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• Consolidating SQL Server Error Logs from Multiple Instances Using SSIS

  SQL Server hides a lot of very useful information in its error log files. Unfortunately, the process of hunting through all these logs, file-by-file, server-by-server, can cause a problem. Rodney Landrum offers a solution which will allow you to pull error log records from multiple servers into a central database, for analysis and reporting with T-SQL.

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• State Transition Constraints

  Data Validation in a database is a lot more complex than seeing if a string parameter really is an integer. A commercial world is full of complex rules for sequences of procedures, of fixed or variable lifespans, Warranties, commercial offers and bids. All this requires considerable subtlety to prevent bad data getting in, and if it does, locating and fixing the problem. Joe Celko shows how useful a State transition graph can be, and how essential it can become with the time aspect added.

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• Should we always keep same value for body {font-size:...} which we want to use content <p>?

  - by metal-gear-solid

  What are pros and cons to define font-size for body? what if somewhere i will need font smaller and bigger than body? will i get body font size (12px) + needed font size for <p> (10px) = 22 Should we always keep same value for body font size which we want to use content paragraph?

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• Continuous Integration for SQL Server Part II – Integration Testing

  - by Ben Rees

  My previous post, on setting up Continuous Integration for SQL Server databases using GitHub, Bamboo and Red Gate’s tools, covered the first two parts of a simple Database Continuous Delivery process: Putting your database in to a source control system, and, Running a continuous integration process, each time changes are checked in. However there is, of course, a lot more to to Continuous Delivery than that. Specifically, in addition to the above: Putting some actual integration tests in to the CI process (otherwise, they don’t really do much, do they!?), Deploying the database changes with a managed, automated approach, Monitoring what you’ve just put live, to make sure you haven’t broken anything. This post will detail how to set up a very simple pipeline for implementing the first of these (continuous integration testing). NB: A lot of the setup in this post is built on top of the configuration from before, so it might be difficult to implement this post without running through part I first. There’ll then be a third post on automated database deployment followed by a final post dealing with the last item – monitoring changes on the live system. In the previous post, I used a mixture of Red Gate products and other 3rd party software – GitHub and Atlassian Bamboo specifically. This was partly because I believe most people work in an heterogeneous environment, using software from different vendors to suit their purposes and I wanted to show how this could work for this process. For example, you could easily substitute Atlassian’s BitBucket or Stash for GitHub, depending on your needs, or use an alternative CI server such as TeamCity, TFS or Jenkins. However, in this, post, I’ll be mostly using Red Gate products only (other than tSQLt). I would do this, firstly because I work for Red Gate. However, I also think that in the area of Database Delivery processes, nobody else has the offerings to implement this process fully – so I didn’t have any choice!   Background on Continuous Delivery For me, a great source of information on what makes a proper Continuous Delivery process is the Jez Humble and David Farley classic: Continuous Delivery – Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation This book is not of course, primarily about databases, and the process I outline here and in the previous article is a gross simplification of what Jez and David describe (not least because it’s that much harder for databases!). However, a lot of the principles that they describe can be equally applied to database development and, I would argue, should be. As I say however, what I describe here is a very simple version of what would be required for a full production process. A couple of useful resources on handling some of these complexities can be found in the following two references: Refactoring Databases – Evolutionary Database Design, by Scott J Ambler and Pramod J. Sadalage Versioning Databases – Branching and Merging, by Scott Allen In particular, I don’t deal at all with the issues of multiple branches and merging of those branches, an issue made particularly acute by the use of GitHub. The other point worth making is that, in the words of Martin Fowler: Continuous Delivery is about keeping your application in a state where it is always able to deploy into production.   I.e. we are not talking about continuously delivery updates to the production database every time someone checks in an amendment to a stored procedure. That is possible (and what Martin calls Continuous Deployment). However, again, that’s more than I describe in this article. And I doubt I need to remind DBAs or Developers to Proceed with Caution!   Integration Testing Back to something practical. The next stage, building on our set up from the previous article, is to add in some integration tests to the process. As I say, the CI process, though interesting, isn’t enormously useful without some sort of test process running. For this we’ll use the tSQLt framework, an open source framework designed specifically for running SQL Server tests. tSQLt is part of Red Gate’s SQL Test found on http://www.red-gate.com/products/sql-development/sql-test/ or can be downloaded separately from www.tsqlt.org - though I’ll provide a step-by-step guide below for setting this up. Getting tSQLt set up via SQL Test Click on the link http://www.red-gate.com/products/sql-development/sql-test/ and click on the blue Download button to download the Red Gate SQL Test product, if not already installed. Follow the install process for SQL Test to install the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) plugin on to your machine, if not already installed. Open SSMS. You should now see SQL Test under the Tools menu:   Clicking this link will give you the basic SQL Test dialogue: As yet, though we’ve installed the SQL Test product we haven’t yet installed the tSQLt test framework on to any particular database. To do this, we need to add our RedGateApp database using this dialogue, by clicking on the + Add Database to SQL Test… link, selecting the RedGateApp database and clicking the Add Database link:   In the next screen, SQL Test describes what will be installed on the database for the tSQLt framework. Also in this dialogue, uncheck the “Add SQL Cop tests” option (shown below). SQL Cop is a great set of pre-defined tests that work within the tSQLt framework to check the general health of your SQL Server database. However, we won’t be using them in this particular simple example: Once you’ve clicked on the OK button, the changes described in the dialogue will be made to your database. Some of these are shown in the left-hand-side below: We’ve now installed the framework. However, we haven’t actually created any tests, so this will be the next step. But, before we proceed, we’ve made an update to our database so should, again check this in to source control, adding comments as required:   Also worth a quick check that your build still runs with the new additions!: (And a quick check of the RedGateAppCI database shows that the changes have been made).   Creating and Testing a Unit Test There are, of course, a lot of very interesting unit tests that you could and should set up for a database. The great thing about the tSQLt framework is that you can write these in SQL. The example I’m going to use here is pretty Mickey Mouse – our database table is going to include some email addresses as reference data and I want to check whether these are all in a correct email format. Nothing clever but it illustrates the process and hopefully shows the method by which more interesting tests could be set up. Adding Reference Data to our Database To start, I want to add some reference data to my database, and have this source controlled (as well as the schema). First of all I need to add some data in to my solitary table – this can be done a number of ways, but I’ll do this in SSMS for simplicity: I then add some reference data to my table: Currently this reference data just exists in the database. For proper integration testing, this needs to form part of the source-controlled version of the database – and so needs to be added to the Git repository. This can be done via SQL Source Control, though first a Primary Key needs to be added to the table. Right click the table, select Design, then right-click on the first “id” row. Then click on “Set Primary Key”: NB: once this change is made, click Save to save the change to the table. Then, to source control this reference data, right click on the table (dbo.Email) and selecting the following option:   In the next screen, link the data in the Email table, by selecting it from the list and clicking “save and close”: We should at this point re-commit the changes (both the addition of the Primary Key, and the data) to the Git repo. NB: From here on, I won’t show screenshots for the GitHub side of things – it’s the same each time: whenever a change is made in SQL Source Control and committed to your local folder, you then need to sync this in the GitHub Windows client (as this is where the build server, Bamboo is taking it from). An interesting point to note here, when these changes are committed in SQL Source Control (right-click database and select “Commit Changes to Source Control..”): The display gives a warning about possibly needing a migration script for the “Add Primary Key” step of the changes. This isn’t actually necessary in this case, but this mechanism would allow you to create override scripts to replace the default change scripts created by the SQL Compare engine (which runs underneath SQL Source Control). Ignoring this message (!), we add a comment and commit the changes to Git. I then sync these, run a build (or the build gets run automatically), and check that the data is being deployed over to the target RedGateAppCI database:   Creating and Running the Test As I mention, the test I’m going to use here is a very simple one - are the email addresses in my reference table valid? This isn’t of course, a full test of email validation (I expect the email addresses I’ve chosen here aren’t really the those of the Fab Four) – but just a very basic check of format used. I’ve taken the relevant SQL from this Stack Overflow article. In SSMS select “SQL Test” from the Tools menu, then click on + New Test: In the next screen, give your new test a name, and also enter a name in the Test Class box (test classes are schemas that help you keep things organised). Also check that the database in which the test is going to be created is correct – RedGateApp in this example: Click “Create Test”. After closing a couple of subsequent dialogues, you’ll see a dummy script for the test, that needs filling in:   We now need to define the SQL for our test. As mentioned before, tSQLt allows you to write your unit tests in T-SQL, and the code I’m going to use here is as below. This needs to be copied and pasted in to the query window, to replace the default given by tSQLt: –  Basic email check test ALTER PROCEDURE [MyChecks].[test Check Email Addresses] AS BEGIN SET NOCOUNT ON         Declare @Output VarChar(max)     Set @Output = ”       SELECT  @Output = @Output + Email +Char(13) + Char(10) FROM dbo.Email WHERE email NOT LIKE ‘%_@__%.__%’       If @Output > ”         Begin             Set @Output = Char(13) + Char(10)                           + @Output             EXEC tSQLt.Fail@Output         End   END;   Once this script is entered, hit execute to add the Stored Procedure to the database. Before committing the test to source control,  it’s worth just checking that it works! For a positive test, click on “SQL Test” from the Tools menu, then click Run Tests. You should see output like the following: - a green tick to indicate success! But of course, what we also need to do is test that this is actually doing something by showing a failed test. Edit one of the email addresses in your table to an incorrect format: Now, re-run the same SQL Test as before and you’ll see the following: Great – we now know that our test is really doing something! You’ll also see a useful error message at the bottom of SSMS: (leave the email address as invalid for now, for the next steps). The next stage is to check this new test in to source control again, by right-clicking on the database and checking in the changes with a commit message (and not forgetting to sync in the GitHub client):   Checking that the Tests are Running as Integration Tests After the changes above are made, and after a build has run on Bamboo (manual or automatic), looking at the Stored Procedures for the RedGateAppCI, the SPROC for the new test has been moved over to the database. However this is not exactly what we were after. We didn’t want to just copy objects from one database to another, but actually run the tests as part of the build/integration test process. I.e. we’re continuously checking any changes we make (in this case, to the reference data emails), to ensure we’re not breaking a test that we’ve set up. The behaviour we want to see is that, if we check in static data that is incorrect (as we did in step 9 above) and we have the tSQLt test set up, then our build in Bamboo should fail. However, re-running the build shows the following: - sadly, a successful build! To make sure the tSQLt tests are run as part of the integration test, we need to amend a switch in the Red Gate CI config file. First, navigate to file sqlCI.targets in your working folder: Edit this document, make the following change, save the document, then commit and sync this change in the GitHub client: <!-- tSQLt tests --> <!-- Optional --> <!-- To run tSQLt tests in source control for the database, enter true. --> <enableTsqlt>true</enableTsqlt> Now, if we re-run the build in Bamboo (NB: I’ve moved to a new server here, hence different address and build number): - superb, a broken build!! The error message isn’t great here, so to get more detailed info, click on the full build log link on this page (below the fold). The interesting part of the log shown is towards the bottom. Pulling out this part:   21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 Build FAILED. 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 "C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj" (default target) (1) -> 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 (sqlCI target) -> 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 EXEC : sqlCI error occurred: RedGate.Deploy.SqlServerDbPackage.Shared.Exceptions.InvalidSqlException: Test Case Summary: 1 test case(s) executed, 0 succeeded, 1 failed, 0 errored. [C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj] 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 EXEC : sqlCI error occurred: [MyChecks].[test Check Email Addresses] failed: [C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj] 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 EXEC : sqlCI error occurred: ringo.starr@beatles [C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj] 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 EXEC : sqlCI error occurred: [C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj] 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 EXEC : sqlCI error occurred: +----------------------+ [C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj] 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 EXEC : sqlCI error occurred: |Test Execution Summary| [C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj]   As a final check, we should make sure that, if we now fix this error, the build succeeds. So in SSMS, I’m going to correct the invalid email address, then check this change in to SQL Source Control (with a comment), commit to GitHub, and re-run the build:   This should have fixed the build: It worked! Summary This has been a very quick run through the implementation of CI for databases, including tSQLt tests to test whether your database updates are working. The next post in this series will focus on automated deployment – we’ve tested our database changes, how can we now deploy these to target sites?  

