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• Mission Critical: SQL Server 2008 Engine Post-Installation

  Even an experienced DBA finds it safer to double-check that all the tasks have been done, and in the right order. Buck Woody continues his series with another handy checklist, army-style.

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• Documentation and Test Assertions in Databases

  - by Phil Factor

  When I first worked with Sybase/SQL Server, we thought our databases were impressively large but they were, by today’s standards, pathetically small. We had one script to build the whole database. Every script I ever read was richly annotated; it was more like reading a document. Every table had a comment block, and every line would be commented too. At the end of each routine (e.g. procedure) was a quick integration test, or series of test assertions, to check that nothing in the build was broken. We simply ran the build script, stored in the Version Control System, and it pulled everything together in a logical sequence that not only created the database objects but pulled in the static data. This worked fine at the scale we had. The advantage was that one could, by reading the source code, reach a rapid understanding of how the database worked and how one could interface with it. The problem was that it was a system that meant that only one developer at the time could work on the database. It was very easy for a developer to execute accidentally the entire build script rather than the selected section on which he or she was working, thereby cleansing the database of everyone else’s work-in-progress and data. It soon became the fashion to work at the object level, so that programmers could check out individual views, tables, functions, constraints and rules and work on them independently. It was then that I noticed the trend to generate the source for the VCS retrospectively from the development server. Tables were worst affected. You can, of course, add or delete a table’s columns and constraints retrospectively, which means that the existing source no longer represents the current object. If, after your development work, you generate the source from the live table, then you get no block or line comments, and the source script is sprinkled with silly square-brackets and other confetti, thereby rendering it visually indigestible. Routines, too, were affected. In our system, every routine had a directly attached string of unit-tests. A retro-generated routine has no unit-tests or test assertions. Yes, one can still commit our test code to the VCS but it’s a separate module and teams end up running the whole suite of tests for every individual change, rather than just the tests for that routine, which doesn’t scale for database testing. With Extended properties, one can get the best of both worlds, and even use them to put blame, praise or annotations into your VCS. It requires a lot of work, though, particularly the script to generate the table. The problem is that there are no conventional names beyond ‘MS_Description’ for the special use of extended properties. This makes it difficult to do splendid things such ensuring the integrity of the build by running a suite of tests that are actually stored in extended properties within the database and therefore the VCS. We have lost the readability of database source code over the years, and largely jettisoned the use of test assertions as part of the database build. This is not unexpected in view of the increasing complexity of the structure of databases and number of programmers working on them. There must, surely, be a way of getting them back, but I sometimes wonder if I’m one of very few who miss them.

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• Using LogParser - part 1

  - by fatherjack

  A series of walk-through style articles to show someone new to LogParser what it can do and how to use it. It is appropriate to all sorts of job roles in IT, whether you are a System Administrator or a SQL DBA....(read more)

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• 48hrs in Cambridge.

  - by Fatherjack

  In just over 2 weeks something pretty big in the SQL Server Community in the UK is taking place. We are going to witness the first SQL Saturday on these shores. The event is running in Cambridge, the home of the SQL Cambs user group and the chapter leader there (Mark Broadbent) is the lead on the SQL Saturday event too. Mark and his team are making final preparations and looking forward to this event getting started with the Pre-Con day on Friday 7th Sept. They have 3 great sessions from Buck Woody, Jen Stirrup and Mark Rasmussen for those lucky enough to be able to attend on the Friday. There are over 30 speakers providing 4 tracks of sessions on the Saturday so there will be plenty to interest and inform anyone working with SQL Server, take a look at all the sessions on the schedule. In addition to all of this you will be able to spend some quality time talking to all the other attendees, sponsors and PASS representatives to make the most of your time there. If you haven’t registered yet then head over to http://sqlcambs.org.uk/ and get your name down to attend this milestone event.

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• Transparent Data Encryption

  Transparent Data Encryption is designed to protect data by encrypting the physical files of the database, rather than the data itself. Its main purpose is to prevent unauthorized access to the data by restoring the files to another server. With Transparent Data Encryption in place, this requires the original encryption certificate and master key. It was introduced in the Enterprise edition of SQL Server 2008. John Magnabosco explains fully, and guides you through the process of setting it up.

