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• Thank you to all entrants! Finalist announcement coming soon...

  - by Rebecca Amos

  We had a fantastic response to this year's Exceptional DBA Awards. A big thank you to everyone who took the time and effort to make a nomination - it's great to see so many DBAs being appreciated for the hard work that they do. We're now busy collating the answers to send off to the Exceptional DBA judges. They'll pick their five finalists, which we'll be announcing in a few weeks’ time. So watch this space for further details. In the meantime, don't forget you can still download your free resources from the Exceptional DBA Award website. You can use them for your own career and personal development; pass them on to a great DBA you know, or to start planning your entry for next year!

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• Planning for Disaster

  There is a certain paradox in being advised to expect the unexpected, but the DBA must plan and prepare in advance to protect their organisation's data assets in the event of an unexpected crisis, and return them to normal operating conditions. To minimise downtime in such circumstances should be the aim of every effective DBA. To plan for recovery, It pays to have the mindset of a pessimist.

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• .NET Demon support for VS 11 dark theme

  - by Alex.Davies

  I'm pleased to announce that .NET Demon will be shipping simultaneously with Visual Studio 11, whenever it ends up being released. That means we're going to make sure that a version of .NET Demon is released very near to the Visual Studio 11 final release which supports the new version of VS fully. The interesting part of this support is going to be the new dark theme of VS, which I'm looking forward to using. I'm told dark colours reduce eye strain for developers. It's important that extensions like .NET Demon switch to a dark theme when the rest of the IDE changes, or the dark theme will look silly. Unfortunately, none of my favourite extensions look right in the dark theme yet, so even though I use Visual Studio 11 beta for my day-to-day development already, I can't use the dark theme. Luckily .NET Demon uses WPF throughout, and the team at Microsoft are helping us to use the WPF Style system to make it easy for me to implement the support without having to add colour attributes to all the controls manually. We should have dark theme support in .NET Demon in the next month or so.

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• Databases and Beer

  - by Johnm

  It is a bit of a no-brainer: Include the word "beer" in a subject line of an e-mail or blog post title and you can be certain that it will be read. While there are times this practice might be a ploy to increase readership, it is not the case for this blog post. There is inspiration that can be drawn from other industries to which we, as database professionals, can apply in our industry. In this post I will highlight one of my favorite participants of the brewing industry. The Boston Beer Company started in the 1970s in Boston, Massachusetts. Others may be more familiar with this company through their Samuel Adams Boston Lager and other various seasonal beers. I am continually inspired by their commitment to mastery of the brewing process to which they evangelize frequently in their commercials. They also are continually in pursuit of pushing the boundaries of beer as we know it while working within traditional constraints. A recent example of this is their collaboration with Weihenstephan Brewery of Munich, Germany to produce the soon to be released Infinium beer. This beer, while brewed as an ale, is touted as something closer to something like Champaign - all while complying with the Reinheitsgebot. The Reinheitsgebot is also known as the "German Beer Purity Law" which was originated in 1516. This law states that beer is to consist of water, barley, hops and yeast. That's it. Quite a limiting constraint indeed. and yet, The Boston Beer Company pushed forward. Much like the process of brewing, the discipline of database design and architecture is one that is continually in process and driven by the pursuit of mastery. While we do not have purity laws to constrain us, we have many other types: best practices, company policies, government regulations, security and budgets. Through our fellow comrades, we discuss the challenges and constraints in which we operate. We boil down the principles and theories that define our profession. We reassemble these into something that is complementary to the business needs that we must fulfill. As a result, it is not uncommon to see something amazingly innovative in a small business who is pushing the boundaries of their database well beyond its intended state. It is equally common to see innovation in the use of features available in the more advanced features of databases that are found in large businesses. The tag line for The Boston Beer Company is: "Take Pride In Your Beer.", I would like to offer an alternative and say "Take Pride In Your Database." So, As you pour your next Boston Lager into a frosted glass, consider those who spend their lives mastering the craft of brewing and strive to interject their spirit into everything that you do as a database professional. Cheers!

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• Subterranean IL: Compiling C# exception handlers