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• Using Deployment Manager

  - by Jess Nickson

  One of the teams at Red Gate has been working very hard on a new product: Deployment Manager. Deployment Manager is a free tool that lets you deploy updates to .NET apps, services and databases through a central dashboard. Deployment Manager has been out for a while, but I must admit that even though I work in the same building, until now I hadn’t even looked at it. My job at Red Gate is to develop and maintain some of our community sites, which involves carrying out regular deployments. One of the projects I have to deploy on a fairly regular basis requires me to send my changes to our build server, TeamCity. The output is a Zip file of the build. I then have to go and find this file, copy it across to the staging machine, extract it, and copy some of the sub-folders to other places. In order to keep track of what builds are running, I need to rename the folders accordingly. However, even after all that, I still need to go and update the site and its applications in IIS to point at these new builds. Oh, and then, I have to repeat the process when I deploy on production. Did I mention the multiple configuration files that then need updating as well? Manually? The whole process can take well over half an hour. I’m ready to try out a new process. Deployment Manager is designed to massively simplify the deployment processes from what could be lots of manual copying of files, managing of configuration files, and database upgrades down to a few clicks. It’s a big promise, but I decided to try out this new tool on one of the smaller ASP.NET sites at Red Gate, Format SQL (the result of a Red Gate Down Tools week). I wanted to add some new functionality, but given it was a new site with no set way of doing things, I was reluctant to have to manually copy files around servers. I decided to use this opportunity as a chance to set the site up on Deployment Manager and check out its functionality. What follows is a guide on how to get set up with Deployment Manager, a brief overview of its features, and what I thought of the experience. To follow along with the instructions that follow, you’ll first need to download Deployment Manager from Red Gate. It has a free ‘Starter Edition’ which allows you to create up to 5 projects and agents (machines you deploy to), so it’s really easy to get up and running with a fully-featured version. The Initial Set Up After installing the product and setting it up using the administration tool it provides, I launched Deployment Manager by going to the URL and port I had set it to run on. This loads up the main dashboard. The dashboard does a good job of guiding me through the process of getting started, beginning with a prompt to create some environments. 1. Setting up Environments The dashboard informed me that I needed to add new ‘Environments’, which are essentially ways of grouping the machines you want to deploy to. The environments that get added will show up on the main dashboard. I set up two such environments for this project: ‘staging’ and ‘live’.   2. Add Target Machines Once I had created the environments, I was ready to add ‘target machine’s to them, which are the actual machines that the deployment will occur on.   To enable me to deploy to a new machine, I needed to download and install an Agent on it. The ‘Add target machine’ form on the ‘Environments’ page helpfully provides a link for downloading an Agent.   Once the agent has been installed, it is just a case of copying the server key to the agent, and the agent key to the server, to link them up.   3. Run Health Check If, after adding your new target machine, the ‘Status’ flags an error, it is possible that the Agent and Server keys have not been entered correctly on both Deployment Manager and the Agent service.     You can ‘Check Health’, which will give you more information on any issues. It is probably worth running this regardless of what status the ‘Environments’ dashboard is claiming, just to be on the safe side.     4. Add Projects Going back to the main Dashboard tab at this point, I found that it was telling me that I needed to set up a new project.   I clicked the ‘project’ link to get started, gave my new project a name and clicked ‘Create’. I was then redirected to the ‘Steps’ page for the project under the Projects tab.   5. Package Steps The ‘Steps’ page was fairly empty when it first loaded.   Adding a ‘step’ allowed me to specify what packages I wanted to grab for the deployment. This part requires a NuGet package feed to be set up, which is where Deployment Manager will look for the packages. At Red Gate, we already have one set up, so I just needed to tell Deployment Manager about it. Don’t worry; there is a nice guide included on how to go about doing all of this on the ‘Package Feeds’ page in ‘Settings’, if you need any help with setting these bits up.    At Red Gate we use a build server, TeamCity, which is capable of publishing built projects to the NuGet feed we use. This makes the workflow for Format SQL relatively simple: when I commit a change to the project, the build server is configured to grab those changes, build the project, and spit out a new NuGet package to the Red Gate NuGet package feed. My ‘package step’, therefore, is set up to look for this package on our feed. The final part of package step was simply specifying which machines from what environments I wanted to be able to deploy the project to.     Format SQL Now the main Dashboard showed my new project and environment in a rather empty looking grid. Clicking on my project presented me with a nice little message telling me that I am now ready to create my first release!   Create a release Next I clicked on the ‘Create release’ button in the Projects tab. If your feeds and package step(s) were set up correctly, then Deployment Manager will automatically grab the latest version of the NuGet package that you want to deploy. As you can see here, it was able to pick up the latest build for Format SQL and all I needed to do was enter a version number and description of the release.   As you can see underneath ‘Version number’, it keeps track of what version the previous release was given. Clicking ‘Create’ created the release and redirected me to a summary of it where I could check the details before deploying.   I clicked ‘Deploy this release’ and chose the environment I wanted to deploy to and…that’s it. Deployment Manager went off and deployed it for me.   Once I clicked ‘Deploy release’, Deployment Manager started to automatically update and provide continuing feedback about the process. If any errors do arise, then I can expand the results to see where it went wrong. That’s it, I’m done! Keep in mind, if you hit errors with the deployment itself then it is possible to view the log output to try and determine where these occurred. You can keep expanding the logs to narrow down the problem. The screenshot below is not from my Format SQL deployment, but I thought I’d post one to demonstrate the logging output available. Features One of the best bits of Deployment Manager for me is the ability to very, very easily deploy the same release to multiple machines. Deploying this same release to production was just a case of selecting the deployment and choosing the ‘live’ environment as the place to deploy to. Following on from this is the fact that, as Deployment Manager keeps track of all of your releases, it is extremely easy to roll back to a previous release if anything goes pear-shaped! You can view all your previous releases and select one to re-deploy. I needed this feature more than once when differences in my production and staging machines lead to some odd behavior.     Another option is to use the TeamCity integration available. This enables you to set Deployment Manager up so that it will automatically create releases and deploy these to an environment directly from TeamCity, meaning that you can always see the latest version up and running without having to do anything. Machine Specific Deployments ‘What about custom configuration files?’ I hear you shout. Certainly, it was one of my concerns. Our setup on the staging machine is not in line with that on production. What this means is that, should we deploy the same configuration to both, one of them is going to break. Thankfully, it turns out that Deployment Manager can deal with this. Given I had environments ‘staging’ and ‘live’, and that staging used the project’s web.config file, while production (‘live’) required the config file to undergo some transformations, I simply added a web.live.config file in the project, so that it would be included as part of the NuGet package. In this file, I wrote the XML document transformations I needed and Deployment Manager took care of the rest. Another option is to set up ‘variables’ for your project, which allow you to specify key-value pairs for your configuration file, and which environment to apply them to. You’ll find Variables as a full left-hand submenu within the ‘Projects’ tab. These features will definitely be of interest if you have a large number of environments! There are still many other features that I didn’t get a chance to play around with like running PowerShell scripts for more personalised deployments. Maybe next time! Also, let’s not forget that my use case in this article is a very simple one – deploying a single package. I don’t believe that all projects will be equally as simple, but I already appreciate how much easier Deployment Manager could make my life. I look forward to the possibility of moving our other sites over to Deployment Manager in the near future.   Conclusion In this article I have described the steps involved in setting up and configuring an instance of Deployment Manager, creating a new automated deployment process, and using this to actually carry out a deployment. I’ve tried to mention some of the features I found particularly useful, such as error logging, easy release management allowing you to deploy the same release multiple times, and configuration file transformations. If I had to point out one issue, then it would be that the releases are immutable, which from a development point of view makes sense. However, this causes confusion where I have to create a new release to deploy to a newly set up environment – I cannot simply deploy an old release onto a new environment, the whole release needs to be recreated. I really liked how easy it was to get going with the product. Setting up Format SQL and making a first deployment took very little time. Especially when you compare it to how long it takes me to manually deploy the other site, as I described earlier. I liked how it let me know what I needed to do next, with little messages flagging up that I needed to ‘create environments’ or ‘add some deployment steps’ before I could continue. I found the dashboard incredibly convenient. As the number of projects and environments increase, it might become awkward to try and search them and find out what state they are in. Instead, the dashboard handily keeps track of the latest deployments of each project and lets you know what version is running on each of the environments, and when that deployment occurred. Finally, do you remember my complaint about having to rename folders so that I could keep track of what build they came from? This is yet another thing that Deployment Manager takes care of for you. Each release is put into its own directory, which takes the name of whatever version number that release has, though these can be customised if necessary. If you’d like to take a look at Deployment Manager for yourself, then you can download it here.