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• Windows 8 and the future of Silverlight

  - by Laila

  After Steve Ballmer's indiscrete 'MisSpeak' about Windows 8, there has been a lot of speculation about the new operating system. We've now had a few glimpses, such as the demonstration of 'Mosh' at the D9 2011 conference, and the Youtube video, which showed a touch-centric new interface for apps built using HTML5 and JavaScript. This has caused acute anxiety to the programmers who have followed the recommended route of WPF, Silverlight and .NET, but it need not have caused quite so much panic since it was, in fact, just a thin layer to make Windows into an apparently mobile-friendly OS. More worryingly, the press-release from Microsoft was at pains to say that 'Windows 8 apps use the power of HTML5, tapping into the native capabilities of Windows using standard JavaScript and HTML', as if all thought of Silverlight, dominant in WP7, had been jettisoned. Ironically, this brave new 'happening' platform can all be done now in Windows 7 and an iPad, using Adobe Air, so it is hardly cutting-edge; in fact the tile interface had a sort of Retro-Zune Metro UI feel first seen in Media Centre, followed by Windows Phone 7, with any originality leached out of it by the corporate decision-making process. It was kinda weird seeing old Excel running alongside stodgily away amongst all the extreme paragliding videos. The ability to snap and resize concurrent apps might be a novelty on a tablet, but it is hardly so on a PC. It was at that moment that it struck me that here was a spreadsheet application that hadn't even made the leap to the .NET platform. Windows was once again trying to be all things to all men, whereas Apple had carefully separated Mac OS X development from iOS. The acrobatic feat of straddling all mobile and desktop devices with one OS is looking increasingly implausible. There is a world of difference between an operating system that facilitates business procedures and a one that drives a device for playing pop videos and your holiday photos. So where does this leave Silverlight? Pretty much where it was. Windows 8 will support it, and it will continue to be developed, but if these press-releases reflect the thinking within Microsoft, it is no longer seen as the strategic direction. However, Silverlight is still there and there will be a whole new set of developer APIs for building touch-centric apps. Jupiter, for example, is rumoured to involve an App store that provides new, Silverlight based "immersive" applications that are deployed as AppX packages. When the smoke clears, one suspects that the Javascript/HTML5 is merely an alternative development environment for Windows 8 to attract the legions of independent developers outside the .NET culture who are unlikely to ever take a shine to a more serious development environment such as WPF or Silverlight. Cheers, Laila

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• Learn Many Languages

  - by Jeff Foster

  My previous blog, Deliberate Practice, discussed the need for developers to “sharpen their pencil” continually, by setting aside time to learn how to tackle problems in different ways. However, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, a contested and somewhat-controversial concept from language theory, seems to hold reasonably true when applied to programming languages. It states that: “The structure of a language affects the ways in which its speakers conceptualize their world.” If you’re constrained by a single programming language, the one that dominates your day job, then you only have the tools of that language at your disposal to think about and solve a problem. For example, if you’ve only ever worked with Java, you would never think of passing a function to a method. A good developer needs to learn many languages. You may never deploy them in production, you may never ship code with them, but by learning a new language, you’ll have new ideas that will transfer to your current “day-job” language. With the abundant choices in programming languages, how does one choose which to learn? Alan Perlis sums it up best. “A language that doesn‘t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing“ With that in mind, here’s a selection of languages that I think are worth learning and that have certainly changed the way I think about tackling programming problems. Clojure Clojure is a Lisp-based language running on the Java Virtual Machine. The unique property of Lisp is homoiconicity, which means that a Lisp program is a Lisp data structure, and vice-versa. Since we can treat Lisp programs as Lisp data structures, we can write our code generation in the same style as our code. This gives Lisp a uniquely powerful macro system, and makes it ideal for implementing domain specific languages. Clojure also makes software transactional memory a first-class citizen, giving us a new approach to concurrency and dealing with the problems of shared state. Haskell Haskell is a strongly typed, functional programming language. Haskell’s type system is far richer than C# or Java, and allows us to push more of our application logic to compile-time safety. If it compiles, it usually works! Haskell is also a lazy language – we can work with infinite data structures. For example, in a board game we can generate the complete game tree, even if there are billions of possibilities, because the values are computed only as they are needed. Erlang Erlang is a functional language with a strong emphasis on reliability. Erlang’s approach to concurrency uses message passing instead of shared variables, with strong support from both the language itself and the virtual machine. Processes are extremely lightweight, and garbage collection doesn’t require all processes to be paused at the same time, making it feasible for a single program to use millions of processes at once, all without the mental overhead of managing shared state. The Benefits of Multilingualism By studying new languages, even if you won’t ever get the chance to use them in production, you will find yourself open to new ideas and ways of coding in your main language. For example, studying Haskell has taught me that you can do so much more with types and has changed my programming style in C#. A type represents some state a program should have, and a type should not be able to represent an invalid state. I often find myself refactoring methods like this… void SomeMethod(bool doThis, bool doThat) { if (!(doThis ^ doThat)) throw new ArgumentException(“At least one arg should be true”); if (doThis) DoThis(); if (doThat) DoThat(); } …into a type-based solution, like this: enum Action { DoThis, DoThat, Both }; void SomeMethod(Action action) { if (action == Action.DoThis || action == Action.Both) DoThis(); if (action == Action.DoThat || action == Action.Both) DoThat(); } At this point, I’ve removed the runtime exception in favor of a compile-time check. This is a trivial example, but is just one of many ideas that I’ve taken from one language and implemented in another.

