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• Understanding Performance Profiling Targets

  In this sample chapter from his upcoming book, Paul Glavich explains performance metrics and walks us through the steps needed to establish meaningful performance targets. He covers many metrics such as "time to first byte" and explains why you should add some contingency into your estimated performance requirements.

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• IndyTechFest Recap

  - by Johnm

  The sun had yet to raise above the horizon on Saturday, May 22nd and I was traveling toward the location of the 2010 IndyTechFest. In my freshly awaken, and pre-coffee, state I reflected on the months that preceded this day and how quickly they slipped away. The big day had finally come and the morning dew glistened with a unique brightness that morning. What is this all about? For those who are unfamiliar with IndyTechFest, it is a regional conference held in Indianapolis and hosted by the Indianapolis .NET Developers Association (IndyNDA) and the Indianapolis Professional Association for SQL Server (IndyPASS).  The event presents multiple tracks and sessions covering subjects such as Business Intelligence,  Database Administration, .NET Development, SharePoint Development, Windows Mobile Development as well as non-Microsoft topics such as Lean and MongoDB. This year's event was the third hosting of IndyTechFest. No man is an island No event such as IndyTechFest is executed by a single person. My fellow co-founders, with their highly complementary skill sets and philanthropy make the process very enjoyable. Our amazing volunteers and their aid were indispensible. The generous financial support of our sponsors that made the event and fabulous prizes possible. The spectacular line up of speakers who came from near and far to donate their time and knowledge. Our beloved attendees who sacrificed the first sunny Saturday in weeks to expand their skill sets and network with their peers. We are deeply appreciative. Challenges in preparation With the preparation of any event comes challenges. It is these challenges that makes the process of planning an event so interesting. This year's largest challenge was the location of the event. In the past two years IndyTechFest was held at the Gene B. Glick Junior Achievement Center in Indianapolis. This facility has been the hub of the Indy technical community for many years. As the big day drew near, the facility's availability came into question due to some recent changes that had occurred with those who operated the facility. We began our search for an alternative option. Thankfully, the Marriott Indianapolis East was available, was very spacious and willing to work within the range of our budget. Within days of our event, the decision to move proved to be wise since the prior location had begun renovations to the interior. Whew! Always trust your gut. Every day it's getting better At the ending of each year, we huddle together, review the evaluations and identify an area in which the event could improve. This year's big opportunity for improvement resided in the prize give-away portion at the end of the day. In the 2008 event, admittedly, this portion was rather chaotic, rushed and disorganized. This year, we broke the drawing into two sections, of which each attendee received two tickets. The first ticket was a drawing for the mountain of books that were given away. The second ticket was a drawing for the big prizes, the 2 Xboxes, 3 laptops and iPad. We peppered the ticket drawings with gift card raffles and tossing t-shirts into the audience. If at first you don't succeed, try and try again Each year of IndyTechFest, we have offered a means for ad-hoc sessions or discussion groups to pop-up. To our disappointment it was something that never quite took off. We have always believed that this unique type of session was valuable and wanted to figure out a way to make it work for this year. A special thanks to Alan Stevens, who took on and facilitated the "open space" track and made it an official success. Share with your tweety When the attendee badges were designed we decided to place an emphasis on the attendee's Twitter account as well as the events hash-tag (#IndyTechFest) to encourage some real-time buzz during the day. At the host table we displayed a Twitter feed for all to enjoy. It was quite successful and encouraging use of social media. My badge was missing my Twitter account since it was recently changed. For those who care to follow my rather sparse tweets, my address is @johnnydata. Man, this is one long blog post! All in all it was a very successful event. It is always great to see new faces and meet old friends. The planning for the 2011 IndyTechFest will kick off very soon. We have more capacity for future growth and a truck full of great ideas. Stay tuned!

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• Implementing User-Defined Hierarchies in SQL Server Analysis Services

  To be able to drill into multidimensional cube data at several levels, you must implement all of the hierarchies on the database dimensions. Then you'll create the attribute relationships necessary to optimize performance. Analysis Services hierarchies offer plenty of possibilities for displaying the data that your business requires. Rob Sheldon continues his series on SQL Server Analysis Services 2008.

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• .NET Reflector Pro to the rescue

  Almost all applications have to interface with components or modules written by somebody else, for which you don't have the source code. This is fine until things go wrong, but when you need to refactor your code and you keep getting strange exceptions, you'll start to wish you could place breakpoints in someone else's code and step through it. Now, of course, you can, as Geoffrey Braaf discovered.

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• Win a copy of ANTS Memory Profiler!

  - by Bart Read

  Tell us about your experiences dealing with memory issues in .NET, and you stand a chance of winning a copy of the best memory profiler out there....(read more)

