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• Intermittent wired network issues in 14.04

  - by Tommy Brunn

  Since yesterday, my wired network connection has been dropping for a couple of seconds every 30 seconds or so. To my knowledge, I had not made any changes to my network. Output of ifconfig -a: ? ~ ifconfig -a eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 6c:f0:49:b9:b1:7f inet addr:192.168.0.16 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::6ef0:49ff:feb9:b17f/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:11597 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:9783 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:10101682 (10.1 MB) TX bytes:1215142 (1.2 MB) Interrupt:48 Base address:0x8000 lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:65536 Metric:1 RX packets:96691 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:96691 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:13594355 (13.5 MB) TX bytes:13594355 (13.5 MB) lspci |grep Ethernet: 04:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 03) Pinging my router: ? ~ ping 192.168.0.1 PING 192.168.0.1 (192.168.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from 192.168.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.435 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.0.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.571 ms ping: sendmsg: Network is unreachable ping: sendmsg: Network is unreachable ping: sendmsg: Network is unreachable ping: sendmsg: Network is unreachable ping: sendmsg: Network is unreachable 64 bytes from 192.168.0.1: icmp_seq=8 ttl=64 time=1.03 ms And the output of route: ? ~ route Kernel IP routing table Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface default 192.168.0.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0 192.168.0.0 * 255.255.255.0 U 1 0 0 eth0 Some messages from /var/logs/syslog: ? ~ tail -f /var/log/syslog Jun 6 10:37:34 lolbox dhclient: RCV: Advertise message on eth0 from fe80::120d:7fff:fe97:9d54. Jun 6 10:37:34 lolbox dhclient: IA_NA status code NoAddrsAvail. Jun 6 10:37:37 lolbox dnsmasq[1138]: Maximum number of concurrent DNS queries reached (max: 150) Jun 6 10:37:37 lolbox dnsmasq[1362]: Maximum number of concurrent DNS queries reached (max: 150) Jun 6 10:37:39 lolbox dhclient: XMT: Solicit on eth0, interval 8660ms. Jun 6 10:37:39 lolbox dhclient: RCV: Advertise message on eth0 from fe80::120d:7fff:fe97:9d54. Jun 6 10:37:39 lolbox dhclient: IA_NA status code NoAddrsAvail. Jun 6 10:37:47 lolbox dhclient: XMT: Solicit on eth0, interval 16820ms. Jun 6 10:37:47 lolbox dhclient: RCV: Advertise message on eth0 from fe80::120d:7fff:fe97:9d54. Jun 6 10:37:47 lolbox dhclient: IA_NA status code NoAddrsAvail. Jun 6 10:38:04 lolbox dhclient: XMT: Solicit on eth0, interval 34410ms. Jun 6 10:38:04 lolbox dhclient: RCV: Advertise message on eth0 from fe80::120d:7fff:fe97:9d54. Jun 6 10:38:04 lolbox dhclient: IA_NA status code NoAddrsAvail. Jun 6 10:38:16 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <warn> (eth0): DHCPv6 request timed out. Jun 6 10:38:16 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> (eth0): canceled DHCP transaction, DHCP client pid 13045 Jun 6 10:38:16 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) Stage 4 of 5 (IPv6 Configure Timeout) scheduled... Jun 6 10:38:16 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) Stage 4 of 5 (IPv6 Configure Timeout) started... Jun 6 10:38:16 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> (eth0): device state change: activated -> failed (reason 'ip-config-unavailable') [100 120 5] Jun 6 10:38:16 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> NetworkManager state is now DISCONNECTED Jun 6 10:38:16 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <warn> Activation (eth0) failed for connection 'Wired connection 1' Jun 6 10:38:16 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) Stage 4 of 5 (IPv6 Configure Timeout) complete. Jun 6 10:38:16 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> (eth0): device state change: failed -> disconnected (reason 'none') [120 30 0] Jun 6 10:38:16 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> (eth0): deactivating device (reason 'none') [0] Jun 6 10:37:34 lolbox whoopsie[1133]: online Jun 6 10:38:16 lolbox whoopsie[1133]: offline Jun 6 10:38:16 lolbox dbus[485]: [system] Activating service name='org.freedesktop.nm_dispatcher' (using servicehelper) Jun 6 10:38:16 lolbox dbus[485]: [system] Successfully activated service 'org.freedesktop.nm_dispatcher' Jun 6 10:38:16 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> (eth0): canceled DHCP transaction, DHCP client pid 13044 Jun 6 10:38:16 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <warn> DNS: plugin dnsmasq update failed Jun 6 10:38:16 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Removing DNS information from /sbin/resolvconf Jun 6 10:38:16 lolbox avahi-daemon[619]: Withdrawing address record for fe80::6ef0:49ff:feb9:b17f on eth0. Jun 6 10:38:16 lolbox avahi-daemon[619]: Leaving mDNS multicast group on interface eth0.IPv6 with address fe80::6ef0:49ff:feb9:b17f. Jun 6 10:38:16 lolbox avahi-daemon[619]: Interface eth0.IPv6 no longer relevant for mDNS. Jun 6 10:38:16 lolbox avahi-daemon[619]: Withdrawing address record for 192.168.0.16 on eth0. Jun 6 10:38:16 lolbox avahi-daemon[619]: Leaving mDNS multicast group on interface eth0.IPv4 with address 192.168.0.16. Jun 6 10:38:16 lolbox avahi-daemon[619]: Interface eth0.IPv4 no longer relevant for mDNS. Jun 6 10:38:16 lolbox dnsmasq[1362]: setting upstream servers from DBus Jun 6 10:38:17 lolbox avahi-daemon[619]: Joining mDNS multicast group on interface eth0.IPv6 with address fe80::6ef0:49ff:feb9:b17f. Jun 6 10:38:17 lolbox avahi-daemon[619]: New relevant interface eth0.IPv6 for mDNS. Jun 6 10:38:17 lolbox avahi-daemon[619]: Registering new address record for fe80::6ef0:49ff:feb9:b17f on eth0.*. Jun 6 10:38:18 lolbox dnsmasq[1138]: no servers found in /var/run/dnsmasq/resolv.conf, will retry Jun 6 10:38:18 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Auto-activating connection 'Wired connection 1'. Jun 6 10:38:18 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) starting connection 'Wired connection 1' Jun 6 10:38:18 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> (eth0): device state change: disconnected -> prepare (reason 'none') [30 40 0] Jun 6 10:38:18 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> NetworkManager state is now CONNECTING Jun 6 10:38:18 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) Stage 1 of 5 (Device Prepare) scheduled... Jun 6 10:38:18 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) Stage 1 of 5 (Device Prepare) started... Jun 6 10:38:18 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) Stage 2 of 5 (Device Configure) scheduled... Jun 6 10:38:18 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) Stage 1 of 5 (Device Prepare) complete. Jun 6 10:38:18 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) Stage 2 of 5 (Device Configure) starting... Jun 6 10:38:18 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> (eth0): device state change: prepare -> config (reason 'none') [40 50 0] Jun 6 10:38:18 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) Stage 2 of 5 (Device Configure) successful. Jun 6 10:38:18 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) Stage 3 of 5 (IP Configure Start) scheduled. Jun 6 10:38:18 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) Stage 2 of 5 (Device Configure) complete. Jun 6 10:38:18 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) Stage 3 of 5 (IP Configure Start) started... Jun 6 10:38:18 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> (eth0): device state change: config -> ip-config (reason 'none') [50 70 0] Jun 6 10:38:18 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) Beginning DHCPv4 transaction (timeout in 45 seconds) Jun 6 10:38:18 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> dhclient started with pid 13160 Jun 6 10:38:18 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) Beginning DHCPv6 transaction (timeout in 45 seconds) Jun 6 10:38:18 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> dhclient started with pid 13161 Jun 6 10:38:18 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) Stage 3 of 5 (IP Configure Start) complete. Jun 6 10:38:18 lolbox avahi-daemon[619]: Withdrawing address record for fe80::6ef0:49ff:feb9:b17f on eth0. Jun 6 10:38:18 lolbox avahi-daemon[619]: Leaving mDNS multicast group on interface eth0.IPv6 with address fe80::6ef0:49ff:feb9:b17f. Jun 6 10:38:18 lolbox avahi-daemon[619]: Interface eth0.IPv6 no longer relevant for mDNS. Jun 6 10:38:18 lolbox dhclient: Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client 4.2.4 Jun 6 10:38:18 lolbox dhclient: Copyright 2004-2012 Internet Systems Consortium. Jun 6 10:38:18 lolbox dhclient: All rights reserved. Jun 6 10:38:18 lolbox dhclient: For info, please visit https://www.isc.org/software/dhcp/ Jun 6 10:38:18 lolbox dhclient: Jun 6 10:38:19 lolbox dhclient: Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client 4.2.4 Jun 6 10:38:19 lolbox dhclient: Copyright 2004-2012 Internet Systems Consortium. Jun 6 10:38:19 lolbox dhclient: All rights reserved. Jun 6 10:38:19 lolbox dhclient: For info, please visit https://www.isc.org/software/dhcp/ Jun 6 10:38:19 lolbox dhclient: Jun 6 10:38:19 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> (eth0): DHCPv4 state changed nbi -> preinit Jun 6 10:38:19 lolbox dhclient: Bound to *:546 Jun 6 10:38:19 lolbox dhclient: Listening on Socket/eth0 Jun 6 10:38:19 lolbox dhclient: Sending on Socket/eth0 Jun 6 10:38:19 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> (eth0): DHCPv6 state changed nbi -> preinit6 Jun 6 10:38:19 lolbox dhclient: Listening on LPF/eth0/6c:f0:49:b9:b1:7f Jun 6 10:38:19 lolbox dhclient: Sending on LPF/eth0/6c:f0:49:b9:b1:7f Jun 6 10:38:19 lolbox dhclient: Sending on Socket/fallback Jun 6 10:38:19 lolbox dhclient: DHCPREQUEST of 192.168.0.16 on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 (xid=0x3fc9376d) Jun 6 10:38:19 lolbox dhclient: XMT: Solicit on eth0, interval 1020ms. Jun 6 10:38:19 lolbox dhclient: send_packet6: Cannot assign requested address Jun 6 10:38:19 lolbox dhclient: dhc6: send_packet6() sent -1 of 77 bytes Jun 6 10:38:20 lolbox dhclient: DHCPACK of 192.168.0.16 from 192.168.0.1 Jun 6 10:38:20 lolbox dhclient: bound to 192.168.0.16 -- renewal in 41481 seconds. Jun 6 10:38:20 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> (eth0): DHCPv4 state changed preinit -> reboot Jun 6 10:38:20 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> address 192.168.0.16 Jun 6 10:38:20 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> prefix 24 (255.255.255.0) Jun 6 10:38:20 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> gateway 192.168.0.1 Jun 6 10:38:20 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> nameserver '83.255.245.11' Jun 6 10:38:20 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> nameserver '193.150.193.150' Jun 6 10:38:20 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) Stage 5 of 5 (IPv4 Configure Commit) scheduled... Jun 6 10:38:20 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) Stage 5 of 5 (IPv4 Commit) started... Jun 6 10:38:20 lolbox avahi-daemon[619]: Joining mDNS multicast group on interface eth0.IPv4 with address 192.168.0.16. Jun 6 10:38:20 lolbox avahi-daemon[619]: New relevant interface eth0.IPv4 for mDNS. Jun 6 10:38:20 lolbox avahi-daemon[619]: Registering new address record for 192.168.0.16 on eth0.IPv4. Jun 6 10:38:20 lolbox dhclient: XMT: Solicit on eth0, interval 2110ms. Jun 6 10:38:20 lolbox dhclient: send_packet6: Cannot assign requested address Jun 6 10:38:20 lolbox dhclient: dhc6: send_packet6() sent -1 of 77 bytes Jun 6 10:38:20 lolbox avahi-daemon[619]: Joining mDNS multicast group on interface eth0.IPv6 with address fe80::6ef0:49ff:feb9:b17f. Jun 6 10:38:20 lolbox avahi-daemon[619]: New relevant interface eth0.IPv6 for mDNS. Jun 6 10:38:20 lolbox avahi-daemon[619]: Registering new address record for fe80::6ef0:49ff:feb9:b17f on eth0.*. Jun 6 10:38:21 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> (eth0): device state change: ip-config -> secondaries (reason 'none') [70 90 0] Jun 6 10:38:21 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) Stage 5 of 5 (IPv4 Commit) complete. Jun 6 10:38:21 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> (eth0): device state change: secondaries -> activated (reason 'none') [90 100 0] Jun 6 10:38:21 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> NetworkManager state is now CONNECTED_GLOBAL Jun 6 10:38:21 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Policy set 'Wired connection 1' (eth0) as default for IPv4 routing and DNS. Jun 6 10:38:21 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Writing DNS information to /sbin/resolvconf Jun 6 10:38:21 lolbox dnsmasq[1362]: setting upstream servers from DBus Jun 6 10:38:21 lolbox dnsmasq[1362]: using nameserver 127.0.0.1#53 Jun 6 10:38:21 lolbox dnsmasq[1362]: using nameserver 193.150.193.150#53 Jun 6 10:38:21 lolbox dnsmasq[1362]: using nameserver 83.255.245.11#53 Jun 6 10:38:21 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) successful, device activated. Jun 6 10:38:21 lolbox whoopsie[1133]: message repeated 2 times: [ offline] Jun 6 10:38:21 lolbox whoopsie[1133]: online Jun 6 10:38:21 lolbox ntpdate[13217]: Can't find host ntp.ubuntu.com: Name or service not known (-2) Jun 6 10:38:21 lolbox ntpdate[13217]: no servers can be used, exiting Jun 6 10:38:22 lolbox dnsmasq[1138]: reading /var/run/dnsmasq/resolv.conf Jun 6 10:38:22 lolbox dnsmasq[1138]: using nameserver 127.0.1.1#53 Jun 6 10:38:22 lolbox dhclient: XMT: Solicit on eth0, interval 4080ms. Jun 6 10:38:22 lolbox dhclient: RCV: Advertise message on eth0 from fe80::120d:7fff:fe97:9d54. Jun 6 10:38:22 lolbox dhclient: IA_NA status code NoAddrsAvail. Jun 6 10:38:26 lolbox dhclient: XMT: Solicit on eth0, interval 8450ms. Jun 6 10:38:26 lolbox dhclient: RCV: Advertise message on eth0 from fe80::120d:7fff:fe97:9d54. Jun 6 10:38:26 lolbox dhclient: IA_NA status code NoAddrsAvail. Jun 6 10:38:35 lolbox dhclient: XMT: Solicit on eth0, interval 16630ms. Jun 6 10:38:35 lolbox dhclient: RCV: Advertise message on eth0 from fe80::120d:7fff:fe97:9d54. Jun 6 10:38:35 lolbox dhclient: IA_NA status code NoAddrsAvail. Jun 6 10:38:51 lolbox dhclient: XMT: Solicit on eth0, interval 34860ms. Jun 6 10:38:51 lolbox dhclient: RCV: Advertise message on eth0 from fe80::120d:7fff:fe97:9d54. Jun 6 10:38:51 lolbox dhclient: IA_NA status code NoAddrsAvail. Jun 6 10:38:58 lolbox dnsmasq[1138]: Maximum number of concurrent DNS queries reached (max: 150) Jun 6 10:38:58 lolbox dnsmasq[1362]: Maximum number of concurrent DNS queries reached (max: 150) Jun 6 10:39:04 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <warn> (eth0): DHCPv6 request timed out. Jun 6 10:39:04 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> (eth0): canceled DHCP transaction, DHCP client pid 13161 Jun 6 10:39:04 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) Stage 4 of 5 (IPv6 Configure Timeout) scheduled... Jun 6 10:39:04 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) Stage 4 of 5 (IPv6 Configure Timeout) started... Jun 6 10:39:04 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> (eth0): device state change: activated -> failed (reason 'ip-config-unavailable') [100 120 5] Jun 6 10:39:04 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> NetworkManager state is now DISCONNECTED Jun 6 10:39:04 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <warn> Activation (eth0) failed for connection 'Wired connection 1' Jun 6 10:38:22 lolbox whoopsie[1133]: online Jun 6 10:39:04 lolbox whoopsie[1133]: offline Jun 6 10:39:04 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) Stage 4 of 5 (IPv6 Configure Timeout) complete. Jun 6 10:39:04 lolbox dbus[485]: [system] Activating service name='org.freedesktop.nm_dispatcher' (using servicehelper) Jun 6 10:39:04 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> (eth0): device state change: failed -> disconnected (reason 'none') [120 30 0] Jun 6 10:39:04 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> (eth0): deactivating device (reason 'none') [0] Jun 6 10:39:04 lolbox dbus[485]: [system] Successfully activated service 'org.freedesktop.nm_dispatcher' Jun 6 10:39:04 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> (eth0): canceled DHCP transaction, DHCP client pid 13160 Jun 6 10:39:04 lolbox avahi-daemon[619]: Withdrawing address record for fe80::6ef0:49ff:feb9:b17f on eth0. Jun 6 10:39:04 lolbox avahi-daemon[619]: Leaving mDNS multicast group on interface eth0.IPv6 with address fe80::6ef0:49ff:feb9:b17f. Jun 6 10:39:04 lolbox avahi-daemon[619]: Interface eth0.IPv6 no longer relevant for mDNS. Jun 6 10:39:04 lolbox avahi-daemon[619]: Withdrawing address record for 192.168.0.16 on eth0. Jun 6 10:39:04 lolbox avahi-daemon[619]: Leaving mDNS multicast group on interface eth0.IPv4 with address 192.168.0.16. Jun 6 10:39:04 lolbox avahi-daemon[619]: Interface eth0.IPv4 no longer relevant for mDNS. Jun 6 10:39:04 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <warn> DNS: plugin dnsmasq update failed Jun 6 10:39:04 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Removing DNS information from /sbin/resolvconf Jun 6 10:39:04 lolbox dnsmasq[1362]: setting upstream servers from DBus Jun 6 10:39:05 lolbox avahi-daemon[619]: Joining mDNS multicast group on interface eth0.IPv6 with address fe80::6ef0:49ff:feb9:b17f. Jun 6 10:39:05 lolbox avahi-daemon[619]: New relevant interface eth0.IPv6 for mDNS. Jun 6 10:39:05 lolbox avahi-daemon[619]: Registering new address record for fe80::6ef0:49ff:feb9:b17f on eth0.*. Jun 6 10:39:06 lolbox dnsmasq[1138]: no servers found in /var/run/dnsmasq/resolv.conf, will retry Jun 6 10:39:07 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Auto-activating connection 'Wired connection 1'. Jun 6 10:39:07 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) starting connection 'Wired connection 1' Jun 6 10:39:07 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> (eth0): device state change: disconnected -> prepare (reason 'none') [30 40 0] Jun 6 10:39:07 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> NetworkManager state is now CONNECTING Jun 6 10:39:07 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) Stage 1 of 5 (Device Prepare) scheduled... Jun 6 10:39:07 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) Stage 1 of 5 (Device Prepare) started... Jun 6 10:39:07 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) Stage 2 of 5 (Device Configure) scheduled... Jun 6 10:39:07 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) Stage 1 of 5 (Device Prepare) complete. Jun 6 10:39:07 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) Stage 2 of 5 (Device Configure) starting... Jun 6 10:39:07 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> (eth0): device state change: prepare -> config (reason 'none') [40 50 0] Jun 6 10:39:07 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) Stage 2 of 5 (Device Configure) successful. Jun 6 10:39:07 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) Stage 3 of 5 (IP Configure Start) scheduled. Jun 6 10:39:07 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) Stage 2 of 5 (Device Configure) complete. Jun 6 10:39:07 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) Stage 3 of 5 (IP Configure Start) started... Jun 6 10:39:07 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> (eth0): device state change: config -> ip-config (reason 'none') [50 70 0] Jun 6 10:39:07 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) Beginning DHCPv4 transaction (timeout in 45 seconds) Jun 6 10:39:07 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> dhclient started with pid 13270 Jun 6 10:39:07 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) Beginning DHCPv6 transaction (timeout in 45 seconds) Jun 6 10:39:07 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> dhclient started with pid 13271 Jun 6 10:39:07 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) Stage 3 of 5 (IP Configure Start) complete. Jun 6 10:39:07 lolbox avahi-daemon[619]: Withdrawing address record for fe80::6ef0:49ff:feb9:b17f on eth0. Jun 6 10:39:07 lolbox avahi-daemon[619]: Leaving mDNS multicast group on interface eth0.IPv6 with address fe80::6ef0:49ff:feb9:b17f. Jun 6 10:39:07 lolbox avahi-daemon[619]: Interface eth0.IPv6 no longer relevant for mDNS. Jun 6 10:39:07 lolbox dhclient: Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client 4.2.4 Jun 6 10:39:07 lolbox dhclient: Copyright 2004-2012 Internet Systems Consortium. Jun 6 10:39:07 lolbox dhclient: All rights reserved. Jun 6 10:39:07 lolbox dhclient: For info, please visit https://www.isc.org/software/dhcp/ Jun 6 10:39:07 lolbox dhclient: Jun 6 10:39:08 lolbox dhclient: Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client 4.2.4 Jun 6 10:39:08 lolbox dhclient: Copyright 2004-2012 Internet Systems Consortium. Jun 6 10:39:08 lolbox dhclient: All rights reserved. Jun 6 10:39:08 lolbox dhclient: For info, please visit https://www.isc.org/software/dhcp/ Jun 6 10:39:08 lolbox dhclient: Jun 6 10:39:08 lolbox dhclient: Bound to *:546 Jun 6 10:39:08 lolbox dhclient: Listening on Socket/eth0 Jun 6 10:39:08 lolbox dhclient: Sending on Socket/eth0 Jun 6 10:39:08 lolbox kernel: [ 1446.098590] type=1400 audit(1402043948.002:75): apparmor="DENIED" operation="signal" profile="/usr/lib/NetworkManager/nm-dhcp-client.action" pid=13273 comm="nm-dhcp-client." requested_mask="send" denied_mask="send" signal=term peer="/sbin/dhclient" Jun 6 10:39:08 lolbox kernel: [ 1446.098599] type=1400 audit(1402043948.002:76): apparmor="DENIED" operation="signal" profile="/sbin/dhclient" pid=13273 comm="nm-dhcp-client." requested_mask="receive" denied_mask="receive" signal=term peer="/usr/lib/NetworkManager/nm-dhcp-client.action" Jun 6 10:39:08 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> (eth0): DHCPv4 state changed nbi -> preinit Jun 6 10:39:08 lolbox dhclient: Listening on LPF/eth0/6c:f0:49:b9:b1:7f Jun 6 10:39:08 lolbox dhclient: Sending on LPF/eth0/6c:f0:49:b9:b1:7f Jun 6 10:39:08 lolbox dhclient: Sending on Socket/fallback Jun 6 10:39:08 lolbox dhclient: DHCPREQUEST of 192.168.0.16 on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 (xid=0x3e0183b9) Jun 6 10:39:08 lolbox dhclient: XMT: Solicit on eth0, interval 1050ms. Jun 6 10:39:08 lolbox dhclient: send_packet6: Cannot assign requested address Jun 6 10:39:08 lolbox dhclient: dhc6: send_packet6() sent -1 of 77 bytes Jun 6 10:39:09 lolbox dhclient: DHCPACK of 192.168.0.16 from 192.168.0.1 Jun 6 10:39:09 lolbox dhclient: bound to 192.168.0.16 -- renewal in 35498 seconds. Jun 6 10:39:09 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> (eth0): DHCPv4 state changed preinit -> reboot Jun 6 10:39:09 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> address 192.168.0.16 Jun 6 10:39:09 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> prefix 24 (255.255.255.0) Jun 6 10:39:09 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> gateway 192.168.0.1 Jun 6 10:39:09 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> nameserver '83.255.245.11' Jun 6 10:39:09 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> nameserver '193.150.193.150' Jun 6 10:39:09 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) Stage 5 of 5 (IPv4 Configure Commit) scheduled... Jun 6 10:39:09 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) Stage 5 of 5 (IPv4 Commit) started... Jun 6 10:39:09 lolbox avahi-daemon[619]: Joining mDNS multicast group on interface eth0.IPv4 with address 192.168.0.16. Jun 6 10:39:09 lolbox avahi-daemon[619]: New relevant interface eth0.IPv4 for mDNS. Jun 6 10:39:09 lolbox avahi-daemon[619]: Registering new address record for 192.168.0.16 on eth0.IPv4. Jun 6 10:39:09 lolbox avahi-daemon[619]: Joining mDNS multicast group on interface eth0.IPv6 with address fe80::6ef0:49ff:feb9:b17f. Jun 6 10:39:09 lolbox avahi-daemon[619]: New relevant interface eth0.IPv6 for mDNS. Jun 6 10:39:09 lolbox avahi-daemon[619]: Registering new address record for fe80::6ef0:49ff:feb9:b17f on eth0.*. Jun 6 10:39:10 lolbox dhclient: XMT: Solicit on eth0, interval 2180ms. Jun 6 10:39:10 lolbox dhclient: RCV: Advertise message on eth0 from fe80::120d:7fff:fe97:9d54. Jun 6 10:39:10 lolbox dhclient: IA_NA status code NoAddrsAvail. Jun 6 10:39:10 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> (eth0): device state change: ip-config -> secondaries (reason 'none') [70 90 0] Jun 6 10:39:10 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) Stage 5 of 5 (IPv4 Commit) complete. Jun 6 10:39:10 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> (eth0): device state change: secondaries -> activated (reason 'none') [90 100 0] Jun 6 10:39:10 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> NetworkManager state is now CONNECTED_GLOBAL Jun 6 10:39:10 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Policy set 'Wired connection 1' (eth0) as default for IPv4 routing and DNS. Jun 6 10:39:10 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Writing DNS information to /sbin/resolvconf Jun 6 10:39:10 lolbox dnsmasq[1362]: setting upstream servers from DBus Jun 6 10:39:10 lolbox dnsmasq[1362]: using nameserver 127.0.0.1#53 Jun 6 10:39:10 lolbox dnsmasq[1362]: using nameserver 193.150.193.150#53 Jun 6 10:39:10 lolbox dnsmasq[1362]: using nameserver 83.255.245.11#53 Jun 6 10:39:10 lolbox NetworkManager[862]: <info> Activation (eth0) successful, device activated. Jun 6 10:39:10 lolbox whoopsie[1133]: message repeated 2 times: [ offline] Jun 6 10:39:10 lolbox whoopsie[1133]: online Jun 6 10:39:10 lolbox ntpdate[13339]: Can't find host ntp.ubuntu.com: Name or service not known (-2) Jun 6 10:39:10 lolbox ntpdate[13339]: no servers can be used, exiting Jun 6 10:39:11 lolbox dnsmasq[1138]: reading /var/run/dnsmasq/resolv.conf Jun 6 10:39:11 lolbox dnsmasq[1138]: using nameserver 127.0.1.1#53 Jun 6 10:39:12 lolbox dhclient: XMT: Solicit on eth0, interval 4350ms. Jun 6 10:39:12 lolbox dhclient: RCV: Advertise message on eth0 from fe80::120d:7fff:fe97:9d54. Jun 6 10:39:12 lolbox dhclient: IA_NA status code NoAddrsAvail. Jun 6 10:39:16 lolbox dhclient: XMT: Solicit on eth0, interval 8740ms. Jun 6 10:39:16 lolbox dhclient: RCV: Advertise message on eth0 from fe80::120d:7fff:fe97:9d54. Jun 6 10:39:16 lolbox dhclient: IA_NA status code NoAddrsAvail. Jun 6 10:39:17 lolbox dnsmasq[1138]: Maximum number of concurrent DNS queries reached (max: 150) Jun 6 10:39:17 lolbox dnsmasq[1362]: Maximum number of concurrent DNS queries reached (max: 150) Jun 6 10:39:25 lolbox dhclient: XMT: Solicit on eth0, interval 17610ms. Jun 6 10:39:25 lolbox dhclient: RCV: Advertise message on eth0 from fe80::120d:7fff:fe97:9d54. Jun 6 10:39:25 lolbox dhclient: IA_NA status code NoAddrsAvail.

