🔹SQL Server: Full-Text Index (Definitions)

"The portion of a full-text catalog that stores all of the full-text words and their locations for a given table." (Microsoft Corporation, "SQL Server 7.0 System Administration Training Kit", 1999)

"A special index that efficiently tracks the words you're looking for in a table. They help in enabling special searching functions that differ from those used in regular indexes." (Thomas Moore, "EXAM CRAM™ 2: Designing and Implementing Databases with SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition", 2005)

"This is an index that can be queried for large amounts of text. This is maintained by the full-text search service." (Joseph L Jorden & Dandy Weyn, "MCTS Microsoft SQL Server 2005: Implementation and Maintenance Study Guide - Exam 70-431", 2006)

"A full-text index enables advanced text-based searches to be performed against a database table." (Michael Coles, "Pro T-SQL 2008 Programmer's Guide", 2008)

"Index that enables advanced text-based searches to be performed against a database table." (Miguel Cebollero et al, "Pro T-SQL Programmer’s Guide" 4th Ed., 2015)

🪄SSRS: First Magic Class (Wizarding a Report)

Introduction

    One year back I started a set of posts on SSIS showing how to create a package with ‘SQL Server Import and Export Wizard’ using as source a SQL Server, respectively Oracle database, in a third post showing how to use the Data Flow Task. The “wizarding” thematic was based on the fact the respective posts were showing how to make use of the wizards built within SQL Server and Visual Studio in order to create a basic export package. Therefore the posts were targeting mainly beginners, my intention at that time was to use them as a starting point in showing various objects and techniques. I also intended to start a set of similar posts on SSRS, so here I am, in this first post showing how to use the Report Wizard to create a report in BIDS (SQL Server Business Intelligence Development Studio) using a SQL Server database.

    This short tutorial uses a query based on AdventureWorks2008 sample database and considers that your Reporting Services instance is installed on the same computer with the database. For simplicity, I focused on the minimal information required in order to built a simple report, following to cover some of themes in detail in other posts. The tutorial can be used together with the information provided in MSDN, see Creating a Report Using Report Wizard and Report Layout How-to Topics sections.

Step 1: Create the Query 

 
    Before creating a report of any type or platform, it’s recommended to create and stabilize the query on which the report is based. For simplification let’s use a query based on Sales.vIndividualCustomer view:

-- Customer Addresses 
SELECT SIC.Title  
, SIC.FirstName  
, SIC.LastName  
, SIC.AddressLine1  
, SIC.City  
, SIC.PostalCode  
, SIC.CountryRegionName  
, SIC.PhoneNumber  
, SIC.EmailAddress  
FROM Sales.vIndividualCustomer SIC 

Step 2: Create the Project 

 
   Launch the BIDS from Windows Menu, create a new Project (File/New/Project) by using the “Report Server Project Wizard” Template, give the Project an appropriate Name and other related information. 

 

   This will open the Report Wizard, and unless you have chosen previously not to show this step, it will appear a tab in which are shown the step that will be performed:
- Select a data source from which to retrieve data
- Design a query to execute against the data source
- Choose the type of report you want to create
- Specify the basic layout of the report
- Specify the formatting for the report
- Select the report type, choose tabular

Step 3: Create/select the Data Source 

 
    Creating a Data Source pointing to the local server isn’t complicated at all, all you have to do is to give your data source a meaningful name (e.g. Adventure Works) and then define connection’s properties by selecting the “Server name” and database’s name, in this case AdventureWorks2008.

 
    Test the connection, just to be sure that everything works. In the end your data source might look like this:

    You can define your data source as shared by clicking the “Make this a shared data source” checkbox, allowing you thus to reuse the respective data source between several projects.

Step 4: Provide the Query 

 
   Because the query for our report was created beforehand, is enough to copy it in “Query string” textbox. We could have used the “Query Builder” to built the query, though a tool like SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio) can be considered a better choice for query design. As pointed above, it’s recommended to built the query and stabilize its logic before starting the work on the actual report.
Step 5: Generate the Report
   

Creating a report supposes choosing a Report Type (Tabular vs. Matrix), the level at which the fields will be displayed (page, group or details), and the Table Style. For this tutorial choose a Tabular type and, as no grouping is needed, in “Design the Table” step choose all the Available fields and drag-and-drop them in “Details”, the bottommost list from “Displayed fields” section. 

 

    In Choose the Table Style go with the first option (e.g. Slate), though it’s up to you which one of the styles you prefer.

Step 6: Deploy the Report 

 
    You can deploy the report if your report server is already configured, however in order to test the report you don’t have to go that far because you can test the report directly in BIDS. So you can go with the actual settings: 

 

    In the last step provide a meaningful name for the Report (e.g. Customer Addresses) and here is the report in Design mode: 

 

   By clicking on “Preview” tab you can see how the actual report will look like:
 
   Now I would recommend you to check what objects the wizard has created and what properties are used. Just play with the layout, observe the behavior and what the documentation says. There are plenty of tutorials on the web, so don't be afraid to search further.

