User profile for EdCarden

fionag wrote: Hi Ed Can I in the first instance point you towards this post that has quite a lot of detail regarding getting data out of SQL Monitor using T-SQL. http://www.red-gate.com/MessageBoard/vi ... hp?t=12594 Best regards, Fiona Fionag Thanks for the link but that thread is dead. The last post which has gone unaddressed is from more than 6 months back, September 2011. While a reply to the last post would certainly not come in a day nor two or even a week, but six months without a reply is a clear indicator that it is unlikely any additional replies to the thread or even an answer to the last post in the thread will ever be forthcoming. That said, where does Red-Gate stand with regards to a DDF or equivalent for its SQL monitor data? Is this something we users of SQL Monitor can expect and fi so then when? Or is this something that is unlikely to happen leaving customers to do it themselves? I can guarantee you that if Red-Gate does not take control of this by providing customers with a DDF or a similar set of base tools they can use to report on data in SQL Monitor then the users will come up with something themselves. A proper base set of tools would be best met with some simple views that can be combined to make complex data sets that can be used for reporting purposes. While it may be tempting, as Red-Gate employee benrees made reference to in the thread you mentioned, to provide users with a handful of detailed SSRS Reports the end result of that would be that only a handful of usersâ€™ needs were met and the rest were left coming up with their own custom solution. Most of your clients will have a working knowledge of SQL Server sufficient enough to create the reports they need so long as they have a useable set of base objects like views. Instead of providing a few detailed SSRS reports SQL Monitor users would be better served with user friendly base views that can be combined together to create rich data sets for use in whatever reporting solution the customer likes be it SSRS, Crystal Reports or even Excel. In the end if Red-Gate provided a set of usable base views to customers then Red-Gate could be confident that the source data used in a customerâ€™s reports is accurate (as opposed to being inaccurate and the user incorrectly blaming the product for something that is instead a flaw in the source that the report is using) and it would also have an additional â€œfeatureâ€ to advertise with the product. Currently the marketing for SQL Monitor does not include: â€œNeed a report that is not available in SQL Monitor? Then create your own custom reports using customer friendly â€˜reporting viewsâ€™ that are included with SQL Monitor X.â€ That feature would carry a lot of weight with many a customer. In closing let me say that this is an opportunity for Red-Gate to increase the features in its product by doing nothing more than documenting its database schema using non-cryptic views that users can then use for custom reports. If Red-Gate doesnâ€™t do this you can bet one or more customers will and when that happens Red-Gate loses the ability to steer the direction of custom reporting in SQL Monitor. I await your response. BTW â€“ If this suggestion does not fall on deaf ears then let me add this to the above. If its decided to embrace something like this then poll your customers and ask them what kind of base views they would like to see made available for custom reporting purposes instead of asking one or more in house developers to make that determination. The Red-Gate developers certainly are more knowledgeable about the inner workings of SQL Monitor and its database schema but itâ€™s the customers who best know what they want to see from Red-Gate as far as reporting goes that is not already available. / comments

fionag wrote: Hi Ed Can I in the first instance point you towards this post that has quite a lot of detail regarding getting data out of SQL Monitor using T-SQL.http://www.red-gate.com/MessageBo...

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I too experience a freeze or lockup of SSMS (versin 2008 R2) when SQL Prompt is enabled but mine occurs when I am typing in a table join and get the keyword ON. After the N in ON is typed SSMS freezes and is unresposive for several seconds and sometime may take 10-15 seconds or more. The only consistency I can find is that its the first instance of ON following the listing of 2 tables in the FROM clause. The next table joins all occur with no issue and no freeze. I thought the probelm was with a specific table but additional testing just now showed me its always the first table join that does this. EXAMPLE: SELECT A.*, B.* FROM TABLEA A Join TABLEB B ON AT this point, after typing ON SSMS will freeze up. I have not tested this with SP's myself. / comments

I too experience a freeze or lockup of SSMS (versin 2008 R2) when SQL Prompt is enabled but mine occurs when I am typing in a table join and get the keyword ON. After the N in ON is typed SSMS fre...

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Angus C wrote: Hi Ed, We had a power cut yesterday which is likely why nobody answered your call, my apologies for that. You can extend your support contract at the end of each term. We will attempt to contact the license holder by both email and phone when the license is due for renewal. You can also pre-buy up front a disocunted rate for future years, it is entirely up to you. If you need any more advice or want to see pricing then the best email address is dba.info@red-gate.com which is solely monitored by the DBA sales team. Thanks, Angus. NOTE: That last reply was supposed to be for the prior post from Brian and not you Angus. With some sites having buttons listed at the top of a post and some at the bottom its easy to mix up which is which. Since thereâ€™s no EDIT button I have no way to correct that. That would certainly explain the lack of someone answering. It is strange though that the voice mail still worked. Under normal circumstances I would not have thought much about not being able to reach someone and would have just left a voice mail msg but Iâ€™ve had problems in the past with timely follow-ups from sales. Thank you for replying / comments

Angus C wrote: Hi Ed, We had a power cut yesterday which is likely why nobody answered your call, my apologies for that. You can extend your support contract at the end of each term. We will at...

