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LessThanDot

A decade of helpful technical content

This is an archive of the posts published to LessThanDot from 2008 to 2018, over a decade of useful content. While we're no longer adding new content, we still receive a lot of visitors and wanted to make sure the content didn't disappear forever.

Building a SharePoint 2013 BI Demo Environment Part 2 – Building the VM

In this blog post I'll explain how I build the VM and VHD for my virtual demo environment. I use Hyper-V locally on my Windows 8 OS to run my virtual environment. If you have Windows 8 Enterprise, Hyper-V is a feature you can simply enable in the control panel. (If any of the screenshots is too small, click on the picture to view it in real-size format.) Create the virtual hard disk

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Building a SharePoint 2013 BI Demo Environment Part 1 – Introduction

Recently I had to give a Power View demo for a client. Giving a demonstration means of course you have a demo environment available. I could've simply given a demo on Power View using Office 2013 and call it a day, but I really wanted to show the "convert Power View report to PowerPoint" feature, which is only available in Power View for SharePoint. And also because I wanted to write this blog post series of course.

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SQL Puzzle...how many even numbers are there in a row

In last week’s puzzle SQL Puzzle: RIGHT without using the RIGHT function we looked at how to do a RIGHT function without using the RIGHT function. Today we are going to find out how many columns are even in a row. Before starting I want you to be aware that 0 is an even number From wikipedia: Parity of zero Zero is an even number. In other words, its parity—the quality of an integer being even or odd—is even.

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SQL Puzzle: RIGHT without using the RIGHT function

I haven’t done a puzzle for a long time so I figured let’s do a simple one. Return the right 6 characters of the column but without using the RIGHT function. Here is what the table looks like CREATE TABLE #Puzzle(SomeCol CHAR(7)) INSERT #Puzzle VALUES ('AAAAAAA') INSERT #Puzzle VALUES (' BBBBBB') INSERT #Puzzle VALUES ('CCCCCC') INSERT #Puzzle VALUES (' DDDDD ') INSERT #Puzzle VALUES (NULL) INSERT #Puzzle VALUES (' ') As you can see some rows start with spaces and some end with spaces, one row has the NULL value

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Deploying Database Changes with PowerShell

Recently, while working on a personal project, I found myself needing a lightweight way to deploy database changes to multiple environments. In the past I have used a wide range of methods, ranging from applying the changes manually to applying changes via a diff tool (SQL Compare), to automatically applying manually created change scripts, to automatically applying diff scripts that were automatically generated, to working directly in production..er, pretend you didn’t see that one.

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A big loss to our community

Today was a very sad day for me. I received news that a dear friend, Rose Waters @SQLRose, whom I had the pleasure of working with, passed away yesterday. Rose was an all-around great and very intelligent, hard working person. Her energy in wanting to learn new parts of the SQL Server product line made her successful and brilliant at everything she took on. While we worked together, her motivation and ambition to learn kept me going on expanding my own knowledge sharing to the community.

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SQL Server Database owner ~~UNKNOWN~~

Today I was checking an older server and decided to run sp_helpdb. On a bunch of databases I noticed that the owner was UNKNOWN. The only reason I noticed this was when I tried to look at a specific database which is mirrored. I was greeted with this dialog box Cannot show requested dialog. Additional information: Cannot show requested dialog.(SqlMgmt) Property Owner is not available for Database’[Your Database Name]‘. This property may not exist for this

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T-SQL Tuesday #42: The Long and Winding Road

It's the second Tuesday of the month, which means it's time again for #TSQL2sday! It is the 42nd installment of this blog post series and the subject is not about the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything as I hoped it would be, but about the long and winding road that is our work life and which technologies were key to our interests and successes.

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Modify a Power View Data Source

I'm currently setting up a demo environment using SQL Server 2012 and SharePoint 2013 (more on that in later blog posts). This gives me the chance to play around with Power View for SharePoint and I absolutely love it. I ran into an issue however because the Windows Authentication wasn't working properly. When I view a Power View report I get the following error: An error occurred while loading the model for the item or data source 'EntityDataSource'.

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SQL Server Baseline Collection

SQL Server baseline collection is an important task that is too frequently overlooked. Collecting information on how SQL Server is both providing data services and reacting to how those data services are being utilized, creates a foundation for efficient troubleshooting and predicting growth. Take a typical problem in which a customer (anyone you are providing data services to internally or externally) comes to you and states something is slow and they think it is the data services.

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