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• ALSA samples capture: cannot open device

  - by Randagio

  I'm quite new to Linux (Lubuntu 12.04 for sake of precision) and ALSA programming at all. I'm trying to write a C program to capture audio from internal PC microphone for processing it. So as first step I google a bit and I found this article for capturing audio samples A tutorial on using the ALSA Audio API but when I compile it and execute it with: ./capture "default" or ./capture "hw:0,0" and all the possible variants on theme it always raises the error: cannot open device hw:0,0 (no such file or directory). So the issue is: what is the name of the mic audio device to pass as parameter to record the audio from mic ? The mic is working ok because the Sound Recorder program records sounds perfectly and I can playback them. The output of the aplay -l is the following : **** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices **** card 0: I82801DBICH4 [Intel 82801DB-ICH4], device 0: Intel ICH [Intel 82801DB-ICH4] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 card 0: I82801DBICH4 [Intel 82801DB-ICH4], device 4: Intel ICH - IEC958 [Intel 82801DB-ICH4 - IEC958] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 and this is the amixer output (cut) Simple mixer control 'Master',0 Capabilities: pvolume pswitch penum Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right Limits: Playback 0 - 31 Mono: Front Left: Playback 31 [100%] [0.00dB] [on] Front Right: Playback 31 [100%] [0.00dB] [on] Simple mixer control 'Master Mono',0 Capabilities: pvolume pvolume-joined pswitch pswitch-joined penum Playback channels: Mono Limits: Playback 0 - 31 Mono: Playback 4 [13%] [-40.50dB] [on] Simple mixer control 'PCM',0 Capabilities: pvolume pswitch penum Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right Limits: Playback 0 - 31 Mono: Front Left: Playback 31 [100%] [12.00dB] [on] Front Right: Playback 31 [100%] [12.00dB] [on] Simple mixer control 'CD',0 Capabilities: pvolume pswitch cswitch cswitch-exclusive penum Capture exclusive group: 0 Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right Capture channels: Front Left - Front Right Limits: Playback 0 - 31 Front Left: Playback 0 [0%] [-34.50dB] [off] Capture [off] Front Right: Playback 0 [0%] [-34.50dB] [off] Capture [off] Simple mixer control 'Mic',0 Capabilities: pvolume pvolume-joined pswitch pswitch-joined cswitch cswitch-exclusive penum Capture exclusive group: 0 Playback channels: Mono Capture channels: Front Left - Front Right Limits: Playback 0 - 31 Mono: Playback 22 [71%] [-1.50dB] [on] Front Left: Capture [on] Front Right: Capture [on] Simple mixer control 'Mic Boost (+20dB)',0 Capabilities: pswitch pswitch-joined penum Playback channels: Mono Mono: Playback [off] Simple mixer control 'Mic Select',0 Capabilities: enum Items: 'Mic1' 'Mic2' Item0: 'Mic1' Simple mixer control 'Stereo Mic',0 Capabilities: pswitch pswitch-joined penum Playback channels: Mono Mono: Playback [off] so for aplay it seems I have no recording device, but for amixer I've got the mic, a mic boost and mic stereo as well with all those gorgeous stuffs on their place !!. If so, how could my Sound Recorder record the audio without any problem at all ?!?! For sure I'm giving the wrong device name to the command line for capturing audio but I'm loosing the hope for finding the correct one ! Please help....before I tear my hair out !!!

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• Odd squid transparent redirect behavior

  - by EMiller

  This is the first time I've set up squid. It's running a redirect script that does some text search/replace on html pages, and then saves them to a location on the same machine on the nginx path - then issues the redirect to that URL (it's an art project :D). The relevant lines in squid.conf are http_port 3128 transparent redirect_program /etc/squid/jefferson_redirect.py The jefferson_redirect.py script is based on this script: http://gofedora.com/how-to-write-custom-redirector-rewritor-plugin-squid-python/ The issue: I'm getting strange http redirect behavior. For example, here is the normal request/response from a PHP script that issues a header("Location:"); - a 302 redirect: http://redirector.mysite.com/?unicmd=g+yreka GET /?unicmd=g+yreka HTTP/1.1 Host: redirector.mysite.com User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.9) Gecko/20100330 Fedora/3.5.9-1.fc12 Firefox/3.5.9 Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 Keep-Alive: 300 Connection: keep-alive HTTP/1.1 302 Found Date: Tue, 13 Apr 2010 05:15:43 GMT Server: Apache X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.11 Location: http://www.google.com/search?q=yreka Content-Type: text/html Vary: User-Agent,Accept-Encoding Content-Encoding: gzip Content-Length: 2108 Keep-Alive: timeout=3, max=100 Connection: Keep-Alive Here's what it looks like when running through the squid proxy (note that "redirector.mysite.com" is not the site running squid or nginx): http://redirector.mysite.com/?unicmd=g+yreka GET /?unicmd=g+yreka HTTP/1.1 Host: redirector.mysite.com User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.9) Gecko/20100330 Fedora/3.5.9-1.fc12 Firefox/3.5.9 Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 Keep-Alive: 300 Proxy-Connection: keep-alive If-Modified-Since: Tue, 13 Apr 2010 05:21:02 GMT HTTP/1.0 200 OK Server: nginx/0.7.62 Date: Tue, 13 Apr 2010 05:21:10 GMT Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 17865 Last-Modified: Tue, 13 Apr 2010 05:21:10 GMT Accept-Ranges: bytes X-Cache: MISS from jefferson X-Cache-Lookup: HIT from jefferson:3128 Via: 1.1 jefferson:3128 (squid/2.7.STABLE6) Connection: keep-alive Proxy-Connection: keep-alive It is basically working - but the URL http://redirector.mysite.com/?unicmd=g+yreka remains unchanged, while displaying the google page (mostly broken as it's using URLs relative to redirector.mysite.com) I've experienced a similar thing with google results pages: when clicking to another page from google, I get a google URL, with the other site's content. Sorry for the long post - many thanks if you've read this far! Any ideas?

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• HTTP Content-type header for cached files

  - by Brian

  Hello, Using Apache with mod_rewrite, when I load a .css or .js file and view the HTTP headers, the Content-type is only set correctly the first time I load it - subsequent refreshes are missing Content-type altogether and it's creating some problems for me. Specifically, gzip is not compressing these files. I can get around this by appending a random query string value to the end of each filename, eg. http://www.site.com/script.js?12345 However, I don't want to have to do that, since caching is good and all I want is for the Content-type to be present. I've tried using a RewriteRule to force the type but still didn't solve the problem. Any ideas? Thanks, Brian More Details: HTTP headers WITHOUT random query string value: http://localhost/script.js GET /script.js HTTP/1.1 Host: localhost User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3 Accept: */* Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 Keep-Alive: 115 Connection: keep-alive Referer: http://localhost/ Cookie: PHPSESSID=ke3p35v5qbus24che765p9jni5; If-Modified-Since: Thu, 29 Apr 2010 15:49:56 GMT If-None-Match: "3440e9-119ed-485621404f100" Cache-Control: max-age=0 HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2010 20:19:44 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.14 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.14 OpenSSL/0.9.8l DAV/2 PHP/5.3.1 Connection: Keep-Alive Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100 Etag: "3440e9-119ed-485621404f100" Vary: Accept-Encoding X-Pad: avoid browser bug HTTP headers WITH random query string value: http://localhost/script.js?c947344de8278053f6edbb4365550b25 GET /script.js?c947344de8278053f6edbb4365550b25 HTTP/1.1 Host: localhost User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3 Accept: */* Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 Keep-Alive: 115 Connection: keep-alive Referer: http://localhost/ Cookie: PHPSESSID=ke3p35v5qbus24che765p9jni5; HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2010 20:14:40 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.14 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.14 OpenSSL/0.9.8l DAV/2 PHP/5.3.1 Last-Modified: Thu, 29 Apr 2010 15:49:56 GMT Etag: "3440e9-119ed-485621404f100" Accept-Ranges: bytes Vary: Accept-Encoding Content-Encoding: gzip Content-Length: 24605 Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100 Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Type: application/javascript

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• Configure Apache with a htaccess file to strip out unneeded respond-headers.

  - by Koning Baard XIV

  For ultimate speed, I want my Apache server strip unneeded headers from the response. Currently, the headers looks like this (excluding the status header): Connection:Keep-Alive Content-Length:200 Content-Type:text/html Date:Sat, 15 May 2010 16:28:37 GMT Keep-Alive:timeout=5, max=100 Server:Apache/2.2.14 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.14 OpenSSL/0.9.8l DAV/2 PHP/5.3.1 Phusion_Passenger/2.2.7 X-Powered-By:PHP/5.3.1 Which I want to be like: Connection:Keep-Alive Content-Type:text/html Keep-Alive:timeout=5, max=100 How can I configure this in a .htaccess file? Thanks

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• FreeBSD performance tuning. Sysctls, loader.conf, kernel.

