I am getting ready to do bunch of presentations this weekend and I realized half my computers were running the rc of Sql 2008

So I decided to got to the site and downloaded and selected to install SQL Exrpress 2008.

Went to look for SQL Server Express Management Studio Express 2008 annnnnd nothing!

Few search engine searches later and no clear direction found this on SQL Express home page:

You can manually download and install any edition of SQL Server 2008 directly from the Microsoft Download Center:

• SQL Server 2008 Express
• SQL Server 2008 Express with Tools
• SQL Server 2008 Express with Advanced Services

Which edition of SQL Server 2008 Express is right for you?

SQL Server 2008 Express is available in the following 3 editions (each is available from the Install Wizard):

• SQL Server 2008 Express
  • SQL Server database engine - create, store, update and retrieve your data
• SQL Server 2008 Express with Tools
  • SQL Server database engine - create, store, update and retrieve your data
  • SQL Server Management Studio Basic - visual database management tool for creating, editing and managing databases
• SQL Server 2008 Express with Advanced Services
  • SQL Server database engine - create, store, update and retrieve your data
  • SQL Server Management Studio Basic - visual database management tool for creating, editing and managing databases
  • Full-text Search - powerful, high-speed engine for searching text-intensive data
  • Reporting Services - integrated report creation and design environment to create reports

So make sure you download the SQL Server 2008 Express with ToolsSql

Though I save some people some time.

One last thing:

Step 1: Download and install Microsoft .Net Framework 3.5 SP1.
Step 2 Download and install Windows Installer 4.5.
Step 3 Download and install Windows PowerShell 1.0.

I jut received this email this morning

Dear AWS Developers,

We are excited to release the public beta of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) running Microsoft Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server. AWS is also announcing that Amazon EC2 is now Generally Available and includes a Service Level Agreement (SLA). In addition, we're giving you a sneak peek at some upcoming features that will make Amazon EC2 even easier to operate. Please see details below on these announcements.

You requested to be notified when Windows was available on EC2, and starting now you can employ Amazon EC2 running Windows Server or SQL Server with all of the performance, reliability, and scalability benefits of Amazon EC2. AWS customers have commonly requested Amazon EC2 running Windows Server since the service launched, and this announcement means that Amazon EC2 will provide an ideal environment for deploying ASP.NET web sites, high performance computing clusters, media transcoding solutions, and many other Windows-based applications. Like all services offered by AWS, Amazon EC2 running Windows Server or SQL Server offers a low-cost, pay-as-you-go model with no long-term commitments and no minimum fees. Pricing for Amazon EC2 running Windows Server begins at $0.125 per compute hour. Please go to aws.amazon.com/windows for more information.

Also, Amazon EC2 has entered General Availability (GA), after just over two years of operation in beta and the addition of many highly-requested features. We are also providing an SLA for Amazon EC2, with a service level commitment of 99.95% availability within a Region. If availability falls below this level, customers are eligible to receive service credits. The new Amazon EC2 SLA is designed to give customers additional confidence that even the most demanding applications will run dependably in the AWS cloud. For further details on the SLA for EC2, see aws.amazon.com/ec2-sla.

Lastly, to help its customers better plan their future hardware and software investments, AWS is providing visibility into plans to release several new features in 2009 that will make managing cloud-based applications even easier. These features will help provide even more cost-efficient consumption of Amazon EC2 and greater visibility into the operational health of applications running in the AWS cloud. These features include:

• Load balancing - Enables AWS customers to balance incoming requests and distribute traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances.
• Auto-scaling - Automatically grows and shrinks usage of Amazon EC2 compute capacity based on application requirements.
• Cloud monitoring - Enables AWS customers to monitor operational metrics of Amazon EC2, providing visibility into usage of the AWS cloud.
• Management Console - Provides a simple, point-and-click web interface that lets customers manage and access their AWS cloud resources.

To learn more about these new services or to sign-up for notification when they are released, please visit: aws.amazon.com/contact-us/new-features-for-amazon-ec2.

We are excited to share these exciting new announcements with you, and invite you to visit aws.amazon.com/ec2 for full details.

