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• Making Money from your SQL Server Blog

  - by Bill Graziano

  My SQL Server blog reading list is around one hundred blogs.  Many people are writing great content and generating lots of page views.  I see some of them running Google AdSense and trying to make a little money off their traffic.  If you want to earn some some extra money from what you’ve written there are a couple of options.  And one new option that I’m announcing here. Background Internet advertising is sold based on a few different pricing schemes.  Flat Fee.  You offer either all your impressions (page views) or some percentage of your impressions in exchange for a flat monthly fee.  CPM or cost per thousand impressions.  If the quoted price is $2 CPM you’ll get $2 for every 1,000 times the ad is displayed.  While you might think the “M” means millions, the “M” in CPM is the roman numeral for 1,000. CPC or cost per click.  This is also called PPC or pay per click.  In this method you get paid based on how many clicks there are on the ad.  CPA or cost per action.  In this method you get paid based on an action that occurs on the advertisers site after they click on the ad.  This is typically some type of sign up form.  This is how most affiliate programs work. Darren Rowse at ProBlogger has been writing about blogging and making money off blogs for years.  He has a good introduction to making money on your blog in his “Making Money” section.  If you’re interested in learning more he has a post up titled How to Make More Money From Your Blog in the New Year that links to many of his best posts on the subject. Google AdSense This is the most common method for people earning money from their blogging.  It’s easy to setup and administer.  You tell AdSense what size ads you’d like to run and it gives you a little piece of JavaScript to put on your site.  AdSense quickly learns the topics you write about and displays ads that are appropriate for your site.  I typically see ads for hosting, SQL Server tools and developer tools running in AdSense slots.  AdSense pays on a CPC model.  If you translate that back to CPM pricing you’ll see rates from $0.50 to $1.00 CPM. Amazon While you might not make much money writing books it’s now possible to make even less helping Amazon sell them.  You can sign up for an Amazon affiliate program.  Each time you send Amazon a link and someone buys the book you get a cut of that sale.  This is the CPA model from above.  Amazon can help you build some pretty nice “stores”.  Here’s the SQL Server bookstore I built for SQLTeam.com.  If you’re just putting in a page with books like I’ve done on SQLTeam you should keep your expectations low.  If you’re writing book reviews of suggesting books on your blog it really does make sense to setup an Amazon affiliate link.  People are much more likely to buy a book based on a review from a trusted source.  I always try to buy through a referral link if there is one. Amazon pays about 4% of the price as a referral fee.  You also get credit for anything else they buy while on the site.  I recently had someone buy an iPod nano with their SQL Server book making me an extra $5.60 richer!  Estimating how much you can make is difficult though.  How much attention you draw to the links and book reviews can dramatically affect the earnings. Private Ad Sales This is the hardest but potentially most lucrative option.  You sell advertising directly to companies that want to sell things to your readers.  Typically this would be SQL Server tool vendors, hosting companies or anyone else that wants to make money off database administrators.  This is also the most difficult to do.  You’ll need the contacts at the companies and enough page views to make it worth their while.  You’ll also need software to track the page views and clicks, geo-target your ads and smooth out the impressions.  Your earnings are based on whatever you can negotiate with the companies. SQL Server Ad Network For the last couple of years I’ve run any extra ads that I sold on the SQLTeam Weblogs.  You can see an example of that on Mladen’s blog.  The ad in the upper right corner is one that I’m running for him.  (Note: Many of the ads I’m running are geo-targeted to only appear in English speaking countries.  You may see a different set of ads outside the US, Canada and the UK.  You can also see he has a couple of Google ads on his blog.)  When I run ads on his blog I split the advertising revenue with him.  They make a little and I make a little. I recently started to expand this and sell advertising specifically to run on SQL Server-related blogs.  I’m also starting to run ads on non-SQLTeam blogs.  The only way I can sell more advertising is to have more blogs to run it on.  And that’s where you come in. I’ve created a SQL Server advertising network.  I handle all the ad sales and provide the technology to serve the ads.  I handle collections and payments back to you.  You get paid at the end of each month regardless of when (or if) the advertiser actually pays.  All you need to do is add a small piece of JavaScript to your site to display the ads. If you’re writing about SQL Server and interested in earning a little money for your site I’d like to talk to you.  You can use the Contact Us page on SQLTeam.com to reach me.  Running advertising on your blog isn’t for everyone.  If you’re concerned about what advertisers might think about certain posts then you might not be a good fit.  For the most part this isn’t an issue.  You’ll also need to have a PayPal account to receive payments.  You probably won’t get rich doing this.  But you can earn extra cash on the side for doing what you would do anyway.  I do know that people have earned enough to buy themselves a nice laptop doing this. My initial target is blogs with more than 10,000 page views per month.  I expect to pay two to three times what Google pays.  If you have less than 10,000 page views per month but are still interested I’d still like to hear from you.  I may not be able to sign up smaller blogs right away but we’ll get the process started.  If you’re unsure about your traffic Google Analytics is a free tool that provides great reporting on traffic, popular posts and how people find your blog.  If you have any questions or are just curious drop me a line and I’ll try to answer your questions.

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• Interview with Lenz Grimmer about MySQL Connect

  - by Keith Larson

  Keith Larson: Thank you for allowing me to do this interview with you.  I have been talking with a few different Oracle ACEs   about the MySQL Connect Conference. I figured the MySQL community might be missing you as well. You have been very busy with Oracle Linux but I know you still have an eye on the MySQL Community. How have things been?Lenz Grimmer: Thanks for including me in this series of interviews, I feel honored! I've read the other interviews, and really liked them. I still try to follow what's going on over in the MySQL community and it's good to see that many of the familiar faces are still around. Over the course of the 9 years that I was involved with MySQL, many colleagues and contacts turned into good friends and we still maintain close relationships.It's been almost 1.5 years ago that I moved into my new role here in the Linux team at Oracle, and I really enjoy working on a Linux distribution again (I worked for SUSE before I joined MySQL AB in 2002). I'm still learning a lot - Linux in the data center has greatly evolved in so many ways and there are a lot of new and exciting technologies to explore. Keith Larson: What were your thoughts when you heard that Oracle was going to deliver the MySQL Connect conference to the MySQL Community?Lenz Grimmer: I think it's testament to the fact that Oracle deeply cares about MySQL, despite what many skeptics may say. What started as "MySQL Sunday" two years ago has now evolved into a full-blown sub-conference, with 80 sessions at one of the largest corporate IT events in the world. I find this quite telling, not many products at Oracle enjoy this level of exposure! So it certainly makes me feel proud to see how far MySQL has come. Keith Larson: Have you had a chance to look over the sessions? What are your thoughts on them?Lenz Grimmer: I did indeed look at the final schedule.The content committee did a great job with selecting these sessions. I'm glad to see that the content selection was influenced by involving well-known and respected members of the MySQL community. The sessions cover a broad range of topics and technologies, both covering established topics as well as recent developments. Keith Larson: When you get a chance, what sessions do you plan on attending?Lenz Grimmer: I will actually be manning the Oracle booth in the exhibition area on one of these days, so I'm not sure if I'll have a lot of time attending sessions. But if I do, I'd love to see the keynotes and catch some of the sessions that talk about recent developments and new features in MySQL, High Availability and Clustering . Quite a lot has happened and it's hard to keep up with this constant flow of new MySQL releases.In particular, the following sessions caught my attention: MySQL Connect Keynote: The State of the Dolphin Evaluating MySQL High-Availability Alternatives CERN’s MySQL “as a Service” Deployment with Oracle VM: Empowering Users MySQL 5.6 Replication: Taking Scalability and High Availability to the Next Level What’s New in MySQL Server 5.6? MySQL Security: Past and Present MySQL at Twitter: Development and Deployment MySQL Community BOF MySQL Connect Keynote: MySQL Perspectives Keith Larson: So I will ask you just like I have asked the others I have interviewed, any tips that you would give to people for handling the long hours at conferences?Lenz Grimmer: Wear comfortable shoes and make sure to drink a lot! Also prepare a plan of the sessions you would like to attend beforehand and familiarize yourself with the venue, so you can get to the next talk in time without scrambling to find the location. The good thing about piggybacking on such a large conference like Oracle OpenWorld is that you benefit from the whole infrastructure. For example, there is a nice schedule builder that helps you to keep track of your sessions of interest. Other than that, bring enough business cards and talk to people, build up your network among your peers and other MySQL professionals! Keith Larson: What features of the MySQL 5.6 release do you look forward to the most ?Lenz Grimmer: There has been solid progress in so many areas like the InnoDB Storage Engine, the Optimizer, Replication or Performance Schema, it's hard for me to really highlight anything in particular. All in all, MySQL 5.6 sounds like a very promising release. I'm confident it will follow the tradition that Oracle already established with MySQL 5.5, which received a lot of praise even from very critical members of the MySQL community. If I had to name a single feature, I'm particularly and personally happy that the precise GIS functions have finally made it into a GA release - that was long overdue. Keith Larson:  In your opinion what is the best reason for someone to attend this event?Lenz Grimmer: This conference is an excellent opportunity to get in touch with the key people in the MySQL community and ecosystem and to get facts and information from the domain experts and developers that work on MySQL. The broad range of topics should attract people from a variety of roles and relations to MySQL, beginning with Developers and DBAs, to CIOs considering MySQL as a viable solution for their requirements. Keith Larson: You will be attending MySQL Connect and have some Oracle Linux Demos, do you see a growing demand for MySQL on Oracle Linux ?Lenz Grimmer: Yes! Oracle Linux is our recommended Linux distribution and we have a good relationship to the MySQL engineering group. They use Oracle Linux as a base Linux platform for development and QA, so we make sure that MySQL and Oracle Linux are well tested together. Setting up a MySQL server on Oracle Linux can be done very quickly, and many customers recognize the benefits of using them both in combination.Because Oracle Linux is available for free (including free bug fixes and errata), it's an ideal choice for running MySQL in your data center. You can run the same Linux distribution on both your development/staging systems as well as on the production machines, you decide which of these should be covered by a support subscription and at which level of support. This gives you flexibility and provides some really attractive cost-saving opportunities. Keith Larson: Since I am a Linux user and fan, what is on the horizon for  Oracle Linux?Lenz Grimmer: We're working hard on broadening the ecosystem around Oracle Linux, building up partnerships with ISVs and IHVs to certify Oracle Linux as a fully supported platform for their products. We also continue to collaborate closely with the Linux kernel community on various projects, to make sure that Linux scales and performs well on large systems and meets the demands of today's data centers. These improvements and enhancements will then rolled into the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, which is the key ingredient that sets Oracle Linux apart from other distributions. We also have a number of ongoing projects which are making good progress, and I'm sure you'll hear more about this at the upcoming OpenWorld conference :) Keith Larson: What is something that more people should be aware of when it comes to Oracle Linux and MySQL ?Lenz Grimmer: Many people assume that Oracle Linux is just tuned for Oracle products, such as the Oracle Database or our Engineered Systems. While it's of course true that we do a lot of testing and optimization for these workloads, Oracle Linux is and will remain a general-purpose Linux distribution that is a very good foundation for setting up a LAMP-Stack, for example. We also provide MySQL RPM packages for Oracle Linux, so you can easily stay up to date if you need something newer than what's included in the stock distribution.One more thing that is really unique to Oracle Linux is Ksplice, which allows you to apply security patches to the running Linux kernel, without having to reboot. This ensures that your MySQL database server keeps up and running and is not affected by any downtime. Keith Larson: What else would you like to add ?Lenz Grimmer: Thanks again for getting in touch with me, I appreciated the opportunity. I'm looking forward to MySQL Connect and Oracle OpenWorld and to meet you and many other people from the MySQL community that I haven't seen for quite some time! Keith Larson:  Thank you Lenz!

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• Big Data – Is Big Data Relevant to me? – Big Data Questionnaires – Guest Post by Vinod Kumar

  - by Pinal Dave

  This guest post is by Vinod Kumar. Vinod Kumar has worked with SQL Server extensively since joining the industry over a decade ago. Working on various versions of SQL Server 7.0, Oracle 7.3 and other database technologies – he now works with the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) as a Technology Architect. Let us read the blog post in Vinod’s own voice. I think the series from Pinal is a good one for anyone planning to start on Big Data journey from the basics. In my daily customer interactions this buzz of “Big Data” always comes up, I react generally saying – “Sir, do you really have a ‘Big Data’ problem or do you have a big Data problem?” Generally, there is a silence in the air when I ask this question. Data is everywhere in organizations – be it big data, small data, all data and for few it is bad data which is same as no data :). Wow, don’t discount me as someone who opposes “Big Data”, I am a big supporter as much as I am a critic of the abuse of this term by the people. In this post, I wanted to let my mind flow so that you can also think in the direction I want you to see these concepts. In any case, this is not an exhaustive dump of what is in my mind – but you will surely get the drift how I am going to question Big Data terms from customers!!! Is Big Data Relevant to me? Many of my customers talk to me like blank whiteboard with no idea – “why Big Data”. They want to jump into the bandwagon of technology and they want to decipher insights from their unexplored data a.k.a. unstructured data with structured data. So what are these industry scenario’s that come to mind? Here are some of them: Financials Fraud detection: Banks and Credit cards are monitoring your spending habits on real-time basis. Customer Segmentation: applies in every industry from Banking to Retail to Aviation to Utility and others where they deal with end customer who consume their products and services. Customer Sentiment Analysis: Responding to negative brand perception on social or amplify the positive perception. Sales and Marketing Campaign: Understand the impact and get closer to customer delight. Call Center Analysis: attempt to take unstructured voice recordings and analyze them for content and sentiment. Medical Reduce Re-admissions: How to build a proactive follow-up engagements with patients. Patient Monitoring: How to track Inpatient, Out-Patient, Emergency Visits, Intensive Care Units etc. Preventive Care: Disease identification and Risk stratification is a very crucial business function for medical. Claims fraud detection: There is no precise dollars that one can put here, but this is a big thing for the medical field. Retail Customer Sentiment Analysis, Customer Care Centers, Campaign Management. Supply Chain Analysis: Every sensors and RFID data can be tracked for warehouse space optimization. Location based marketing: Based on where a check-in happens retail stores can be optimize their marketing. Telecom Price optimization and Plans, Finding Customer churn, Customer loyalty programs Call Detail Record (CDR) Analysis, Network optimizations, User Location analysis Customer Behavior Analysis Insurance Fraud Detection & Analysis, Pricing based on customer Sentiment Analysis, Loyalty Management Agents Analysis, Customer Value Management This list can go on to other areas like Utility, Manufacturing, Travel, ITES etc. So as you can see, there are obviously interesting use cases for each of these industry verticals. These are just representative list. Where to start? A lot of times I try to quiz customers on a number of dimensions before starting a Big Data conversation. Are you getting the data you need the way you want it and in a timely manner? Can you get in and analyze the data you need? How quickly is IT to respond to your BI Requests? How easily can you get at the data that you need to run your business/department/project? How are you currently measuring your business? Can you get the data you need to react WITHIN THE QUARTER to impact behaviors to meet your numbers or is it always “rear-view mirror?” How are you measuring: The Brand Customer Sentiment Your Competition Your Pricing Your performance Supply Chain Efficiencies Predictive product / service positioning What are your key challenges of driving collaboration across your global business?  What the challenges in innovation? What challenges are you facing in getting more information out of your data? Note: Garbage-in is Garbage-out. Hold good for all reporting / analytics requirements Big Data POCs? A number of customers get into the realm of setting a small team to work on Big Data – well it is a great start from an understanding point of view, but I tend to ask a number of other questions to such customers. Some of these common questions are: To what degree is your advanced analytics (natural language processing, sentiment analysis, predictive analytics and classification) paired with your Big Data’s efforts? Do you have dedicated resources exploring the possibilities of advanced analytics in Big Data for your business line? Do you plan to employ machine learning technology while doing Advanced Analytics? How is Social Media being monitored in your organization? What is your ability to scale in terms of storage and processing power? Do you have a system in place to sort incoming data in near real time by potential value, data quality, and use frequency? Do you use event-driven architecture to manage incoming data? Do you have specialized data services that can accommodate different formats, security, and the management requirements of multiple data sources? Is your organization currently using or considering in-memory analytics? To what degree are you able to correlate data from your Big Data infrastructure with that from your enterprise data warehouse? Have you extended the role of Data Stewards to include ownership of big data components? Do you prioritize data quality based on the source system (that is Facebook/Twitter data has lower quality thresholds than radio frequency identification (RFID) for a tracking system)? Do your retention policies consider the different legal responsibilities for storing Big Data for a specific amount of time? Do Data Scientists work in close collaboration with Data Stewards to ensure data quality? How is access to attributes of Big Data being given out in the organization? Are roles related to Big Data (Advanced Analyst, Data Scientist) clearly defined? How involved is risk management in the Big Data governance process? Is there a set of documented policies regarding Big Data governance? Is there an enforcement mechanism or approach to ensure that policies are followed? Who is the key sponsor for your Big Data governance program? (The CIO is best) Do you have defined policies surrounding the use of social media data for potential employees and customers, as well as the use of customer Geo-location data? How accessible are complex analytic routines to your user base? What is the level of involvement with outside vendors and third parties in regard to the planning and execution of Big Data projects? What programming technologies are utilized by your data warehouse/BI staff when working with Big Data? These are some of the important questions I ask each customer who is actively evaluating Big Data trends for their organizations. These questions give you a sense of direction where to start, what to use, how to secure, how to analyze and more. Sign off Any Big data is analysis is incomplete without a compelling story. The best way to understand this is to watch Hans Rosling – Gapminder (2:17 to 6:06) videos about the third world myths. Don’t get overwhelmed with the Big Data buzz word, the destination to what your data speaks is important. In this blog post, we did not particularly look at any Big Data technologies. This is a set of questionnaire one needs to keep in mind as they embark their journey of Big Data. I did write some of the basics in my blog: Big Data – Big Hype yet Big Opportunity. Do let me know if these questions make sense?  Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• Win a set of Infragistics Silverlight Controls with Data Visualization!