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• SQL SERVER – Attach mdf file without ldf file in Database

  - by pinaldave

  Background Story: One of my friends recently called up and asked me if I had spare time to look at his database and give him a performance tuning advice. Because I had some free time to help him out, I said yes. I asked him to send me the details of his database structure and sample data. He said that since his database is in a very early stage and is small as of the moment, so he told me that he would like me to have a complete database. My response to him was “Sure! In that case, take a backup of the database and send it to me. I will restore it into my computer and play with it.” He did send me his database; however, his method made me write this quick note here. Instead of taking a full backup of the database and sending it to me, he sent me only the .mdf (primary database file). In fact, I asked for a complete backup (I wanted to review file groups, files, as well as few other details).  Upon calling my friend,  I found that he was not available. Now,  he left me with only a .mdf file. As I had some extra time, I decided to checkout his database structure and get back to him regarding the full backup, whenever I can get in touch with him again. Technical Talk: If the database is shutdown gracefully and there was no abrupt shutdown (power outrages, pulling plugs to machines, machine crashes or any other reasons), it is possible (there’s no guarantee) to attach .mdf file only to the server. Please note that there can be many more reasons for a database that is not getting attached or restored. In my case, the database had a clean shutdown and there were no complex issues. I was able to recreate a transaction log file and attached the received .mdf file. There are multiple ways of doing this. I am listing all of them here. Before using any of them, please consult the Domain Expert in your company or industry. Also, never attempt this on live/production server without the presence of a Disaster Recovery expert. USE [master] GO -- Method 1: I use this method EXEC sp_attach_single_file_db @dbname='TestDb', @physname=N'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQL\DATA\TestDb.mdf' GO -- Method 2: CREATE DATABASE TestDb ON (FILENAME = N'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQL\DATA\TestDb.mdf') FOR ATTACH_REBUILD_LOG GO Method 2: If one or more log files are missing, they are recreated again. There is one more method which I am demonstrating here but I have not used myself before. According to Book Online, it will work only if there is one log file that is missing. If there are more than one log files involved, all of them are required to undergo the same procedure. -- Method 3: CREATE DATABASE TestDb ON ( FILENAME = N'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQL\DATA\TestDb.mdf') FOR ATTACH GO Please read the Book Online in depth and consult DR experts before working on the production server. In my case, the above syntax just worked fine as the database was clean when it was detached. Feel free to write your opinions and experiences for it will help the IT community to learn more from your suggestions and skills. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, Readers Question, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Backup and Restore, SQL Data Storage, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Creating PDF documents dynamically using Umbraco and XSL-FO part 2

  - by Vizioz Limited

  Since my last post I have made a few modifications to the PDF generation, the main one being that the files are now dynamically renamed so that they reflect the name of the case study instead of all being called PDF.PDF which was not a very helpful filename, I just wanted to get something live last week, so decided that something was better than nothing :)The issue with the filenames comes down to the way that the PDF's are being generated by using an alternative template in Umbraco, this means that all you need to do is add " /pdf " to the end of a case study URL and it will create a PDF version of the case study. The down side is that your browser will merrily download the file and save it as PDF.PDF because that is the name of the last part of the URL.What you need to do is set the content-disposition header to be equal to the name you would like the file use, Darren Ferguson mentioned this on the Change the name of the PDF forum post.We have used the same technique for downloading dynamically generated excel files, so I thought it would be useful to create a small macro to set both this header and also to set the caching headers to prevent any caching issues, I think in the past we have experienced all possible issues, including various issues where IE behaves differently to other browsers when you are using SSL and so the below code should work in all situations!The template for the PDF alternative template is very simple:<%@ Master Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/umbraco/masterpages/default.master" AutoEventWireup="true" %><asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="ContentPlaceHolderDefault" runat="server"> <umbraco:Macro Alias="PDFHeaders" runat="server"></umbraco:Macro> <umbraco:Macro xsl="FO-CaseStudy.xslt" Alias="PDFXSLFO" runat="server"></umbraco:Macro></asp:Content>The following code snippet is the XSLT macro that simply creates our file name and then passes the file name into the helper function:<xsl:template match="/"> <xsl:variable name="fileName"> <xsl:text>Vizioz_</xsl:text> <xsl:value-of select="$currentPage/@nodeName" /> <xsl:text>_case_study.pdf</xsl:text> </xsl:variable> <xsl:value-of select="Vizioz.Helper:AddDocumentDownloadHeaders('application/pdf', $fileName)"/> </xsl:template>And the following code is the helper function that clears the current response and adds all the appropriate headers:public static void AddDocumentDownloadHeaders(string contentType, string fileName){ HttpResponse response = HttpContext.Current.Response; HttpRequest request = HttpContext.Current.Request; response.Clear(); response.ClearHeaders(); if (request.IsSecureConnection & request.Browser.Browser == "IE") { // Don't use the caching headers if the browser is IE and it's a secure connection // see: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/323308 } else { // force not using the cache response.AppendHeader("Cache-Control", "no-cache"); response.AppendHeader("Cache-Control", "private"); response.AppendHeader("Cache-Control", "no-store"); response.AppendHeader("Cache-Control", "must-revalidate"); response.AppendHeader("Cache-Control", "max-stale=0"); response.AppendHeader("Cache-Control", "post-check=0"); response.AppendHeader("Cache-Control", "pre-check=0"); response.AppendHeader("Pragma", "no-cache"); response.Cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.NoCache); response.Cache.SetNoStore(); response.Cache.SetExpires(DateTime.UtcNow.AddMinutes(-1)); } response.AppendHeader("Expires", DateTime.Now.AddMinutes(-1).ToLongDateString()); response.AppendHeader("Keep-Alive", "timeout=3, max=993"); response.AddHeader("content-disposition", "attachment; filename=\"" + fileName + "\""); response.ContentType = contentType;}I will write another blog soon with some more details about XSL-FO and how to create the PDF's dynamically.Please do re-tweet if you find this interest :)

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• SQL SERVER – Reducing CXPACKET Wait Stats for High Transactional Database

  - by pinaldave

  While engaging in a performance tuning consultation for a client, a situation occurred where they were facing a lot of CXPACKET Waits Stats. The client asked me if I could help them reduce this huge number of wait stats. I usually receive this kind of request from other client as well, but the important thing to understand is whether this question has any merits or benefits, or not. Before we continue the resolution, let us understand what CXPACKET Wait Stats are. The official definition suggests that CXPACKET Wait Stats occurs when trying to synchronize the query processor exchange iterator. You may consider lowering the degree of parallelism if a conflict concerning this wait type develops into a problem. (from BOL) In simpler words, when a parallel operation is created for SQL Query, there are multiple threads for a single query. Each query deals with a different set of the data (or rows). Due to some reasons, one or more of the threads lag behind, creating the CXPACKET Wait Stat. Threads which came first have to wait for the slower thread to finish. The Wait by a specific completed thread is called CXPACKET Wait Stat. Note that CXPACKET Wait is done by completed thread and not the one which are unfinished. “Note that not all the CXPACKET wait types are bad. You might experience a case when it totally makes sense. There might also be cases when this is also unavoidable. If you remove this particular wait type for any query, then that query may run slower because the parallel operations are disabled for the query.” Now let us see what the best practices to reduce the CXPACKET Wait Stats are. The suggestions, with which you will find that if you search online through the browser, would play a major role as and might be asked about their jobs In addition, might tell you that you should set ‘maximum degree of parallelism’ to 1. I do agree with these suggestions, too; however, I think this is not the final resolutions. As soon as you set your entire query to run on single CPU, you will get a very bad performance from the queries which are actually performing okay when using parallelism. The best suggestion to this is that you set ‘the maximum degree of parallelism’ to a lower number or 1 (be very careful with this – it can create more problems) but tune the queries which can be benefited from multiple CPU’s. You can use query hint OPTION (MAXDOP 0) to run the server to use parallelism. Here is the two-quick script which helps to resolve these issues: Change MAXDOP at Server Level EXEC sys.sp_configure N'max degree of parallelism', N'1' GO RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE GO Run Query with all the CPU (using parallelism) USE AdventureWorks GO SELECT * FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail ORDER BY ProductID OPTION (MAXDOP 0) GO Below is the blog post which will help you to find all the parallel query in your server. SQL SERVER – Find Queries using Parallelism from Cached Plan Please note running Queries in single CPU may worsen your performance and it is not recommended at all. Infect this can be very bad advise. I strongly suggest that you identify the queries which are offending and tune them instead of following any other suggestions. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Optimization, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL White Papers, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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• SQL SERVER – Merge Operations – Insert, Update, Delete in Single Execution

  - by pinaldave

  This blog post is written in response to T-SQL Tuesday hosted by Jorge Segarra (aka SQLChicken). I have been very active using these Merge operations in my development. However, I have found out from my consultancy work and friends that these amazing operations are not utilized by them most of the time. Here is my attempt to bring the necessity of using the Merge Operation to surface one more time. MERGE is a new feature that provides an efficient way to do multiple DML operations. In earlier versions of SQL Server, we had to write separate statements to INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE data based on certain conditions; however, at present, by using the MERGE statement, we can include the logic of such data changes in one statement that even checks when the data is matched and then just update it, and similarly, when the data is unmatched, it is inserted. One of the most important advantages of MERGE statement is that the entire data are read and processed only once. In earlier versions, three different statements had to be written to process three different activities (INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE); however, by using MERGE statement, all the update activities can be done in one pass of database table. I have written about these Merge Operations earlier in my blog post over here SQL SERVER – 2008 – Introduction to Merge Statement – One Statement for INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE. I was asked by one of the readers that how do we know that this operator was doing everything in single pass and was not calling this Merge Operator multiple times. Let us run the same example which I have used earlier; I am listing the same here again for convenience. --Let’s create Student Details and StudentTotalMarks and inserted some records. USE tempdb GO CREATE TABLE StudentDetails ( StudentID INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, StudentName VARCHAR(15) ) GO INSERT INTO StudentDetails VALUES(1,'SMITH') INSERT INTO StudentDetails VALUES(2,'ALLEN') INSERT INTO StudentDetails VALUES(3,'JONES') INSERT INTO StudentDetails VALUES(4,'MARTIN') INSERT INTO StudentDetails VALUES(5,'JAMES') GO CREATE TABLE StudentTotalMarks ( StudentID INTEGER REFERENCES StudentDetails, StudentMarks INTEGER ) GO INSERT INTO StudentTotalMarks VALUES(1,230) INSERT INTO StudentTotalMarks VALUES(2,255) INSERT INTO StudentTotalMarks VALUES(3,200) GO -- Select from Table SELECT * FROM StudentDetails GO SELECT * FROM StudentTotalMarks GO -- Merge Statement MERGE StudentTotalMarks AS stm USING (SELECT StudentID,StudentName FROM StudentDetails) AS sd ON stm.StudentID = sd.StudentID WHEN MATCHED AND stm.StudentMarks > 250 THEN DELETE WHEN MATCHED THEN UPDATE SET stm.StudentMarks = stm.StudentMarks + 25 WHEN NOT MATCHED THEN INSERT(StudentID,StudentMarks) VALUES(sd.StudentID,25); GO -- Select from Table SELECT * FROM StudentDetails GO SELECT * FROM StudentTotalMarks GO -- Clean up DROP TABLE StudentDetails GO DROP TABLE StudentTotalMarks GO The Merge Join performs very well and the following result is obtained. Let us check the execution plan for the merge operator. You can click on following image to enlarge it. Let us evaluate the execution plan for the Table Merge Operator only. We can clearly see that the Number of Executions property suggests value 1. Which is quite clear that in a single PASS, the Merge Operation completes the operations of Insert, Update and Delete. I strongly suggest you all to use this operation, if possible, in your development. I have seen this operation implemented in many data warehousing applications. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Joins, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Merge