  - by SaveTheRbtz

  I wanted to share knowledge of tuning FreeBSD via sysctls, so i'm posting them with comments. Based on Igor Sysoev (author of nginx) presentation about FreeBSD tuning up to 100,000-200,000 active connections. Sysctls are for 7.x FreeBSD. Since 7.2 amd64 some of them are tuned well by default. Prior 7.0 some of them are boot only (set via /boot/loader.conf) or does not exist at all. Highload web server sysctls: # Max. backlog size kern.ipc.somaxconn=4096 # Shared memory // 7.2+ can use shared memory > 2Gb kern.ipc.shmmax=2147483648 # Sockets kern.ipc.maxsockets=204800 # Do not use lager sockbufs on 8.0 # ( http://old.nabble.com/Significant-performance-regression-for-increased-maxsockbuf-on-8.0-RELEASE-tt26745981.html#a26745981 ) kern.ipc.maxsockbuf=262144 # Recive clusters (on amd64 7.2+ 65k is default) # For such high value vm.kmem_size must be increased to 3G #kern.ipc.nmbclusters=229376 # Jumbo pagesize(4k/8k) clusters # Used as general packet storage for jumbo frames # can be monitored via `netstat -m` #kern.ipc.nmbjumbop=192000 # Jumbo 9k/16k clusters # If you are using them #kern.ipc.nmbjumbo9=24000 #kern.ipc.nmbjumbo16=10240 # Every socket is a file, so increase them kern.maxfiles=204800 kern.maxfilesperproc=200000 kern.maxvnodes=200000 # Turn off receive autotuning #net.inet.tcp.recvbuf_auto=0 # Small receive space, only usable on http-server, on file server this # should be increased to 65535 or even more #net.inet.tcp.recvspace=8192 # Small send space is useful for http servers that serve small files # Autotuned since 7.x net.inet.tcp.sendspace=16384 # This should be enabled if you going to use big spaces (>64k) #net.inet.tcp.rfc1323=1 # Turn this off on highspeed, lossless connections (LAN 1Gbit+) #net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0 # This feature is useful if you are serving data over modems, Gigabit Ethernet, # or even high speed WAN links (or any other link with a high bandwidth delay product), # especially if you are also using window scaling or have configured a large send window. # You can try setting it to 0 on fileserver with 1GBit+ interfaces # Automatically disables on small RTT ( http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/netinet/tcp_subr.c?#rev1.237 ) #net.inet.tcp.inflight.enable=0 # Disable randomizing of ports to avoid false RST # Before usage check SA here www.bsdcan.org/2006/papers/ImprovingTCPIP.pdf # (it's also says that port randomization auto-disables at some conn.rates, but I didn't tested it thou) #net.inet.ip.portrange.randomized=0 # Increase portrange # For outgoing connections only. Good for seed-boxes and ftp servers. net.inet.ip.portrange.first=1024 net.inet.ip.portrange.last=65535 # Security net.inet.ip.redirect=0 net.inet.ip.sourceroute=0 net.inet.ip.accept_sourceroute=0 net.inet.icmp.maskrepl=0 net.inet.icmp.log_redirect=0 net.inet.icmp.drop_redirect=1 net.inet.tcp.drop_synfin=1 # Security net.inet.udp.blackhole=1 net.inet.tcp.blackhole=2 # Increases default TTL, sometimes useful # Default is 64 net.inet.ip.ttl=128 # Lessen max segment life to conserve resources # ACK waiting time in miliseconds (default: 30000 from RFC) net.inet.tcp.msl=5000 # Max bumber of timewait sockets net.inet.tcp.maxtcptw=40960 # Don't use tw on local connections # As of 15 Apr 2009. Igor Sysoev says that nolocaltimewait has some buggy realization. # So disable it or now till get fixed #net.inet.tcp.nolocaltimewait=1 # FIN_WAIT_2 state fast recycle net.inet.tcp.fast_finwait2_recycle=1 # Time before tcp keepalive probe is sent # default is 2 hours (7200000) #net.inet.tcp.keepidle=60000 # Should be increased until net.inet.ip.intr_queue_drops is zero net.inet.ip.intr_queue_maxlen=4096 # Interrupt handling via multiple CPU, but with context switch. # You can play with it. Default is 1; #net.isr.direct=0 # This is for routers only #net.inet.ip.forwarding=1 #net.inet.ip.fastforwarding=1 # This speed ups dummynet when channel isn't saturated net.inet.ip.dummynet.io_fast=1 # Increase dummynet(4) hash #net.inet.ip.dummynet.hash_size=2048 #net.inet.ip.dummynet.max_chain_len # Should be increased when you have A LOT of files on server # (Increase until vfs.ufs.dirhash_mem becames lower) vfs.ufs.dirhash_maxmem=67108864 # Explicit Congestion Notification (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explicit_Congestion_Notification) net.inet.tcp.ecn.enable=1 # Flowtable - flow caching mechanism # Useful for routers #net.inet.flowtable.enable=1 #net.inet.flowtable.nmbflows=65535 # Extreme polling tuning #kern.polling.burst_max=1000 #kern.polling.each_burst=1000 #kern.polling.reg_frac=100 #kern.polling.user_frac=1 #kern.polling.idle_poll=0 # IPFW dynamic rules and timeouts tuning # Increase dyn_buckets till net.inet.ip.fw.curr_dyn_buckets is lower net.inet.ip.fw.dyn_buckets=65536 net.inet.ip.fw.dyn_max=65536 net.inet.ip.fw.dyn_ack_lifetime=120 net.inet.ip.fw.dyn_syn_lifetime=10 net.inet.ip.fw.dyn_fin_lifetime=2 net.inet.ip.fw.dyn_short_lifetime=10 # Make packets pass firewall only once when using dummynet # i.e. packets going thru pipe are passing out from firewall with accept #net.inet.ip.fw.one_pass=1 # shm_use_phys Wires all shared pages, making them unswappable # Use this to lessen Virtual Memory Manager's work when using Shared Mem. # Useful for databases #kern.ipc.shm_use_phys=1 /boot/loader.conf: # Accept filters for data, http and DNS requests # Usefull when your software uses select() instead of kevent/kqueue or when you under DDoS # DNS accf available on 8.0+ accf_data_load="YES" accf_http_load="YES" accf_dns_load="YES" # Async IO system calls aio_load="YES" # Adds NCQ support in FreeBSD # WARNING! all ad[0-9]+ devices will be renamed to ada[0-9]+ # 8.0+ only #ahci_load= #siis_load= # Increase kernel memory size to 3G. # # Use ONLY if you have KVA_PAGES in kernel configuration, and you have more than 3G RAM # Otherwise panic will happen on next reboot! # # It's required for high buffer sizes: kern.ipc.nmbjumbop, kern.ipc.nmbclusters, etc # Useful on highload stateful firewalls, proxies or ZFS fileservers # (FreeBSD 7.2+ amd64 users: Check that current value is lower!) #vm.kmem_size="3G" # Older versions of FreeBSD can't tune maxfiles on the fly #kern.maxfiles="200000" # Useful for databases # Sets maximum data size to 1G # (FreeBSD 7.2+ amd64 users: Check that current value is lower!) #kern.maxdsiz="1G" # Maximum buffer size(vfs.maxbufspace) # You can check current one via vfs.bufspace # Should be lowered/upped depending on server's load-type # Usually decreased to preserve kmem # (default is 200M) #kern.maxbcache="512M" # Sendfile buffers # For i386 only #kern.ipc.nsfbufs=10240 # syncache Hash table tuning net.inet.tcp.syncache.hashsize=1024 net.inet.tcp.syncache.bucketlimit=100 # Incresed hostcache net.inet.tcp.hostcache.hashsize="16384" net.inet.tcp.hostcache.bucketlimit="100" # TCP control-block Hash table tuning net.inet.tcp.tcbhashsize=4096 # Enable superpages, for 7.2+ only # Also read http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2009-November/030094.html vm.pmap.pg_ps_enabled=1 # Usefull if you are using Intel-Gigabit NIC #hw.em.rxd=4096 #hw.em.txd=4096 #hw.em.rx_process_limit="-1" # Also if you have ALOT interrupts on NIC - play with following parameters # NOTE: You should set them for every NIC #dev.em.0.rx_int_delay: 250 #dev.em.0.tx_int_delay: 250 #dev.em.0.rx_abs_int_delay: 250 #dev.em.0.tx_abs_int_delay: 250 # There is also multithreaded version of em drivers can be found here: # http://people.yandex-team.ru/~wawa/ # # for additional em monitoring and statistics use # `sysctl dev.em.0.stats=1 ; dmesg` # #Same tunings for igb #hw.igb.rxd=4096 #hw.igb.txd=4096 #hw.igb.rx_process_limit=100 # Some useful netisr tunables. See sysctl net.isr #net.isr.defaultqlimit=4096 #net.isr.maxqlimit: 10240 # Bind netisr threads to CPUs #net.isr.bindthreads=1 # Nicer boot logo =) loader_logo="beastie" And finally here is my additions to GENERIC kernel # Just some of them, see also # cat /sys/{i386,amd64,}/conf/NOTES # This one useful only on i386 #options KVA_PAGES=512 # You can play with HZ in environments with high interrupt rate (default is 1000) # 100 is for my notebook to prolong it's battery life #options HZ=100 # Polling is goot on network loads with high packet rates and low-end NICs # NB! Do not enable it if you want more than one netisr thread #options DEVICE_POLLING # Eliminate datacopy on socket read-write # To take advantage with zero copy sockets you should have an MTU of 8K(amd64) # (4k for i386). This req. is only for receiving data. # Read more in man zero_copy_sockets #options ZERO_COPY_SOCKETS # Support TCP sign. Used for IPSec options TCP_SIGNATURE options IPSEC # This ones can be loaded as modules. They described in loader.conf section #options ACCEPT_FILTER_DATA #options ACCEPT_FILTER_HTTP # Adding ipfw, also can be loaded as modules options IPFIREWALL options IPFIREWALL_VERBOSE options IPFIREWALL_VERBOSE_LIMIT=10 options IPFIREWALL_DEFAULT_TO_ACCEPT options IPFIREWALL_FORWARD # Adding kernel NAT options IPFIREWALL_NAT options LIBALIAS # Traffic shaping options DUMMYNET # Divert, i.e. for userspace NAT options IPDIVERT # This is for OpenBSD's pf firewall device pf device pflog # pf's QoS - ALTQ options ALTQ options ALTQ_CBQ # Class Bases Queuing (CBQ) options ALTQ_RED # Random Early Detection (RED) options ALTQ_RIO # RED In/Out options ALTQ_HFSC # Hierarchical Packet Scheduler (HFSC) options ALTQ_PRIQ # Priority Queuing (PRIQ) options ALTQ_NOPCC # Required for SMP build # Pretty console # Manual can be found here http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=6134 #options VESA #options SC_PIXEL_MODE # Disable reboot on Ctrl Alt Del #options SC_DISABLE_REBOOT # Change normal|kernel messages color options SC_NORM_ATTR=(FG_GREEN|BG_BLACK) options SC_KERNEL_CONS_ATTR=(FG_YELLOW|BG_BLACK) # More scroll space options SC_HISTORY_SIZE=8192 # Adding hardware crypto device device crypto device cryptodev # Useful network interfaces device vlan device tap #Virtual Ethernet driver device gre #IP over IP tunneling device if_bridge #Bridge interface device pfsync #synchronization interface for PF device carp #Common Address Redundancy Protocol device enc #IPsec interface device lagg #Link aggregation interface device stf #IPv4-IPv6 port # Also for my notebook, but may be used with Opteron #device amdtemp # Support for ECMP. More than one route for destination # Works even with default route so one can use it as LB for two ISP # For now code is unstable and panics (panic: rtfree 2) on route deletions. #options RADIX_MPATH # Multicast routing #options MROUTING #options PIM # DTrace options KDTRACE_HOOKS # all architectures - enable general DTrace hooks options DDB_CTF # all architectures - kernel ELF linker loads CTF data #options KDTRACE_FRAME # amd64-only # Adaptive spining in lockmgr (8.x+) # See http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg10782.html options ADAPTIVE_LOCKMGRS # UTF-8 in console (9.x+) #options TEKEN_UTF8 #options TEKEN_XTERM # NCQ support # WARNING! all ad[0-9]+ devices will be renamed to ada[0-9]+ #options ATA_CAM # FreeBSD 9+ # Deadlock resolver thread # For additional information see http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg18124.html #options DEADLKRES PS. Also most of FreeBSD's limits can be monitored by # vmstat -z and # limits PPS. variety of network counters can be monitored via # netstat -s In FreeBSD-9 netstat's -Q option appeared, try following command to display netisr stats # netstat -Q PPPS. also see # man 7 tuning PPPPS. I wanted to thank FreeBSD community, especially author of nginx - Igor Sysoev, nginx-ru@ and FreeBSD-performance@ mailing lists for providing useful information about FreeBSD tuning. So here is the question: What tunings are you using on yours FreeBSD servers? You can also post your /etc/sysctl.conf, /boot/loader.conf, kernel options, etc with description of its' meaning (do not copy-paste from sysctl -d). Don't forget to specify server type (web, smb, gateway, etc) Let's share experience!

