This is it. The last melon… No wait, that was Ice Age. The last beta exam! This morning will be 71-465: Designing Database Solutions for Microsoft SQL Server 2012. Out of all the exams this is the one that I’m probably the most skilled on, but will probably do the worst because I’ll be overconfident. Bonne Chance!
Almost done! Today I faced 71-464: Developing Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Databases.
Today marks the 5th beta exam for SQL Server 2012 that I will take. On deck for today is 71-462: Administering Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Databases.
Today I’ll be sitting in the electric chair for exam 71-463: Implementing a Data Warehouse with Microsoft SQL Server 2012. Hopefully I won’t have a temperamental computer which decides to have a mind of its own today and have to shuffle off to another machine. Wish me luck!
The day after April Fools I find myself at the testing center again to take my third of 7 SQL Server 2012 beta exams. Today’s entree is 71-461: Querying Microsoft SQL Server 2012.
Agenda today:
DeWitt keynote
Query Tuning Mastery: Zen and the Art of Workspace Memory (AD-500-S)
Scaling SQL Server (DBA-302-HD)
Enterprise SQL I/O Optimization Best Practices (DBA-413-A)
SQL Server Memory Management (DBA-310)
Todays’ Agenda
Sessions I will be attending today will be “SQL Server Storage Engine under the hood: How SQL Server performs I/O” (DBA-407) by Thomas Grohser and the “The Ultimate Session on Indexes” (AD-302-HD) by Victor Isakov.
I’m trying to build a simple (at least I thought it was) report which shows a matrix. Let’s just say for example I have a stored procedure which returns the number of bikes manufactured by plant, by color for each month between two dates I specify. Since we are a pretty low volume bike builder, we only make them in Red, Blue, and Black. Also, there are times where we only make one or two of the colors in a month. Finally, there are some months we take off and do absolutely nothing at all.
Here is the result of my stored procedure call when I want 3 months of data, from Jan 2011 to Mar 2011.
| 2/1/2011 | Contoso | Red | 12 |
| 2/1/2011 | Fabrikam | Red | 11 |
| 3/1/2011 | Contoso | Blue | 8 |
| 3/1/2011 | Fabrikam | Red | 17 |
And this is what the matrix report shows….
| Month | |||
| Company | Color | Feb 2011 | Mar 2011 |
| Contoso | Blue | 0 | 8 |
| Red | 12 | 0 | |
| Fabrikam | Red | 11 | 17 |
However, this is not what I want. I want to be able to display all colors on the rows, and all dates on the columns, like this
| Month | ||||
| Company | Color | Jan 2011 | Feb 2011 | Mar 2011 |
| Contoso | Blue | 0 | 0 | 8 |
| Red | 0 | 12 | 0 | |
| Black | 0 | 0 | 0 | |
| Fabrikam | Blue | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Red | 0 | 11 | 17 | |
| Black | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Assuming that I cannot change the results of the stored procedure, but I could get all the colors and all the months, can I get it to work?
I’ve been notified that my Chalk-Talk session, AppFabric Cache and SQL Server 2008, has been selected for this years PASS summit. Here is the abstract that I submitted:
With all the hype about NoSQL going around in the SQL community its about time we looked at a Microsoft’s distributed cache-aside solution, AppFabric Cache. In this session we will briefly go over what AppFabric Cache is, what it can and cannot do, as well as some of the compelling features that make it a complimentary product to SQL Server. We will go over some real-world examples on how AppFabric Cache can co-exist with SQL Server and increase performance. In addition, we will compare the speed of the AppFabric Cache in comparison to SQL Server 2008 in both queries and inserts/updates. This chalk-talk will go more in-depth into some of the information presented in the SQLCAT Optimizing application workload & performance by leveraging AppFabric Cache along with SQL Server session.
Looks like I’ll be practicing nothing but AppFabric from now until the conference!