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• SQL SERVER – 2012 – All Download Links in Single Page – SQL Server 2012

  - by pinaldave

  SQL Server 2012 RTM is just announced and recently I wrote about all the SQL Server 2012 Certification on single page. As a feedback, I received suggestions to have a single page where everything about SQL Server 2012 is listed. I will keep this page updated as new updates are announced. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Evaluation Microsoft SQL Server 2012 enables a cloud-ready information platform that will help organizations unlock breakthrough insights across the organization. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Express Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Express is a powerful and reliable free data management system that delivers a rich and reliable data store for lightweight Web Sites and desktop applications. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Feature Pack The Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Feature Pack is a collection of stand-alone packages which provide additional value for Microsoft SQL Server 2012. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Report Builder Report Builder provides a productive report-authoring environment for IT professionals and power users. It supports the full capabilities of SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Master Data Services Add-in For Microsoft Excel The Master Data Services Add-in for Excel gives multiple users the ability to update master data in a familiar tool without compromising the data’s integrity in Master Data Services. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Performance Dashboard Reports The SQL Server 2012 Performance Dashboard Reports are Reporting Services report files designed to be used with the Custom Reports feature of SQL Server Management Studio. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 PowerPivot for Microsoft Excel® 2010 Microsoft PowerPivot for Microsoft Excel 2010 provides ground-breaking technology; fast manipulation of large data sets, streamlined integration of data, and the ability to effortlessly share your analysis through Microsoft SharePoint. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services Add-in for Microsoft SharePoint Technologies 2010 The SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services Add-in for Microsoft SharePoint 2010 technologies allows you to integrate your reporting environment with the collaborative SharePoint 2010 experience. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Semantic Language Statistics The Semantic Language Statistics Database is a required component for the Statistical Semantic Search feature in Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Semantic Language Statistics. Microsoft ®SQL Server 2012 FileStream Driver – Windows Logo Certification Catalog file for Microsoft SQL Server 2012 FileStream Driver that is certified for WindowsServer 2008 R2. It meets Microsoft standards for compatibility and recommended practices with the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating systems. Microsoft SQL Server StreamInsight 2.0 Microsoft StreamInsight is Microsoft’s Complex Event Processing technology to help businesses create event-driven applications and derive better insights by correlating event streams from multiple sources with near-zero latency. Microsoft JDBC Driver 4.0 for SQL Server Download the Microsoft JDBC Driver 4.0 for SQL Server, a Type 4 JDBC driver that provides database connectivity through the standard JDBC application program interfaces (APIs) available in Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 5 and 6. Data Quality Services Performance Best Practices Guide This guide focuses on a set of best practices for optimizing performance of Data Quality Services (DQS). Microsoft Drivers 3.0 for SQL Server for PHP The Microsoft Drivers 3.0 for SQL Server for PHP provide connectivity to Microsoft SQLServer from PHP applications. Product Documentation for Microsoft SQL Server 2012 for firewall and proxy restricted environments The Microsoft SQL Server 2012 setup installs only the Help Viewer…install any documentation. All of the SQL Server documentation is available online. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Big Data – Buzz Words: What is MapReduce – Day 7 of 21

  - by Pinal Dave

  In yesterday’s blog post we learned what is Hadoop. In this article we will take a quick look at one of the four most important buzz words which goes around Big Data – MapReduce. What is MapReduce? MapReduce was designed by Google as a programming model for processing large data sets with a parallel, distributed algorithm on a cluster. Though, MapReduce was originally Google proprietary technology, it has been quite a generalized term in the recent time. MapReduce comprises a Map() and Reduce() procedures. Procedure Map() performance filtering and sorting operation on data where as procedure Reduce() performs a summary operation of the data. This model is based on modified concepts of the map and reduce functions commonly available in functional programing. The library where procedure Map() and Reduce() belongs is written in many different languages. The most popular free implementation of MapReduce is Apache Hadoop which we will explore tomorrow. Advantages of MapReduce Procedures The MapReduce Framework usually contains distributed servers and it runs various tasks in parallel to each other. There are various components which manages the communications between various nodes of the data and provides the high availability and fault tolerance. Programs written in MapReduce functional styles are automatically parallelized and executed on commodity machines. The MapReduce Framework takes care of the details of partitioning the data and executing the processes on distributed server on run time. During this process if there is any disaster the framework provides high availability and other available modes take care of the responsibility of the failed node. As you can clearly see more this entire MapReduce Frameworks provides much more than just Map() and Reduce() procedures; it provides scalability and fault tolerance as well. A typical implementation of the MapReduce Framework processes many petabytes of data and thousands of the processing machines. How do MapReduce Framework Works? A typical MapReduce Framework contains petabytes of the data and thousands of the nodes. Here is the basic explanation of the MapReduce Procedures which uses this massive commodity of the servers. Map() Procedure There is always a master node in this infrastructure which takes an input. Right after taking input master node divides it into smaller sub-inputs or sub-problems. These sub-problems are distributed to worker nodes. A worker node later processes them and does necessary analysis. Once the worker node completes the process with this sub-problem it returns it back to master node. Reduce() Procedure All the worker nodes return the answer to the sub-problem assigned to them to master node. The master node collects the answer and once again aggregate that in the form of the answer to the original big problem which was assigned master node. The MapReduce Framework does the above Map () and Reduce () procedure in the parallel and independent to each other. All the Map() procedures can run parallel to each other and once each worker node had completed their task they can send it back to master code to compile it with a single answer. This particular procedure can be very effective when it is implemented on a very large amount of data (Big Data). The MapReduce Framework has five different steps: Preparing Map() Input Executing User Provided Map() Code Shuffle Map Output to Reduce Processor Executing User Provided Reduce Code Producing the Final Output Here is the Dataflow of MapReduce Framework: Input Reader Map Function Partition Function Compare Function Reduce Function Output Writer In a future blog post of this 31 day series we will explore various components of MapReduce in Detail. MapReduce in a Single Statement MapReduce is equivalent to SELECT and GROUP BY of a relational database for a very large database. Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will discuss Buzz Word – HDFS. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• Windows Azure: Import/Export Hard Drives, VM ACLs, Web Sockets, Remote Debugging, Continuous Delivery, New Relic, Billing Alerts and More

  - by ScottGu

  Two weeks ago we released a giant set of improvements to Windows Azure, as well as a significant update of the Windows Azure SDK. This morning we released another massive set of enhancements to Windows Azure.  Today’s new capabilities include: Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to your Storage Accounts HDInsight: General Availability of our Hadoop Service in the cloud Virtual Machines: New VM Gallery, ACL support for VIPs Web Sites: WebSocket and Remote Debugging Support Notification Hubs: Segmented customer push notification support with tag expressions TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics Billing: New Billing Alert Service that sends emails notifications when your bill hits a threshold you define All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note that some features are still in preview).  Below are more details about them. Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to Windows Azure I am excited to announce the preview of our new Windows Azure Import/Export Service! The Windows Azure Import/Export Service enables you to move large amounts of on-premises data into and out of your Windows Azure Storage accounts. It does this by enabling you to securely ship hard disk drives directly to our Windows Azure data centers. Once we receive the drives we’ll automatically transfer the data to or from your Windows Azure Storage account.  This enables you to import or export massive amounts of data more quickly and cost effectively (and not be constrained by available network bandwidth). Encrypted Transport Our Import/Export service provides built-in support for BitLocker disk encryption – which enables you to securely encrypt data on the hard drives before you send it, and not have to worry about it being compromised even if the disk is lost/stolen in transit (since the content on the transported hard drives is completely encrypted and you are the only one who has the key to it).  The drive preparation tool we are shipping today makes setting up bitlocker encryption on these hard drives easy. How to Import/Export your first Hard Drive of Data You can read our Getting Started Guide to learn more about how to begin using the import/export service.  You can create import and export jobs via the Windows Azure Management Portal as well as programmatically using our Server Management APIs. It is really easy to create a new import or export job using the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Simply navigate to a Windows Azure storage account, and then click the new Import/Export tab now available within it (note: if you don’t have this tab make sure to sign-up for the Import/Export preview): Then click the “Create Import Job” or “Create Export Job” commands at the bottom of it.  This will launch a wizard that easily walks you through the steps required: For more comprehensive information about Import/Export, refer to Windows Azure Storage team blog.  You can also send questions and comments to the waimportexport@microsoft.com email address. We think you’ll find this new service makes it much easier to move data into and out of Windows Azure, and it will dramatically cut down the network bandwidth required when working on large data migration projects.  We hope you like it. HDInsight: 100% Compatible Hadoop Service in the Cloud Last week we announced the general availability release of Windows Azure HDInsight. HDInsight is a 100% compatible Hadoop service that allows you to easily provision and manage Hadoop clusters for big data processing in Windows Azure.  This release is now live in production, backed by an enterprise SLA, supported 24x7 by Microsoft Support, and is ready to use for production scenarios. HDInsight allows you to use Apache Hadoop tools, such as Pig and Hive, to process large amounts of data in Windows Azure Blob Storage. Because data is stored in Windows Azure Blob Storage, you can choose to dynamically create Hadoop clusters only when you need them, and then shut them down when they are no longer required (since you pay only for the time the Hadoop cluster instances are running this provides a super cost effective way to use them).  You can create Hadoop clusters using either the Windows Azure Management Portal (see below) or using our PowerShell and Cross Platform Command line tools: The import/export hard drive support that came out today is a perfect companion service to use with HDInsight – the combination allows you to easily ingest, process and optionally export a limitless amount of data.  We’ve also integrated HDInsight with our Business Intelligence tools, so users can leverage familiar tools like Excel in order to analyze the output of jobs.  You can find out more about how to get started with HDInsight here. Virtual Machines: VM Gallery Enhancements Today’s update of Windows Azure brings with it a new Virtual Machine gallery that you can use to create new VMs in the cloud.  You can launch the gallery by doing New->Compute->Virtual Machine->From Gallery within the Windows Azure Management Portal: The new Virtual Machine Gallery includes some nice enhancements that make it even easier to use: Search: You can now easily search and filter images using the search box in the top-right of the dialog.  For example, simply type “SQL” and we’ll filter to show those images in the gallery that contain that substring. Category Tree-view: Each month we add more built-in VM images to the gallery.  You can continue to browse these using the “All” view within the VM Gallery – or now quickly filter them using the category tree-view on the left-hand side of the dialog.  For example, by selecting “Oracle” in the tree-view you can now quickly filter to see the official Oracle supplied images. MSDN and Supported checkboxes: With today’s update we are also introducing filters that makes it easy to filter out types of images that you may not be interested in. The first checkbox is MSDN: using this filter you can exclude any image that is not part of the Windows Azure benefits for MSDN subscribers (which have highly discounted pricing - you can learn more about the MSDN pricing here). The second checkbox is Supported: this filter will exclude any image that contains prerelease software, so you can feel confident that the software you choose to deploy is fully supported by Windows Azure and our partners. Sort options: We sort gallery images by what we think customers are most interested in, but sometimes you might want to sort using different views. So we’re providing some additional sort options, like “Newest,” to customize the image list for what suits you best. Pricing information: We now provide additional pricing information about images and options on how to cost effectively run them directly within the VM Gallery. The above improvements make it even easier to use the VM Gallery and quickly create launch and run Virtual Machines in the cloud. Virtual Machines: ACL Support for VIPs A few months ago we exposed the ability to configure Access Control Lists (ACLs) for Virtual Machines using Windows PowerShell cmdlets and our Service Management API. With today’s release, you can now configure VM ACLs using the Windows Azure Management Portal as well. You can now do this by clicking the new Manage ACL command in the Endpoints tab of a virtual machine instance: This will enable you to configure an ordered list of permit and deny rules to scope the traffic that can access your VM’s network endpoints. For example, if you were on a virtual network, you could limit RDP access to a Windows Azure virtual machine to only a few computers attached to your enterprise. Or if you weren’t on a virtual network you could alternatively limit traffic from public IPs that can access your workloads: Here is the default behaviors for ACLs in Windows Azure: By default (i.e. no rules specified), all traffic is permitted. When using only Permit rules, all other traffic is denied. When using only Deny rules, all other traffic is permitted. When there is a combination of Permit and Deny rules, all other traffic is denied. Lastly, remember that configuring endpoints does not automatically configure them within the VM if it also has firewall rules enabled at the OS level.  So if you create an endpoint using the Windows Azure Management Portal, Windows PowerShell, or REST API, be sure to also configure your guest VM firewall appropriately as well. Web Sites: Web Sockets Support With today’s release you can now use Web Sockets with Windows Azure Web Sites.  This feature enables you to easily integrate real-time communication scenarios within your web based applications, and is available at no extra charge (it even works with the free tier).  Higher level programming libraries like SignalR and socket.io are also now supported with it. You can enable Web Sockets support on a web site by navigating to the Configure tab of a Web Site, and by toggling Web Sockets support to “on”: Once Web Sockets is enabled you can start to integrate some really cool scenarios into your web applications.  Check out the new SignalR documentation hub on www.asp.net to learn more about some of the awesome scenarios you can do with it. Web Sites: Remote Debugging Support The Windows Azure SDK 2.2 we released two weeks ago introduced remote debugging support for Windows Azure Cloud Services. With today’s Windows Azure release we are extending this remote debugging support to also work with Windows Azure Web Sites. With live, remote debugging support inside of Visual Studio, you are able to have more visibility than ever before into how your code is operating live in Windows Azure. It is now super easy to attach the debugger and quickly see what is going on with your application in the cloud. Remote Debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 Enabling the remote debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 is really easy.  Start by opening up your web application’s project within Visual Studio. Then navigate to the “Server Explorer” tab within Visual Studio, and click on the deployed web-site you want to debug that is running within Windows Azure using the Windows Azure->Web Sites node in the Server Explorer.  Then right-click and choose the “Attach Debugger” option on it: When you do this Visual Studio will remotely attach the debugger to the Web Site running within Windows Azure.  The debugger will then stop the web site’s execution when it hits any break points that you have set within your web application’s project inside Visual Studio.  For example, below I set a breakpoint on the “ViewBag.Message” assignment statement within the HomeController of the standard ASP.NET MVC project template.  When I hit refresh on the “About” page of the web site within the browser, the breakpoint was triggered and I am now able to debug the app remotely using Visual Studio: Note above how we can debug variables (including autos/watchlist/etc), as well as use the Immediate and Command Windows. In the debug session above I used the Immediate Window to explore some of the request object state, as well as to dynamically change the ViewBag.Message property.  When we click the the “Continue” button (or press F5) the app will continue execution and the Web Site will render the content back to the browser.  This makes it super easy to debug web apps remotely. Tips for Better Debugging To get the best experience while debugging, we recommend publishing your site using the Debug configuration within Visual Studio’s Web Publish dialog. This will ensure that debug symbol information is uploaded to the Web Site which will enable a richer debug experience within Visual Studio.  You can find this option on the Web Publish dialog on the Settings tab: When you ultimately deploy/run the application in production we recommend using the “Release” configuration setting – the release configuration is memory optimized and will provide the best production performance.  To learn more about diagnosing and debugging Windows Azure Web Sites read our new Troubleshooting Windows Azure Web Sites in Visual Studio guide. Notification Hubs: Segmented Push Notification support with tag expressions In August we announced the General Availability of Windows Azure Notification Hubs - a powerful Mobile Push Notifications service that makes it easy to send high volume push notifications with low latency from any mobile app back-end.  Notification hubs can be used with any mobile app back-end (including ones built using our Mobile Services capability) and can also be used with back-ends that run in the cloud as well as on-premises. Beginning with the initial release, Notification Hubs allowed developers to send personalized push notifications to both individual users as well as groups of users by interest, by associating their devices with tags representing the logical target of the notification. For example, by registering all devices of customers interested in a favorite MLB team with a corresponding tag, it is possible to broadcast one message to millions of Boston Red Sox fans and another message to millions of St. Louis Cardinals fans with a single API call respectively. New support for using tag expressions to enable advanced customer segmentation With today’s release we are adding support for even more advanced customer targeting.  You can now identify customers that you want to send push notifications to by defining rich tag expressions. With tag expressions, you can now not only broadcast notifications to Boston Red Sox fans, but take that segmenting a step farther and reach more granular segments. This opens up a variety of scenarios, for example: Offers based on multiple preferences—e.g. send a game day vegetarian special to users tagged as both a Boston Red Sox fan AND a vegetarian Push content to multiple segments in a single message—e.g. rain delay information only to users who are tagged as either a Boston Red Sox fan OR a St. Louis Cardinal fan Avoid presenting subsets of a segment with irrelevant content—e.g. season ticket availability reminder to users who are tagged as a Boston Red Sox fan but NOT also a season ticket holder To illustrate with code, consider a restaurant chain app that sends an offer related to a Red Sox vs Cardinals game for users in Boston. Devices can be tagged by your app with location tags (e.g. “Loc:Boston”) and interest tags (e.g. “Follows:RedSox”, “Follows:Cardinals”), and then a notification can be sent by your back-end to “(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston” in order to deliver an offer to all devices in Boston that follow either the RedSox or the Cardinals. This can be done directly in your server backend send logic using the code below: var notification = new WindowsNotification(messagePayload); hub.SendNotificationAsync(notification, "(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston"); In your expressions you can use all Boolean operators: AND (&&), OR (||), and NOT (!).  Some other cool use cases for tag expressions that are now supported include: Social: To “all my group except me” - group:id && !user:id Events: Touchdown event is sent to everybody following either team or any of the players involved in the action: Followteam:A || Followteam:B || followplayer:1 || followplayer:2 … Hours: Send notifications at specific times. E.g. Tag devices with time zone and when it is 12pm in Seattle send to: GMT8 && follows:thaifood Versions and platforms: Send a reminder to people still using your first version for Android - version:1.0 && platform:Android For help on getting started with Notification Hubs, visit the Notification Hub documentation center.  Then download the latest NuGet package (or use the Notification Hubs REST APIs directly) to start sending push notifications using tag expressions.  They are really powerful and enable a bunch of great new scenarios. TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable continuous delivery support with Windows Azure and Team Foundation Services.  Team Foundation Services is a cloud based offering from Microsoft that provides integrated source control (with both TFS and Git support), build server, test execution, collaboration tools, and agile planning support.  It makes it really easy to setup a team project (complete with automated builds and test runners) in the cloud, and it has really rich integration with Visual Studio. With today’s Windows Azure release it is now really easy to enable continuous delivery support with both TFS and Git based repositories hosted using Team Foundation Services.  This enables a workflow where when code is checked in, built successfully on an automated build server, and all tests pass on it – I can automatically have the app deployed on Windows Azure with zero manual intervention or work required. The below screen-shots demonstrate how to quickly setup a continuous delivery workflow to Windows Azure with a Git-based ASP.NET MVC project hosted using Team Foundation Services. Enabling Continuous Delivery to Windows Azure with Team Foundation Services The project I’m going to enable continuous delivery with is a simple ASP.NET MVC project whose source code I’m hosting using Team Foundation Services.  I did this by creating a “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” repository there using Git – and then used the new built-in Git tooling support within Visual Studio 2013 to push the source code to it.  Below is a screen-shot of the Git repository hosted within Team Foundation Services: I can access the repository within Visual Studio 2013 and easily make commits with it (as well as branch, merge and do other tasks).  Using VS 2013 I can also setup automated builds to take place in the cloud using Team Foundation Services every time someone checks in code to the repository: The cool thing about this is that I don’t have to buy or rent my own build server – Team Foundation Services automatically maintains its own build server farm and can automatically queue up a build for me (for free) every time someone checks in code using the above settings.  This build server (and automated testing) support now works with both TFS and Git based source control repositories. Connecting a Team Foundation Services project to Windows Azure Once I have a source repository hosted in Team Foundation Services with Automated Builds and Testing set up, I can then go even further and set it up so that it will be automatically deployed to Windows Azure when a source code commit is made to the repository (assuming the Build + Tests pass).  Enabling this is now really easy.  To set this up with a Windows Azure Web Site simply use the New->Compute->Web Site->Custom Create command inside the Windows Azure Management Portal.  This will create a dialog like below.  I gave the web site a name and then made sure the “Publish from source control” checkbox was selected: When we click next we’ll be prompted for the location of the source repository.  We’ll select “Team Foundation Services”: Once we do this we’ll be prompted for our Team Foundation Services account that our source repository is hosted under (in this case my TFS account is “scottguthrie”): When we click the “Authorize Now” button we’ll be prompted to give Windows Azure permissions to connect to the Team Foundation Services account.  Once we do this we’ll be prompted to pick the source repository we want to connect to.  Starting with today’s Windows Azure release you can now connect to both TFS and Git based source repositories.  This new support allows me to connect to the “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” respository we created earlier: Clicking the finish button will then create the Web Site with the continuous delivery hooks setup with Team Foundation Services.  Now every time someone pushes source control to the repository in Team Foundation Services, it will kick off an automated build, run all of the unit tests in the solution , and if they pass the app will be automatically deployed to our Web Site in Windows Azure.  You can monitor the history and status of these automated deployments using the Deployments tab within the Web Site: This enables a really slick continuous delivery workflow, and enables you to build and deploy apps in a really nice way. Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable Developer Analytics and Monitoring support with both Windows Azure Web Site and Windows Azure Mobile Services.  We are partnering with New Relic, who provide a great dev analytics and app performance monitoring offering, to enable this - and we have updated the Windows Azure Management Portal to make it really easy to configure. Enabling New Relic with a Windows Azure Web Site Enabling New Relic support with a Windows Azure Web Site is now really easy.  Simply navigate to the Configure tab of a Web Site and scroll down to the “developer analytics” section that is now within it: Clicking the “add-on” button will display some additional UI.  If you don’t already have a New Relic subscription, you can click the “view windows azure store” button to obtain a subscription (note: New Relic has a perpetually free tier so you can enable it even without paying anything): Clicking the “view windows azure store” button will launch the integrated Windows Azure Store experience we have within the Windows Azure Management Portal.  You can use this to browse from a variety of great add-on services – including New Relic: Select “New Relic” within the dialog above, then click the next button, and you’ll be able to choose which type of New Relic subscription you wish to purchase.  For this demo we’ll simply select the “Free Standard Version” – which does not cost anything and can be used forever:  Once we’ve signed-up for our New Relic subscription and added it to our Windows Azure account, we can go back to the Web Site’s configuration tab and choose to use the New Relic add-on with our Windows Azure Web Site.  We can do this by simply selecting it from the “add-on” dropdown (it is automatically populated within it once we have a New Relic subscription in our account): Clicking the “Save” button will then cause the Windows Azure Management Portal to automatically populate all of the needed New Relic configuration settings to our Web Site: Deploying the New Relic Agent as part of a Web Site The final step to enable developer analytics using New Relic is to add the New Relic runtime agent to our web app.  We can do this within Visual Studio by right-clicking on our web project and selecting the “Manage NuGet Packages” context menu: This will bring up the NuGet package manager.  You can search for “New Relic” within it to find the New Relic agent.  Note that there is both a 32-bit and 64-bit edition of it – make sure to install the version that matches how your Web Site is running within Windows Azure (note: you can configure your Web Site to run in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode using the Web Site’s “Configuration” tab within the Windows Azure Management Portal): Once we install the NuGet package we are all set to go.  We’ll simply re-publish the web site again to Windows Azure and New Relic will now automatically start monitoring the application Monitoring a Web Site using New Relic Now that the application has developer analytics support with New Relic enabled, we can launch the New Relic monitoring portal to start monitoring the health of it.  We can do this by clicking on the “Add Ons” tab in the left-hand side of the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Then select the New Relic add-on we signed-up for within it.  The Windows Azure Management Portal will provide some default information about the add-on when we do this.  Clicking the “Manage” button in the tray at the bottom will launch a new browser tab and single-sign us into the New Relic monitoring portal associated with our account: When we do this a new browser tab will launch with the New Relic admin tool loaded within it: We can now see insights into how our app is performing – without having to have written a single line of monitoring code.  The New Relic service provides a ton of great built-in monitoring features allowing us to quickly see: Performance times (including browser rendering speed) for the overall site and individual pages.  You can optionally set alert thresholds to trigger if the speed does not meet a threshold you specify. Information about where in the world your customers are hitting the site from (and how performance varies by region) Details on the latency performance of external services your web apps are using (for example: SQL, Storage, Twitter, etc) Error information including call stack details for exceptions that have occurred at runtime SQL Server profiling information – including which queries executed against your database and what their performance was And a whole bunch more… The cool thing about New Relic is that you don’t need to write monitoring code within your application to get all of the above reports (plus a lot more).  The New Relic agent automatically enables the CLR profiler within applications and automatically captures the information necessary to identify these.  This makes it super easy to get started and immediately have a rich developer analytics view for your solutions with very little effort. If you haven’t tried New Relic out yet with Windows Azure I recommend you do so – I think you’ll find it helps you build even better cloud applications.  Following the above steps will help you get started and deliver you a really good application monitoring solution in only minutes. Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics With today’s release, we are enabling support within Service Bus for partitioned queues and topics. Enabling partitioning enables you to achieve a higher message throughput and better availability from your queues and topics. Higher message throughput is achieved by implementing multiple message brokers for each partitioned queue and topic.  The  multiple messaging stores will also provide higher availability. You can create a partitioned queue or topic by simply checking the Enable Partitioning option in the custom create wizard for a Queue or Topic: Read this article to learn more about partitioned queues and topics and how to take advantage of them today. Billing: New Billing Alert Service Today’s Windows Azure update enables a new Billing Alert Service Preview that enables you to get proactive email notifications when your Windows Azure bill goes above a certain monetary threshold that you configure.  This makes it easier to manage your bill and avoid potential surprises at the end of the month. With the Billing Alert Service Preview, you can now create email alerts to monitor and manage your monetary credits or your current bill total.  To set up an alert first sign-up for the free Billing Alert Service Preview.  Then visit the account management page, click on a subscription you have setup, and then navigate to the new Alerts tab that is available: The alerts tab allows you to setup email alerts that will be sent automatically once a certain threshold is hit.  For example, by clicking the “add alert” button above I can setup a rule to send myself email anytime my Windows Azure bill goes above $100 for the month: The Billing Alert Service will evolve to support additional aspects of your bill as well as support multiple forms of alerts such as SMS.  Try out the new Billing Alert Service Preview today and give us feedback. Summary Today’s Windows Azure release enables a ton of great new scenarios, and makes building applications hosted in the cloud even easier. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