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• MYSQL - Group by limit

  - by jono2010

  Hello Is there a simple way to LIMIT the GROUP BY results to the top 2. The following query returns all the results. Using 'LIMIT 2' reduces the overall list to the top 2 entries only. select distinct(rating_name), id_markets, sum(rating_good) 'good', sum(rating_neutral)'neutral', sum(rating_bad) 'bad' from ratings where rating_year=year(curdate()) and rating_week= week(curdate(),1) group by rating_name,id_markets order by rating_name, sum(rating_good) desc Results in the following :- poland 78 48 24 12 <- keep poland 1 15 5 0 <- keep poland 23 12 6 3 poland 2 5 0 0 poland 3 0 5 0 poland 4 0 0 5 ireland 1 9 3 0 <- keep ireland 2 3 0 0 <- keep ireland 3 0 3 0 ireland 4 0 0 3 france 12 24 12 6 <- keep france 1 3 1 0 <- keep france 231 1 0 0 france 2 1 0 0 france 4 0 0 1 france 3 0 1 0 Thanks Jon

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• How Mature is Your Database Change Management Process?

  - by Ben Rees

  .dbd-banner p{ font-size:0.75em; padding:0 0 10px; margin:0 } .dbd-banner p span{ color:#675C6D; } .dbd-banner p:last-child{ padding:0; } @media ALL and (max-width:640px){ .dbd-banner{ background:#f0f0f0; padding:5px; color:#333; margin-top: 5px; } } -- Database Delivery Patterns & Practices Further Reading Organization and team processes How do you get your database schema changes live, on to your production system? As your team of developers and DBAs are working on the changes to the database to support your business-critical applications, how do these updates wend their way through from dev environments, possibly to QA, hopefully through pre-production and eventually to production in a controlled, reliable and repeatable way? In this article, I describe a model we use to try and understand the different stages that customers go through as their database change management processes mature, from the very basic and manual, through to advanced continuous delivery practices. I also provide a simple chart that will help you determine “How mature is our database change management process?” This process of managing changes to the database – which all of us who have worked in application/database development have had to deal with in one form or another – is sometimes known as Database Change Management (even if we’ve never used the term ourselves). And it’s a difficult process, often painfully so. Some developers take the approach of “I’ve no idea how my changes get live – I just write the stored procedures and add columns to the tables. It’s someone else’s problem to get this stuff live. I think we’ve got a DBA somewhere who deals with it – I don’t know, I’ve never met him/her”. I know I used to work that way. I worked that way because I assumed that making the updates to production was a trivial task – how hard can it be? Pause the application for half an hour in the middle of the night, copy over the changes to the app and the database, and switch it back on again? Voila! But somehow it never seemed that easy. And it certainly was never that easy for database changes. Why? Because you can’t just overwrite the old database with the new version. Databases have a state – more specifically 4Tb of critical data built up over the last 12 years of running your business, and if your quick hotfix happened to accidentally delete that 4Tb of data, then you’re “Looking for a new role” pretty quickly after the failed release. There are a lot of other reasons why a managed database change management process is important for organisations, besides job security, not least: Frequency of releases. Many business managers are feeling the pressure to get functionality out to their users sooner, quicker and more reliably. The new book (which I highly recommend) Lean Enterprise by Jez Humble, Barry O’Reilly and Joanne Molesky provides a great discussion on how many enterprises are having to move towards a leaner, more frequent release cycle to maintain their competitive advantage. It’s no longer acceptable to release once per year, leaving your customers waiting all year for changes they desperately need (and expect) Auditing and compliance. SOX, HIPAA and other compliance frameworks have demanded that companies implement proper processes for managing changes to their databases, whether managing schema changes, making sure that the data itself is being looked after correctly or other mechanisms that provide an audit trail of changes. We’ve found, at Red Gate that we have a very wide range of customers using every possible form of database change management imaginable. Everything from “Nothing – I just fix the schema on production from my laptop when things go wrong, and write it down in my notebook” to “A full Continuous Delivery process – any change made by a dev gets checked in and recorded, fully tested (including performance tests) before a (tested) release is made available to our Release Management system, ready for live deployment!”. And everything in between of course. Because of the vast number of customers using so many different approaches we found ourselves struggling to keep on top of what everyone was doing – struggling to identify patterns in customers’ behavior. This is useful for us, because we want to try and fit the products we have to different needs – different products are relevant to different customers and we waste everyone’s time (most notably, our customers’) if we’re suggesting products that aren’t appropriate for them. If someone visited a sports store, looking to embark on a new fitness program, and the store assistant suggested the latest $10,000 multi-gym, complete with multiple weights mechanisms, dumb-bells, pull-up bars and so on, then he’s likely to lose that customer. All he needed was a pair of running shoes! To solve this issue – in an attempt to simplify how we understand our customers and our offerings – we built a model. This is a an attempt at trying to classify our customers in to some sort of model or “Customer Maturity Framework” as we rather grandly term it, which somehow simplifies our understanding of what our customers are doing. The great statistician, George Box (amongst other things, the “Box” in the Box-Jenkins time series model) gave us the famous quote: “Essentially all models are wrong, but some are useful” We’ve taken this quote to heart – we know it’s a gross over-simplification of the real world of how users work with complex legacy and new database developments. Almost nobody precisely fits in to one of our categories. But we hope it’s useful and interesting. There are actually a number of similar models that exist for more general application delivery. We’ve found these from ThoughtWorks/Forrester, from InfoQ and others, and initially we tried just taking these models and replacing the word “application” for “database”. However, we hit a problem. From talking to our customers we know that users are far less further down the road of mature database change management than they are for application development. As a simple example, no application developer, who wants to keep his/her job would develop an application for an organisation without source controlling that code. Sure, he/she might not be using an advanced Gitflow branching methodology but they’ll certainly be making sure their code gets managed in a repo somewhere with all the benefits of history, auditing and so on. But this certainly isn’t the case (yet) for the database – a very large segment of the people we speak to have no source control set up for their databases whatsoever, even at the most basic level (for example, keeping change scripts in a source control system somewhere). By the way, if this is you, Red Gate has a great whitepaper here, on the barriers people face getting a source control process implemented at their organisations. This difference in maturity is the same as you move in to areas such as continuous integration (common amongst app developers, relatively rare for database developers) and automated release management (growing amongst app developers, very rare for the database). So, when we created the model we started from scratch and biased the levels of maturity towards what we actually see amongst our customers. But, what are these stages? And what level are you? The table below describes our definitions for four levels of maturity – Baseline, Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced. As I say, this is a model – you won’t fit any of these categories perfectly, but hopefully one will ring true more than others. We’ve also created a PDF with a flow chart to help you find which of these groups most closely matches your team:  Download the Database Delivery Maturity Framework PDF here   Level D1 – Baseline Work directly on live databases Sometimes work directly in production Generate manual scripts for releases. Sometimes use a product like SQL Compare or similar to do this Any tests that we might have are run manually Level D2 – Beginner Have some ad-hoc DB version control such as manually adding upgrade scripts to a version control system Attempt is made to keep production in sync with development environments There is some documentation and planning of manual deployments Some basic automated DB testing in process Level D3 – Intermediate The database is fully version-controlled with a product like Red Gate SQL Source Control or SSDT Database environments are managed Production environment schema is reproducible from the source control system There are some automated tests Have looked at using migration scripts for difficult database refactoring cases Level D4 – Advanced Using continuous integration for database changes Build, testing and deployment of DB changes carried out through a proper database release process Fully automated tests Production system is monitored for fast feedback to developers   Does this model reflect your team at all? Where are you on this journey? We’d be very interested in knowing how you get on. We’re doing a lot of work at the moment, at Red Gate, trying to help people progress through these stages. For example, if you’re currently not source controlling your database, then this is a natural next step. If you are already source controlling your database, what about the next stage – continuous integration and automated release management? To help understand these issues, there’s a summary of the Red Gate Database Delivery learning program on our site, alongside a Patterns and Practices library here on Simple-Talk and a Training Academy section on our documentation site to help you get up and running with the tools you need to progress. All feedback is welcome and it would be great to hear where you find yourself on this journey! This article is part of our database delivery patterns & practices series on Simple Talk. Find more articles for version control, automated testing, continuous integration & deployment.