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• A TDD Journey: 1-Trials and Tribulations

  Test-Driven Development (TDD) has a misleading name, because the objective is to design and specify that the system you are developing behaves in the ways that the customer expects, and to prove that it does so for the lifetime of the system. It isn't an intuitive way of coding but by automating the specifications of a system, we end up with tests and documentation as a by-product. Michael Sorens starts an introduction to TDD that is more of a journey in six parts:

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• Antenna Aligner Part 7: Connecting the dots

  - by Chris George

  The app is basically ready, so I eagerly started to sort out creating the application entry in iTunes Connect. It's mostly intuitive actually, although I did have to create yet another icon for iTunes sized 512x512 pixels, damn lucky I did the original graphics as vector! It took me longer to write the application description than anything else, I'm so not a tech author! I didn't like the way you have to 'make up' an SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) number. I have to do some googling to find out that it really doesn't matter what it is! It should be more obvious what to do from the actual website itself. That aside, the rest of it was actually fairly straightforward. As well as the details of the application, iPhone and iPad screenshots were also required. This posed somewhat of a problem. The iPhone ones were easy (as I have one!), but I do not (yet) own an iPad . So I thought I'd leave the iPad screenshots out for now. Once the application details were sorted, I moved onto the rights and pricing. At the start of the project I had made the decision that I wouldn't charge any more than the lowest amount £0.59. I believe there is a market for this, but as my first foray into app development I didn't want to take the mick. I did realise, however, that I had built my app with a developer certificate and provisioning profile. This was fairly quickly corrected, and again Nomad made this very easy to switch over to the distribution certificate and provisioning profile. With a sense of excitement I cracked open iTunes connect and clicked the upload button ... ...slight snag... . when the Nomad project was started, Apple allowed uploads of these binaries via iTunes Connect. But this is no longer possible, the only upload path is via the Application Loader available from the Apple Developer program. This itself has one limitation, it only runs on a mac! D'OH!!!  Actually my language was somewhat more colourful when this fact came to light. After picking my laptop up off the floor and putting it back together... ok only joking, but I did nearly throw it out of frustration!... I started to consider the options; I briefly entertained the idea of buying a cheap mac from ebay... no, that defeats the whole object of what I'm doing, plus my wife wouldn't be impressed there are some guys out there in the interweb who will upload your app for a small fee...but I don't really like the idea of giving some faceless email address my apple developer login details, as well as my app binary! find some willing friend with a mac who would kindly let me use it... obviously this is the only sensible option. In the meantime, I informed the Nomad team about this slight 'issue' and they are currently investigating possible solutions...

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• A Bit Cloudy

  - by Chris Massey

  "Systems Administrators, I come in peace. You have nothing to fear from me" - Office 365 Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite recently absorbed a few other services and has been rebranded as Office 365, which is currently in private Beta and NDA-d up to the eyeballs. As Microsoft's (slightly delayed) answer to Google Apps Premier Edition, it shows a lot of promise; MS has technical expertise, market penetration, and financial capital all going for it. On the other hand, Google...(read more)

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• Head in the Clouds

  - by Tony Davis

  We're just past the second anniversary of the launch of Windows Azure. A couple of years' experience with Azure in the industry has provided some obvious success stories, but has deflated some of the initial marketing hyperbole. As a general principle, Azure seems to work well in providing a Service-Oriented Architecture for services in enterprises that suffer wide fluctuations in demand. Instead of being obliged to provide hardware sufficient for the occasional peaks in demand, one can hire capacity only when it is needed, and the cost of hosting an application is no longer a capital cost. It enables companies to avoid having to scale out hardware for peak periods only to see it underused for the rest of the time. A customer-facing application such as a concert ticketing system, which suffers high demand in short, predictable bursts of activity, is a great example of an application that would work well in Azure. However, moving existing applications to Azure isn't something to be done on impulse. Unless your application is .NET-based, and consists of 'stateless' components that communicate via queues, you are probably in for a lot of redevelopment work. It makes most sense for IT departments who are already deep in this .NET mindset, and who also want 'grown-up' methods of staging, testing, and deployment. Azure fits well with this culture and offers, as a bonus, good Visual Studio integration. The most-commonly stated barrier to porting these applications to Azure is the problem of reconciling the use of the cloud with legislation for data privacy and security. Putting databases in the cloud is a sticky issue for many and impossible for some due to compliance and security issues, the need for direct control over data, and so on. In the face of feedback from the early adopters of Azure, Microsoft has broadened the architectural choices to cater for a wide range of requirements. As well as SQL Azure Database (SAD) and Azure storage, the unstructured 'BLOB and Entity-Attribute-Value' NoSQL storage alternative (which equates more closely with folders and files than a database), Windows Azure offers a wide range of storage options including use of services such as oData: developers who are programming for Windows Azure can simply choose the one most appropriate for their needs. Secondly, and crucially, the Windows Azure architecture allows you the freedom to produce hybrid applications, where only those parts that need cloud-based hosting are deployed to Azure, whereas those parts that must unavoidably be hosted in a corporate datacenter can stay there. By using a hybrid architecture, it will seldom, if ever, be necessary to move an entire application to the cloud, along with personal and financial data. For example that we could port to Azure only put those parts of our ticketing application that capture and process tickets orders. Once an order is captured, the financial side can be processed in our own data center. In short, Windows Azure seems to be a very effective way of providing services that are subject to wide but predictable fluctuations in demand. Have you come to the same conclusions, or do you think I've got it wrong? If you've had experience with Azure, would you recommend it? It would be great to hear from you. Cheers, Tony.