  Read the article

• You Might Be a DBA

  - by BuckWoody

  With all apologies to Jeff Foxworthy, I was up late Friday night on a holiday weekend (which translated into T-SQL becomes “Maintenance Window”) and I got bored in between the two or three minutes I had between clicks. So I started a “Twitter” meme – and it just took off. I haven’t cleaned these up much, but here, in author order as of Saturday the 29th of May is the list “You might be a DBA” from around the Twitterverse: buckwoody Your two main enemies are developers and SAN admins #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody People can use Access as a cross or garlic on you #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You always plan an exit strategy, even when entering a McDonald's #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You can't explain to your family what you really do for a living #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You have at least one set of scripts you won't share #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You have an opinion on the best code-beautifier #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You have children older than the rest of your team #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You and the Oracle DBA would kill each other, but you'll happily fight off a developer together first #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You've threatened to quit if they give anyone the sa password on production #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You've sent a vendor suggestions on improving their database design or code (and been ignored) #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You've sent a vendor suggestions on improving their database design or code (and been ignored) #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You have an opinion on the best code-beautifier #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You have at least one set of scripts you won't share #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You refer to co-workers as "carbon-units" #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody Being paranoid is on your resume at the top #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody Everyone comes to your cube to find the MSDN DVD's #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You always plan an exit strategy, even when entering a McDonald's #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You've worn down developers to get your way by explaining normalization levels #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You refer to clothes as "Data Abstractions" #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody Users pester you to be able to put data in a database, then they pester you to take it out and put it in Excel #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody Others try to de-duplicate data, you try to copy it to more than three locations #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You have at least one DLT tape in the trunk of your car #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You use twitter and facebook to talk with colleagues because there's no one else in your company that does what you do #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody Your spouse knows what "ETL" means #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You've referred to yourself as the "Data Janitor" #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You don't have positive connotations of the word "upgrade" #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You get your coffee before you check your servers, because you know you won't get any if you don't #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You always come to work through the back door so no one hijacks you on the way to your cube #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You check your server logs before you check your e-mail in the morning so you can reply "Yeah, I already fixed that." #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You have more conference badges than clean socks #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody Your coffee mug says "It depends" #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You can convince a boss that you need 16GB of RAM in your laptop #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You've used ebay to find production equipment #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You pad all project timelines by 2X, and you still miss them #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You know when your company is acquiring another even before the CFO #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You pad all project timelines by 2X, and you still miss them #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You call aspirin "work vitamins" #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You get the same amount of sleep even after you have a child #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You obsess about performance metrics from over one year ago #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody The first thing you buy after the database software is aftermarket tools to manage the database software #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You've tried to convince someone else to become a DBA #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You use twitter and facebook to talk with colleagues because there's no one else in your company that does what you do #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You only know other DBA's by their Tweet Handle #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You've explained the difference between 32 and 64-bit to more than one manager in terms they can understand, using puppets #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody Your two main enemies are developers and SAN admins #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You've driven to the Datacenter to install SQL Server because "you don't trust those NOC admins" #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You pay more for faster Internet connections than cable at home so you don't have to drive in #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You call texting a "queuing system" #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You know that if someone can read Perl, they manage an Oracle system #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You have an e-mail rule for backup notifications #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody Your food pyramid includes coffee, salt and fat #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You wish everything had a graphical query plan #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You refactor your e-mails #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You've gotten more help from twitter and facebook than all your years in college #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You would pay money for a license plate that has the letters S-Q-L together #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You have actually considered making a RAID array from thumb drives #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody Everything on your laptop is installed from your MSDN subscription #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You've written blog posts on technology you've never actually implemented in production #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody Everything on your laptop is installed from your MSDN subscription #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody @MidnightDBA Click the #youmightbeaDBA tag. I've had WAY too much coffee today.  buckwoody There is no other position that is 1-deep except you and the CEO #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody When you watch "The Office" you call it "OJT" #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You would pay money for a license plate that has the letters S-Q-L together #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody Your blog would make a "best practices" or "worst practices" book #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You have actually considered making a RAID array from thumb drives #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody The first thing you install on your netbook is SSMS #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody Everything on your laptop is installed from your MSDN subscription #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody Your watch is set to UTC because it's just easier #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You make plenty of money, but you're excited to get a $2.00 squeeze-ball from Quest and Redgate #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You make plenty of money, but you're excited to get a $2.00 squeeze-ball from Quest and Redgate #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You think data can be represented as something OTHER than XML #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You tell people that you made a database query go faster, and expect them to be happy for you #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You take the word "NoSQL" as a personal attack #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody People can use Access as a cross or garlic on you #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody * == bad #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody * == bad #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody There are just as many females in your technical field as males #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody People can use Access as a cross or garlic on you #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You've gotten more help from twitter and facebook than all your years in college #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You think that something OTHER than the database might be the performance bottleneck #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You refer to time as a "Clustered Index" #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You know why "user" refers to both business people and crack addicts #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You make plenty of money, but you're excited to get a $2.00 squeeze-ball from Quest and Redgate #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You can't explain to your family what you really do for a living #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You tell people that you made a database query go faster, and expect them to be happy for you #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You think a millisecond is a really long time #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You're sitting and typing #youmightbeaDBA when you could be outside #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You can't wait for a technical conference so you can wear a kilt - and you're not Scottish #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You know that "DBA" stands for "Default Blame Acceptor" #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody People can use Access as a cross or garlic on you #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You know what "the truth, thole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me Codd" means #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You've gotten more help from twitter and facebook than all your years in college #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You can't talk fast enough to get a concept out of your head so you tweet it instead #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You cry when someone doesn't use a WHERE clause #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You think data can be represented as something OTHER than XML #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You think "Set theory" is not an verb but a noun #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You try to convince random strangers to vote on your Connect item #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You think 3 hours of contiguous sleep is a good thing #youmightbeaDBA or #youmightbeamother  buckwoody You don't like Oracle, and not just because of what she did to Neo #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You know when to say "sequel" and "s-q-l" #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You know where the data is #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You refer to your children as "Fully Redundant Mirrors" #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody Holiday == "Maintenance Window" #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody Your laptop is more powerful than the servers in most companies - including your own #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You capitalize SELECTed words #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You take the word "NoSQL" as a personal attack #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You know why "user" refers to both business people and crack addicts #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You cringe in public when the word "upgrade" is used in a sentence #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody Holiday == "Maintenance Window" #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody All Data Is MetaData means something to you #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You've never seen the driveway to your house in the daylight #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You think that something OTHER than the database might be the performance bottleneck #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody Most of your bloodstream is composed of caffeine #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody Your task list is labeled "CRUD Matrix" #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You call your wife/husband a "Linked Server" #youmightbeaDBA  anonythemouse When someone tells you they are going to take a dump and you wonder of which database then #youmightbeaDBA  anonythemouse When it's 11pm on a holiday weekend and you are working #youmightbeaDBA  anonythemouse When you sit down at a table and look for it's primary key #youmightbeaDBA  anonythemouse When getting milk from the fridge you check the expiry date is > getdate() #youmightbeaDBA  blakmk when you wake up dreaming about sql #youmightbeaDBA  CharlesGarver You think a @buckwoody bobblehead would be a cool thing to have on the dashboard of your car #youmightbeaDBA  CharlesGarver Your friends don't understand why you think there's a difference between single and double quotes #youmightbeaDBA  CharlesGarver Even the newest employees know your name from all the downtime notices you've sent out #youmightbeaDBA  CharlesGarver You sometimes feel anxious and think "I should test restoring those backups" and then the feeling passes #youmightbeadba  CharlesGarver You know what a co-worker means when they ask "how is your squirrel server?" #youmightbeadba  CharlesGarver You can't sleep at night and you ponder the logisitcs of collecting every copy of Access for the world's biggest bonfire #youmightbeaDBA  CharlesGarver You can't sleep at night and you ponder the logisitcs of collecting every copy of Access for the world's biggest bonfire #youmightbeaDBA  CharlesGarver You're willing to move someone's job up in priority for a box of #voodoodonuts #youmightbeaDBA  CharlesGarver Each person in your company seems to think you work for THEM #youmightbeaDBA  CharlesGarver You have a Love/Hate relationship going on with #Microsoft #youmightbeaDBA  CharlesGarver People ask you to troubleshoot their Access program #youmightbeaDBA  CharlesGarver The first words you hear in the morning are 'your voicemail box is full' #youmightbeaDBA  CharlesGarver The thought of disrupting 500 people's work so you can do something doesn't phase you #youmightbeaDBA  CharlesGarver You can't sleep at night and you ponder the logisitcs of collecting every copy of Access for the world's biggest bonfire #youmightbeaDBA  CharlesGarver Your home computer is backed up in 3 different places #youmightbeaDBA  CharlesGarver Your wardrobe for work includes pajamas #youmightbeaDBA  CharlesGarver Someone tells you to look in the INDEX and you look puzzled before finally going to the back of the book. #youmightbeaDBA  chuckboycejr If you have ever set up a SQLAgent job to email your mobile phone to serve as an alarm clock #youmightbeaDBA  chuckboycejr If you'd rather meet Itzik than Jay Z #youmightbeaDBA  chuckboycejr If you'd rather meet Itzik than Jay Z #youmightbeaDBA  chuckboycejr If you'd wrestle a SysAdmin to the ground to implement #DPA best practices as per @aspiringgeek #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy I need to be up in 7 hours, so I'm off to bed! I'll have to read the rest of @buckwoody's #youmightbeaDBA posts in the AM. (g'night Buck!)  databaseguy When people ask you about your house, the first thing you describe is the network. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy The last thing you say at the office each day is, "is anybody else here? I'm shutting off the lights!" #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy Your blood pressure rises when you read application specs drafted by marketing. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy A good day at work is one when nobody pays you no mind. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy You care about latches and wait states. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy You have worked over 200 hours on a performance tuning project that required no application changes at all. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy The late-night security guard knows the names of your spouse and kids. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy You have had vigorous debates about whether it should be pronounced "sequel" or "ess-queue-ell". #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy You have VPN and RDP software installed on your phone ... just in case. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy You have edited a data file by hand, just to see what would happen. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy You decorate your office walls with database catalog posters. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy You've built programs that access data just to keep other developers from asking you to run queries all the time. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy When you watch movies like The Matrix, you find yourself calculating the fasibility of storing all that data. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy You have tried to convince someone to spend money on an SSD storage array. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy When CPU is spiked on a server, you want to gather forensic evidence. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy You have to remind developers not to push code to production without checking if the database is ready. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy Nobody cares what you wear to work, as long as the thing keeps running. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy Telepathy is a job requirement when working with app dev teams. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy You read database statistics for the educational value. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy And your boss freely admits this to anyone within earshot. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy Your boss cannot explain or understand what you do. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy You envision ERDs when you see a GUI. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy You say things like "applications come and go, but data lasts forever." #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy You have memorized the names of several of the AdventureWorks employees. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy You know what MAXDOP setting you can get away with for a big query based on current server load. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy And you immediately recognize the recursion in my last tweet. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy You find 50 simultaneous tweets from @buckwoody about #youmightbeaDBA :O)  DBAishness You have "funny stories" about the times your developers accidentally deleted the T-log in their test environment. #youmightbeaDBA  DBAishness Planning to slice and dice your MDW data with PowerPivot makes you giggle like a schoolgirl. #youmightbeaDBA  donalddotfarmer You think @buckwoody lives in the "real world." #youmightbeaDBA  jamach09 @buckwoody #youmightbeaDBA Why go outside when you can sit in the nice cool server room?  jamach09 If you refer to procreation as "Replication", #youmightbeaDBA.  jamach09 If you think ORM is a four-letter word, #youmightbeaDBA  JamesMarsh If you have ever preached the value of Source Code Control, #YouMightBeADBA  jethrocarr @venzann You store your shopping list in a ACID compliant DB #youmightbeaDBA  joe_positive @buckwoody thought it stood for "Don't Bother Asking" #youmightbeaDBA  joe_positive when you check your IT Events Calendar before making weekend plans #youmightbeaDBA  LadyRuna You cringe whenever someone calls Excel a database #youmightbeaDBA  LadyRuna When the waiter says he'll be your server today, you ask how many terabytes he is #youmightbeaDBA  LadyRuna you always call the asterisk a "Star" #youmightbeaDBA  LadyRuna You walk into a server room, say "Nice RACK!" and everyone there knows you're talking about server rack... #youmightbeaDBA  LadyRuna You receive more messages from servers than from friends #youmightbeaDBA  LadyRuna hmmm... #youmightbeaDBA if your recipe for gumbo is "SELECT * FROM Refrigerator"  markjholmes @SQLSoldier Heh. #youmightbeaDBA if you correct other DBAs' spelling of @PaulRandal  markjholmes #youmightbeaDBA if you actually test RAID5 vs RAID10 on your SAN because when it comes to configuration, "it depends."  markjholmes #youmightbeaDBA if you have at least 3 definitions of the word "cluster"  MarlonRibunal 3 Words: @BrentO, snicker, & Access #youmightbeaDBA  MarlonRibunal @onpnt @mikeSQL my appeal was a couple of mins late. Enjoying #youmightbeaDBA  MarlonRibunal @mikeSQL @onpnt pls, don't mention bacon #youmightbeaDBA  merv @buckwoody You HATE 3-way joins #youmightbeaDBA  MidnightDBA If you're up at midnight Tweeting about SQL #youmightbeaDBA  MidnightDBA @buckwoody I'd noticed that. :) #youmightbeaDBA  mikeSQL when people talk about "their type" you're thinking varchar, bigint, binary, etc #youmightbeadba  mikeSQL people ask you to go to lunch , but you can't go because you're attending #SQLlunch #youmightbeadba  mikeSQL you laugh for hours at all of the #sqlmoviequotes ....things in which a normal individual would scratch their head at. #youmightbeadba  mikeSQL you laugh for hours at all of the #sqlmoviequotes ....things in which a normal individual would scratch their head at. #youmightbeadba  mrdenny If you think that @buckwoody's demo using PowerPivot to analyze index usage data from DMVs is awesome then #youmightbeaDBA  mrdenny You wish @PaulRandal still worked at Microsoft so that they would make a bobble head of him #youmightbeadba  mrdenny When it's 11pm on a holiday weekend, and your posting stupid jokes on Twitter then #youmightbeadba  mrdenny If you go out with friends and wonder why no one's wearing a kilt then #YouMightBeADBA  mrdenny You can't do basic math, but you know off the top of your head how many CALs $14,412 can buy you. #YoumightbeaDBA  mrdenny If you've ever setup a SQL Job to email you to get you out of a regularly scheduled meeting #YouMightBeADBA.  