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• Big Data: Size isn’t everything

  - by Simon Elliston Ball

  Big Data has a big problem; it’s the word “Big”. These days, a quick Google search will uncover terabytes of negative opinion about the futility of relying on huge volumes of data to produce magical, meaningful insight. There are also many clichéd but correct assertions about the difficulties of correlation versus causation, in massive data sets. In reading some of these pieces, I begin to understand how climatologists must feel when people complain ironically about “global warming” during snowfall. Big Data has a name problem. There is a lot more to it than size. Shape, Speed, and…err…Veracity are also key elements (now I understand why Gartner and the gang went with V’s instead of S’s). The need to handle data of different shapes (Variety) is not new. Data developers have always had to mold strange-shaped data into our reporting systems, integrating with semi-structured sources, and even straying into full-text searching. However, what we lacked was an easy way to add semi-structured and unstructured data to our arsenal. New “Big Data” tools such as MongoDB, and other NoSQL (Not Only SQL) databases, or a graph database like Neo4J, fill this gap. Still, to many, they simply introduce noise to the clean signal that is their sensibly normalized data structures. What about speed (Velocity)? It’s not just high frequency trading that generates data faster than a single system can handle. Many other applications need to make trade-offs that traditional databases won’t, in order to cope with high data insert speeds, or to extract quickly the required information from data streams. Unfortunately, many people equate Big Data with the Hadoop platform, whose batch driven queries and job processing queues have little to do with “velocity”. StreamInsight, Esper and Tibco BusinessEvents are examples of Big Data tools designed to handle high-velocity data streams. Again, the name doesn’t do the discipline of Big Data any favors. Ultimately, though, does analyzing fast moving data produce insights as useful as the ones we get through a more considered approach, enabled by traditional BI? Finally, we have Veracity and Value. In many ways, these additions to the classic Volume, Velocity and Variety trio acknowledge the criticism that without high-quality data and genuinely valuable outputs then data, big or otherwise, is worthless. As a discipline, Big Data has recognized this, and data quality and cleaning tools are starting to appear to support it. Rather than simply decrying the irrelevance of Volume, we need as a profession to focus how to improve Veracity and Value. Perhaps we should just declare the ‘Big’ silent, embrace these new data tools and help develop better practices for their use, just as we did the good old RDBMS? What does Big Data mean to you? Which V gives your business the most pain, or the most value? Do you see these new tools as a useful addition to the BI toolbox, or are they just enabling a dangerous trend to find ghosts in the noise?

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• It’s the thought that counts…

  - by Tony Davis

  I recently finished editing a book called Tribal SQL, and it was a fantastic experience. It’s a community-sourced book written by first-timers. Fifteen previously unpublished authors contributed one chapter each, with the seemingly simple remit to write about “what makes them passionate about working with SQL Server, something that all SQL Server DBAs and developers really need to know”. Sure, some of the writing skills were a bit rusty as one would expect from busy people, but the ideas and energy were sheer nectar. Any seasoned editor can deal easily with the problem of fixing the output of untrained writers. We can handle with the occasional technical error too, which is why we have technical reviewers. The editor’s real job is to hone the clarity and flow of ideas, making the author’s knowledge and experience accessible to as many others as possible. What the writer needs to bring, on the other hand, is enthusiasm, attention to detail, common sense, and a sense of the person behind the writing. If any of these are missing, no editor can fix it. We can see these essential characteristics in many of the more seasoned and widely-published writers about SQL. To illustrate what I mean by enthusiasm, or passion, take a look at the work of Laerte Junior or Fabiano Amorim. Both authors have English as a second language, but their energy, enthusiasm, sheer immersion in a technology and thirst to know more, drives them, with a little editorial help, to produce articles of far more practical value than one can find in the “manuals”. There’s the attention to detail of the likes of Jonathan Kehayias, or Paul Randal. Read their work and one begins to understand the knowledge coupled with incredible rigor, the willingness to bend and test every piece of advice offered to make sure it’s correct, that marks out the very best technical writing. There’s the common sense of someone like Louis Davidson. All writers, including Louis, like to stretch the grey matter of their readers, but some of the most valuable writing is that which takes a complicated idea, or distils years of experience, and expresses it in a way that sounds like simple common sense. There’s personality and humor. Contrary to what you may have been told, they can and do mix well with technical writing, as long as they don’t become a distraction. Read someone like Rodney Landrum, or Phil Factor, for numerous examples of articles that teach hard technical lessons but also make you smile at least twice along the way. Writing well is not easy and it takes a certain bravery to expose your ideas and knowledge for dissection by others, but it doesn’t mean that writing should be the preserve only of those trained in the art, or best left to the MVPs. I believe that Tribal SQL is testament to the fact that if you have passion for what you do, and really know your topic then, with a little editorial help, you can write, and people will learn from what you have to say. You can read a sample chapter, by Mark Rasmussen, in this issue of Simple-Talk and I hope you’ll consider checking out the book (if you needed any further encouragement, it’s also for a good cause, Computers4Africa). Cheers, Tony  

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• Application Performance Episode 2: Announcing the Judges!

  - by Michaela Murray

  The story so far… We’re writing a new book for ASP.NET developers, and we want you to be a part of it! If you work with ASP.NET applications, and have top tips, hard-won lessons, or sage advice for avoiding, finding, and fixing performance problems, we want to hear from you! And if your app uses SQL Server, even better – interaction with the database is critical to application performance, so we’re looking for database top tips too. There’s a Microsoft Surface apiece for the person who comes up with the best tip for SQL Server and the best tip for .NET. Of course, if your suggestion is selected for the book, you’ll get full credit, by name, Twitter handle, GitHub repository, or whatever you like. To get involved, just email your nuggets of performance wisdom to [email protected] – there are examples of what we’re looking for and full competition details at Application Performance: The Best of the Web. Enter the judges… As mentioned in my last blogpost, we have a mystery panel of celebrity judges lined up to select the prize-winning performance pointers. We’re now ready to reveal their secret identities! Judging your ASP.NET  tips will be: Jean-Phillippe Gouigoux, MCTS/MCPD Enterprise Architect and MVP Connected System Developer. He’s a board member at French software company MGDIS, and teaches algorithms, security, software tests, and ALM at the Université de Bretagne Sud. Jean-Philippe also lectures at IT conferences and writes articles for programming magazines. His book Practical Performance Profiling is published by Simple-Talk. Nik Molnar,  a New Yorker, ASP Insider, and co-founder of Glimpse, an open source ASP.NET diagnostics and debugging tool. Originally from Florida, Nik specializes in web development, building scalable, client-centric solutions. In his spare time, Nik can be found cooking up a storm in the kitchen, hanging with his wife, speaking at conferences, and working on other open source projects. Mitchel Sellers, Microsoft C# and DotNetNuke MVP. Mitchel is an experienced software architect, business leader, public speaker, and educator. He works with companies across the globe, as CEO of IowaComputerGurus Inc. Mitchel writes technical articles for online and print publications and is the author of Professional DotNetNuke Module Programming. He frequently answers questions on StackOverflow and MSDN and is an active participant in the .NET and DotNetNuke communities. Clive Tong, Software Engineer at Red Gate. In previous roles, Clive spent a lot of time working with Common LISP and enthusing about functional languages, and he’s worked with managed languages since before his first real job (which was a long time ago). Long convinced of the productivity benefits of managed languages, Clive is very interested in getting good runtime performance to keep managed languages practical for real-world development. And our trio of SQL Server specialists, ready to select your top suggestion, are (drumroll): Rodney Landrum, a SQL Server MVP who writes regularly about Integration Services, Analysis Services, and Reporting Services. He’s authored SQL Server Tacklebox, three Reporting Services books, and contributes regularly to SQLServerCentral, SQL Server Magazine, and Simple–Talk. His day job involves overseeing a large SQL Server infrastructure in Orlando. Grant Fritchey, Product Evangelist at Red Gate and SQL Server MVP. In an IT career spanning more than 20 years, Grant has written VB, VB.NET, C#, and Java. He’s been working with SQL Server since version 6.0. Grant volunteers with the Editorial Committee at PASS and has written books for Apress and Simple-Talk. Jonathan Allen, leader and founder of the PASS SQL South West user group. He’s been working with SQL Server since 1999 and enjoys performance tuning, development, and using SQL Server for business solutions. He’s spoken at SQLBits and SQL in the City, as well as local user groups across the UK. He’s also a moderator at ask.sqlservercentral.com.

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• Application Performance: The Best of the Web

  - by Michaela Murray

  Wisdom A deep understanding and realization […] resulting in the ability to apply perceptions, judgements and actions. It is also the comprehension of what is true coupled with optimum judgment as to action. - Wikipedia We’re writing a book for ASP.NET developers, and we want you to be a part of it. We know that there’s a huge amount of web developer wisdom that never gets shared, and we want to find those golden nuggets of knowledge and experience, and make sure everyone can learn from them. Right now, we want to find out about your top tips, hard-won lessons, and sage advice for avoiding, finding, and fixing application performance problems. If you work with .NET and SQL, even better – a lot of application performance relies on the interaction with the database, so we want to hear from you! “How Do You Want Me To Be Involved?” Right! Details! We want you, our most excellent readers, to email us with the Best Advice you would give to other developers for getting the best performance out of their applications. It doesn’t matter if your advice is for newbies or veterans, .NET or SQL – so long as it’s about application performance, we want to hear from you. (And if you think that there’s developer wisdom out there that “everyone knows”, a) I’m willing to bet you could find someone who doesn’t know about it, and b) it probably bears repeating anyway!) “I’m Interested. What Can You Do For Me?” Excellent question. For starters, there’s a chance to win a Microsoft Surface (the tablet, not the table-top). Once all the ASP.NET Wisdom has been collected, tallied, and labelled, it will then be weighed and measured by a team of expert judges (whose identities are still a closely-guarded secret).  The top tip in both SQL & .NET categories will each win their author their very own MS Surface. But that’s not all! We can also give you… immortality! More details? Ok. We’ll be collecting all of the tips sent in by our readers (and we can’t wait to learn from you all,) and with the help of our Simple-Talk editors, we will publish and distribute your combined and documented knowledge as a free, community-created, professionally typeset eBook. You will naturally be credited by name / pseudonym / twitter handle / GitHub username / StackOverflow profile / Whatever, as the clearly ingenious author of hot performance tips. The Not-Very-Fine Print Here’s the breakdown: We want to bring together the best application performance knowledge from ASP.NET developers. Closing date for submissions will be 9am GMT, December 4th. Submissions should be made by email – [email protected] Submissions will be judged by a panel of expert judges (who will be revealed soon). The top submission in both the SQL & .NET categories will each win a Microsoft Surface. ALL the tips which make it through the judging process will be polished by Simple-Talk editors, and turned into a professionally typeset eBook, which will be freely available, and promoted alongside the ANTS Performance Profiler tool. Anyone whose entry makes it into the book will be clearly and profusely credited in the method of their choice (or can remain anonymous.) The really REALLY short version Share what you know about ASP.NET application performance for a chance to win a Microsoft Surface, and then get your name credited in a slick eBook with top-notch production values. For more details, see above. We can’t wait to learn from you!