  - by mbcrump

  Infragistics recently released their new Silverlight Data Visualization Controls. I saw a couple of samples and had to take a look. I headed over to their website and downloaded the controls. I first noticed the hospital floor-plan demo shown on their site and started thinking of ways that I could use this in my own organization. I emailed them asking if I could give away the Silverlight Data Visualization controls on my site and they said, Yes! They also wanted to throw in the standard Silverlight Line of Business controls. (combined they are worth about $3000 US). I am very thankful they were willing to help the Silverlight community with this giveaway. So some quick rules below: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Win a FREE developer’s license of Infragistics Silverlight Controls with Data Visualization ($3000 Value) Random winner will be announced on January 1st, 2011! To be entered into the contest do the following things: Subscribe to my feed. Leave a comment below with a valid email account (I WILL NOT share this info with anyone.) For extra entries simply: Retweet a link to this page using the following URL [ http://mcrump.me/iscfree ]. It does not matter what the tweet says, just as long as the URL is the same. Unlimited tweets, but please don’t go crazy! This URL will allow me to track the users that Tweet this page. Don’t forget to visit Infragistics because they made this possible. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Before we get started with the Silverlight Controls, here is a couple of links to bookmark: The Silverlight Line of Business Control page is here. You can also check out the live demos here. The Data Visualization page is here. You can also check out the live demos here. Don’t worry about the Samples/Help Documentation. You can install all of that to your local HDD when you are installing it. I am going to walk you through the Silverlight Controls recently released by Infragistics. Begin by downloading the trial version and running the executable. If you downloaded the Complete bundle then you will have the following options to pick from. I like having help documentation and samples on my local HDD in case I do not have access to the internet and want to code. After it is installed, you may want to take a look at your Toolbox in Visual Studio 2010. Look for NetAdvantage 10.3 Silverlight and you will see that you now have access to all of these controls. At this point, to use the controls it’s as simple as drag/drop onto your Silverlight container. It will create the proper Namespaces for you. I wanted to highlight a few of the controls that I liked the most: Grid – After using the Infragistics grid you will wonder how you ever survived using the grid supplied by Microsoft standard controls.  This grid was designed to get your application up and running very fast. It’s simple to bind, it handles LARGE DataSets, easy to filter and allows endless possibilities of formatting data. The screenshot below is an example of the grid. For a real-time updating demo click here. SpellChecker- If your users are creating emails or performing any other function that requires Spell Checking then this control is great. Check out the screenshots below: In this first screen, I have a word that is not in the dictionary [DotNet]. The Spell Checker finds the word and allows the user to correct it. What is so great about Infragistics controls is that it only takes a few lines of code to have a full-featured Spell Checker in your application. TagCloud – This is a control that I haven’t seen anywhere else. It allows you to create keywords for popular search terms. This is very similar to TagCloud seen all over the internet.  Below is a screenshot that shows “Facebook” being a very popular item in the cloud. You can link these items to a hyperlink if you wanted. Importing/Exporting from Excel – I work with data a majority of the time. We all know the importance of Excel in our organizations, its used a lot. With Infragistics controls it make importing and exporting data from a Grid into Excel a snap. One of the things that I liked most about this control was the option to choose the Excel format (2003 or 2007). I haven’t seen this feature in other controls. Creating/Saving/Extracting/Uploading Zip Files – This is another control that I haven’t seen many others making. It allows you to basically manipulate a zip file in any way you like. You can even create a password on the zip file. Schedule – The Schedule that Infragistics provides resembles Outlook’s calendar. I think that it’s important for a user to see your app for the first time and immediately be able to start using because they are already familiar with the UI. The Schedule control accomplishes that in my opinion. I have just barely scratched the surface with the Infragistics Silverlight Line of Business controls. To check all of them then click here. A quick thing to note is that this giveaway also comes with the following Silverlight Data Visualization Controls. Below is a screenshot that list all of them:   I wanted to highlight 2 of the controls that I liked the most: xamBarcode– The xamBarcode supports the following Symbologies: Below is an example of the barcode generated by Infragistics controls. This is a high resolution barcode that you will not have to wonder if your scanner can read it. As long as you have ink in your printer your barcode will read it. I used a Symbol barcode reader to test this barcode. xamTreemap– I’ve never seen a way of displaying data like this before, but I like it. You can style this anyway that you like of course and it also comes with an Office 2010 Theme. Thanks to Infragistics for providing the controls to one lucky reader. I hope that you enjoyed this post and good luck to those that entered the contest.  Subscribe to my feed

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• SQL SERVER – Extending SQL Azure with Azure worker role – Guest Post by Paras Doshi

  - by pinaldave

  This is guest post by Paras Doshi. Paras Doshi is a research Intern at SolidQ.com and a Microsoft student partner. He is currently working in the domain of SQL Azure. SQL Azure is nothing but a SQL server in the cloud. SQL Azure provides benefits such as on demand rapid provisioning, cost-effective scalability, high availability and reduced management overhead. To see an introduction on SQL Azure, check out the post by Pinal here In this article, we are going to discuss how to extend SQL Azure with the Azure worker role. In other words, we will attempt to write a custom code and host it in the Azure worker role; the aim is to add some features that are not available with SQL Azure currently or features that need to be customized for flexibility. This way we extend the SQL Azure capability by building some solutions that run on Azure as worker roles. To understand Azure worker role, think of it as a windows service in cloud. Azure worker role can perform background processes, and to handle processes such as synchronization and backup, it becomes our ideal tool. First, we will focus on writing a worker role code that synchronizes SQL Azure databases. Before we do so, let’s see some scenarios in which synchronization between SQL Azure databases is beneficial: scaling out access over multiple databases enables us to handle workload efficiently As of now, SQL Azure database can be hosted in one of any six datacenters. By synchronizing databases located in different data centers, one can extend the data by enabling access to geographically distributed data Let us see some scenarios in which SQL server to SQL Azure database synchronization is beneficial To backup SQL Azure database on local infrastructure Rather than investing in local infrastructure for increased workloads, such workloads could be handled by cloud Ability to extend data to different datacenters located across the world to enable efficient data access from remote locations Now, let us develop cloud-based app that synchronizes SQL Azure databases. For an Introduction to developing cloud based apps, click here Now, in this article, I aim to provide a bird’s eye view of how a code that synchronizes SQL Azure databases look like and then list resources that can help you develop the solution from scratch. Now, if you newly add a worker role to the cloud-based project, this is how the code will look like. (Note: I have added comments to the skeleton code to point out the modifications that will be required in the code to carry out the SQL Azure synchronization. Note the placement of Setup() and Sync() function.) Click here (http://parasdoshi1989.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/code-snippet-1-for-extending-sql-azure-with-azure-worker-role1.pdf ) Enabling SQL Azure databases synchronization through sync framework is a two-step process. In the first step, the database is provisioned and sync framework creates tracking tables, stored procedures, triggers, and tables to store metadata to enable synchronization. This is one time step. The code for the same is put in the setup() function which is called once when the worker role starts. Now, the second step is continuous (or on demand) synchronization of SQL Azure databases by propagating changes between databases. This is done on a continuous basis by calling the sync() function in the while loop. The code logic to synchronize changes between SQL Azure databases should be put in the sync() function. Discussing the coding part step by step is out of the scope of this article. Therefore, let me suggest you a resource, which is given here. Also, note that before you start developing the code, you will need to install SYNC framework 2.1 SDK (download here). Further, you will reference some libraries before you start coding. Details regarding the same are available in the article that I just pointed to. You will be charged for data transfers if the databases are not in the same datacenter. For pricing information, go here Currently, a tool named DATA SYNC, which is built on top of sync framework, is available in CTP that allows SQL Azure <-> SQL server and SQL Azure <-> SQL Azure synchronization (without writing single line of code); however, in some cases, the custom code shown in this blogpost provides flexibility that is not available with Data SYNC. For instance, filtering is not supported in the SQL Azure DATA SYNC CTP2; if you wish to have such a functionality now, then you have the option of developing a custom code using SYNC Framework. Now, this code can be easily extended to synchronize at some schedule. Let us say we want the databases to get synchronized every day at 10:00 pm. This is what the code will look like now: (http://parasdoshi1989.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/code-snippet-2-for-extending-sql-azure-with-azure-worker-role.pdf) Don’t you think that by writing such a code, we are imitating the functionality provided by the SQL server agent for a SQL server? Think about it. We are scheduling our administrative task by writing custom code – in other words, we have developed a “Light weight SQL server agent for SQL Azure!” Since the SQL server agent is not currently available in cloud, we have developed a solution that enables us to schedule tasks, and thus we have extended SQL Azure with the Azure worker role! Now if you wish to track jobs, you can do so by storing this data in SQL Azure (or Azure tables). The reason is that Windows Azure is a stateless platform, and we will need to store the state of the job ourselves and the choice that you have is SQL Azure or Azure tables. Note that this solution requires custom code and also it is not UI driven; however, for now, it can act as a temporary solution until SQL server agent is made available in the cloud. Moreover, this solution does not encompass functionalities that a SQL server agent provides, but it does open up an interesting avenue to schedule some of the tasks such as backup and synchronization of SQL Azure databases by writing some custom code in the Azure worker role. Now, let us see one more possibility – i.e., running BCP through a worker role in Azure-hosted services and then uploading the backup files either locally or on blobs. If you upload it locally, then consider the data transfer cost. If you upload it to blobs residing in the same datacenter, then no transfer cost applies but the cost on blob size applies. So, before choosing the option, you need to evaluate your preferences keeping the cost associated with each option in mind. In this article, I have shown that Azure worker role solution could be developed to synchronize SQL Azure databases. Moreover, a light-weight SQL server agent for SQL Azure can be developed. Also we discussed the possibility of running BCP through a worker role in Azure-hosted services for backing up our precious SQL Azure data. Thus, we can extend SQL Azure with the Azure worker role. But remember: you will be charged for running Azure worker roles. So at the end of the day, you need to ask – am I willing to build a custom code and pay money to achieve this functionality? I hope you found this blog post interesting. If you have any questions/feedback, you can comment below or you can mail me at Paras[at]student-partners[dot]com Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Azure, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Microsoft TechEd 2010 - Day 3 @ Bangalore

  - by sathya

  Microsoft TechEd 2010 - Day 3 @ Bangalore Sorry for my delayed post on day 3 because I had to travel from Blore to Chennai So I couldnt write for the past two days. On day 3 as usual we had lot of simultaneous tracks on various sessions. This day I choose the Your Data, Our Platform Track. It had sessions on the following 5 topics :   Developing Data-tier Applications in Visual Studio 2010 - by Sanjay Nagamangalam SQL Server Query Optimization, Execution and Debugging Query Performance - by Vinod Kumar M SQL Server Utility - Its about more than 1 SQL Server - by Vinod Kumar Jagannathan Data Recovery / Consistency with CheckDB - by Vinod Kumar M Developing with SQL Server Spatial and Deep dive into Spatial Indexing - by Pinal Dave Developing Data-tier Applications in Visual Studio 2010 - by Sanjay Nagamangalam This was one of the superb sessions i have attended. He explained all the concepts in detail with a demo. The important thing in this is there is something called Data-Tier application project which is newly introduced in this VS2010 with which we can manage all our data along with our application inside our VS itself. We can create DB,Tables,Procs,Views etc. here itself and once we deploy it creates a compressed file called .dacpac which stores all the changes in Table Schema,Created procs, etc. on to that single file which reduces our (developer's) effort in preparing the deployment scripts and giving it to the DBA. It also has some policy configurations which can be managed easily by checking some rules like in outlook. For Ex : IF the SQL Server Version > 10 then deploy else dont. This rule specifies that even if we try to deploy on SQL Server DB with version less than 10 It will not do it. And if we deploy some .dacpac to SQL server production db with the option upgrade DB with this dacpac once everything completes successfully it will say success else it rollsback to the prior version. Even if it gets deployed successfully and later @ a point of time you wish to revert it back to the prior version, you can go ahead and delete the existing dacpac version so that it reverts to the older version of the db changes. And for the good questions that were asked in the session T-Shirts were given. SQL Server Query Optimization, Execution and Debugging Query Performance - by Vinod Kumar M This one too was the best session. The speaker Vinod explained everything very much clearly. This was really useful session and you dont believe, as per my knowledge, in the total 3 days in the TechEd except the Keynote, for this session seats were full (House FULL)  People were even standing out to attend this session. Such a great one it was. The speaker did a deep dive in to the Query Plan section and showed which actually causes the problem. Its all about the thing that we need to understand about the execution of SQL server Queries. We think in a way and SQL Server never executes in that way. We need to understand that first. He also told about there might be two plans generated for a single query at a point of time because of parallel processors in the system. The Key is here in every query. There is something called Estimated Row Count and Actual Row Count in the query plan. If the estimated row count by SQL server tallies with the actual row count your performance will be awesome. He said some tweaks to achieve the same. After this as usual we had lunch SQL Server Utility - Its about more than 1 SQL Server - by Vinod Kumar Jagannathan This was more of a DBA's session. Am really sorry I was totally blank and I was not interested to attend this session and walked out to attend Migrating to the cloud by Harish Ranganathan (My favorite Speaker) but unfortunately that was some other persons session. There the speaker was telling about how to configure the connection strings in such a way that we can connect to the SQL Azure platform from our VS and also showed us how to deploy the same in to Windows Azure. In between there were lot of technical problems like laptop hang, user locked and he was switching between systems, also i came in the half so i wasnt able to listen that fully. In between, Since I got an MCTS certification they gave me T-Shirt with the lines 'Iam Certified. Are you?' and they asked me to wear that. If we wear that we might get spotted and they would give us some goodies  So on the 3rd day I was wearing that T-Shirt. I got spotted by the person Tarun who was coordinating things about the certification, and he was accompanied with a cameraman and they interviewed me about the certification and I was shown live in the Teched and was seen by 60000 live viewers of the TechEd. I was really happy on that. Data Recovery / Consistency with CheckDB - by Vinod Kumar M This was one of the best sessions too in the TechEd. This guy is really amazing. In front of us he crashed a DB and showed how to recover the same in 6 different ways for different no of failures. Showed about Different types of error msgs like : 823,824,825 msdb..suspect_pages DBCC CheckDB (different parameters to it) I am really waiting for his session to get uploaded live in the Teched Website. Here is his contact info If you wish to connect to him : Twitter : @vinodk_sql Website : www.ExtremeExperts.com Blog : http://blogs.sqlxml.org/vinodkumar Developing with SQL Server Spatial and Deep dive into Spatial Indexing - by Pinal Dave Pinal Dave is a King in SQL and he is a SQL MVP and he is the owner of SQLAuthority.com He took the session on Spatial Databases from the start. Showed about the different types of Spatial : Geometric and Geographic Geometric : x and y axis its a planar surface Geographic : Spherical surface with 3600  as the maximum which is used to represent the geographic points on the earth and easy to draw maps of different kinds. He had a lot of obstacles during his session like rain coming inside the hall, mic wires got bursted due to rain, Videos off on the display screens. In spite of that he asked the audience to come in the front rows and managed to take a good session without ppts and finally we got the displays on and he was showing demos on the same what he explained orally. That was really a fun filled informative session. He gave some books for the persons who asked good questions and answered well for his questions and I got one too  (It was a book on Data Mining - Wrox Publishers) And finally after all these things there was Keynote session for close of the TechEd. and we all assembled in a big hall where Mr.Ashok Soota, a man of age around 70  co-founder of Mindtree was called to give some lecture on his successes. He was explaining about his past and what all companies he switched and for what reasons and what are all his successes and what are all his failures and the learnings of him from his past failures. and his success and failures on his partnerships with the other concern. And there were some questions for him like What is your suggestion on young entrepreneur? How did you learn from past failures? What is reiterating your success? What is your suggestion on partnerships? How to choose partnerships? etc. And they said @ 7.30 Pm there would be a party night, but unfortunately i was not able to attend that because I had to catch my train and before that i had to pack things, so I started @ 7 itself. Thats it about the TechED!!! Stay tuned for further Technology updates.

