SQL Server 2016 First Installation is in 2015

Would you believe that first SQL Server 2016 production installation done in 2015. Yes it is. The first customer adopted SQL Server 2016 in production a couple days after it was released CTP2.  CTP2 is the first production-ready build for SQL Server 2016 not just a beta version.

If you have not yet installed SQL Server 2016, it is good time now.

Read more about SQL Server 2016 here

Discontinued Database Engine Functionality in SQL Server 2016

Major discontinued feature of the SQL Server 2016 feature is that exclusion of 32 bit of the SQL Server. So now on, you have only 64 bit version.

Only other discontinued feature is, as usual dropping of the 3rd before compatible level which is 90 or SQL Server 2005.

-https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms144262.aspx

However, even in SQL Server 2014, 90 compatible level which is also an discontinued feature.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/ms144262(v=sql.120)

I don't understand the possibility of discontinuing a feature which is already discontinued. Typically Microsoft keeps three versions of backward compatibility. however, in SQL Server 2016 , 4 previous versions of backward compatibility is kept as shown below.

10 Business Intelligence Trends for 2016

BI analysts, industry players predict the rise of self-service, Big Data analytics, real-time data in the coming year. These are the trends for next year.

• Evolution of Self-Service BI
• More Advanced, Customizable Visualizations
• A Screen In the Hand Is Worth Two On the Desk
• The Rise Of API Deployment
• Data Is the New Water
• IoT and Real-Time Data Science
• Affordable BI For SMBs
• Mobile Analytics Stands On Its Own
• Analytics on Hadoop Will Become Reality
• Tech Giants Escalate the BI War

Read the article at http://www.kdnuggets.com/2015/12/10-business-intelligence-trends-2016.html/2

By looking at the list, real time BI and Internet of things seems to be the hot topics in year 2016.

Technorati Tags: News,Big Data,BI,Business Intelligence

Open Live Writer for Windows Live Writer

There has been issues with Windows Live Writer recently mailn it is not able to connect to the blogger account. After searching i found this thread.

Windows live writer wont connect to blogger

It says, this was due to a configuration change from the google end.

“Today we ended support for ClientLogin OAuth 1 (3LO), AuthSub, and OpenID2, and started the shutdown process. Clients attempting to use these services will begin to fail and must be migrated to OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect.”

However, There is an alternative for this tool called Open Live writer which can be downloaded at http://openlivewriter.org/.

This is my first post from Open Live Writer.   But this does not have taggings.

These are the known issues of this tool.

Known issues:

• You need to remove your old Google Blogger accounts from Open Live Writer first. After removing them, click the 'Add blog account...' button in Open Live Writer to set up your Google Blogger accounts. When setting up your new blog account, make sure to choose the ‘Google Blogger’ option on the first page. Don’t choose ‘Other’.
• Scheduling a published post may be a few hours off.
• Categories are no longer supported in the latest Blogger API v3.
• Support for authors, tags and comment policies is not enabled yet.
• Attempting to login to Google Blogger with 0 blogs will show an error message. Please create a blog on http://www.blogger.com first before using Open Live Writer.
• After logging into Google Blogger in your browser, you may need to manually close the webpage and switch back to Open Live Writer.

Big Data Still Requires Humans To Make Meaningful Connections

This is great article as many of us think that technology is everything. No matter the rich technology we have, still human interventaion is needed for meaningfull connections.

“Perhaps it’s because we put so much faith into technology to solve our problems. We have been led to believe big data is going to help businesses make smarter and more informed decisions.”

“We tend to believe that technology is the answer when it’s just a tool in the hands of humans. As anyone who has watched an episode of Law and Order can attest, you can have the DNA evidence at the scene of the crime, but the detectives still have to do the hard work of finding the person connected to that bit of data. The data is useless without the human element to connect the dots.”

Read the full article at http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/02/big-data-still-requires-humans-to-make-meaningful-connections/?utm_source=hootsuite

Technorati Tags: Big Data,Article,News

Tutorial: Data Science with SQL Server R Services

You may have heard that R and the big-data RevoScaleR package have been integrated with with SQL Server 2016 as SQL Server R Services. If you've been wanting to try out R with SQL Server but haven't been sure where to start, a new MSDN tutorial will take you through all the steps of creating a predictive model: from obtaining data for analysis, to building a statistical model, to creating a stored prodedure to make predictions from the model. To work through the tutorial, you'll need a suitable Windows server on which to install the SQL Server 2016 Community Technology Preview, and make sure you have SQL Server R Services installed. You'll also need a separate Windows machine (say a desktop or laptop) where you'll install Revolution R Open and Revolution R Enterprise. Most of the computations will be happening in SQL Server, though, so this "data science client machine" doesn't need to be as powerful.
Read more at http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/sql-rre-tutorial.html

Additional Controls for SSIS

COZYROC is the leading company providing advanced Microsoft SQL Server 2005-2014 Integration Services (SSIS) library of custom tasks, components and scripts for handling Zip, GZip, BZip2, Tar archives, enhanced script reuse and secure internet communications.

Details can be found at http://www.cozyroc.com/products

ETL FRAMEWORK DESIGN FOR NOSQL DATABASES IN DATAWARE HOUSING

With the development of Web 2.0 significantly semi-structured, unstructured data has been generated. Typical RDBMS are lack of scaling and inefficient of handling Big data So the NoSQL Databases have the capabilities of handling those kind of data. Even though NoSQL databases are there, RDBMS are still remaining in the industry since some of features are not yet supported by the NoSQL databases, such as ACID properties. The typical Data warehouse consists of repository of data and those are non-volatile and extracting from different heterogeneous data sources. Since the central repository of data allows make strategic decisions of an organization. ETL is the process which used in extracting data, transform data to suit to data warehouse environment and load the data to the targeted data warehouse database. There were similar researches on for extracting data from NoSQL databases. However, those have limitations such as specific only for one vendor and only extraction is considered and transformation and loading to data warehouses with ETL characteristics are not addressed. Aim of this research on NoSQL ETL will be vital since currently data warehouses are consists of structured data and this will leads to store unstructured data in data warehouse and allows making strategic decisions, data analysis on top of it.

Paper ID: v3i1105 is published in IJRCAR  volume 3 Issue 11 November 2015
Volume Link: http://www.ijrcar.com/contents/volume_3_issue_11
Paper Link: http://ijrcar.com/Volume_3_Issue_11/v3i1105.pdf

How to Avoid CXPACKETs?

CXPACKET is one of the famous wait type that database administrators are experiencing. Before moving into the details of CXPACKET wait type, - See more at: http://www.sqlshack.com/how-to-avoid-cxpackets/#sthash.lnQI7Ouh.dpuf

Eight Types of Slowly Changing Dimensions (SCDs)

We typically talks about three SCDs which are Type 1, Type 2 and Type 3. In Ralph Kimball and Margy Ross Third edition of the Data Warehouse Toolkit book, they talked about eight types of SCDs.