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• C# async and actors

  - by Alex.Davies

  If you read my last post about async, you might be wondering what drove me to write such odd code in the first place. The short answer is that .NET Demon is written using NAct Actors. Actors are an old idea, which I believe deserve a renaissance under C# 5. The idea is to isolate each stateful object so that only one thread has access to its state at any point in time. That much should be familiar, it's equivalent to traditional lock-based synchronization. The different part is that actors pass "messages" to each other rather than calling a method and waiting for it to return. By doing that, each thread can only ever be holding one lock. This completely eliminates deadlocks, my least favourite concurrency problem. Most people who use actors take this quite literally, and there are plenty of frameworks which help you to create message classes and loops which can receive the messages, inspect what type of message they are, and process them accordingly. But I write C# for a reason. Do I really have to choose between using actors and everything I love about object orientation in C#? Type safety Interfaces Inheritance Generics As it turns out, no. You don't need to choose between messages and method calls. A method call makes a perfectly good message, as long as you don't wait for it to return. This is where asynchonous methods come in. I have used NAct for a while to wrap my objects in a proxy layer. As long as I followed the rule that methods must always return void, NAct queued up the call for later, and immediately released my thread. When I needed to get information out of other actors, I could use EventHandlers and callbacks (continuation passing style, for any CS geeks reading), and NAct would call me back in my isolated thread without blocking the actor that raised the event. Using callbacks looks horrible though. To remind you: m_BuildControl.FilterEnabledForBuilding(    projects,    enabledProjects = m_OutOfDateProjectFinder.FilterNeedsBuilding(        enabledProjects,             newDirtyProjects =             {                 ....... Which is why I'm really happy that NAct now supports async methods. Now, methods are allowed to return Task rather than just void. I can await those methods, and C# 5 will turn the rest of my method into a continuation for me. NAct will run the other method in the other actor's context, but will make sure that when my method resumes, we're back in my context. Neither actor was ever blocked waiting for the other one. Apart from when they were actually busy doing something, they were responsive to concurrent messages from other sources. To be fair, you could use async methods with lock statements to achieve exactly the same thing, but it's ugly. Here's a realistic example of an object that has a queue of data that gets passed to another object to be processed: class QueueProcessor {    private readonly ItemProcessor m_ItemProcessor = ...     private readonly object m_Sync = new object();    private Queue<object> m_DataQueue = ...    private List<object> m_Results = ...     public async Task ProcessOne() {         object data = null;         lock (m_Sync)         {             data = m_DataQueue.Dequeue();         }         var processedData = await m_ItemProcessor.ProcessData(data); lock (m_Sync)         {             m_Results.Add(processedData);         }     } } We needed to write two lock blocks, one to get the data to process, one to store the result. The worrying part is how easily we could have forgotten one of the locks. Compare that to the version using NAct: class QueueProcessorActor : IActor { private readonly ItemProcessor m_ItemProcessor = ... private Queue<object> m_DataQueue = ... private List<object> m_Results = ... public async Task ProcessOne()     {         // We are an actor, it's always thread-safe to access our private fields         var data = m_DataQueue.Dequeue();         var processedData = await m_ItemProcessor.ProcessData(data);         m_Results.Add(processedData);     } } You don't have to explicitly lock anywhere, NAct ensures that your code will only ever run on one thread, because it's an actor. Either way, async is definitely better than traditional synchronous code. Here's a diagram of what a typical synchronous implementation might do: The left side shows what is running on the thread that has the lock required to access the QueueProcessor's data. The red section is where that lock is held, but doesn't need to be. Contrast that with the async version we wrote above: Here, the lock is released in the middle. The QueueProcessor is free to do something else. Most importantly, even if the ItemProcessor sometimes calls the QueueProcessor, they can never deadlock waiting for each other. So I thoroughly recommend you use async for all code that has to wait a while for things. And if you find yourself writing lots of lock statements, think about using actors as well. Using actors and async together really takes the misery out of concurrent programming.

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• Using Apache FOP from .NET level

  - by Lukasz Kurylo

  In one of my previous posts I was talking about FO.NET which I was using to generate a pdf documents from XSL-FO. FO.NET is one of the .NET ports of Apache FOP. Unfortunatelly it is no longer maintained. I known it when I decidec to use it, because there is a lack of available (free) choices for .NET to render a pdf form XSL-FO. I hoped in this implementation I will find all I need to create a pdf file with my really simple requirements. FO.NET is a port from some old version of Apache FOP and I found really quickly that there is a lack of some features that I needed, like dotted borders, double borders or support for margins. So I started to looking for some alternatives. I didn’t try the NFOP, another port of Apache FOP, because I found something I think much more better, the IKVM.NET project.   IKVM.NET it is not a pdf renderer. So what it is? From the project site:   IKVM.NET is an implementation of Java for Mono and the Microsoft .NET Framework. It includes the following components: a Java Virtual Machine implemented in .NET a .NET implementation of the Java class libraries tools that enable Java and .NET interoperability   In the simplest form IKVM.NET allows to use a Java code library in the C# code and vice versa.   I tried to use an Apache FOP, the best I think open source pdf –> XSL-FO renderer written in Java from my project written in C# using an IKVM.NET and it work like a charm. In the rest of the post I want to show, how to prepare a .NET *.dll class library from Apache FOP *.jar’s with IKVM.NET and generate a simple Hello world pdf document.   To start playing with IKVM.NET and Apache FOP we need to download their packages: IKVM.NET Apache FOP and then unpack them.   From the FOP directory copy all the *.jar’s files from lib and build catalogs to some location, e.g. d:\fop. Second step is to build the *.dll library from these files. On the console execute the following comand:   ikvmc –target:library –out:d:\fop\fop.dll –recurse:d:\fop   The ikvmc is located in the bin subdirectory where you unpacked the IKVM.NET. You must execute this command from this catalog, add this path to the global variable PATH or specify the full path to the bin subdirectory.   In no error occurred during this process, the fop.dll library should be created. Right now we can create a simple project to test if we can create a pdf file.   So let’s create a simple console project application and add reference to the fop.dll and the IKVM dll’s: IKVM.OpenJDK.Core and IKVM.OpenJDK.XML.API.   Full code to generate a pdf file from XSL-FO template:   static void Main(string[] args)         {             //initialize the Apache FOP             FopFactory fopFactory = FopFactory.newInstance();               //in this stream we will get the generated pdf file             OutputStream o = new DotNetOutputMemoryStream();             try             {                 Fop fop = fopFactory.newFop("application/pdf", o);                 TransformerFactory factory = TransformerFactory.newInstance();                 Transformer transformer = factory.newTransformer();                   //read the template from disc                 Source src = new StreamSource(new File("HelloWorld.fo"));                 Result res = new SAXResult(fop.getDefaultHandler());                 transformer.transform(src, res);             }             finally             {                 o.close();             }             using (System.IO.FileStream fs = System.IO.File.Create("HelloWorld.pdf"))             {                 //write from the .NET MemoryStream stream to disc the generated pdf file                 var data = ((DotNetOutputMemoryStream)o).Stream.GetBuffer();                 fs.Write(data, 0, data.Length);             }             Process.Start("HelloWorld.pdf");             System.Console.ReadLine();         }   Apache FOP be default using a Java’s Xalan to work with XML files. I didn’t find a way to replace this piece of code with equivalent from .NET standard library. If any error or warning will occure during generating the pdf file, on the console will ge shown, that’s why I inserted the last line in the sample above. The DotNetOutputMemoryStream this is my wrapper for the Java OutputStream. I have created it to have the possibility to exchange data between the .NET <-> Java objects. It’s implementation:   class DotNetOutputMemoryStream : OutputStream     {         private System.IO.MemoryStream ms = new System.IO.MemoryStream();         public System.IO.MemoryStream Stream         {             get             {                 return ms;             }         }         public override void write(int i)         {             ms.WriteByte((byte)i);         }         public override void write(byte[] b, int off, int len)         {             ms.Write(b, off, len);         }         public override void write(byte[] b)         {             ms.Write(b, 0, b.Length);         }         public override void close()         {             ms.Close();         }         public override void flush()         {             ms.Flush();         }     } The last thing we need, this is the HelloWorld.fo template.   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <fo:root xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format"          xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">   <fo:layout-master-set>     <fo:simple-page-master master-name="simple"                   page-height="29.7cm"                   page-width="21cm"                   margin-top="1.8cm"                   margin-bottom="0.8cm"                   margin-left="1.6cm"                   margin-right="1.2cm">       <fo:region-body margin-top="3cm"/>       <fo:region-before extent="3cm"/>       <fo:region-after extent="1.5cm"/>     </fo:simple-page-master>   </fo:layout-master-set>   <fo:page-sequence master-reference="simple">     <fo:flow flow-name="xsl-region-body">       <fo:block font-size="18pt" color="black" text-align="center">         Hello, World!       </fo:block>     </fo:flow>   </fo:page-sequence> </fo:root>   I’m not going to explain how how this template is created, because this will be covered in the near future posts.   Generated pdf file should look that:

