Moving to Serve You Better

I am in the process of moving my blog to www.sqlbipro.com.

SQL Server Version Numbers

A colleague of mine was setting up a development environment to mirror the deployment environment of our client.  In the course of his activities, he needed to know the version number for SQL Server 2005 with SP3.  Here is a handy link for decoding version number information in the future: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/321185

Pensacola SQL Saturday 14

Thanks to my attentive and brilliant audience at my Introduction to MDX for SQL Programmers presentation at SQL Saturday 14, Pensacola.  Should you desire assistance with any of the examples, feel free to contact me with SQL Saturday in the subject line.

BI Solutions for a Tough Economy

My colleague Derek Comingore and myself will be presenting our three-part series of BI Solutions for a Tough Economy, sponsored via SQL Server and Windows IT Pro magazines in July. 

We will be covering three main solutions:

• Predictive Analytics with Data Mining
• Metric visibility with Excel Services
• Dashboard creation with PerformancePoint Services

You can register here at Windows IT Pro. 

If Surgical Teams worked like Some Software Teams

Oracle Date Numbers to SQL Server Datetime

File this under ‘blogging so I never have to recall this from memory’.  One of my current clients is extracting data from an Oracle database to be loaded into a SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) cube.  Of course, the date columns contain floats, representing the number of days since January 1, 1900 in the integer portion and the fraction is the portion of the date (time of day) for this datetime.

Fortunately, we are only concerned with the date grain of data, so I am able to use dateadd(day, <<column with oracle>>,’1/1/1900’) to calculate a SQL Server date time (this is a 2005 project).

Thank You Sara Ford

I owe a quick thanks to Sara Ford, author of the book Microsoft Visual Studio Tips in addition to creating the Visual Studio ‘Tip of the Day’ feed.  That said, while reading her book, I picked up on a particularly helpful tidbit that is helping me maintain this blog, Windows Live Writer.  Live Writer is a great solution for creating and publishing blog posts, it even allows me to author a post ‘on the fly’, scheduling it for later or simply storing it for further refinement.  Even better, it plays exceptionally well with a non-MSFT blogging environment like Blogspot.

You can follow Sara’s other work on her blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/saraford/

HP Mini 1035nr

As Circuit City continues to circle the drain, on their way to a corporate version of a Darwin Award, I had the opportunity to pickup a netbook.  In particular, the HP Mini 1035nr.  At a very attractive price point, the device has a 95% keyboard, critical to touch-typing things like this blog post.  Which, I am doing while seated at lunch at the Nashville, TN location of the Flying Saucer.

The device has stellar battery life, i have gone over 3 hours without a charge, using wireless sporadically and wailing away on Word and Excel.

I was able to install the beta of Windows 7, per instructions here.  I am amazed as to the cold boot time from flicking a switch to the Windows desktop.  So far, these ‘stats’ are 1-gig of RAM per the licensing agreement allowing HP to equip these devices with Windows XP.

I have ordered a 2-gig RAM stick for $20.  Stay tuned for updates on other mods, including swapping my 60-gig, 4200 rpm drive for SSD storage.