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• RequestValidation Changes in ASP.NET 4.0

  - by Rick Strahl

  There’s been a change in the way the ValidateRequest attribute on WebForms works in ASP.NET 4.0. I noticed this today while updating a post on my WebLog all of which contain raw HTML and so all pretty much trigger request validation. I recently upgraded this app from ASP.NET 2.0 to 4.0 and it’s now failing to update posts. At first this was difficult to track down because of custom error handling in my app – the custom error handler traps the exception and logs it with only basic error information so the full detail of the error was initially hidden. After some more experimentation in development mode the error that occurs is the typical ASP.NET validate request error (‘A potentially dangerous Request.Form value was detetected…’) which looks like this in ASP.NET 4.0: At first when I got this I was real perplexed as I didn’t read the entire error message and because my page does have: <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="NewEntry.aspx.cs" Inherits="Westwind.WebLog.NewEntry" MasterPageFile="~/App_Templates/Standard/AdminMaster.master" ValidateRequest="false" EnableEventValidation="false" EnableViewState="false" %> WTF? ValidateRequest would seem like it should be enough, but alas in ASP.NET 4.0 apparently that setting alone is no longer enough. Reading the fine print in the error explains that you need to explicitly set the requestValidationMode for the application back to V2.0 in web.config: <httpRuntime executionTimeout="300" requestValidationMode="2.0" /> Kudos for the ASP.NET team for putting up a nice error message that tells me how to fix this problem, but excuse me why the heck would you change this behavior to require an explicit override to an optional and by default disabled page level switch? You’ve just made a relatively simple fix to a solution a nasty morass of hard to discover configuration settings??? The original way this worked was perfectly discoverable via attributes in the page. Now you can set this setting in the page and get completely unexpected behavior and you are required to set what effectively amounts to a backwards compatibility flag in the configuration file. It turns out the real reason for the .config flag is that the request validation behavior has moved from WebForms pipeline down into the entire ASP.NET/IIS request pipeline and is now applied against all requests. Here’s what the breaking changes page from Microsoft says about it: The request validation feature in ASP.NET provides a certain level of default protection against cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. In previous versions of ASP.NET, request validation was enabled by default. However, it applied only to ASP.NET pages (.aspx files and their class files) and only when those pages were executing. In ASP.NET 4, by default, request validation is enabled for all requests, because it is enabled before the BeginRequest phase of an HTTP request. As a result, request validation applies to requests for all ASP.NET resources, not just .aspx page requests. This includes requests such as Web service calls and custom HTTP handlers. Request validation is also active when custom HTTP modules are reading the contents of an HTTP request. As a result, request validation errors might now occur for requests that previously did not trigger errors. To revert to the behavior of the ASP.NET 2.0 request validation feature, add the following setting in the Web.config file: <httpRuntime requestValidationMode="2.0" /> However, we recommend that you analyze any request validation errors to determine whether existing handlers, modules, or other custom code accesses potentially unsafe HTTP inputs that could be XSS attack vectors. Ok, so ValidateRequest of the form still works as it always has but it’s actually the ASP.NET Event Pipeline, not WebForms that’s throwing the above exception as request validation is applied to every request that hits the pipeline. Creating the runtime override removes the HttpRuntime checking and restores the WebForms only behavior. That fixes my immediate problem but still leaves me wondering especially given the vague wording of the above explanation. One thing that’s missing in the description is above is one important detail: The request validation is applied only to application/x-www-form-urlencoded POST content not to all inbound POST data. When I first read this this freaked me out because it sounds like literally ANY request hitting the pipeline is affected. To make sure this is not really so I created a quick handler: public class Handler1 : IHttpHandler { public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) { context.Response.ContentType = "text/plain"; context.Response.Write("Hello World <hr>" + context.Request.Form.ToString()); } public bool IsReusable { get { return false; } } } and called it with Fiddler by posting some XML to the handler using a default form-urlencoded POST content type: and sure enough – hitting the handler also causes the request validation error and 500 server response. Changing the content type to text/xml effectively fixes the problem however, bypassing the request validation filter so Web Services/AJAX handlers and custom modules/handlers that implement custom protocols aren’t affected as long as they work with special input content types. It also looks that multipart encoding does not trigger event validation of the runtime either so this request also works fine: POST http://rasnote/weblog/handler1.ashx HTTP/1.1 Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=------7cf2a327f01ae User-Agent: West Wind Internet Protocols 5.53 Host: rasnote Content-Length: 40 Pragma: no-cache <xml>asdasd</xml>--------7cf2a327f01ae *That* probably should trigger event validation – since it is a potential HTML form submission, but it doesn’t. New Runtime Feature, Global Scope Only? Ok, so request validation is now a runtime feature but sadly it’s a feature that’s scoped to the ASP.NET Runtime – effective scope to the entire running application/app domain. You can still manually force validation using Request.ValidateInput() which gives you the option to do this in code, but that realistically will only work with the requestValidationMode set to V2.0 as well since the 4.0 mode auto-fires before code ever gets a chance to intercept the call. Given all that, the new setting in ASP.NET 4.0 seems to limit options and makes things more difficult and less flexible. Of course Microsoft gets to say ASP.NET is more secure by default because of it but what good is that if you have to turn off this flag the very first time you need to allow one single request that bypasses request validation??? This is really shortsighted design… <sigh>© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET  

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• Life Technologies: Making Life Easier to Manage

  - by Michael Snow

  12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} When we’re thinking about customer engagement, we’re acutely aware of all the forces at play competing for our customer’s attention. Solutions that make life easier for our customers draw attention to themselves. We tend to engage more when there is a distinct benefit and we can take a deep breath and accept that there is hope in the world and everything isn’t designed to frustrate us and make our lives miserable. (sigh…) When products are designed to automate processes that were consuming hours of our time with no relief in sight, they deserve to be recognized. One of our recent Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Award Winners in the WebCenter category, Life Technologies, has recently posted a video promoting their “award winning” solution. The Oracle Innovation Awards are part of the overall Oracle Excellence awards given to customers for innovation with Oracle products. More info here. Their award nomination included this description: Life Technologies delivered the My Life Service Portal as part of a larger Digital Hub strategy. This Portal is the first of its kind in the biotechnology service providing industry. The Portal provides access to Life Technologies cloud based service monitoring system where all customer deployed instruments can be remotely monitored and proactively repaired. The portal provides alerts from these cloud based monitoring services directly to the customer and to Life Technologies Field Engineers. The Portal provides insight into the instruments and services customers purchased for the purpose of analyzing and anticipating future customer needs and creating targeted sales and service programs. This portal not only provides benefits for Life Technologies internal sales and service teams but provides customers a central place to track all pertinent instrument information including: instrument service history instrument status and previous activities instrument performance analytics planned service visits warranty/contract information discussion forums social networks for lab management and collaboration alerts and notifications on all of the above team scheduling for instrument usage promote optional reagents required to keep instruments performing From their website The Life Technologies Instruments & Services Portal Helps You Save Time and Gain Peace of Mind Introducing the new, award-winning, free online tool that enables easier management of your instrument use and care, faster response to requests for service or service quotes, and instant sharing of key instrument and service information with your colleagues. Now – this unto itself is obviously beneficial for their customers who were previously burdened with having to do all of these tasks separately, manually and inconsistently by nature. Now – all in one place and free to their customers – a portal that ties it all together. They now have built the platform to give their customers yet another reason to do business with them – Their headline on their product page says it all: “Life is now easier to manage - All your instrument use and care in one place – the no-cost, no-hassle Instruments and Services Portal.” Of course – it’s very convenient that the company name includes “Life” and now can also promote to their clients and prospects that doing business with them is easy and their sophisticated lab equipment is easy to manage. In an industry full of PhD’s – “Easy” isn’t usually the first word that comes to mind, but Life Technologies has now tied the word to their brand in a very eloquent way. Between our work lives and family or personal lives, getting any mono-focused minutes of dedicated attention has become such a rare occurrence in our current era of multi-tasking that those moments of focus are highly prized. So – when something is done really well – so well that it becomes captivating and urges sharing impulses – I take notice and dig deeper and most of the time I discover other gems not so hidden below the surface. And then I share with those I know would enjoy and understand. In the spirit of full disclosure, I must admit here that the first person I shared the videos below with was my daughter. She’s in her senior year of high school in the midst of her college search. She’s passionate about her academics and has already decided that she wants to study Neuroscience in college and like her mother will be in for the long haul to a PhD eventually. In a summer science program at Smith College 2 summers ago – she sent the family famous text to me – “I just dissected a sheep’s brain – wicked cool!” – This was followed by an equally memorable text this past summer in a research mentorship in Neuroscience at UConn – “Just sliced up some rat brain. Reminded me of a deli slicer at the supermarket… sorry I forgot to call last night…” So… needless to say – I knew I had an audience that would enjoy and understand these videos below and are now being shared among her science classmates and faculty. And evidently - so does Life Technologies! They’ve done a great job on these making them fun and something that will easily be shared among their customers social networks. They’ve created a neuro-archetypal character, “Ph.Diddy” and know that their world of clients in academics, research, and other institutions would understand and enjoy the “edutainment” value in this series of videos on their YouTube channel that pokes fun at the stereotypes while also promoting their products at the same time. They use their Facebook page for additional engagement with their clients and as another venue to promote these videos. Enjoy this one as well! More to be found here: http://www.youtube.com/lifetechnologies Stay tuned to this Oracle WebCenter blog channel. Tomorrow we'll be taking a look at another winner of the Innovation Awards, LADWP - helping to keep the citizens of Los Angeles engaged with their Water and Power provider.

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• Fragmented Log files could be slowing down your database

  - by Fatherjack

  Something that is sometimes forgotten by a lot of DBAs is the fact that database log files get fragmented in the same way that you get fragmentation in a data file. The cause is very different but the effect is the same – too much effort reading and writing data. Data files get fragmented as data is changed through normal system activity, INSERTs, UPDATEs and DELETEs cause fragmentation and most experienced DBAs are monitoring their indexes for fragmentation and dealing with it accordingly. However, you don’t hear about so many working on their log files. How can a log file get fragmented? I’m glad you asked. When you create a database there are at least two files created on the disk storage; an mdf for the data and an ldf for the log file (you can also have ndf files for extra data storage but that’s off topic for now). It is wholly possible to have more than one log file but in most cases there is little point in creating more than one as the log file is written to in a ‘wrap-around’ method (more on that later). When a log file is created at the time that a database is created the file is actually sub divided into a number of virtual log files (VLFs). The number and size of these VLFs depends on the size chosen for the log file. VLFs are also created in the space added to a log file when a log file growth event takes place. Do you have your log files set to auto grow? Then you have potentially been introducing many VLFs into your log file. Let’s get to see how many VLFs we have in a brand new database. USE master GO CREATE DATABASE VLF_Test ON ( NAME = VLF_Test, FILENAME = 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.ROCK_2008\MSSQL\DATA\VLF_Test.mdf', SIZE = 100, MAXSIZE = 500, FILEGROWTH = 50 ) LOG ON ( NAME = VLF_Test_Log, FILENAME = 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.ROCK_2008\MSSQL\DATA\VLF_Test_log.ldf', SIZE = 5MB, MAXSIZE = 250MB, FILEGROWTH = 5MB ); go USE VLF_Test go DBCC LOGINFO; The results of this are firstly a new database is created with specified files sizes and the the DBCC LOGINFO results are returned to the script editor. The DBCC LOGINFO results have plenty of interesting information in them but lets first note there are 4 rows of information, this relates to the fact that 4 VLFs have been created in the log file. The values in the FileSize column are the sizes of each VLF in bytes, you will see that the last one to be created is slightly larger than the others. So, a 5MB log file has 4 VLFs of roughly 1.25 MB. Lets alter the CREATE DATABASE script to create a log file that’s a bit bigger and see what happens. Alter the code above so that the log file details are replaced by LOG ON ( NAME = VLF_Test_Log, FILENAME = 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.ROCK_2008\MSSQL\DATA\VLF_Test_log.ldf', SIZE = 1GB, MAXSIZE = 25GB, FILEGROWTH = 1GB ); With a bigger log file specified we get more VLFs What if we make it bigger again? LOG ON ( NAME = VLF_Test_Log, FILENAME = 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.ROCK_2008\MSSQL\DATA\VLF_Test_log.ldf', SIZE = 5GB, MAXSIZE = 250GB, FILEGROWTH = 5GB ); This time we see more VLFs are created within our log file. We now have our 5GB log file comprised of 16 files of 320MB each. In fact these sizes fall into all the ranges that control the VLF creation criteria – what a coincidence! The rules that are followed when a log file is created or has it’s size increased are pretty basic. If the file growth is lower than 64MB then 4 VLFs are created If the growth is between 64MB and 1GB then 8 VLFs are created If the growth is greater than 1GB then 16 VLFs are created. Now the potential for chaos comes if the default values and settings for log file growth are used. By default a database log file gets a 1MB log file with unlimited growth in steps of 10%. The database we just created is 6 MB, let’s add some data and see what happens. USE vlf_test go -- we need somewhere to put the data so, a table is in order IF OBJECT_ID('A_Table') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE A_Table go CREATE TABLE A_Table ( Col_A int IDENTITY, Col_B CHAR(8000) ) GO -- Let's check the state of the log file -- 4 VLFs found EXECUTE ('DBCC LOGINFO'); go -- We can go ahead and insert some data and then check the state of the log file again INSERT A_Table (col_b) SELECT TOP 500 REPLICATE('a',2000) FROM sys.columns AS sc, sys.columns AS sc2 GO -- insert 500 rows and we get 22 VLFs EXECUTE ('DBCC LOGINFO'); go -- Let's insert more rows INSERT A_Table (col_b) SELECT TOP 2000 REPLICATE('a',2000) FROM sys.columns AS sc, sys.columns AS sc2 GO 10 -- insert 2000 rows, in 10 batches and we suddenly have 107 VLFs EXECUTE ('DBCC LOGINFO'); Well, that escalated quickly! Our log file is split, internally, into 107 fragments after a few thousand inserts. The same happens with any logged transactions, I just chose to illustrate this with INSERTs. Having too many VLFs can cause performance degradation at times of database start up, log backup and log restore operations so it’s well worth keeping a check on this property. How do we prevent excessive VLF creation? Creating the database with larger files and also with larger growth steps and actively choosing to grow your databases rather than leaving it to the Auto Grow event can make sure that the growths are made with a size that is optimal. How do we resolve a situation of a database with too many VLFs? This process needs to be done when the database is under little or no stress so that you don’t affect system users. The steps are: BACKUP LOG YourDBName TO YourBackupDestinationOfChoice Shrink the log file to its smallest possible size DBCC SHRINKFILE(FileNameOfTLogHere, TRUNCATEONLY) * Re-size the log file to the size you want it to, taking in to account your expected needs for the coming months or year. ALTER DATABASE YourDBName MODIFY FILE ( NAME = FileNameOfTLogHere, SIZE = TheSizeYouWantItToBeIn_MB) * – If you don’t know the file name of your log file then run sp_helpfile while you are connected to the database that you want to work on and you will get the details you need. The resize step can take quite a while This is already detailed far better than I can explain it by Kimberley Tripp in her blog 8-Steps-to-better-Transaction-Log-throughput.aspx. The result of this will be a log file with a VLF count according to the bullet list above. Knowing when VLFs are being created By complete coincidence while I have been writing this blog (it’s been quite some time from it’s inception to going live) Jonathan Kehayias from SQLSkills.com has written a great article on how to track database file growth using Event Notifications and Service Broker. I strongly recommend taking a look at it as this is going to catch any sneaky auto grows that take place and let you know about them right away. Hassle free monitoring of VLFs If you are lucky or wise enough to be using SQL Monitor or another monitoring tool that let’s you write your own custom metrics then you can keep an eye on this very easily. There is a custom metric for VLFs (written by Stuart Ainsworth) already on the site and there are some others there are very useful so take a moment or two to look around while you are there. Resources MSDN – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms179355(v=sql.105).aspx Kimberly Tripp from SQLSkills.com – http://www.sqlskills.com/BLOGS/KIMBERLY/post/8-Steps-to-better-Transaction-Log-throughput.aspx Thomas LaRock at Simple-Talk.com – http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/database-administration/monitoring-sql-server-virtual-log-file-fragmentation/ Disclosure I am a Friend of Red Gate. This means that I am more than likely to say good things about Red Gate DBA and Developer tools. No matter how awesome I make them sound, take the time to compare them with other products before you contact the Red Gate sales team to make your order.

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• Career development as a Software Developer without becoming a manager.

