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  • Keeping an Eye on Your Storage

    - by Fatherjack
    There are plenty of resources that advise you about looking for signs that your storage hardware is having problems. SQL Server Alerts for 823, 824 and 825 are covered here by Paul Randall of SQL Skills: http://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/paul/a-little-known-sign-of-impending-doom-error-825/ and here by me: https://www.simple-talk.com/blogs/2011/06/27/alerts-are-good-arent-they/. Now until very recently I wasn’t aware that there was a different way to track the 823 + 824 errors. It was by complete chance that I happened to be searching about in the msdb database when I found the suspect_pages table. Running a query against it I got zero rows. This, as it turns out is a good thing. Highlighting the table name and pressing F1 got me nowhere – Is it just me or does Books Online fail to load properly for no obvious reason sometimes? So I typed the table name into the search bar and got my local version of http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms174425.aspx. From that we get the following description: Contains one row per page that failed with a minor 823 error or an 824 error. Pages are listed in this table because they are suspected of being bad, but they might actually be fine. When a suspect page is repaired, its status is updated in the event_type column. So, in the table we would, on healthy hardware, expect to see zero rows but on disks that are having problems the event_type column would show us what is going on. Where there are suspect pages on the disk the rows would have an event_type value of 1, 2 or 3, where those suspect pages have been restored, repaired or deallocated by DBCC then the value would be 4, 5 or 7. Having this table means that we can set up SQL Monitor to check the status of our hardware as we can create a custom metric based on the query below: USE [msdb] go SELECT COUNT(*) FROM [dbo].[suspect_pages] AS sp All we need to do is set the metric to collect this value and set an alert to email when the value is not 1 and we are then able to let SQL Monitor take care of our storage. Note that the suspect_pages table does not have any updates concerning Error 825 which the links at the top of the page cover in more detail. I would suggest that you set SQL Monitor to alert on the suspect_pages table in addition to other taking other measures to look after your storage hardware and not have it as your only precaution. Microsoft actually pass ownership and administration of the suspect_pages table over to the database administrator (Manage the suspect_pages Table (SQL Server)) and in a surprising move (to me at least) advise DBAs to actively update and archive data in it. The table will only ever contain a maximum of 1000 rows and once full, new rows will not be added. Keeping an eye on this table is pretty important, although In my opinion, if you get to 1000 rows in this table and are not already waiting for new disks to be added to your server you are doing something wrong but if you have 1000 rows in there then you need to move data out quickly because you may be missing some important events on your server.

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  • PASS summit 2013. We do not remember days. We remember moments.

    - by Maria Zakourdaev
      "Business or pleasure?" barked the security officer in the Charlotte International Airport. "I’m not sure, sir," I whimpered, immediately losing all courage. "I'm here for the database technologies summit called PASS”. "Sounds boring. Definitely a business trip." Boring?! He couldn’t have been more wrong. If he only knew about the countless meetings throughout the year where I waved my hands at my great boss and explained again and again how fantastic this summit is and how much I learned last year. One by one, the drops of water began eating away at the stone. He finally approved of my trip just to stop me from torturing him. Time moves as slow as a turtle when you are waiting for something. Time runs as fast as a cheetah when you are there. PASS has come...and passed. It’s been an amazing week. Enormous sqlenergy has filled the city, filled the convention center and the surrounding pubs and restaurants. There were awesome speakers, great content, and the chance to meet most inspiring database professionals from all over the world. Some sessions were unforgettable. Imagine a fully packed room with more than 500 people in awed silence, catching each and every one of Paul Randall's words. His tremendous energy and deep knowledge were truly thrilling. No words can describe Rob Farley's unique presentation style, captivating and engaging the audience. When the precious session minutes were over, I could tell that the many random puzzle pieces of information that his listeners knew had been suddenly combined into a clear, cohesive picture. I was amazed as always by Paul White's great sense of humor and his phenomenal ability to explain complicated concepts in a simple way. The keynote by the brilliant Dr. DeWitt from Microsoft in front of the full summit audience of 5000 deeply listening people was genuinely breathtaking. The entire conference throughout offered excellent speakers who inspired me to absorb the knowledge and use it when I got home. To my great surprise, I found that there are other people in this world who like replication as much I do. During the Birds of a Feather Luncheon, SQL Server MVP Ted Krueger was writing a script for replicating the food to other tables. I learned many things at PASS, and not all of them were about SQL. After three summits, this time I finally got the knack of networking. I actually went up and spoke to people, and believe me, that was not easy for an introvert. But this is what the summit is all about. Sqlpeople. They are the ones who make it such an exciting experience. I will be looking forward to the next year. Till then I have my notes and new ideas. How long was the summit? Thousands of unforgettable moments.