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• New Wine in New Bottles

  - by Tony Davis

  How many people, when their car shows signs of wear and tear, would consider upgrading the engine and keeping the shell? Even if you're cash-strapped, you'll soon work out the subtlety of the economics, the cost of sudden breakdowns, the precious time lost coping with the hassle, and the low 'book value'. You'll generally buy a new car. The same philosophy should apply to database systems. Mainstream support for SQL Server 2005 ends on April 12; many DBAS, if they haven't done so already, will be considering the migration to SQL Server 2008 R2. Hopefully, that upgrade plan will include a fresh install of the operating system on brand new hardware. SQL Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are designed to work together. The improved architecture, processing power, and hyper-threading capabilities of modern processors will dramatically improve the performance of many SQL Server workloads, and allow consolidation opportunities. Of course, there will be many DBAs smiling ruefully at the suggestion of such indulgence. This is nothing like the real world, this halcyon place where hardware and software budgets are limitless, development and testing resources are plentiful, and third party vendors immediately certify their applications for the latest-and-greatest platform! As with cars, or any other technology, the justification for a complete upgrade is complex. With Servers, the extra cost at time of upgrade will generally pay you back in terms of the increased performance of your business applications, reduced maintenance costs, training costs and downtime. Also, if you plan and design carefully, it's possible to offset hardware costs with reduced SQL Server licence costs. In his forthcoming SQL Server Hardware book, Glenn Berry describes a recent case where he was able to replace 4 single-socket database servers with one two-socket server, saving about $90K in hardware costs and $350K in SQL Server license costs. Of course, there are exceptions. If you do have a stable, reliable, secure SQL Server 6.5 system that still admirably meets the needs of a specific business requirement, and has no security vulnerabilities, then by all means leave it alone. Why upgrade just for the sake of it? However, as soon as a system shows sign of being unfit for purpose, or is moving out of mainstream support, the ruthless DBA will make the strongest possible case for a belts-and-braces upgrade. We'd love to hear what you think. What does your typical upgrade path look like? What are the major obstacles? Cheers, Tony.

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• Conference networking for the socially awkward

