This is being added to the addendum (located here) for my “Pro SQL Server 2005 Database Design and Optimization” book and would have appeared in the pessimistic locking section on page 478 in Chapter 9: Coding for Integrity and Concurrency; Pessimistic Locking. You can download the entire addendum here: Addendum. The problem of the critical … Read more
SQL Backup 5.0 is a major upgrade including a complete redesign of the user interface. What’s new in 5.0? Complete redesign of the UI including a timeline feature for monitoring past backup activity and future backup jobs Integrated support for clusters Reporting across multiple servers using a central reporting database New keywords THREADCOUNT (to get … Read more
A year and a little bit ago, I sat down with Tom (head of development at Red Gate) to talk about what was next on the cards after SQL Data Compare. Tom asked that I join Helen and the rest of the SQL Backup team to act as technical lead on a new version of … Read more
‘Look, see what I mean?’, the manager said, as a dishevelled DBA stumbled past his pig pen grunting inconsequentially to himself. ‘Good morning’, said the manager to him, forcing a beam from ear to ear with a rather strained Bonhomie The DBA gave an extra-loud grunt, his pale puffy face turned to stare balefully at … Read more
Last week, I presented a query to view I/O pressure, and (to me) more usefully, look at it in a slice of time, like when doing a performance test. Here is a a very similar solution for index usage using the sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats dynamic management views. I will probably do several more of these types of … Read more
It’s amazing what you learn reading MSDN. It has recently been my joy to have to discover everything I’ve never really wanted to know about the internal system tables of SQL Server 2005. I don’t mean those lovely system views that they’ve created. I mean all the grubby nasty little tables with names like sys.objects$ … Read more
After watching some of the demo videos of the latest Visual Studio SDK, I was excited to get started and try out my own add-in. I installed the SDK, fired up Visual Studio, created an integration package, compiled, and got a nasty error: CTC : fatal error CTC2013: Can’t start preprocessor (2) What does this mean? Apparently, … Read more
The sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats dynamic management function returns I/O statistics for data and log files [MDF and LDF file], with two parameters, one for database_id and another for the file_id. This function will help you to identify I/O file level. I was led here when doing a search because we were getting enormous amounts of disk … Read more
Microsoft has built a little site for searching the books online on the web (which gives you links that are more readily shared with others): http://search.live.com/macros/sql_server_user_education/booksonline That is nice, but what is nicer is that you can create your own search macros and save them.. Just click the “create your own search engine” and go … Read more
I’ll admit it, I never really got the yield statement in C# before today. However there’s a very good article I’ve just read on msdn that takes you through it step-by-step. It’s certainly an interesting read and with luck will help you out when you really really need it. Have a look…http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vcsharp/bb264519.aspx On an aside, … Read more
I find that I end up custom painting a lot of the controls in Red Gate products, this is normally due to some gripe from our usability engineers – I was doing this today and wanted to gray scale some of the pngs when I need to show them disabled – This normally means loading up … Read more
SharePoint 2007 has a new control called the SPSecurityTrimmedControl. It’s a container control that allows you to hide or display a section of your page depending on whether or not the currently logged-in user has the appropriate permissions. To set the permissions, however, you need to know what SharePoint calls the permissions. Took a little … Read more
If you haven’t already, check out Scott Guthrie’s blog about Extension Methods that will be available when the next version of the .NET framework. It’s always cool when they add a completely new feature because it opens up more options for really elegant solutions. And it also opens up new ways for people to really … Read more
Action 19 News in Ohio was hot on the investigative trail of a Girl Scout cookie scalper today. Apparently, the owner of a Valero gas station in Parma Heights, Ohio bought a LOT of Girl Scout cookie boxes and is selling them in his store for $4 dollars. Girls Scouts, on the other hand, peddle the … Read more
As I believe I have already opined, dealing with databases is not one of my all time favourite activities. It’s not right up there with drinking, skiing and World of Warcraft, for example. For someone in my position, dealing with databases is naturally an occupational hazard; but I do attempt to minimise the amount of … Read more
In the past, in order to get something done, you did something. This normally involved taking off your jacket; possibly even loosening your tie. It could be you needed gloves and goggles, maybe a mate to hold your tools, but generally, you got on and did it. Now, dear me no. Steps in doing something … Read more
For anyone out there working with SQL Server on a large or mission critical system it’s quite likely that, unless you’re the DBA, you’re not going to have dbo access to the databases you’re working with, particularly if you’re working directly with the production servers. Unsurprisingly then we’ve had a number of complaints from people … Read more
Tony was a systems analyst and programmer. For many years, he’d worked for a large insurance company in London. He’d spent all his working life there, in fact, seeing their IT systems grow from simple Cobol-based accounting systems to their current sophisticated distributed architecture. He’d grown to become a typical repository of IT knowledge, but … Read more
A good question to ask in any interview with one of the high and mighty in IT is ‘What is the biggest mistake you ever made’. Few of us will have made a mistake as easy to sympathise with, but with such far-reaching consequences as the one Gary Kildall made. It is a reminder of … Read more
Came across an interesting thing to do with static constructors in the course of the development of ANTS Profiler 3. We got around to talking about static constructors across multiple files and wondering what would happen if you attempted to create a circular reference of static initialisers. In the result you can see that the … Read more
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