  - by Simon Cooper

  An exception handler in C# combines the IL catch and finally exception handling clauses into a single try statement: try { Console.WriteLine("Try block") // ... } catch (IOException) { Console.WriteLine("IOException catch") // ... } catch (Exception e) { Console.WriteLine("Exception catch") // ... } finally { Console.WriteLine("Finally block") // ... } How does this get compiled into IL? Initial implementation If you remember from my earlier post, finally clauses must be specified with their own .try clause. So, for the initial implementation, we take the try/catch/finally, and simply split it up into two .try clauses (I have to use label syntax for this): StartTry: ldstr "Try block" call void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(string) // ... leave.s End EndTry: StartIOECatch: ldstr "IOException catch" call void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(string) // ... leave.s End EndIOECatch: StartECatch: ldstr "Exception catch" call void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(string) // ... leave.s End EndECatch: StartFinally: ldstr "Finally block" call void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(string) // ... endfinally EndFinally: End: // ... .try StartTry to EndTry catch [mscorlib]System.IO.IOException handler StartIOECatch to EndIOECatch catch [mscorlib]System.Exception handler StartECatch to EndECatch .try StartTry to EndTry finally handler StartFinally to EndFinally However, the resulting program isn't verifiable, and doesn't run: [IL]: Error: Shared try has finally or fault handler. Nested try blocks What's with the verification error? Well, it's a condition of IL verification that all exception handling regions (try, catch, filter, finally, fault) of a single .try clause have to be completely contained within any outer exception region, and they can't overlap with any other exception handling clause. In other words, IL exception handling clauses must to be representable in the scoped syntax, and in this example, we're overlapping catch and finally clauses. Not only is this example not verifiable, it isn't semantically correct. The finally handler is specified round the .try. What happens if you were able to run this code, and an exception was thrown? Program execution enters top of try block, and exception is thrown within it CLR searches for an exception handler, finds catch Because control flow is leaving .try, finally block is run The catch block is run leave.s End inside the catch handler branches to End label. We're actually running the finally before the catch! What we do about it What we actually need to do is put the catch clauses inside the finally clause, as this will ensure the finally gets executed at the correct time (this time using scoped syntax): .try { .try { ldstr "Try block" call void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(string) // ... leave.s End } catch [mscorlib]System.IO.IOException { ldstr "IOException catch" call void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(string) // ... leave.s End } catch [mscorlib]System.Exception { ldstr "Exception catch" call void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(string) // ... leave.s End } } finally { ldstr "Finally block" call void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(string) // ... endfinally } End: ret Returning from methods There is a further semantic mismatch that the C# compiler has to deal with; in C#, you are allowed to return from within an exception handling block: public int HandleMethod() { try { // ... return 0; } catch (Exception) { // ... return -1; } } However, you can't ret inside an exception handling block in IL. So the C# compiler does a leave.s to a ret outside the exception handling area, loading/storing any return value to a local variable along the way (as leave.s clears the stack): .method public instance int32 HandleMethod() { .locals init ( int32 retVal ) .try { // ... ldc.i4.0 stloc.0 leave.s End } catch [mscorlib]System.Exception { // ... ldc.i4.m1 stloc.0 leave.s End } End: ldloc.0 ret } Conclusion As you can see, the C# compiler has quite a few hoops to jump through to translate C# code into semantically-correct IL, and hides the numerous conditions on IL exception handling blocks from the C# programmer. Next up: catch-all blocks, and how the runtime deals with non-Exception exceptions.

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• Aptronyms: fitting the profession to the name

  - by Tony Davis

  Writing a recent piece on the pains of index fragmentation, I found myself wondering why, in SQL Server, you can’t set the equivalent of a fill factor, on a heap table. I scratched my head…who might know? Phil Factor, of course! I approached him with a due sense of optimism only to find that not only did he not know, he also didn’t seem to care much either. I skulked off thinking how this may be the final nail in the coffin of nominative determinism. I’ve always wondered if there was anything in it, though. If your surname is Plumb or Leeks, is there even a tiny, extra percentage chance that you’ll end up fitting bathrooms? Some examples are quite common. I’m sure we’ve all met teachers called English or French, or lawyers called Judge or Laws. I’ve also known a Doctor called Coffin, a Urologist called Waterfall, and a Dentist called Dentith. Two personal favorites are Wolfgang Wolf who ended up managing the German Soccer team, Wolfsburg, and Edmund Akenhead, a Crossword Editor for The Times newspaper. Having forgiven Phil his earlier offhandedness, I asked him for if he knew of any notable examples. He had met the famous Dr. Batty and Dr. Nutter, both Psychiatrists, knew undertakers called Death and Stiff, had read a book by Frederick Page-Turner, and suppressed a giggle at the idea of a feminist called Gurley-Brown. He even managed to better my Urologist example, citing the article on incontinence in the British Journal of Urology (vol.49, pp.173-176, 1977) by A. J. Splatt and D. Weedon. What, however, if you were keen to gently nudge your child down the path to a career in IT? What name would you choose? Subtlety probably doesn’t really work, although in a recent interview, Rodney Landrum did congratulate PowerShell MVP Max Trinidad on being named after a SQL function. Grant “The Memory” Fritchey (OK, I made up that nickname) doesn’t do badly either. Some surnames, seem to offer a natural head start, although I know of no members of the Page-Reid clan in the profession. There are certainly families with the Table surname, although sadly, Little Bobby Tables was merely a legend by xkcd. A member of the well-known Key family would need to name their son Primary, or maybe live abroad, to make their mark. Nominate your examples of people seemingly destined, by name, for their chosen profession (extra points for IT). The best three will receive a prize. Cheers, Tony.

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• Finding Stuff in SQL Server Database DDL

  You'd have thought that nothing would be easier than using SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) for searching through the DDL for both the names and definitions of the structural metadata of your databases, for the occurrence of a particular string of letters. Not so easy, it turns out, though Phil Factor is able to come up with various methods for various purposes.