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• Welcome to the Red Gate BI Tools Team blog!

  - by BI Tools Team

  Welcome to the first ever post on the brand new Red Gate Business Intelligence Tools Team blog! About the team Nick Sutherland (product manager): After many years as a software developer and project manager, Nick took an MBA and turned to product marketing. SSAS Compare is his second lean startup product (the first being SQL Connect). Follow him on Twitter. David Pond (developer): Before he joined Red Gate in 2011, David made monitoring systems for Goodyear. Follow him on Twitter. Jonathan Watts (tester): Jonathan became a tester after finishing his media degree and joining Xerox. He joined Red Gate in 2004. Follow him on Twitter. James Duffy (technical author): After a spell as a writer in the video game industry, James lived briefly in Tokyo before returning to the UK to start at Red Gate. What we're working on We launched a beta of our first tool, SSAS Compare, last month. It works like SQL Compare but for SSAS cubes, letting you deploy just the changes you want. It's completely free (for now), so check it out. We're still working on it, and we're eager to hear what you think. We hope SSAS Compare will be the first of several tools Red Gate develops for BI professionals, so keep an eye out for more from us in the future. Why we need you This is your chance to help influence the course of SSAS Compare and our future BI tools. If you're a business intelligence specialist, we want to hear about the problems you face so we can build tools that solve them. What do you want to see? Tell us! We'll be posting more about SSAS Compare, business intelligence and our journey into BI in the coming days and weeks. Stay tuned!

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• Security Issues When Creating Pages in SharePoint

  - by Damon

  I was speaking (or rather IM'ing) with Ben Collins a while back and he came across an interesting problem that I wanted to document for the sake of posterity.  If you have a SharePoint user who has permissions to create a page in a page library, but that user is having security issues trying to actually make a page, then it the security issue may be related to their access rights on the master page gallery.  Users who create pages must have at least restricted read access to the master page gallery for page creation to succeed. That is one of the joys of working in SharePoint. if something doesn't show up there is usually a good but obscure reason for it, but SharePoint certainly won't tell you outright why it is.  All I have to say is that I'm glad he ran into that issue and not me.

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• An experiment: unlimited free trial

  - by Alex.Davies

  The .NET Demon team have just implemented an experiment that is quite a break from Red Gate's normal business model. Instead of the tool expiring after the trial period, it now continues to work, but with a new message that appears after the tool has saved you a certain amount of time. The rationale is that a user that stops using .NET Demon because the trial expired isn't doing anyone any good. We'd much rather people continue using it forever, as long as everyone that finds it useful and can afford it still pays for it. Hopefully the message appearing is annoying enough to achieve that, but not for people to uninstall it. It's true that many companies have tried it before with mixed results, but we have a secret weapon. The perfect nag message? The neat thing for .NET Demon is that we can easily measure exactly how much time .NET Demon has saved you, in terms of unnecessary project builds that Visual Studio would have done. When you press F5, the message shows you the time saved, and then makes you wait a shorter time before starting your application. Confronted with the truth about how amazing .NET Demon is, who can do anything but buy it? The real secret though, is that while you wait, .NET Demon gives you entertainment, in the form of a picture of a cute kitten. I've only had time to embed one kitten so far, but the eventual aim is for a random different kitten to appear each time. The psychological health benefits of a dose of kittens in the daily life of the developer are obvious. My only concern is that people will complain after paying for .NET Demon that the kittens are gone.

