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  • High Jinks, Hi Jacks, Exceptional DBA Awards and PASS

    - by Rodney
    The countdown to PASS has counted down.  The day after tomorrow I will board a plane, like many others, on my way for the 4th year in a row to SQL PASS Summit.  The anticipation has been excruciating but luckily I have this little thing called a day job as a DBA that has kept me busy and not thinking too much about the event. Well that is not exactly true since my beautiful wife works for PASS so we get to talk about SQL from the time we wake up until late in the evening. I would not have it any other way and I feel very fortunate to be a part of this great event and to have been chosen as the Exceptional DBA Award judge also for the 4th year in a row.  This year, I will have been again tasked with presenting the award to the winner, Mr. Jeff Moden and it will be a true honor to meet him in person as I have read many of his articles on SSC and have attended his session at PASS previously.  The speech is all ready but one item remains, which will be a surprise to all who attend the party on Tuesday night in Seattle (see links below).  Let's face it, Exceptional DBAs everywhere work very hard protecting our data stores, tuning queries, mentoring, saving money, installing clusters, etc and once in a while there is time to be exceptionally non-professional and have a bit of fun. Once incident that happened this year that falls under the High Jinks category was when my network admin asked if I could Telnet into a SQL instance and see if I could make the connection through the firewall that he had just configured. I was able to establish a connection on port 1433 and it occurred to me that it would be very interesting if I could actually run T-SQL queries via a Telnet session much like you might do with an SMTP server. With that thought, I proceeded to demonstrate this could be possible by convincing my senior DBA Shawn McGehee that I was able to do so. At first he did not believe me. It shook his world view.  It was inconceivable.  What I had done, behind the scenes, of course, was to copy and rename SQLCMD.exe to Telnet.exe and used it to connect and run a simple, "Select * from sys.databases" on the SQL instance. I think if it had been anyone other than Shawn I could have extended this ruse indefinitely but he caught on within 30 seconds. It was a fun thirty seconds though. On the High Jacks side of the house, which is really merged to be SQL HACKS, I finally, after several years of struggling with how to connect to an untrusted domain like in a DMZ with a windows account in SSMS, I stumbled upon a solution that does away with the requirement to use SQL Authentication.  While "Runas" is a great command to use to run an application with a higher privileged account, I had not previously been able to figure out how to connect to the remote domain with SSMS and "Runsas". It never connected and caused a login failure every time for the remote windows domain account. Then I ran across an option for "Runas",   "/netonly".  This option postpones the login until a connection is made and only then passes the remote login you supply when you first launch SSMS with the "Runas" command. So a typical shortcut would look like: "C:\Windows\System32\runas.exe /netonly /user:remotedomain.com\rodlandrum "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Binn\VSShell\Common7\IDE\Ssms.exe" You will want to make sure the passwords are synced between the two domains, your local domain and the remote domain, otherwise you may have account lockout issues, but I have found in weeks of testing this is a stable solution. Now it is time to get ready to head for Seattle. Please, if you see me (@SQLBeat) or my wife (@Karlakay22) please run up and high five me (wait..High Jinks.High Jacks.High Fives.Need to change the title) or give me a big bear hug if you are strong enough to lift me off the ground. And if you do actually do that, I will think you are awesome and will not embarrass you by crying out for help or complaining of a broken back or sciatic nerve damage. And now the links to others who have all of the details. First, for the MVP Deep Dives 2, of which, like John, I was lucky enough to be able to participate in this year. http://www.simple-talk.com/community/blogs/johnm/archive/2011/09/29/103577.aspx And the details of the SSC party where the Exceptional DBA of 2011, Jeff Moden, will be awarded. http://www.simple-talk.com/community/blogs/rebecca_amos/archive/2011/10/05/103661.aspx   Cheers! Rodney

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  • JavaOne Latin America 2012 Trip Report

    - by reza_rahman
    JavaOne Latin America 2012 was held at the Transamerica Expo Center in Sao Paulo, Brazil on December 4-6. The conference was a resounding success with a great vibe, excellent technical content and numerous world class speakers. Some notable local and international speakers included Bruno Souza, Yara Senger, Mattias Karlsson, Vinicius Senger, Heather Vancura, Tori Wieldt, Arun Gupta, Jim Weaver, Stephen Chin, Simon Ritter and Henrik Stahl. Topics covered included the JCP/JUGs, Java SE 7, HTML 5/WebSocket, CDI, Java EE 6, Java EE 7, JSF 2.2, JMS 2, JAX-RS 2, Arquillian and JavaFX. Bruno Borges and I manned the GlassFish booth at the Java Pavilion on Tuesday and Webnesday. The booth traffic was decent and not too hectic. We met a number of GlassFish adopters including perhaps one of the largest GlassFish deployments in Brazil as well as some folks migrating to Java EE from Spring. We invited them to share their stories with us. We also talked with some key members of the local Java community. Tuesday evening we had the GlassFish party at the Tribeca Pub. The party was definitely a hit and we could have used a larger venue (this was the first time we had the GlassFish party in Brazil). Along with GlassFish enthusiasts, a number of Java community leaders were there. We met some of the same folks again at the JUG leader's party on Wednesday evening. On Thursday Arun Gupta, Bruno Borges and I ran a hands-on-lab on JAX-RS, WebSocket and Server-Sent Events (SSE) titled "Developing JAX-RS Web Applications Utilizing Server-Sent Events and WebSocket". This is the same Java EE 7 lab run at JavaOne San Francisco. The lab provides developers a first hand glipse of how an HTML 5 powered Java EE application might look like. We had an overflow crowd for the lab (at one point we had about twenty people standing) and the lab went very well. The slides for the lab are here: Developing JAX-RS Web Applications Utilizing Server-Sent Events and WebSocket from Reza Rahman The actual contents for the lab is available here. Give me a shout if you need help getting it up and running. I gave two solo talks following the lab. The first was on JMS 2 titled "What’s New in Java Message Service 2". This was essentially the same talk given by JMS 2 specification lead Nigel Deakin at JavaOne San Francisco. I talked about the JMS 2 simplified API, JMSContext injection, delivery delays, asynchronous send, JMS resource definition in Java EE 7, standardized configuration for JMS MDBs in EJB 3.2, mandatory JCA pluggability and the like. The session went very well, there was good Q & A and someone even told me this was the best session of the conference! The slides for the talk are here: What’s New in Java Message Service 2 from Reza Rahman My last talk for the conference was on JAX-RS 2 in the keynote hall. Titled "JAX-RS 2: New and Noteworthy in the RESTful Web Services API" this was basically the same talk given by the specification leads Santiago Pericas-Geertsen and Marek Potociar at JavaOne San Francisco. I talked about the JAX-RS 2 client API, asyncronous processing, filters/interceptors, hypermedia support, server-side content negotiation and the like. The talk went very well and I got a few very kind complements afterwards. The slides for the talk are here: JAX-RS 2: New and Noteworthy in the RESTful Web Services API from Reza Rahman On a more personal note, Sao Paulo has always had a special place in my heart as the incubating city for Sepultura and Soulfy -- two of my most favorite heavy metal musical groups of all time! Consequently, the city has a perpertually alive and kicking metal scene pretty much any given day of the week. This time I got to check out a solid performance by local metal gig Republica at the legendary Manifesto Bar. I also wanted to see a Dio Tribute at the Blackmore but ran out of time and energy... Overall I enjoyed the conference/Sao Paulo and look forward to going to Brazil again next year!