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• Troubleshooting Nonpaged and Paged Pool Errors in Windows

  Ben Lye uncovered a memory leak in the nonpaged pool which was crashing his servers with disquieting regularity. Luckily it was relatively easy to troubleshoot, and he's sharing the tools and techniques he used to get his servers back on track in double-quick time.

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• Exceptional PowerShell DBA Pt 2 - The Morning Checklist

  Laerte Junior takes us further into the world of an Exceptional PowerShell DBA, showing us how he uses PowerShell 2.0 to take all the headaches out of even more of his daily checklist. What could be better than having your morning checklist run itself?

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• SQL Monitor and "The Cloud"

  - by Richard Mitchell

  So, how can we demo this thing? In the beginning there was a product, and it was a good product for the testers had decreed it so, and nobody argues with a tester. But then comes the inevitable question of how can somebody test it out without risk. Red Gate prides itself on the tools being easy for people to trial before they buy, and no cut down trial for you sir, oh no, for you sir only the best will do - a fully functional trial - suits you sir. The problem The problem comes when you get a...(read more)

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• The Running Cost of Azure - MSDN Offer

  - by RobbieT

  Richard recently blogged about getting the Red Gate Labs website onto Azure; it's been running awhile now and, as Richard makes sure the cogs are all turning, I've been trying to track the cost. We decided to launch on Windows Azure as both an exercise in using Azure and also getting to grips with hosting stuff in the cloud. If you have an MSDN subscription then you're eligible for an offer which looks pretty great: What the offer amounted to was a small compute instance, a bunch of storage...(read more)

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• Anatomy of a .NET Assembly - CLR metadata 2

  - by Simon Cooper

  Before we look any further at the CLR metadata, we need a quick diversion to understand how the metadata is actually stored. Encoding table information As an example, we'll have a look at a row in the TypeDef table. According to the spec, each TypeDef consists of the following: Flags specifying various properties of the class, including visibility. The name of the type. The namespace of the type. What type this type extends. The field list of this type. The method list of this type. How is all this data actually represented? Offset & RID encoding Most assemblies don't need to use a 4 byte value to specify heap offsets and RIDs everywhere, however we can't hard-code every offset and RID to be 2 bytes long as there could conceivably be more than 65535 items in a heap or more than 65535 fields or types defined in an assembly. So heap offsets and RIDs are only represented in the full 4 bytes if it is required; in the header information at the top of the #~ stream are 3 bits indicating if the #Strings, #GUID, or #Blob heaps use 2 or 4 bytes (the #US stream is not accessed from metadata), and the rowcount of each table. If the rowcount for a particular table is greater than 65535 then all RIDs referencing that table throughout the metadata use 4 bytes, else only 2 bytes are used. Coded tokens Not every field in a table row references a single predefined table. For example, in the TypeDef extends field, a type can extend another TypeDef (a type in the same assembly), a TypeRef (a type in a different assembly), or a TypeSpec (an instantiation of a generic type). A token would have to be used to let us specify the table along with the RID. Tokens are always 4 bytes long; again, this is rather wasteful of space. Cutting the RID down to 2 bytes would make each token 3 bytes long, which isn't really an optimum size for computers to read from memory or disk. However, every use of a token in the metadata tables can only point to a limited subset of the metadata tables. For the extends field, we only need to be able to specify one of 3 tables, which we can do using 2 bits: 0x0: TypeDef 0x1: TypeRef 0x2: TypeSpec We could therefore compress the 4-byte token that would otherwise be needed into a coded token of type TypeDefOrRef. For each type of coded token, the least significant bits encode the table the token points to, and the rest of the bits encode the RID within that table. We can work out whether each type of coded token needs 2 or 4 bytes to represent it by working out whether the maximum RID of every table that the coded token type can point to will fit in the space available. The space available for the RID depends on the type of coded token; a TypeOrMethodDef coded token only needs 1 bit to specify the table, leaving 15 bits available for the RID before a 4-byte representation is needed, whereas a HasCustomAttribute coded token can point to one of 18 different tables, and so needs 5 bits to specify the table, only leaving 11 bits for the RID before 4 bytes are needed to represent that coded token type. For example, a 2-byte TypeDefOrRef coded token with the value 0x0321 has the following bit pattern: 0 3 2 1 0000 0011 0010 0001 The first two bits specify the table - TypeRef; the other bits specify the RID. Because we've used the first two bits, we've got to shift everything along two bits: 000000 1100 1000 This gives us a RID of 0xc8. If any one of the TypeDef, TypeRef or TypeSpec tables had more than 16383 rows (2^14 - 1), then 4 bytes would need to be used to represent all TypeDefOrRef coded tokens throughout the metadata tables. Lists The third representation we need to consider is 1-to-many references; each TypeDef refers to a list of FieldDef and MethodDef belonging to that type. If we were to specify every FieldDef and MethodDef individually then each TypeDef would be very large and a variable size, which isn't ideal. There is a way of specifying a list of references without explicitly specifying every item; if we order the MethodDef and FieldDef tables by the owning type, then the field list and method list in a TypeDef only have to be a single RID pointing at the first FieldDef or MethodDef belonging to that type; the end of the list can be inferred by the field list and method list RIDs of the next row in the TypeDef table. Going back to the TypeDef If we have a look back at the definition of a TypeDef, we end up with the following reprensentation for each row: Flags - always 4 bytes Name - a #Strings heap offset. Namespace - a #Strings heap offset. Extends - a TypeDefOrRef coded token. FieldList - a single RID to the FieldDef table. MethodList - a single RID to the MethodDef table. So, depending on the number of entries in the heaps and tables within the assembly, the rows in the TypeDef table can be as small as 14 bytes, or as large as 24 bytes. Now we've had a look at how information is encoded within the metadata tables, in the next post we can see how they are arranged on disk.