  - by Melanie Townsend

  Do you approach a room full of strangers with excitement at all the new people you’re going to chat to over coffee and a muffin as you swap tales of how you convinced your manager to give you the day “off”? Or, do you find rooms full of strangers intimidating and begin by scouting out a place you can stand quietly and not be in someone’s way until the next session begins? If you’re on the train to extrovert city, that’s great, well done, move along. If, on the other hand, a room full of strangers who all seem to inexplicably know each other already is more challenge than opportunity, then making those connections with other professionals can be more difficult. So, here’s some advice, some gleaned from other things I’ve read online when trying to overcome my own discomfort in large groups (hopefully minus the infuriating condescension), others are just things I’ve found helpful over the years. Start small Smaller groups are less intimidating, and, now that you’ve taken the plunge to show up, it’s harder to remain inconspicuous. I find it’s easier to speak to new people once the option NOT to has been taken away. You’re there now, smile through the awkward and you’ll be forever grateful when the three people you’ve met and gotten to know here are also at that gigantic conference later on (ideally, introducing you to other people). Smile, or at the very least, stop scowling You probably don’t even know you’re doing it. If your resting face doesn’t come across as manically happy, tinge that with some social anxiety and you become one great ball of unapproachable. Normally, I wouldn’t suggest this as a problem that needs fixing, I have personally honed this face to use while travelling alone all the time. However, if you are indeed hoping to meet some useful people and get the most out of this conference, you may need to remind yourself to smile. Prepare some ice breakers This is going to sound stupid, like “no one does this right?” stupid, but, just, trust me a minute. It’s okay to prepare. You don’t need to write word-for-word questions to ask people and practice them in a mirror – that would be strange. I’m suggesting to just have an arsenal of questions to ask people if you get stuck, what session has been your favorite, which ones are you most looking forward to, have you heard X presenter speak before, what did you think of them? Even just thinking about these things in advance can help, and, as a bonus, while the other person is answering it gives you a moment to tamp down that panic, I mean breathe, I mean get to know them. You’re not alone (in the least creepy way possible) See that person in the corner clutching their phone with a mild deer in the headlights look?  That is potentially your new conference buddy. Starting with something along the lines of: I don’t know about you, the sessions here are great but I find the crowds a little tough to deal with. Mind if I park here for a second? is a decent opener. Just walking around and looking at exhibitors (if applicable) is fine, but it’s a little too easy to wander about and not actually speak to anyone if that’s all you’re doing. If joining a group of people talking is too much to start with, one-on-one can be easier. Have goals Are there people in particular you wanted to speak to? Did you have a personal goal of speaking to at least “x” new people? Are you trying to get a contact in a specific company because you want to work with them on something? Does the business have vague goals as well that you may or may not be judged on later? Making specific goals you can accomplish lets you know whether you’ve actually succeeded in your “networking pursuits” or what you need to work on more for next time. Everyone’s got their own coping technique. Some people are able to remind themselves that “humans are fundamentally social creatures” and somehow that helps them, others drink which is not really something I recommend for professional conferences but to each their own, and some focus on the fact that networking can play a big role in their career path. Just do what works for you, and if there’re any tricks you’ve found helpful over the years, please share em.

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• What Counts For a DBA – Decisions

  - by Louis Davidson

  It’s Friday afternoon, and the lead DBA, a very talented guy, is getting ready to head out for two well-earned weeks of vacation, with his family, when this error message pops up in his inbox: Msg 211, Level 23, State 51, Line 1. Possible schema corruption. Run DBCC CHECKCATALOG. His heart sinks. It’s ten…no eight…minutes till it’s time to walk out the door. He glances around at his coworkers, competent to handle many problems, but probably not up to the challenge of fixing possible database corruption. What does he do? After a few agonizing moments of indecision, he clicks shut his laptop. He’ll just wait and see. It was unlikely to come to anything; after all, it did say “possible” schema corruption, not definite. In that moment, his fate was sealed. The start of the solution to the problem (run DBCC CHECKCATALOG) had been right there in the error message. Had he done this, or at least took two of those eight minutes to delegate the task to a coworker, then he wouldn’t have ended up spending two-thirds of an idyllic vacation (for the rest of the family, at least) dealing with a problem that got consistently worse as the weekend progressed until the entire system was down. When I told this story to a friend of mine, an opera fan, he smiled and said it described the basic plotline of almost every opera or ‘Greek Tragedy’ ever written. The particular joy in opera, he told me, isn’t the warbly voiced leading ladies, or the plump middle-aged romantic leads, or even the music. No, what packs the opera houses in Italy is the drama of characters who, by the very nature of their life-experiences and emotional baggage, make all sorts of bad choices when faced with ordinary decisions, and so move inexorably to their fate. The audience is gripped by the spectacle of exotic characters doomed by their inability to see the obvious. I confess, my personal experience with opera is limited to Bugs Bunny in “What’s Opera, Doc?” (Elmer Fudd is a great example of a bad decision maker, if ever one existed), but I was struck by my friend’s analogy. If all the DBA cubicles were a stage, I think we would hear many similarly tragic tales, played out to music: “Error handling? We write our code to never experience errors, so nah…“ “Backups failed today, but it’s okay, we’ll back up tomorrow (we’ll back up tomorrow)“ And similarly, they would leave their audience gasping, not necessarily at the beauty of the music, or poetry of the lyrics, but at the inevitable, grisly fate of the protagonists. If you choose not to use proper error handling, or if you choose to skip a backup because, hey, you haven’t had a server crash in 10 years, then inevitably, in that moment you expected to be enjoying a vacation, or a football game, with your family and friends, you will instead be sitting in front of a computer screen, paying for your poor choices. Tragedies are very much part of IT. Most of a DBA’s day to day work has limited potential to wreak havoc; paperwork, timesheets, random anonymous threats to developers, routine maintenance and whatnot. However, just occasionally, you, as a DBA, will face one of those decisions that really matter, and which has the possibility to greatly affect your future and the future of your user’s data. Make those decisions count, and you’ll avoid the tragic fate of many an operatic hero or villain.