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Angus C wrote: Hi Ed, We had a power cut yesterday which is likely why nobody answered your call, my apologies for that. You can extend your support contract at the end of each term. We will attempt to contact the license holder by both email and phone when the license is due for renewal. You can also pre-buy up front a disocunted rate for future years, it is entirely up to you. If you need any more advice or want to see pricing then the best email address is dba.info@red-gate.com which is solely monitored by the DBA sales team. Thanks, Angus. Thanks for the follow-up Brian. I do hope though that youâ€™re mistaken about customers being charged a penalty fee when they go to by more support after their current support runs out. While charging the customer full price when they go to buy additional support is fair and reasonable since they did have the opportunity to get that support at a discount thru pre-purchasing, I would hope that RedGate would not make the mistake of intentionally penalizing a customer who choose to by additional support later on as that kind of â€œpenaltyâ€ approach is not very good customer service especially in an economy where money is tight. Thanks again for replying / comments

Angus C wrote: Hi Ed, We had a power cut yesterday which is likely why nobody answered your call, my apologies for that. You can extend your support contract at the end of each term. We will at...

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Thanks for rpelying. After I posted this question I went ahead and did an all in one install to test this and it does work fine. The Server being monitored is a different server though. I wanted an all in one install for the purposes of reviewing the trial version of the sofwtare. If we go with SQL Monitor we'd spread the steup across 2 systems for live use. / comments

Thanks for rpelying. After I posted this question I went ahead and did an all in one install to test this and it does work fine. The Server being monitored is a different server though. I wanted ...

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I face this same duration issue since our primary accounting database (used by our accounting software) consists of over 2000 tables alone (donâ€™t ask how many other objects we have) . This problem could be easily over come for most scenarios by enabling some form of schema cache. Suggestions: 1) Allow for storing the layout of an already queried DB Schema so that when the user goes to work on a project or start a new one they can opt to use a cached copy of the schema thereby greatly reducing the time to get the schema. 2) Allow the user to restrict the schema query to specific objects types (i.e. all tables) and perhaps even to specific schemas (i.e. all dbo schema objects) so as to cut down on the number of objects the app has to load. The main goal should be to offer greater control of schema retrieval operations which currently is limited to selecting a specific DB on a server instance. Had I realized in advance it was going to take this long to start Dependency Tracker every time I used it I might not have purchased it. / comments

I face this same duration issue since our primary accounting database (used by our accounting software) consists of over 2000 tables alone (donâ€™t ask how many other objects we have) . This probl...

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FYI - SQL Prompt stores User-Deifned aliases along with a few other custmizations in the xml file EngineOptions.xml which can be found (On a Windows Vista computer) at C:\Users\John.Smith\AppData\Local\Red Gate\SQL Prompt 3 Where the 'John.Smith' is your name/Login Name. In it is a section labled UserDefinedAliases that has 4 lines of info for each defined User-Defined Alias. I am going to test editing this with just a few items and if it works then I will use a query (in T-SQL) that pulls Table Names and aliases from a table we have setup to store this. Using concactenated string combined with CHAR(10) (for CrLf) and output to Text will produce a complete section of UserDefinedAlias items. This section ahs at the very start a line that lists the total number of UDFs listed and so it will need to be updated to account for the new items Hopefully this will work and save me literally hours of time. / comments

FYI - SQL Prompt stores User-Deifned aliases along with a few other custmizations in the xml file EngineOptions.xml which can be found (On a Windows Vista computer) at C:\Users\John.Smith\AppData\...

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Anu Deshpande wrote: Thanks for your post and suggestion ED. Kindly let us know if you have any issues or questions regarding the product,I'll like to help. Anu, If I wanted to suggest as a new feature in a future version the ability to more easily edit the info in this file how would I go about doing so? I imagine I'm not teh first person who wished to Bulk Load User-Defined Aliases and the like in SQL Prompt. Thanks / comments

Anu Deshpande wrote: Thanks for your post and suggestion ED. Kindly let us know if you have any issues or questions regarding the product,I'll like to help. Anu, If I wanted to suggest as a ...

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datacentricity wrote: An alternative view might be that if one uses cursors so rarely as to need a snippit to remeber all the correct syntax that's a good thing. I get what you're saying but the point or purpose for creating Code Snippets is so you have quick access to frequently used code, not access to seldom used code. I doubt the author of this thread was creating a snippet for a seldom used cursor / comments

datacentricity wrote: An alternative view might be that if one uses cursors so rarely as to need a snippit to remeber all the correct syntax that's a good thing. I get what you're saying but t...

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DO you use cursors enough that you would benefit from having a Cursor code snippet in SQL Prompt? Cursors are a necessary evil in SQL that more often then ot are heavily over used by traditional procedural/OOP developers. There are valid scenarios for using cursors but they are far and few. If your using cursors enough that having a predefined code snippet would be of benefit then you should look take some time to look at alternatives to cursor use. BTW - I mean no offense with the above; just comenting on how you could help yourself improve things by avoiding excess cursor use. / comments

DO you use cursors enough that you would benefit from having a Cursor code snippet in SQL Prompt? Cursors are a necessary evil in SQL that more often then ot are heavily over used by traditional pr...

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