💎SQL Reloaded: Searching a Value within a Database

Some years back, in a Management meeting related to one of the projects I was working on, one of the Managers made a quite interesting statement, something like: "it should be easy to pool in an Excel sheet from the whole database all the information I am interested in". I kind of smiled, because the information he was requiring was spanning within different modules, having different levels of detail and thus requiring several different output datasets in order to answer a simple question like "how is the manufacturing cost varying over time?". After some meetings we figured out that it’s not so easy to pull the data for the respective question, lacking some data which were not available in the respective database. It’s funny how IS (Information Systems) are getting more complex day by day but fail to capture and indirectly answer simple questions, this also because they were not designed to address such questions. Anyway, this post is not about this.

Some days back I spent a couple of hours trying to identify the tables from which the IDs stored in a log where coming from, in the log being saved no reference to the table, just the IDs. Another example of "good" design! While working diligently, I remembered that I could have easily solved the problem if I were using one of the CLR functions created in a post on Data Profiling Using CLR Functions. Unfortunately, because I was working in a production environment with strong security constraints, I wasn’t allowed registering and use any of the respective functions. Still, considering the easiness and flexibility of a the solution I thought that would be interesting to put it into practice. Who knows, maybe someday I will find the opportunity to use it!

Let’s suppose I am searching for an integer ID value within a given schema of AdventureWorks database. So, in theory, I need to do a search on each integer column of all the tables from the respective schema. The tables can be found in a matter of seconds using the following query based on the dbo.ExecuteScalarToInt CLR function introduced in the previous mention post and dbo.vTableColumns view.

 

-- searching a value in whole database 
WITH CTE 
AS (  
    SELECT [Schema_Name]  
    , Table_Name  
    , Column_Name 
    , system_type 
    , dbo.ExecuteScalarToInt('SELECT count(*) FROM ' + Quotename([Schema_Name]) + '.' + Quotename(Table_Name) + ' WHERE ' + Quotename(Column_Name) + ' = ' + Cast(1001 as varchar(20))) NumberRecords 
    FROM dbo.vTableColumns 
    WHERE [Schema_Name]= 'Sales' 
     --AND Table_Name = 'SalesOrderDetail' 
     --AND Column_Name = 'SalesOrderDetailID' 
     AND system_type = 'int' ) 
SELECT * 
FROM CTE 
WHERE NumberRecords>0 
ORDER BY [Schema_Name] 
, Table_Name  

Output:

Schema_Name	Table_Name	Column_Name	system_type	NumberRecords
Sales	ContactCeditCard	CreditCardId	int	1
Sales	CreditCard	CreditCardId	int	1
Sales	CurrencyRate	CurrencyRateId	int	1
Sales	CustomerAddress	AddressId	int	1
Sales	SalesOrderDetail	SalesOrderDetailId	int	1
Sales	SalesOrderHeader	BillToAddressId	int	8
Sales	SalesOrderHeader	CreditCardId	int	1
Sales	SalesOrderHeader	ShipToAddressId	int	8

As can be seen the dynamically built query, based on table metadata and searched value, is provided as parameter to dbo.ExecuteScalarToInt function. The query calculates the number of occurrences (see NumberRecords column) of the same value within a given column. Some attention must be given to the search column’s data type, as the data type needs to be compatible with the searched value, otherwise a cast being necessary. I haven’t tried the query in a big database and I would advice you to be cautious when running it in a production environment. In case you arrive to use the query in a big database, please let me know how it behaved!

In case of the problem I had a few days back, the above query it’s only a first step in identifying the tables in which the values occur. Because multiple tables are returned, it’s needed to investigate which of the tables has the highest probability to be the source for the ID saved in log. Of course, some DM (data mining) algorithm could be probably used for this purpose, however some programming is needed and also some amount of diligent work to prove the data. It would be nice to have a tool that performs such analysis or that creates a complex query using any set of attributes within a given database.

💎SQL Reloaded: Table Value Constructors at Work

    Paradoxically, the first new SQL Server 2008 feature I learned, soon after the first CTP was made available, was the use of table value constructors, however I managed all this time without using it. This happened because I was either working on previous SQL Server versions or because other techniques were more appropriate to the problems I had to solve. So, a few days ago, the use of table value constructors came again on the table when I was weighting what’s the best approach to a problem posed by a colleague. Actually, the problem is quite simple – given a pair of values (id, new value) is needed to update a table with the “new value” corresponding to the given “id”. Previously, in similar cases, I preferred to load the data in a staging table because this was allowing me to quickly perform several checks on the set of values (e.g. check for duplicates, identify how many records will be updated). But what do you do when you are working directly in a production or any other type of environment in which you don’t have the possibility of using a staging table?

    For such cases you can either create a dataset on the fly with a set of UNIONS and reuse it in queries or, create an UPDATE statement for each pair of values. You can even automate the creation of UNION and UPDATE statements, however their use doesn’t seem so elegant, especially when you can use table value constructors. The feature seems to be hidden in documentation, as a matter of fact I found it only in the online documentation, the local help having no reference to it. Anyway, excepting a few posts on the same subject I can’t say I have seen any code until now making use of it. What’s interesting to note, before going into details, is that the ANSI SQL 94 (the earliest version of documentation I have) mentions vaguely table value constructors (p. 221), therefore I expect they are part of ANSI standard.

