Refocusing on Studies and Blogging

It has been a crazy couple of months. I have actually gotten my dream as a SQL Server and SharePoint admin/developer. I cannot explain how happy this has made me and I have been working hard to fill in the gaps in my knowledge. Now that I'm more settled in, I'm trying to get back on track as far as my studies go and take the dang upgrade exam for the MCITP DBA 2008. I know I am pretty much ready for the test. I think with a good review of mirroring and replication I could pass without really doing any prep. So I am hoping to schedule this exam as soon as possible.

I use certification to both focus and measure my studies on a given topic. There are a couple of other areas that I need to explore and I am going to pursuing the following certifications in the next 6 months as well:

• MCITP: SharePoint 2010 Administrator (70-677 | 70-668)
  
• MCTS: SQL Server 2008, Business Intelligence Development (70-448)
  

I'm really hoping to be able to accomplish these quickly and be able to share some details about my studies and some of the very interesting things that I have going on at work.

The Power of Stupid...

Stupid mistakes can just make you feel like an idiot sometimes. At my new job I wasted nearly 2 hours trying to figure out why some very simple C# code was not working properly. The idea was to execute the code inside of an SSIS package so that it updates a WSS 3.0 Issue Tracker list. It was simple stuff, but it took me far too long to realize that I was logged in on the wrong domain.


It was not until I wrote the same code in PowerShell that I actually got an error that made sense: “Access Denied.” I mentioned this to my boss who asked me which domain I was logged in under. Then I typed whoami and quickly realized what a dummy I had been.

Chinook Database on CodePlex

The other day I was browsing around CodePlex and found a wonderful tool for learning SQL Server or for integrating your applications with SQL Server. The Chinook database, while small, has some cool appeal to it. It has all the major components you need. You can work on reporting for invoicing, sales, inventory, just about anything. You can download it at http://chinookdatabase.codeplex.com/

How to Remove Some Thing from a Column’s Data

Here was a problem I was faced with today. A friend of mine was experiencing issues with two databases not syncing properly because one had a column (City) that contained a special character (a single quote). We needed to craft a query that would remove the single quote without changing any other portion of the column's data. There were two considerations that needed to be made:

1. Ensuring the single quote was properly escaped so that it did not cause an error at run time.
2. How to properly place the REPLACE function inside the UPDATE command.

It took me about 30 minutes to figure it out but here is what I came up with.

UPDATE [ARCUSTOMERS] SET City = REPLACE(City, '''', '') FROM [ARCUSTOMERS] WHERE City LIKE '%''%'

Getting Back to Basics

In any art or profession one can never review the fundamentals too frequently. For this reason I am looking at doing some posts on the basics of relational theory. Not so much for the sake of my readers' (Hi, mom!) but more for my own sake. Here is what I currently have planned:

Fundamentals of Relational Theory and Database Design
Fundamentals of T-SQL Querying (2005 and 2008)
T-SQL Queries and DMVs

The third item is really one of my favorites, but I feel I have not put as much effort into it as I should.

Excel Services and PowerPivot for BI

I am really impressed with the enhancements in Excel services and the addition of PowerPivot to SharePoint 2010.  I'm going to have to write some sort of top 10 article on the two of them. Here is an example of a dashboard I wrote for the Shceduling Department and the Production supervisors published in Excel Services. The data is driven via T-SQL queries. The datasource can even be refreshed. I'm just amazed.

Stupid SharePoint 2010 Error:The Installation of this Package Failed

If you are trying to install SharePoint 2010 and you get the error message shown in the following image, you will need to redownload the installation file and try again.

I wasted an entire afternoon trying to figure out why I was getting the error above. I had installed all of the prereq's and my Server 2008 R2 was up-to-date. The executable would not even fully extract, so there was no error log or anything to help me troubleshoot. I hope this post saves someone some time.