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  • How do I sanitize a string in PHP that contains "; Echo"? (I have a solid reason)

    - by user337878
    I turned this case into a simple PHP page that submits to itself. My issue is that I am submitting track meet results and one of the girl's names is Echo...a lovely name. The problem text I'm submitting is: Pole vault - Rachel Simons, Tow, 8-6; Echo Wilson, Cit, 8-0; Molly Randall, Tow, 7-0; So you see a semicolon followed by white space followed by Echo... After submitting, it says: POST to /results/test.php not supported The end goal is to save it to a database along with some other info and have a search page to find it and simply print out the full result on the screen. I stripped out all my database stuff to get it down to this one error. I mean, I can intentionally mis-spell her name, but there's gotta be a way around this, right??? Here's the test PHP file. <html> <head> <title>title</title> </head> <body> <?php echo "<h3>Edit meet info below</h3>"; echo "<form action=\"test.php\" method=\"post\" id=\"submitForm\">"; echo "Full Results:<br/><textarea NAME=\"results\" id=\"results\" rows=\"20\" cols=\"80\" MAXLENGTH=\"8191\"></textarea><br/><br/>"; echo "<input type=\"submit\" name=\"submitMeet\" value=\"Submit\">"; echo "</form>"; ?> </body> </html>

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  • Why does Python sometimes upgrade a string to unicode and sometimes not?

    - by samtregar
    I'm confused. Consider this code working the way I expect: >>> foo = u'Émilie and Juañ are turncoats.' >>> bar = "foo is %s" % foo >>> bar u'foo is \xc3\x89milie and Jua\xc3\xb1 are turncoats.' And this code not at all working the way I expect: >>> try: ... raise Exception(foo) ... except Exception as e: ... foo2 = e ... >>> bar = "foo2 is %s" % foo2 ------------------------------------------------------------ Traceback (most recent call last): File "<ipython console>", line 1, in <module> UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 0-1: ordinal not in range(128) Can someone explain what's going on here? Why does it matter whether the unicode data is in a plain unicode string or stored in an Exception object? And why does this fix it: >>> bar = u"foo2 is %s" % foo2 >>> bar u'foo2 is \xc3\x89milie and Jua\xc3\xb1 are turncoats.' I am quite confused! Thanks for the help! UPDATE: My coding buddy Randall has added to my confusion in an attempt to help me! Send in the reinforcements to explain how this is supposed to make sense: >>> class A: ... def __str__(self): return "string" ... def __unicode__(self): return "unicode" ... >>> "%s %s" % (u'niño', A()) u'ni\xc3\xb1o unicode' >>> "%s %s" % (A(), u'niño') u'string ni\xc3\xb1o' Note that the order of the arguments here determines which method is called!

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  • How do you use blog content?