mrdenny You throw up in your mouth a little when ever you here the word "Access". Even if it doesn't relate to a MS product. #YouMightBeADBA  msdtjones You spend more time listening to @buckwoody than your wife #youmightbeaDBA  NFDotCom You perform "hail deltas" on a regular basis. #YouMightBeADBA  NoelMcKinney If you tell your wife you want to go to Columbus Ohio for your wedding anniversary so you can attend #sqlsat42 then #youmightbeaDBA  NoelMcKinney You read a union is on strike and wonder if it's a UNION ALL #youmightbeaDBA  NoelMcKinney You read a union is on strike and wonder if it's a UNION ALL #youmightbeaDBA  NoelMcKinney Someone asks you to throw another log on the fire and you tell them not to worry about it because Autogrowth is turned on #youmightbeaDBA  Nuurdygirl Even if you have a girlfriend...its possible #youmightbeadba. Yeah-i said its possible!  Nuurdygirl When your girlfriend has to lean around the laptop to kiss you goodnight #youmightbeadba  Old_Man_Fish If you worry about how big your package is and how long it takes to finish #youmightbeaDBA  Old_Man_Fish If you no longer wonder if someone is in trouble or died if you are getting calls at 2AM #youmightbeaDBA  Old_Man_Fish If, when you hear the word ACCESS with no connotation you blood pressure jumps 50 points, #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt When you hear the word inject you immediately get concerned if your databases are OK #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt Your servers haven't been rebooted in a year #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt You know why it's funny when @PaulRandal has the word, "Sheep" in a tweet #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt You have read BOL without actually having a problem to figure out #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt You can type "SELECT columns FROM tables" without typos but tipen ni Banglish ares a messis #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt DR strategies doesn't include the word, RAID in them #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt you can move a SQL Server instance to a new server without the users ever knowing #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt You have made an SSIS package that is more than one step #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt You have the balls to say no to your boss when they ask for the sa password #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt you google to trouble shoot a problem and end up at your own blog (and it fixes it) #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt You talk your wife into moving the family vacation a week earlier so you can attend the areas local SSUG meeting #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt you can explain to a nontechnical person what a deadlock is #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt You hope a girl asks you what your collation is #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt you make jokes that include the words shrink, truncate and 1205. And you are the only one that laughs at them #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt You rate your ability to stay awake to work longer on blogs, twitter, forums and your day to day job with the 5 9's goal #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt you have major surgery and beg the doctor to release you back to work 5 days later because you miss your servers #youmightbeaDBA #TrueStory  onpnt You do have backups and you know how to use them #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt It's the network #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt When the developers get to work your mood changes rapidly #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt When someone says, "PASS", you first think of karaoke #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt Recruiters try to get you to call them *just* because they think you'll give them @BrentO contact info #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt You chuckle every time you go to grab the "CLR" Calcium, Lime and Rust Remover to clean something #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt @MarlonRibunal @mikeSQL Sorry man, it was already in motion ;-) #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt When you have an "I love bacon" sticker on your laptop. #youmightbeaDBA http://twitpic.com/1ry671  onpnt You sing SELECT statements in the shower #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt When you see a chicken it doesn't remind you of food. It reminds you of a guy named Jorge #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt At time, SQL is your mistress #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt Your wife wonders if SQL is the code name of your mistress at times #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt it's Friday and you are on twitter thinking really hard about what would be funny for hash tag #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt You organize your wife's "decorative"pillows on the bed in a B-Tree structure #youmightbeaDBA  PaulWhiteNZ If you: SELECT TOP (1) milk FROM fridge WHERE use_by_date >= GET_DATE() ORDER BY use_by_date ASC #YouMightBeaDBA  RonDBA #youmightbeaDBA if you read @buckwoody's and @BrentO's blogs.  ryaneastabrook @buckwoody omg, you have to stand up a website with these on them, they are awesome #youmightbeaDBA  soulvy @StrateSQL @LadyRuna Or a "Splat" #youmightbeaDBA  speedracer You can still fall asleep after three cups of coffee #youmightbeaDBA  speedracer You retweet @buckwoody on a Friday night #youmightbeaDBA  speedracer You can still fall asleep after three cups of coffee #youmightbeaDBA  speedracer Developers make you twitch #youmightbeaDBA  sqlagentman You know what X/1024*8 is. #YouMightBeADBA  SqlAsylum Your still in the office at 5:00 on memorial day weekend. #youmightbeadba :)  SQLBob Whenever someone you know gets pregnant you bring up INNER JOINs or SQL Injection attacks... #youmightbeaDBA  SQLChicken You know one or more SQL folks in the community with an animal in their username #youmightbeaDBA  SQLChicken You've used one or more car analogies to explain how a database works #youmightbeaDBA  SQLChicken “@sqljoe: #youmightbeaDBA if you applied to attend #sqlu and requested @SQLChicken to pull strings for you” lmao nice!  SQLChicken When talking about SSIS your discussions break down into various jokes about packages #youmightbeaDBA  SQLChicken Just SEEING the code for cursors makes you break out in hives #youmightbeaDBA  SQLChicken Just SEEING the code for cursors makes you break out in hives #youmightbeaDBA  SQLCraftsman You coined the phrase "Magic SAN Dust" because calling a vendor's marketing claims BS is not acceptable in a meeting. #YouMightBeADBA  SQLCraftsman If you hear about a new feature with the acronym "DAC" and wonder what disaster of a feature it is attached to this time. #YouMightBeADBA  SQLCraftsman You really own a "Stick of Much Developer Whacking" #YouMightBeADBA  SQLCraftsman You coined the phrase "Magic SAN Dust" because calling a vendor's marketing claims BS is not acceptable in a meeting. #YouMightBeADBA  SQLCraftsman Default Blame Acceptor #YouMightBeADBA  SQLCraftsman If you hear about a new feature with the acronym "DAC" and wonder what disaster of a feature it is attached to this time. #YouMightBeADBA  SQLCraftsman Default Blame Acceptor #YouMightBeADBA  SQLCraftsman If you hear about a new feature with the acronym "DAC" and wonder what disaster of a feature it is attached to this time. #YouMightBeADBA  sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if you wished your wife knew T-sql. USE ShoppingList SELECT NecessaryItems from Supermarket WHERE Category<> ("junk food")  sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if the first thing you kiss when you wake up is your mobile for not waking you up in the middle of the night  sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if your wife has a "Do Not Fly" family vacation list of her own including your laptop and mobile  sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if you have researched for DBA Anonymous groups and attended a #SSUG willing to drop your database (vice)  sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if your only maintenance windows are staff meetings  sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if you think of yourself as "The One" in The Matrix "balancing the equation" from The Architect's (developers) poor coding  sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if you think @PaulRandal should have played the Oracle in The Matrix  sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if home CD & Movie collection is stored in secured containers,in logical order & naming convention,and with a backup copy  sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if you applied to attend #sqlu and requested @SQLChicken to pull strings for you  sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if you have tried to TiVo @MidnightDBA broadcasts  sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if your #sql user group feels like #AA meetings  sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if you thought of bringing your #sql books to #sqlsaturday and #sqlpass for autographs  sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if #sqlpass feels like the #oscars  sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if you are proud of your small package  SQLLawman #youmightbeaDBA when you hear MDX and Acura is not first thought that comes to mind.  sqlrunner If your wife double checks that there isn't a SQLSat within 200 miles of your vacation destination #youmightbeaDBA  sqlrunner When you're on a conference call and your wife thinks your speaking in a foreign language #youmightbeaDBA  sqlrunner When you're on a conference call and your wife thinks your speaking in a foreign language #youmightbeaDBA  sqlrunner You treat the word 'access' as a verb, not a noun #youmightbeaDBA  sqlrunner If you are happy with sub-second performance #youmightbeaDBA  sqlrunner When you know the names of the NOC people AND their families #youmightbeadba  sqlrunner When you know the names of the NOC people AND their families #youmightbeadba  sqlrunner Your company set's up international phone coverage for your cruise #youmightbeaDBA  sqlsamson @buckwoody if your manager asks you for data and you respond with "there's a script for that" #youmightbeadba  sqlsamson @buckwoody If you receive more messages from your server then your spouse #youmightbeadba  SQLSoldier You've spent all night Valentines Day upgrading the SQL Servers and forgot to tell your wife you'd be working late. #youmightbeadba  SQLSoldier You're flattered when someone calls you a geek. #youmightbeadba  SQLSoldier @llangit @mrdenny it's 11pm on a holiday weekend, & your reading stupid jokes on Twitter then #youmightbeadba  SQLSoldier Your manager borrows lunch money from you because your salary is 30% higher than his. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You think "intellisense" is a double negative because it's not intelligent nor makes sense. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier 75% of the emails you receive at home have the phrase "now following you on Twitter!" in the subject line. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You petition Ken Burns to remake Office Space because it should have been 18 hours long. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You select a candidate for a Jr DBA position because his resume said he's willing to get your coffee. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier Somebody misquotes @PaulRandall and you call him on your cell to verify. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You wish the elevator in your building was slower because it's the last time you'll be left alone all day. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier The developers sacrifice small animals before giving you their code for review. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier Developers bring you coffee and a BLT when you review their code. #youmightbeaDBA #IWish  SQLSoldier You can get out of any family get-together by saying you have to work and nobody questions it. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You've requested a HP Superdome for you "test" box. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier Your leave work early because your internet connection to the data center is better at home #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier The new CEO asks you to justify your salary, so you go on vacation for 2 weeks. And he never questions you again. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You cheer when Milton burns down the company in Office Space #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier A dev. asks if you've heard about some great new feature in SQL and you show the 16 blog posts you wrote on it ... last year #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier Your dev team is still testing SQL 2008 and you're already planning for SQL 11. #youmightbeaDBA #TrueStory  SQLSoldier The new CEO asks you to justify your salary, so you go on vacation for 2 weeks. And he never questions you again. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier Your dev team is still testing SQL 2008 and you're already planning for SQL 11. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You use a cell phone service coverage map to plan your next vacation. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You come in to work at 7 AM because it gives you at least 3 hours without any developers around. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You figure out a way to make take your wife on a cruise and deduct it as a business expense. #youmightbeaDBA #sqlcruise  SQLSoldier You name your cat SQLDog because the name @SQLCat was already taken. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You rate your blog posts based on the number of retweets you get. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You disable random logins just to mess with people. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You fall for the pickup line, "Hey baby, what's your collation?" #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You can blame an outage on anyone in the company because you're the only one that knows how to find out what really happened #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You can blame an outage on anyone in the company because you're the only one that knows how to find out what really happened #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You cheer when Milton burns down the company in Office Space #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier Your leave work early because your internet connection to the data center is better at home #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You cheer when Milton burns down the company in Office Space #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier Your think the 4 food groups are coffee, bacon, fast food, and Mountain Dew. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You tell someone your job title and they ask "What?" You describe it and they ask "What?". So you say "computer geek". #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier The #1 referrer to your blog is Twitter.com. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier Your idea of a good time on a Saturday involves free training. #youmightbeaDBA #sqlsat43  SQLSoldier You write a book that all of your co-workers have and none have read it. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You write a book that sells a couple thousand copies and is heralded a best seller. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier No matter how sick you are, you go to work if it's time to pass the pager on to the next guy. #youmightbeaDBA #TrueStory  SQLSoldier You go out on the town, and strangers walk up to you and say, "Hey you're that SQL guy" #youmightbeaDBA #TrueStory  SQLSoldier Your wife asks you to fix something, and you request a downtime window. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier Your wife asks when you'll be home, and you tell her that you wish you knew. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier Your best pickup line, "Hey baby, what's your collation?" #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier Your wife asks when you'll be home, and you tell her that you wish you knew. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You know that @BuckWoody is not someone's porno name. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You list TSQL as your native language on the 2010 census. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier Starbucks' stock price drops every time you go on vacation. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You're happy when the web master says that the website is down. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You know that @BuckWoody is not someone's porno name. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You get mad when someone calls your car a "heap" because you've always considered it to be a "clustered index". #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier Your blog has more hits than your company's website. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You systematically remove the asterisk key from all keyboards in the company except yours. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier When asked if you recycle, you reply that you run sp_cycle_errorlog every night at midnight #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You wouldn't allow someone named @AdamMachanic to work on your car. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You switch offices every 3 days to avoid developers #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier PSS has your number on speed dial. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You frown when you they tell Neo that he's going to the Oracle #youmightbeaDBA  swhaley you regretted saying "This shouldn't effect production" #youmightbeaDBA  swhaley you regretted saying "This shouldn't effect production" #youmightbeaDBA  Tarwn A pleasurable saturday means spending the day learning more about what you already do the rest of the week #youmightbeaDBA ...oh, wait...  thelostforum For great justice; all our base are belong to YOU !! #youmightbeadba  thelostforum @SQLSoldier: You need a witness to use a mirror #youmightbeaDBA ;)  TimCost you capitalize key words. always. everywhere. you can't help it, usually don't even notice. #youmightbeaDBA  Toshana Your the only one in your company not impressed with the developers new application. #youmightbeaDBA  venzann Coming soon from a (respected) book publisher - @buckwoody's #youmightbeaDBA  venzann He's on a role tonight. @buckwoody is summing up my life with his #youmightbeaDBA tweets...  venzann I love the #youmightbeaDBA tag. Found at least 6 new DBAs to follow..  venzann He's on a role tonight. @buckwoody is summing up my life with his #youmightbeaDBA tweets...  venzann You use #sqlhelp as a primary resource during troubleshooting #youmightbeaDBA  venzann You insist on stricter password security for your sql servers than you implement on your own laptop #youmightbeaDBA  WesBrownSQL @buckwoody you are up so late the only tweets you see are from @buckwoody #youmightbeaDBA  WesBrownSQL @SQLSoldier you are upgrading all your 2005 prod servers to 2008 R2 on a three day weekend... #youmightbeaDBA  zippy1981 #youmightbeaDBA if everytime you do something with #mongodb you think of the Vulcan proverb "only Nixon could go to China."  Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Displaying JSON in your Browser

  - by Rick Strahl

  Do you work with AJAX requests a lot and need to quickly check URLs for JSON results? Then you probably know that it’s a fairly big hassle to examine JSON results directly in the browser. Yes, you can use FireBug or Fiddler which work pretty well for actual AJAX requests, but if you just fire off a URL for quick testing in the browser you usually get hit by the Save As dialog and the download manager, followed by having to open the saved document in a text editor in FireFox. Enter JSONView which allows you to simply display JSON results directly in the browser. For example, imagine I have a URL like this: http://localhost/westwindwebtoolkitweb/RestService.ashx?Method=ReturnObject&format=json&Name1=Rick&Name2=John&date=12/30/2010 typed directly into the browser and that that returns a complex JSON object. With JSONView the result looks like this: No fuss, no muss. It just works. Here the result is an array of Person objects that contain additional address child objects displayed right in the browser. JSONView basically adds content type checking for application/json results and when it finds a JSON result takes over the rendering and formats the display in the browser. Note that it re-formats the raw JSON as well for a nicer display view along with collapsible regions for objects. You can still use View Source to see the raw JSON string returned. For me this is a huge time-saver. As I work with AJAX result data using GET and REST style URLs quite a bit it’s a big timesaver. To quickly and easily display JSON is a key feature in my development day and JSONView for all its simplicity fits that bill for me. If you’re doing AJAX development and you often review URL based JSON results do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of JSONView. Other Browsers JSONView works only with FireFox – what about other browsers? Chrome Chrome actually displays raw JSON responses as plain text without any plug-ins. There’s no plug-in or configuration needed, it just works, although you won’t get any fancy formatting. [updated from comments] There’s also a port of JSONView available for Chrome from here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chklaanhfefbnpoihckbnefhakgolnmc It looks like it works just about the same as the JSONView plug-in for FireFox. Thanks for all that pointed this out… Internet Explorer Internet Explorer probably has the worst response to JSON encoded content: It displays an error page as it apparently tries to render JSON as XML: Yeah that seems real smart – rendering JSON as an XML document. WTF? To get at the actual JSON output, you can use View Source. To get IE to display JSON directly as text you can add a Mime type mapping in the registry:   Create a new application/json key in: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MIME\Database\ContentType\application/json Add a string value of CLSID with a value of {25336920-03F9-11cf-8FD0-00AA00686F13} Add a DWORD value of Encoding with a value of 80000 I can’t take credit for this tip – found it here first on Sky Sander’s Blog. Note that the CLSID can be used for just about any type of text data you want to display as plain text in the IE. It’s the in-place display mechanism and it should work for most text content. For example it might also be useful for looking at CSS and JS files inside of the browser instead of downloading those documents as well. © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in ASP.NET  AJAX  

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• Social Media Talk: Facebook, Really?? How Has It Become This Popular??

