Officially disguised as a Canadian
A new beta of ShutOff 2000 v3.0.0 is now available. The product is fast approaching code completion. The Visual Basic 6 edition of the application has always used the Windows Registry to store its settings. However, Microsoft’s best practice for the Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 platform does not allow for this, soContinue reading The life of an application config from the registry to SQLite to SQL CE to XML
Regular followers will recognise the date of 22 May as the first day of the Smiters of Iniquity calendar year. As I mentioned last year on the Smiters’ forum, I will be naming the months of the year after disciples as they die, in honour of the memory left by Ian when he died, andContinue reading Happy New Year!
I’ve been vocal for some years about the importance of backups, and I have zero sympathy for anyone who does not have good backups*. This comes with (very) painful experience: a few years ago, during the migration of data from several drives to my new computer at the time, I lost the drive everything wasContinue reading On the importance of good backups
There’s an interesting bug I ran across tonight while converting a large SVN repository (containing over 4100 revisions and 52 400 objects) to Git, using git svn clone. The clone failed at r1000 and left me with an incomplete repository. I did some searching and came across several articles on StackOverflow. The one that isContinue reading Bug in git svn clone, failing at r1000
I got a new laptop in March, which includes an SSD and 16GB of RAM, and it was enough inspiration (over and above the virtual machines for SQL Server that I’ve been playing with) to work some more on ShutOff 2000. I’ve made astounding progress on it, considering the lethargic approach the C# version hasContinue reading ShutOff 2000 progress report
The latest version of sp_WhoIsActive (and apparently last for SQL Server 2005/2008, according to Adam Machanic), was released a week ago. Yesterday, out of curiosity piqued by my recent three-week SQLskills training, I decided to run sp_WhoIsActive while doing a DBCC CHECKDB on a moderately large database (mainly because it takes longer, so it’s easierContinue reading Adventures in @BlobEater, sp_WhoIsActive and DBCC CHECKDB
When setting up a virtualised clustering environment, using a base install of Windows that you want to clone for use later, remember to run sysprep BEFORE cloning. Thanks to James for pointing out the glaringly obvious.
I’ve finally got all four virtual machines required (per Jonathan’s blog series), up and running on my laptop, and it is taking serious strain. I’m inclined, in fact, to change all the machines from 2 vCPUs to a single vCPU each, because that’s what’s killing the machine. Then again, I never considered until February 2012Continue reading My laptop is crying
A week ago, I had just returned from a three-week sojourn in sunny Tampa, where I spent most of the time indoors, far away from the sun, relearning everything about SQL Server. Those three weeks are best summarised in my previous blog entry, where I described Immersion Event 1. The result was that I wantedContinue reading And he’s back …
With permission from Kimberly Tripp, the creator of the fantastic duplicate index finder for SQL Server 2005 and 2008, I have ported this duplicate index finder to SQL Server 2000. I am fortunate in many respects, in that SQL Server 2000 does not support included columns, nor disabled indexes, so the scripts themselves were straightforward.Continue reading Remove duplicate indexes in SQL Server 2000