    - by fatherjack
    Do you write a blog, have you ever thought about it? I think people fall into one of a few categories when it comes to blogs, especially blogs with technical content. Writing articles furiously - daily, twice daily and reading dozens of others. Writing the odd piece of content and read plenty of others' output. Started a blog once and its fizzled out but reading lots. Thought about starting a blog someday but never got around to it, hopping into the occasional blog when a link or a Tweet takes them there. Never thought about writing one but often catching content from them when Google (or other preferred search engine) finds content related to their search. Now I am not saying that either of these is right or wrong, nor am I saying that anyone should feel any compulsion to be in any particular category. What I would say is that you as a blog reader have the power to move blog writers from one category to another. How, you might ask? How do I have any power over a blog writer? It is very simple - feedback. If you give feedback then the blog writer knows that they are reaching an audience, if there is no response then they we are simply writing down our thoughts for what could amount to nothing more than a feeble amount of exercise and a few more key stokes towards the onset of RSI. Most blogs have a mechanism to alert the writer when there are comments, and personally speaking, if an email is received saying there has been a response to a blog article then there is a rush of enthusiasm, a moment of excitement that someone is actually reading and considering the text that was submitted and made available for the whole world to read. I am relatively new to this blog game and could be in some extended honeymoon period as I have also recently been incorporated into the Simple Talk 'stable'. I can understand that once you get to the "Dizzy Heights of Ozar" (www.brentozar.com) then getting comments and feedback might not be such a pleasure and may even be rather more of a chore but that, I guess, is the price of fame. For us mere mortals starting out blogging, getting feedback (or even at the moment for me, simply the hope of getting feedback) is what keeps it going. The hope that you will pick a topic that hasn't been done recently by Brad McGehee, Grant Fritchey,  Paul Randall, Thomas LaRock or any one of the dozen of rock star bloggers listed here or others from SQLServerPedia and so on, and then do it well enough to be found, reviewed, or <shudder> (re)tweeted to bring more visitors is what we are striving for, along with the fact that the content we might produce is something that will be of benefit to others. There is only so much point to typing content that no-one is reading and putting it on a blog. You may as well just write it in a diary. A technical blog is not like, say, a blog covering photography techniques where the way to frame and take a picture stands true whether it was written last week, last year or last century - technical content goes sour, quite quickly. There isn't much call for articles about yesterdays technology unless its something that still applies to current versions too, so some content written no more than 2 years ago isn't worth having now. The combination of a piece of content that you know is going to not last long and the fact that no-one reads it is a strong force against writing anything else. Getting feedback counters that despair and gives a value to writing something new. I would say that any feedback is good but there are obviously comments that are just so negative or otherwise badly phrased that they would hasten the demise of a blog but, in general most feedback will encourage a writer. It may not be a comment that supports or agrees with the main theme of a post but if it generates discussion or opens up a previously unexplored viewpoint it is contributing to the blog and is therefore encouraging to the writer. Even if you only say "thank you" before you leave a blog, having taken a section of script to use for yourself or having been given a few links to some content that has widened your knowledge it will be so welcome to the blog owner. Isn't it also the decent thing to do, acknowledging that you have benefited from another's efforts?

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  • Recommended textbook for machine-level programming?

    - by Norman Ramsey
    I'm looking at textbooks for an undergraduate course in machine-level programming. If the perfect book existed, this is what it would look like: Uses examples written in C or assembly language, or both. Covers machine-level operations such as two's-complement integer arithmetic, bitwise operations, and floating-point arithmetic. Explains how caches work and how they affect performance. Explains machine instructions or assembly instructions. Bonus if the example assembly language includes x86; triple bonus if it includes x86-64 (aka AMD64). Explains how C values and data structures are represented using hardware registers and memory. Explains how C control structures are translated into assembly language using conditional and unconditional branch instructions. Explains something about procedure calling conventions and how procedure calls are implemented at the machine level. Books I might be interested in would probably have the words "machine organization" or "computer architecture" in the title. Here are some books I'm considering but am not quite happy with: Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective by Randy Bryant and Dave O'Hallaron. This is quite a nice book, but it's a book for a broad, shallow course in systems programming, and it contains a great deal of material my students don't need. Also, it is just out in a second edition, which will make it expensive. Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface by Dave Patterson and John Hennessy. This is also a very nice book, but it contains way more information about how the hardware works than my students need. Also, the exercises look boring. Finally, it has a show-stopping bug: it is based very heavily on MIPS hardware and the use of a MIPS simulator. My students need to learn how to use DDD, and I can't see getting this to work on a simulator. Not to mention that I can't see them cross-compiling their code for the simulator, and so on and so forth. Another flaw is that the book mentions the x86 architecture only to sneer at it. I am entirely sympathetic to this point of view, but news flash! You guys lost! Write Great Code Vol I: Understanding the Machine by Randall Hyde. I haven't evaluated this book as thoroughly as the other two. It has a lot of what I need, but the translation from high-level language to assembler is deferred to Volume Two, which has mixed reviews. My students will be annoyed if I make them buy a two-volume series, even if the price of those two volumes is smaller than the price of other books. I would really welcome other suggestions of books that would help students in a class where they are to learn how C-language data structures and code are translated to machine-level data structures and code and where they learn how to think about performance, with an emphasis on the cache.

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  • Summit Time!

    - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell
    Boy, how time flies!  I can hardly believe that the 2011 PASS Summit is just one week away.  Maybe it snuck up on me because it’s a few weeks earlier than last year.  Whatever the cause, I am really looking forward to next week.  The PASS Summit is the largest SQL Server conference in the world and a fantastic networking opportunity thrown in for no additional charge.  Here are a few thoughts to help you maximize the week. Networking As Karen Lopez (blog | @DataChick) mentioned in her presentation for the Professional Development Virtual Chapter just a couple of weeks ago, “Don’t wait until you need a new job to start networking.”  You should always be working on your professional network.  Some people, especially technical-minded people, get confused by the term networking.  The first image that used to pop into my head was the image of some guy standing, awkwardly, off to the side of a cocktail party, trying to shmooze those around him.  That’s not what I’m talking about.  If you’re good at that sort of thing, and you can strike up a conversation with some stranger and learn all about them in 5 minutes, and walk away with your next business deal all but approved by the lawyers, then congratulations.  But if you’re not, and most of us are not, I have two suggestions for you.  First, register for Don Gabor’s 2-hour session on Tuesday at the Summit called Networking to Build Business Contacts.  Don is a master at small talk, and at teaching others, and in just those two short hours will help you with important tips about breaking the ice, remembering names, and smooth transitions into and out of conversations.  Then go put that great training to work right away at the Tuesday night Welcome Reception and meet some new people; which is really my second suggestion…just meet a few new people.  You see, “networking” is about meeting new people and being friendly without trying to “work it” to get something out of the relationship at this point.  In fact, Don will tell you that a better way to build the connection with someone is to look for some way that you can help them, not how they can help you. There are a ton of opportunities as long as you follow this one key point: Don’t stay in your hotel!  At the least, get out and go to the free events such as the Tuesday night Welcome Reception, the Wednesday night Exhibitor Reception, and the Thursday night Community Appreciation Party.  All three of these are perfect opportunities to meet other professionals with a similar job or interest as you, and you never know how that may help you out in the future.  Maybe you just meet someone to say HI to at breakfast the next day instead of eating alone.  Or maybe you cross paths several times throughout the Summit and compare notes on different sessions you attended.  And you just might make new friends that you look forward to seeing year after year at the Summit.  Who knows, it might even turn out that you have some specific experience that will help out that other person a few months’ from now when they run into the same challenge that you just overcame, or vice-versa.  But the point is, if you don’t get out and meet people, you’ll never have the chance for anything else to happen in the future. One more tip for shy attendees of the Summit…if you can’t bring yourself to strike up conversation with strangers at these events, then at the least, after you sit through a good session that helps you out, go up to the speaker and introduce yourself and thank them for taking the time and effort to put together their presentation.  Ideally, when you do this, tell them WHY it was beneficial to you (e.g. “Now I have a new idea of how to tackle a problem back at the office.”)  I know you think the speakers are all full of confidence and are always receiving a ton of accolades and applause, but you’re wrong.  Most of them will be very happy to hear first-hand that all the work they put into getting ready for their presentation is paying off for somebody. Training With over 170 technical sessions at the Summit, training is what it’s all about, and the training is fantastic!  Of course there are the big-name trainers like Paul Randall, Kimberly Tripp, Kalen Delaney, Itzik Ben-Gan and several others, but I am always impressed by the quality of the training put on by so many other “regular” members of the SQL Server community.  It is amazing how you don’t have to be a published author or otherwise recognized as an “expert” in an area in order to make a big impact on others just by sharing your personal experience and lessons learned.  I would rather hear the story of, and lessons learned from, “some guy or gal” who has actually been through an issue and came out the other side, than I would a trained professor who is speaking just from theory or an intellectual understanding of a topic. In addition to the three full days of regular sessions, there are also two days of pre-conference intensive training available.  There is an extra cost to this, but it is a fantastic opportunity.  Think about it…you’re already coming to this area for training, so why not extend your stay a little bit and get some in-depth training on a particular topic or two?  I did this for the first time last year.  I attended one day of extra training and it was well worth the time and money.  One of the best reasons for it is that I am extremely busy at home with my regular job and family, that it was hard to carve out the time to learn about the topic on my own.  It worked out so well last year that I am doubling up and doing two days or “pre-cons” this year. And then there are the DVDs.  I think these are another great option.  I used the online schedule builder to get ready and have an idea of which sessions I want to attend and when they are (much better than trying to figure this out at the last minute every day).  But the problem that I have run into (seems this happens every year) is that nearly every session block has two different sessions that I would like to attend.  And some of them have three!  ACK!  That won’t work!  What is a guy supposed to do?  Well, one option is to purchase the DVDs which are recordings of the audio and projected images from each session so you can continue to attend sessions long after the Summit is officially over.  Yes, many (possibly all) of these also get posted online and attendees can access those for no extra charge, but those are not necessarily all available as quickly as the DVD recording are, and the DVDs are often more convenient than downloading, especially if you want to share the training with someone who was not able to attend in person. Remember, I don’t make any money or get any other benefit if you buy the DVDs or from anything else that I have recommended here.  These are just my own thoughts, trying to help out based on my experiences from the 8 or so Summits I have attended.  There is nothing like the Summit.  It is an awesome experience, fantastic training, and a whole lot of fun which is just compounded if you’ll take advantage of the first part of this article and make some new friends along the way.