  - by david.talamelli

  If you have read some of my previous posts over the past few years either here or on my personal blog David's Journal on Tap you will know I am a Social Media enthusiast. I use various social media sites everday in both my work and personal life. I was surprised to read today on Mashable.com that Facebook now Commands 41% of Social Media Trafic. When I think of the Social Media sites I use most, the sites that jump into my mind first are LinkedIn, Blogging and Twitter. I do use Facebook in both work and in my personal life but on the list of sites I use it probably ranks closer to the bottom of the list rather than the top. I know Facebook is engrained in everything these days - but really I am not a huge Facebook fan - and I am finding that over the past 3-6 months my interest in Facebook is going down rather than up. From a work perspective - SM sites let me connect with candidates and communities and they help me talk about the things that I am doing here at Oracle. From a personal perspective SM sites let me keep in touch with friends and family both here and overseas in a really simple and easy way. Sites like LinkedIn give me a great way to proactively talk to both active and passive candidates. Twitter is fantastic to keep in touch with industry trends and keep up to date on the latest trending topics as well as follow conversations about whatever keyword you want to follow. Blogging lets me share my thoughts and ideas with others and while FB does have some great benefits I don't think the benefits outweigh the negatives of using FB. I use TweetDeck to keep track of my twitter feeds, the latest LinkedIn updates and Facebook updates. Tweetdeck is a great tool as it consolidates these 3 SM sites for me and I can quickly scan to see the latest news on any of them. From what I have seen from Facebook it looks like 70%-80% of people are using FB to grow their farm on farmville, start a mafia war on mafiawars or read their horoscope, check their love percentage, etc...... In between all these "updates" every now and again you do see a real update from someone who actually has something to say but there is so much "white noise" on FB from all the games and apps that is hard to see the real messages from all the 'games' information. I don't like having to scroll through what seems likes pages of farmville updates only to get one real piece of information. For me this is where FB's value really drops off. While I use SM everyday I try to use SM effectively. Sifting through so much noise is not effective and really I am not all that interested in Farmville, MafiaWars or any similar game/app. But what about Groups and Facebook Ads?? Groups are ok, but I am not sure I would call them SM game changers - yes there is a group for everything out there, but a group whether it is on FB or not is only as good as the community that supports and participates in it. Many of the Groups on FB (and elsewhere) are set up and never used or promoted by the moderator. I have heard that FB ads do have an impact, and I have not really looked at them - the question of cost jumps and return on investment comes to my mind though. FB does have some benefits, it is a great way to keep in touch with people and a great way to talk to others. I think it would have been interesting to see a different statistic measuring how effective that 41% of Social Media Traffic via FB really is or is it just a case of more people jumping online to play games. To me FB does not equal SM effectiveness, at the moment it is a tool that I sometimes need to use as opposed to want to use. This article was originally posted on David Talamelli's Blog - David's Journal on Tap

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• SQL SERVER – SOS_SCHEDULER_YIELD – Wait Type – Day 8 of 28

  - by pinaldave

  This is a very interesting wait type and quite often seen as one of the top wait types. Let us discuss this today. From Book On-Line: Occurs when a task voluntarily yields the scheduler for other tasks to execute. During this wait the task is waiting for its quantum to be renewed. SOS_SCHEDULER_YIELD Explanation: SQL Server has multiple threads, and the basic working methodology for SQL Server is that SQL Server does not let any “runnable” thread to starve. Now let us assume SQL Server OS is very busy running threads on all the scheduler. There are always new threads coming up which are ready to run (in other words, runnable). Thread management of the SQL Server is decided by SQL Server and not the operating system. SQL Server runs on non-preemptive mode most of the time, meaning the threads are co-operative and can let other threads to run from time to time by yielding itself. When any thread yields itself for another thread, it creates this wait. If there are more threads, it clearly indicates that the CPU is under pressure. You can fun the following DMV to see how many runnable task counts there are in your system. SELECT scheduler_id, current_tasks_count, runnable_tasks_count, work_queue_count, pending_disk_io_count FROM sys.dm_os_schedulers WHERE scheduler_id < 255 GO If you notice a two-digit number in runnable_tasks_count continuously for long time (not once in a while), you will know that there is CPU pressure. The two-digit number is usually considered as a bad thing; you can read the description of the above DMV over here. Additionally, there are several other counters (%Processor Time and other processor related counters), through which you can refer to so you can validate CPU pressure along with the method explained above. Reducing SOS_SCHEDULER_YIELD wait: This is the trickiest part of this procedure. As discussed, this particular wait type relates to CPU pressure. Increasing more CPU is the solution in simple terms; however, it is not easy to implement this solution. There are other things that you can consider when this wait type is very high. Here is the query where you can find the most expensive query related to CPU from the cache Note: The query that used lots of resources but is not cached will not be caught here. SELECT SUBSTRING(qt.TEXT, (qs.statement_start_offset/2)+1, ((CASE qs.statement_end_offset WHEN -1 THEN DATALENGTH(qt.TEXT) ELSE qs.statement_end_offset END - qs.statement_start_offset)/2)+1), qs.execution_count, qs.total_logical_reads, qs.last_logical_reads, qs.total_logical_writes, qs.last_logical_writes, qs.total_worker_time, qs.last_worker_time, qs.total_elapsed_time/1000000 total_elapsed_time_in_S, qs.last_elapsed_time/1000000 last_elapsed_time_in_S, qs.last_execution_time, qp.query_plan FROM sys.dm_exec_query_stats qs CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_sql_text(qs.sql_handle) qt CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_query_plan(qs.plan_handle) qp ORDER BY qs.total_worker_time DESC -- CPU time You can find the most expensive queries that are utilizing lots of CPU (from the cache) and you can tune them accordingly. Moreover, you can find the longest running query and attempt to tune them if there is any processor offending code. Additionally, pay attention to total_worker_time because if that is also consistently higher, then  the CPU under too much pressure. You can also check perfmon counters of compilations as they tend to use good amount of CPU. Index rebuild is also a CPU intensive process but we should consider that main cause for this query because that is indeed needed on high transactions OLTP system utilized to reduce fragmentations. Note: The information presented here is from my experience and there is no way that I claim it to be accurate. I suggest reading Book OnLine for further clarification. All of the discussions of Wait Stats in this blog is generic and varies from system to system. It is recommended that you test this on a development server before implementing it to a production server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Wait Stats, SQL Wait Types, T SQL, Technology

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• default xna 4.0 gametime don´t works well for 2D physics

  - by EusKoder

  I am developing a game using Visual Studio 2010 and XNA 4.0, after advancing to some extent with the project (a platform based 2d platformer msdn starter kit) I got to test it on different computers with different hardware (CPU, graphics, etc.) and I found that the speed of movement object of the game is quite different, I implemented the PSK physics msdn that are based on time, /// <summary> /// Updates the player's velocity and position based on input, gravity, etc. /// </summary> public void ApplyPhysics(GameTime gameTime) { float elapsed = (float)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalSeconds; Vector2 previousPosition = Position; // Base velocity is a combination of horizontal movement control and // acceleration downward due to gravity. velocity.X += movement * MoveAcceleration * elapsed; velocity.Y = MathHelper.Clamp(velocity.Y + GravityAcceleration * elapsed, -MaxFallSpeed, MaxFallSpeed); velocity.Y = DoJump(velocity.Y, gameTime); // Apply pseudo-drag horizontally. if (IsOnGround) velocity.X *= GroundDragFactor; else velocity.X *= GroundDragFactor; //velocity.X *= AirDragFactor; // Prevent the player from running faster than his top speed. velocity.X = MathHelper.Clamp(velocity.X, -MaxMoveSpeed, MaxMoveSpeed); // Apply velocity. Position += velocity *elapsed; Position = new Vector2((float)Math.Round(Position.X), (float)Math.Round(Position.Y)); // If the player is now colliding with the level, separate them. HandleCollisions(gameTime); // If the collision stopped us from moving, reset the velocity to zero. if (Position.X == previousPosition.X) velocity.X = 0; if (Position.Y == previousPosition.Y) { velocity.Y = 0; jumpTime = 0.0f; } } tested eg with a PC (PC1) 2.13GHz Intel Core 2 6400 / ATI Radeon HD 4670 and another one: (pc2) 3.00GHz Intel Pentium D / Intel 82945G Express Chipset Family by displacement difference (moving x axis at supossed (position = velocity * gametime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalSeconds) constant velocity, for example) is 3 seconds in a total of 20 (example: moving pc1 player sprite 6000 pixels in the x-axis at 20 seconds and pc 2 runs the same distance in 17 ). Tested on a 3rd PC: i72700k / Gigabyte GTX 560 TI the results are even worse, after some time after starting the game gets like 3 times slower and showing the number of pixels in each frame moved in a debug window in the game (counting updatespersecond with counter variable for updates cuantity and gametime for counting a second show 63fps), it appears as if the number is always constant ( refreshments lose the Update method?). In this pc if I put the game in fullscreen during the course of the game, the effect of "go slow" is immediate and restore window mode sometimes yield returns to "normal" and sometimes not. Eventually I began to try a new project to test whether the movement is constant in different pc loading only one sprite and its position value in screen printing. Occur The same. I even tried moving a constant amount of pixels explicitly (position + = 5) and different speeds in different pc quantities of pixels moved in x time. I have the game loop as the default (fixedTimeStep=true;SynchronizeWithVerticalRetrace=true;). I've also tried turning off and creating another timestep as discussed in different post (eg http://gafferongames.com/game-physics/fix-your-timestep/ but i can´t achieve the desired result, move the same number of pixels in X seconds on different computers with windows. All pc used for tests use windows 7 enterprise pc1 == x86 the others are x64. The weirdest thing is that I find information about people describing the same problem and that I wear long nights of searches. Thanks for your help.

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• Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Startup Failures

  - by Rick Strahl

  I’ve been working with VS 2010 Beta 2 for a while now and while it works Ok most of the time it seems the environment is very, very fragile when it comes to crashes and installed packages. Specifically I’ve been working just fine for days, then when VS 2010 crashes it will not re-start. Instead I get the good old Application cannot start dialog: Other failures I’ve seen bring forth other just as useful dialogs with information overload like Operation cannot be performed which for me specifically happens when trying to compile any project. After a bit of digging around and a post to Microsoft Connect the solution boils down to resetting the VS.NET environment. The Application Cannot Start issue stems from a package load failure of some sort, so the work around for this is typically: c:\program files\Visual Studio 2010\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe /ResetSkipPkgs In most cases that should do the trick. If it doesn’t and the error doesn’t go away the more drastic: c:\program files\Visual Studio 2010\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe /ResetSettings is required which resets all settings in VS to its installation defaults. Between these two I’ve always been able to get VS to startup and run properly. BTW it’s handy to keep a list of command line options for Visual Studio around: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/xee0c8y7%28VS.100%29.aspx Note that the /? option in VS 2010 doesn’t display all the options available but rather displays the ‘demo version’ message instead, so the above should be helpful. Also note that unless you install Visual C++ the Visual Studio Command Prompt icon is not automatically installed so you may have to navigate manually to the appropriate folder above. Cannot Build Failures If you get the Cannot compile error dialog, there is another thing that have worked for me: Change your project build target from Debug to Release (or whatever – just change it) and compile again. If that doesn’t work doing the reset steps above will do it for me. It appears this failure comes from some sort of interference of other versions of Visual Studio installed on the system and running another version first. Resetting the build target explicitly seems to reset the build providers to a normalized state so that things work in many cases. But not all. Worst case – resetting settings will do it. The bottom line for working in VS 2010 has been – don’t get too attached to your custom settings as they will get blown away quite a bit. I’ve probably been through 20 or more of these VS resets although I’ve been working with it quite a bit on an internal project. It’s kind of frustrating to see this kind of high level instability in a Beta 2 product which is supposedly the last public beta they will put out. On the other hand this beta has been otherwise rather stable and performance is roughly equivalent to VS 2008. Although I mention the crash above – crashes I’ve seen have been relatively rare and no more frequent than in VS 2008 it seems. Given the drastic UI changes in VS 2010 (using WPF for the shell and editor) I’m actually impressed that the product is as stable as it is at this point. Also I was seriously worried about text quality going to a WPF model, but thankfully WPF 4.0 addresses the blurry text issue with native font rendering to render text on non-cleartype enabled systems crisply. Anyway I hope that these notes are helpful to some of you playing around with the beta and running into problems. Hopefully you won’t need them :-}© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010

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• SQL SERVER – Error: Fix – Msg 208 – Invalid object name ‘dbo.backupset’ – Invalid object name ‘dbo.backupfile’

  - by pinaldave

  Just a day before I got a very interesting email. Here is the email (modified a bit to make it relevant to this blog post). “Pinal, We are facing a very strange issue. One of our query  related to backup files and backup set has stopped working suddenly in SSMS. It works fine in application where we have and in the stored procedure but when we have it in our SSMS it gives following error. Msg 208, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 Invalid object name ‘dbo.backupfile’. Here are our queries which we are trying to execute. SELECT name, database_name, backup_size, TYPE, compatibility_level, backup_set_id FROM dbo.backupset; SELECT logical_name, backup_size, file_type FROM dbo.backupfile; This query gives us details related to backupset and backup files when the backup was taken.” When I receive this kind of email, usually I have no answers directly. The claim that it works in stored procedure and in application but not in SSMS gives me no real data. I have requested him to very first check following two things: If he is connected to correct server? His answer was yes. If he has enough permissions? His answer was he was logged in as an admin. This means there was something more to it and I requested him to send me a screenshot of the his SSMS. He promptly sends that to me and as soon as I receive the screen shot I knew what was going on. Before I say anything take a look at the screenshot yourself and see if you can figure out why his queries are not working in SSMS. Just to make your life a bit easy, I have already given a hint in the image. The answer is very simple, the context of the database is master database. To execute above two queries the context of the database has to be msdb. Tables backupset and backupfile belong to the database msdb only. Here are two workaround or solution to above problem: 1) Change context to MSDB Above two queries when they will run as following they will not error out and will give the accurate desired result. USE msdb GO SELECT name, database_name, backup_size, TYPE, compatibility_level, backup_set_id FROM dbo.backupset; SELECT logical_name, backup_size, file_type FROM dbo.backupfile; 2) Prefix the query with msdb There are cases above script used in stored procedure or part of big query, it is not possible to change the context of the whole query to any specific database. Use three part naming convention and prefix them with msdb. SELECT name, database_name, backup_size, TYPE, compatibility_level, backup_set_id FROM msdb.dbo.backupset; SELECT logical_name, backup_size, file_type FROM msdb.dbo.backupfile; Very simple solution but sometime keeps people wondering for an answer. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Error Messages, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• SQL SERVER – What is a Technology Evangelist?

  - by pinaldave

  When you hear that someone is an “evangelist” the first thing that might pop into your mind is the Christian church.  In fact, the term did come from Christianity, and basically means someone who spreads the news about their faith.  In the technology world, the same definition is true. Technology evangelists are individuals who, professionally or in their spare time, spread the news about the latest new products.  Sounds like a salesperson, right?  No they are absolutely different. Salespeople also keep up to date with a large number of people, and like to convince others to buy their product – and some will go to any lengths to sell!  An evangelist, on the other hand, is brutally honest about the product, even if sometimes it means not making a sale.  An evangelist is out there to tell the TRUTH.  A salesperson needs to make sales. An Evangelist offers a Solution independent of Technology used – a Salesperson offers Particular Technology. With this definition in mind, you can probably think of a few technology evangelists you already know.  Maybe it’s a relative or a neighbor, someone who loves keeping up with the latest trends and is always willing to tell you about them if you ask even the simplest question.  And, in fact, they probably are evangelists and don’t even know it.  For a long time, the work of technology evangelism was in the hands of community and community technology leaders. Luckily now various organizations have understood the importance of the community and helping community to reach their goals. This has lead them to create role of “Technology Evangelists”. Let me talk about one of the most famous Evangelist of the SQL Server technology. Technology Evangelist only belongs to technology and above any country, race, location or any other thing. They are dedicated to the technology. Vinod Kumar is such a man, who have given a lot to community. For years he was a Technology Evangelist for Microsoft, and maintained a blog that was dedicated to spreading his enthusiasm for his favorite products.  He is one of the most respected Evangelists in the field, and has done a lot of work to define the job for other professionals. Vinod’s career has since progressed to the Microsoft Technology Center (read his post), but he is continuing to be a strong presence in the evangelism community.  I have a lot of respect for Vinod.  He has done a lot for the community and technology evangelism.  Everybody has dream to serve community the way he does, and he is a great role model for evangelists everywhere. On his blog, Vinod created one of the best descriptions of a Technology Evangelist.  It defined the position and also made the distinction between evangelist and salesperson extremely clear.  I will include the highlights of that list here, because no one can say it better than Vinod: Bundle of energy – Passion is their middle name Wonderful Story tellers Empathy, Trust, Loyalty, Openness, Accessibility and Warmth Technology Enthusiast – Doers Love people, people and more people – Community oriented Unique Style and Leadership qualities !!! Self-Confident, Self-Motivated but a student (To read the full list, see: Evangelism Beyond Borders with Evangelists) His blog is a must-read for anyone interested in technology evangelism as a career or simply a hobby.  His advice about how to gain an audience and become a trusted advisor is the best in the business. I think there is an evangelist in everyone. I, too, consider myself a technology evangelist.  Regular readers of this blog will recognize that I am dedicated to bringing information to the masses, and that I pride myself on being both brutally and honest and giving every product fair consideration. I think there is no better way of saying following subject. “Once an Evangelist – Always an Evangelist!” Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com)     Filed under: About Me, Database, MVP, Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Evangelist

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• BizTalk 2009 - BizTalk Benchmark Wizard: Installation

  - by StuartBrierley

  As previously detailed, I have completed a single server installation of BizTalk Server 2009 standard on my development laptop; a MacBook Pro Core2Duo running at 2.16Ghz with 2Gb of RAM.  Following this I also posted on my use of the BizTalk Server Best Practices Anaylser and how to configure the BizTalk SQL Server Jobs.  All of which means that I should have some confidence that I have a decent working BizTalk Server 2009 environment, Next I thought that it would be a good idea to try and get some idea of how this setup performs by carrying out some baseline tests that can then be replicated on the test and live servers. The aim of this would be to allow confident predictions to be made of how any solutions developed on a single "server" installation may be expected to perform when deployed to these multi-server BizTalk Server 2009 standard installations. The BizTalk Benchmark Wizard would seem to be the perfect tool for the job. The BizTalk Benchmark Wizard is a ultility that can be used to gain some validation of a BizTalk installation, giving a level of guidance on whether it is performing as might be expected. This utility should be used after BizTalk Server has been installed and before any solutions are deployed to the environment.  This will ensure that you are getting consistent and clean results from the BizTalk Benchmark Wizard. The BizTalk Benchmark Wizard applies load to the BizTalk Server environment under a choice of specific scenarios. During these scenarios performance counter information is collected and assessed against statistics that are appropriate to the BizTalk Server environment: "The executed scenarios may or may not be relative to any realistic scenario, and is only intended for testing. The BizTalk Benchmark Wizard has been developed in relation to the BizTalk Server 2009 Scale Out Testing Study. More information about the study can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee377068(BTS.10).aspx" After downloading and installing the wizard you will need set up the Hosts, Instances and Adapter handlers.  This is done by running a script file using the “cscript” detailed below.  To do this you will need to open a command prompt window and navigate to the script folder; assuming the default installation location this would be C:\Program Files\Blogical\BizTalk Benchmark Wizard\Artefacts\BizTalk. In this folder you should find an InstallHosts.vbs file which can be executed using the following parameters: NTGroupName - The name of the Windows NT group. UserName – The name of the user account running the service instances. Password – The password of the user account running the service instances. Receive Host – The name of the server where you want to run the receive host instance.  Send Host - The name of the server where you want to run the sen host instance. Processing Host - The name of the server where you want to run the process host instance. By default the script is set up for 64 bit hosts, so if you are running in 32 bit environment make sure that you change the following line in the script before continuing: from:   objHS.IsHost32BitOnly = False to:    objHS.IsHost32BitOnly = True If you have a single box installation, your script command might look like this: cscript InstallHosts.vbs "BizTalk Application Users" “\MyUser” “MyPassword” “BtsServer1” “BtsServer1” “BtsServer1” If you have a multi server installation, your script command might look like this: cscript InstallHosts.vbs "MyDomain\BizTalk Application Users" “MyDomain\MyUser” “MyPassword” “BtsServer1” “BtsServer2” “BtsServer2” Running this script will create: Three hosts (BBW_RxHost, BBW_TxHost and BBW_PxHost) Three host instances One send and one receive adapter handler for the WCF NetTcp adapter. You will then need to import the BizTalk MSI via the BizTalk Administration Console.  Open the BizTalk Administration Console, point to the “Applications” node and import the BizTalk Benchmark Wizard.msi found in the same folder as the script above. This will create a “BizTalk Benchmark Wizard” application along with all ports and orchestrations needed. To finish the installation you will need to run the BizTalk Benchmark Wizard.msi on all BizTalk servers to add the assemblies to the Global Assembly Cache (GAC). Next I will look at running the BizTalk Benchmark Wizard.