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• Data Model Dissonance

  - by Tony Davis

  So often at the start of the development of database applications, there is a premature rush to the keyboard. Unless, before we get there, we’ve mapped out and agreed the three data models, the Conceptual, the Logical and the Physical, then the inevitable refactoring will dog development work. It pays to get the data models sorted out up-front, however ‘agile’ you profess to be. The hardest model to get right, the most misunderstood, and the one most neglected by the various modeling tools, is the conceptual data model, and yet it is critical to all that follows. The conceptual model distils what the business understands about itself, and the way it operates. It represents the business rules that govern the required data, its constraints and its properties. The conceptual model uses the terminology of the business and defines the most important entities and their inter-relationships. Don’t assume that the organization’s understanding of these business rules is consistent or accurate. Too often, one department has a subtly different understanding of what an entity means and what it stores, from another. If our conceptual data model fails to resolve such inconsistencies, it will reduce data quality. If we don’t collect and measure the raw data in a consistent way across the whole business, how can we hope to perform meaningful aggregation? The conceptual data model has more to do with business than technology, and as such, developers often regard it as a worthy but rather arcane ceremony like saluting the flag or only eating fish on Friday. However, the consequences of getting it wrong have a direct and painful impact on many aspects of the project. If you adopt a silo-based (a.k.a. Domain driven) approach to development), you are still likely to suffer by starting with an incomplete knowledge of the domain. Even when you have surmounted these problems so that the data entities accurately reflect the business domain that the application represents, there are likely to be dire consequences from abandoning the goal of a shared, enterprise-wide understanding of the business. In reading this, you may recall experiences of the consequence of getting the conceptual data model wrong. I believe that Phil Factor, for example, witnessed the abandonment of a multi-million dollar banking project due to an inadequate conceptual analysis of how the bank defined a ‘customer’. We’d love to hear of any examples you know of development projects poleaxed by errors in the conceptual data model. Cheers, Tony

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• Are your personal insecurities screwing up your internal communications?