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  • The best, in the West

    - by Fatherjack
    As many of you know, I run the SQL South West user group and we are currently in full flow preparing to stage the UK’s second SQL Saturday. The SQL Saturday spotlight is going to fall on Exeter in March 2013. We have full-day session on Friday 8th with some truly amazing speakers giving their insights and experience into some vital areas of working with SQL Server: Dave Ballantyne and Dave Morrison – TSQL and internals Christian Bolton and Gavin Payne – Mission critical data platforms on Windows Server 2012 Denny Cherry – SQL Server Security André Kamman – Powershell 3.0 for SQL Server Administrators and Developers Mladen Prajdic – From SQL Traces to Extended Events – The next big switch. A number of people have claimed that the choice is too good and they’d have trouble selecting just one session to attend. I can see how this is a problem but hope that they make their minds up quickly. The venue is a bespoke conference suite in the centre of Exeter but has limited capacity so we are working on a first-come first-served basis. All the session details and booking and travel information can be found on our user group website. The Saturday will be a day of free, 50 minute sessions on all aspects SQL Server from almost 30 different speakers. If you would like to submit a session then get a move on as submissions close on 8th January 2013 (That’s less than a month away). We are really interested in getting new speakers started so we have a lightning talk session where you can come along and give a small talk (anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes long) about anything connected with SQL Server as a way to introduce you to what it’s like to be a speaker at an event. Details on registering to attend and to submit a session (Lightning talks need to be submitted too please) can be found on our SQL Saturday pages. This is going to be the biggest and best bespoke SQL Server conference to ever take place this far South West in the UK and we aim to give everyone who comes to either day a real experience of the South West so we have a few surprises for you on the day.

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  • Developing your Data Access Layer with ADO.NET Entity Framework 4

    Entity Framework has evolved in the light of feedback. ADO.NET Entity Framework 4 is now better able to accommodate different development methodologies. A welcome improvement is the way that, the application designer now has a range of options in the way that Entity Framework creates the Data Access layer. Prasanna returns to Simple-Talk to explain the significance of the changes.

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  • {smartassembly} software for code obfuscation

    {smartassembly} is a tool for ensuring that the source code your commercial .NET application isn't visible to anyone with .NET Reflector. Matteo, who writes for us about encryption in .NET, asked if he could write a review of {smartassembly} for Simple-Talk. Because we like the product too, and Red Gate Software had recently taken over the product, we were happy to agree.

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  • SQL Relay - G is for GO

    - by fatherjack
    At the SQL Relay event last week all the UK user group leaders did a combined session - The A to Z of SQL - where we all took two letters of the alphabet and gave a 2 minute (it was strictly timed) talk on something SQL related beginning with those letters. It was quite a riot working through 26 different talks in an hour with 25 speaker handovers and the associated switches between SSMS and the slide deck. As a speaker I thoroughly enjoyed it and i hoe we informed as much as  we entertained the...(read more)

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  • Agile Testing Days 2012 – Day 3 – Agile or agile?

    - by Chris George
    Another early start for my last Lean Coffee of the conference, and again it was not wasted. We had some really interesting discussions around how to determine what test automation is useful, if agile is not faster, why do it? and a rather existential discussion on whether unicorns exist! First keynote of the day was entitled “Fast Feedback Teams” by Ola Ellnestam. Again this relates nicely to the releasing faster talk on day 2, and something that we are looking at and some teams are actively trying. Introducing the notion of feedback, Ola describes a game he wrote for his eldest child. It was a simple game where every time he clicked a button, it displayed “You’ve Won!”. He then changed it to be a Win-Lose-Win-Lose pattern and watched the feedback from his son who then twigged the pattern and got his younger brother to play, alternating turns… genius! (must do that with my children). The idea behind this was that you need that feedback loop to learn and progress. If you are not getting the feedback you need to close that loop. An interesting point Ola made was to solve problems BEFORE writing software. It may be that you don’t have to write anything at all, perhaps it’s a communication/training issue? Perhaps the problem can be solved another way. Writing software, although it’s the business we are in, is expensive, and this should be taken into account. He again mentions frequent releases, and how they should be made as soon as stuff is ready to be released, don’t leave stuff on the shelf cause it’s not earning you anything, money or data. I totally agree with this and it’s something that we will be aiming for moving forwards. “Exceptions, Assumptions and Ambiguity: Finding the truth behind the story” by David Evans started off very promising by making references to ‘Grim up North’ referring to the north of England. Not sure it was appreciated by most of the audience, but it made me laugh! David explained how there are always risks associated with exceptions, giving the example of a one-way road near where he lives, with an exception sign giving rights to coaches to go the wrong way. Therefore you could merrily swing around the corner of the one way road straight into a coach! David showed the danger in making assumptions with lyrical quotes from Lola by The Kinks “I’m glad I’m a man, and so is Lola” and with a picture of a toilet flush that needed instructions to operate the full and half flush. With this particular flush, you pulled the handle all the way down to half flush, and half way down to full flush! hmmm, a bit of a crappy user experience methinks! Then through a clever use of a passage from the Jabberwocky, David then went onto show how mis-translation/ambiguity is the can completely distort the original meaning of something, and this is a real enemy of software development. This was all helping to demonstrate that the term Story is often heavily overloaded in the Agile world, and should really be stripped back to what it is really for, stating a business problem, and offering a technical solution. Therefore a story could be worded as “In order to {make some improvement}, we will { do something}”. The first ‘in order to’ statement is stakeholder neutral, and states the problem through requesting an improvement to the software/process etc. The second part of the story is the verb, the doing bit. So to achieve the ‘improvement’ which is not currently true, we will do something to make this true in the future. My PM is very interested in this, and he’s observed some of the problems of overloading stories so I’m hoping between us we can use some of David’s suggestions to help clarify our stories better. The second keynote of the day (and our last) proved to be the most entertaining and exhausting of the conference for me. “The ongoing evolution of testing in agile development” by Scott Barber. I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing Scott before… OMG I would love to have even half of the energy he has! What struck me during this presentation was Scott’s explanation of how testing has become the role/job that it is (largely) today, and how this has led to the need for ‘methodologies’ to make dev and test work! The argument that we should be trying to converge the roles again is a very valid one, and one that a couple of the teams at work are actively doing with great results. Making developers as responsible for quality as testers is something that has been lost over the years, but something that we are now striving to achieve. The idea that we (testers) should be testing experts/specialists, not testing ‘union members’, supports this idea so the entire team works on all aspects of a feature/product, with the ‘specialists’ taking the lead and advising/coaching the others. This leads to better propagation of information around the team, a greater holistic understanding of the project and it allows the team to continue functioning if some of it’s members are off sick, for example. Feeling somewhat drained from Scott’s keynote (but at the same time excited that alot of the points he raised supported actions we are taking at work), I headed into my last presentation for Agile Testing Days 2012 before having to make my way to Tegel to catch the flight home. “Thinking and working agile in an unbending world” with Pete Walen was a talk I was not going to miss! Having spoken to Pete several times during the past few days, I was looking forward to hearing what he was going to say, and I was not disappointed. Pete started off by trying to separate the definitions of ‘Agile’ as in the methodology, and ‘agile’ as in the adjective by pronouncing them the ‘english’ and ‘american’ ways. So Agile pronounced (Ajyle) and agile pronounced (ajul). There was much confusion around what the hell he was talking about, although I thought it was quite clear. Agile – Software development methodology agile – Marked by ready ability to move with quick easy grace; Having a quick resourceful and adaptable character. Anyway, that aside (although it provided a few laughs during the presentation), the point was that many teams that claim to be ‘Agile’ but are not, in fact, ‘agile’ by nature. Implementing ‘Agile’ methodologies that are so prescriptive actually goes against the very nature of Agile development where a team should anticipate, adapt and explore. Pete made a valid point that very few companies intentionally put up roadblocks to impede work, so if work is being blocked/delayed, why? This is where being agile as a team pays off because the team can inspect what’s going on, explore options and adapt their processes. It is through experimentation (and that means trying and failing as well as trying and succeeding) that a team will improve and grow leading to focussing on what really needs to be done to achieve X. So, that was it, the last talk of our conference. I was gutted that we had to miss the closing keynote from Matt Heusser, as Matt was another person I had spoken too a few times during the conference, but the flight would not wait, and just as well we left when we did because the traffic was a nightmare! My Takeaway Triple from Day 3: Release often and release small – don’t leave stuff on the shelf Keep the meaning of the word ‘agile’ in mind when working in ‘Agile Look at testing as more of a skill than a role  