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• SQL Azure Down - how I got labs.red-gate.com back up

  - by Richard Mitchell

  11:06am - Currently SQL Azure in western europe is down How do I know this? Well on labs.red-gate.com (my Azure website) I have elmah installed which started sending me e-mails about connection failures from 10:40am when trying to get the dynamic content from the database (I was too busy playing with my new Eee Pad transformer to notice immediately). Going to the website confirmed the failure and trying to connect to SQL Azure from SQL Server Management studio and the Management confirmed bad...(read more)

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• What if you could work on anything you wanted?

  - by red@work

  This week we've downed our tools and organised ourselves into small project teams or struck out alone. We're working on whatever we like, with whoever we like, wherever we like. We've called it Down Tools week and so far it's a blast. It all started a few months ago with an idea from Neil, our CEO. Neil wanted to capture the excitement, innovation, and productivity of Coding by the Sea and extend this to all Red Gaters working in Product Development. A brainstorm is always a good place to start for an "anything goes" project. Half of Red Gate piled into our largest meeting room (it's pretty big) armed with flip charts, post its and a heightened sense of possibility. An hour or so later our SQL Servery walls were covered in project ideas. So what would you do, if you could work on anything you wanted? Many projects are related to tools we already make, others are for internal product development use and some are, well, just something completely different. Someone suggested we point a web cam at the SQL Servery lunch queue so we can check it before heading to lunch. That one couldn't wait for Down Tools Week. It was up and running within a few days and even better, it captures the table tennis table too. Thursday is the Show and Tell - I am looking forward to seeing what everyone has come up with. Some of the projects will turn into new products or features so this probably isn't the time or place to go into detail of what is being worked on. Rest assured, you'll hear all about it! We're making a video as we go along too which will be up on our website as soon. In the meantime, all meetings are cancelled, we've got plenty of food in and people are being very creative with the £500 expenses budget (Richard, do you really need an iPad?). It's brilliant to see it all coming together from the idea stage to reality. Catch up with our progress by following #downtoolsweek on Twitter. Who knows, maybe a future Red Gate flagship tool is coming to life right now? By the way, it's business as usual for our customer facing and internal operations teams. Hmm, maybe we can all down tools for a week and ask Product Development to hold the fort? Post by: Alice Chapman

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• ANTS Profiler Saves Me From A Sordid Fate

  A bit of string concatenation never hurt anybody, right? Think again. Carl Niedner has been designing software since 1983, and was shocked to find his latest and greatest creation suddenly plagued with long loading times. After trying ANTS Profiler, he discovered one tiny line of forgotten concept code was causing his pain.

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• ReSharper C# Live Template for Dependency Property and Property Change Routed Event Boilerplate Code

  - by Bart Read

  I don't know about you but it took me about 5 seconds to get royally fed up of typing the boilerplate code necessary for creating WPF (and Silverlight) dependency properties and, if you want them, their associated property change routed events. Being a ReSharper user, I wondered if there was any live template for doing this. It turns out there's nothing built in, but there are many examples of templates for creating dependency properties out there on the web, such as this excellent one from Roy...(read more)

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• Subterranean IL: Generics and array covariance