  - by albertpascual

  I’m a developer, I like to write new exciting code everyday, my perfect day at work is a day that when I wake up, I know that I have to write some code that I haven’t done before or to use a new framework/language/platform that is unknown to me. The best days in the office is when a project is waiting for me to architect or write. In my 15 years in the development field, I had to in order to get a better salary to manage people, not just to lead developers, to actually manage people. Something that I found out when I get into a management position is that I’m not that good at managing people, and not afraid to say it. I do not enjoy that part of the job, the worse one, takes time away from what I really like. Leading developers and managing people are very different things. I do like teaching and leading developers in a project. Yet most people believe, and is true in most companies, the way to get a better salary is to be promoted to a manager position. In order to advance in your career you need to let go of the everyday writing code and become a supervisor or manager. This is the path for developers after they become senior developers. As you get older and your family grows, the only way to hit your salary requirements is to advance your career to become a manager and get that manager salary. That path is the common in most companies, the most intelligent companies out there, have learned that promoting good developers mean getting a crappy manager and losing a good resource. Now scratch everything I said, because as I previously stated, I don’t see myself going to the office everyday and just managing people until is time to go home. I like to spend hours working in some code to accomplish a task, learning new platforms and languages or patterns to existing languages. Being interrupted every 15 minutes by emails or people stopping by my office to resolve their problems, is not something I could enjoy. All the sudden riding my motorcycle to work one cold morning over the Redlands Canyon and listening to .NET Rocks podcast, Michael “Doc” Norton explaining how to take control of your development career without necessary going to the manager’s track. I know, I should not have headphones under my helmet when riding a motorcycle in California. His conversation with Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell was just confirming everything I have ever did with actually more details and assuring that there are other paths. His method was simple yet most of us, already do many of those steps, Mr. Michael “Doc” Norton believe that it pays off on the long run, that finally companies prefer to pay higher salaries to those developers, yet I would actually think that many companies do not see developers that way, this is not true for bigger companies. However I do believe the value of those developers increase and most of the time, changing companies could increase their salary instead of staying in the same one. In short without even trying to get into the shadow of Mr. Norton and without following the steps in the order; you should love to learn new technologies, and then teach them to other geeks. I personally have learn many technologies and I haven’t stop doing that, I am a professor at UCR where I teach ASP.NET and Silverlight. Mr Norton continues that after than, you want to be involve in the development community, user groups, online forums, open source projects. I personally talk to user groups, I’m very active in forums asking and answering questions as well as for those I got awarded the Microsoft MVP for ASP.NET. After you accomplish all those, you should also expose yourself for what you know and what you do not know, learning a new language will make you humble again as well as extremely happy. There is no better feeling that learning a new language or pattern in your daily job. If you love your job everyday and what you do, I really recommend you to follow Michael’s presentation that he kindly share it on the link below. His confirmation is a refreshing, knowing that my future is not behind a desk where the computer screen is on my right hand side instead of in front of me. Where I don’t have to spent the days filling up performance forms for people and the new platforms that I haven’t been using yet are just at my fingertips. Presentation here. http://www.slideshare.net/LeanDog/take-control-of-your-development-career-michael-doc-norton?from=share_email_logout3 Take Control of Your Development Career Welcome! Michael “Doc” Norton @DocOnDev http://docondev.blogspot.com/ [email protected] Recovering Post Technical I love to learn I love to teach I love to work in teams I love to write code I really love to write code What about YOU? Do you love your job? Do you love your Employer? Do you love your Boss? What do you love? What do you really love? Take Control Take Control • Get Noticed • Get Together • Get Your Mojo • Get Naked • Get Schooled Get Noticed Get Noticed Know Your Business Get Noticed Get Noticed Understand Management Get Noticed Get Noticed Do Your Existing Job Get Noticed Get Noticed Make Yourself Expendable Get Together Get Together Join a User Group Get Together Help Run a User Group Get Together Start a User Group Get Your Mojo Get Your Mojo Kata Get Your Mojo Koans Get Your Mojo Breakable Toys Get Your Mojo Open Source Get Naked Get Naked Run with Group A Get Naked Do Something Different Get Naked Own Your Mistakes Get Naked Admit You Don’t Know Get Schooled Get Schooled Choose a Mentor Get Schooled Attend Conferences Get Schooled Teach a New Subject Get Started Read These (Again) Take Control of Your Development Career Thank You! Michael “Doc” Norton @DocOnDev http://docondev.blogspot.com/ [email protected] In a short summary, I recommend any developer to check his blog and more important his presentation, I haven’t been lucky enough to watch him live, I’m looking forward the day I have the opportunity. He is giving us hope in the future of developers, when I see some of my geek friends moving to position that in short years they begin to regret, I get more unsure of my future doing what I love. I would say that now is looking at the spectrum of companies that understand and appreciate developers. There are a few there, hopefully with time code sweat shops will start disappearing and being a developer will feed a family of 4. Cheers Al tweetmeme_url = 'http://weblogs.asp.net/albertpascual/archive/2010/12/07/career-development-as-a-software-developer-without-becoming-a-manager.aspx'; tweetmeme_source = 'alpascual';

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• Developer’s Life – Attitude and Communication – They Can Cause Problems – Notes from the Field #027

  - by Pinal Dave

  [Note from Pinal]: This is a 27th episode of Notes from the Field series. The biggest challenge for anyone is to understand human nature. We human have so many things on our mind at any moment of time. There are cases when what we say is not what we mean and there are cases where what we mean we do not say. We do say and things as per our mood and our agenda in mind. Sometimes there are incidents when our attitude creates confusion in the communication and we end up creating a situation which is absolutely not warranted. In this episode of the Notes from the Field series database expert Mike Walsh explains a very crucial issue we face in our career, which is not technical but more to relate to human nature. Read on this may be the best blog post you might read in recent times. In this week’s note from the field, I’m taking a slight departure from technical knowledge and concepts explained. We’ll be back to it next week, I’m sure. Pinal wanted us to explain some of the issues we bump into and how we see some of our customers arrive at problem situations and how we have helped get them back on the right track. Often it is a technical problem we are officially solving – but in a lot of cases as a consultant, we are really helping fix some communication difficulties. This is a technical blog post and not an “advice column” in a newspaper – but the longer I am a consultant, the more years I add to my experience in technology the more I learn that the vast majority of the problems we encounter have “soft skills” included in the chain of causes for the issue we are helping overcome. This is not going to be exhaustive but I hope that sharing four pieces of advice inspired by real issues starts a process of searching for places where we can be the cause of these challenges and look at fixing them in ourselves. Or perhaps we can begin looking at resolving them in teams that we manage. I’ll share three statements that I’ve either heard, read or said and talk about some of the communication or attitude challenges highlighted by the statement. 1 – “But that’s the SAN Administrator’s responsibility…” I heard that early on in my consulting career when talking with a customer who had serious corruption and no good recent backups – potentially no good backups at all. The statement doesn’t have to be this one exactly, but the attitude here is an attitude of “my job stops here, and I don’t care about the intent or principle of why I’m here.” It’s also a situation of having the attitude that as long as there is someone else to blame, I’m fine…  You see in this case, the DBA had a suspicion that the backups were not being handled right.  They were the DBA and they knew that they had responsibility to ensure SQL backups were good to go – it’s a basic requirement of a production DBA. In my “As A DBA Where Do I start?!” presentation, I argue that is job #1 of a DBA. But in this case, the thought was that there was someone else to blame. Rather than create extra work and take on responsibility it was decided to just let it be another team’s responsibility. This failed the company, the company’s customers and no one won. As technologists – we should strive to go the extra mile. If there is a lack of clarity around roles and responsibilities and we know it – we should push to get it resolved. Especially as the DBAs who should act as the advocates of the data contained in the databases we are responsible for. 2 – “We’ve always done it this way, it’s never caused a problem before!” Complacency. I have to say that many failures I’ve been paid good money to help recover from would have not happened had it been for an attitude of complacency. If any thoughts like this have entered your mind about your situation you may be suffering from it. If, while reading this, you get this sinking feeling in your stomach about that one thing you know should be fixed but haven’t done it.. Why don’t you stop and go fix it then come back.. “We should have better backups, but we’re on a SAN so we should be fine really.” “Technically speaking that could happen, but what are the chances?” “We’ll just clean that up as a fast follow” ..and so on. In the age of tightening IT budgets, increased expectations of up time, availability and performance there is no room for complacency. Our customers and business units expect – no demand – the best. Complacency says “we will give you second best or hopefully good enough and we accept the risk and know this may hurt us later. Sometimes an organization will opt for “good enough” and I agree with the concept that at times the perfect can be the enemy of the good. But when we make those decisions in a vacuum and are not reporting them up and discussing them as an organization that is different. That is us unilaterally choosing to do something less than the best and purposefully playing a game of chance. 3 – “This device must accept interference from other devices but not create any” I’ve paraphrased this one – but it’s something the Federal Communications Commission – a federal agency in the United States that regulates electronic communication – requires of all manufacturers of any device that could cause or receive interference electronically. I blogged in depth about this here (http://www.straightpathsql.com/archives/2011/07/relationship-advice-from-the-fcc/) so I won’t go into much detail other than to say this… If we all operated more on the premise that we should do our best to not be the cause of conflict, and to be less easily offended and less upset when we perceive offense life would be easier in many areas! This doesn’t always cause the issues we are called in to help out. Not directly. But where we see it is in unhealthy relationships between the various technology teams at a client. We’ll see teams hoarding knowledge, not sharing well with others and almost working against other teams instead of working with them. If you trace these problems back far enough it often stems from someone or some group of people violating this principle from the FCC. To Sum It Up Technology problems are easy to solve. At Linchpin People we help many customers get past the toughest technological challenge – and at the end of the day it is really just a repeatable process of pattern based troubleshooting, logical thinking and starting at the beginning and carefully stepping through to the end. It’s easy at the end of the day. The tough part of what we do as consultants is the people skills. Being able to help get teams working together, being able to help teams take responsibility, to improve team to team communication? That is the difficult part, and we get to use the soft skills on every engagement. Work on professional development (http://professionaldevelopment.sqlpass.org/) and see continuing improvement here, not just with technology. I can teach just about anyone how to be an excellent DBA and performance tuner, but some of these soft skills are much more difficult to teach. If you want to get started with performance analytics and triage of virtualized SQL Servers with the help of experts, read more over at Fix Your SQL Server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: Notes from the Field, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• Easier ASP.NET MVC Routing

  - by Steve Wilkes

  I've recently refactored the way Routes are declared in an ASP.NET MVC application I'm working on, and I wanted to share part of the system I came up with; a really easy way to declare and keep track of ASP.NET MVC Routes, which then allows you to find the name of the Route which has been selected for the current request. Traditional MVC Route Declaration Traditionally, ASP.NET MVC Routes are added to the application's RouteCollection using overloads of the RouteCollection.MapRoute() method; for example, this is the standard way the default Route which matches /controller/action URLs is created: routes.MapRoute(     "Default",     "{controller}/{action}/{id}",     new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional }); The first argument declares that this Route is to be named 'Default', the second specifies the Route's URL pattern, and the third contains the URL pattern segments' default values. To then write a link to a URL which matches the default Route in a View, you can use the HtmlHelper.RouteLink() method, like this: @ this.Html.RouteLink("Default", new { controller = "Orders", action = "Index" }) ...that substitutes 'Orders' into the {controller} segment of the default Route's URL pattern, and 'Index' into the {action} segment. The {Id} segment was declared optional and isn't specified here. That's about the most basic thing you can do with MVC routing, and I already have reservations: I've duplicated the magic string "Default" between the Route declaration and the use of RouteLink(). This isn't likely to cause a problem for the default Route, but once you get to dozens of Routes the duplication is a pain. There's no easy way to get from the RouteLink() method call to the declaration of the Route itself, so getting the names of the Route's URL parameters correct requires some effort. The call to MapRoute() is quite verbose; with dozens of Routes this gets pretty ugly. If at some point during a request I want to find out the name of the Route has been matched.... and I can't. To get around these issues, I wanted to achieve the following: Make declaring a Route very easy, using as little code as possible. Introduce a direct link between where a Route is declared, where the Route is defined and where the Route's name is used, so I can use Visual Studio's Go To Definition to get from a call to RouteLink() to the declaration of the Route I'm using, making it easier to make sure I use the correct URL parameters. Create a way to access the currently-selected Route's name during the execution of a request. My first step was to come up with a quick and easy syntax for declaring Routes. 1 . An Easy Route Declaration Syntax I figured the easiest way of declaring a route was to put all the information in a single string with a special syntax. For example, the default MVC route would be declared like this: "{controller:Home}/{action:Index}/{Id}*" This contains the same information as the regular way of defining a Route, but is far more compact: The default values for each URL segment are specified in a colon-separated section after the segment name The {Id} segment is declared as optional simply by placing a * after it That's the default route - a pretty simple example - so how about this? routes.MapRoute(     "CustomerOrderList",     "Orders/{customerRef}/{pageNo}",     new { controller = "Orders", action = "List", pageNo = UrlParameter.Optional },     new { customerRef = "^[a-zA-Z0-9]+$", pageNo = "^[0-9]+$" }); This maps to the List action on the Orders controller URLs which: Start with the string Orders/ Then have a {customerRef} set of characters and numbers Then optionally a numeric {pageNo}. And again, it’s quite verbose. Here's my alternative: "Orders/{customerRef:^[a-zA-Z0-9]+$}/{pageNo:^[0-9]+$}*->Orders/List" Quite a bit more brief, and again, containing the same information as the regular way of declaring Routes: Regular expression constraints are declared after the colon separator, the same as default values The target controller and action are specified after the -> The {pageNo} is defined as optional by placing a * after it With an appropriate parser that gave me a nice, compact and clear way to declare routes. Next I wanted to have a single place where Routes were declared and accessed. 2. A Central Place to Declare and Access Routes I wanted all my Routes declared in one, dedicated place, which I would also use for Route names when calling RouteLink(). With this in mind I made a single class named Routes with a series of public, constant fields, each one relating to a particular Route. With this done, I figured a good place to actually declare each Route was in an attribute on the field defining the Route’s name; the attribute would parse the Route definition string and make the resulting Route object available as a property. I then made the Routes class examine its own fields during its static setup, and cache all the attribute-created Route objects in an internal Dictionary. Finally I made Routes use that cache to register the Routes when requested, and to access them later when required. So the Routes class declares its named Routes like this: public static class Routes{     [RouteDefinition("Orders/{customerName}->Orders/Index")]     public const string OrdersCustomerIndex = "OrdersCustomerIndex";     [RouteDefinition("Orders/{customerName}/{orderId:^([0-9]+)$}->Orders/Details")]     public const string OrdersDetails = "OrdersDetails";     [RouteDefinition("{controller:Home}*/{action:Index}*")]     public const string Default = "Default"; } ...which are then used like this: @ this.Html.RouteLink(Routes.Default, new { controller = "Orders", action = "Index" }) Now that using Go To Definition on the Routes.Default constant takes me to where the Route is actually defined, it's nice and easy to quickly check on the parameter names when using RouteLink(). Finally, I wanted to be able to access the name of the current Route during a request. 3. Recovering the Route Name The RouteDefinitionAttribute creates a NamedRoute class; a simple derivative of Route, but with a Name property. When the Routes class examines its fields and caches all the defined Routes, it has access to the name of the Route through the name of the field against which it is defined. It was therefore a pretty easy matter to have Routes give NamedRoute its name when it creates its cache of Routes. This means that the Route which is found in RequestContext.RouteData.Route is now a NamedRoute, and I can recover the Route's name during a request. For visibility, I made NamedRoute.ToString() return the Route name and URL pattern, like this: The screenshot is from an example project I’ve made on bitbucket; it contains all the named route classes and an MVC 3 application which demonstrates their use. I’ve found this way of defining and using Routes much tidier than the default MVC system, and you find it useful too

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 20, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 20, 2010New ProjectsaMaze Mapa Generator: Parte do Projeto aMazeASP.Net RIA Controls: Simple ASP.Net server controls to integrate Flash and Silverlight controls into your web applications. Included controls don't use any JavaScript,...BMap.NET: BMaps.NET is a .NET application written in C#, for access Bing Maps from your computer without web browsers. With it you can access to Bing Maps an...DaliNet: A .NET API for the Tridonic.Atco DALI USB device.Fabrica7: This is the main project of Fabrica 7 Corp.Image Ripper: A Winform application parse & fetch various HD pictures in specific photo galleries.IoCWrap: Provides interfaces which wrap various IoC container implementations so that it is possible to switch to a different provider without changing any ...NetSockets: NetSockets is a .NET class library that provides easy-to-use, multi-threaded, event-based, client and server network communication.Network Backup: Network Backup is a home and small company backup solution for workstations and a backup server. It incorporates a backup service, scheduler, data ...NUnit.Specs: Specification extensions for NUnit.Nutrivida: Sistema para avaliação de especialização.OHTB Snake: OHTB Snake is a multiplayer game. In this incarnation, snakes may eat 3 types of powerups: standard berries, causing them to grow; sawberries, caus...Playground TDrouen: Tjerk's PlaygroundPower Plan Chooser: This is my first endeavor into a C# Windows application with XAML. The program sits in the notification area (task bar) and lets you quickly activa...Search IMDB in C#: In lack of an IMDB API most of us resort to screen scraping utilities to query the Internet Movie Database. This one is written in C# (.NET 2.0 sta...SIGPRO Desktop: FUNCERNSql2008 PerfMonCounter Fix: Small console application to Fix the SQL 2008 Express Edition installation error: Pequena aplicação para Corrigir o seguinte erro de Instalação do...TwiztedTracker: TwiztedTracker designed to make your bug tracking easy.UmbracoXsltLogHelper: I needed a way to easily add log rows from my xslt macros, and added a single-line-extension for that reason. Then I played around with the umbraco...VisualStock: VisualStock is stock data visualization, analysis application build on the Micorsoft Composite Application Library.WHS File Mover: A Windows Home Server Plugin to move files from a local directory ("drop" or "staging" directory to a folder share)XML based Content Deployment in SharePoint: XML based Content Deployment in Sharepoint helps you to easy deploy content into SharePoint, including webs, lists, items, files and folder. You wi...New ReleasesASP.Net RIA Controls: Version 1.0 Beta: The first functionnal version.BMap.NET: BMap.NET 1: This is the 1st version of BMap.NETDigital Media Processing Project 1: Image Processor: Image Processor 1.0: All features implemented. Added: clipping imageFamily Tree Analyzer: Version 1.3.1.0: Version 1.3.1.0 Added a cancel button to marriage and children IGI Searches Opening Results window now automatically shows first record Updated IGI...Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts 3.0.5 Released: Hi, This release contains fix for the following bug: * Chart threw exception if ZoomingEnabled property was set to True at real-time. You ca...Homework Helper: Homework Helper v.1.1: Sorry but the latest release didn't seem to be the latest. This should be the right one!Image Ripper: Image Ripper: Image Ripper based on HtmlAgilityPack and GData library.ManPowerEngine: 0.1: UpdatesSound System added. Bitmap Collider in Physics System works now. Improved the performance of HTTP download in images Physics Framework...NIPO Data Processing Component Framework: NIPO 1.0: The first release of NIPO. Includes the NIPO binary dll and documentation. This release does not include a starter application since it is still in...patterns & practices SharePoint Guidance: SPG2010 Drop7: SharePoint Guidance Drop Notes Microsoft patterns and practices ****************************************** ***************************************...Photosynth Point Cloud Exporter: Photosynth Point Cloud Exporter 1.0.2: Photosynth webservice reference updated to work with the new site OBJ file format support added (Note: this format doesn't support vertex colors)Power Plan Chooser: Power Plan Chooser 1.0.0: Power Plan Chooser is a small utility that sits in the notification area (task bar) in Windows 7 and allows the user to quickly activate one of the...Restart Explorer: RestartExplorer Release 1.00.0001: Initial release: Start, stop and restart Windows Explorer with this utility.Search IMDB in C#: Search IMDB 1.0: Source code included with compiled example.SIMD Detector: 3rd Release: Added Intel AES instruction check Added a CSharp Winform NetSIMDDetector application. Changes the red ball and green ball images to red cross a...Sql2008 PerfMonCounter Fix: Sql2008FIx_PerfMonCounter.zip: Small console application to Fix the SQL 2008 Express Edition installation error: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300956 Rule Name PerfMonCounter...UmbracoXsltLogHelper: 0.9 Working Beta: First version. XsltLogHelper09 is the installable package.VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30319.0: Automatic drop of latest buildWCF RIA Services Contrib: RIA Services Contrib RC Release: This version is recompiled against the RC release of WCF RIA Services.XML based Content Deployment in SharePoint: SPContentDeployment 1.0.0.0: The first link contains the resources and a sample project. The second link contains everything included in the first package and an additional fo...Yet Another GPS: YAGPS Alfa.2: Yet another GPS tracker is a very powerful GPS track application for Windows Mobile Speed Guage, Sat Count number, KML for google map file formatZGuideTV.NET: ZGuideTV.NET 0.92: Vendredi 19 mars 2010 (ZGuideTV.NET bêta 9 build 0.92) - English below Corrections : - Gestion de certains contrôles dans l'écran principal. - Div...Most Popular ProjectsMetaSharpRawrWBFS ManagerSilverlight ToolkitASP.NET Ajax LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseAJAX Control ToolkitLiveUpload to FacebookWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMost Active ProjectsLINQ to TwitterRawrOData SDK for PHPjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesDirectQPHPExcelpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryBlogEngine.NETFarseer Physics EngineNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Module

