Did you know that SQL Server Management Studio makes a nice little regular expression (regex) editor and tester?  Go to find and replace (Ctrl-H) and down at the bottom of the dialog box is a check box names “Use”.  Check that box and choose Regular Expression.  Now to the right of the box where you type the text, there is a glyph that will fly out a regular expression character helper.  You can type in text in Management Studio and test a regular expression against it.

You can also leverage this regular expression functionality to do a multi-line find and replace.  You can substitute in the old C# (C++) syntax \n for a new line.  I needed to replace a block of text with a multi-line block of text and this worked beautifully!

Don’t forget you can use Management Studio to search in files too.  A nice GREP tool too!  Hit the glyph just to the right of Quick Replace or Quick Find at the top and you’ll get the option to search in files.

http://www.silverlight.net/learn/pivotviewer/

Mark

The only problem is that when you turn on the Hyper-V role, the system becomes unstable and BSODs because of the high end video card.  For some stories, check here and here and here.

I finally gave up and installed VMWare and everything works great.  I’m a total Microsoft kind of person.  I love not having to install anything I don’t have to, but I had to.

Hyper-V just isn’t ready to handle these new processors and new video cards.  VMWare is.

And after all that, VMWare just works.  It comes with all the virtual networks set up.  They just work.  There is a setting to optimize disk for performance by not waiting for disk write.  This is perfect for demo machines.

Once Microsoft remedies the Hyper-V situation, I’ll gladly switch back.

Make sure you use either Home or Work network.

I hadn’t really considered it until this morning.  I have already considered and used the technique of dropping indexes during ETL and then creating them afterwords.  But this was new.

I had a load that took 50 seconds.  It had a clustered index as well as a unique index that was used to enforce a primary key.  The ETL load came in in no order.

The first thing I tried was to order the ETL in ascending order – which is the same as the order of the clustered index – to see if it mattered.  I suspected it would and it did.  the time went from 50 s. to 33 s.  This was good - nearly half the time just by ordering the data.  I wondered if ordering the data backwards from the clustered index would help or hurt, and to my surprise, it helped and lowered the time further to 28 s.

Now I wondered how much lower I could go by dropping the indexes before ETL and the rebuilding them afterwords.

I re-ran the non-ordered ETL using the drop and rebuild method and got 28 s.  So if all I had done was just drop and rebuild indexes, I would have gone from 50 to 28 s.  Not bad.  But when I ordered the load descending it dropped even further to 14 s.  The last test of course was the order it back to ascending and see which ordering worked best for the drop and rebuild method.  It turned out that ordering ascending worked better and dropped the time down to 13 s.

This was a surprise to me.  With the indexes built, the opposite order to the clustered index was better.  When you drop and reload, the same order was better.  I think the moral of the story isn’t specifically whether ascending or descending is better – I suppose it could be different in other cases.  Mostly just remember that the order can really matter and when you are trying to squeeze every ounce of performance out of ETL, check out the order of your ETL. 

Anyone on the SQL CAT team want to comment on why backwards works better when indexes are left intact?

I just did and there wasn’t a menu item on the View menu in VS 2008 to bring it up.  There is a KB article that fixes a bug with this, but I wanted to add there is a keyboard shortcut you may not know.

Ctrl-Alt-D brings it up.

Keyboard shortcuts are always good.

There are two kinds of permissions in Reporting Services – Server Level and Item Level.  To get to the Server Level permissions, in Report Manager, go to home, and then click on Site Settings in the upper right hand corner, then click the Security menu item on the left.  If you click, New Role Assignment, Notice there are only two roles here.  You can make yourself an administrator here – although local Administrators is automatically added.  This may be enough.  FYI – it may be a good idea to take the local administrators out anyways so that hardware administrators don’t get administrative rights to the Reporting Services Server inadvertently.

But before you can deploy a Reporting Services project to the server, you have to do one more thing.  You need to have item level permissions as well.  To add yourself, go to Home and then click Properties – the blue tab next to Contents.  If you click New Role Assignment, you’ll see item level roles.  You’ll need to be at least Publisher, but you’ll probably just want to be Content Editor.  Publisher can’t modify folder structure, Content Editor can.

After you add yourself, you should be good to go.

Update: Here is a link to more info on adding Item Level Permissions http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa337471(lightweight).aspx