  - by Simon Cooper

  Arrays in .NET are curious beasts. They are the only built-in collection types in the CLR, and SZ-arrays (single dimension, zero-indexed) have their own commands and IL syntax. One of their stranger properties is they have a kind of built-in covariance long before generic variance was added in .NET 4. However, this causes a subtle but important problem with generics. First of all, we need to briefly recap on array covariance. SZ-array covariance To demonstrate, I'll tweak the classes I introduced in my previous posts: public class IncrementableClass { public int Value; public virtual void Increment(int incrementBy) { Value += incrementBy; } } public class IncrementableClassx2 : IncrementableClass { public override void Increment(int incrementBy) { base.Increment(incrementBy); base.Increment(incrementBy); } } In the CLR, SZ-arrays of reference types are implicitly convertible to arrays of the element's supertypes, all the way up to object (note that this does not apply to value types). That is, an instance of IncrementableClassx2[] can be used wherever a IncrementableClass[] or object[] is required. When an SZ-array could be used in this fashion, a run-time type check is performed when you try to insert an object into the array to make sure you're not trying to insert an instance of IncrementableClass into an IncrementableClassx2[]. This check means that the following code will compile fine but will fail at run-time: IncrementableClass[] array = new IncrementableClassx2[1]; array[0] = new IncrementableClass(); // throws ArrayTypeMismatchException These checks are enforced by the various stelem* and ldelem* il instructions in such a way as to ensure you can't insert a IncrementableClass into a IncrementableClassx2[]. For the rest of this post, however, I'm going to concentrate on the ldelema instruction. ldelema This instruction pops the array index (int32) and array reference (O) off the stack, and pushes a pointer (&) to the corresponding array element. However, unlike the ldelem instruction, the instruction's type argument must match the run-time array type exactly. This is because, once you've got a managed pointer, you can use that pointer to both load and store values in that array element using the ldind* and stind* (load/store indirect) instructions. As the same pointer can be used for both input and output to the array, the type argument to ldelema must be invariant. At the time, this was a perfectly reasonable restriction, and maintained array type-safety within managed code. However, along came generics, and with it the constrained callvirt instruction. So, what happens when we combine array covariance and constrained callvirt? .method public static void CallIncrementArrayValue() { // IncrementableClassx2[] arr = new IncrementableClassx2[1] ldc.i4.1 newarr IncrementableClassx2 // arr[0] = new IncrementableClassx2(); dup newobj instance void IncrementableClassx2::.ctor() ldc.i4.0 stelem.ref // IncrementArrayValue<IncrementableClass>(arr, 0) // here, we're treating an IncrementableClassx2[] as IncrementableClass[] dup ldc.i4.0 call void IncrementArrayValue<class IncrementableClass>(!!0[],int32) // ... ret } .method public static void IncrementArrayValue<(IncrementableClass) T>( !!T[] arr, int32 index) { // arr[index].Increment(1) ldarg.0 ldarg.1 ldelema !!T ldc.i4.1 constrained. !!T callvirt instance void IIncrementable::Increment(int32) ret } And the result: Unhandled Exception: System.ArrayTypeMismatchException: Attempted to access an element as a type incompatible with the array. at IncrementArrayValue[T](T[] arr, Int32 index) at CallIncrementArrayValue() Hmm. We're instantiating the generic method as IncrementArrayValue<IncrementableClass>, but passing in an IncrementableClassx2[], hence the ldelema instruction is failing as it's expecting an IncrementableClass[]. On features and feature conflicts What we've got here is a conflict between existing behaviour (ldelema ensuring type safety on covariant arrays) and new behaviour (managed pointers to object references used for every constrained callvirt on generic type instances). And, although this is an edge case, there is no general workaround. The generic method could be hidden behind several layers of assemblies, wrappers and interfaces that make it a requirement to use array covariance when calling the generic method. Furthermore, this will only fail at runtime, whereas compile-time safety is what generics were designed for! The solution is the readonly. prefix instruction. This modifies the ldelema instruction to ignore the exact type check for arrays of reference types, and so it lets us take the address of array elements using a covariant type to the actual run-time type of the array: .method public static void IncrementArrayValue<(IncrementableClass) T>( !!T[] arr, int32 index) { // arr[index].Increment(1) ldarg.0 ldarg.1 readonly. ldelema !!T ldc.i4.1 constrained. !!T callvirt instance void IIncrementable::Increment(int32) ret } But what about type safety? In return for ignoring the type check, the resulting controlled mutability pointer can only be used in the following situations: As the object parameter to ldfld, ldflda, stfld, call and constrained callvirt instructions As the pointer parameter to ldobj or ldind* As the source parameter to cpobj In other words, the only operations allowed are those that read from the pointer; stind* and similar that alter the pointer itself are banned. This ensures that the array element we're pointing to won't be changed to anything untoward, and so type safety within the array is maintained. This is a typical example of the maxim that whenever you add a feature to a program, you have to consider how that feature interacts with every single one of the existing features. Although an edge case, the readonly. prefix instruction ensures that generics and array covariance work together and that compile-time type safety is maintained. Tune in next time for a look at the .ctor generic type constraint, and what it means.