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  • How important is knowing functionality before coding?

    - by minusSeven
    I work for a software development company where the development work have been off shored to us. The on shore team handle the support and talk directly to the clients. We never talk to the clients directly we just talk people from the on shore team who talk directly to the clients. When requirements come, on shore team talk to the clients and make requirement documents and informs us. We make design documents after studying the requirements (we follow traditional waterfall model ). But there is one problem in the whole process: nobody in the either off-shore or on-shore understand the functionality of the application completely. We just know its a big complex web app handling complex order processing, catalog management, campaign management and other activities. We struggle with the design document as the requirements would not be clear. It then goes into a series of questions/answers back and forth between the on shore team,off shore team and clients. We would often be told to understand functionality from the code. But that's usually not feasible as the code base is huge and even understanding a simple menu item take days if not weeks. We tried telling the clients to give us knowledge transfer about the application but to no avail. Our manager would often tell us to start coding even if the design document is not complete or requirements not clear. We would start by coding part of the requirement that seems clear and wait for the rest. This usually would delay the deployment by a month. In extreme cases we would have very low errors in the development and production but the clients would say that's not what they asked. That would start a blame game and a series of change requests and we would end up developing something very different. My question is how would you do development work if you don't know the functionality of the app fully? UPDATE About development methodology it isn't really my choice and I am not my team's lead It is the way it began. I tried to tell people about the advantages of agile but to no avail. Besides I don't think my team has the necessary mindset to work in AGILE environment.

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  • JUDCon 2013 Trip Report

    - by reza_rahman
    JUDCon (JBoss Users and Developers Conference) 2013 was held in historic Boston on June 9-11 at the Hynes Convention Center. JUDCon is the largest get together for the JBoss community, has gone global in recent years but has it's roots in Boston. The JBoss folks graciously accepted a Java EE 7 talk from me and actually referenced my talk in their own sessions. I am proud to say this is my third time speaking at JUDCon/the Red Hat Summit over the years (this was the first time on behalf of Oracle). I had great company with many of the rock stars of the JBoss ecosystem speaking such as Lincoln Baxter, Jay Balunas, Gavin King, Mark Proctor, Andrew Lee Rubinger, Emmanuel Bernard and Pete Muir. Notably missing from JUDCon were Bill Burke, Burr Sutter, Aslak Knutsen and Dan Allen. Topics included Java EE, Forge, Arquillian, AeroGear, OpenShift, WildFly, Errai/GWT, NoSQL, Drools, jBPM, OpenJDK, Apache Camel and JBoss Tools/Eclipse. My session titled "JavaEE.Next(): Java EE 7, 8, and Beyond" went very well and it was a full house. This is our main talk covering the changes in JMS 2, the Java API for WebSocket (JSR 356), the Java API for JSON Processing (JSON-P), JAX-RS 2, JPA 2.1, JTA 1.2, JSF 2.2, Java Batch, Bean Validation 1.1, Java EE Concurrency and the rest of the APIs in Java EE 7. I also briefly talked about the possibilities for Java EE 8. The slides for the talk are here: JavaEE.Next(): Java EE 7, 8, and Beyond from reza_rahman Besides presenting my talk, it was great to catch up with the JBoss gang and attend a few interesting sessions. On Sunday night I went to one of my favorite hangouts in Boston - the exalted Middle East Club as Rolling Stone refers to it (other cool spots in an otherwise pretty boring town is "the Church"). As contradictory as it might sound to the uninitiated, the Middle East Club is possibly the best place in Boston to simultaneously get great Middle Eastern (primarily Lebanese) food and great underground metal. For folks with a bit more exposure, this is probably not contradictory at all given bands like Acrassicauda and documentaries like Heavy Metal in Baghdad. Luckily for me they were featuring a few local Thrash metal bands from the greater Boston area. It wasn't too bad considering it was primarily amateur twenty-something guys (although I'm not sure I'm a qualified critic any more since I all but stopped playing about at that age). It's great Boston has the Middle East as an incubator to keep the rock, metal, folk, jazz, blues and indie scene alive. I definitely enjoyed JUDCon/Boston and hope to be part of the conference next year again.