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• Overload Avoidance

  - by mikef

  A little under a year ago, Matt Simmons wrote a rather reflective article about his terrifying brush with stress-induced ill health. SysAdmins and DBAs have always been prime victims of work-related stress, but I wonder if that predilection is perhaps getting worse, despite the best efforts of Matt and his trusty side-kick, HR. The constant pressure from share-holders and CFOs to 'streamline' the workforce is partially to blame, but the more recent culprit is technology itself. I can't deny that the rise of technologies like virtualization, PowerCLI, PowerShell, and a host of others has been a tremendous boon. As a result, individual IT professionals are now able to handle more and more tasks and manage increasingly large and complex environments. But, without a doubt, this is a two-edged sword; The reward for competence is invariably more work. Unfortunately, SysAdmins play such a pivotal role in modern business that it's easy to see how they can very quickly become swamped in conflicting demands coming from different directions. However, that doesn't justify the ridiculous hours many are asked (or volunteer) to devote to their work. Admirably though their commitment is, it isn't healthy for them, it sets a dangerous expectation, and eventually something will snap. There are times when everyone needs to step up to the plate outside of 'normal' work hours, but that time isn't all the time. Naturally, with all that lovely technology, you can automate more and more of those tricky tasks to keep on top of the workload, but you are still only human. Clever though you may be, there is a very real limit to how far technology can take you. I'm not suggesting that you avoid these technologies, or deliberately aim for mediocrity; I'm just saying that you need to be more than just technically skilled (and Wesley Nonapeptide riffs on and around this topic in his excellent 'Telepathic Robot Drones' blog post). You need to be able to manage expectations, not just Exchange. Specifically, that means your own expectations of what you are capable of, because those come before everyone else's. After all, how can you keep your work-life balance under control, if you're the one setting the bar way too high? Talking to your manager, or discussing issues with your users, is only going to be productive if you have some facts to work with. "Know Thyself" is the first law of managing work overload, and this is obviously a skill which people develop over time; the fact that veteran Sysadmins exist at all is testament to this. I'd just love to know how you get to that point. Personally, I'm using RescueTime to keep myself honest, but I'm open to recommendations for better methods. Do you track your own time, do you have an intuitive sense of what is possible, or do you just rely on someone else to handle that all for you? Cheers, Michael

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• PASS Summit 2011 &ndash; Part III

  - by Tara Kizer

  Well we’re about a month past PASS Summit 2011, and yet I haven’t finished blogging my notes! Between work and home life, I haven’t been able to come up for air in a bit.  Now on to my notes… On Thursday of the PASS Summit 2011, I attended Klaus Aschenbrenner’s (blog|twitter) “Advanced SQL Server 2008 Troubleshooting”, Joe Webb’s (blog|twitter) “SQL Server Locking & Blocking Made Simple”, Kalen Delaney’s (blog|twitter) “What Happened? Exploring the Plan Cache”, and Paul Randal’s (blog|twitter) “More DBA Mythbusters”.  I think my head grew two times in size from the Thursday sessions.  Just WOW! I took a ton of notes in Klaus' session.  He took a deep dive into how to troubleshoot performance problems.  Here is how he goes about solving a performance problem: Start by checking the wait stats DMV System health Memory issues I/O issues I normally start with blocking and then hit the wait stats.  Here’s the wait stat query (Paul Randal’s) that I use when working on a performance problem.  He highlighted a few waits to be aware of such as WRITELOG (indicates IO subsystem problem), SOS_SCHEDULER_YIELD (indicates CPU problem), and PAGEIOLATCH_XX (indicates an IO subsystem problem or a buffer pool problem).  Regarding memory issues, Klaus recommended that as a bare minimum, one should set the “max server memory (MB)” in sp_configure to 2GB or 10% reserved for the OS (whichever comes first).  This is just a starting point though! Regarding I/O issues, Klaus talked about disk partition alignment, which can improve SQL I/O performance by up to 100%.  You should use 64kb for NTFS cluster, and it’s automatic in Windows 2008 R2. Joe’s locking and blocking presentation was a good session to really clear up the fog in my mind about locking.  One takeaway that I had no idea could be done was that you can set a timeout in T-SQL code view LOCK_TIMEOUT.  If you do this via the application, you should trap error 1222. Kalen’s session went into execution plans.  The minimum size of a plan is 24k.  This adds up fast especially if you have a lot of plans that don’t get reused much.  You can use sys.dm_exec_cached_plans to check how often a plan is being reused by checking the usecounts column.  She said that we can use DBCC FLUSHPROCINDB to clear out the stored procedure cache for a specific database.  I didn’t know we had this available, so this was great to hear.  This will be less intrusive when an emergency comes up where I’ve needed to run DBCC FREEPROCCACHE. Kalen said one should enable “optimize for ad hoc workloads” if you have an adhoc loc.  This stores only a 300-byte stub of the first plan, and if it gets run again, it’ll store the whole thing.  This helps with plan cache bloat.  I have a lot of systems that use prepared statements, and Kalen says we simulate those calls by using sp_executesql.  Cool! Paul did a series of posts last year to debunk various myths and misconceptions around SQL Server.  He continues to debunk things via “DBA Mythbusters”.  You can get a PDF of a bunch of these here.  One of the myths he went over is the number of tempdb data files that you should have.  Back in 2000, the recommendation was to have as many tempdb data files as there are CPU cores on your server.  This no longer holds true due to the numerous cores we have on our servers.  Paul says you should start out with 1/4 to 1/2 the number of cores and work your way up from there.  BUT!  Paul likes what Bob Ward (twitter) says on this topic: 8 or less cores –> set number of files equal to the number of cores Greater than 8 cores –> start with 8 files and increase in blocks of 4 One common myth out there is to set your MAXDOP to 1 for an OLTP workload with high CXPACKET waits.  Instead of that, dig deeper first.  Look for missing indexes, out-of-date statistics, increase the “cost threshold for parallelism” setting, and perhaps set MAXDOP at the query level.  Paul stressed that you should not plan a backup strategy but instead plan a restore strategy.  What are your recoverability requirements?  Once you know that, now plan out your backups. As Paul always does, he talked about DBCC CHECKDB.  He said how fabulous it is.  I didn’t want to interrupt the presentation, so after his session had ended, I asked Paul about the need to run DBCC CHECKDB on your mirror systems.  You could have data corruption occur at the mirror and not at the principal server.  If you aren’t checking for data corruption on your mirror systems, you could be failing over to a corrupt database in the case of a disaster or even a planned failover.  You can’t run DBCC CHECKDB against the mirrored database, but you can run it against a snapshot off the mirrored database.