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• SQL SERVER – A Quick Look at Logging and Ideas around Logging

  - by pinaldave

  This blog post is written in response to the T-SQL Tuesday post on Logging. When someone talks about logging, personally I get lots of ideas about it. I have seen logging as a very generic term. Let me ask you this question first before I continue writing about logging. What is the first thing comes to your mind when you hear word “Logging”? Now ask the same question to the guy standing next to you. I am pretty confident that you will get  a different answer from different people. I decided to do this activity and asked 5 SQL Server person the same question. Question: What is the first thing comes to your mind when you hear the word “Logging”? Strange enough I got a different answer every single time. Let me just list what answer I got from my friends. Let us go over them one by one. Output Clause The very first person replied output clause. Pretty interesting answer to start with. I see what exactly he was thinking. SQL Server 2005 has introduced a new OUTPUT clause. OUTPUT clause has access to inserted and deleted tables (virtual tables) just like triggers. OUTPUT clause can be used to return values to client clause. OUTPUT clause can be used with INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE to identify the actual rows affected by these statements. Here are some references for Output Clause: OUTPUT Clause Example and Explanation with INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE Reasons for Using Output Clause – Quiz Tips from the SQL Joes 2 Pros Development Series – Output Clause in Simple Examples Error Logs I was expecting someone to mention Error logs when it is about logging. The error log is the most looked place when there is any error either with the application or there is an error with the operating system. I have kept the policy to check my server’s error log every day. The reason is simple – enough time in my career I have figured out that when I am looking at error logs I find something which I was not expecting. There are cases, when I noticed errors in the error log and I fixed them before end user notices it. Other common practices I always tell my DBA friends to do is that when any error happens they should find relevant entries in the error logs and document the same. It is quite possible that they will see the same error in the error log  and able to fix the error based on the knowledge base which they have created. There can be many different kinds of error log files exists in SQL Server as well – 1) SQL Server Error Logs 2) Windows Event Log 3) SQL Server Agent Log 4) SQL Server Profile Log 5) SQL Server Setup Log etc. Here are some references for Error Logs: Recycle Error Log – Create New Log file without Server Restart SQL Error Messages Change Data Capture I got surprised with this answer. I think more than the answer I was surprised by the person who had answered me this one. I always thought he was expert in HTML, JavaScript but I guess, one should never assume about others. Indeed one of the cool logging feature is Change Data Capture. Change Data Capture records INSERTs, UPDATEs, and DELETEs applied to SQL Server tables, and makes a record available of what changed, where, and when, in simple relational ‘change tables’ rather than in an esoteric chopped salad of XML. These change tables contain columns that reflect the column structure of the source table you have chosen to track, along with the metadata needed to understand the changes that have been made. Here are some references for Change Data Capture: Introduction to Change Data Capture (CDC) in SQL Server 2008 Tuning the Performance of Change Data Capture in SQL Server 2008 Download Script of Change Data Capture (CDC) CDC and TRUNCATE – Cannot truncate table because it is published for replication or enabled for Change Data Capture Dynamic Management View (DMV) I like this answer. If asked I would have not come up with DMV right away but in the spirit of the original question, I think DMV does log the data. DMV logs or stores or records the various data and activity on the SQL Server. Dynamic management views return server state information that can be used to monitor the health of a server instance, diagnose problems, and tune performance. One can get plethero of information from DMVs – High Availability Status, Query Executions Details, SQL Server Resources Status etc. Here are some references for Dynamic Management View (DMV): SQL SERVER – Denali – DMV Enhancement – sys.dm_exec_query_stats – New Columns DMV – sys.dm_os_windows_info – Information about Operating System DMV – sys.dm_os_wait_stats Explanation – Wait Type – Day 3 of 28 DMV sys.dm_exec_describe_first_result_set_for_object – Describes the First Result Metadata for the Module Transaction Log Impact Detection Using DMV – dm_tran_database_transactions Log Files I almost flipped with this final answer from my friend. This should be probably the first answer. Yes, indeed log file logs the SQL Server activities. One can write infinite things about log file. SQL Server uses log file with the extension .ldf to manage transactions and maintain database integrity. Log file ensures that valid data is written out to database and system is in a consistent state. Log files are extremely useful in case of the database failures as with the help of full backup file database can be brought in the desired state (point in time recovery is also possible). SQL Server database has three recovery models – 1) Simple, 2) Full and 3) Bulk Logged. Each of the model uses the .ldf file for performing various activities. It is very important to take the backup of the log files (along with full backup) as one never knows when backup of the log file come into the action and save the day! How to Stop Growing Log File Too Big Reduce the Virtual Log Files (VLFs) from LDF file Log File Growing for Model Database – model Database Log File Grew Too Big master Database Log File Grew Too Big SHRINKFILE and TRUNCATE Log File in SQL Server 2008 Can I just say I loved this month’s T-SQL Tuesday Question. It really provoked very interesting conversation around me. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Optimization, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, April 06, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, April 06, 2010New ProjectsASP.NET MVC | SCAFFOLD: Add-in para Visual Studio 2008 que adiciona um poderoso scaffold para o ASP.NET MVC, com suporte ao Entity Framework.ASP.Net Permission Manager: This is an extension of ASP.Net Permission Manager that permission to roles.Babelfish.NET: Babelfish was created as a common framework for navigating several different node-to-node structured data sources, such as HTML, CSS, Javascript, X...CollaSuite: Collaboration Suite, Chat Client ServerdnyFramework: Denny FrameWorkDocxToHtml: DocxToHtmlDomain Driven Design and ASP.NET MVC 2 sample: It's a simple application ASP.NET MVC 2 with DDD modeling approach. It's about how to build maintainable applications applying DDD, IoC and infrast...DRP Address Book: A web based address book implementation using SQL Server 2008, ASP.NET, C#, and CSLA.NETFileSystemHelper SQL Server CLR: FileSystemHelper SQL Server CLR provides a collection of CLR stored procedures and functions for interacting with the file system. Using these sto...Foothill: This is an asp.net Web AppHouseFly controls: Controls for my upcomming app: HouseFlyiTunes Artwork App: This project is related to my iTunes Artwork App blog series. The application will automate the process of collecting album art for music tracks i...Logwiz - Automate the collection of Performance monitor logs using logman.exe: This tool is used to automate the process of collecting Performance monitoring data using the logman.exe on Windows Vista/Windows 7/Windows 2008 an...MailSharp - Beyond MailMessage: An easy-to-use library for .NET developers to send HTML formatted emails using templates with merge tags and embedded images instead of pointing at...MSTests.Fluently: MSTests.Fluently makes it easier for developers and testers to read and write tests with the Visual Studio Unit-Testing Framework. The Sentence-lik...openSIS dot net - Open Source SIS written in C#, built on dotnet 3.5 framework: openSIS dotnet is the dot net version of the popular openSIS Student Information System from OS4ED. This openSIS version is written in C# and is ba...PHP.net: PHP.net is a PHP IDE written in C# for Windows. The IDE will eventually be a complete standalone PHP development enviroment, including a developmen...Recommender System for Optus Website: <Recommender System for Optus Website>This project is trying to apply some recommeder system techniques to telecom company websites. This project ...Sendkeys: This is a tool for remote controlling any Windows Application.Shamil: Shamil WorkSite Directory for SharePoint 2010 (from Microsoft Consulting Services, UK): A solution which provides 'site directory' functionality for SharePoint 2010. Refer to [file:Solution Description|Microsoft.MCSUK.SPSiteDirectory...SPD Workflow action to add user to a security group: This is a custom SPD workflow step developed to facilitate the process of adding users from a list to the security group. Keep in mind this is run...Star Trooper for XNA 2D Tutorial: Source for the Star Trooper XNA 2d Tutorial on XNA-UK (www.XNA-UK.co.uk), including the full set of code and each phase of the tutorial. Additio...TFS WitAdminUI: Team Foundation Server 2010 RC WitAdmin simple application with UIWindows Phone 7 Panorama control: The Windows Phone 7 Panorama control is a sample implementation of a Silverlight control that allows to create "Hub" applications on Windows Phone ...Yulu: Yulu helps you maintain short quotations or your thoughts with your Windows Mobile phones.New ReleasesASP .NET MVC CMS (Content Management System): Atomic CMS 2.0: Atomic CMS 2.0 was released. Please visit http://atomiccms.com/ for download documentation, last release and get more information about Atomic CMS ...ASP.Net Permission Manager: Mal.Web.Security.dll v1.0.2.0: Mal.Web.Security.dll Relealse v1.0.2.0CycleMania Starter Kit EAP - ASP.NET 4 Problem - Design - Solution: Cyclemania 0.08.48: The application now uses Windows Communication Foundation services. See Source Code tab for other recent changes.dotNetInstaller: setup bootstrapper for Windows: 1.10 (Development): Build 1.10.6588.0. Features - Added support for .exe setup components with an optional response file. - Added has_value_disabled option to user-de...Examine: RC 1: This is Examine RC1 release. It includes: Examine UmbracoExamine Lucene.Net 2.9.2Extend SmallBasic: Teaching Extensions v.010: Improved the pentagone crazy quizFileSystemHelper SQL Server CLR: FileSystemHelper CLR Project: Source code for FileSystemHelper CLR assembly.GameStore League Manager: League Manager 1.0.5-Logging: Added Logging functionality to track down bugs.iSun Shut - PC Auto Shutdown: iSun Shut 2.5: Relase Notes: -To properly view the source code please install DotNetBar 8.3 (http://www.devcomponents.com) -The Shutdown after firefox download f...LINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter Beta v2.0.10: New items added since v1.1 include: Support for OAuth (via DotNetOpenAuth), secure communication via https, VB language support, serialization of ...MIC Pattern: !MIC Pattern DAL: Data Access Layer Este arquivo contem a DLL que faz acesso a dados e simplifica as operações de INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE e SELECT em bases de dados ...MVC Foolproof Validation: Alpha 0.1: Server side validation is stable. Client side validation is fairly stable aside from some border cases I hope to address soon. I’m actually using t...OpenGL ES 2.0 Compact Framework Wrapper: First binary release: CAB-installer for installing the sample application provided with the solution. Demonstrates a simple quad with rotation animation. Changes from l...patterns & practices SharePoint Guidance: SPG2010 Drop8: SharePoint Guidance Drop Notes Microsoft patterns and practices ****************************************** ***************************************...PROGRAMMABLE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT: PROGRAMMABLE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT - V3: The Beta Version 3 of the Programmable Software Development Environment features the random generator, longitudinal and cryptographic commands whi...RoTwee: RoTwee (9.0.0.0): New feature in this version : 17102 Tweet rotated count.SharePhone: SharePhone v.1.0.3: Added search functionality. Use clientContext.SearchProvider.Search(..) or clientContext.SearchProvider.KeywordSearch(..) A few examples here: ht...SharePoint Outlook Connector: Version 1.2.4.3: UI has been improved. Some bugs have been resolved.SPD Workflow action to add user to a security group: Version 1 custom workflow action: A custom SPD workflow step that automatically adds user to the correct security group, the user name can be driven from a list item or document li...SQL Server Metadata Toolkit 2008: SQL Server Metadata Toolkit Alpha 5: This release addresses the Issue 10567, which was a recursive view recursing more than 100 times. This was caused by the addition of SQL Parsing in...TFS WitAdminUI: WitAdminUI ver1.0: Download zip file and unzip to TFS2010 RC. And Excute WitAdminUI.exe. 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• Announcing Windows Azure Mobile Services

  - by ScottGu

  I’m excited to announce a new capability we are adding to Windows Azure today: Windows Azure Mobile Services Windows Azure Mobile Services makes it incredibly easy to connect a scalable cloud backend to your client and mobile applications.  It allows you to easily store structured data in the cloud that can span both devices and users, integrate it with user authentication, as well as send out updates to clients via push notifications. Today’s release enables you to add these capabilities to any Windows 8 app in literally minutes, and provides a super productive way for you to quickly build out your app ideas.  We’ll also be adding support to enable these same scenarios for Windows Phone, iOS, and Android devices soon. Read this getting started tutorial to walkthrough how you can build (in less than 5 minutes) a simple Windows 8 “Todo List” app that is cloud enabled using Windows Azure Mobile Services.  Or watch this video of me showing how to do it step by step. Getting Started If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign up for a no-obligation Free Trial.  Once you are signed-up, click the “preview features” section under the “account” tab of the www.windowsazure.com website and enable your account to support the “Mobile Services” preview.   Instructions on how to enable this can be found here. Once you have the mobile services preview enabled, log into the Windows Azure Portal, click the “New” button and choose the new “Mobile Services” icon to create your first mobile backend.  Once created, you’ll see a quick-start page like below with instructions on how to connect your mobile service to an existing Windows 8 client app you have already started working on, or how to create and connect a brand-new Windows 8 client app with it: Read this getting started tutorial to walkthrough how you can build (in less than 5 minutes) a simple Windows 8 “Todo List” app  that stores data in Windows Azure. Storing Data in the Cloud Storing data in the cloud with Windows Azure Mobile Services is incredibly easy.  When you create a Windows Azure Mobile Service, we automatically associate it with a SQL Database inside Windows Azure.  The Windows Azure Mobile Service backend then provides built-in support for enabling remote apps to securely store and retrieve data from it (using secure REST end-points utilizing a JSON-based ODATA format) – without you having to write or deploy any custom server code.  Built-in management support is provided within the Windows Azure portal for creating new tables, browsing data, setting indexes, and controlling access permissions. This makes it incredibly easy to connect client applications to the cloud, and enables client developers who don’t have a server-code background to be productive from the very beginning.  They can instead focus on building the client app experience, and leverage Windows Azure Mobile Services to provide the cloud backend services they require.  Below is an example of client-side Windows 8 C#/XAML code that could be used to query data from a Windows Azure Mobile Service.  Client-side C# developers can write queries like this using LINQ and strongly typed POCO objects, which are then translated into HTTP REST queries that run against a Windows Azure Mobile Service.   Developers don’t have to write or deploy any custom server-side code in order to enable client-side code below to execute and asynchronously populate their client UI: Because Mobile Services is part of Windows Azure, developers can later choose to augment or extend their initial solution and add custom server functionality and more advanced logic if they want.  This provides maximum flexibility, and enables developers to grow and extend their solutions to meet any needs. User Authentication and Push Notifications Windows Azure Mobile Services also make it incredibly easy to integrate user authentication/authorization and push notifications within your applications.  You can use these capabilities to enable authentication and fine grain access control permissions to the data you store in the cloud, as well as to trigger push notifications to users/devices when the data changes.  Windows Azure Mobile Services supports the concept of “server scripts” (small chunks of server-side script that executes in response to actions) that make it really easy to enable these scenarios. Below are some tutorials that walkthrough common authentication/authorization/push scenarios you can do with Windows Azure Mobile Services and Windows 8 apps: Enabling User Authentication Authorizing Users  Get Started with Push Notifications Push Notifications to multiple Users Manage and Monitor your Mobile Service Just like with every other service in Windows Azure, you can monitor usage and metrics of your mobile service backend using the “Dashboard” tab within the Windows Azure Portal. The dashboard tab provides a built-in monitoring view of the API calls, Bandwidth, and server CPU cycles of your Windows Azure Mobile Service.   You can also use the “Logs” tab within the portal to review error messages.  This makes it easy to monitor and track how your application is doing. Scale Up as Your Business Grows Windows Azure Mobile Services now allows every Windows Azure customer to create and run up to 10 Mobile Services in a free, shared/multi-tenant hosting environment (where your mobile backend will be one of multiple apps running on a shared set of server resources).  This provides an easy way to get started on projects at no cost beyond the database you connect your Windows Azure Mobile Service to (note: each Windows Azure free trial account also includes a 1GB SQL Database that you can use with any number of apps or Windows Azure Mobile Services). If your client application becomes popular, you can click the “Scale” tab of your Mobile Service and switch from “Shared” to “Reserved” mode.  Doing so allows you to isolate your apps so that you are the only customer within a virtual machine.  This allows you to elastically scale the amount of resources your apps use – allowing you to scale-up (or scale-down) your capacity as your traffic grows: With Windows Azure you pay for compute capacity on a per-hour basis – which allows you to scale up and down your resources to match only what you need.  This enables a super flexible model that is ideal for new mobile app scenarios, as well as startups who are just getting going.  Summary I’ve only scratched the surface of what you can do with Windows Azure Mobile Services – there are a lot more features to explore.  With Windows Azure Mobile Services you’ll be able to build mobile app experiences faster than ever, and enable even better user experiences – by connecting your client apps to the cloud. Visit the Windows Azure Mobile Services development center to learn more, and build your first Windows 8 app connected with Windows Azure today.  And read this getting started tutorial to walkthrough how you can build (in less than 5 minutes) a simple Windows 8 “Todo List” app that is cloud enabled using Windows Azure Mobile Services. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• Silverlight Recruiting Application Part 4 - Navigation and Modules

