OLAP/Data Mining

Huge list of resources at this site. 

OLAP/Data Mining

Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)

http://altaplana.com/olap/

What Is OLAP

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~cse330/lecture14/sld002.htm

OLAP Council

http://www.olapcouncil.org/

The OLAP Report

http://www.olapreport.com/

OLAP Journal

http://www.olapjournal.org/

Data Warehousing and OLAP Research Bibliography

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~mendel/dwbib.html

OLAP Information Site

http://www.olapinfo.de/

Visual OLAP Resources

http://www.visualolap.com/

OLE DB For OLAP

http://www.microsoft.com/data/oledb/olap/default.htm

Microsoft OLAP Services User Community

http://groups.msn.com/MicrosoftOLAPServicesUsersCommunity/_homepage.msnw?pgmarket=en-us

Microsoft OLAP

http://www.mosha.com/msolap/

Microsoft SQL Server OLAP Services

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vfoxpro/technical/olap.asp

Microsoft OLAP Unleashed (Book) 1999

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?srefer=&isbn=0672316714

Microsoft OLAP Solutions Updates

http://www.dsslab.com/MSOLAPSolutions.html

FIX: Processing OLAP Partitions in Parallel May Result in Errors (Q253496)

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q253496

SAS Business Intelligence & OLAP

http://www.sas.com/technologies/olap/

SAS Analytic Intelligence

http://www.sas.com/technologies/data_mining/

OLAP and OLAP Server Definitions

http://www.moulton.com/olap/olap.glossary.html

The OLAP Survey

http://www.survey.com/reports/olap/

Active OLAP For Essbase

http://www.appliedolap.com/

EASY OLAP

http://www.peyo-home.sk/index.html?easyolap/index.htm~main

OLAP Technical Work Forum

http://www.tek-tips.com/gthreadminder.cfm/lev2/77/lev3/25/pid/450

German OLAP and Data Warehouse Forum

http://olap.winf.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/

OLAP Forum

http://www.ontargettek.com/wwwboard/wwwboard.html

OLAP Train

http://olaptrain.com/

OLAP Links

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/O/OLAP.html

OLAP Resources

http://www.sgroves.demon.co.uk/olaplnks.htm

Open Directory: OLAP

http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Databases/OLAP/

Google Web Directory: OLAP

http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Software/Databases/OLAP/

Databases, Data Warehousing and OLAP

http://www.kdnuggets.com/websites/dbolap.html

IBM Welds OLAP, Data Mining

http://www.idg.net/ic_855480_8434_1-3921.html

IBM DB2 OLAP Server

http://www-3.ibm.com/software/data/db2/db2olap/

IBM Adds Hybrid OLAP In DB2

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,120907,00.asp

Oracle OLAP

http://otn.oracle.com/products/oracle9i/datasheets/olap.pdf

Oracle9i OLAP

http://www.oracle.com/ip/deploy/database/oracle9i/index.html?bi_olap.html

Oracle Express OLAP

http://www.charlesriver.com/titles/oracle.html

OLAP Information

http://www.andypryke.com/university/dm_docs/olap/

A New Face For OLAP

http://www.dbmsmag.com/9701i08.html

White Papers On Data Warehousing, Data Mining, OLAP

http://www.dkms.com/white_papers.htm

JSR 69 Java OLAP Interface (JOLAP)

http://www.jcp.org/jsr/detail/69.jsp

OLAP/Multidimensional Database Tools

http://www.dwinfocenter.org/olap.html

OLAP Performance

http://www.sqlmag.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=7638

The Transition of OLAP

http://www.101com.com/solutions/dataintelligence/article.asp?articleid=4650

Intelligent Rollups In Multidimensional OLAP Data

http://www.it.iitb.ernet.in/~sunita/papers/vldb01.pdf

Maintenance and Control Aspects of OLAP Applications

http://www.xs4all.nl/~fab/olapkeep.html

OLAP and Statistical Databases: Similarities and Differences

http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/shoshani97olap.html

Mining/OLAP

http://www.cio.com/research/data/data_mining.html

Discovering New Opportunities With OLAP

http://webevents.broadcast.com/ibm/olap/home.asp

OLAP Tools

http://www.meridian-marketing.com/TECH/olap.html

OLAP Market Review

http://www.dmreview.com/master.cfm?NavID=198&EdID=4085

Evaluating OLAP Servers and Tools

http://www.corpinfodesigns.com/priv_docs/EVAL_OLAP.pdf

OLAP For Java Developers

http://www.devx.com/upload/free/features/javapro/1999/07jul99/kn0799/kn0799.asp

Mining For Golden Nuggets of Data

http://www.toptentechs.com/applications/Issue6/

A Survey On Logical Models For OLAP Databases

http://www.dbnet.ece.ntua.gr/~dwq/p31.pdf

Specifying OLAP Cubes On XML Data

http://www.cs.auc.dk/~tbp/articles/R015003.pdf

What Is Data Mining ?