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• The SQL Beat Podcast-Capturing a SQL Rockstar

  - by SQLBeat

    This is the first permissible (waiting for signed disclaimers) episode of the SQL Beat Podcast featuring the gracious and famous Thomas La Rock. We talk about gay marriage, abortion, SQL community and a 9 inch pipe with a hole in it at the tip. No really. If there ever was a gentleman, SQL Rockstar is one and I want to thank him from the bottom of my digital recorder for agreeing to talk to me and my audience. All forty of them will appreciate the candor. Enjoy World. I did. Oh and a special rock start drum intro from me to you. CLICK HERE TO PLAY >>

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• Opportunity Nokia's

  - by Andrew Clarke

  Nokia’s alliance with Microsoft is likely to be good news for anyone using Microsoft technologies, and particularly for .NET developers. Before the announcement, the future wasn’t looking so bright for the ‘mobile’ version of Windows, Windows Phone. Microsoft currently has only 3.1% of the Smartphone market, even though it has been involved in it for longer than its main rivals. Windows Phone has now got the basics right, but that is hardly sufficient by itself to change its predicament significantly. With Nokia's help, it is possible. Despite the promise of multi-tasking for third party apps, integration with Microsoft platforms such as Xbox and Office, direct integration of Twitter support, and the introduction of IE 9 “later this year”, there have been frustratingly few signs of urgency on Microsoft’s part in improving the Windows Phone  product. Until this happens, there seems little prospect of reward for third-party developers brave enough to support the platform with applications. This is puzzling when one sees how well SQL Server and Microsoft’s other server technologies have thrived in recent years, under good leadership from a management that understands the technology. The same just hasn’t been true for some of the consumer products. In consequence, iPads and Android tablets have already exposed diehard Windows users, for the first time, to an alternative GUI for consumer Tablet PCs, and the comparisons aren’t always in Windows’ favour. Nokia’s problem is obvious: Android’s meteoric rise. Android now has 33% of the worldwide market for smartphones, while the market share of Nokia’s Symbian has dropped from 44% to 31%. As details of the agreement emerge, it would seem that Nokia will bring a great deal of expertise, such as imaging and Nokia Maps, to Windows Phone that should make it more competitive. It is wrong to assume that Nokia’s decline will continue: the shock of Android’s sudden rise could be enough to sting them back to their previous form, and they have Microsoft’s huge resources and marketing clout to help them. For the sake of the whole Windows stack, I really hope the alliance succeeds.

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• A Deep Dive into Transport Queues (Part 2)

  Johan Veldhuis completes his 'Deep Dive' by plunging even deeper into the mysteries of MS Exchange's Transport queues that are used to temporarily store messages which are waiting until they are passed through to the next stage, and explains how to change the way they work via configuration settings.

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• The Presentation Isn't Over Until It's Over

  - by Phil Factor

  The senior corporate dignitaries settled into their seats looking important in a blue-suited sort of way. The lights dimmed as I strode out in front to give my presentation.  I had ten vital minutes to make my pitch.  I was about to dazzle the top management of a large software company who were considering the purchase of my software product. I would present them with a dazzling synthesis of diagrams, graphs, followed by  a live demonstration of my software projected from my laptop.  My preparation had been meticulous: It had to be: A year’s hard work was at stake, so I’d prepared it to perfection.  I stood up and took them all in, with a gaze of sublime confidence. Then the laptop expired. There are several possible alternative plans of action when this happens     A. Stare at the smoking laptop vacuously, flapping ones mouth slowly up and down     B. Stand frozen like a statue, locked in indecision between fright and flight.     C. Run out of the room, weeping     D. Pretend that this was all planned     E. Abandon the presentation in favour of a stilted and tedious dissertation about the software     F. Shake your fist at the sky, and curse the sense of humour of your preferred deity I started for a few seconds on plan B, normally referred to as the ‘Rabbit in the headlamps of the car’ technique. Suddenly, a little voice inside my head spoke. It spoke the famous inane words of Yogi Berra; ‘The game isn't over until it's over.’ ‘Too right’, I thought. What to do? I ran through the alternatives A-F inclusive in my mind but none appealed to me. I was completely unprepared for this. Nowadays, longevity has since taught me more than I wanted to know about the wacky sense of humour of fate, and I would have taken two laptops. I hadn’t, but decided to do the presentation anyway as planned. I started out ignoring the dead laptop, but pretending, instead that it was still working. The audience looked startled. They were expecting plan B to be succeeded by plan C, I suspect. They weren’t used to denial on this scale. After my introductory talk, which didn’t require any visuals, I came to the diagram that described the application I’d written.  I’d taken ages over it and it was hot stuff. Well, it would have been had it been projected onto the screen. It wasn’t. Before I describe what happened then, I must explain that I have thespian tendencies.  My  triumph as Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady at the local operatic society is now long forgotten, but I remember at the time of my finest performance, the moment that, glancing up over the vast audience of  moist-eyed faces at the during the poignant  scene between Eliza and Higgins at the end, I  realised that I had a talent that one day could possibly  be harnessed for commercial use I just talked about the diagram as if it was there, but throwing in some extra description. The audience nodded helpfully when I’d done enough. Emboldened, I began a sort of mime, well, more of a ballet, to represent each slide as I came to it. Heaven knows I’d done my preparation and, in my mind’s eye, I could see every detail, but I had to somehow project the reality of that vision to the audience, much the same way any actor playing Macbeth should do the ghost of Banquo.  My desperation gave me a manic energy. If you’ve ever demonstrated a windows application entirely by mime, gesture and florid description, you’ll understand the scale of the challenge, but then I had nothing to lose. With a brief sentence of description here and there, and arms flailing whilst outlining the size and shape of  graphs and diagrams, I used the many tricks of mime, gesture and body-language  learned from playing Captain Hook, or the Sheriff of Nottingham in pantomime. I set out determinedly on my desperate venture. There wasn’t time to do anything but focus on the challenge of the task: the world around me narrowed down to ten faces and my presentation: ten souls who had to be hypnotized into seeing a Windows application:  one that was slick, well organized and functional I don’t remember the details. Eight minutes of my life are gone completely. I was a thespian berserker.  I know however that I followed the basic plan of building the presentation in a carefully controlled crescendo until the dazzling finale where the results were displayed on-screen.  ‘And here you see the results, neatly formatted and grouped carefully to enhance the significance of the figures, together with running trend-graphs!’ I waved a mime to signify an animated  window-opening, and looked up, in my first pause, to gaze defiantly  at the audience.  It was a sight I’ll never forget. Ten pairs of eyes were gazing in rapt attention at the imaginary window, and several pairs of eyes were glancing at the imaginary graphs and figures.  I hadn’t had an audience like that since my starring role in  Beauty and the Beast.  At that moment, I realized that my desperate ploy might work. I sat down, slightly winded, when my ten minutes were up.  For the first and last time in my life, the audience of a  ‘PowerPoint’ presentation burst into spontaneous applause. ‘Any questions?’ ‘Yes,  Have you got an agent?’ Yes, in case you’re wondering, I got the deal. They bought the software product from me there and then. However, it was a life-changing experience for me and I have never ever again trusted technology as part of a presentation.  Even if things can’t go wrong, they’ll go wrong and they’ll kill the flow of what you’re presenting.  if you can’t do something without the techno-props, then you shouldn’t do it.  The greatest lesson of all is that great presentations require preparation and  ‘stage-presence’ rather than fancy graphics. They’re a great supporting aid, but they should never dominate to the point that you’re lost without them.