  After our brief intermission (and the craziness of Q1 2010 release week), we're back on track here and today we get to dive into how we are going to navigate through our applications as well as how to set up our modules. That way, as I start adding the functionality- adding Jobs and Applicants, Interview Scheduling, and finally a handy Dashboard- you'll see how everything is communicating back and forth. This is all leading up to an eventual webinar, in which I'll dive into this process and give a honest look at the current story for MVVM vs. Code-Behind applications. (For a look at the future with SL4 and a little thing called MEF, check out what Ross is doing over at his blog!) Preamble... Before getting into really talking about this app, I've done a little bit of work ahead of time to create a ton of files that I'll need. Since the webinar is going to cover the Dashboard, it's not here, but otherwise this is a look at what the project layout looks like (and remember, this is both projects since they share the .Web): So as you can see, from an architecture perspective, the code-behind app is much smaller and more streamlined- aka a better fit for the one man shop that is me. Each module in the MVVM app has the same setup, which is the Module class and corresponding Views and ViewModels. Since the code-behind app doesn't need a go-between project like Infrastructure, each MVVM module is instead replaced by a single Silverlight UserControl which will contain all the logic for each respective bit of functionality. My Very First Module Navigation is going to be key to my application, so I figured the first thing I would setup is my MenuModule. First step here is creating a Silverlight Class Library named MenuModule, creatingthe View and ViewModel folders, and adding the MenuModule.cs class to handle module loading. The most important thing here is that my MenuModule inherits from IModule, which runs an Initialize on each module as it is created that, in my case, adds the views to the correct regions. Here's the MenuModule.cs code: public class MenuModule : IModule { private readonly IRegionManager regionManager; private readonly IUnityContainer container; public MenuModule(IUnityContainer container, IRegionManager regionmanager) { this.container = container; this.regionManager = regionmanager; } public void Initialize() { var addMenuView = container.Resolve<MenuView>(); regionManager.Regions["MenuRegion"].Add(addMenuView); } } Pretty straightforward here... We inject a container and region manager from Prism/Unity, then upon initialization we grab the view (out of our Views folder) and add it to the region it needs to live in. Simple, right? When the MenuView is created, the only thing in the code-behind is a reference to the set the MenuViewModel as the DataContext. I'd like to achieve MVVM nirvana and have zero code-behind by placing the viewmodel in the XAML, but for the reasons listed further below I can't. Navigation - MVVM Since navigation isn't the biggest concern in putting this whole thing together, I'm using the Button control to handle different options for loading up views/modules. There is another reason for this- out of the box, Prism has command support for buttons, which is one less custom command I had to work up for the functionality I would need. This comes from the Microsoft.Practices.Composite.Presentation assembly and looks as follows when put in code: <Button x:Name="xGoToJobs" Style="{StaticResource menuStyle}" Content="Jobs" cal:Click.Command="{Binding GoModule}" cal:Click.CommandParameter="JobPostingsView" /> For quick reference, 'menuStyle' is just taking care of margins and spacing, otherwise it looks, feels, and functions like everyone's favorite Button. What MVVM's this up is that the Click.Command is tying to a DelegateCommand (also coming fromPrism) on the backend. This setup allows you to tie user interaction to a command you setup in your viewmodel, which replaces the standard event-based setup you'd see in the code-behind app. Due to databinding magic, it all just works. When we get looking at the DelegateCommand in code, it ends up like this: public class MenuViewModel : ViewModelBase { private readonly IRegionManager regionManager; public DelegateCommand<object> GoModule { get; set; } public MenuViewModel(IRegionManager regionmanager) { this.regionManager = regionmanager; this.GoModule = new DelegateCommand<object>(this.goToView); } public void goToView(object obj) { MakeMeActive(this.regionManager, "MainRegion", obj.ToString()); } } Another for reference, ViewModelBase takes care of iNotifyPropertyChanged and MakeMeActive, which switches views in the MainRegion based on the parameters. So our public DelegateCommand GoModule ties to our command on the view, that in turn calls goToView, and the parameter on the button is the name of the view (which we pass with obj.ToString()) to activate. And how do the views get the names I can pass as a string? When I called regionManager.Regions[regionname].Add(view), there is an overload that allows for .Add(view, "viewname"), with viewname being what I use to activate views. You'll see that in action next installment, just wanted to clarify how that works. With this setup, I create two more buttons in my MenuView and the MenuModule is good to go. Last step is to make sure my MenuModule loads in my Bootstrapper: protected override IModuleCatalog GetModuleCatalog() { ModuleCatalog catalog = new ModuleCatalog(); // add modules here catalog.AddModule(typeof(MenuModule.MenuModule)); return catalog; } Clean, simple, MVVM-delicious. Navigation - Code-Behind Keeping with the history of significantly shorter code-behind sections of this series, Navigation will be no different. I promise. As I explained in a prior post, due to the one-project setup I don't have to worry about the same concerns so my menu is part of MainPage.xaml. So I can cheese-it a bit, though, since I've already got three buttons all set I'm just copying that code and adding three click-events instead of the command/commandparameter setup: <!-- Menu Region --> <StackPanel Grid.Row="1" Orientation="Vertical"> <Button x:Name="xJobsButton" Content="Jobs" Style="{StaticResource menuStyleCB}" Click="xJobsButton_Click" /> <Button x:Name="xApplicantsButton" Content="Applicants" Style="{StaticResource menuStyleCB}" Click="xApplicantsButton_Click" /> <Button x:Name="xSchedulingModule" Content="Scheduling" Style="{StaticResource menuStyleCB}" Click="xSchedulingModule_Click" /> </StackPanel> Simple, easy to use events, and no extra assemblies required! Since the code for loading each view will be similar, we'll focus on JobsView for now.The code-behind with this setup looks something like... private JobsView _jobsView; public MainPage() { InitializeComponent(); } private void xJobsButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { if (MainRegion.Content.GetType() != typeof(JobsView)) { if (_jobsView == null) _jobsView = new JobsView(); MainRegion.Content = _jobsView; } } What am I doing here? First, for each 'view' I create a private reference which MainPage will hold on to. This allows for a little bit of state-maintenance when switching views. When a button is clicked, first we make sure the 'view' typeisn't active (why load it again if it is already at center stage?), then we check if the view has been created and create if necessary, then load it up. Three steps to switching views and is easy as pie. Part 4 Results The end result of all this is that I now have a menu module (MVVM) and a menu section (code-behind) that load their respective views. Since I'm using the same exact XAML (except with commands/events depending on the project), the end result for both is again exactly the same and I'll show a slightly larger image to show it off: Next time, we add the Jobs Module and wire up RadGridView and a separate edit page to handle adding and editing new jobs. That's when things get fun. And somewhere down the line, I'll make the menu look slicker. :) Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Of C# Iterators and Performance

  - by James Michael Hare

  Some of you reading this will be wondering, "what is an iterator" and think I'm locked in the world of C++.  Nope, I'm talking C# iterators.  No, not enumerators, iterators.   So, for those of you who do not know what iterators are in C#, I will explain it in summary, and for those of you who know what iterators are but are curious of the performance impacts, I will explore that as well.   Iterators have been around for a bit now, and there are still a bunch of people who don't know what they are or what they do.  I don't know how many times at work I've had a code review on my code and have someone ask me, "what's that yield word do?"   Basically, this post came to me as I was writing some extension methods to extend IEnumerable<T> -- I'll post some of the fun ones in a later post.  Since I was filtering the resulting list down, I was using the standard C# iterator concept; but that got me wondering: what are the performance implications of using an iterator versus returning a new enumeration?   So, to begin, let's look at a couple of methods.  This is a new (albeit contrived) method called Every(...).  The goal of this method is to access and enumeration and return every nth item in the enumeration (including the first).  So Every(2) would return items 0, 2, 4, 6, etc.   Now, if you wanted to write this in the traditional way, you may come up with something like this:       public static IEnumerable<T> Every<T>(this IEnumerable<T> list, int interval)     {         List<T> newList = new List<T>();         int count = 0;           foreach (var i in list)         {             if ((count++ % interval) == 0)             {                 newList.Add(i);             }         }           return newList;     }     So basically this method takes any IEnumerable<T> and returns a new IEnumerable<T> that contains every nth item.  Pretty straight forward.   The problem?  Well, Every<T>(...) will construct a list containing every nth item whether or not you care.  What happens if you were searching this result for a certain item and find that item after five tries?  You would have generated the rest of the list for nothing.   Enter iterators.  This C# construct uses the yield keyword to effectively defer evaluation of the next item until it is asked for.  This can be very handy if the evaluation itself is expensive or if there's a fair chance you'll never want to fully evaluate a list.   We see this all the time in Linq, where many expressions are chained together to do complex processing on a list.  This would be very expensive if each of these expressions evaluated their entire possible result set on call.    Let's look at the same example function, this time using an iterator:       public static IEnumerable<T> Every<T>(this IEnumerable<T> list, int interval)     {         int count = 0;         foreach (var i in list)         {             if ((count++ % interval) == 0)             {                 yield return i;             }         }     }   Notice it does not create a new return value explicitly, the only evidence of a return is the "yield return" statement.  What this means is that when an item is requested from the enumeration, it will enter this method and evaluate until it either hits a yield return (in which case that item is returned) or until it exits the method or hits a yield break (in which case the iteration ends.   Behind the scenes, this is all done with a class that the CLR creates behind the scenes that keeps track of the state of the iteration, so that every time the next item is asked for, it finds that item and then updates the current position so it knows where to start at next time.   It doesn't seem like a big deal, does it?  But keep in mind the key point here: it only returns items as they are requested. Thus if there's a good chance you will only process a portion of the return list and/or if the evaluation of each item is expensive, an iterator may be of benefit.   This is especially true if you intend your methods to be chainable similar to the way Linq methods can be chained.    For example, perhaps you have a List<int> and you want to take every tenth one until you find one greater than 10.  We could write that as:       List<int> someList = new List<int>();         // fill list here         someList.Every(10).TakeWhile(i => i <= 10);     Now is the difference more apparent?  If we use the first form of Every that makes a copy of the list.  It's going to copy the entire list whether we will need those items or not, that can be costly!    With the iterator version, however, it will only take items from the list until it finds one that is > 10, at which point no further items in the list are evaluated.   So, sounds neat eh?  But what's the cost is what you're probably wondering.  So I ran some tests using the two forms of Every above on lists varying from 5 to 500,000 integers and tried various things.    Now, iteration isn't free.  If you are more likely than not to iterate the entire collection every time, iterator has some very slight overhead:   Copy vs Iterator on 100% of Collection (10,000 iterations) Collection Size Num Iterated Type Total ms 5 5 Copy 5 5 5 Iterator 5 50 50 Copy 28 50 50 Iterator 27 500 500 Copy 227 500 500 Iterator 247 5000 5000 Copy 2266 5000 5000 Iterator 2444 50,000 50,000 Copy 24,443 50,000 50,000 Iterator 24,719 500,000 500,000 Copy 250,024 500,000 500,000 Iterator 251,521   Notice that when iterating over the entire produced list, the times for the iterator are a little better for smaller lists, then getting just a slight bit worse for larger lists.  In reality, given the number of items and iterations, the result is near negligible, but just to show that iterators come at a price.  However, it should also be noted that the form of Every that returns a copy will have a left-over collection to garbage collect.   However, if we only partially evaluate less and less through the list, the savings start to show and make it well worth the overhead.  Let's look at what happens if you stop looking after 80% of the list:   Copy vs Iterator on 80% of Collection (10,000 iterations) Collection Size Num Iterated Type Total ms 5 4 Copy 5 5 4 Iterator 5 50 40 Copy 27 50 40 Iterator 23 500 400 Copy 215 500 400 Iterator 200 5000 4000 Copy 2099 5000 4000 Iterator 1962 50,000 40,000 Copy 22,385 50,000 40,000 Iterator 19,599 500,000 400,000 Copy 236,427 500,000 400,000 Iterator 196,010       Notice that the iterator form is now operating quite a bit faster.  But the savings really add up if you stop on average at 50% (which most searches would typically do):     Copy vs Iterator on 50% of Collection (10,000 iterations) Collection Size Num Iterated Type Total ms 5 2 Copy 5 5 2 Iterator 4 50 25 Copy 25 50 25 Iterator 16 500 250 Copy 188 500 250 Iterator 126 5000 2500 Copy 1854 5000 2500 Iterator 1226 50,000 25,000 Copy 19,839 50,000 25,000 Iterator 12,233 500,000 250,000 Copy 208,667 500,000 250,000 Iterator 122,336   Now we see that if we only expect to go on average 50% into the results, we tend to shave off around 40% of the time.  And this is only for one level deep.  If we are using this in a chain of query expressions it only adds to the savings.   So my recommendation?  If you have a resonable expectation that someone may only want to partially consume your enumerable result, I would always tend to favor an iterator.  The cost if they iterate the whole thing does not add much at all -- and if they consume only partially, you reap some really good performance gains.   Next time I'll discuss some of my favorite extensions I've created to make development life a little easier and maintainability a little better.

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• C#: LINQ vs foreach - Round 1.

  - by James Michael Hare

  So I was reading Peter Kellner's blog entry on Resharper 5.0 and its LINQ refactoring and thought that was very cool.  But that raised a point I had always been curious about in my head -- which is a better choice: manual foreach loops or LINQ?    The answer is not really clear-cut.  There are two sides to any code cost arguments: performance and maintainability.  The first of these is obvious and quantifiable.  Given any two pieces of code that perform the same function, you can run them side-by-side and see which piece of code performs better.   Unfortunately, this is not always a good measure.  Well written assembly language outperforms well written C++ code, but you lose a lot in maintainability which creates a big techncial debt load that is hard to offset as the application ages.  In contrast, higher level constructs make the code more brief and easier to understand, hence reducing technical cost.   Now, obviously in this case we're not talking two separate languages, we're comparing doing something manually in the language versus using a higher-order set of IEnumerable extensions that are in the System.Linq library.   Well, before we discuss any further, let's look at some sample code and the numbers.  First, let's take a look at the for loop and the LINQ expression.  This is just a simple find comparison:       // find implemented via LINQ     public static bool FindViaLinq(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         return list.Any(item => item == target);     }         // find implemented via standard iteration     public static bool FindViaIteration(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         foreach (var i in list)         {             if (i == target)             {                 return true;             }         }           return false;     }   Okay, looking at this from a maintainability point of view, the Linq expression is definitely more concise (8 lines down to 1) and is very readable in intention.  You don't have to actually analyze the behavior of the loop to determine what it's doing.   So let's take a look at performance metrics from 100,000 iterations of these methods on a List<int> of varying sizes filled with random data.  For this test, we fill a target array with 100,000 random integers and then run the exact same pseudo-random targets through both searches.                       List<T> On 100,000 Iterations     Method      Size     Total (ms)  Per Iteration (ms)  % Slower     Any         10       26          0.00046             30.00%     Iteration   10       20          0.00023             -     Any         100      116         0.00201             18.37%     Iteration   100      98          0.00118             -     Any         1000     1058        0.01853             16.78%     Iteration   1000     906         0.01155             -     Any         10,000   10,383      0.18189             17.41%     Iteration   10,000   8843        0.11362             -     Any         100,000  104,004     1.8297              18.27%     Iteration   100,000  87,941      1.13163             -   The LINQ expression is running about 17% slower for average size collections and worse for smaller collections.  Presumably, this is due to the overhead of the state machine used to track the iterators for the yield returns in the LINQ expressions, which seems about right in a tight loop such as this.   So what about other LINQ expressions?  After all, Any() is one of the more trivial ones.  I decided to try the TakeWhile() algorithm using a Count() to get the position stopped like the sample Pete was using in his blog that Resharper refactored for him into LINQ:       // Linq form     public static int GetTargetPosition1(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         return list.TakeWhile(item => item != target).Count();     }       // traditionally iterative form     public static int GetTargetPosition2(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         int count = 0;           foreach (var i in list)         {             if(i == target)             {                 break;             }               ++count;         }           return count;     }   Once again, the LINQ expression is much shorter, easier to read, and should be easier to maintain over time, reducing the cost of technical debt.  So I ran these through the same test data:                       List<T> On 100,000 Iterations     Method      Size     Total (ms)  Per Iteration (ms)  % Slower     TakeWhile   10       41          0.00041             128%     Iteration   10       18          0.00018             -     TakeWhile   100      171         0.00171             88%     Iteration   100      91          0.00091             -     TakeWhile   1000     1604        0.01604             94%     Iteration   1000     825         0.00825             -     TakeWhile   10,000   15765       0.15765             92%     Iteration   10,000   8204        0.08204             -     TakeWhile   100,000  156950      1.5695              92%     Iteration   100,000  81635       0.81635             -     Wow!  I expected some overhead due to the state machines iterators produce, but 90% slower?  That seems a little heavy to me.  So then I thought, well, what if TakeWhile() is not the right tool for the job?  The problem is TakeWhile returns each item for processing using yield return, whereas our for-loop really doesn't care about the item beyond using it as a stop condition to evaluate. So what if that back and forth with the iterator state machine is the problem?  Well, we can quickly create an (albeit ugly) lambda that uses the Any() along with a count in a closure (if a LINQ guru knows a better way PLEASE let me know!), after all , this is more consistent with what we're trying to do, we're trying to find the first occurence of an item and halt once we find it, we just happen to be counting on the way.  This mostly matches Any().       // a new method that uses linq but evaluates the count in a closure.     public static int TakeWhileViaLinq2(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         int count = 0;         list.Any(item =>             {                 if(item == target)                 {                     return true;                 }                   ++count;                 return false;             });         return count;     }     Now how does this one compare?                         List<T> On 100,000 Iterations     Method         Size     Total (ms)  Per Iteration (ms)  % Slower     TakeWhile      10       41          0.00041             128%     Any w/Closure  10       23          0.00023             28%     Iteration      10       18          0.00018             -     TakeWhile      100      171         0.00171             88%     Any w/Closure  100      116         0.00116             27%     Iteration      100      91          0.00091             -     TakeWhile      1000     1604        0.01604             94%     Any w/Closure  1000     1101        0.01101             33%     Iteration      1000     825         0.00825             -     TakeWhile      10,000   15765       0.15765             92%     Any w/Closure  10,000   10802       0.10802             32%     Iteration      10,000   8204        0.08204             -     TakeWhile      100,000  156950      1.5695              92%     Any w/Closure  100,000  108378      1.08378             33%     Iteration      100,000  81635       0.81635             -     Much better!  It seems that the overhead of TakeAny() returning each item and updating the state in the state machine is drastically reduced by using Any() since Any() iterates forward until it finds the value we're looking for -- for the task we're attempting to do.   So the lesson there is, make sure when you use a LINQ expression you're choosing the best expression for the job, because if you're doing more work than you really need, you'll have a slower algorithm.  But this is true of any choice of algorithm or collection in general.     Even with the Any() with the count in the closure it is still about 30% slower, but let's consider that angle carefully.  For a list of 100,000 items, it was the difference between 1.01 ms and 0.82 ms roughly in a List<T>.  That's really not that bad at all in the grand scheme of things.  Even running at 90% slower with TakeWhile(), for the vast majority of my projects, an extra millisecond to save potential errors in the long term and improve maintainability is a small price to pay.  And if your typical list is 1000 items or less we're talking only microseconds worth of difference.   It's like they say: 90% of your performance bottlenecks are in 2% of your code, so over-optimizing almost never pays off.  So personally, I'll take the LINQ expression wherever I can because they will be easier to read and maintain (thus reducing technical debt) and I can rely on Microsoft's development to have coded and unit tested those algorithm fully for me instead of relying on a developer to code the loop logic correctly.   If something's 90% slower, yes, it's worth keeping in mind, but it's really not until you start get magnitudes-of-order slower (10x, 100x, 1000x) that alarm bells should really go off.  And if I ever do need that last millisecond of performance?  Well then I'll optimize JUST THAT problem spot.  To me it's worth it for the readability, speed-to-market, and maintainability.