http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/jason.frand/teacher/technologies/palace/datamining.htm

Data Mining Overview

http://www.megaputer.com/dm/index.php3

Defining Data Mining

http://www.dbmsmag.com/9608d53.html

Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Journal

http://www.digimine.com/usama/datamine/

Information About Data Mining

http://www.the-data-mine.com/

IBM Data Mining Group Quest

http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/quest/

IBM DB2 Intelligent Miner For Data

http://www-3.ibm.com/software/data/iminer/fordata/

Data Mining, Web Mining and Knowledge Discovery Guide

http://www.kdnuggets.com/

National Center For Data Mining (NCDM)

http://www.ncdm.uic.edu/

Data Mining News

http://www.idagroup.com/

Data Mining Books, White Papers, and Tutorial

http://www3.shore.net/~kht/

Data Miners

http://www.data-miners.com/

Data Mining and Machine Learning

http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/research/fdk/datamining/

Effectively Guide Your Organization's Future With Data Mining

http://www.spss.com/spssbi/applications/datamining/

Data Mining Benchmarking Association

http://www.dmbenchmarking.com/

URLs For Data Mining

http://www.galaxy.gmu.edu/stats/syllabi/DMLIST.html

Data Mining In Molecular Biology

http://industry.ebi.ac.uk/~brazma/dm.html

Data Mining Glossary

http://www.twocrows.com/glossary.htm

Data Mining Technologies

http://www.data-mine.com/

DMSK: Data Miner Software Kit

http://www.data-miner.com/

ACM Special Interest Group On Knowledge Discovery in Data and Data Mining (SIGKDD)

http://www.acm.org/sigkdd/

http://www.kdd.org/

The Data Mining Institute (DMI)

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/dmi/

Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery in Databases

http://db.cs.sfu.ca/sections/publication/kdd/kdd.html

Untangling Text Data Mining

http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hearst/papers/acl99/acl99-tdm.html

Data Mining Forum

http://www.data-mining-forum.de/

Data Warehouse, Data Mining and Decision Support Resources

http://www.infogoal.com/dmc/dmcdwh.htm

Data Mining Lecture Notes

http://www-db.stanford.edu/~ullman/mining/mining.html

Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques (Book) 2000

http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~han/DM_Book.html

Analysis of Data Mining Algorithms

http://userpages.umbc.edu/~kjoshi1/data-mine/proj_rpt.htm

Tutorial On High Performance Data Mining

http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~mjoshi/hpdmtut/

ITSC Data Mining Center

http://datamining.itsc.uah.edu/

Data Mining Techniques

http://www.statsoftinc.com/textbook/stdatmin.html

Advances In Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (Book)

http://www.aaai.org/Press/Books/Fayyad/fayyad.html

Data Mining Tools

http://www.dwinfocenter.org/datamine.html

http://www.rulequest.com/

Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques with Java Implementations (Book) 1999

http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~ml/weka/book.html

Data Mining With Predictive Models

http://www.spss.com/spssbi/clementine/

Open Directory: Data Mining

http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Databases/Data_Mining/

Data Mining Resources For Space Science

http://adc.gsfc.nasa.gov/adc/adc_datamining.html

Data Mining Group

http://cslab.anu.edu.au/ml/dm/

NAG Data Mining Components To Create Critical Competitive Advantage

http://www.nag.co.uk/numeric/DR/drdescription.asp

Data Mining Approaches for Intrusion Detection

http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~wenke/papers/usenix/usenix.html

Data Mining in Python

http://ai.fri.uni-lj.si/~aleks/orng/

Data Mining Product Features

http://www.exclusiveore.com/prodtable.html

Knowledge Discovery/Data Mining Center

http://open.cineca.it/datamining/index_ing.htm

UCLA Data Mining Lab

http://dml.cs.ucla.edu/

Data Mining Solutions and Establishment of A Data Warehouse

http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_5/maxwell/

Data Mining - Case Study

http://www.math.mcmaster.ca/peter/sora/case_studies_00/data_mining.html

Workshop On Data Mining Lessons Learned

http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Tom_Fawcett/DMLL-workshop.html