  - by Lucy Boyes

  I do some internal comms as part of my job. Quite a lot of it involves talking to people about stuff. I’m spending the next couple of weeks talking to lots of people about internal comms itself, because we haven’t done a lot of audience/user feedback gathering, and it turns out that if you talk to people about how they feel and what they think, you get some pretty interesting insights (and an idea of what to do next that isn’t just based on guesswork and generalising from self). Three things keep coming up from talking to people about what we suck at  in terms of internal comms. And, as far as I can tell, they’re all examples where personal insecurity on the part of the person doing the communicating makes the experience much worse for the people on the receiving end. 1. Spending time telling people how you’re going to do something, not what you’re doing and why Imagine you’ve got to give an update to a lot of people who don’t work in your area or department but do have an interest in what you’re doing (either because they want to know because they’re curious or because they need to know because it’s going to affect their work too). You don’t want to look bad at your job. You want to make them think you’ve got it covered – ideally because you do*. And you want to reassure them that there’s lots of exciting work going on in your area to make [insert thing of choice] happen to [insert thing of choice] so that [insert group of people] will be happy. That’s great! You’re doing a good job and you want to tell people about it. This is good comms stuff right here. However, you’re slightly afraid you might secretly be stupid or lazy or incompetent. And you’re exponentially more afraid that the people you’re talking to might think you’re stupid or lazy or incompetent. Or pointless. Or not-adding-value. Or whatever the thing that’s the worst possible thing to be in your company is. So you open by mentioning all the stuff you’re going to do, spending five minutes or so making sure that everyone knows that you’re DOING lots of STUFF. And the you talk for the rest of the time about HOW you’re going to do the stuff, because that way everyone will know that you’ve thought about this really hard and done tons of planning and had lots of great ideas about process and that you’ve got this one down. That’s the stuff you’ve got to say, right? To prove you’re not fundamentally worthless as a human being? Well, maybe. But probably not. See, the people who need to know how you’re going to do the stuff are the people doing the stuff. And those are the people in your area who you’ve (hopefully-please-for-the-love-of-everything-holy) already talked to in depth about how you’re going to do the thing (because else how could they help do it?). They are the only people who need to know the how**. It’s the difference between strategy and tactics. The people outside of your bubble of stuff-doing need to know the strategy – what it is that you’re doing, why, where you’re going with it, etc. The people on the ground with you need the strategy and the tactics, because else they won’t know how to do the stuff. But the outside people don’t really need the tactics at all. Don’t bother with the how unless your audience needs it. They probably don’t. It might make you feel better about yourself, but it’s much more likely that Bob and Jane are thinking about how long this meeting has gone on for already than how personally impressive and definitely-not-an-idiot you are for knowing how you’re going to do some work. Feeling marginally better about yourself (but, let’s face it, still insecure as heck) is not worth the cost, which in this case is the alienation of your audience. 2. Talking for too long about stuff This is kinda the same problem as the previous problem, only much less specific, and I’ve more or less covered why it’s bad already. Basic motivation: to make people think you’re not an idiot. What you do: talk for a very long time about what you’re doing so as to make it sound like you know what you’re doing and lots about it. What your audience wants: the shortest meaningful update. Some of this is a kill your darlings problem – the stuff you’re doing that seems really nifty to you seems really nifty to you, and thus you want to share it with everyone to show that you’re a smart person who thinks up nifty things to do. The downside to this is that it’s mostly only interesting to you – if other people don’t need to know, they likely also don’t care. Think about how you feel when someone is talking a lot to you about a lot of stuff that they’re doing which is at best tangentially interesting and/or relevant. You’re probably not thinking that they’re really smart and clearly know what they’re doing (unless they’re talking a lot and being really engaging about it, which is not the same as talking a lot). You’re probably thinking about something totally unrelated to the thing they’re talking about. Or the fact that you’re bored. You might even – and this is the opposite of what they’re hoping to achieve by talking a lot about stuff – be thinking they’re kind of an idiot. There’s another huge advantage to paring down what you’re trying to say to the barest possible points – it clarifies your thinking. The lightning talk format, as well as other formats which limit the time and/or number of slides you have to say a thing, are really good for doing this. It’s incredibly likely that your audience in this case (the people who need to know some things about your thing but not all the things about your thing) will get everything they need to know from five minutes of you talking about it, especially if trying to condense ALL THE THINGS into a five-minute talk has helped you get clear in your own mind what you’re doing, what you’re trying to say about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. The bonus of this is that by being clear in your thoughts and in what you say, and in not taking up lots of people’s time to tell them stuff they don’t really need to know, you actually come across as much, much smarter than the person who talks for half an hour or more about things that are semi-relevant at best. 3. Waiting until you’ve got every detail sorted before announcing a big change to the people affected by it This is the worst crime on the list. It’s also human nature. Announcing uncertainty – that something important is going to happen (big reorganisation, product getting canned, etc.) but you’re not quite sure what or when or how yet – is scary. There are risks to it. Uncertainty makes people anxious. It might even paralyse them. You can’t run a business while you’re figuring out what to do if you’ve paralysed everyone with fear over what the future might bring. And you’re scared that they might think you’re not the right person to be in charge of [thing] if you don’t even know what you’re doing with it. Best not to say anything until you know exactly what’s going to happen and you can reassure them all, right? Nope. The people who are going to be affected by whatever it is that you don’t quite know all the details of yet aren’t stupid***. You wouldn’t have hired them if they were. They know something’s up because you’ve got your guilty face on and you keep pulling people into meeting rooms and looking vaguely worried. Here’s the deal: it’s a lot less stressful for everyone (including you) if you’re up front from the beginning. We took this approach during a recent company-wide reorganisation and got really positive feedback. People would much, much rather be told that something is going to happen but you’re not entirely sure what it is yet than have you wait until it’s all fixed up and then fait accompli the heck out of them. They will tell you this themselves if you ask them. And here’s why: by waiting until you know exactly what’s going on to communicate, you remove any agency that the people that the thing is going to happen to might otherwise have had. I know you’re scared that they might get scared – and that’s natural and kind of admirable – but it’s also patronising and infantilising. Ask someone whether they’d rather work on a project which has an openly uncertain future from the beginning, or one where everything’s great until it gets shut down with no forewarning, and very few people are going to tell you they’d prefer the latter. Uncertainty is humanising. It’s you admitting that you don’t have all the answers, which is great, because no one does. It allows you to be consultative – you can actually ask other people what they think and how they feel and what they’d like to do and what they think you should do, and they’ll thank you for it and feel listened to and respected as people and colleagues. Which is a really good reason to start talking to them about what’s going on as soon as you know something’s going on yourself. All of the above assumes you actually care about talking to the people who work with you and for you, and that you’d like to do the right thing by them. If that’s not the case, you can cheerfully disregard the advice here, but if it is, you might want to think about the ways above – and the inevitable countless other ways – that making internal communication about you and not about your audience could actually be doing the people you’re trying to communicate with a huge disservice. So take a deep breath and talk. For five minutes or so. About the important things. Not the other things. As soon as you possibly can. And you’ll be fine.   *Of course you do. You’re good at your job. Don’t worry. **This might not always be true, but it is most of the time. Other people who need to know the how will either be people who you’ve already identified as needing-to-know and thus part of the same set as the people in you’re area you’ve already discussed this with, or else they’ll ask you. But don’t bring this stuff up unless someone asks for it, because most of the people in the audience really don’t care and you’re wasting their time. ***I mean, they might be. But let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they’re not.

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• Why should i use EJB?

  - by Nitesh Panchal

  Hello, As we all know that EJB's in 3.1 or 3.0 are simple POJOs. You just need to give annotations here and there and it gets converted to EJB from simple class. So, now my question is why should i use EJBs at all? Can i not do without them? In .Net i created class library and got things done. I never felt the need for anything like EJB. Simple classes were enough. Then, why in Java people stress on EJB? What is difference between a simple POJO and EJB in terms of execution and memory? Further which function should i write in EJB and which should i write in simple class? Should i dump every function in EJB only? or there is some kind of strategy? Does EJB provide anything special?