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• An update process that is even worse than Windows updates

  - by fatherjack

  I'm sorry EA but your game update process stinks. I am not a hardcore gamer but I own a Playstation3 and have been playing Battlefield Bad Company 2 (BFBC2) a bit since I got it for my birthday and there have been two recent updates to the game. Now I like the idea of games getting updates via downloadable content. You can buy a game and if there are changes that are needed (service packs if you will) then they can be distributed over the games console network. Great. Sometimes it fixes problems,...(read more)

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• Subterranean IL: Exception handler semantics

  - by Simon Cooper

  In my blog posts on fault and filter exception handlers, I said that the same behaviour could be replicated using normal catch blocks. Well, that isn't entirely true... Changing the handler semantics Consider the following: .try { .try { .try { newobj instance void [mscorlib]System.Exception::.ctor() // IL for: // e.Data.Add("DictKey", true) throw } fault { ldstr "1: Fault handler" call void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(string) endfault } } filter { ldstr "2a: Filter logic" call void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(string) // IL for: // (bool)((Exception)e).Data["DictKey"] endfilter }{ ldstr "2b: Filter handler" call void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(string) leave.s Return } } catch object { ldstr "3: Catch handler" call void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(string) leave.s Return } Return: // rest of method If the filter handler is engaged (true is inserted into the exception dictionary) then the filter handler gets engaged, and the following gets printed to the console: 2a: Filter logic 1: Fault handler 2b: Filter handler and if the filter handler isn't engaged, then the following is printed: 2a:Filter logic 1: Fault handler 3: Catch handler Filter handler execution The filter handler is executed first. Hmm, ok. Well, what happens if we replaced the fault block with the C# equivalent (with the exception dictionary value set to false)? .try { // throw exception } catch object { ldstr "1: Fault handler" call void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(string) rethrow } we get this: 1: Fault handler 2a: Filter logic 3: Catch handler The fault handler is executed first, instead of the filter block. Eh? This change in behaviour is due to the way the CLR searches for exception handlers. When an exception is thrown, the CLR stops execution of the thread, and searches up the stack for an exception handler that can handle the exception and stop it propagating further - catch or filter handlers. It checks the type clause of catch clauses, and executes the code in filter blocks to see if the filter can handle the exception. When the CLR finds a valid handler, it saves the handler's location, then goes back to where the exception was thrown and executes fault and finally blocks between there and the handler location, discarding stack frames in the process, until it reaches the handler. So? By replacing a fault with a catch, we have changed the semantics of when the filter code is executed; by using a rethrow instruction, we've split up the exception handler search into two - one search to find the first catch, then a second when the rethrow instruction is encountered. This is only really obvious when mixing C# exception handlers with fault or filter handlers, so this doesn't affect code written only in C#. However it could cause some subtle and hard-to-debug effects with object initialization and ordering when using and calling code written in a language that can compile fault and filter handlers.

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• .Net Reflector 6.5 EAP now available

  - by CliveT

  With the release of CLR 4 being so close, we’ve been working hard on getting the new C# and VB language features implemented inside Reflector. The work isn’t complete yet, but we have some of the features working. Most importantly, there are going to be changes to the Reflector object model, and we though it would be useful for people to see the changes and have an opportunity to comment on them. Before going any further, we should tell you what the EAP contains that’s different from the released version. A number of bugs have been fixed, mainly bugs that were raised via the forum. This is slightly offset by the fact that this EAP hasn’t had a whole lot of testing and there may have been new bugs introduced during the development work we’ve been doing. The C# language writer has been changed to display in and out co- and contra-variance markers on interfaces and delegates, and to display default values for optional parameters in method definitions. We also concisely display values passed by reference into COM calls. However, we do not change callsites to display calls using named parameters; this looks like hard work to get right. The forthcoming version of the C# language introduces dynamic types and dynamic calls. The new version of Reflector should display a dynamic call rather than the generated C#: dynamic target = MyTestObject(); target.Hello("Mum"); We have a few bugs in this area where we are not casting to dynamic when necessary. These have been fixed on a branch and should make their way into the next EAP. To support the dynamic features, we’ve added the types IDynamicMethodReferenceExpression, IDynamicPropertyIndexerExpression, and IDynamicPropertyReferenceExpression to the object model. These types, based on the versions without “Dynamic” in the name, reflect the fact that we don’t have full information about the method that is going to be called, but only have its name (as a string). These interfaces are going to change – in an internal version, they have been extended to include information about which parameter positions use runtime types and which use compile time types. There’s also the interface, IDynamicVariableDeclaration, that can be used to determine if a particular variable is used at dynamic call sites as a target. A couple of these language changes have also been added to the Visual Basic language writer. The new features are exposed only when the optimization level is set to .NET 4. When the level is set this high, the other standard language writers will simply display a message to say that they do not handle such an optimization level. Reflector Pro now has 4.0 as an optional compilation target and we have done some work to get the pdb generation right for these new features. The EAP version of Reflector no longer installs the add-in on startup. The first time you run the EAP, it displays the integration options dialog. You can use the checkboxes to select the versions of Visual Studio into which you want to install the EAP version. Note that you can only have one version of Reflector Pro installed in Visual Studio; if you install into a Visual Studio that has another version installed, the previous version will be removed. Please try it out and send your feedback to the EAP forum.