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• ASP.NET MVC JavaScript Routing

  - by zowens

  Have you ever done this sort of thing in your ASP.NET MVC view? The weird thing about this isn’t the alert function, it’s the code block containing the Url formation using the ASP.NET MVC UrlHelper. The terrible thing about this experience is the obvious lack of IntelliSense and this ugly inline JavaScript code. Inline JavaScript isn’t portable to other pages beyond the current page of execution. It is generally considered bad practice to use inline JavaScript in your public-facing pages. How ludicrous would it be to copy and paste the entire jQuery code base into your pages…? Not something you’d ever consider doing. The problem is that your URLs have to be generated by ASP.NET at runtime and really can’t be copied to your JavaScript code without some trickery. How about this? Does the hard-coded URL bother you? It really bothers me. The typical solution to this whole routing in JavaScript issue is to just hard-code your URLs into your JavaScript files and call it done. But what if your URLs change? You have to now go an track down the places in JavaScript and manually replace them. What if you get the pattern wrong? Do you have tests around it? This isn’t something you should have to worry about.   The Solution To Our Problems The solution is to port routing over to JavaScript. Does that sound daunting to you? It’s actually not very hard, but I decided to create my own generator that will do all the work for you. What I have created is a very basic port of the route formation feature of ASP.NET routing. It will generate the formatted URLs based on your routing patterns. Here’s how you’d do this: Does that feel familiar? It looks a lot like something you’d do inside of your ASP.NET MVC views… but this is inside of a JavaScript file… just a plain ol’ .js file.  Your first question might be why do you have to have that “.toUrl()” thing. The reason is that I wanted to make POST and GET requests dead simple. Here’s how you’d do a POST request (and the same would work with a GET request):   The first parameter is extra data passed to the post request and the second parameter is a function that handles the success of the POST request. If you’re familiar with jQuery’s Ajax goodness, you’ll know how to use it. (if not, check out http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.Post/ and the parameters are essentially the same). But we still haven’t gotten rid of the magic strings. We still have controller names and action names represented as strings. This is going to blow your mind… If you’ve seen T4MVC, this will look familiar. We’re essentially doing the same sort of thing with my JavaScript router, but we’re porting the concept to JavaScript. The good news is that parameters to the controllers are directly reflected in the action function, just like T4MVC. And the even better news… IntlliSense is easily transferred to the JavaScript version if you’re using Visual Studio as your JavaScript editor. The additional data parameter gives you the ability to pass extra routing data to the URL formatter.   About the Magic You may be wondering how this all work. It’s actually quite simple. I’ve built a simple jQuery pluggin (called routeManager) that hangs off the main jQuery namespace and routes all the URLs. Every time your solution builds, a routing file will be generated with this pluggin, all your route and controller definitions along with your documentation. Then by the power of Visual Studio, you get some really slick IntelliSense that is hard to live without. But there are a few steps you have to take before this whole thing is going to work. First and foremost, you need a reference to the JsRouting.Core.dll to your projects containing controllers or routes. Second, you have to specify your routes in a bit of a non-standard way. See, we can’t just pull routes out of your App_Start in your Global.asax. We force you to build a route source like this: The way we determine the routes is by pulling in all RouteSources and generating routes based upon the mapped routes. There are various reasons why we can’t use RouteCollection (different post for another day)… but in this case, you get the same route mapping experience. Converting the RouteSource to a RouteCollection is trivial (there’s an extension method for that). Next thing you have to do is generate a documentation XML file. This is done by going to the project settings, going to the build tab and clicking the checkbox. (this isn’t required, but nice to have). The final thing you need to do is hook up the generation mechanism. Pop open your project file and look for the AfterBuild step. Now change the build step task to look like this: The “PathToOutputExe” is the path to the JsRouting.Output.exe file. This will change based on where you put the EXE. The “PathToOutputJs” is a path to the output JavaScript file. The “DicrectoryOfAssemblies” is a path to the directory containing controller and routing DLLs. The JsRouting.Output.exe executable pulls in all these assemblies and scans them for controllers and route sources.   Now that wasn’t too bad, was it :)   The State of the Project This is definitely not complete… I have a lot of plans for this little project of mine. For starters, I need to look at the generation mechanism. Either I will be creating a utility that will do the project file manipulation or I will go a different direction. I’d like some feedback on this if you feel partial either way. Another thing I don’t support currently is areas. While this wouldn’t be too hard to support, I just don’t use areas and I wanted something up quickly (this is, after all, for a current project of mine). I’ll be adding support shortly. There are a few things that I haven’t covered in this post that I will most certainly be covering in another post, such as routing constraints and how these will be translated to JavaScript. I decided to open source this whole thing, since it’s a nice little utility I think others should really be using. Currently we’re using ASP.NET MVC 2, but it should work with MVC 3 as well. I’ll upgrade it as soon as MVC 3 is released. Along those same lines, I’m investigating how this could be put on the NuGet feed. Show me the Bits! OK, OK! The code is posted on my GitHub account. Go nuts. Tell me what you think. Tell me what you want. Tell me that you hate it. All feedback is welcome! https://github.com/zowens/ASP.NET-MVC-JavaScript-Routing

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, May 19, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, May 19, 2010New Projects3FD - Framework For Fast Development: This is a C++ framework that provides a solid error handling structure, garbage collection, multi-threading and portability between compilers. The ...ali test project: test projectAttribute Builder: The Attribute Builder builds an attribute from a lambda expression because it can.BDK0008: it is a food lovers websitecgdigest: cg digest template for non-profit orgCokmez: Bilmuh cokmez duyuru sistemiDot Game: It is a dot game that our Bangladeshi people used to play at their childhood time and their last time when they are poor for working.ESRI Javascript .NET Integration: Visual Studio project that shows how to integrate the Esri Javascript API with .NET Exchange 2010 RBAC Editor (RBAC GUI): Exchange 2010 RBAC Editor (RBAC GUI) Developed in C# and using Powershell behind the scenes RBAC tool to simplfy RBAC administrationFile Validator (Validador de Archivos): Componente que permite realizar la validación de archivos (txt, imagenes, PDF, etc) actualmente solo tiene implementado la parte de los txt, permit...Grip 09 Lab4: GripjPageFlipper: This is a wonderful implementation of page flipper entirely based on HTML 5 <canvas> tag. It means that it can work in any browser that supports HT...Main project: Index bird families and associated species. Malware Analysis and Can Handler: MACH is a tool to organize and catalog your malware analysis canned responses, and to track the topic response lifecycle for forum experts.Perf Web: Performance team web sitePiPiBugNet: PiPiBugNet是一套全新的开源Bug管理系统。 PiPiBugNet代码基于ASP.NET 2.0平台开发，编程语言为C#。 PiPiBugNet界面基于Ext JS设计，提供了极佳的用户体验。RemoteDesktop: integrated remote console, desktop and chat utilityRuneScape emulation done right.: RuneScape emulator.Sandkasten: SandkastenSilverlight Metro Theme: Metro Theme for Silverlight.Silverlight Stereoscopy: Stereoscopy with Silverlight.Twitivia: Twitivia is an online trivia service that runs through twitter and is being used as an example set of projects. C#, MVC, Windows Services, Linq ...XPool: A simple school project.New ReleasesDot Game: 'Dot Game' first release: Dot Game first release This is the 'Dot Game' first release.DotNetNuke® Store: 02.01.35: What's New in this release? Bugs corrected: - Fixed a resource for the header in the Category list of the Store Admin module. - Added several test...ESRI Javascript .NET Integration: Map search results in a DataView: Visual Studio 2010 example showing how to pass Map results back to ASP.NET for use in a DataView.Exchange 2010 RBAC Editor (RBAC GUI): RBAC Editor: This binary is still beta (0.0.9.1) but in most case it's very stableExtending C# editor - Outlining, classification: first revision: a couple of bug has been eliminated, performance improvementFloe IRC Client: Floe IRC Client 2010-05 R6: Corrected bug where text would be unexpectedly copied to the clipboard.Floe IRC Client: Floe IRC Client 2010-05 R7: - Fixed bug where text would show up in a query window with someone if they said something on a channel that you are both present on.Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts v3.0.9 GA released: Hi, Today we have released the final version of Visifire v3.0.9 which contains the following enhancements: * Two new properties ActualAxisMin...Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts v3.5.2 GA Released: Hi, Today we have released the final version of Visifire v3.5.2 which contains the following enhancements: Two new properties ActualAxisMinimum a...HB Batch Encoder Mk 2: HB Batch Encoder Mk2 v1.02: Added .mov support.jPageFlipper: jPageFlipper 0.9: This is an initial community preview of jPageFlipper. It's not ready for production usage but has almost all functionality implemented.linq.js - LINQ for JavaScript: ver 2.1.0.0: Add Class Dictionary Lookup Grouping OrderedEnumerable Add Method ToDictionary MemoizeAll Share Let Add Overload ...Microsoft Research Biology Extension for Excel: MSR Biology Extension for Excel - M9: M9 Release includes the following updates to the previous release: > Import / Export support from Excel for multiple file formats > Bug fixes and ...Nifty CSharp Tools: Event Watcher: Event Watcher!Paint.NET Bulk Image Processor: Paint.NET Bulk Image Processor v1.0: This is the initial release of the Paint.NET Bulk Image processor plugin. All feedback is welcome.PiPiBugNet: PiPiBugNet架构设计: PiPiBugNet架构设计，未包含功能实现RuneScape emulation done right.: rc0: Release cantidate 0.Rx Contrib: V1.6: Adding CCR queue as adapter for the ReactiveQueue credits goes to Yuval Mazor http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/yuvmaz/Silverlight Metro Theme: Silverlight Metro Theme Alpha 1: Silverlight Metro Theme Alpha 1Silverlight Stereoscopy: Silverlight Stereoscopy Alpha 1: Silverlight Stereoscopy Alpha 20100518Stratosphere: Stratosphere 1.0.6.0: Introduced support for batch put Introduced Support for conditional updates and consistent read Added support for select conditions Brought t...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30518.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVideo Downloader: Example Program - 1.1: Example Program showing the features of the DLL and what can be achieved using it. For DLL Version 1.1.Video Downloader: Version 1.1: Version 1.1 See Home Page for usage and more information regarding new features. Please remember changes at You-Tube can prevent this software from...WatchersNET.TagCloud: WatchersNET.TagCloud 01.06.00: Whats New New Tag Mode: Show Tags from Ventrian.com NewsArticles Module New Tag Mode: Show Tags from Ventrian.com SimpleGallery Module Hyperlin...Windows Double Explorer: WDE v0.4: -optimization -switch to new vst2010 -viewer close now by pressing escape -reorder tabs -send selected fullname or shortnames via email (eye button...Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesPHPExcelASP.NETMost Active Projectspatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryRawrPHPExcelGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationCustomer Portal Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRMBlogEngine.NETWindows Azure Command-line Tools for PHP DevelopersCassiniDev - Cassini 3.5/4.0 Developers EditionSQL Server PowerShell ExtensionsFluent Ribbon Control Suite

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• External usb 3.0 hard drive is not recognised when plugged into usb 3 port (ubuntu natty 64 bit).

