One of the things I write about in this blog is how to
get help from the Community of SQL Server users and experts, and also the
importance of conferences and networking. One of the most important conferences
of the year for SQL Server professionals is the SQL PASS Community Summit. This
year it will be held in Seattle, Washington from October 12th -14th, here's a link to the event.

So what if you are not the most social person, or you have
never been to a large conference like this? 
Have no fear, SQL Server MVP Arnie Rowland has a solution for you – the Big
Brothers/Big Sisters program.  For those
of you who do not know Arnie, he is an incredible guy, has a massive amount of SQL
Server knowledge, and gives tirelessly to the SQL Server community.  Here’s a link to his blog post:

https://1568.com/arnie/profdev/remember-your-first-high-school-dance/

I will be there too, and I’m always happy to talk to
anyone who wants to learn more about Community in general or SQL Server
specifically.  If at all possible, you
should come to this event for the knowledge transfer alone – it is an intense
week packed with things to do – top-notch SQL Server content, product booths
from vendors of SQL Server tools and services, tons of Microsoft product group
folks, MVPs, social gatherings and tons of networking opportunities.  I hope to see you there!

Ed

Simply put, you Lock data in a database to keep multiple operations from occurring on the same data at the same time – for example, if two Update operations are trying to modify the same record in the database, there will be an issue and the data will likely be incorrect when they are done.  So, each operation will lock the resource (record, page table, etc.), and release the lock when it is finished with the data.  Too many locks on a database will hinder performance, so it is important to only use the type of Lock that is necessary for the operation.  The big trade-off here is performance vs. data integrity – too few locks, and your data may become corrupt, while too many will bog down your servers.  You will have to determine what is best for your environment based on a number of factors, including number of concurrent users/applications, hardware resources, necessity of data integrity, etc.

In SQL Server, there are seven types of Locks modes available.  I will go over each one briefly, but you should also refer to the Books Online (BOL) documentation for a full discussion of these Lock types if necessary.  Here are the 7 types of Lock modes available in SQL Server:

Shared:  This type of lock is used in Read operations (typically a SELECT statement), the resource only needs to be locked to make sure the data is not modified during the Read.  As the data will not be modified by a simple Read operation, nothing further needs to be done.

Update:  This lock type is used when a resource needs to be updated – the lock needs to be put on the data before the transaction starts to ensure that another operation is not reading data that is going to be modified before the operation is complete.  This Lock will prevent deadlocks from Shared locks simultaneously trying to promote to an Exclusive lock on the same piece of data.

Exclusive:  This Lock is used when any of the data modification commands are used, such as UPDATE or DELETE.  No other lock is allowed on the data while an Exclusive lock is in place.

Intent: These locks are basically “pre-locks” set at table level to signal that another type of Lock will be placed on a resource in that Table.  There are three types of these,

Schema: These are used by the database engine to make sure no data is updated in a table while adding a column or doing some other operation involving the database structure itself.

Bulk Update: Used for doing bulk updates – this will lock the entire table so that multiple threads can execute the bulk update concurrently and not be interrupted or cause corruption with other operations.

Key-range: This type of Lock is placed on an Index, effectively locking off a range of data from Reads and other operations.

I hope this has given you a basic idea of the concept of locking, why it is done, and what the limitations and performance implications are.

As some of you know, I manage about 120 MSDN and TechNet Forums for our division.  One thing I see constantly is questions that are asked in the wrong forum, and this never results in a high probability of getting an answer to your question, and getting an answer is what everyone wants!  I’ve already written a post on “How to post effectively in Forums”, so this is a follow-up to that, with some pointers about how to find the right place to ask your question.  You want to find the Forum with the greatest amount of experts in the area you are asking about, right?

Due to the evolution of technology communities at different rates by different groups within Microsoft, we have two major Forum platforms that do not share a common code base.  The reasons for this are complex and involve lots of things that happen inside a large corporation, so I won’t go into details.  What you do need to know, though, is that it is impossible for a Moderator to move posts between these sets of Forums, so it is important that you at least get your post in the correct set of Forums, or your chances of getting a good answer quickly decrease drastically.

ASP.Net, Silverlight and their associated technologies all work on the Telligent platform at https://www.asp.net.  MSDN, TechNet and Microsoft forums all reside on our own framework at https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/categories and https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/categories.  MSDN is more geared toward Developer technologies, while TechNet is meant for IT Pro based issues.  I have put together the following table to help:

One of my duties here is to work with the Microsoft MVPs, and it is something I really enjoy doing.  I have been working with them for about 10 years now in various capacities.  For more info on what an MVP is, you can go to https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/gp/aboutmvp and read up more about them.  In general, though, I like to describe the MVP award as a “thank-you for what you did in the Community last year”.  These folks write blogs, answer Forum posts, speak at conferences and User Groups, write books, etc.  If you have been anywhere in the community, you likely have seen one or more of these folks out there.  The largest group I manage is the SQL Server Expertise.