Data Mining and Customer Relationships

http://www3.primushost.com/~kht/text/whexcerpt/whexcerpt.htm

OMG Common Warehouse Metamodel (CWM)

Data Warehousing, CWM and MOF Resources

http://www.omg.org/cwm/

OLAP/Data Mining

Precision Computing - Interacting with SQL & PowerShell

Yet another way to ETL without Integration Services? 

Jeffrey McManus recently wrote about database queries with PowerShell – a small script that lets you query a SQL data store. This is really powerful. Rather than context switch into SQL Express (or TOAD, or your other favourite administration tool,) you can do what you need from PowerShell.

It goes even further, though. A lot of PowerShell's built-in commands have a set-oriented flavour: Where-Object, Select-Object, Group-Object, and Sort-Object. I also blogged about a set intersection script here: http://www.leeholmes.com/blog/CreatingSQLsJoinlikeFunctionalityInMSH.aspx. After spending a ton of time in Oracle databases during an internship at General Electric, I remember always wishing that DIR supported a WHERE clause. Well, with PowerShell, it does!

One thing Jeffrey's post doesn't fully highlight is that the .NET Framework can also return fully structured objects that represent the results of your query. If your SELECT query returns a recordset with Name and Address columns, you can get back objects with Name and Address properties. With that, you can slice and dice the results even further in the shell.

PS D:\Temp> Invoke-SqlCommand.ps1 -Sql "SELECT TOP 5 * FROM Orders" | Format-Table

    OrderID CustomerID   EmployeeID OrderDate   RequiredDat ShippedDate     ShipVia     Freight
                                                e
    ------- ----------   ---------- ---------   ----------- -----------     -------     -------
      10248 VINET                 5 7/4/1996... 8/1/1996... 7/16/199...           3       32.38
      10249 TOMSP                 6 7/5/1996... 8/16/199... 7/10/199...           1       11.61
      10250 HANAR                 4 7/8/1996... 8/5/1996... 7/12/199...           2       65.83
      10251 VICTE                 3 7/8/1996... 8/5/1996... 7/15/199...           1       41.34
      10252 SUPRD                 4 7/9/1996... 8/6/1996... 7/11/199...           2        51.3

Precision Computing

Importing Text-based data: Workbench

Alternatives to SSIS & DTS are built-in to T-SQL 

It is hard to estimate the enormous number of unnecessry and unmaintainable SSIS and DTS files that are written merely to import data from text into SQL Server. For performance, and for the sanity of the DBA, it is usually better to allow SQL Server to import text and to pummel it into normalised relational tables, rather than rely on procedural techniques.

There are many ways to read text into SQL Server including, amongst others, BCP, BULK INSERT, OPENROWSET, OPENDATASOURCE, OPENQUERY, or by setting up a linked server.

Normally, for reading in a table from an external source such as a text file, one would use an OpenRowSet, which can be referenced in the FROM clause of a query as though it were a table name. This is a topic that would take too long to tackle in this workbench, though we'll show you an example of its use for reading in a CSV file. Perhaps one day we'll do an OpenRowSet Workbench!...

Importing Text-based data: Workbench

US ISV Developer Evangelism Team : Oslo-SOA & BPM

A roadmap into next year's MS offerings around SOA & BPM 

“Oslo” is the latest in a series of long term investments in SOA and BPM technologies, enabling the development of distributed applications. At the conference, we will disclose the targeted investment areas and the associated priorities. These product investments are part of a multi-release investment that will help advance the Dynamic IT initiative – specifically in the areas of ‘services-enabled’ and ‘model-driven’.

There are five primary areas of investment targeted by “Oslo” development efforts:

§ Framework: The .NET Framework “4” release will make further investments in model-driven development as part of our Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Workflow Foundation (WF) technologies. This will be the logical successor to the .NET Framework 3.5 release happening later this calendar year.

§ Server: This release will continue to evolve our BizTalk family of products as the distributed platform for highly scalable SOA and BPM solutions. BizTalk Server “6” will build deeply on top of both WCF and WF as its core foundation, and deliver the capability to develop, manage and deploy composite applications.