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  • On the art of self-promotion

    - by Tony Davis
    I attended Brent Ozar's Building the Fastest SQL Servers session at Tech Ed last week, and found myself engulfed in a 'perfect storm' of excellent technical and presentational skills coupled with an astute awareness of the value of promoting one's work. I spend a lot of time at such events talking to developers and DBAs about the value of blogging and writing articles, and my impression is that some could benefit from a touch less modesty and a little more self-promotion. I sense a reticence in many would-be writers. Is what I have to say important enough? Haven't far more qualified and established commentators, MVPs and so on, already said it? While it's a good idea to pick reasonably fresh and interesting topics, it's more important not to let such fears lead to writer's block. In the eyes of any future employer, your published writing is an extension of your resume. They will not care that a certain MVP knows how to solve problem x, but they will be very interested to see that you have tackled that same problem, and solved it in your own way, and described the process in your own voice. In your current job, your writing is one of the ways you can express to your peers, and to the organization as a whole, the value of what you contribute. Many Developers and DBAs seem to rely on the idea that their work will speak for itself, and that their skill shines out from it. Unfortunately, this isn't always true. Many Development DBAs, for example, will be painfully aware of the massive effort involved in tuning and adding resilience to rapidly developed applications. However, others in the organization who are unaware of what's involved in getting an application that is 'done' ready for production may dismiss such efforts as fussiness or conservatism. At the dark end of the development cycle, chickens come home to roost, but their droppings tend to land on those trying to clear up the mess. My advice is this: next time you fix a bug or improve the resilience or performance of a database or application, make sure that you use team meetings, informal discussions and so on to ensure that people understand what the problem was and what you had to do to fix it. Use your blog to describe, generally, the process you adopted, the resources you used and the insights that came from your work. Encourage your colleagues to do the same. By spreading the art of self-promotion to everyone involved in an IT project, we get a better idea of the extent of the work and the value of the contribution of all the team members. As always, we'd love to hear what you think. This very week, Simple-talk launches its new blogging platform. If any of this has moved you to 'throw your hat into the ring', drop us a mail at [email protected]. Cheers, Tony.

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  • On the art of self-promotion

    - by Tony Davis
    I attended Brent Ozar’s Building the Fastest SQL Servers session at Tech Ed last week, and found myself engulfed in a ‘perfect storm’ of excellent technical and presentational skills coupled with an astute awareness of the value of promoting one’s work. I spend a lot of time at such events talking to developers and DBAs about the value of blogging and writing articles, and my impression is that some could benefit from a touch less modesty and a little more self-promotion. I sense a reticence in many would-be writers. Is what I have to say important enough? Haven’t far more qualified and established commentators, MVPs and so on, already said it? While it’s a good idea to pick reasonably fresh and interesting topics, it’s more important not to let such fears lead to writer’s block. In the eyes of any future employer, your published writing is an extension of your resume. They will not care that a certain MVP knows how to solve problem x, but they will be very interested to see that you have tackled that same problem, and solved it in your own way, and described the process in your own voice. In your current job, your writing is one of the ways you can express to your peers, and to the organization as a whole, the value of what you contribute. Many Developers and DBAs seem to rely on the idea that their work will speak for itself, and that their skill shines out from it. Unfortunately, this isn’t always true. Many Development DBAs, for example, will be painfully aware of the massive effort involved in tuning and adding resilience to rapidly developed applications. However, others in the organization who are unaware of what’s involved in getting an application that is ‘done’ ready for production may dismiss such efforts as fussiness or conservatism. At the dark end of the development cycle, chickens come home to roost, but their droppings tend to land on those trying to clear up the mess. My advice is this: next time you fix a bug or improve the resilience or performance of a database or application, make sure that you use team meetings, informal discussions and so on to ensure that people understand what the problem was and what you had to do to fix it. Use your blog to describe, generally, the process you adopted, the resources you used and the insights that came from your work. Encourage your colleagues to do the same. By spreading the art of self-promotion to everyone involved in an IT project, we get a better idea of the extent of the work and the value of the contribution of all the team members. As always, we’d love to hear what you think. This very week, Simple-talk launches its new blogging platform. If any of this has moved you to ‘throw your hat into the ring’, drop us a mail at [email protected]. Cheers, Tony.

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  • Reflector Pro Cometh

    Reflector 6 is here. Nick Harrison is a long-time Reflector enthusiast, and has been responsible for writing an add-in. As he'd helped test the new version, Nick asked to review it for Simple-Talk. The team were anxious to know what he thought. They needn't have worried.

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  • Using Three Flavors of LINQ To Populate a TreeView

    LINQ is a valuable technology. LINQ to XML, LINQ to Objects and LINQ to XSD, in particular, can save valuable time for developers and produce more maintainable code. Michael describes how he used three different flavours of LINQ to map XML to a Treeview component that he used in the QueryPicker control that was the subject of a two-part article here on Simple-Talk.

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  • On the art of self-promotion

    - by Tony Davis
    I attended Brent Ozar's Building the Fastest SQL Servers session at Tech Ed last week, and found myself engulfed in a 'perfect storm' of excellent technical and presentational skills coupled with an astute awareness of the value of promoting one's work. I spend a lot of time at such events talking to developers and DBAs about the value of blogging and writing articles, and my impression is that some could benefit from a touch less modesty and a little more self-promotion. I sense a reticence in many would-be writers. Is what I have to say important enough? Haven't far more qualified and established commentators, MVPs and so on, already said it? While it's a good idea to pick reasonably fresh and interesting topics, it's more important not to let such fears lead to writer's block. In the eyes of any future employer, your published writing is an extension of your resume. They will not care that a certain MVP knows how to solve problem x, but they will be very interested to see that you have tackled that same problem, and solved it in your own way, and described the process in your own voice. In your current job, your writing is one of the ways you can express to your peers, and to the organization as a whole, the value of what you contribute. Many Developers and DBAs seem to rely on the idea that their work will speak for itself, and that their skill shines out from it. Unfortunately, this isn't always true. Many Development DBAs, for example, will be painfully aware of the massive effort involved in tuning and adding resilience to rapidly developed applications. However, others in the organization who are unaware of what's involved in getting an application that is 'done' ready for production may dismiss such efforts as fussiness or conservatism. At the dark end of the development cycle, chickens come home to roost, but their droppings tend to land on those trying to clear up the mess. My advice is this: next time you fix a bug or improve the resilience or performance of a database or application, make sure that you use team meetings, informal discussions and so on to ensure that people understand what the problem was and what you had to do to fix it. Use your blog to describe, generally, the process you adopted, the resources you used and the insights that came from your work. Encourage your colleagues to do the same. By spreading the art of self-promotion to everyone involved in an IT project, we get a better idea of the extent of the work and the value of the contribution of all the team members. As always, we'd love to hear what you think. This very week, Simple-talk launches its new blogging platform. If any of this has moved you to 'throw your hat into the ring', drop us a mail at [email protected]. Cheers, Tony.