We hold an MVP Summit here on the Redmond campus every year, which is an enormous event (nearly 1700 MVPs came this year), and we put on technical sessions, dinners, parties, meetings with the Product Groups, and all the usual sorts of mayhem that any large conference entails.  All the sessions are under NDA, which allows us to give a lot of insider information, share future plans, and most importantly, hear a LOT of great feedback on what we are working on.  My role in all of this is to organize these events for my group of MVPs, and make sure it all goes smoothly.

The upside to this is that I get to spend a few days with all my MVP friends in town, which is great.  The downside is that the event planning takes pretty much all of my time for a few months, so I don’t get to do things like post to my blog.  But, in reality I am helping you to learn SQL Server by doing what I do, and to tell you the honest truth, it is better to learn it from the Experts than to learn it from me.  When we let them know what is happening, they can then let you know in their own particular style.  And, they do all of this on their own time – they do not receive anything from Microsoft for their efforts other than a nifty title and a conference each year.

So, the moral of the story is this – go find an MVP, listen to what they have to say, and chances are, you will learn something valuable from them.

I’ve had a couple of times this week when I have been contacted by customers, and they have not been happy, as they have had issues trying to get support from Microsoft.  I fully understand the frustration, as most of us seem to have to work with at least one Microsoft product in our daily lives, and we will invariably run into issues at some point or another.  This has nothing to do with technical proficiency, experience with the product or anything like that, it has more to do with the sheer amount of new information that we have to absorb every day.  Think about it – 5 years ago, there were very few blogs, no such thing as Twitter and Facebook, no Cloud, and a host of other changes that seem to come at an ever-quickening pace.  There are constantly more sites, content, ideas and opinions out there for us to navigate, regardless of where we work.

My hope for this post is to try to make a bit of sense of what is out there in a fairly generic pattern, so whatever field you happen to be in, you will be able to look up helpful sites and be able to get an answer to your question, which is really why most people visit these kinds of sites.  I’m not going to go into the more esoteric sites and tools, as there are literally hundreds of these coming out each week.  I just want to describe the more common types of venues, and describe what each one of them is best at giving you as far as information.

First, a good place to start is the Company website, in our case, this is www.microsoft.com.  Most companies will have a website, and this is usually a good place to start to see what is offered.  These sites are good for getting product info, such as hardware requirements, cost of the products, if there are sites that host Forums, etc.   These sites are good for finding overview information, but not the best place to find specific information about a problem you may be having.

Search Engines are a great source of both help and frustration.  If you happen to hit the right search phrase, you can find just about anything, but if you don’t know what you are searching for you can search forever and have to sift through hundreds of irrelevant pages and still have a great chance of not finding the right piece of information.  There is a great deal of interest these days in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) from a corporate standpoint, as this is how most people will find information for the company’s products.  For instance, 80% of the people who visit the MSDN Forums arrive via a search engine, so you can see how knowledge of this is essential to any company these days.  My tips for searching for things are to use the more specific words first, and to try and find the most specific term possible for what you are looking for.  The more you can narrow down the search term to something unique, the better chance you have of not getting 4 million results for your search.  So, if you are looking for a SQL initialization string, for example, simply searching on “String” will likely not be terribly helpful.  For this phrase, I’d use the whole phrase in quotes which will give you results that have all the terms.

Blogs are another good source of information, and they can either be company-sponsored or 3^rd party.  In  this case, my blog is “company sponsored”, as it is in a Microsoft site and I work for Microsoft.  3^rd party blogs would be those authored by MVPs or others who do not work for the parent company and are not hosted on a company website.  Blogs are great sources of information for getting an overview of something, and for finding a more lengthy treatment of a specific problem.  As an example, this post is very general about “finding help”, but it is not going to solve the specific issue you are having right now with the product you are using.  Blogs are usually easy to find by using a search engine like Bing, as they will contain relevant keywords that you will type in the search box.

Forums are another good place to find help, most places these days have them somewhere on their online properties.  The Microsoft Forums are located at https://social.msdn.microsoft.com (MSDN, for Developers) and https://social.technet.microsoft.com (TechNet, for IT Pros), and these are an excellent source of answers to specific questions, and the content that has been generated there is all searchable.  See the post earlier in my blog about “How to post effectively in Forums” to increase your chances of getting an answer to your question.  There are also 3^rd party Forums on just about everything under the sun, from barbequing to cars to games, and so on.

Videos are an ever-increasing source of information about topics as well, sites like YouTube have literally millions of videos, and not all of them are people doing stupid things or stupid pet tricks.  Use the search functionality on the site you choose to see if there is something appropriate for what you are trying to find, chances are there are.  If I told you there were over 5000 videos that showed up when you search on “SQL Server”, would you believe me?  You should, because there are.

