Upcoming Events
vWorkshop: SQL Server 911
Learn about what really matters with backup and recovery – including what you need to know if a recovery fails. This virtual workshop goes into all of the options and tools you have available to protect your systems. SQL Server MVP Chris Shaw will go through how backups work, how you know what types of backups to use, what all of the options and techniques are all about. You can’t go wrong – and after you pass the quiz, we’ll even issue a certificate for your class time.
The vWorkshop is coming up October 15 – save your spot right away!
Check out the course outline here.
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Featured Article(s)
Validating CheckBoxList using CustomValidator
When creating user controls and aspx pages you probably make a heavy use of client side validators to ensure user has entered valid values before sending request to a server. Although this has been a standard approach for the longest time – some controls that are used very often, like CheckBoxList, don`t have out of the box client side validators. Here we take a look how to create one by yourself
Featured White Paper(s)
SQL Server 2008: What to Expect
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 has many great new features that will allow you to develop higher performing, more scalable nex… (read more)
Featured Script
Get unique records and their count from a table
This script will get an aggregate of a given value and the number of times it appears in the table. Such as: Value1 15 … (read more)
The SQL Server Profession Fork in the Road
JD writes: "In your analysis of the two forks you talked a bit about DBA involvement under the covers with SharePoint. While I do think this is very important (I found the “self-managing and don’t require a DBA” quote truly laughable), I think you’re missing a large point which probably needs to be expanded on in your second fork.
I’m a database guy from way back, and I have moved into the role of SharePoint Practice Lead at my consulting company. I’ve seen this as a very natural move given the fact that SharePoint is… a database. Specifically, it is a database for all those things that we database experts have historically lumped into the “Unstructured Data” category and done our best to ignore if we could get away with it (Documents, Ad-Hoc Spreadsheets, pictures, etc.). The SharePoint organization of these into Sites and lists with metadata fields and views maps quite nicely to Databases, Tables, Columns, and queries. Once you get past the details of the interface, it’s all fairly intuitive for someone with database experience.
However, where I see most SharePoint installations get out of hand is where they have been set up and organized by people without these skills. In SharePoint, as with any other database system, how you structure, organize, and link your data is absolutely key to being able to use it in a realistic manner. Many of the data access and structural issues I see in SharePoint sites would have been obvious and easily avoided by a good database analyst. Extremely simple things, like defining a key to the data, are routinely missed. On a more advanced level, once you start adding in Forms data collection and BDC (Business Data Catalogs) to tie back to other external database, the need for a unified view of the data, both inside and outside of SharePoint, is absolutely essential.
For the SharePoint clients I work with, I push very hard to get the DBAs and analysts involved as early and often as possible in order to use their expertise and company knowledge at the beginning of the process and to hopefully prevent the train wreck when, inevitably, the data worlds of SharePoint and their other line of business systems collide.
Therefore, not only do I believe that there is great opportunity in the design and organization of SharePoint for people with data analyst skills, I believe that these people ignore the inner structure and data of SharePoint in their organization at their peril."