§ Services: Extending the early BizTalk Services incubation (currently available at labs.biztalk.net), the BizTalk Services “1” release will deliver a commercial release of hosted services that enable cross-organizational composite application scenarios. This includes expanded capabilities around hosted messaging, identity and workflow capabilities.

§ Tools: These investments will advance the application lifecycle management capabilities of Visual Studio Team System and provide support for an expanded range of roles. Furthermore, Visual Studio “10” will provide deep support for model-driven design and deployment of composite applications.

§ Repository: There will also be investments aligning the metadata repositories across the Server and Tools product sets. System Center “5”, Visual Studio “10” and BizTalk Server “6” will utilize a common repository technology for managing, versioning, and deploying models.

US ISV Developer Evangelism Team : Oslo-SOA & BPM

Microsoft Pushes Cloud Development

Tier-based development with Volta encourages developers to "use what's in the room"

The project to enable this is called Volta and it is headed up by Erik Meijer, a Microsoft architect in the company's SQL Server group. Meijer gave a demonstration of Volta at OOPSLA (Object-Oriented Programming, Languages, Systems and Applications) here on Oct. 23 and later discussed the technology with me.

Microsoft Pushes Cloud Development

More on Volta with Erik Meijer at Channel9.

SQL Community

MS has put up a web site dedicated to the SQL Server Community.. called the Microsoft SQL Server Community for Worldwide SQL Server Professionals.

http://www.sqlcommunity.com/

Looks like a bit of competition for www.SQLServerCentral.com

They're using DotNetNuke to power the site. I wonder why Sharepoint isn't up to snuff?

SimonS SQL Server Stuff : OCR for free from any image = PDF to Text

Yet another reason to use One Note... OCR from any image. 

OCR for free from any image

There are always features of products that you never now about. It is rare to go on training courses and so its up to you and your favourtie search engine to find out what a product does.

Onenote is a product I like. I'm not nuts about it but it is useful. One feature that I've always loved is the screen clipping feature. You always see users doing ALT+PRINT SCREEN to get a screen print, and then pasting into word and emailing 2Mb word documents with screen captures in them. The One Note feature allows you to not only select the section of the screen you want but also the file sizes aren't huge.

Its was my favourite feature until I found a new feature.

Image to Text.

Yes in Onenote you can copy the text from an image. I'm using it at the moment to convert screen captures I have from a terminal system to the text.

Simply this is OCR for free, out of the box. It also supports multiple languages.

To use the feature, paste an image into onenote, then select "Make Text in Image Searchable" and then select "Copy Text from Picture" and heh presto you have the text from the picture in the clipboard

SimonS SQL Server Stuff : OCR for free from any image

Microsoft SQL Server Development Customer Advisory Team

 

If a report does not use formatted cell values, query time can be reduced. An example is a Reporting Services report that does its own formatting and therefore would not use the formatted values from SSAS. By returning only the value of the cell and not its formatted value in MDX, you can achieve better queries performance, sometimes between 5-20%, depending on the size of the cell set. The default properties include FORMAT_STRING and FORMATTED_VALUE, and can be omitted by specifying a list of properties. An example is to add "cell properties VALUE" at the end of every query.

select [Measures].[Internet Sales Amount]

on columns

from [adventure works]

cell properties value

Microsoft SQL Server Development Customer Advisory Team

from Euan Garden's BLOG... SQL 2005 CTP

 Should have called it Q3 release but whatever...  Looks like they've integrated SQL Health and History tool and fixed Database Mirroring for starters.

SQL Server 2008 - July CTP Available

Nothing quite like cutting it fine on the naming still being valid :-)

Get all the info and downloads from here. A quick scan reveals the following improvements;

T-SQL - Separate Data and Time Types FINALLY, YIPEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

SQL Server 2008 introduces new date and time data types. The new data types enable applications to have separate date and time types, larger year ranges for date value, larger fractional seconds precision for time value, time-zone offset aware datetime type that containing date, time and time zone offset portion, user defined option on fractional seconds precision of time related types and datetime2 and datetimeoffset provide standards conformant semantics. Along with the T-SQL support on the new types, both native (ODBC, OLEDB) and managed (SqlClient) providers also provide the full support through the client driver APIs.

