Answer to question posed at VSLive

The thing I was most nervous about at my VSLive presentation was question time. I had an ingenious plan to avoid question time... I had timed my presentation, and it went for just over 1 hour, but in the words of a famous poet... "The best layed plans of Mice, Men (and Geeks) gang aft aglay". People from the audience stopped me mid-way through to ask questions. Most of the questions I was able to answer, but there was one that I said "I think the answer is yes, but I'll get back to you". The question was... "Does SQL Express support bulk copy?", and after some testing the answer is "Yes". As mentioned in my presentation (slides available here) SQL Express does not support SSIS (The replacement for DTS), however after testing, the bcp utility works fine. The following script can be used to verify that both import and export work fine.


use tempdb

-- Create a test table
create table BulkTest
(TestKey INT NOT NULL,
TestData NVARCHAR(50) NULL,
CONSTRAINT BulkTest_PK_Constraint PRIMARY KEY (TestKey ASC)
)

-- Add some test data
INSERT INTO BulkTest
(TestKey, TestData)
VALUES
(1, 'This is just some test data')

INSERT INTO BulkTest
(TestKey, TestData)
VALUES
(2, 'This is some more test data')

INSERT INTO BulkTest
(TestKey, TestData)
VALUES
(3, 'It is important to have test data')

-- perform bulk Export using bcp command line utility
-- bcp tempdb.dbo.BulkTest out BulkTest.dat -T -c -S ServerName\SQLExpress

delete from BulkTest

-- perform bulk Import using bcp command line utility
-- bcp tempdb.dbo.BulkTest in BulkTest.dat -T -c -S ServerName\SQLExpress

select * from BulkTest


VSLive Seminar post mortem

Well, my VSLive presentation was on Wednesday, and I personally was quite pleased with how it all went. I must confess, I was a little nervous, but I didn't let my nerves get the better of me. I had really positive feedback from people after the seminar, and even one request for the source code for my Photo Album Demo... enjoy! The demo sort of loses a bit by distributing it in this form, as it was more about the process of building it and displaying the Visual Studio integration features of SQL Server Express. There are only 5 lines of user written code in the project, and they are all to do with implementing Drag-Drop on the picture box so that you can add the photos to the database, the rest is all IDE generated.

There was one point that given the discussions after the seminar, I feel I should clarify. I went into a bit of detail describing the SQL Express only feature "User Instances" or RANU (Run As a Normal User). I do think it is an interesting feature and I can see some real potential for it, however, from the discussions after the seminar, it appears that I didn’t stress enough, that User Instances are optional (in the connection string "User Instance = true"). You don't need to use it, in fact, I would suggest that in the majority of usage scenarios, you will use SQL Server Express in your traditional Database server scenarios where you have a dedicated server machine that a DBA logs on to allowing her to perform maintenance tasks like Attaching databases etc... multiple clients would then log onto the database from their own machines with only the privileges they require to perform the tasks they need to. User Instances are only really required when you want to deploy an application in a single user type scenario, and you want to deploy the database file along with the executables and have the user (who by best practice in security, should NOT be an administrator on their own machine) attach dynamically to the database. I hope this clears things up.

For a really good, in depth article on User Instances, see Roger Wolter's msdn article on SQL Express User Instances.

By the way if any of the people in the seminar find my blog, please feel free to leave any feedback on my performance, I would like to know how to improve my presenting.