitable Limitations
Of course, this technique is not without its limitations. Here are a few to bear in mind:

* The data is insecure, as it is in clear readable text. So if you are using real data, you should delete the file created once you have loaded it into SQL Server 2005. You can regenerate the file from the SQL 2008 backup, if necessary.
* If you have a database with a large amount of data, the script file, of course, will be huge.
* SQL Server 2008 specifics in the source database will not be migrated.

SQL Server 2008 Management Studio Trick

I had a database selected in the Object Explorer window and I had the Object Explorer Details window open. I noticed a little icon at the bottom of the screen:



Then I saw that the bar above it was a moveable bar. So I moved it and saw this:



Whoa! So then I tried a table, HumanResources.Department from AdventureWorks2008:



Which caused me to check a procedure:




Each line has a little icon on the side that lets you copy it, line by line. It’s really just a way to display the basic properties about the object in a readily accessible format. It’s not going to change my life, or yours, but it sure is handy to know a quick way to access some basic information.

F4 is also a lot more handy in SSMS these days than it used to be. My favorite is when you hit F4 after clicking on a node in a graphical execution plan. But it works for several other things as well, including tables, procedures, etc. And doesn’t make you keep object explorer details open (which causes some problems of its own, at least pre-CU3).

SQL Server Query Execution Plan Analysis

If your SQL Server has multiple CPUs, and you have not changed the default setting in SQL Server to limit SQL Server's ability to use all of the CPUs in the server, then the query optimizer will consider using parallelism to execute some queries. Parallelism refers to the ability to execute a query on more than one CPU at the same time. In many cases, a query that runs on multiple processors is faster than a query that only runs on a single processor, but not always.

The Query Optimizer will not always use parallelism, even though it potentially can. This is because the Query Optimizer takes a variety of different things into consideration before it decides to use parallelism. For example, how many active concurrent connections are there, how busy is the CPU, is there enough available memory to run parallel queries, how many rows are being processed, and what is the type of query being run? Once the Query Optimizer collects all the facts, then it decides if parallelism is best for this particular run of the query. You may find that one time a query runs without parallelism, but later, the same query runs again, but this time, parallelism is used.

In some cases, the overhead of using multiple processors is greater than the resource savings of using them. While the query processor does try to weigh the pros and cons of using a parallel query, it doesn't always guess correctly.

If you suspect that parallelism might be hurting the performance of a particular query, you can turn off parallelism for this particular query by using the OPTION (MAXDOP 1) hint.

The only way to know for sure is to test the query both ways, and see what happens. [7.0, 2000, 2005]

How can I confirm whether a SQL Server installation is 32 or x64 bit?

How about to confirm the component type when a particular SQL Server 2005 instance has been installed?

You can obtain the relevant information using a TSQL statement or referring to the SQL installation directory on that Windows server. Each of these options are outlined below:

Transact-SQL statement:

Execute select @@version from Query Editor or Query Analyzer and the results will be :

SQL 90

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 - 9.00.2153.00 (X64) May 9 2006 13:58:37 Copyright (c) 1988-2005 Microsoft Corporation Standard Edition (64-bit) on Windows NT 5.2 (Build 3790: Service Pack 1)

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 - 9.00.2047.00 (Intel X86) Apr 14 2006 01:12:25 Copyright (c) 1988-2005 Microsoft CorporationStandard Edition on Windows NT 5.2 (Build 3790: Service Pack 1)

SQL 80

Microsoft SQL Server 2000 - 8.00.2148 (Intel X86) Jul 7 2005 20:33:10 Copyright (c) 1988-2003 Microsoft Corporation Standard Edition on Windows NT 5.0 (Build 2195: Service Pack 4)

If the installation is 32 bit then as highlighted above you will see 'Intel X86', if not then you will see 'X64' after the SQL Server version number.

SQL Server Installation Directory:

The default installation directory for SQL Server is \Program Files\ and the same can be referenced as below on a x64 operating system:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Binn

32-bit:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Binn

For more information on the SQL Server 2005 x64 bit refer to
http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2005/en/us/64-bit.aspx

How to import an Excel file which has columns with more than 255 characters to SQL Server using SSIS?

When the driver determines that an Excel column contains text data, the driver selects the data type based on the longest value that it samples. If the driver does not discover any values longer than 255 characters in the rows that it samples, it treats the column as a 255-character string column instead of a memo column. Therefore, values longer than 255 characters may be truncated. To import data from a memo column without truncation, you must make sure that the memo column in at least one of the sampled rows contains a value longer than 255 characters, or you must increase the number of rows sampled by the driver to include such a row.

You can increase the number of rows sampled by increasing the value of TypeGuessRows under the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Jet\4.0\Engines\Excel registry key. By default it is 8 rows.