These are just the basics, there are usually tons of ways to find information, but you need to know where to look, and hopefully I’ve given you a few ideas on where to look for things.

I was able to pull a report to a spreadsheet, and I started looking through it, but was soon thwarted by two major factors.  First, the way it was set up in the spreadsheet, there were headers every few lines in the spreadsheet that made Filtering impossible, I would have had to go into each section (several hundred sections in total) and set a Filter on each one, which would have taken a long time.  Second, when I hit Ctrl + End to get to the bottom of the spreadsheet, there were over 35000 rows!  That is certainly too much to be playing with in a spreadsheet, that is a job for a database, and luckily I have one on my machine.

SQL Server to the rescue!  I obviously needed to get all of this data into a table for some much easier handling of a large amount of data, so I fired up our old friend SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS).  From there, it was easy – right-click on the Databases label, and click “New Database” and I named it “ForumStats”.  Then, right-click on the ForumStats label in the treeview to the left, and go to Tasks/Import Data, which starts the SQL Server Import and Export Wizard.  This will walk you through connecting to the Data Source, which is the spreadsheet.  For the Data Source field, I chose Microsoft Excel, then used Browse to point to the spreadsheet itself.  Be sure to tell it what version of Excel you are using in the Version field, and hit Next. 

The next screen will let you pick the destination database from the dropdown, for the rest of it you should be able to use the defaults for the client and server name.  If you have not created a database for this yet, you can also do that from this screen.  The next screen allows you to copy all of the data or to write a query to get just selected data into the new table – for this exercise, I used “Copy data from one or more tables or views”.  The next screen asked me what sheet from the workbook I want to import, then we’re on to the last screen of the Wizard, which is the one that actually imports the data.

Now I have all of my data in a single table, and I can write my own query to get my results, or I can also use the Query Editor, which was discussed in an earlier post.  Start to finish, this took me about 5 minutes, which was a much shorter time that trying to manipulate an enormous spreadsheet, and it kept me much more sane in the process.  There’s an old saying about using the right tool for the job, and this is definitely an application of that adage.  My manager was happy with the info I was able to give her as well, which is exactly what we were trying to do in the first place, right?   J

There are several ways to so this, of course, including writing code, which I will not go into just yet.  This week we will start with getting the data into the table using SQL Server Management Studio, which is probably the easiest solution, but it is not so good for doing large imports.  In this case, though, I have about 10 photos to add to the Table for demonstration purposes, so SSMS will work just fine.

To avoid you having to go back and read previous posts, I have a database named Pictures that I created, then a table named Photos with 5 fields:

PK – numeric

Description – text

DateTaken – date

Photo – image

Subject – text

So, open up SSMS, navigate to the table, then you can right-click it to bring up the context menu.  We’ll want “Script Table as”, then “INSERT to” and finally “New Query Editor Window”, and this will bring up a stub of a query with the fields listed:

INSERT INTO [Pictures].[dbo].[Photos]

           ([PK]

           ,[Description]

           ,[DateTaken]

           ,[Photo]

           ,[Subject])

     VALUES

           (<PK, numeric(18,0),>

           ,<Description, text,>

           ,<DateTaken, date,>

           ,<Photo, image,>

           ,<Subject, text,>)

GO

The INSERT INTO clause if fine, we don’t need to mess with that, but we will want to put our actual values into the VALUES clause, but there’s a small gotcha here – the syntax is not correct, here’s what I put in to make it actually work:

VALUES

           (000001

           ,'Challenger Pic'

           ,'04/01/2009'

           ,'c:\EdStuff\Pics\ChallyPic.jpg'

           ,'Eds new car')

GO

There are a few things to note here – first off, the angle brackets in the original stub are not needed, and we don’t need to explicitly call out the Field names either, as they are called out in the INSERT INTO clause already.  The other thing that threw me for a loop was the fact that any single-quoted field in SSMS shows up by default in a red color, and that, coming from the Dev world, means “error” to me, but it works perfectly well.  Click Execute and it will tell you that it updated successfully.  Notice I used a path to an image file on my hard drive, the rest of the fields are pretty self explanatory.

To confirm that you actually did get some data into the table, you will again want to right-click the table in SSMS, then select “Script Table as”, then “SELECT to” and finally “New Query Editor Window”.  This will again bring up a new query template:

SELECT [PK]

      ,[Description]

      ,[DateTaken]

      ,[Photo]

      ,[Subject]

  FROM [Pictures].[dbo].[Photos]

GO

This does not need modification, once you hit Execute on this query, it will show you the results in the Results tab below the Query Editor window.

That’s it for this week, for next week I plan on using a free download called WebMatrix to build my client for showing the data, I will report on my experiences with that tool then.