I can't tell how exciting this is. More to come on this!

I was just talking about windows/SQL server in the cloud with my buddy James and after reading my blog he was still a little confused about what was going on. So I found a much more interesting link that I think will be more relevant to the average .net hoster here is the relevant information that I think that you will need to get started.

Starting later this Fall, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) will offer you the ability to run Microsoft Windows Server or Microsoft SQL Server. Today, you can choose from a variety of Unix-based operating systems, and soon you will be able to configure your instances to run the Windows Server operating system. In addition, you will be able to use SQL Server as another option within Amazon EC2 for running relational databases.

Amazon EC2 running Windows Server or SQL Server provides an ideal environment for deploying ASP.NET web sites, high performance computing clusters, media transcoding solutions, and many other Windows-based applications. By choosing Amazon EC2 as the deployment environment for your Windows-based applications, you will be able to take advantage of Amazon’s proven scalability and reliability, as well as the cost-effective, pay-as-you-go pricing model offered by Amazon Web Services. Customers will only pay for as much or little as they actually use; of course the actual price will be higher than Linux-based instances, due to the cost of Windows licenses. We’ll announce specific pricing when we make the service broadly available later this Fall.

Our goal is to support any and all of the programming models, operating systems and database servers that you need for building applications on our cloud computing platform. The ability to run a Windows environment within Amazon EC2 has been one of our most requested features, and we are excited to be able to provide this capability. We are currently operating a private beta of Amazon EC2 running Windows Server and SQL Server

 

You can sign up for more information about this from here

After doing some basic analysis about what it cost to relocate some common domains that were more brochure site we figured we could incur a common savings of over 50%. The question still is how is the SQL server instance going to work and replicate across the data centers.

I think the biggest question here is what is microsoft going to do with its cloud and what announcements are going to come out at PDC?

I love data...It holds so many interesting secrets just waiting to be mined out and taken advantage of. If you haven't looked into space before the time is now and its never been easier.

Start to read Lynn Langit's Blog She is the BI Queen, and posts solid information that you will need like this great post on  BI.

http://blogs.msdn.com/socaldevgal/archive/2008/08/27/sql-server-2008-data-mining-in-the-cloud.aspx

Her book a great place to start as well

http://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Server-2005-Business-Intelligence/dp/1590598342

Enjoy!

I just used this for the 1000th time so I thought i would blog about it. Just replace getdate() and with your date...

-- just the date

SELECT CONVERT(char(10), getdate(), 101) AS [Date]

SELECT DATEADD(dd, 0, DATEDIFF(dd, 0, GETDATE()))

-- just the time

SELECT (getdate() - 

    CAST(ROUND(CAST(getdate() AS float), 0, 1) AS datetime))

SELECT CONVERT (datetime, (1 - (CONVERT (float, getdate() ) - 

     CONVERT (int, CONVERT (float, getdate())))) * - 1 - 1)

Ok so I was running into some errors restoring a database and I ended up writing this little script that did the job.

Thought I would share.

Here’s how you look into a backup set to find out what logical files make up the backup set.

When you get the logical file names you can then write a restore script to restore the database to any name you would like as well as renaming the datafiles to match your new database name.  Here are the steps:

From Management Studio, run this command from the master database: restore filelistonly from

disk=’path\dbname.bak’ where path is the location of the backup set: 
restore filelistonly from disk='\\YourServer\c$\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Backup\Email.bak' 

In this case it returned the following information:

LogicalName   PhysicalName                  Type       FileGroupName        Size                MaxSize              FileId

Email1        E:\Data\Email_Backup.mdf   D         PRIMARY              10770972672           35184372080640       1

Email1_log   E:\Log\Email_Backup.ldf      L         NULL                 4312465408          2199023255552         2

Then we build the restore database statement and change the PhysicalName and location of the file to a new name we prefer.  In this case it looked like this:

restore database Email from disk='\\YourServer\c$\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Backup\Email.bak' 
with move 'Email1' to 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\DATA\Email_data.mdf', 
move 'Email1_log' to 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\DATA\Email_log.ldf' 
go

Bata Bing Bata Boom rocking the new database..