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• Regional Office Virtualization - Less Can Be More

  The dream of an 'office in a box' has been around for years, but the increasing sophistication of virtualization software has turned the dream into reality. Ben Lye explains the problems and benefits of reducing the amount of physical hardware that were deployed in his organisation's regional offices.

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• SharePoint Web Part Constructor Fires Twice When Adding it to the Page (and has a different security

  - by Damon

  We had some exciting times debugging an interesting issue with SharePoint 2007 Web Parts.  We had some code in staging that had been running just fine for weeks and had not been touched or changed in about the same amount of time.  However, when we tried to move the web part into a different staging environment, the part started throwing a security exception when we tried to add it to a page.  After a bit of debugging, we determined that the web part was throwing the exception while trying to access the SPGroups property on the SharePoint site.  This was pretty strange because we were logged in as an admin and the code was working perfectly fine before.  During the debugging process, however, we found out that the web part constructor was being fired twice.  On one request, the security context did not seem to have everything it needed in order to run.  On the other request, the security context was populated with the user context with the user making the request (like it normally is).  Moving the security code outside of the constructor seems to have fixed the issue. Why the discrepancy between the two staging environments?  Turns out we deployed the part originally, then deployed an update with the security code.  Since the part was never "added" to the page after the code updates were made (we just deployed a new assembly to make the updates), we never saw the problem.  It seems as though the constructor fires twice when you are adding the web part to the page, and when you run the web part from the web part gallery.  My only thought on why this would occur is that SharePoint is instantiating an instance to get some information from it - which is odd because you would think that would happen with reflection without requiring a new object.  Anyway, the work around is to just not put anything security related inside the constructor, or to do a good job accounting for the possibility of the security context not being present if you are adding the item to the page. Technorati Tags: SharePoint,.NET,Microsoft,ASP.NET

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• Operator of the Week - Spools, Eager Spool

  For the fifth part of Fabiano's mission to describe the major Showplan Operators used by SQL Server's Query Optimiser, he introduces the spool operators and particularly the Eager Spool, explains blocking and non-blocking and then describes how the Halloween Problem is avoided.

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• From WinForm to WPF: A Quick Reference Guide

  Michael Sorens provides a handy wallchart to help migration between WinForm / WPF, VS 2008 / 2010, and .NET 3.5 / 4.0. this can be downloaded for free from the speech-bubble at the head of the article. He also describes the current weaknesses in WPF, and the most obvious differences between the two.

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• SQL Server CTE Basics

  The CTE was introduced into standard SQL in order to simplify various classes of SQL Queries for which a derived table just wasn't suitable. For some reason, it can be difficult to grasp the techniques of using it. Well, that's before Rob Sheldon explained it all so clearly for us.

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• Taking our Friendships to the next level.

  - by RedAndTheCommunity

  Red Gate have been running the Friends of Red Gate program for years now, and over that time we've built some great relationships with some truly awesome members of the SQL and .NET communities. When I took over the running of the program from Annabel in 2011, I was overwhelmed by the enthusiasm and commitment of our Friends. There were just so many of them, however, that it was hard to make the most of the relationships we had with people, and I wanted to fix that. I decided to survey all our Friends, to find out what they wanted to get out of, and put into, being in the Friends of Red Gate (FoRG) program. From the results of that survey, I identified 30 FoRGs that were really willing and able to go that step further to help Red Gate improve their tools, improve their relationship with the community, and improve the Friends of Red Gate program. Those 30 Friends of Red Gate have been awarded 'FoRG+' status. That means they'll: Have a closer relationship with the product teams, by getting involved in projects Have even more access to the inside track about the tools they're interested in Get the opportunity to come visit us at the Red Gate office and really influence the development of the tools. Plus more, depending on how the individual FoRG+ wants to work with us. This doesn't mean I've forgotten our other Friends; I'm working on ways to improve their experience of the Friends of Red Gate program. I'll write about them in another post. If you're an existing Friend of Red Gate, and you're interested in finding out how to get involved in the FoRG+ program, then I'd love to chat to you. For anyone that's interested in joining the Friend of Red Gate program, take a look at the web page dedicated to the program, and get in touch at [email protected] to be put on the waiting list for our 2013 program.

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• Reflector Pro has now been released!

  - by CliveT

  After moving into the .NET division in May , and having a great time working on Reflector, I'm pleased to say that the results of that work are now available. Reflector Pro has now been released! The old Reflector as you know and love it is still available free of charge, and as part of this project we've fixed a number of bugs in the de-compilation that have been around for a long time. The Pro version comes as an add-in for Visual Studio - this offers dynamic de-compilation and generation of pdb files which allow you to step into the de-compiled code. Alex has some good pictures of this functionality on his beta post from around a month ago. Thanks to the other guys who've worked on this for taking me along for the ride - Alex, Andrew, Bart and Jason. Stephen did some great usability work, Chris Alford did some great technical authoring and Laila handled the launch publicity. Like all projects, there's always more I'd like to have done, but what we have looks like a pretty powerful addition to the developer's set of tools to me. Please try it and give us feedback on the forum.