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  • Why does my macbook pro have long ping times over wifi?

    - by randynov
    I have been having problems connecting with my wifi. It is weird, the ping times to the router (<30 feet away) seem to surge, often getting over 10s before slowly coming back down. You can see the trend below. I'm on a macbook pro and have done the normal stuff (reset the pram and smc, changed wireless channels, etc.). It happens across different routers, so I think it must be my laptop, but I don't know what it could be. The RSSI value hovers around -57, but I've seen the transmit rate flip between 0, 48 & 54. The signal strength is ~60% with 9% noise. Currently, there are 17 other wireless networks in range, but only one in the same channel. 1 - How can I figure out what's going on? 2 - How can I correct the situation? TIA! Randall PING 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=254 time=781.107 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=254 time=681.551 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=254 time=610.001 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=254 time=544.915 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=254 time=547.622 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=5 ttl=254 time=468.914 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=6 ttl=254 time=237.368 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=7 ttl=254 time=229.902 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=8 ttl=254 time=11754.151 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=9 ttl=254 time=10753.943 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=10 ttl=254 time=9754.428 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=11 ttl=254 time=8754.199 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=12 ttl=254 time=7754.138 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=13 ttl=254 time=6754.159 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=14 ttl=254 time=5753.991 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=15 ttl=254 time=4754.068 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=16 ttl=254 time=3753.930 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=17 ttl=254 time=2753.768 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=18 ttl=254 time=1753.866 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=19 ttl=254 time=753.592 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=20 ttl=254 time=517.315 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=37 ttl=254 time=1.315 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=38 ttl=254 time=1.035 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=39 ttl=254 time=4.597 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=21 ttl=254 time=18010.681 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=22 ttl=254 time=17010.449 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=23 ttl=254 time=16010.430 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=24 ttl=254 time=15010.540 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=25 ttl=254 time=14010.450 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=26 ttl=254 time=13010.175 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=27 ttl=254 time=12010.282 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=28 ttl=254 time=11010.265 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=29 ttl=254 time=10010.285 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=30 ttl=254 time=9010.235 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=31 ttl=254 time=8010.399 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=32 ttl=254 time=7010.144 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=33 ttl=254 time=6010.113 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=34 ttl=254 time=5010.025 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=35 ttl=254 time=4009.966 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=36 ttl=254 time=3009.825 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=40 ttl=254 time=16000.676 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=41 ttl=254 time=15000.477 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=42 ttl=254 time=14000.388 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=43 ttl=254 time=13000.549 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=44 ttl=254 time=12000.469 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=45 ttl=254 time=11000.332 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=46 ttl=254 time=10000.339 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=47 ttl=254 time=9000.338 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=48 ttl=254 time=8000.198 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=49 ttl=254 time=7000.388 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=50 ttl=254 time=6000.217 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=51 ttl=254 time=5000.084 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=52 ttl=254 time=3999.920 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=53 ttl=254 time=3000.010 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=54 ttl=254 time=1999.832 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=55 ttl=254 time=1000.072 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=58 ttl=254 time=1.125 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=59 ttl=254 time=1.070 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=60 ttl=254 time=2.515 ms

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