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• SSAS Compare version 1.0 released

  - by Red Gate Software BI Tools Team

  We’re pleased to announce that SSAS Compare version 1.0 has been released as a free tool. Version 1.0 includes: Comparisons of live databases and XMLA or Analysis Services Project files MDX syntax diffs and highlighting Server comparisons Deployment wizard with summaries of scripted actions Bug fixes and engine and UI refinements We’ve tested it on as many cube configurations as we could find (not just good old AdventureWorks!), but we can’t provide support for free tools — so if you’re reliant on SSAS Compare for your cube deployment, use it at your own risk. See the user license agreement in the installer for more details. SSAS Compare’s come a long way from its humble beginnings as an internal tool first developed for Red Gate’s own BI developers. Today’s SSAS Compare is now much more stable — not to mention much easier to use — and something the team is proud to have released with Red Gate’s name on. Next: Deployment Manager We’re working on integrating SSAS Compare cube deployment with our new Deployment Manager tool, so you’ll be able to create cube deployment scripts and automate the deployment process, too.  We’re documenting the process in a white paper we’ll publish online in the next week. Thank you! Thanks to all the SSAS Compare users out there. Without your feedback, we could never have produced such a stable product so quickly. We hope you continue to find useful. See you in Deployment Manager!  

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• Implementing Cluster Continuous Replication, Part 2

  Cluster continuous replication (CCR) helps to provide a more resilient email system with faster recovery. It was introduced in Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and uses log shipping and failover. configuring Cluster Continuous Replication on a Windows Server 2008 requires different techniques to Windows Server 2003. Brien Posey explains all.

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• Defining .NET Components with Namespaces

  A .NET software component is a compiled set of classes that provide a programmable interface that is used by consumer applications for a service. As a component is no more than a logical grouping of classes, what then is the best way to define the boundaries of a component within the .NET framework? How should the classes inter-operate? Patrick Smacchia, the lead developer of NDepend, discusses the issues and comes up with a solution.

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• 3 tips for SQL Azure connection perfection

  - by Richard Mitchell

  One of my main annoyances when dealing with SQL Azure is of course the occasional connection problems that communicating to a cloud database entails. If you're used to programming against a locally hosted SQL Server box this can be quite a change and annoying like you wouldn't believe. So after hitting the problem again in http://cloudservices.red-gate.com  I thought I'd write a little post to remind myself how I've got it working, I don't say it's right but at least "it works on my machine" Tip...(read more)

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• Make your TSQL easier to read during a presentation

  - by fatherjack

  SQL Server Management Studio 2012 has some neat settings that you can use to help your presentations at a SQL event better for the attendees if you are willing to spend a few minutes making some settings changes. Historically, I have been reluctant to make changes to my SSMS settings as it is such a tedious process and it's not 100% clear that what you think you are changing is actually what gets changed. With SSMS 2012 this has become a lot easier and a...(read more)

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• SQLIO Writes

  - by Grant Fritchey

  SQLIO is a fantastic utility for testing the abilities of the disks in your system. It has a very unfortunate name though, since it's not really a SQL Server testing utility at all. It really is a disk utility. They ought to call it DiskIO because they'd get more people using I think. Anyway, branding is not the point of this blog post. Writes are the point of this blog post. SQLIO works by slamming your disk. It performs as mean reads as it can or it performs as many writes as it can depending on how you've configured your tests. There are much smarter people than me who will get into all the various types of tests you should run. I'd suggest reading a bit of what Jonathan Kehayias (blog|twitter) has to say or wade into Denny Cherry's (blog|twitter) work. They're going to do a better job than I can describing all the benefits and mechanisms around using this excellent piece of software. My concerns are very focused. I needed to set up a series of tests to see how well our product SQL Storage Compress worked. I wanted to know the effects it would have on a system, the disk for sure, but also memory and CPU. How to stress the system? SQLIO of course. But when I set it up and ran it, following the documentation that comes with it, I was seeing better than 99% compression on the files. Don't get me wrong. Our product is magnificent, wonderful, all things great and beautiful, gets you coffee in the morning and is made mostly from bacon. But 99% compression. No, it's not that good. So what's up? Well, it's the configuration. The default mechanism is to load up a file, something large that will overwhelm your disk cache. You're instructed to load the file with a character 0x0. I never got a computer science degree. I went to film school. Because of this, I didn't memorize ASCII tables so when I saw this, I thought it was zero's or something. Nope. It's NULL. That's right, you're making a very large file, but you're filling it with NULL values. That's actually ok when all you're testing is the disk sub-system. But, when you want to test a compression and decompression, that can be an issue. I got around this fairly quickly. Instead of generating a file filled with NULL values, I just copied a database file for my tests. And to test it with SQL Storage Compress, I used a database file that had already been run through compression (about 40% compression on that file if you're interested). Now the reads were taken care of. I am seeing very realistic performance from decompressing the information for reads through SQLIO. But what about writes? Well, the issue is, what does SQLIO write? I don't have access to the code. But I do have access to the results. I did two different tests, just to be sure of what I was seeing. First test, use the .DAT file as described in the documentation. I opened the .DAT file after I was done with SQLIO, using WordPad. Guess what? It's a giant file full of air. SQLIO writes NULL values. What does that do to compression? I did the test again on a copy of an uncompressed database file. Then I ran the original and the SQLIO modified copy through ZIP to see what happened. I got better than 99% compression out of the SQLIO modified file (original file of 624,896kb went to 275,871kb compressed, after SQLIO it went to 608kb compressed). So, what does SQLIO write? It writes air. If you're trying to test it with compression or maybe some other type of file storage mechanism like dedupe, you need to know this because your tests really won't be valid. Should I find some other mechanism for testing? Yeah, if all I'm interested in is establishing performance to my own satisfaction, yes. But, I want to be able to compare my results with other people's results and we all need to be using the same tool in order for that to happen. SQLIO is the common mechanism that most people I know use to establish disk performance behavior. It'd be better if we could get SQLIO to do writes in some other fashion. Oh, and before I go, I get to brag a bit. Measuring IOPS, SQL Storage Compress outperforms my disk alone by about 30%.