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• Hello, can you just send me all your data please?

  - by fatherjack

  LiveJournal Tags: Security,SQL Server Our house phone rang on Saturday night and Mrs Fatherjack answered. I was in the other room but I heard her trying to explain to the caller that they were in some way mistaken. Eventually, as she got more irate with the caller, I went out and started to catch up with the events so far. The caller was trying to convince my wife that our computer was infected with a virus. She was confident that it wasn't. Her patience expired after almost 10 minutes...(read more)

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• Developing Schema Compare for Oracle (Part 1)

  - by Simon Cooper

  SQL Compare is one of Red Gate's most successful SQL Server tools; it allows developers and DBAs to compare and synchronize the contents of their databases. Although similar tools exist for Oracle, they are quite noticeably lacking in the usability and stability that SQL Compare is known for in the SQL Server world. We could see a real need for a usable schema comparison tools for Oracle, and so the Schema Compare for Oracle project was born. Over the next few weeks, as we come up to release of v1, I'll be doing a series of posts on the development of Schema Compare for Oracle. For the first post, I thought I would start with the main pitfalls that we stumbled across when developing the product, especially from a SQL Server background. 1. Schemas and Databases The most obvious difference is that the concept of a 'database' is quite different between Oracle and SQL Server. On SQL Server, one server instance has multiple databases, each with separate schemas. There is typically little communication between separate databases, and most databases are no more than about 1000-2000 objects. This means SQL Compare can register an entire database in a reasonable amount of time, and cross-database dependencies probably won't be an issue. It is a quite different scene under Oracle, however. The terms 'database' and 'instance' are used interchangeably, (although technically 'database' refers to the datafiles on disk, and 'instance' the running Oracle process that reads & writes to the database), and a database is a single conceptual entity. This immediately presents problems, as it is infeasible to register an entire database as we do in SQL Compare; in my Oracle install, using the standard recommended options, there are 63975 system objects. If we tried to register all those, not only would it take hours, but the client would probably run out of memory before we finished. As a result, we had to allow people to specify what schemas they wanted to register. This decision had quite a few knock-on effects for the design, which I will cover in a future post. 2. Connecting to Oracle The next obvious difference is in actually connecting to Oracle – in SQL Server, you can specify a server and database, and off you go. On Oracle things are slightly more complicated. SIDs, Service Names, and TNS A database (the files on disk) must have a unique identifier for the databases on the system, called the SID. It also has a global database name, which consists of a name (which doesn't have to match the SID) and a domain. Alternatively, you can identify a database using a service name, which normally has a 1-to-1 relationship with instances, but may not if, for example, using RAC (Real Application Clusters) for redundancy and failover. You specify the computer and instance you want to connect to using TNS (Transparent Network Substrate). The user-visible parts are a config file (tnsnames.ora) on the client machine that specifies how to connect to an instance. For example, the entry for one of my test instances is: SC_11GDB1 = (DESCRIPTION = (ADDRESS_LIST = (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = simonctest)(PORT = 1521)) ) (CONNECT_DATA = (SID = 11gR1db1) ) ) This gives the hostname, port, and SID of the instance I want to connect to, and associates it with a name (SC_11GDB1). The tnsnames syntax also allows you to specify failover, multiple descriptions and address lists, and client load balancing. You can then specify this TNS identifier as the data source in a connection string. Although using ODP.NET (the .NET dlls provided by Oracle) was fine for internal prototype builds, once we released the EAP we discovered that this simply wasn't an acceptable solution for installs on other people's machines. Due to .NET assembly strong naming, users had to have installed on their machines the exact same version of the ODP.NET dlls as we had on our build server. We couldn't ship the ODP.NET dlls with our installer as the Oracle license agreement prohibited this, and we didn't want to force users to install another Oracle client just so they can run our program. To be able to list the TNS entries in the connection dialog, we also had to locate and parse