Microsoft SQL Server User Group Sydney

Tuesday 2nd May 2006

Well the pizza was hot and there was plenty of it.

Dr Greg Low presented and his depth of knowledge is very good.

There were no new announcements except to say to look out for SQL down under podcasts.
http://www.sqldownunder.com/

They mentioned fun with installing sp1 for sql server 2005. One trick was to stop the services only at a particular point. Will need to try it to see how easy/difficult it is....

Again we here another reason to upgrade to SQL Server 2005. This time it was because stored procedures will run faster as they do statement level execution rather than recompling the whole batch.
This means, less memory is used, faster execution and less compile locks.
This also means you don;t need to break stored procedures up into small ones to run faster, as has been the "workaround" in SQL Server 2000...

There were a few interesting articles to look at regarding this, if you want to write better stored procedures. Names of these authors were Arun Marathe and Tibor Karaszi so will need to Google these guys for their SQL articles.

Some tricks we were advised about were:
keeping naming identical even case sensitivity is important as well and spaces etc.
Strong naming was also raised as a good way to call your stored procedures, saving it looking in the master, then for the current user and then for dbo. Also don't start stored procedures with SP_.
e.g. exec proc1 will look for username.proc1 and then dbo.proc1
and sp_proc1 will look for sp_proc1 in the master database before looking for username.proc1 and then dbo.proc1. So the more you qualify the name the better.

Then we had a general session and talked about various things:

One tip is to use checkdb shrinkfile rather shrinkdb for your sql server 2000 databases etc.

Pro-clarity was bought by microsoft and they have a BI client and also work in excel? Will need to investigate further.
http://www.proclarity.com/

Mendocino will be called duet and this is a SAP connector tool...
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1956671,00.asp

Tom Bizannes
Microsoft Certified Professional
http://www.macroview.com.au