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• Access Denied

  - by Tony Davis

  When Microsoft executives wake up in the night screaming, I suspect they are having a nightmare about their own version of Frankenstein's monster. Created with the best of intentions, without thinking too hard of the long-term strategy, and having long outlived its usefulness, the monster still lives on, occasionally wreaking vengeance on the innocent. Its name is Access; a living synthesis of disparate body parts that is resistant to all attempts at a mercy-killing. In 1986, Microsoft had no database products, and needed one for their new OS/2 operating system, the successor to MSDOS. In 1986, they bought exclusive rights to Sybase DataServer, and were also intent on developing a desktop database to capture Ashton-Tate's dominance of that market, with dbase. This project, first called 'Omega' and later 'Cirrus', eventually spawned two products: Visual Basic in 1991 and Access in late 1992. Whereas Visual Basic battled with PowerBuilder for dominance in the client-server market, Access easily won the desktop database battle, with Dbase III and DataEase falling away. Access did an excellent job of abstracting and simplifying the task of building small database applications in a short amount of time, for a small number of departmental users, and often for a transient requirement. There is an excellent front end and forms generator. We not only see it in Access but parts of it also reappear in SSMS. It's good. A business user can pull together useful reports, without relying on extensive technical support. A skilled Access programmer can deliver a fairly sophisticated application, whilst the traditional client-server programmer is still sharpening his pencil. Even for the SQL Server programmer, the forms generator of Access is useful for sketching out application designs. So far, so good, but here's where the problems start; Access ties together two different products and the backend of Access is the bugbear. The limitations of Jet/ACE are well-known and documented. They range from MDB files that are prone to corruption, especially as they grow in size, pathetic security, and "copy and paste" Backups. The biggest problem though, was an infamous lack of scalability. Because Microsoft never realized how long the product would last, they put little energy into improving the beast. Microsoft 'ate their own dog food' by using Access for Microsoft Exchange and Outlook. They choked on it. For years, scalability and performance problems with Exchange Server have been laid at the door of the Jet Blue engine on which it relies. Substantial development work in Exchange 2010 was required, just in order to improve the engine and storage schema so that it more efficiently handled the reading and writing of mails. The alternative of using SQL Server just never panned out. The Jet engine was designed to limit concurrent users to a small number (10-20). When Access applications outgrew this, bitter experience proved that there really is no easy upgrade path from Access to SQL Server, beyond rewriting the whole lot from scratch. The various initiatives to do this never quite bridged the cultural gulf between Access and a true relational database So, what are the obvious alternatives for small, strategic database applications? I know many users who, for simple 'list maintenance' requirements are very happy using Excel databases. Surely, now that PowerPivot has led the way, it is time for Microsoft to offer a new RAD package for database application development; namely an Excel-based front end for SQL Server Express. In that way, we'll have a powerful and familiar front end, to a scalable database, and a clear upgrade path when an app takes off and needs to go enterprise. Cheers, Tony.

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• Automated Error Reporting = More Robust Software

  - by Laila

  I would like to tell you how to revolutionize your software development process </marketing hyperbole> On a more serious note, we (Red Gate's .NET Development team) recently rolled a new tool into our development process which has made our lives dramatically easier AND improved the quality of our software, and I (& one of our developers, Alex Davies) just wanted to take a quick moment to share the love. I work with a development team that takes pride in what they ship, so we take software testing rather seriously. For every development project we run, we allocate at least one software tester for every two developers, and we never ship software without first shipping early access releases and betas to get user feedback. And therein lies the challenge -encouraging users to provide consistent, useful feedback is a headache, but without that feedback, improving the software is. tricky. Until fairly recently, we used the standard (if long-winded) approach of receiving bug reports of variable quality via email or through our support forums. If that didn't give us enough information to reproduce the problem - which was most of the time - we had to enter into a time-consuming to-and-fro conversation with the end-user, to get scrape together the data we needed to work out where the problem lay. As I'm sure you're aware, this is painfully slow. To the delight of the team, we recently got to work with SmartAssembly, which lets us embed automated exception and error reporting into our software with very little pain, and we decided to do a little dogfooding. As a result, we've have made a really handy (if perhaps slightly obvious) discovery: As soon as we release a beta, or indeed any release of software, we now get tonnes of customer feedback through automated error reports. Making this process easier for our users has dramatically increased the amount (and quality) of feedback we get. From their point of view, they get an experience similar to Microsoft's error reporting, and process is essentially idiot-proof. From our side of things, we can now react much faster to the information we get, fixing the bugs and shipping a new-and-improved release, which our users rather appreciate. Smiles and hugs all round. Even more so because, as we're use SmartAssembly's Automated Error Reporting, we get to avoid having to spend weeks building an exception reporting mechanism. It takes just a few minutes to add reporting to a project, and we get a bunch of useful information back, like a stack trace and the values of all the local variables, which we can use to fix bugs. Happily, "Automated Error Reporting = More Robust Software" can actually be read two ways: we've found that we not only ship higher quality software, but we also release within a shorter time. We can ship stable software that our users are happy to upgrade to, and we then bask in the glory of lots of positive customer feedback. Once we'd starting working with SmartAssembly, we were curious to know how widespread error reporting was as a practice. Our product manager ran a survey in autumn last year, and found that 40% of software developers never really considered deploying error reporting. Considering how we've now got plenty of experience on the subject, one of our dev guys, Alex Davies, thought we should share what we've learnt, and he's kindly offered to host a webinar on delivering robust software with Automated Error Reporting. Drawing on our own in-house development experiences, he'll cover how to add error reporting to your program, how to actually use the error reports to fix bugs (don't snigger, not everyone's as bright as you), how to customize the error report dialog that your users see, and how to automatically get log files from your users' machine. The webinar will take place on Jan 25th (that's next week). It's free to attend, but you'll still need to register to hear Alex's dulcet tones.

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• Learn Many Languages

  - by Phil Factor

  Around twenty-five years ago, I was trying to solve the problem of recruiting suitable developers for a large business. I visited the local University (it was a Technical College then). My mission was to remind them that we were a large, local employer of technical people and to suggest that, as they were in the business of educating young people for a career in IT, we should work together. I anticipated a harmonious chat where we could suggest to them the idea of mentioning our name to some of their graduates. It didn’t go well. The academic staff displayed a degree of revulsion towards the whole topic of IT in the world of commerce that surprised me; tweed met charcoal-grey, trainers met black shoes. However, their antipathy to commerce was something we could have worked around, since few of their graduates were destined for a career as university lecturers. They asked me what sort of language skills we needed. I tried ducking the invidious task of naming computer languages, since I wanted recruits who were quick to adapt and learn, with a broad understanding of IT, including development methodologies, technologies, and data. However, they pressed the point and I ended up saying that we needed good working knowledge of C and BASIC, though FORTRAN and COBOL were, at the time, still useful. There was a ghastly silence. It was as if I’d recommended the beliefs and practices of the Bogomils of Bulgaria to a gathering of Cardinals. They stared at me severely, like owls, until the head of department broke the silence, informing me in clipped tones that they taught only Modula 2. Now, I wouldn’t blame you if at this point you hurriedly had to look up ‘Modula 2′ on Wikipedia. Based largely on Pascal, it was a specialist language for embedded systems, but I’ve never ever come across it in a commercial business application. Nevertheless, it was an excellent teaching language since it taught modules, scope control, multiprogramming and the advantages of encapsulating a set of related subprograms and data structures. As long as the course also taught how to transfer these skills to other, more useful languages, it was not necessarily a problem. I said as much, but they gleefully retorted that the biggest local employer, a defense contractor specializing in Radar and military technology, used nothing but Modula 2. “Why teach any other programming language when they will be using Modula 2 for all their working lives?” said a complacent lecturer. On hearing this, I made my excuses and left. There could be no meeting of minds. They were providing training in a specific computer language, not an education in IT. Twenty years later, I once more worked nearby and regularly passed the long-deserted ‘brownfield’ site of the erstwhile largest local employer; the end of the cold war had led to lean times for defense contractors. A digger was about to clear the rubble of the long demolished factory along with the accompanying growth of buddleia and thistles, in order to lay the infrastructure for ‘affordable housing’. Modula 2 was a distant memory. Either those employees had short working lives or they’d retrained in other languages. The University, by contrast, was thriving, but I wondered if their erstwhile graduates had ever cursed the narrow specialization of their training in IT, as they struggled with the unexpected variety of their subsequent careers.

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• Deliberate Practice

  - by Jeff Foster

  It’s easy to assume, as software engineers, that there is little need to “practice” writing code. After all, we write code all day long! Just by writing a little each day, we’re constantly learning and getting better, right? Unfortunately, that’s just not true. Of course, developers do improve with experience. Each time we encounter a problem we’re more likely to avoid it next time. If we’re in a team that deploys software early and often, we hone and improve the deployment process each time we practice it. However, not all practice makes perfect. To develop true expertise requires a particular type of practice, deliberate practice, the only goal of which is to make us better programmers. Everyday software development has other constraints and goals, not least the pressure to deliver. We rarely get the chance in the course of a “sprint” to experiment with potential solutions that are outside our current comfort zone. However, if we believe that software is a craft then it’s our duty to strive continuously to raise the standard of software development. This requires specific and sustained efforts to get better at something we currently can’t do well (from Harvard Business Review July/August 2007). One interesting way to introduce deliberate practice, in a sustainable way, is the code kata. The term kata derives from martial arts and refers to a set of movements practiced either solo or in pairs. One of the better-known examples is the Bowling Game kata by Bob Martin, the goal of which is simply to write some code to do the scoring for 10-pin bowling. It sounds too easy, right? What could we possibly learn from such a simple example? Trust me, though, that it’s not as simple as five minutes of typing and a solution. Of course, we can reach a solution in a short time, but the important thing about code katas is that we explore each technique fully and in a controlled way. We tackle the same problem multiple times, using different techniques and making different decisions, understanding the ramifications of each one, and exploring edge cases. The short feedback loop optimizes opportunities to learn. Another good example is Conway’s Game of Life. It’s a simple problem to solve, but try solving it in a functional style. If you’re used to mutability, solving the problem without mutating state will push you outside of your comfort zone. Similarly, if you try to solve it with the focus of “tell-don’t-ask“, how will the responsibilities of each object change? As software engineers, we don’t get enough opportunities to explore new ideas. In the middle of a development cycle, we can’t suddenly start experimenting on the team’s code base. Code katas offer an opportunity to explore new techniques in a safe environment. If you’re still skeptical, my challenge to you is simply to try it out. Convince a willing colleague to pair with you and work through a kata or two. It only takes an hour and I’m willing to bet you learn a few new things each time. The next step is to make it a sustainable team practice. Start with an hour every Friday afternoon (after all who wants to commit code to production just before they leave for the weekend?) for month and see how that works out. Finally, consider signing up for the Global Day of Code Retreat. It’s like a daylong code kata, it’s on December 8th and there’s probably an event in your area!