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  • Oredev 2012: Summary and source code

    - by Laurent Bugnion
    This week, I had the pleasure to be invited to talk at Oredev, a really cool conference taking place in Malmo, Sweden. The whole event is awesome, including a very special dinner on Monday including sauna and swimming in a 6 degrees cold Baltic sea, and a reception with dinner at the town hall, including the mayor himself. Considering Malmo is a town of 300'000 inhabitants, it is a pretty nice occasion and the historical building itself is really worth seeing. For those interested, I placed my pictures on my Flickr account. I had a workshop on Tuesday morning about Windows 8 development with XAML/C#, and then a session on Wednesday about MVVM in Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8, of course using MVVM Light. I was very nervous because I reworked some of my demos as recently as this morning, in the wake of the Build conference last week and the release of both the Windows Phone SDK and MVVM Light V4.1. Everything went well however, and if I judge by the people I talked t after the talk, and Twitter, everything went pretty well. Before my talk on Tuesday, I had the pleasure to see a talk by Iris Classon (@irisclasson) on the challenges of being a "n00b" and a woman in software development. I especially appreciated her research and conclusions on the lack of women I our industry, a topic that is dear to my heart (because I want the best possible future for my two daughters, and also because I really enjoy working with women on projects, and getting a different insight on the art of software development. I really want to thank the excellent organization committee for their hard work and their fantastic welcome to Malmo. In particular Emily Holweck did a wonderful job and was super helpful throughout the preparation and the conference itself. I made a few pictures during my stay, all with the new Nokia Lumia 920, and hope you will enjoy them too. The source code and the slides… The source code is available for download from Skydrive. You will find the following: Windows 8 workshop slides. MVVM Applied slides Source code package with Win8Demo: The demo I built during the 4 hours workshop, with some light MVVM, web services (JSON), GridView, Design time data (Blend / Visual Studio designer), Bing maps integration, location sensor, Search pane integration. SemanticZoomSample: a sample I put together to demonstrate the SemanticZoom control, with two GridViews and of course full design time data for Blend work. Due to time constraints, I was not able to show this demo during the workshop, but I publish it anyway, hoping it will be useful to someone. PictureUploader: The demo I built during my 50 minutes session about MVVM Applied in Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8. Code sharing, design time data, MVVM Light are used in Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 apps. And in video… You can also see the video of my MVVM talk thanks to the good services of the Oredev team! MVVM Applied in Windows Phone and Windows 8 from Øredev Conference on Vimeo.   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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  • Propel Single Table Inheritance Issue

    - by lo_fye
    I have a table called "talk", which is defined as abstract in my schema.xml file. It generates 4 objects (1 per classkey): Comment, Rating, Review, Checkin It also generates TalkPeer, but I couldn't get it to generate the other 4 peers (CommentPeer, RatingPeer, ReviewPeer, CheckinPeer), so I created them by hand, and made them inherit from TalkPeer.php, which inherits from BaseTalkPeer. I then implemented getOMClass() in each of those peers. The problem is that when I do queries using the 4 peers, they return all 4 types of objects. That is, ReviewPeer will return Visits, Ratings, Comments, AND Reviews. Example: $c = new Criteria(); $c->add(RatingPeer::VALUE, 5, Criteria::GREATER_THAN); $positive_ratings = RatingPeer::doSelect($c); This returns all comments, ratings, reviews, & checkins that have a value 5. ReviewPeer should only return Review objects, and can't figure out how to do this. Do I actually have to go through and change all my criteria to manually specify the classkey? That seems a little pointless, since the Peer name already distinct. I don't want to have to customize each Peer. I should be able to customize JUST the TalkPeer, since they all inherit from it... I just can't figure out how. I tried changing doSelectStmt just in TalkPeer so that it automatically adds the CLASSKEY restriction to the Criteria. It almost works, but I get a: Fatal error: Cannot instantiate abstract class Talk in /models/om/BaseTalkPeer.php on line 503. Line 503 is in BaseTalkPeer::populateObjects(), and is the 3rd line below: $cls = TalkPeer::getOMClass($row, 0); $cls = substr('.'.$cls, strrpos('.'.$cls, '.') + 1); $obj = new $cls(); The docs talked about overriding BaseTalkPeer::populateObject(). I have a feeling that's my problem, but even after reading the source code, I still couldn't figure out how to get it to work. Here is what I tried in TalkPeer::doSelectStmt: public static function doSelectStmt(Criteria $criteria, PropelPDO $con = null) { $keys = array('models.Visit'=>1,'models.Comment'=>2,'models.Rating'=>3,'models.Review'=>4); $class_name = self::getOMClass(); if(isset($keys[$class_name])) { //Talk itself is not a returnable type, so we must check $class_key = $keys[$class_name]; $criteria->add(TalkPeer::CLASS_KEY, $class_key); } return parent::doSelectStmt($criteria, $con = null); } Here is an example of my getOMClass method from ReviewPeer: public static function getOMClass() { return self::CLASSNAME_4; //aka 'talk.Review'; } Here is the relevant bit of my schema: <table name="talk" idMethod="native" abstract="true"> <column name="talk_pk" type="INTEGER" required="true" autoIncrement="true" primaryKey="true" /> <column name="class_key" type="INTEGER" required="true" default="" inheritance="single"> <inheritance key="1" class="Visit" extends="models.Talk" /> <inheritance key="2" class="Comment" extends="models.Talk" /> <inheritance key="3" class="Rating" extends="models.Talk" /> <inheritance key="4" class="Review" extends="models.Rating" /> </column> </table> P.S. - No, I can't upgrade from 1.3 to 1.4. There's just too much code that would need to be re-tested

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  • excel 2010 search function?

    - by Tom
    can a cell A1:A200 be searched for a "name" then once found, imput the cell location into a formula? such as find "tom"(a1:a200), [found location at cell a22] IF(a22),=IF(MINUTE(Auto_Agent!G27)+(SECOND(Auto_Agent!G27))=0,"",(MINUTE(Auto_Agent!G27)*60+(SECOND(Auto_Agent!G27)))) the problem I'm having is each time I import data names can be in different cell locations depending on who is working that day. example: Agent: Tom 07:59:49 02:31:04 00:00:00 00:42:44 01:33:02 00:00:43 00:02:00 03:09:05 Avg Skillset Talk Time: 00:06:52 07:59:49 02:31:04 00:00:00 00:42:44 01:33:02 00:00:43 00:02:00 03:09:05 () 9/19/2012 Avg Skillset Talk Time: 00:06:52 07:59:49 02:31:04 00:00:00 00:42:44 01:33:02 00:00:43 00:02:00 03:09:05 Agent: Bill 07:59:49 02:31:04 00:00:00 00:42:44 01:33:02 00:00:43 00:02:00 03:09:05 Avg Skillset Talk Time: 00:06:52 07:59:49 02:31:04 00:00:00 00:42:44 01:33:02 00:00:43 00:02:00 03:09:05 () 9/19/2012 Avg Skillset Talk Time: 00:06:52 07:59:49 02:31:04 00:00:00 00:42:44 01:33:02 00:00:43 00:02:00 03:09:05

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  • can a python script know that another instance of the same script is running... and then talk to it?