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• Make your TSQL easier to read during a presentation

  - by Jonathan Allen

  SQL Server Management Studio 2012 has some neat settings that you can use to help your presentations at a SQL event better for the attendees if you are willing to spend a few minutes making some settings changes. Historically, I have been reluctant to make changes to my SSMS settings as it is such a tedious process and it’s not 100% clear that what you think you are changing is actually what gets changed. With SSMS 2012 this has become a lot easier and a lot less risky. In any session that involves TSQL there is a trade off between the speaker having all the code on screen and the attendees being able to read any of what is on screen. You (the speaker) might be able to read this when you are working on the code but plenty of your audience wont be able to make head or tail of it. SSMS 2012 has a zoom facility that can help: but don’t go nuts … Having the font too big means you will be scrolling a lot and the code will again be rendered unreadable. There is more though but you need to take a deep breath and open the Tools menu and delve into the SSMS options. In previous versions of SSMS this is a deep, dark and scary place where changing values can be obscure and sometimes catastrophic to the UI when you get back to the code editor. First things first, we set out as a good DBA and save our current (and presumably acceptable) SSMS configuration. From the import and Export Settings you can set up a file to hold all of the settings that you currently have. The wizard will open and ask you to pick an option. This time around choose to export settings. hit next and next again and then name your settings profile in the final step of the wizard and then click Finish. Once this is done then you can change whatever you like and always get back to this configuration in a couple of clicks. So what can you change to make for a good experience? Well there are plenty of things that can be altered but don’t go too mad and change too many things without taking a look at the results for every item on the list above you can change font, size, weight, colour, background colour etc. etc. but consider what you are trying to achieve and take it slowly. I have seen presenters with their settings set to have a yellow highlight and black font rather than the default pale blue background and slightly darker font so to achieve that select Text Editor and then select “Selected Text” in the Display Items listbox. As you change things the Sample area give you an idea of what effect you are going to have. Black and yellow is the colour combination with the highest contrast – that’s why bees and wasps# are that colour. What next? how about increasing the default font for your demo scripts? This means that any script you open and any new ones that you start will take on this font. No more zooming (or forgetting to) in the middle of sessions. now don’t forget to save this profile – follow the same steps as above but give the profile a different name, something like PresentationBigFontHighContrast might be appropriate. Once you are done making changes, export the settings once more and then go into the Import Export wizard and import settings from the first profile you created. Everything will be back to normal. Now making changes to suit your environment can be done very easily and with confidence. * – and warning tape and safety signs and so forth – Health and Safety officers simply copy nature!

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• Obscure SPUtility.SendMail Behavior When Manually Passing in Mail Headers

  - by Damon

  There are two ways to send mail in SharePoint: you can either use the mail components from the System.Net namespace, or you can send email using SharePoint's SPUtility.SendMail method.  One of the benefits of the SPUtility.SendMail method is that it uses the mail configuration from SharePoint, so you can manage settings in Central Administration instead of having to go through and modify your web.config file.  SPUtility.SendMail can get the job done, but it's defiantly not as developer friendly as the components from the System.Net namespace.  If you want to CC someone on an email, for example, you do NOT have a nice CC parameter - you have to manually add the CC mail header and pass it into the SPUtility.SendMail method.  I had to do this the other day, and ran into a really obscure issue. If you do NOT pass the headers into the method then SharePoint sends the email using the From Address configured in the Outgoing Mail settings in Central Admin.  If you pass headers into the method, but do not include the from header, then SharePoint sends the mail using the email address of the current user. This can be an issue if your mail server is setup to reject an email from an invalid email address or an email address that is not on your domain.  The way to fix this issue is to always pass in the from header.  If you want to use the configured From address, then you can do the following: SPWebApplication webApp = SPWebApplication.Lookup(new Uri(SPContext.Current.Site.Url)); StringDictionary headers = new StringDictionary(); headers.Add("from", webApp.OutboundMailSenderAddress);

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