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• News From EAP Testing

  - by Fatherjack

  There is a phrase that goes something like “Watch the pennies and the pounds/dollars will take care of themselves”, meaning that if you pay attention to the small things then the larger things are going to fare well too. I am lucky enough to be a Friend of Red Gate and once in a while I get told about new features in their tools and have a test copy of the software to trial. I got one of those emails a week or so ago and I have been exploring the SQL Prompt 6 EAP since then. One really useful feature of long standing in SQL Prompt is the idea of a code snippet that is automatically pasted into the SSMS editor when you type a few key letters. For example I can type “ssf” and then press the tab key and the text is expanded to SELECT * FROM. There are lots of these combinations and it is possible to create your own really easily. To create your own you use the Snippet Manager interface to define the shortcut letters and the code that you want to have put in their place. Let’s look at an example. Say I am writing a blog about something and want to have the demo code create a temporary table. It might looks like this; The first time you run the code everything is fine, a lovely set of dates fill the results grid but run it a second time and this happens.   Yep, we didn’t destroy the temporary table so the CREATE statement fails when it finds the table already exists. No matter, I have a snippet created that takes care of this.   Nothing too technical here but you will see that in the Code section there is $CURSOR$, this isn’t a TSQL keyword but a marker for SQL Prompt to place the cursor in that position when the Code is pasted into the SSMS Editor. I just place my cursor above the CREATE statement and type “ifobj” – the shortcut for my code to DROP the temporary table – which has been defined in the Snippet Manager as below. This means I am right-away ready to type the name of the offending table. Pretty neat and it’s been very useful in saving me lots of time over many years.   The news for SQL Prompt 6 is that Red Gate have added a new Snippet Command of $PASTE$. Let’s alter our snippet to the following and try it out   Once again, we will type type “ifobj” in the SSMS Editor but first of all, highlight the name of the table #TestTable and copy it to your clipboard. Now type “ifobj” and press Tab… Wherever the string $PASTE$ is placed in the snippet, the contents of your clipboard are merged into the pasted TSQL. This means I don’t need to type the table name into the code snippet, it’s already there and I am seeing a fully functioning piece of TSQL ready to run. This means it is it even easier to write TSQL quickly and consistently. Attention to detail like this from Red Gate means that their developer tools stay on track to keep winning awards year after year and help take the hard work out of writing neat, accurate TSQL. If you want to try out SQL Prompt all the details are at http://www.red-gate.com/products/sql-development/sql-prompt/.

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• What Counts For a DBA – Depth

  - by Louis Davidson

  SQL Server offers very simple interfaces to many of its features. Most people could open up SSMS, connect to a server, write a simple query and see the results. Even several of the core DBA tasks are deceptively straightforward. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to perform a basic database backup or run a trace (even using the newfangled Extended Events!). However, appearances can be deceptive, and often times it is really important that a DBA understands not just the basics of how to perform a task, but why we do a task, and how that task works. As an analogy, consider a child walking into a darkened room. Most would know that they need to turn on the light, and how to do it, so they flick the switch. But what happens if light fails to shine forth. Most would immediately tell you that you need to consider changing the light bulb. So you hop in the car and take them to the local home store and instruct them to buy a replacement. Confronted with a 40 foot display of light bulbs, how will they decide which of the hundreds of types of bulbs, of different types, fittings, shapes, colors, power and efficiency ratings, is the right choice? Obviously the main lesson the child is going to learn this day is how to use their cell phone as a flashlight so they don’t have to ask for help the next time. Likewise, when the metaphorical toddlers who use your database server have issues, they will instinctively know something is wrong, and may even have some idea what caused it, but will have no depth of knowledge to figure out the right solution. That is where the DBA comes in and attempts to save the day. However, when one looks beneath the shiny UI, SQL Server has its own “40 foot display of light bulbs”, in the form of the tremendous number of tools and the often-bewildering amount of information they can present to the DBA, to help us find issues. Unfortunately, resorting to guesswork, to trying different “bulbs” over and over, hoping to stumble on the answer. This is where the right depth of knowledge goes a long way. If we need to write a SELECT statement, then knowing the syntax and where to find the data is not enough. Knowledge of indexes and query plans is essential. Without it, we might hit on a query that “works”, but we are basically still a user, not a programmer, because we have no real control over our platform. Is that level of knowledge deep enough? Probably not, since knowledge of the underlying metadata and structures would be very useful in helping us make sense of any query plan. Understanding the structure of an index makes the “key lookup” operator not sound like what you do when someone tapes your car key to the ceiling. So is even this level of understanding deep enough? Do we need to understand the memory architecture used to process the query? It might be a comforting level of knowledge, and will doubtless come in handy at some point, but is not strictly necessary in most cases. Beyond that lies (more or less) full knowledge of SQL language and the intricacies of every step the SQL Server engine takes to process our query. My personal theory is that, as a professional, our knowledge of a given task should extend, at a minimum, one level deeper than is strictly necessary to perform the task. Anything deeper can be left to the ridiculously smart, or obsessive, or both. As an example. tasked with storing an integer value between 0 and 99999999, it’s essential that I know that choosing an Integer over Decimal(8,0) will likely offer performance benefits. It is then useful that I also understand the value of adding a CHECK constraint, to make sure the values are valid to the desired range; and comforting that I know a little about the underlying processors, registers and computer math. Anything further, I leave to the likes of Joe Chang, whose recent blog post on the topic offers depth by the bucketful!  

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• OWB 11gR2 - Find and Search Metadata in Designer

  - by David Allan

  Here are some tools and techniques for finding objects, specifically in the design repository. There are ways of navigating and collating objects that are useful for day to day development and build-time usage - this includes features out of the box and utilities constructed on top. There are a variety of techniques to navigate and find objects in the repository, the first 3 are out of the box, the 4th is an expert utility. Navigating by the tree, grouping by project and module - ok if you are aware of the exact module/folder that objects reside in. The structure panel is a useful way of finding parts of an object, especially when large rather than using the canvas. In large scale projects it helps to have accelerators (either find or collections below). Advanced find to search by name - 11gR2 included a find capability specifically for large scale projects. There were improvements in both the tree search and the object editors (including highlighting in mapping for example). So you can now do regular expression based search and quickly navigate to objects within a repository. Collections - logically organize your objects into virtual folders by shortcutting the actual objects. This is useful for a range of things since all the OWB services operate on collections too (export/import, validation, deployment). See the post here for new collection functionality in 11gR2. Reports for searching by type, updated on, updated by etc. Useful for activities such as periodic incremental actions (deploy all mappings changed in the past week). The report style view is useful since I can quickly see who changed what and when. You can see all the audit details for objects within each objects property inspector, but its useful to just get all objects changed today or example, all objects changed since my last build etc. This utility combines both UI extensions via experts and the public views on the repository. In the figure to the right you see the contextual option 'Object Search' which invokes the utility, you can see I have quite a number of modules within my project. Figure out all the potential objects which have been changed is not simple. The utility is an expert which provides this kind of search capability. The utility provides a report of the objects in the design repository which satisfy some filter criteria. The type of criteria includes; objects updated in the last n days optionally filter the objects updated by user filter the user by project and by type (table/mappings etc.) The search dialog appears with these options, you can multi-select the object types, so for example you can select TABLE and MAPPING. Its also possible to search across projects if need be. If you have multiple users using the repository you can define the OWB user name in the 'Updated by' property to restrict the report to just that user also. Finally there is a search name that will be used for some of the options such as building a collection - this name is used for the collection to be built. In the example I have done, I've just searched my project for all process flows and mappings that users have updated in the last 7 days. The results of the query are returned in a table containing the object names, types, full path and audit details. The columns are sort-able, you can sort the results by name, type, path etc. One of the cool things here, is that you can then perform operations on these objects - such as edit them, export single selection or entire results to MDL, create a collection from the results (now you have a saved set of references in the repository, you could do deploy/export etc.), create a deployment script from the results...or even add in your own ideas! You see from this that you can do bulk operations on sets of objects based on search results. So for example selecting the 'Build Collection' option creates a collection with all of the objects from my search, you can subsequently deploy/generate/maintain this collection of objects. Under the hood of the expert if just basic OMB commands from the product and the use of the public views on the design repository. You can see how easy it is to build up macro-like capabilities that will help you do day-to-day as well as build like tasks on sets of objects.

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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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• Monitoring Your Servers

  - by Grant Fritchey

  If you are the DBA in a large scale enterprise, you’re probably already monitoring your servers for up-time and performance. But if you work for a medium-sized business, a small shop, or even a one-man operation, chances are pretty good that you’re not doing that sort of monitoring. You know that you’re supposed to be doing it, but other things, more important at-the-moment things, keep getting in the way. After all, which is more important, some monitoring or backup testing?  Backup testing, of course. Monitoring is frequently one of those things that you do when can get around to it.  Well, as you can see at the right, I have your round tuit ready to go. What if I told you that you could get monitoring on your servers for up-time, job completion, performance, all the standard stuff? And what if I told you that you wouldn’t need to install and configure another server in your environment to get it done? And what if I told you that you’d be able to set up and customize your alerts so you could know if your server was offline or a drive was full? Almost nothing for you to do, and you’ll have a full-blown monitoring process. Sounds to good to be true doesn’t it? Well, it’s coming. We’re creating an online, remote, monitoring system here at Red Gate. You’ll be able to use our SQL Monitor tool (which you can see here, monitoring SQL Server Central in real time) to keep track of your systems, but without having to set up a server and a database for storing the information collected. Instead, we’re taking advantage of services available through the internet to enable collection and storage of this information remotely, off your systems. All you have to do is install a piece of software that will communicate between our service and your servers and you’ll be off and running. It’s that easy. Before you get too excited, let me break the news that this is the near future I’m talking about. We’re setting up the program and there’s a sign-up you can use to get in on the initial tests.

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