Jacob's Blog

I will be doing a webcast on error handling in SQL Server for PASS Application Development Virtual Chapter on 26 January 2010.  You can find the session schedule and registration link at http://appdev.sqlpass.org/

This will be the ‘virtual’ version of the session “Best Practices for Exception Handling and Defensive Programming in Microsoft SQL Server” that I presented at Community Tech Days, Ahmedabad and SQL Saturday, New Jersey.

SQL Server MVP Erland Sommarskog has written two great articles that covers error handling in SQL Server in great detail. You can find his articles here:

1. http://www.sommarskog.se/error-handling-I.html
2. http://www.sommarskog.se/error-handling-II.html

One of sources of reference for this session was Erland’s error handling article and I recommend it as a must-read article for every SQL Server developer and DBA.

I was eagerly waiting to look at the session evaluation data after my presentation at PASS 2009 Summit (Seattle, WA) in November 2009. I had written a detailed post sharing my experience at PASS 2009 some time back. You can find the post here: http://beyondrelational.com/blogs/jacob/archive/2009/11/22/summary-of-my-experience-at-pass-2009-summit.aspx

XML Schema Collections

My presentation was on SQL Server XML Schema Collections where we discussed XSD and XML Schema Collections in detail. We discussed the basics of XML Schema Collections, saw a number of demos and had an interesting set of questions and answers.

Session Evaluation

Here is the data that I received from PASS Head Quarters recently (for the above session).

Some of the attendees have rated the session at speakerrate.com and here is the rating I received there. (http://speakerrate.com/talks/1679-sql-server-2008-create-powerful-xml-schema-collections-to-validate-your-xml-documents)

• Delivery: 4.87 out of 5.0
• Content: 4.93 out of 5.0
• Overall Rating: 4.9 out of 5.0

I would like to thank every one who attended my session and provided their feedback. Your feedback helps me to identify the areas that I need to focus to make the ‘blue bar’ longer next time :-).

PASS 2009 was a great experience, both as a speaker and as an attendee. It was a great opportunity to learn quite a lot, not only about SQL Server, but also about developing leadership and presentation skills.

Privacy and Security are two of the key concerns most of us have, when thinking about storing our mission critical data in the cloud. There are people who appreciate the benefits storing data in a cloud based data store such as SQL Azure. There are also people who warns about possible dangers in storing important data in a cloud store.

I recently wrote an introductory article to SQL Azure at sqlservercentral.com. You can read the article here. The discussion forum for this article saw a lot of very interesting arguments on the positive sides of cloud storage and the negative aspects of using a cloud store. You can follow the discussion thread here.

I just found two Microsoft White Papers that answers some of the questions that many of us have about the security and privacy of cloud data.

1. Privacy in the Cloud Computing Era
2. Securing Microsoft’s Cloud Infrastructure

I have got a very interesting questions to the readers. Did reading these documents bring any changes to your thoughts about SQL Azure or cloud computing in general?

Please feel free to share your thoughts.

This is a full day course that focuses on learning XSD and XML Schema Collections. SQL Server supports a limited subset of the XSD specification. This session will examine all the XSD features supported in SQL Server 2005 and all the new features added in SQL Server 2008.

This is an introductory session where the participants will develop basic XSD skills. It focuses on helping the attendees to learn the basics of XSD and make them capable of creating and using XML Schema collections to validate their TYPED XML data.

This session will take the attendees deeper into the building blocks of XSD. A very detailed over view of simple types, complex types, attribute groups and modal groups is given in this session. This session examines the attributes of element and attribute declarations in detail.

This session starts with understanding XSD primitive and derived data types. It further walks the attendees through creating and using user defined simple and complex types. Finally it demonstrates type derivation in XSD and helps the attendees to derive types from simple and complex types, having different content models and deriving by extension and restriction.

This session focuses on some of the advanced schema concepts. It starts with a detailed discussion on the regular expression language supported by XSD, which can be used to perform a variety of pattern restrictions. It further takes the attendees into detailed discussion on the attributes of schema element declaration, element and attribute wild card declarations, lax validation support added in SQL Server 2008, XML Schema Collection metadata and the limitations of the XSD implementation in SQL Server.

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