    - by Justin Grant
    I'd like to prevent multiple instances of the same long-running python command-line script from running at the same time, and I'd like the new instance to be able to send data to the original insance before the new instance commits suicide. How can I do this in a cross-platform way? Specifically, I'd like to enable the following behavior: "foo.py" is launched from the command line, and it will stay running for a long time-- days or weeks until the machine is rebooted or the parent process kills it. every few minutes the same script is launched again, but with different command-line parameters when launched, the script should see if any other instances are running. if other instances are running, then instance #2 should send its command-line parameters to instance #1, and then instance #2 should exit. instance #1, if it receives command-line parameters from another script, should spin up a new thread and (using the command-line parameters sent in the step above) start performing the work that instance #2 was going to perform. So I'm looking for two things: how can a python program know another instance of itself is running, and then how can one python command-line program communicate with another? Making this more complicated, the same script needs to run on both Windows and Linux, so ideally the solution would use only the Python standard library and not any OS-specific calls. Although if I need to have a Windows codepath and an *nix codepath (and a big if statement in my code to choose one or the other), that's OK if a "same code" solution isn't possible. I realize I could probably work out a file-based approach (e.g. instance #1 watches a directory for changes and each instance drops a file into that directory when it wants to do work) but I'm a little concerned about cleaning up those files after a non-graceful machine shutdown. I'd ideally be able to use an in-memory solution. But again I'm flexible, if a persistent-file-based approach is the only way to do it, I'm open to that option. More details: I'm trying to do this because our servers are using a monitoring tool which supports running python scripts to collect monitoring data (e.g. results of a database query or web service call) which the monitoring tool then indexes for later use. Some of these scripts are very expensive to start up but cheap to run after startup (e.g. making a DB connection vs. running a query). So we've chosen to keep them running in an infinite loop until the parent process kills them. This works great, but on larger servers 100 instances of the same script may be running, even if they're only gathering data every 20 minutes each. This wreaks havoc with RAM, DB connection limits, etc. We want to switch from 100 processes with 1 thread to one process with 100 threads, each executing the work that, previously, one script was doing. But changing how the scripts are invoked by the monitoring tool is not possible. We need to keep invocation the same (launch a process with different command-line parameters) but but change the scripts to recognize that another one is active, and have the "new" script send its work instructions (from the command line params) over to the "old" script.

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  • DevDays ‘00 The Netherlands day #1

    - by erwin21
    First day of DevDays 2010, I was looking forward to DevDays to see all the new things like VS2010, .NET4.0, MVC2. The lineup for this year is again better than the year before, there are 100+ session of all kind of topics like Cloud, Database, Mobile, SharePoint, User experience, Visual Studio, Web. The first session of the day was a keynote by Anders Hejlsberg he talked about the history and future of programming languages. He gave his view about trends and influences in programming languages today and in the future. The second talk that i followed was from the famous Scott Hanselman, he talked about the basics of ASP.NET MVC 2, although it was a 300 level session, it was more like a level 100 session, but it was mentioned by Scott at the beginning. Although it was interesting to see all the basic things about MVC like the controllers, actions, routes, views, models etc. After the lunch the third talk for me was about moving ASP.NET webform applications to MVC from Fritz Onion. In this session he changed an example webform application part by part to a MVC application. He gave some interesting tips and tricks and showed how to solve some issues that occur while converting. Next and the fourth talk was about the difference between LINQ to SQL and  the ADO.NET  Entity Framework from Kurt Claeys. He gave a good understanding about this two options, the demos where in LINQ to SQL and the Entity Framework, the goal was to get a good understanding when and where to use both options. The last talk about this day was also from Scott Hanselman, he goes deeper into the features of ASP.NET MVC 2 and gave some interesting tips, the ninja black belt tips. He gave some tips about the tooling, the new MVC 2 html helper methods, other view engines (like NHaml, spark),T4 templating. With this tips we can be more productive and create web applications better and faster. It was a long and interesting day, I am looking forward to day #2.

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  • Pluralsight Meet the Author Podcast on HTML5 Canvas Programming

