I’m continuing to make my way through this book, although far more slowly then I would like. If you missed the first part of my review you can find it here.
Chapter 6 – This chapter focuses on using graphics such as charts and images in reports. This chapter provided a nice overview of graphics, and like the previous chapter, the directions were easy to follow. I’m not sure if I will use graphics to build reports in my current job, none of the reports we have in production include charts and we have very little use of images.
Chapter 7 – This chapter is called “Kicking it Up a Notch: Intermediate Reporting” and that is a perfect title for it. The chapter starts with showing how to create a template to use in future reports. Much time is spent on improving the presentation of reports and the chapter introduces concepts like totals in reports, grouping, sorting, parameters, and using stored procedures instead of SQL queries. Lots of meat here and it took me a bit of time to build all the reports in this chapter.
And I can’t remember any typos, not a one! The only criticism I have is this: stored procedures should be introduced earlier, maybe even in chapter 5. Embedded SQL in reports (or applications) is not a good thing.
So far, a very good book, well worth my money.
The other day I was looking up some information about SQL Server Profiler and I came across this book “Mastering SQL Server Profiler” by Brad McGehee. It is in PDF format, so I downloaded it and opened it up to take a look. 306 pages. Oh my! On just Profiler alone! Then I grabbed another book, “SQL Server Execution Plans” by Grant Fritchey. This one was 181 pages! And my Reporting Services book tops those two at 866 pages.
Ten years ago, when I started my first job in the database world, working with SQL Server 6.5, I could not have imagined the volume of information dedicated to SQL Server. Back then, a whole book on the product was only 400-500 pages. The product has grown so much that no one person could know it all. Even the people considered the most knowledgeable about SQL Server typically specialize in just a part of it. That’s probably why I have over 25 different SQL Server blogs in my RSS reader. No one blog covers it all.
I have to remind myself to focus my self study efforts. I have to partition out all the things I would like to know about SQL Server into two buckets: stuff I need in my head and stuff I should just know to how to look up. It’s less stressful that way.
I have spent the last few weeks thinking about what the new year and the new decade will bring. I am happy to leave 2009, which was a strange year, at least I felt strange about it. Not much was accomplished in my civilian career because I spent much of the year deployed to Kosovo with the National Guard. It was an interesting experience, but it put me behind in building new skills for my civilian career. So….2010 is the year to jump start my career. Fortunately, I do have a good job, one that will provide excellent experience for me in the coming year.
So other then doing my day to day work at my job, what I am going to do to jump start and beef up my SQL Server skill set? I will focus on the following 3 items:
- Increase my blogging. My goal this year is to post at least once per week, 52 times this next year. Writing about a subject is a good learning experience, at least for me.
- Take and pass the two exams for SQL Server 2008 development, 70-433 & 70-451.
- Attend at least 4 in-person events relating to SQL Server. This could be a code camp, PASS, local user group, or some classroom training. It just has to be in person and related to SQL Server in some way.
So, here’s to a great new year!
Now that I am back home from my deployment to Kosovo, I’ve gone back to work. My first day back was Monday, December 7th. It was nice to come back, but I was a little nervous that first day thinking about what changed while I was gone. Now that I’ve been back for 4 days now, I feel a bit silly that I was nervous last Monday…there are many good changes. Most of our servers are now running SQL Server 2005 and we have a major upgrade project that is being developed on SQL Server 2008. It’s nice to be moving off SQL 2000.
It feels good to be back. 2010 will be a great year!
Just the other day I received a call from a developer with a database problem. He was receiving timeouts when he called a particular stored procedure from his application. So I took a look at the proc, reviewed the code, and tried to run it. It just ran and ran and ran, no error messages, nothing. Then I tried to recompile the proc, same thing, just hung. So I stopped it, looked at the amount of data it needed to run, not much data involved, so I cut the proc into pieces and ran it a chuck at a time. Finally, I got to the problem part of the code, the part that just hung. In reading the code, I noticed that it was referencing a linked server, hmmm, where does this point to? So, I go into the Client Network Utility and here we are, an old server that no longer exists! Change the server name and port number and yes! The proc complies and runs! Weird, wonder why it just didn’t just return an error message. Oh well, all in a day’s fun!