T-SQL - Object Dependencies

The object dependencies improvement provides reliable discovery of dependencies between objects through newly introduced catalog view and dynamic management functions. Dependency information is always up-to-date for both schema-bound and non-schema-bound objects. Dependencies are tracked for stored procedures, tables, views, functions, triggers, user-defined types, XML schema-collections, and more.

T-SQL - ORDPATH

ORDPATH improvement provides an important new functionality to our customers who use hierarchical data.  It provides a superior way of modeling hierarchies in SQL Server by introducing the HierarchyID system data type and corresponding built-in methods which are designed to make it easier to store, query and operate hierarchical data.  HierarchyID is also optimized for representing trees, the most common type of hierarchical data.

T-SQL - Large User Defined Types

Large user-defined types allows users to expand the size of defined data types by eliminating the 8‑KB limit.

Reporting Services - New Server and Designer

Improvements represent the two major infrastructure changes for Reporting Services. Reporting Services enhances the processing engine and rendering extensions to enable new functionality, such as Tablix support, and scalability as well as remove the dependency on IIS.  Additionally, new report designer and configuration tool are provided that improve usability and workflow for RS customers.

Management - Performance Data Collection

Collect data from various sources in SQL Server and OS to help with performance troubleshooting and server maintenance. With this improvement, organizations improve their analysis of common performance issues:

• Define what data is collected and organize the collection into collection sets
• Start/stop/manipulate collection sets programmatically (T-SQL and .NET API)
• Define where data is stored (relational database)
• View data through reports in SQL Server Management Studio.
• Provide platform to plug in more data collectors in the future.

HADR - Database Mirroring Enhancements

SQL Server 2008 builds upon the momentum of SQL Server 2005 by providing a more reliable platform with enhanced database mirroring:

• Automatic bad page repair - allows the principal and mirror machines to transparently recover from 823/824 types of data page errors by requesting a fresh copy of the corrupted page from the mirroring partner.
• Log stream compression - compression of the outgoing log stream in order to minimize the network bandwidth used by database mirroring.
• Miscellaneous performance enhancements:
  • Using asynchronous log write requests on the mirror in order to shorten the log write time and thus speed-up the commit acknowledgement.
  • Better utilization of the mirroring log send buffers in order to pack multiple smaller log blocks into a single network send.
• Supportability and diagnosability improvements:
  • Additional performance counters to allow for more granular accounting of the time spent across the different stages of the DBM log processing.
  • New DMVs and extensions of existing views in order to expose additional information about the mirroring sessions.

Posted Tuesday, July 31, 2007 6:27 PM by euanga | 6 Comments

Filed under: SQL Server, Microsoft

Rosario: Next Generation of Team Test (almost) out in the wild - Rosario Aug CTP

Brian let the cat out of the bag earlier today, then Doug confirmed it. The project I came over to VSTS to focus on is starting to get shared. As Brian discusses in his post we demo'd live code from the Aug CTP and the CTP that will follow Aug this week to our Technical Field and it was very well received. Brian's right it has been pretty challenging for the team to be working on 2 full versions of VS at the same time(VS 2008 and Rosario) but I think the team have done a great job.

We'll start talking about the details of whats in the product over the coming weeks and months but I wanted to kick off my Rosario blogging by talking a little bit about the way that we think about testing and testers. Brian refers to Manual Tester in his blog but we really think of this as short hand for testers that do manual testing (the difference will become clear in a moment).

The testing that VSTT supports today is really in 3 forms;

• Unit Testing, this is really a developer orientated form of testing and almost no "testers" use it directly but they wish all the developers in their team did!
• Web Testing, this confused me when I first joined the team as I assumed it was UI testing for web apps, its not that and I like David Williamson's definition, its about using the browser to capture the (http)data required to test an http server, when we playback(or run the tests) we do so at the http level. Testing server protocols (even http) is a pretty technical and specialised task.
• Load Testing, here we consume other tests and use them to simulate load against servers, web servers, reporting servers etc etc. We can use any test that includes code or web tests, this is somewhere that testers do/can use Unit Tests as they can form the basis of a load test. Again this is pretty technical and specialised testing.