    - by dwahlin
      In the latest installment of Pluralsight’s Meet the Author podcast series, Fritz Onion and I talk about my new course, HTML5 Canvas Fundamentals.  In the interview I describe different canvas technologies covered throughout the course and a sample application at the end of the course that covers how to build a custom business chart from start to finish. Meet the Author:  Dan Wahlin on HTML5 Canvas Fundamentals   Transcript [Fritz] Hi. This is Fritz Onion. I’m here today with Dan Wahlin to talk about his new course HTML5 Canvas Fundamentals. Dan founded the Wahlin Group, which you can find at thewahlingroup.com, which specializes in ASP.NET, jQuery, Silverlight, and SharePoint consulting. He’s a Microsoft Regional Director and has been awarded Microsoft’s MVP for ASP.NET, Connected Systems, and Silverlight. Dan is on the INETA Bureau’s — Speaker’s Bureau, speaks at conferences and user groups around the world, and has written several books on .NET. Thanks for talking to me today, Dan. [Dan] Always good to talk with you, Fritz. [Fritz] So this new course of yours, HTML5 Canvas Fundamentals, I have to say that most of the really snazzy demos I’ve seen with HTML5 have involved Canvas, so I thought it would be a good starting point to chat with you about why we decided to create a course dedicated just to Canvas. If you want to kind of give us that perspective. [Dan] Sure. So, you know, there’s quite a bit of material out there on HTML5 in general, and as people that have done a lot with HTML5 are probably aware, a lot of HTML5 is actually JavaScript centric. You know, a lot of people when they first learn it, think it’s tags, but most of it’s actually JavaScript, and it just so happens that the HTML5 Canvas is one of those things. And so it’s not just, you know, a tag you add and it just magically draws all these things. You mentioned there’s a lot of cool things you can do from games to there’s some really cool multimedia applications out there where they integrate video and audio and all kinds of things into the Canvas, to more business scenarios such as charting and things along those lines. So the reason we made a course specifically on it is, a lot of the material out there touches on it but the Canvas is actually a pretty deep topic. You can do some pretty advanced stuff or easy stuff depending on what your application requirements are, and the API itself, you know, there’s over 30 functions just in the Canvas API and then a whole set of properties that actually go with that as well. So it’s a pretty big topic, and that’s why we created a course specifically tailored towards just the Canvas. [Fritz] Right. And let’s — let me just review the outline briefly here for everyone. So you start off with an introduction to getting started with Canvas, drawing with the HTML5 Canvas, then you talk about manipulating pixels, and you finish up with building a custom data chart. So I really like your example flow here. I think it will appeal to even business developers, right. Even if you’re not into HTML5 for the games or the media capabilities, there’s still something here for everyone I think working with the Canvas. Which leads me to another question, which is, where do you see the Canvas fitting in to kind of your day-to-day developer, people that are working business applications and maybe vanilla websites that aren’t doing kind of cutting edge stuff with interactivity with users? Is there a still a place for the Canvas in those scenarios? [Dan] Yeah, definitely. I think a lot of us — and I include myself here — over the last few years, the focus has generally been, especially if you’re, let’s say, a PHP or ASP.NET or Java type of developer, we’re kind of accustomed to working on the server side, and, you know, we kind of relied on Flash or Silverlight or these other plug-ins for the client side stuff when it was kind of fancy, like charts and graphs and things along those lines. With the what I call massive shift of applications, you know, mainly because of mobile, to more of client side, one of the big benefits I think from a maybe corporate standard way of thinking of things, since we do a lot of work with different corporations, is that, number one, rather than having to have the plug-in, which of course isn’t going to work on iPad and some of these other devices out there that are pretty popular, you can now use a built-in technology that all the modern browsers support, and that includes things like Safari on the iPad and iPhone and the Android tablets and things like that with their browsers, and actually render some really sophisticated charts. Whether you do it by scratch or from scratch or, you know, get a third party type of library involved, it’s just JavaScript. So it downloads fast so it’s good from a performance perspective; and when it comes to what you can render, it’s extremely robust. You can do everything from, you know, your basic circles to polygons or polylines to really advanced gradients as well and even provide some interactivity and animations, and that’s some of the stuff I touch upon in the class. In fact, you mentioned the last part of the outline there is building a custom data chart and that’s kind of gears towards more of the, what I’d call enterprise or corporate type developer. [Fritz] Yeah, that makes sense. And it’s, you know, a lot of the demos I’ve seen with HTML5 focus on more the interactivity and kind of game side of things, but the Canvas is such a diverse element within HTML5 that I can see it being applicable pretty much anywhere. So why don’t we talk a little bit about some of the specifics of what you cover? You talk about drawing and then manipulating pixels. You want to kind of give us the different ways of working with the Canvas and what some of those APIs provide for you? [Dan] Sure. So going all the way back to the start of the outline, we actually started off by showing different demonstrations of the Canvas in action, and we show some fun stuff — multimedia apps and games and things like that — and then also some more business scenarios; and then once you see that, hopefully it kinds of piques your interest and you go, oh, wow, this is actually pretty phenomenal what you can do. So then we start you off with, so how to you actually draw things. Now, there are some libraries out there that will draw things like graphs, but if you want to customize those or just build something you have from scratch, you need to know the basics, such as, you know, how do you draw circles and lines and arcs and Bezier curves and all those fancy types of shapes that a given chart may have on it or that a game may have in it for that matter. So we start off by covering what I call the core API functions; how do you, for instance, fill a rectangle or convert that to a square by setting the height and the width; how do you draw arcs or different types of curves and there’s different types supported such as I mentioned Bezier curves or quadratic curves; and then we also talk about how do you integrate text into it. You might have some images already that are just regular bitmap type images that you want to integrate, you can do that with a Canvas. And you can even sync video into the Canvas, which actually opens up some pretty interesting possibilities for both business and I think just general multimedia apps. Once you kind of get those core functions down for the basic shapes that you need to be able to draw on any type of Canvas, then we go a little deeper into what are the pixels that are there to manipulate. And that’s one of the important things to understand about the HTML5 Canvas, scalable vector graphics is another thing you can use now in the modern browsers; it’s vector based. Canvas is pixel based. And so we talk about how to do gradients, how can you do transforms, you know, how do you scale things or rotate things, which is extremely useful for charts ’cause you might have text that, you know, flips up on its side for a y-axis or something like that. And you can even do direct pixel manipulation. So it’s really, really powerful. If you want to get down to the RGBA level, you can do that, and I show how to do that in the course, and then kind of wrap that section up with some animation fundamentals. [Fritz] Great. Yeah, that’s really powerful stuff for programmatically rendering data to clients and responding to user inputs. Look forward to seeing what everyone’s going to come up with building this stuff. So great. That’s — that’s HTML5 Canvas Fundamentals with Dan Wahlin. Thanks very much, Dan. [Dan] Thanks again. I appreciate it.

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  • WebSocket@QCon NY

    - by reza_rahman
    QCon NY was held on June 10-14 at the New York Marriott/Brooklyn Bridge. Part of the QCon franchise, this is one of the most significant IT conferences in the greater NYC area. It was an honor to do a WebSocket (JSR 356) talk at the conference. Unfortunately, my schedule was such that I could only attend one day of the conference and did not really get a chance to attend many sessions or do much networking. I did get a chance to talk to fellow Oracle speakers Doug Clarke, Stephen Chin and Frederic Desbiens, which was great. My session, titled Building Java HTML5/WebSocket Applications with JSR 356 was very well attended and I had some excellent Q & A. The talk introduces HTML 5 WebSocket, overviews JSR 356, tours the API and ends with a small WebSocket demo on GlassFish 4. The slide deck for the talk is posted below. Building Java HTML5/WebSocket Applications with JSR 356 from Reza Rahman The demo code is posted on GitHub: https://github.com/m-reza-rahman/hello-websocket. Oracle hosted a reception in the evening which was very well attended. Later in the evening the QCon organizers hosted a very nice speakers' dinner at a local boutique restaurant with excellent atmosphere and good food.

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  • Some Original Expressions

    - by Phil Factor
    Guest Editorial for Simple-Talk newsletterIn a guest editorial for the Simple-Talk Newsletter, Phil Factor wonders if we are still likely to find some more novel and unexpected ways of using the newer features of Transact SQL: or maybe in some features that have always been there! There can be a great deal of fun to be had in trying out recent features of SQL Expressions to see if  they provide new functionality.  It is surprisingly rare to find things that couldn’t be done before, but in a different   and more cumbersome way; but it is great to experiment or to read of someone else making that discovery.  One such recent feature is the ‘table value constructor’, or ‘VALUES constructor’, that managed to get into SQL Server 2008 from Standard SQL.  This allows you to create derived tables of up to 1000 rows neatly within select statements that consist of  lists of row values.  E.g. SELECT Old_Welsh, number FROM (VALUES ('Un',1),('Dou',2),('Tri',3),('Petuar',4),('Pimp',5),('Chwech',6),('Seith',7),('Wyth',8),('Nau',9),('Dec',10)) AS WelshWordsToTen (Old_Welsh, number) These values can be expressions that return single values, including, surprisingly, subqueries. You can use this device to create views, or in the USING clause of a MERGE statement. Joe Celko covered  this here and here.  It can become extraordinarily handy to use once one gets into the way of thinking in these terms, and I’ve rewritten a lot of routines to use the constructor, but the old way of using UNION can be used the same way, but is a little slower and more long-winded. The use of scalar SQL subqueries as an expression in a VALUES constructor, and then applied to a MERGE, has got me thinking. It looks very clever, but what use could one put it to? I haven’t seen anything yet that couldn’t be done almost as  simply in SQL Server 2000, but I’m hopeful that someone will come up with a way of solving a tricky problem, just in the same way that a freak of the XML syntax forever made the in-line  production of delimited lists from an expression easy, or that a weird XML pirouette could do an elegant  pivot-table rotation. It is in this sort of experimentation where the community of users can make a real contribution. The dissemination of techniques such as the Number, or Tally table, or the unconventional ways that the UPDATE statement can be used, has been rapid due to articles and blogs. However, there is plenty to be done to explore some of the less obvious features of Transact SQL. Even some of the features introduced into SQL Server 2000 are hardly well-known. Certain operations on data are still awkward to perform in Transact SQL, but we mustn’t, I think, be too ready to state that certain things can only be done in the application layer, or using a CLR routine. With the vast array of features in the product, and with the tools that surround it, I feel that there is generally a way of getting tricky things done. Or should we just stick to our lasts and push anything difficult out into procedural code? I’d love to know your views.