the tnsnames.ora file, which was complicated by users with several Oracle client installs and intricate TNS entries. After much swearing at our computers, we eventually decided to use a third party Oracle connection library from Devart that we could ship with our program; this could use whatever client version was installed, parse the TNS entries for us, and also had the nice feature of being able to connect to an Oracle server without having any client installed at all. Unfortunately, their current license agreement prevents us from shipping an Oracle SDK, but that's a bridge we'll cross when we get to it. 3. Running synchronization scripts The most important difference is that in Oracle, DDL is non-transactional; you cannot rollback DDL statements like you can on SQL Server. Although we considered various solutions to this, including using the flashback archive or recycle bin, or generating an undo script, no reliable method of completely undoing a half-executed sync script has yet been found; so in this case we simply have to trust that the DBA or developer will check and verify the script before running it. However, before we got to that stage, we had to get the scripts to run in the first place... To run a synchronization script from SQL Compare we essentially pass the script over to the SqlCommand.ExecuteNonQuery method. However, when we tried to do the same for an OracleConnection we got a very strange error – 'ORA-00911: invalid character', even when running the most basic CREATE TABLE command. After much hair-pulling and Googling, we discovered that Oracle has got some very strange behaviour with semicolons at the end of statements. To understand what's going on, we need to take a quick foray into SQL and PL/SQL. PL/SQL is not T-SQL In SQL Server, T-SQL is the language used to interface with the database. It has DDL, DML, control flow, and many other nice features (like Turing-completeness) that you can mix and match in the same script. In Oracle, DDL SQL and PL/SQL are two completely separate languages, with different syntax, different datatypes and different execution engines within the instance. Oracle SQL is much more like 'pure' ANSI SQL, with no state, no control flow, and only the basic DML commands. PL/SQL is the Turing-complete language, but can only do DML and DCL (i.e. BEGIN TRANSATION commands). Any DDL or SQL commands that aren't recognised by the PL/SQL engine have to be passed back to the SQL engine via an EXECUTE IMMEDIATE command. In PL/SQL, a semicolons is a valid token used to delimit the end of a statement. In SQL, a semicolon is not a valid token (even though the Oracle documentation gives them at the end of the syntax diagrams) . When you execute the command CREATE TABLE table1 (COL1 NUMBER); in SQL*Plus the semicolon on the end is a command to SQL*Plus to execute the preceding statement on the server; it strips off the semicolon before passing it on. SQL Developer does a similar thing. When executing a PL/SQL block, however, the syntax is like so: BEGIN INSERT INTO table1 VALUES (1); INSERT INTO table1 VALUES (2); END; / In this case, the semicolon is accepted by the PL/SQL engine as a statement delimiter, and instead the / is the command to SQL*Plus to execute the current block. This explains the ORA-00911 error we got when trying to run the CREATE TABLE command – the server is complaining about the semicolon on the end. This also means that there is no SQL syntax to execute more than one DDL command in the same OracleCommand. Therefore, we would have to do a round-trip to the server for every command we want to execute. Obviously, this would cause lots of network traffic and be very slow on slow or congested networks. Our first attempt at a solution was to wrap every SQL statement (without semicolon) inside an EXECUTE IMMEDIATE command in a PL/SQL block and pass that to the server to execute. One downside of this solution is that we get no feedback as to how the script execution is going; we're currently evaluating better solutions to this thorny issue. Next up: Dependencies; how we solved the problem of being unable to register the entire database, and the knock-on effects to the whole product.

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• ASP.NET 4.0 Features

  ASP.NET v4 is released with Visual studio 2010. Web developers are presented with a bewildering range of new features and so Ludmal De Silva has described what he considers to be the most important new features in ASP.NET V4

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• Profiling SharePoint with ANTS Performance Profiler 5.2

  Using ANTS Performance Profiler with SharePoint has, previously, been possible, but not easy. Version 5.2 of ANTS Performance Profiler changes all that, and Chris Allen has put together a straight-forward guide to profiling SharePoint, demonstrating just how much easier it has become.

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