When we decided to make a big investment in testing for VSTS going fwds (the team is more than 3x the size it was for VS 2005) one of the things we did was to segment the potential customer base into 3 broad buckets (with specialisations within, but we'll cover those in another post). Those buckets are;

• The Developer Tester, this includes both TDD and traditional Unit Testing based developers who are focussed on using dev orientated testing to increase initial and ongoing code/application quality.
• The Specialist Tester, this includes Load Testing, Security Testing, Protocol Testing, Very Deep/Complex Automation Testing etc etc, these are testers focussed on the more technical and specialised aspects of testing.
• The Generalist Tester, these testers are about making sure the functional quality of the software is right for the user community, they might be former users of the software in question they likely do lots of manual testing, scenaro testing and some form of automation(but not all organisations do automation).

We want to provide a complete testing solution for customers, and that means have products/solutions for each one of these buckets(as well as managers, leads etc). As we start to reveal the layers of Rosario we'll come back to these roles and talk about the different pieces that we are building and how they address the requirements of each.

Posted Wednesday, July 25, 2007 5:11 PM by euanga | 2 Comments

Filed under: Microsoft, Team System, Testing, Rosario, VSTSR

Service Release of Data Dude now out

Gert has all the details.

Posted Wednesday, July 25, 2007 4:42 PM by euanga | 0 Comments

Filed under: SQL Server, Microsoft, Team System

Launch Date <> (or != if you prefer) RTM Date

At the World Wide Partner Conference (WWPC) this week Kevin Turner announced a launch date for the 2008 Wave of Products(Longhorn, Orcas and Katmai). There has been a lot of conjecture about products slipping and stuff like that.

To be clear this is all about a marketing launch, the RTM dates for these products are not the same as the launch date so you can draw almost no conclusions from that other than we are going to have lots of events and giveaways in Feb of next year :-)

For example when we launched VS2005, SQL2005 and Biztalk 2006 in Nov of 2005, SQL and VS had both been on MSDN for a number of weeks and Biztalk was still in Beta. When we launched Vista and Office 12 both had been available for a number of weeks before hand.

In the words of Cpl Jones "Don't panic Capt Mainwaring"

UPDATE: Doug (now in VSTS Marketing Yay!!!) says that VS will RTM before the launch, as he's in maketing he is allowed to say stuff like that, being in Prod Dev I'm not :-)

Posted Wednesday, July 11, 2007 2:21 PM by euanga | 8 Comments

Filed under: SQL Server, Microsoft, Team System

SQL Server Database Engine based Reporting and Analytics

(If you don't want to read the blurb just download) 

The SQL Team has had a long flirtation with building a Data Warehouse/Analytics system on top of the system information that exists in the Database Engine. The first time I remember discussing this was just after SQL 2000 shipped, we had mapped out all the SQL Agent jobs that needed to run, and what data to collect. The very first version of the product plan for Yukon had a Operations Data Warehouse feature listed but it got dropped pretty quickly as the scope of Yukon became clear.

Part of the reason it was an expensive feature in early days was the lack of consistent info in the server, we were going to have to use Trace, DBCC, System Tables, System Views and a bunch of undocumented stuff to accomplish a meaningful solution. However once DMVs started appearing in the product(that was not their original name) lots of ideas starting floating around again.

In parallel one of the small (I think there were 3 people that worked on the project) central test teams came up with the idea for H2( there was a predecessor but I don't remember its name and it was not broadly released, just select customers and internally) and built it, shipped it internally and then out to the public. There is interesting data in H2 but its mostly config data.

Through the personal perseverance of a couple of folks (mostly Dan Winn and Paul Mestamaker, then an intern, but others as well) with support from Dave Campbell we got a bunch of reports added to what was then the Summary View in Management Studio.

The Summary reports are great but they are more operational than they are analytical, lots of members of the community have filled in the gap by providing richer reports/analysis either plugged into SSMS or as standalone tools.

But as an analytics geek I have always wanted something more. Well last week the folks from the customer advisory team shipped out DMVStats which is a reporting and analytics solution focused on DMV reported perf data. I can't think of anyone better than these guys to ship such a tool as I am sure its based on real world usage. You can get it here.

Hopefully there is more to come in this space.

Posted Wednesday, July 04, 2007 10:23 PM by euanga | 3 Comments

Filed under: SQL Server, Microsoft

July SQL 2005 Best Practices Analyzer

This sneaked out, it does not say CTP so are we to presume this is a production version?

UPDATE: Paul says here that this is the final version (for now) and they are going to be doing ongoing updates to the rules, thats pretty cool.

Posted Tuesday, July 03, 2007 11:01 PM by euanga | 4 Comments

Filed under: SQL Server, Microsoft

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