After hearing great feedback about my last UG report, I am thrilled and excited to write report about recent Bangalore SQL Server User Group Meeting on 19th Jan 2013. [apologies for delay as it took time to get the pictures of event). This UG meet was focused on SQL Server Excel based visualizations. Peoples were expected to get some great content that was less known to do inside Excel. It was held at Microsoft Signature building, 4th floor. I came to the event when room was empty and here is what it was looking like when we started rolling our camera…

….and in no time, room was full!

Excitement was set to start at 10:30 AM and first session was started as per schedule and delivered by Vinod (B|T). His topic was “Tour of PowerPivot with Excel” and he continued with his last session’s excel trick about FlashFill feature of excel 2013.

Well received session and ended with claps of 70+ folks.

Next session taken by S Anand (B|T) on “Advanced Excel Visualizations”, who showed is the real power of visualization. He demonstrated analysis done for various classes results, hotel eating pattern, child birth pattern. In below picture, he was explaining why some hotels replaced their 1 liters bottle to 200 milliliters bottle.

This session was truly an eye opener and shown that how easy it is to read the data if its presented properly. This was truly one of the mostly discussed session after delivery.

Later, Selva (Blog|FB) from SQL Server Escalation Services team, who was called as hidden Gem by Vinod. Session title for Selva was – Introduction to PowerView with Excel. It was truly amazing session and was a good start point for them who wanted to learn PowerView. As per his demo “we might overtake china in population in next few years”. Sorry Selva, no picture.

Finally, most awaited surprise session from Pinal Dave (b|t) started and in a short session of 15 minutes, people learned about Auto Update Statistics and Auto Create Statistics setting of a database. Pinal was missing the cameraman and suddenly god shown his grace and Manas (b|t), appeared and clicked some pictures.

In his own unique style of presentation he showed one of the addictive game “Angry Bird” screenshot and asked which level it is. As usual there were many fun elements in the session and no one can forget those 15 minutes. One of the participants , Onkar, who kept him on toes received his famous book SQL Server Interview Questions and Answers (Amazon | Kindle | Flipkart | Indiaplaza) as a reward.

Pinal also shared a secret that why he checks in to all new places via foursquare (don’t worry Pinal, I will not write here). Session was full of infotainment followed by closure picture. Below are those folks who stayed late to have a photo session.

Few more folks were nice enough to take a picture with me as well I tried my best to hide my tummy by “cheese and inhale” trick but it didn’t work and got worst of my pic ever.

Below picture of all back-benchers clicked by another back bencher Manas (b|t). Left to Right – Selva (Blog|FB), Govind (B|T) Sudeepta (b|t), Kamlesh (B|T), , Vinod, Balmukund, Deepthi

That’s all for now. I personally had a great time in organizing, executing and becoming reporter of this event along with Vinod.

Feeling free to join the excitement at Facebook.

This is Balmukund, with no cameraman, reporting on wordpress about SQLBangUG#3.

Cheers,
Balmukund

I was contacted by colleague of mine and he informed that he has seen 19 GB database size on SQL Express 2008 R2. He read that limit was 10 GB and asked is there any workaround to elevate the limit? 

So, as a follow-up to Guru’s post I did further research and found interesting information.

Size limitation mentioned in his post are actually limit for data file(s) only. Which means I can have a database for total size more than specified in his post’s table. Actually this makes sense to me because log file is for recovery purpose not to store user data.

Also, this limit does not include filestream data (this is tricky to track) because user can store many images, more than 10 GB and still stay within the limit.

Happy learning!

Cheers,
Balmukund Lakhani
Twitter @blakhani

Sounds strange? Yeah and that’s the reason I am blogging about this. And recently I saw this question in forum as well. Have you ever come across this scenario?

Here is the repro of the issue and explanation. Below is the screenshot of my windows explorer space usage before I fired the query.

And here is the “bad” query. I know its the stupid query but it serves purpose of the blog  

Select    * 
from    sys.objects a1,
        sys.objects a2,
        sys.objects a3,
        sys.objects a4,
        sys.objects a5,
        sys.objects a6,
        sys.objects a7,
        sys.objects a8,
        sys.objects a9,
        sys.objects a0

Space would not be taken up as soon as you run the query. Once its start producing “HUGE” result set. I left the query running for around 6 min and here is the “proof”

Empty space in C drive dropped from 21.9 GB to 20.9 GB (Yeah you read is correct, it’s 1 GB) I have run process monitor and filtered results for ssms.exe.

Opened file Start > Run > %temp%\FileName  (I don’t know why i didn’t see file in folder)

If you look closely and compare above tmp file with management studio result window, it would be evident that ssms is writing the result in tmp file.

Moral of the Story:

• Don’t run query which has HUGE result set on server directly.
• If you have such need, redirect the output to “file” rather than shown in management studio result window. This can be done by two ways.

OR

Another workaround would be to change the TEMP/TMP path in environment variables as shown below.
My Computer > Right Click > Properies

Hope this would help someone in the world!

Cheers,
Balmukund Lakhani
Twitter @blakhani