   According to MSDN a table value constructor allows a set of row value expressions to be constructed into a table within a single DML statement. As can be seen from the MSDN examples the list of values can contain a combination of list of values and queries, as long the data type matches and only a single scalar value is provided as a row value expression Another limitation concerns the maximum number of rows constructed, the maximum value being 1000. It’s important to know these limitations, because they might force you use other approaches. Before sketching a solution for this post’s problem, let’s look how a table can be constructed on the fly given a list of pair-values:

-- example table value constructor 
SELECT EmployeeId 
, VacationHours 
FROM ( VALUES (101, '23') 
     , (102, '82') 
     , (103, '66') 
     , (104, '17') 
      , (105, '64') 
      , (106, '56') 
      , (107, '107') 
      , (108, '50') 
      , (109, '109') 
      , (110, '48')) AS Data(EmployeeId, VacationHours) 

    The table thus constructed can be further used in an UPDATE statement, the following example being based on HumanResources.Employee from AdventureWorks database.

-- example table value constructor update UPDATE HumanResources.Employee 
SET VacationHours = Data.VacationHours 
FROM ( VALUES (101, '23') 
      , (102, '82') 
      , (103, '66') 
      , (104, '17') 
      , (105, '64') 
      , (106, '56') 
      , (107, '107') 
      , (108, '50') 
      , (109, '109') 
      , (110, '48')) AS Data(EmployeeId, VacationHours) 
WHERE HumanResources.Employee.EmployeeId = Data.EmployeeId 

    A similar construct can be be used to perform a SELECT, UPDATE or DELETE in which multiple columns participate in the JOIN. For example let’s consider a SELECT based on a set of pairs of values from the Sales.SalesOrderHeader table:

-- example table value constructor
SELECT SOH.* 
FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader SOH 
     JOIN ( -- set of pairs 
        VALUES(10, 5069) 
         , (10, 6070) 
         , (10, 7060) 
         , (11, 407) 
         , (11, 1603) 
         , (11, 2737)) AS Data(CustomerId, CurrencyRateID) 
      ON SOH.CustomerId = Data.CustomerID 
    AND SOH.CurrencyRateID = Data.CurrencyRateID 

    As can be seen table value constructors are pretty simple to use, especially when dealing with a small number of values. If they are the best choice, that depends on the problem you are trying to solve and its specific constraints!

🔹SQL Server: Server Role (Definitions)

"A named set of security accounts. A SQL Server role can contain Windows NT users, Windows NT groups, SQL Server users, or other SQL Server roles from the same database." (Microsoft Corporation, "SQL Server 7.0 System Administration Training Kit", 1999)

"A predefined role defined at the server level and existing outside individual databases." (Microsoft Corporation, "SQL Server 7.0 System Administration Training Kit", 1999)

"A predefined role that exists at the server level. The scope of the role is limited to the SQL Server instance in which it is defined. Fixed server roles allow you to quickly assign permissions on the server to specific individuals. Roles can be compared to groups in the Window NT/2000 operating systems." (Anthony Sequeira & Brian Alderman, "The SQL Server 2000 Book", 2003)

"A predefined role at the server level that is used to control administrative access to the SQL Server instance." (Marilyn Miller-White et al, "MCITP Administrator: Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Optimization and Maintenance 70-444", 2007)

"A predefined role that exists at the server level. The scope of the role is limited to the SQL Server instance in which it is defined." (Microsoft, "SQL Server 2012 Glossary", 2012)

"These are special groups in SQL Server that are used to limit the amount of administrative access that a user has once logged on to SQL Server." (Joseph L Jorden & Dandy Weyn, "MCTS Microsoft SQL Server 2005: Implementation and Maintenance Study Guide - Exam 70-431", 2006)

🔹SQL Server: Fixed Database Role (Definitions)

"A predefined role defined at the database level and existing in each database." (Microsoft Corporation, "SQL Server 7.0 System Administration Training Kit", 1999)

"A predefined role that exists in each database. The scope of the role is limited to the database in which it is defined. You use fixed database roles to quickly define permissions within a particular database. Roles can be compared to groups in the Window NT/2000 operating systems." (Anthony Sequeira & Brian Alderman, "The SQL Server 2000 Book", 2003)

"These are special groups in each SQL Server database that already have permissions applied and are used to limit the permissions that a user has inside the database." (Joseph L Jorden & Dandy Weyn, "MCTS Microsoft SQL Server 2005: Implementation and Maintenance Study Guide - Exam 70-431", 2006)

"A role that is created by SQL Server 2005 in each database with a set of permissions that are predetermined and cannot be altered. Users can be added to one or more fixed database roles." (Marilyn Miller-White et al, "MCITP Administrator: Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Optimization and Maintenance 70-444", 2007)

"A predefined role that exists in each database. The scope of the role is limited to the database in which it is defined." (Microsoft, "SQL Server 2012 Glossary", 2012)