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• Logging WebSocket Frames using Chrome Developer Tools, Net-internals and Wireshark (TOTD #184)

  - by arungupta

  TOTD #183 explained how to build a WebSocket-driven application using GlassFish 4. This Tip Of The Day (TOTD) will explain how do view/debug on-the-wire messages, or frames as they are called in WebSocket parlance, over this upgraded connection. This blog will use the application built in TOTD #183. First of all, make sure you are using a browser that supports WebSocket. If you recall from TOTD #183 then WebSocket is combination of Protocol and JavaScript API. A browser supporting WebSocket, or not, means they understand your web pages with the WebSocket JavaScript. caniuse.com/websockets provide a current status of WebSocket support in different browsers. Most of the major browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari already support WebSocket for the past few versions. As of this writing, IE still does not support WebSocket however its planned for a future release. Viewing WebSocket farmes require special settings because all the communication happens over an upgraded HTTP connection over a single TCP connection. If you are building your application using Java, then there are two common ways to debug WebSocket messages today. Other language libraries provide different mechanisms to log the messages. Lets get started! Chrome Developer Tools provide information about the initial handshake only. This can be viewed in the Network tab and selecting the endpoint hosting the WebSocket endpoint. You can also click on "WebSockets" on the bottom-right to show only the WebSocket endpoints. Click on "Frames" in the right panel to view the actual frames being exchanged between the client and server. The frames are not refreshed when new messages are sent or received. You need to refresh the panel by clicking on the endpoint again. To see more detailed information about the WebSocket frames, you need to type "chrome://net-internals" in a new tab. Click on "Sockets" in the left navigation bar and then on "View live sockets" to see the page. Select the box with the address to your WebSocket endpoint and see some basic information about connection and bytes exchanged between the client and the endpoint. Clicking on the blue text "source dependency ..." shows more details about the handshake. If you are interested in viewing the exact payload of WebSocket messages then you need a network sniffer. These tools are used to snoop network traffic and provide a lot more details about the raw messages exchanged over the network. However because they provide lot more information so they need to be configured in order to view the relevant information. Wireshark (nee Ethereal) is a pretty standard tool for sniffing network traffic and will be used here. For this blog purpose, we'll assume that the WebSocket endpoint is hosted on the local machine. These tools do allow to sniff traffic across the network though. Wireshark is quite a comprehensive tool and we'll capture traffic on the loopback address. Start wireshark, select "loopback" and click on "Start". By default, all traffic information on the loopback address is displayed. That includes tons of TCP protocol messages, applications running on your local machines (like GlassFish or Dropbox on mine), and many others. Specify "http" as the filter in the top-left. Invoke the application built in TOTD #183 and click on "Say Hello" button once. The output in wireshark looks like Here is a description of the messages exchanged: Message #4: Initial HTTP request of the JSP page Message #6: Response returning the JSP page Message #16: HTTP Upgrade request Message #18: Upgrade request accepted Message #20: Request favicon Message #22: Responding with favicon not found Message #24: Browser making a WebSocket request to the endpoint Message #26: WebSocket endpoint responding back You can also use Fiddler to debug your WebSocket messages. How are you viewing your WebSocket messages ? Here are some references for you: JSR 356: Java API for WebSocket - Specification (Early Draft) and Implementation (already integrated in GlassFish 4 promoted builds) TOTD #183 - Getting Started with WebSocket in GlassFish Subsequent blogs will discuss the following topics (not necessary in that order) ... Binary data as payload Custom payloads using encoder/decoder Error handling Interface-driven WebSocket endpoint Java client API Client and Server configuration Security Subprotocols Extensions Other topics from the API

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• Data Quality and Master Data Management Resources

  - by Dejan Sarka

  Many companies or organizations do regular data cleansing. When you cleanse the data, the data quality goes up to some higher level. The data quality level is determined by the amount of work invested in the cleansing. As time passes, the data quality deteriorates, and you need to repeat the cleansing process. If you spend an equal amount of effort as you did with the previous cleansing, you can expect the same level of data quality as you had after the previous cleansing. And then the data quality deteriorates over time again, and the cleansing process starts over and over again. The idea of Data Quality Services is to mitigate the cleansing process. While the amount of time you need to spend on cleansing decreases, you will achieve higher and higher levels of data quality. While cleansing, you learn what types of errors to expect, discover error patterns, find domains of correct values, etc. You don’t throw away this knowledge. You store it and use it to find and correct the same issues automatically during your next cleansing process. The following figure shows this graphically. The idea of master data management, which you can perform with Master Data Services (MDS), is to prevent data quality from deteriorating. Once you reach a particular quality level, the MDS application—together with the defined policies, people, and master data management processes—allow you to maintain this level permanently. This idea is shown in the following picture. OK, now you know what DQS and MDS are about. You can imagine the importance on maintaining the data quality. Here are some resources that help you preparing and executing the data quality (DQ) and master data management (MDM) activities. Books Dejan Sarka and Davide Mauri: Data Quality and Master Data Management with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 – a general introduction to MDM, MDS, and data profiling. Matching explained in depth. Dejan Sarka, Matija Lah and Grega Jerkic: MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-463): Building Data Warehouses with Microsoft SQL Server 2012 – I wrote quite a few chapters about DQ and MDM, and introduced also SQL Server 2012 DQS. Thomas Redman: Data Quality: The Field Guide – you should start with this book. Thomas Redman is the father of DQ and MDM. Tyler Graham: Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Master Data Services – MDS in depth from a product team mate. Arkady Maydanchik: Data Quality Assessment – data profiling in depth. Tamraparni Dasu, Theodore Johnson: Exploratory Data Mining and Data Cleaning – advanced data profiling with data mining. Forthcoming presentations I am presenting a DQS and MDM seminar at PASS SQL Rally Amsterdam 2013: Wednesday, November 6th, 2013: Enterprise Information Management with SQL Server 2012 – a good kick start to your first DQ and / or MDM project. Courses Data Quality and Master Data Management with SQL Server 2012 – I wrote a 2-day course for SolidQ. If you are interested in this course, which I could also deliver in a shorter seminar way, you can contact your closes SolidQ subsidiary, or, of course, me directly on addresses dsarka@solidq.com or [email protected]. This course could also complement the existing courseware portfolio of training providers, which are welcome to contact me as well. Start improving the quality of your data now!

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• ASP.NET Server-side comments

  - by nmarun

  I believe a good number of you know about Server-side commenting. This blog is just like a revival to refresh your memories. When you write comments in your .aspx/.ascx files, people usually write them as: 1: <!-- This is a comment. --> To show that it actually makes a difference for using the server-side commenting technique, I’ve started a web application project and my default.aspx page looks like this: 1: <%@ Page Title="Home Page" Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Site.master" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="ServerSideComment._Default" %> 2: <asp:Content ID="HeaderContent" runat="server" ContentPlaceHolderID="HeadContent"> 3: </asp:Content> 4: <asp:Content ID="BodyContent" runat="server" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent"> 5: <h2> 6: <!-- This is a comment --> 7: Welcome to ASP.NET! 8: </h2> 9: <p> 10: To learn more about ASP.NET visit <a href="http://www.asp.net" title="ASP.NET Website">www.asp.net</a>. 11: </p> 12: <p> 13: You can also find <a href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=152368&amp;clcid=0x409" 14: title="MSDN ASP.NET Docs">documentation on ASP.NET at MSDN</a>. 15: </p> 16: </asp:Content> See the comment in line 6 and when I run the app, I can do a view source on the browser which shows up as: 1: <h2> 2: <!-- This is a comment --> 3: Welcome to ASP.NET! 4: </h2> Using Fiddler shows the page size as: Let’s change the comment style and use server-side commenting technique. 1: <h2> 2: <%-- This is a comment --%> 3: Welcome to ASP.NET! 4: </h2> Upon rendering, the view source looks like: 1: <h2> 2: 3: Welcome to ASP.NET! 4: </h2> Fiddler now shows the page size as: The difference is that client-side comments are ignored by the browser, but they are still sent down the pipe. With server-side comments, the compiler ignores everything inside this block. Visual Studio’s Text Editor toolbar also puts comments as server-side ones. If you want to give it a shot, go to your design page and press Ctrl+K, Ctrl+C on some selected text and you’ll see it commented in the server-side commenting style.

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• Using HTML 5 SessionState to save rendered Page Content

  - by Rick Strahl

  HTML 5 SessionState and LocalStorage are very useful and super easy to use to manage client side state. For building rich client side or SPA style applications it's a vital feature to be able to cache user data as well as HTML content in order to swap pages in and out of the browser's DOM. What might not be so obvious is that you can also use the sessionState and localStorage objects even in classic server rendered HTML applications to provide caching features between pages. These APIs have been around for a long time and are supported by most relatively modern browsers and even all the way back to IE8, so you can use them safely in your Web applications. SessionState and LocalStorage are easy The APIs that make up sessionState and localStorage are very simple. Both object feature the same API interface which  is a simple, string based key value store that has getItem, setItem, removeitem, clear and  key methods. The objects are also pseudo array objects and so can be iterated like an array with  a length property and you have array indexers to set and get values with. Basic usage  for storing and retrieval looks like this (using sessionStorage, but the syntax is the same for localStorage - just switch the objects):// set var lastAccess = new Date().getTime(); if (sessionStorage) sessionStorage.setItem("myapp_time", lastAccess.toString()); // retrieve in another page or on a refresh var time = null; if (sessionStorage) time = sessionStorage.getItem("myapp_time"); if (time) time = new Date(time * 1); else time = new Date(); sessionState stores data that is browser session specific and that has a liftetime of the active browser session or window. Shut down the browser or tab and the storage goes away. localStorage uses the same API interface, but the lifetime of the data is permanently stored in the browsers storage area until deleted via code or by clearing out browser cookies (not the cache). Both sessionStorage and localStorage space is limited. The spec is ambiguous about this - supposedly sessionStorage should allow for unlimited size, but it appears that most WebKit browsers support only 2.5mb for either object. This means you have to be careful what you store especially since other applications might be running on the same domain and also use the storage mechanisms. That said 2.5mb worth of character data is quite a bit and would go a long way. The easiest way to get a feel for how sessionState and localStorage work is to look at a simple example. You can go check out the following example online in Plunker: http://plnkr.co/edit/0ICotzkoPjHaWa70GlRZ?p=preview which looks like this: Plunker is an online HTML/JavaScript editor that lets you write and run Javascript code and similar to JsFiddle, but a bit cleaner to work in IMHO (thanks to John Papa for turning me on to it). The sample has two text boxes with counts that update session/local storage every time you click the related button. The counts are 'cached' in Session and Local storage. The point of these examples is that both counters survive full page reloads, and the LocalStorage counter survives a complete browser shutdown and restart. Go ahead and try it out by clicking the Reload button after updating both counters and then shutting down the browser completely and going back to the same URL (with the same browser). What you should see is that reloads leave both counters intact at the counted values, while a browser restart will leave only the local storage counter intact. The code to deal with the SessionStorage (and LocalStorage not shown here) in the example is isolated into a couple of wrapper methods to simplify the code: function getSessionCount() { var count = 0; if (sessionStorage) { var count = sessionStorage.getItem("ss_count"); count = !count ? 0 : count * 1; } $("#txtSession").val(count); return count; } function setSessionCount(count) { if (sessionStorage) sessionStorage.setItem("ss_count", count.toString()); } These two functions essentially load and store a session counter value. The two key methods used here are: sessionStorage.getItem(key); sessionStorage.setItem(key,stringVal); Note that the value given to setItem and return by getItem has to be a string. If you pass another type you get an error. Don't let that limit you though - you can easily enough store JSON data in a variable so it's quite possible to pass complex objects and store them into a single sessionStorage value:var user = { name: "Rick", id="ricks", level=8 } sessionStorage.setItem("app_user",JSON.stringify(user)); to retrieve it:var user = sessionStorage.getItem("app_user"); if (user) user = JSON.parse(user); Simple! If you're using the Chrome Developer Tools (F12) you can also check out the session and local storage state on the Resource tab:   You can also use this tool to refresh or remove entries from storage. What we just looked at is a purely client side implementation where a couple of counters are stored. For rich client centric AJAX applications sessionStorage and localStorage provide a very nice and simple API to store application state while the application is running. But you can also use these storage mechanisms to manage server centric HTML applications when you combine server rendering with some JavaScript to perform client side data caching. You can both store some state information and data on the client (ie. store a JSON object and carry it forth between server rendered HTML requests) or you can use it for good old HTTP based caching where some rendered HTML is saved and then restored later. Let's look at the latter with a real life example. Why do I need Client-side Page Caching for Server Rendered HTML? I don't know about you, but in a lot of my existing server driven applications I have lists that display a fair amount of data. Typically these lists contain links to then drill down into more specific data either for viewing or editing. You can then click on a link and go off to a detail page that provides more concise content. So far so good. But now you're done with the detail page and need to get back to the list, so you click on a 'bread crumbs trail' or an application level 'back to list' button and… …you end up back at the top of the list - the scroll position, the current selection in some cases even filters conditions - all gone with the wind. You've left behind the state of the list and are starting from scratch in your browsing of the list from the top. Not cool! Sound familiar? This a pretty common scenario with server rendered HTML content where it's so common to display lists to drill into, only to lose state in the process of returning back to the original list. Look at just about any traditional forums application, or even StackOverFlow to see what I mean here. Scroll down a bit to look at a post or entry, drill in then use the bread crumbs or tab to go back… In some cases returning to the top of a list is not a big deal. On StackOverFlow that sort of works because content is turning around so quickly you probably want to actually look at the top posts. Not always though - if you're browsing through a list of search topics you're interested in and drill in there's no way back to that position. Essentially anytime you're actively browsing the items in the list, that's when state becomes important and if it's not handled the user experience can be really disrupting. Content Caching If you're building client centric SPA style applications this is a fairly easy to solve problem - you tend to render the list once and then update the page content to overlay the detail content, only hiding the list temporarily until it's used again later. It's relatively easy to accomplish this simply by hiding content on the page and later making it visible again. But if you use server rendered content, hanging on to all the detail like filters, selections and scroll position is not quite as easy. Or is it??? This is where sessionStorage comes in handy. What if we just save the rendered content of a previous page, and then restore it when we return to this page based on a special flag that tells us to use the cached version? Let's see how we can do this. A real World Use Case Recently my local ISP asked me to help out with updating an ancient classifieds application. They had a very busy, local classifieds app that was originally an ASP classic application. The old app was - wait for it: frames based - and even though I lobbied against it, the decision was made to keep the frames based layout to allow rapid browsing of the hundreds of posts that are made on a daily basis. The primary reason they wanted this was precisely for the ability to quickly browse content item by item. While I personally hate working with Frames, I have to admit that the UI actually works well with the frames layout as long as you're running on a large desktop screen. You can check out the frames based desktop site here: http://classifieds.gorge.net/ However when I rebuilt the app I also added a secondary view that doesn't use frames. The main reason for this of course was for mobile displays which work horribly with frames. So there's a somewhat mobile friendly interface to the interface, which ditches the frames and uses some responsive design tweaking for mobile capable operation: http://classifeds.gorge.net/mobile  (or browse the base url with your browser width under 800px)   Here's what the mobile, non-frames view looks like:   As you can see this means that the list of classifieds posts now is a list and there's a separate page for drilling down into the item. And of course… originally we ran into that usability issue I mentioned earlier where the browse, view detail, go back to the list cycle resulted in lost list state. Originally in mobile mode you scrolled through the list, found an item to look at and drilled in to display the item detail. Then you clicked back to the list and BAM - you've lost your place. Because there are so many items added on a daily basis the full list is never fully loaded, but rather there's a "Load Additional Listings"  entry at the button. Not only did we originally lose our place when coming back to the list, but any 'additionally loaded' items are no longer there because the list was now rendering  as if it was the first page hit. The additional listings, and any filters, the selection of an item all were lost. Major Suckage! Using Client SessionStorage to cache Server Rendered Content To work around this problem I decided to cache the rendered page content from the list in SessionStorage. Anytime the list renders or is updated with Load Additional Listings, the page HTML is cached and stored in Session Storage. Any back links from the detail page or the login or write entry forms then point back to the list page with a back=true query string parameter. If the server side sees this parameter it doesn't render the part of the page that is cached. Instead the client side code retrieves the data from the sessionState cache and simply inserts it into the page. It sounds pretty simple, and the overall the process is really easy, but there are a few gotchas that I'll discuss in a minute. But first let's look at the implementation. Let's start with the server side here because that'll give a quick idea of the doc structure. As I mentioned the server renders data from an ASP.NET MVC view. On the list page when returning to the list page from the display page (or a host of other pages) looks like this: https://classifieds.gorge.net/list?back=True The query string value is a flag, that indicates whether the server should render the HTML. Here's what the top level MVC Razor view for the list page looks like:@model MessageListViewModel @{ ViewBag.Title = "Classified Listing"; bool isBack = !string.IsNullOrEmpty(Request.QueryString["back"]); } <form method="post" action="@Url.Action("list")"> <div id="SizingContainer"> @if (!isBack) { @Html.Partial("List_CommandBar_Partial", Model) <div id="PostItemContainer" class="scrollbox" xstyle="-webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;"> @Html.Partial("List_Items_Partial", Model) @if (Model.RequireLoadEntry) { <div class="postitem loadpostitems" style="padding: 15px;"> <div id="LoadProgress" class="smallprogressright"></div> <div class="control-progress"> Load additional listings... </div> </div> } </div> } </div> </form> As you can see the query string triggers a conditional block that if set is simply not rendered. The content inside of #SizingContainer basically holds  the entire page's HTML sans the headers and scripts, but including the filter options and menu at the top. In this case this makes good sense - in other situations the fact that the menu or filter options might be dynamically updated might make you only cache the list rather than essentially the entire page. In this particular instance all of the content works and produces the proper result as both the list along with any filter conditions in the form inputs are restored. Ok, let's move on to the client. On the client there are two page level functions that deal with saving and restoring state. Like the counter example I showed earlier, I like to wrap the logic to save and restore values from sessionState into a separate function because they are almost always used in several places.page.saveData = function(id) { if (!sessionStorage) return; var data = { id: id, scroll: $("#PostItemContainer").scrollTop(), html: $("#SizingContainer").html() }; sessionStorage.setItem("list_html",JSON.stringify(data)); }; page.restoreData = function() { if (!sessionStorage) return; var data = sessionStorage.getItem("list_html"); if (!data) return null; return JSON.parse(data); }; The data that is saved is an object which contains an ID which is the selected element when the user clicks and a scroll position. These two values are used to reset the scroll position when the data is used from the cache. Finally the html from the #SizingContainer element is stored, which makes for the bulk of the document's HTML. In this application the HTML captured could be a substantial bit of data. If you recall, I mentioned that the server side code renders a small chunk of data initially and then gets more data if the user reads through the first 50 or so items. The rest of the items retrieved can be rather sizable. Other than the JSON deserialization that's Ok. Since I'm using SessionStorage the storage space has no immediate limits. Next is the core logic to handle saving and restoring the page state. At first though this would seem pretty simple, and in some cases it might be, but as the following code demonstrates there are a few gotchas to watch out for. Here's the relevant code I use to save and restore:$( function() { … var isBack = getUrlEncodedKey("back", location.href); if (isBack) { // remove the back key from URL setUrlEncodedKey("back", "", location.href); var data = page.restoreData(); // restore from sessionState if (!data) { // no data - force redisplay of the server side default list window.location = "list"; return; } $("#SizingContainer").html(data.html); var el = $(".postitem[data-id=" + data.id + "]"); $(".postitem").removeClass("highlight"); el.addClass("highlight"); $("#PostItemContainer").scrollTop(data.scroll); setTimeout(function() { el.removeClass("highlight"); }, 2500); } else if (window.noFrames) page.saveData(null); // save when page loads $("#SizingContainer").on("click", ".postitem", function() { var id = $(this).attr("data-id"); if (!id) return true; if (window.noFrames) page.saveData(id); var contentFrame = window.parent.frames["Content"]; if (contentFrame) contentFrame.location.href = "show/" + id; else window.location.href = "show/" + id; return false; }); … The code starts out by checking for the back query string flag which triggers restoring from the client cache. If cached the cached data structure is read from sessionStorage. It's important here to check if data was returned. If the user had back=true on the querystring but there is no cached data, he likely bookmarked this page or otherwise shut down the browser and came back to this URL. In that case the server didn't render any detail and we have no cached data, so all we can do is redirect to the original default list view using window.location. If we continued the page would render no data - so make sure to always check the cache retrieval result. Always! If there is data the it's loaded and the data.html data is restored back into the document by simply injecting the HTML back into the document's #SizingContainer element:$("#SizingContainer").html(data.html); It's that simple and it's quite quick even with a fully loaded list of additional items and on a phone. The actual HTML data is stored to the cache on every page load initially and then again when the user clicks on an element to navigate to a particular listing. The former ensures that the client cache always has something in it, and the latter updates with additional information for the selected element. For the click handling I use a data-id attribute on the list item (.postitem) in the list and retrieve the id from that. That id is then used to navigate to the actual entry as well as storing that Id value in the saved cached data. The id is used to reset the selection by searching for the data-id value in the restored elements. The overall process of this save/restore process is pretty straight forward and it doesn't require a bunch of code, yet it yields a huge improvement in the usability of the site on mobile devices (or anybody who uses the non-frames view). Some things to watch out for As easy as it conceptually seems to simply store and retrieve cached content, you have to be quite aware what type of content you are caching. The code above is all that's specific to cache/restore cycle and it works, but it took a few tweaks to the rest of the script code and server code to make it all work. There were a few gotchas that weren't immediately obvious. Here are a few things to pay attention to: Event Handling Logic Timing of manipulating DOM events Inline Script Code Bookmarking to the Cache Url when no cache exists Do you have inline script code in your HTML? That script code isn't going to run if you restore from cache and simply assign or it may not run at the time you think it would normally in the DOM rendering cycle. JavaScript Event Hookups The biggest issue I ran into with this approach almost immediately is that originally I had various static event handlers hooked up to various UI elements that are now cached. If you have an event handler like:$("#btnSearch").click( function() {…}); that works fine when the page loads with server rendered HTML, but that code breaks when you now load the HTML from cache. Why? Because the elements you're trying to hook those events to may not actually be there - yet. Luckily there's an easy workaround for this by using deferred events. With jQuery you can use the .on() event handler instead:$("#SelectionContainer").on("click","#btnSearch", function() {…}); which monitors a parent element for the events and checks for the inner selector elements to handle events on. This effectively defers to runtime event binding, so as more items are added to the document bindings still work. For any cached content use deferred events. Timing of manipulating DOM Elements Along the same lines make sure that your DOM manipulation code follows the code that loads the cached content into the page so that you don't manipulate DOM elements that don't exist just yet. Ideally you'll want to check for the condition to restore cached content towards the top of your script code, but that can be tricky if you have components or other logic that might not all run in a straight line. Inline Script Code Here's another small problem I ran into: I use a DateTime Picker widget I built a while back that relies on the jQuery date time picker. I also created a helper function that allows keyboard date navigation into it that uses JavaScript logic. Because MVC's limited 'object model' the only way to embed widget content into the page is through inline script. This code broken when I inserted the cached HTML into the page because the script code was not available when the component actually got injected into the page. As the last bullet - it's a matter of timing. There's no good work around for this - in my case I pulled out the jQuery date picker and relied on native <input type="date" /> logic instead - a better choice these days anyway, especially since this view is meant to be primarily to serve mobile devices which actually support date input through the browser (unlike desktop browsers of which only WebKit seems to support it). Bookmarking Cached Urls When you cache HTML content you have to make a decision whether you cache on the client and also not render that same content on the server. In the Classifieds app I didn't render server side content so if the user comes to the page with back=True and there is no cached content I have to a have a Plan B. Typically this happens when somebody ends up bookmarking the back URL. The easiest and safest solution for this scenario is to ALWAYS check the cache result to make sure it exists and if not have a safe URL to go back to - in this case to the plain uncached list URL which amounts to effectively redirecting. This seems really obvious in hindsight, but it's easy to overlook and not see a problem until much later, when it's not obvious at all why the page is not rendering anything. Don't use <body> to replace Content Since we're practically replacing all the HTML in the page it may seem tempting to simply replace the HTML content of the <body> tag. Don't. The body tag usually contains key things that should stay in the page and be there when it loads. Specifically script tags and elements and possibly other embedded content. It's best to create a top level DOM element specifically as a placeholder container for your cached content and wrap just around the actual content you want to replace. In the app above the #SizingContainer is that container. Other Approaches The approach I've used for this application is kind of specific to the existing server rendered application we're running and so it's just one approach you can take with caching. However for server rendered content caching this is a pattern I've used in a few apps to retrofit some client caching into list displays. In this application I took the path of least resistance to the existing server rendering logic. Here are a few other ways that come to mind: Using Partial HTML Rendering via AJAXInstead of rendering the page initially on the server, the page would load empty and the client would render the UI by retrieving the respective HTML and embedding it into the page from a Partial View. This effectively makes the initial rendering and the cached rendering logic identical and removes the server having to decide whether this request needs to be rendered or not (ie. not checking for a back=true switch). All the logic related to caching is made on the client in this case. Using JSON Data and Client RenderingThe hardcore client option is to do the whole UI SPA style and pull data from the server and then use client rendering or databinding to pull the data down and render using templates or client side databinding with knockout/angular et al. As with the Partial Rendering approach the advantage is that there's no difference in the logic between pulling the data from cache or rendering from scratch other than the initial check for the cache request. Of course if the app is a  full on SPA app, then caching may not be required even - the list could just stay in memory and be hidden and reactivated. I'm sure there are a number of other ways this can be handled as well especially using  AJAX. AJAX rendering might simplify the logic, but it also complicates search engine optimization since there's no content loaded initially. So there are always tradeoffs and it's important to look at all angles before deciding on any sort of caching solution in general. State of the Session SessionState and LocalStorage are easy to use in client code and can be integrated even with server centric applications to provide nice caching features of content and data. In this post I've shown a very specific scenario of storing HTML content for the purpose of remembering list view data and state and making the browsing experience for lists a bit more friendly, especially if there's dynamically loaded content involved. If you haven't played with sessionStorage or localStorage I encourage you to give it a try. There's a lot of cool stuff that you can do with this beyond the specific scenario I've covered here… Resources Overview of localStorage (also applies to sessionStorage) Web Storage Compatibility Modernizr Test Suite© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2013Posted in JavaScript  HTML5  ASP.NET  MVC   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Inequality joins, Asynchronous transformations and Lookups : SSIS

