enterprise – sqlsunday.com

Operations that need a serial plan

Some operations in SQL Server will turn your entire query plan serial (single-threaded), others will just reserve a so-called “serial zone”. I read up on this stuff a number of years ago (including a great post by Paul White), and thinking that some things must have changed since, I decided to go see for myself.

Migrating a database from Enterprise to Standard Edition?

You can move or copy a database from Enterprise Edition (or Developer Edition, which supports more or less the same feature set) to Standard Edition. The simplest way is to take a backup of the database and restore that on the new server. However, if there are any Enterprise Edition features left in the database, the restored database won’t start up, and you’ll get this error, or something similar:

TITLE: Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio
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Restore of database ‘databaseName’ failed. (Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.RelationalEngineTasks)

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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

An exception occurred while executing a Transact-SQL statement or batch. (Microsoft.SqlServer.SmoExtended)

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Database 'databaseName' cannot be started in this edition of SQL Server because part or all of object 'myTableName' is enabled with data compression or vardecimal storage format. Data compression and vardecimal storage format are only supported on SQL Server Enterprise Edition.
Database 'databaseName' cannot be started because some of the database functionality is not available in the current edition of SQL Server. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 909)

Datawarehouse modelling: Inmon vs Kimball

If you’re into business intelligence, data warehousing and analytics, you will have heard an endless number of references to Bill Inmon and Ralph Kimball. These two figureheads in datawarehousing architecture have produced an immense number of books, articles, training seminars, etc. While many of their strategies and modelling approaches are similar, they have near-opposite views on other aspects.