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• Automated Error Reporting in .NET Reflector - harnessing the most powerful test rig in existence

  - by Alex.Davies

  I know a testing system that will find more bugs than all the unit testing, integration testing, and QA you could possibly do. And the chances are you're not using it. It's called your users. It's a cliché that you should test so that you find your bugs rather than your users. Of course you should. But it's also a cliché that no software is ever shipped bug-free. Lost cause? No, opportunity! I think .NET Reflector 6 is pretty stable. In fact I know exactly how stable it is, because some (surprisingly high) proportion of its users tell me every time it crashes: If they press "Send Error Report", I get: And then I fix it. As a rough guess, while a standard stack trace is enough to fix a problem 30% of the time, having all those local variables in the stack trace means I can fix it about 80% of the time. How does this all happen? Did it take ages to code this swish system? Nope, it was one checkbox in SmartAssembly. It adds some clever code to your assembly to capture local variables every time an exception is thrown, and to ask your user to report it to you, with a variety of other useful information. Of course not all bugs show up as exceptions. But if you get used to knowing that SmartAssembly will tell you when an exception happens, you begin to change your coding style. Now, as long as an exception gets thrown in any situation you don't expect, you'll fix it if it ever happens. You'll start throwing exceptions liberally, and stop having to think about whether tiny edge cases are possible, as long as they throw an exception if they happen.

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• To Serve Man?

  - by Dave Convery

  Since the announcement of Windows 8 and its 'Metro' interface, the .NET community has wondered if the skills they've spent so long developing might be swept aside,in favour of HTML5 and JavaScript. Mercifully, that only seems to be true of SilverLight (as Simon Cooper points out), but it did leave me thinking how easy it is to impose a technology upon people without directly serving their needs. Case in point: QR codes. Once, probably, benign in purpose, they seem to have become a marketer's tool for determining when someone has engaged with an advert in the real world, with the same certainty as is possible online. Nobody really wants to use QR codes - it's far too much hassle. But advertisers want that data - they want to know that someone actually read their billboard / poster / cereal box, and so this flawed technology is suddenly everywhere, providing little to no value to the people who are actually meant to use it. What about 3D cinema? Profits from the film industry have been steadily increasing throughout the period that digital piracy and mass sharing has been possible, yet the industry cinema chains have forced 3D films upon a broadly uninterested audience, as a way of providing more purpose to going to a cinema, rather than watching it at home. Despite advances in digital projection, 3D cinema is scarcely more immersive to us than were William Castle's hoary old tricks of skeletons on wires and buzzing chairs were to our grandparents. iTunes - originally just a piece of software that catalogued and ripped music for you, but which is now multi-purpose bloatware; a massive, system-hogging behemoth. If it was being built for the people that used it, it would have been split into three or more separate pieces of software long ago. But as bloatware, it serves Apple primarily rather than us, stuffed with Music, Video, Various stores and phone / iPad management all bolted into one. Why? It's because, that way, you're more likely to bump into something you want to buy. You can't even buy a new laptop without finding that a significant chunk of your hard drive has been sold to 'select partners' - advertisers, suppliers of virus-busting software, and endless bloatware-flogging pop-ups that make using a new laptop without reformatting the hard drive like stepping back in time. The product you want is not the one you paid for. This is without even looking at services like Facebook and Klout, who provide a notional service with the intention of slurping up as much data about you as possible (in Klout's case, whether you create an account with them or not). What technologies do you find annoying or intrusive, and who benefits from keeping them around?

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• Tuning Red Gate: #1 of Many

  - by Grant Fritchey

  Everyone runs into performance issues at some point. Same thing goes for Red Gate software. Some of our internal systems were running into some serious bottlenecks. It just so happens that we have this nice little SQL Server monitoring tool. What if I were to, oh, I don't know, use the monitoring tool to identify the bottlenecks, figure out the causes and then apply a fix (where possible) and then start the whole thing all over again? Just a crazy thought. OK, I was asked to. This is my first time looking through these servers, so here's how I'd go about using SQL Monitor to get a quick health check, sort of like checking the vitals on a patient. First time opening up our internal SQL Monitor instance and I was greeted with this: Oh my. Maybe I need to get our internal guys to read my blog. Anyway, I know that there are two servers where most of the load is. I'll drill down on the first. I'm selecting the server, not the instance, by clicking on the server name. That opens up the Global Overview page for the server. The information here much more applicable to the "oh my gosh, I have a problem now" type of monitoring. But, looking at this, I am seeing something immediately. There are four(4) drives on the system. The C:\ has an average read time of 16.9ms, more than double the others. Is that a problem? Not sure, but it's something I'll look at. It's write time is higher too. I'll keep drilling down, first, to the unclosed alerts on the server. Now things get interesting. SQL Monitor has a number of different types of alerts, some related to error states, others to service status, and then some related to performance. Guess what I'm seeing a bunch of right here: Long running queries and long job durations. If you check the dates, they're all recent, within the last 24 hours. If they had just been old, uncleared alerts, I wouldn't be that concerned. But with all these, all performance related, and all in the last 24 hours, yeah, I'm concerned. At this point, I could just start responding to the Alerts. If I click on one of the the Long-running query alerts, I'll get all kinds of cool data that can help me determine why the query ran long. But, I'm not in a reactive mode here yet. I'm still gathering data, trying to understand how the server works. I have the information that we're generating a lot of performance alerts, let's sock that away for the moment. Instead, I'm going to back up and look at the Global Overview for the SQL Instance. It shows all the databases on the server and their status. Then it shows a number of basic metrics about the SQL Server instance, again for that "what's happening now" view or things. Then, down at the bottom, there is the Top 10 expensive queries list: This is great stuff. And no, not because I can see the top queries for the last 5 minutes, but because I can adjust that out 3 days. Now I can see where some serious pain is occurring over the last few days. Databases have been blocked out to protect the guilty. That's it for the moment. I have enough knowledge of what's going on in the system that I can start to try to figure out why the system is running slowly. But, I want to look a little more at some historical data, to understand better how this server is behaving. More next time.

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