  - by jamiet

  It is pretty much accepted by SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) developers that synchronous transformations are generally quicker than asynchronous transformations (for a description of synchronous and asynchronous transformations go read Asynchronous and synchronous data flow components). Notice I said “generally” and not “always”; there are circumstances where using asynchronous transformations can be beneficial and in this blog post I’ll demonstrate such a scenario, one that is pretty common when building data warehouses. Imagine I have a [Customer] dimension table that manages information about all of my customers as a slowly-changing dimension. If that is a type 2 slowly changing dimension then you will likely have multiple rows per customer in that table. Furthermore you might also have datetime fields that indicate the effective time period of each member record. Here is such a table that contains data for four dimension members {Terry, Max, Henry, Horace}: Notice that we have multiple records per customer and that the [SCDStartDate] of a record is equivalent to the [SCDEndDate] of the record that preceded it (if there was one). (Note that I am on record as saying I am not a fan of this technique of storing an [SCDEndDate] but for the purposes of clarity I have included it here.) Anyway, the idea here is that we will have some incoming data containing [CustomerName] & [EffectiveDate] and we need to use those values to lookup [Customer].[CustomerId]. The logic will be: Lookup a [CustomerId] WHERE [CustomerName]=[CustomerName] AND [SCDStartDate] <= [EffectiveDate] AND [EffectiveDate] <= [SCDEndDate] The conventional approach to this would be to use a full cached lookup but that isn’t an option here because we are using inequality conditions. The obvious next step then is to use a non-cached lookup which enables us to change the SQL statement to use inequality operators: Let’s take a look at the dataflow: Notice these are all synchronous components. This approach works just fine however it does have the limitation that it has to issue a SQL statement against your lookup set for every row thus we can expect the execution time of our dataflow to increase linearly in line with the number of rows in our dataflow; that’s not good. OK, that’s the obvious method. Let’s now look at a different way of achieving this using an asynchronous Merge Join transform coupled with a Conditional Split. I’ve shown it post-execution so that I can include the row counts which help to illustrate what is going on here: Notice that there are more rows output from our Merge Join component than on the input. That is because we are joining on [CustomerName] and, as we know, we have multiple records per [CustomerName] in our lookup set. Notice also that there are two asynchronous components in here (the Sort and the Merge Join). I have embedded a video below that compares the execution times for each of these two methods. The video is just over 8minutes long. View on Vimeo  For those that can’t be bothered watching the video I’ll tell you the results here. The dataflow that used the Lookup transform took 36 seconds whereas the dataflow that used the Merge Join took less than two seconds. An illustration in case it is needed: Pretty conclusive proof that in some scenarios it may be quicker to use an asynchronous component than a synchronous one. Your mileage may of course vary. The scenario outlined here is analogous to performance tuning procedural SQL that uses cursors. It is common to eliminate cursors by converting them to set-based operations and that is effectively what we have done here. Our non-cached lookup is performing a discrete operation for every single row of data, exactly like a cursor does. By eliminating this cursor-in-disguise we have dramatically sped up our dataflow. I hope all of that proves useful. You can download the package that I demonstrated in the video from my SkyDrive at http://cid-550f681dad532637.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/BlogShare/20100514/20100514%20Lookups%20and%20Merge%20Joins.zip Comments are welcome as always. @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Want a headless build server for SSDT without installing Visual Studio? You’re out of luck!

  - by jamiet

  An issue that regularly seems to rear its head on my travels is that of headless build servers for SSDT. What does that mean exactly? Let me give you my interpretation of it. A SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) project incorporates a build process that will basically parse all of the files within the project and spit out a .dacpac file. Where an organisation employs a Continuous Integration process they will likely want to automate the building of that dacpac whenever someone commits a change to the source control repository. In order to do that the organisation will use a build server (e.g. TFS, TeamCity, Jenkins) and hence that build server requires all the pre-requisite software that understands how to build an SSDT project. The simplest way to install all of those pre-requisites is to install SSDT itself however a lot of folks don’t like that approach because it installs a lot unnecessary components on there, not least Visual Studio itself. Those folks (of which i am one) are of the opinion that it should be unnecessary to install a heavyweight GUI in order to simply get a few software components required to do something that inherently doesn’t even need a GUI. The phrase “headless build server” is often used to describe a build server that doesn’t contain any heavyweight GUI tools such as Visual Studio and is a desirable state for a build server. In his blog post Headless MSBuild Support for SSDT (*.sqlproj) Projects Gert Drapers outlines the steps necessary to obtain a headless build server for SSDT: This article describes how to install the required components to build and publish SQL Server Data Tools projects (*.sqlproj) using MSBuild without installing the full SQL Server Data Tool hosted inside the Visual Studio IDE. http://sqlproj.com/index.php/2012/03/headless-msbuild-support-for-ssdt-sqlproj-projects/ Frankly however going through these steps is a royal PITA and folks like myself have longed for Microsoft to support headless build support for SSDT by providing a distributable installer that installs only the pre-requisites for building SSDT projects. Yesterday in MSDN forum thread Building a VS2013 headless build server - it's sooo hard Mike Hingley complained about this very thing and it prompted a response from Kevin Cunnane from the SSDT product team: The official recommendation from the TFS / Visual Studio team is to install the version of Visual Studio you use on the build machine. I, like many others, would rather not have to install full blown Visual Studio and so I asked: Is there any chance you'll ever support any of these scenarios: Installation of all build/deploy pre-requisites without installing the VS shell? TFS shipping with all of the pre-requisites for doing SSDT project build/deploys 3rd party build servers (e.g. TeamCity) shipping with all of the requisites for doing SSDT project build/deploys I have to say that the lack of a single installer containing all the pre-requisites for SSDT build/deploy puzzles me. Surely the DacFX installer would be a perfect vehicle for that? Kevin replied again: The answer is no for all 3 scenarios. We looked into this issue, discussed it with the Visual Studio / TFS team, and in the end agreed to go with their latest guidance which is to install Visual Studio (e.g. VS2013 Express for Web) on the build machine. This is how Visual Studio Online is doing it and it's the approach recommended for customers setting up their own TFS build servers. I would hope this is compatible with 3rd party build servers but have not verified whether this works with TeamCity etc. Note that DacFx MSI isn't a suitable release vehicle for this as we don't want to include Visual Studio/MSBuild dependencies in that package. It's meant to just include the core DacFx DLLs used by SSMS, SqlPackage.exe on the command line, etc. What this means is we won't be providing a separate MSI installer or nuget package with just the necessary build DLLs you need to run your build and tests. If someone wanted to create a script that generated a nuget package based on our DLLs and targets files, then release that somewhere on the web for easier integration with 3rd party build servers we've no problem with that. Again, here’s the link to the thread and its worth reading in its entirety if this is something that interests you. So there you have it. Microsoft will not be be providing support for headless build servers for SSDT but if someone in the community wants to go ahead and roll their own, go right ahead. @Jamiet

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• SQL SERVER – A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words – A Collection of Inspiring and Funny Posts by Vinod Kumar

  - by pinaldave

  One of the most popular quotes is: A picture is worth a thousand words. Working on this concept I started a series over my blog called the “Picture Post”. Rather than rambling over tons of material over text, we are trying to give you a capsule mode of the blog in a quick glance. Some of the picture posts already available over my blog are: Correlation of Ego and Work: Ego and Pride most of the times become a hindrance when we work inside a team. Take this cue, the first ever Picture post was published. Simple and easy to understand concept. Would want to say, Ego is the biggest enemy to humans. Read Original Post. Success (Perception Vs Reality): Personally, have always thought success is not something the talented achieve with the opportunity presented to them, but success is developed using the opportunity in hand now. In this fast paced world where success is pre-defined and convoluted by metrics it is hard to understand how complex it can sometimes be. So I took a stab at this concept in a simple way. Read Original Post. Doing Vs Saying: As Einstein would describe, Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Given the amount of information we get, it is difficult to keep track, learn and implement the same. If you were ever reminded of your college days, there will always be 5-6 people doing different things and we naturally try to emulate what they are doing. This could be from competitive exams GMAT, GRE, CAT, Higher-Ed, B-School hunting etc. Rather than saying you are going to do, it is best to do and then say!!! Read Original Picture Post. Your View Vs Management View: Being in the corporate world can be really demanding and we keep asking this question – “Why me?” when the performance appraisal process ends. In this post I just want to ask you one frank opinion – “Are you really self-critical in your assessments?”. If that is the case there shouldn’t be any heartburns or surprises. If you had just one thing to take back, well forget what others are getting but invest time in making yourself better because that is going to take you longer and further in your career. Read Picture Post. Blogging lifecycle for majority: I am happy and fortunate to be in this blog post because this picture post surely doesn’t apply to SQLAuthority where consistency and persistence have been the hallmark of the blog. For the majority others, who have a tendency to start a blog, get into slumber for a while and write saying they want to get back to blogging, the picture post was specifically done for them. Paradox of being someone else: It is always a dream that we want to become somebody and in this process of doing so, we become nobody. In this constant tussle of lost identity we forget to enjoy the moment that is in front of us. I just depicted this using a simple analogy of our constant struggle to get to the other side, just to realize we missed the wonderful moments. Grass is not greener on the other side, but grass is greener where we water the surface. Read Picture Post. And on the lighter side… Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• SQLAuthority News – The Best Quotes of “Who Wrote This?” Contest

  - by pinaldave

  I am a frequent reader of Brent Ozar PLF, it is one of my favorite blogs. A recent post announced a “Who Wrote This?” contest to see if readers could tell their three contributors apart based on some writing samples. Here are my favorite lines from the sample paragraphs, from each of the three “mystery authors.” Topic 1: Working with Bad Managers Mystery Author A – “Working with bad managers means working against my own happiness, and I’ve come to learn that there’s no changing bad managers.” I love this line because, as anyone who has had a bad manager knows, often a lot of self-doubt rises up. We all have to remember that sometimes the problem is out of our control. Mystery Author B – “Mentor your manager just like you would mentor a junior DBA.” Having a bad manager can be extremely depressing, and we often feel out of control. But we all need to remember that our work is a two-way street, and that sometimes we can subtly influence those above us. Mystery Author C – “The trick to working for all bad managers is to remember that they aren’t your parent. Take charge of your career.” We all also need to learn not to play the blame game. Would you rather stay in a place where you are unhappy, or would you rather take charge of your life? I hope most people would pick the latter. Topic 2: Working with Remote Teams Mystery Author A – “Like almost anything else the key is to make sure that everyone on the team has an understanding of how and when communication will occur.” Communication is so important. I cannot over emphasize how much. And this one line captures how I feel and even communicates the idea clearly! Mystery Author B – “The key to remote team success is verifiable trust: feeling confident that invisible team members are doing the right amount of the right thing at the right time.” I think this line not only captures the key aspects of remote work – verifiable work and trust – but there were so many lines that followed that I loved and could not fit here. The whole paragraph is a list for successful remote work. Everyone could benefit from reading it. Mystery Author C – “What seems clear, precise, and specific in one time zone comes across as vague, soupy, and just plain weird in another.” You know what? I just love this description. The author is right – sometimes vague e-mails really do seem soupy and weird! Topic 3: Working with Your Nemesis Mystery Author A – “Every job is temporary, but your reputation stays with you.” Everyone needs to remember this. The workplace is meant to be a professional arena, and many people have the opinion that work is temporary and disposable. No one wants to work with co-worker like that. Mystery Author B – “Unhealthy conflict is going to lead to leaving three week old tuna fish sandwiches in someone’s desk drawer.” Sometimes humor really is the best policy! Mystery Author C – “Oh no, it’s that guy.” This might seem like a weird phrase to choose as my favorite from an entire paragraph. But the whole piece was written in the form of a story of co-workers getting drunk and plotting against a nemesis. It was too funny to overlook, but too long to post here. A must read! Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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