[]1 It’s T-SQL Tuesday! This month’s topic, A Day in the Life, is hosted by my friend Erin Stellato (blog | twitter). She wanted each of us to track what we do for a day. I can attest that she will ask you, “What do you do?“, earnestly – she did when I went to the 2011 Columbus, OH SQL Saturday. What do I do? As of May 8, 2012, I’m a Consultant with Brent Ozar PLF.

— The Story — Experienced SSIS developers will recognize the usefulness of the simple data viewer object used during the development process to peek into the data set and see what is going on at various stages of execution. One piece of functionality that has been missing since SQL 2005 is the ability to do this from a production SSIS server. Since the data viewer required the use of BIDS, and most organizations don’t allow development tools to be connected to production; troubleshooting data issues often involved lots of blind poking around and vague assumptions.

Introduction This morning I read a tweet by @ONE75 (Stijn Volders) about a blogpost by Phillip Haydon (@philliphaydon). The blogpost is about servicestack. Service Stack is a high-performance .NET web services framework (including a number of high-performance sub-components: see below) that simplifies the development of XML, JSON, JSV and WCF SOAP Web Services. For more info check out servicestack.net. So I went out and tried it. The server First I set out to create the server.

Tonight I had the pleasure of presenting for a new user group, Quad Cities PASS. If you’re in the Quad Cities area the second Wednesday of the month, make sure you check it out! I was asked to present “Make Your Voice Heard”, which is one of my favorite presentations. In it, I talk about how and why to use Twitter, forums, blogging, and presenting. Each of these is more than just a social networking website, or a way to become a “celebrity”.

Earlier this week I came upon a post (Entity Framework Comparative Performance) by Luke McGregor (b|t) that compared the performance of several ORMs for handling batch data. Given the amount of batch data I’ve processed, I was curious how those ORM tests would line up against a couple common non-ORM methods. I decided to stick to ADO.Net methods for data and to focus on the insert, as a fast insert can be used to replace updates and deletes.

Introduction I was just reading Will Green’s (Hotgazpacho) blogpost on using the RX extensions with winforms. And there he references Asynchronous Control Updates In C#/.NET/WinForms by Derrick Bailey. And I swear I never read about that trick (or more likely, I forgot. So I write about it here so I will not forget (yeah right). Since we are still using threads and not the Async-Await keywords which will make these things go away we still have to write cross thread safe code in winforms.

The one thing people seem to be focusing on these days is patterns. If you have a problem there is probably a pattern to fix it. Patterns also come in different flavors. Architectural, design, UX, … You name it and we will find you a pattern for it. The problem seems to be that most people first find a pattern and then try to solve all their problems with it. Then decide it doesn’t work for them and decide never to use that pattern again because by now the pattern has become an anti pattern.

There is a lot of value in knowing what the internals of your application are doing and, more importantly, knowing them 5 minutes ago before someone called to complain the system is slow. Instrumenting an application sounds like a complex task, but in my prior post I showed some sample code that allowed me to tie into several log services to store data from my system as it is running.

I have created several cross tab reports in the last few years. I have also seen several hacks with different ways to achieve what is actually already built into Reporting Services. To begin, let’s define what a cross tab report is. According to Wikipedia, cross tab, or cross tabulation, means “the process of creating a contingency table from the multivariate frequency distribution of statistical variables.” To put that into laymen’s terms, you create a grid with a group of objects on the X (horizontal) axis and another group of objects on the Y (vertical) axis, and you then tally how many occurrences those two objects meet.

I was fortunate to be asked by Aaron Lowe (T | B) to be the host for the second SQLFriends Lunch event. The event was really a good time, educational, and a rewarding social mentoring tool. During the event, I was asked many questions – from the differences in execution plan and performance between a hash join and nested joins to a question that stuck with me. “What’s the best part about consulting?