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  • SQLBeat Podcast – Episode 6 – And the Winner is…Meredith Ryan from Albakerkee.

    - by SQLBeat
    In this episode I speak with the winner of the Exceptional DBA Award for 2012, Meredith Ryan.  We talk about a lot of things, but mainly attending the PASS Summit, first timers (this is PASS related too) and SQL Saturdays. Meredith has been with her present company for 14 years, an achievement of a bygone era in IT, but we are kindred in this area having worked at my present position for nearly 7. We also agree that every DBA should have to spend at least 2 years on Help Desk. I feel really, really dumb for not having recognized her tattoo, which I shamelessly ask about.  Congratulations, Meredith on your award and I look forward to meeting you this year in a few short weeks. Download the MP3

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  • Going to the Score Cards - Exceptional DBA Awards 2011

    - by Rodney
    This year marks my 4th year as a judge for the Exceptional DBA Awards, founded by Red Gate in 2008 to "recognize the essential but often overlooked contributions of DBAs, the unsung heroes of the IT community." As a professional DBA myself I have been honored to participate as a judge. It is not an easy job because there is a voluminous amount of nominees from all over the world. Each judge has to read through every word of the nominee's answers, deciding what makes each person special and stand out amongst their peers. What drives them? What single element of their submission will shine above all others? It is my hope that what I am about to divulge to you as a judge will prompt you to think about yourself or someone you know and decide that you may be the exceptional DBA who can take home the gold at this year's award ceremony in Seattle. We are more than a few weeks into the nomination process and there are quite a number of submissions already. I can not tell you how many as that would not be fair. I can say it is not 1 million or more. I can also say that it is not 100,000. But that is all I can say about that. However, I can tell you that it is enough this year that we are breaking records on the number of people who have been influenced, inspired or intrigued by the awards in the past. I remember them all like it were yesterday. fuzzy thought cloud here. It was a rainy day in Seattle (all memories for each award ceremony will start thusly) and I was in the hotel going over my notes on what I wanted to say about the winner of the 2008 Red Gate Exceptional DBA Award. The notes were on index cards that I had either bought or stolen from my wife, I do not recall, but I was nervous which was unlike me. This was, after all, a big night for the winner. Of course, we, the judges and the SQL community, had already decided the winner and now all that remained was to present the award. The room was packed. It was Casino night, sponsored by sqlservercentral.com. Money (fake), drinks (not fake) and camaraderie flowed through the room. Dan McClain won the award that year. He worked for Anheuser-Busch at the time. I promise that did not influence my decision. We presented Dan with the award. He was very proud of this achievement, rightfully so, as was the SQL community for him. I spoke with Dan throughout the conference and realized how huge this award was for him, not just personally but professionally. It was a rainy day in Seattle in 2009 and I was nervous. I was asked to speak to a group of people again as a judge for the Exceptional DBA Awards. This year, Josef Richberg would be the recipient of the award, but he would not be able to attend. We all prayed for him as he fought through an illness and congratulated him for his accomplishments as a DBA for his company. He got better and sallied forth and continued to give back to the SQL community that he saw as one big family. In 2010, and I am getting ahead of myself, he was asked to be a judge himself for the very award he had just received the year before. It was a sunny day in Seattle and I missed it, because it was in July and I was not there. It was a rainy day in Seattle and it is 2010 and Tracy Hamlin enters a submission that blows this judge away. She is managing a 50 Terabyte distributed database ("50 Gigabytes! Are you kidding me!!!", Rodney jokes.)  and loves her daily job as a DBA working with developers, mentoring them and teaching them best practices with kindness and patience. She is a people person who just happens to have 10+ years experience with RDBMS'. She wins the award and goes on to be recognized as famous at PASS. It will be a rainy day in Seattle this year when I sit amongst my old constituent judges and friends, Brad McGehee, http://www.simple-talk.com/books/sql-books/how-to-become-an-exceptional-dba,-2nd-edition/, Steve Jones, whom we all know and love at http://www.sqlservercentral.com and a young upstart to the SQL Community, this cat named Brent Ozar to announce the 2011 winner. I personally have not heard of Brent but I am told I have interviewed him for a DBA position several years ago and turned him down, http://www.brentozar.com/archive/2011/05/exceptional-dba-contest/ . I hope that did not jeopardize his future in the SQL world. I am a big hearted oaf and would feel horrible. Hopefully I will meet him at PASS and we can work this all out and I can help him get a DBA job. The rain has stopped and a new year is upon us. The stakes are high...the competition is fierce...the rewards are incredible. The entry form awaits you. http://www.exceptionaldba.com/ I very much look forward to meeting you and presenting the award to you in front of hundreds of your envious but proud peers as the new Exceptional DBA for 2011 at the PASS Summit. Here is what you could win: The Exceptional DBA of the Year receives full conference registration for the 2011 PSS Summit in Seattle, where the awards ceremony will take place, four nights' hotel accommodation, and $300 towards travel expenses. They will also be featured on Simple-Talk. Are you ready? Are you nervous?

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  • Last chance to enter! Exceptional DBA Awards 2011

    - by Rebecca Amos
    Only 1 day left to enter the Exceptional DBA Awards! Get started on your entry today, and you could be heading to Seattle for the PASS Summit in October. All you need to do is visit the Exceptional DBA website and answer a few questions about: Your career and achievements as a SQL Server DBAAny mistakes you've made along the way (and how you tackled them)Activities you're involved in within the SQL Server community – for example writing, blogging, contributing to forums, speaking at events, or organising user groupsWhy you think you should be the Exceptional DBA of 2011 As well as the respect and recognition of your peers – and a great boost to your CV – you could win full conference registration to this year's PASS Summit in Seattle (including accommodation and $300 towards travel expenses) – where the award will be presented, as well as a copy of Red Gate's SQL DBA Bundle, and a chance to be featured here, on Simple-Talk.com. So why not give it a shot? Start your entry now at www.exceptionaldba.com (nominations close on 30 June).

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