  - by kimangroo

  I have an Iomega Prestige Portable External Hard Drive 1TB USB 3.0. It works fine on windows 7 as a usb 3.0 drive. It isn't detected on ubuntu natty 64bit, 2.6.38-8-generic. fdisk -l cannot see it at all: Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x1bed746b Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 1 1689 13560832 27 Unknown /dev/sda2 * 1689 1702 102400 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda3 1702 19978 146805760 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda4 19978 60802 327914497 5 Extended /dev/sda5 25555 60802 283120640 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda6 19978 23909 31571968 83 Linux /dev/sda7 23909 25555 13218816 82 Linux swap / Solaris Partition table entries are not in disk order lsusb can see it: Bus 003 Device 003: ID 059b:0070 Iomega Corp. Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub Bus 002 Device 004: ID 05fe:0011 Chic Technology Corp. Browser Mouse Bus 002 Device 003: ID 0a12:0001 Cambridge Silicon Radio, Ltd Bluetooth Dongle (HCI mode) Bus 002 Device 002: ID 8087:0024 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 001 Device 005: ID 0489:e00f Foxconn / Hon Hai Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0c45:64b5 Microdia Bus 001 Device 003: ID 08ff:168f AuthenTec, Inc. Bus 001 Device 002: ID 8087:0024 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub And dmesg | grep -i xhci (I may have unplugged the drive and plugged it back in again after booting): [ 1.659060] pci 0000:04:00.0: xHCI HW did not halt within 2000 usec status = 0x0 [ 11.484971] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 18 [ 11.484997] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: setting latency timer to 64 [ 11.485002] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: xHCI Host Controller [ 11.485064] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 3 [ 11.636149] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: irq 18, io mem 0xc5400000 [ 11.636241] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: irq 43 for MSI/MSI-X [ 11.636246] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: irq 44 for MSI/MSI-X [ 11.636251] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: irq 45 for MSI/MSI-X [ 11.636256] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: irq 46 for MSI/MSI-X [ 11.636261] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: irq 47 for MSI/MSI-X [ 11.639654] xHCI xhci_add_endpoint called for root hub [ 11.639655] xHCI xhci_check_bandwidth called for root hub [ 11.956366] usb 3-1: new SuperSpeed USB device using xhci_hcd and address 2 [ 12.001073] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: WARN: short transfer on control ep [ 12.007059] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: WARN: short transfer on control ep [ 12.012932] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: WARN: short transfer on control ep [ 12.018922] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: WARN: short transfer on control ep [ 12.049139] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: WARN: short transfer on control ep [ 12.056754] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: WARN: short transfer on control ep [ 12.131607] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: WARN no SS endpoint bMaxBurst [ 12.179717] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: WARN: short transfer on control ep [ 12.686876] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: WARN: babble error on endpoint [ 12.687058] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: WARN Set TR Deq Ptr cmd invalid because of stream ID configuration [ 12.687152] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: ERROR Transfer event for disabled endpoint or incorrect stream ring [ 43.330737] usb 3-1: reset SuperSpeed USB device using xhci_hcd and address 2 [ 43.422579] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: WARN: short transfer on control ep [ 43.422658] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: xHCI xhci_drop_endpoint called with disabled ep ffff88014669af00 [ 43.422665] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: xHCI xhci_drop_endpoint called with disabled ep ffff88014669af40 [ 43.422671] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: xHCI xhci_drop_endpoint called with disabled ep ffff88014669af80 [ 43.422677] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: xHCI xhci_drop_endpoint called with disabled ep ffff88014669afc0 [ 43.531159] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: WARN no SS endpoint bMaxBurst [ 125.160248] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: WARN no SS endpoint bMaxBurst [ 903.766466] usb 3-1: new SuperSpeed USB device using xhci_hcd and address 3 [ 903.807789] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: WARN: short transfer on control ep [ 903.813530] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: WARN: short transfer on control ep [ 903.819400] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: WARN: short transfer on control ep [ 903.825104] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: WARN: short transfer on control ep [ 903.855067] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: WARN: short transfer on control ep [ 903.862314] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: WARN: short transfer on control ep [ 903.862597] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: WARN no SS endpoint bMaxBurst [ 903.913211] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: WARN: short transfer on control ep [ 904.424416] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: WARN: babble error on endpoint [ 904.424599] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: WARN Set TR Deq Ptr cmd invalid because of stream ID configuration [ 904.424700] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: ERROR Transfer event for disabled endpoint or incorrect stream ring [ 935.139021] usb 3-1: reset SuperSpeed USB device using xhci_hcd and address 3 [ 935.226075] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: WARN: short transfer on control ep [ 935.226140] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: xHCI xhci_drop_endpoint called with disabled ep ffff880148186b00 [ 935.226148] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: xHCI xhci_drop_endpoint called with disabled ep ffff880148186b40 [ 935.226153] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: xHCI xhci_drop_endpoint called with disabled ep ffff880148186b80 [ 935.226159] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: xHCI xhci_drop_endpoint called with disabled ep ffff880148186bc0 [ 935.343339] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: WARN no SS endpoint bMaxBurst I thought it might be that the firmware wasn't compatible with linux or something, but when booting a live image of partedmagic, (2.6.38.4-pmagic), the drive was detected fine, I could mount it and got usb 3.0 speeds (at least they double the speeds I got from plugging same drive in usb 2 ports). dmesg in partedmagic did say something about no SuperSpeed endpoint which was an error I saw in a previous dmesg of ubuntu: Jun 27 15:49:02 (none) user.info kernel: [ 2.978743] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 18 Jun 27 15:49:02 (none) user.debug kernel: [ 2.978771] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: setting latency timer to 64 Jun 27 15:49:02 (none) user.info kernel: [ 2.978781] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: xHCI Host Controller Jun 27 15:49:02 (none) user.info kernel: [ 2.978856] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 3 Jun 27 15:49:02 (none) user.info kernel: [ 3.089458] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: irq 18, io mem 0xc5400000 Jun 27 15:49:02 (none) user.debug kernel: [ 3.089541] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: irq 42 for MSI/MSI-X Jun 27 15:49:02 (none) user.debug kernel: [ 3.089544] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: irq 43 for MSI/MSI-X Jun 27 15:49:02 (none) user.debug kernel: [ 3.089546] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: irq 44 for MSI/MSI-X Jun 27 15:49:02 (none) user.debug kernel: [ 3.089548] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: irq 45 for MSI/MSI-X Jun 27 15:49:02 (none) user.debug kernel: [ 3.089550] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: irq 46 for MSI/MSI-X Jun 27 15:49:02 (none) user.warn kernel: [ 3.092857] usb usb3: No SuperSpeed endpoint companion for config 1 interface 0 altsetting 0 ep 129: using minimum values Jun 27 15:49:02 (none) user.info kernel: [ 3.092864] usb usb3: New USB device found, idVendor=1d6b, idProduct=0003 Jun 27 15:49:02 (none) user.info kernel: [ 3.092866] usb usb3: New USB device strings: Mfr=3, Product=2, SerialNumber=1 Jun 27 15:49:02 (none) user.info kernel: [ 3.092867] usb usb3: Product: xHCI Host Controller Jun 27 15:49:02 (none) user.info kernel: [ 3.092869] usb usb3: Manufacturer: Linux 2.6.38.4-pmagic xhci_hcd Jun 27 15:49:02 (none) user.info kernel: [ 3.092870] usb usb3: SerialNumber: 0000:04:00.0 Jun 27 15:49:02 (none) user.debug kernel: [ 3.092961] xHCI xhci_add_endpoint called for root hub Jun 27 15:49:02 (none) user.debug kernel: [ 3.092963] xHCI xhci_check_bandwidth called for root hub Well I have no idea what's going wrong, and I haven't had much luck from google and the forums so far. A number of unanswered threads with people with similar error messages and problems only. Hopefully someone here can help or point me in the right direction?!

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• Custom Model Binding of IEnumerable Properties in ASP.Net MVC 2

  - by Doug Lampe

  MVC 2 provides a GREAT feature for dealing with enumerable types.  Let's say you have an object with a parent/child relationship and you want to allow users to modify multiple children at the same time.  You can simply use the following syntax for any indexed enumerables (arrays, generic lists, etc.) and then your values will bind to your enumerable model properties. 1: <% using (Html.BeginForm("TestModelParameter", "Home")) 2: { %> 3: < table > 4: < tr >< th >ID</th><th>Name</th><th>Description</th></tr> 5: <% for (int i = 0; i < Model.Items.Count; i++) 6: { %> 7: < tr > 8: < td > 9: <%= i %> 10: </ td > 11: < td > 12: <%= Html.TextBoxFor(m => m.Items[i].Name) %> 13: </ td > 14: < td > 15: <%= Model.Items[i].Description %> 16: </ td > 17: </ tr > 18: <% } %> 19: </ table > 20: < input type ="submit" /> 21: <% } %> Then just update your model either by passing it into your action method as a parameter or explicitly with UpdateModel/TryUpdateModel. 1: public ActionResult TestTryUpdate() 2: { 3: ContainerModel model = new ContainerModel(); 4: TryUpdateModel(model); 5:   6: return View("Test", model); 7: } 8:   9: public ActionResult TestModelParameter(ContainerModel model) 10: { 11: return View("Test", model); 12: } Simple right?  Well, not quite.  The problem is the DefaultModelBinder and how it sets properties.  In this case our model has a property that is a generic list (Items).  The first bad thing the model binder does is create a new instance of the list.  This can be fixed by making the property truly read-only by removing the set accessor.  However this won't help because this behaviour continues.  As the model binder iterates through the items to "set" their values, it creates new instances of them as well.  This means you lose any information not passed via the UI to your controller so in the examplel above the "Description" property would be blank for each item after the form posts. One solution for this is custom model binding.  I have put together a solution which allows you to retain the structure of your model.  Model binding is a somewhat advanced concept so you may need to do some additional research to really understand what is going on here, but the code is fairly simple.  First we will create a binder for the parent object which will retain the state of the parent as well as some information on which children have already been bound. 1: public class ContainerModelBinder : DefaultModelBinder 2: { 3: /// <summary> 4: /// Gets an instance of the model to be used to bind child objects. 5: /// </summary> 6: public ContainerModel Model { get; private set; } 7:   8: /// <summary> 9: /// Gets a list which will be used to track which items have been bound. 10: /// </summary> 11: public List<ItemModel> BoundItems { get; private set; } 12:   13: public ContainerModelBinder() 14: { 15: BoundItems = new List<ItemModel>(); 16: } 17:   18: protected override object CreateModel(ControllerContext controllerContext, ModelBindingContext bindingContext, Type modelType) 19: { 20: // Set the Model property so child binders can find children. 21: Model = base.CreateModel(controllerContext, bindingContext, modelType) as ContainerModel; 22:   23: return Model; 24: } 25: } Next we will create the child binder and have it point to the parent binder to get instances of the child objects.  Note that this only works if there is only one property of type ItemModel in the parent class since the property to find the item in the parent is hard coded. 1: public class ItemModelBinder : DefaultModelBinder 2: { 3: /// <summary> 4: /// Gets the parent binder so we can find objects in the parent's collection 5: /// </summary> 6: public ContainerModelBinder ParentBinder { get; private set; } 7: 8: public ItemModelBinder(ContainerModelBinder containerModelBinder) 9: { 10: ParentBinder = containerModelBinder; 11: } 12:   13: protected override object CreateModel(ControllerContext controllerContext, ModelBindingContext bindingContext, Type modelType) 14: { 15: // Find the item in the parent collection and add it to the bound items list. 16: ItemModel item = ParentBinder.Model.Items.FirstOrDefault(i => !ParentBinder.BoundItems.Contains(i)); 17: ParentBinder.BoundItems.Add(item); 18: 19: return item; 20: } 21: } Finally, we will register these binders in Global.asax.cs so they will be used to bind the classes. 1: protected void Application_Start() 2: { 3: AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas(); 4:   5: ContainerModelBinder containerModelBinder = new ContainerModelBinder(); 6: ModelBinders.Binders.Add(typeof(ContainerModel), containerModelBinder); 7: ModelBinders.Binders.Add(typeof(ItemModel), new ItemModelBinder(containerModelBinder)); 8:   9: RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes); 10: } I'm sure some of my fellow geeks will comment that this could be done more efficiently by simply rewriting some of the methods of the default model binder to get the same desired behavior.  I like my method shown here because it extends the binder class instead of modifying it so it minimizes the potential for unforseen problems. In a future post (if I ever get around to it) I will explore creating a generic version of these binders.

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• The Data Scientist

  - by BuckWoody

  A new term - well, perhaps not that new - has come up and I’m actually very excited about it. The term is Data Scientist, and since it’s new, it’s fairly undefined. I’ll explain what I think it means, and why I’m excited about it. In general, I’ve found the term deals at its most basic with analyzing data. Of course, we all do that, and the term itself in that definition is redundant. There is no science that I know of that does not work with analyzing lots of data. But the term seems to refer to more than the common practices of looking at data visually, putting it in a spreadsheet or report, or even using simple coding to examine data sets. The term Data Scientist (as far as I can make out this early in it’s use) is someone who has a strong understanding of data sources, relevance (statistical and otherwise) and processing methods as well as front-end displays of large sets of complicated data. Some - but not all - Business Intelligence professionals have these skills. In other cases, senior developers, database architects or others fill these needs, but in my experience, many lack the strong mathematical skills needed to make these choices properly. I’ve divided the knowledge base for someone that would wear this title into three large segments. It remains to be seen if a given Data Scientist would be responsible for knowing all these areas or would specialize. There are pretty high requirements on the math side, specifically in graduate-degree level statistics, but in my experience a company will only have a few of these folks, so they are expected to know quite a bit in each of these areas. Persistence The first area is finding, cleaning and storing the data. In some cases, no cleaning is done prior to storage - it’s just identified and the cleansing is done in a later step. This area is where the professional would be able to tell if a particular data set should be stored in a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS), across a set of key/value pair storage (NoSQL) or in a file system like HDFS (part of the Hadoop landscape) or other methods. Or do you examine the stream of data without storing it in another system at all? This is an important decision - it’s a foundation choice that deals not only with a lot of expense of purchasing systems or even using Cloud Computing (PaaS, SaaS or IaaS) to source it, but also the skillsets and other resources needed to care and feed the system for a long time. The Data Scientist sets something into motion that will probably outlast his or her career at a company or organization. Often these choices are made by senior developers, database administrators or architects in a company. But sometimes each of these has a certain bias towards making a decision one way or another. The Data Scientist would examine these choices in light of the data itself, starting perhaps even before the business requirements are created. The business may not even be aware of all the strategic and tactical data sources that they have access to. Processing Once the decision is made to store the data, the next set of decisions are based around how to process the data. An RDBMS scales well to a certain level, and provides a high degree of ACID compliance as well as offering a well-known set-based language to work with this data. In other cases, scale should be spread among multiple nodes (as in the case of Hadoop landscapes or NoSQL offerings) or even across a Cloud provider like Windows Azure Table Storage. In fact, in many cases - most of the ones I’m dealing with lately - the data should be split among multiple types of processing environments. This is a newer idea. Many data professionals simply pick a methodology (RDBMS with Star Schemas, NoSQL, etc.) and put all data there, regardless of its shape, processing needs and so on. A Data Scientist is familiar not only with the various processing methods, but how they work, so that they can choose the right one for a given need. This is a huge time commitment, hence the need for a dedicated title like this one. Presentation This is where the need for a Data Scientist is most often already being filled, sometimes with more or less success. The latest Business Intelligence systems are quite good at allowing you to create amazing graphics - but it’s the data behind the graphics that are the most important component of truly effective displays. This is where the mathematics requirement of the Data Scientist title is the most unforgiving. In fact, someone without a good foundation in statistics is not a good candidate for creating reports. Even a basic level of statistics can be dangerous. Anyone who works in analyzing data will tell you that there are multiple errors possible when data just seems right - and basic statistics bears out that you’re on the right track - that are only solvable when you understanding why the statistical formula works the way it does. And there are lots of ways of presenting data. Sometimes all you need is a “yes” or “no” answer that can only come after heavy analysis work. In that case, a simple e-mail might be all the reporting you need. In others, complex relationships and multiple components require a deep understanding of the various graphical methods of presenting data. Knowing which kind of chart, color, graphic or shape conveys a particular datum best is essential knowledge for the Data Scientist. Why I’m excited I love this area of study. I like math, stats, and computing technologies, but it goes beyond that. I love what data can do - how it can help an organization. I’ve been fortunate enough in my professional career these past two decades to work with lots of folks who perform this role at companies from aerospace to medical firms, from manufacturing to retail. Interestingly, the size of the company really isn’t germane here. I worked with one very small bio-tech (cryogenics) company that worked deeply with analysis of complex interrelated data. So  watch this space. No, I’m not leaving Azure or distributed computing or Microsoft. In fact, I think I’m perfectly situated to investigate this role further. We have a huge set of tools, from RDBMS to Hadoop to allow me to explore. And I’m happy to share what I learn along the way.

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• T-SQL Tuesday #31 - Logging Tricks with CONTEXT_INFO

  - by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)

  This month's T-SQL Tuesday is being hosted by Aaron Nelson [b | t], fellow Atlantan (the city in Georgia, not the famous sunken city, or the resort in the Bahamas) and covers the topic of logging (the recording of information, not the harvesting of trees) and maintains the fine T-SQL Tuesday tradition begun by Adam Machanic [b | t] (the SQL Server guru, not the guy who fixes cars, check the spelling again, there will be a quiz later). This is a trick I learned from Fernando Guerrero [b | t] waaaaaay back during the PASS Summit 2004 in sunny, hurricane-infested Orlando, during his session on Secret SQL Server (not sure if that's the correct title, and I haven't used parentheses in this paragraph yet).  CONTEXT_INFO is a neat little feature that's existed since SQL Server 2000 and perhaps even earlier.  It lets you assign data to the current session/connection, and maintains that data until you disconnect or change it.  In addition to the CONTEXT_INFO() function, you can also query the context_info column in sys.dm_exec_sessions, or even sysprocesses if you're still running SQL Server 2000, if you need to see it for another session. While you're limited to 128 bytes, one big advantage that CONTEXT_INFO has is that it's independent of any transactions.  If you've ever logged to a table in a transaction and then lost messages when it rolled back, you can understand how aggravating it can be.  CONTEXT_INFO also survives across multiple SQL batches (GO separators) in the same connection, so for those of you who were going to suggest "just log to a table variable, they don't get rolled back":  HA-HA, I GOT YOU!  Since GO starts a new batch all variable declarations are lost. Here's a simple example I recently used at work.  I had to test database mirroring configurations for disaster recovery scenarios and measure the network throughput.  I also needed to log how long it took for the script to run and include the mirror settings for the database in question.  I decided to use AdventureWorks as my database model, and Adam Machanic's Big Adventure script to provide a fairly large workload that's repeatable and easily scalable.  My test would consist of several copies of AdventureWorks running the Big Adventure script while I mirrored the databases (or not). Since Adam's script contains several batches, I decided CONTEXT_INFO would have to be used.  As it turns out, I only needed to grab the start time at the beginning, I could get the rest of the data at the end of the process.   The code is pretty small: declare @time binary(128)=cast(getdate() as binary(8)) set context_info @time   ... rest of Big Adventure code ...   go use master; insert mirror_test(server,role,partner,db,state,safety,start,duration) select @@servername, mirroring_role_desc, mirroring_partner_instance, db_name(database_id), mirroring_state_desc, mirroring_safety_level_desc, cast(cast(context_info() as binary(8)) as datetime), datediff(s,cast(cast(context_info() as binary(8)) as datetime),getdate()) from sys.database_mirroring where db_name(database_id) like 'Adv%';   I declared @time as a binary(128) since CONTEXT_INFO is defined that way.  I couldn't convert GETDATE() to binary(128) as it would pad the first 120 bytes as 0x00.  To keep the CAST functions simple and avoid using SUBSTRING, I decided to CAST GETDATE() as binary(8) and let SQL Server do the implicit conversion.  It's not the safest way perhaps, but it works on my machine. :) As I mentioned earlier, you can query system views for sessions and get their CONTEXT_INFO.  With a little boilerplate code this can be used to monitor long-running procedures, in case you need to kill a process, or are just curious  how long certain parts take.  In this example, I added code to Adam's Big Adventure script to set CONTEXT_INFO messages at strategic places I want to monitor.  (His code is in UPPERCASE as it was in the original, mine is all lowercase): declare @msg binary(128) set @msg=cast('Altering bigProduct.ProductID' as binary(128)) set context_info @msg go ALTER TABLE bigProduct ALTER COLUMN ProductID INT NOT NULL GO set context_info 0x0 go declare @msg1 binary(128) set @msg1=cast('Adding pk_bigProduct Constraint' as binary(128)) set context_info @msg1 go ALTER TABLE bigProduct ADD CONSTRAINT pk_bigProduct PRIMARY KEY (ProductID) GO set context_info 0x0 go declare @msg2 binary(128) set @msg2=cast('Altering bigTransactionHistory.TransactionID' as binary(128)) set context_info @msg2 go ALTER TABLE bigTransactionHistory ALTER COLUMN TransactionID INT NOT NULL GO set context_info 0x0 go declare @msg3 binary(128) set @msg3=cast('Adding pk_bigTransactionHistory Constraint' as binary(128)) set context_info @msg3 go ALTER TABLE bigTransactionHistory ADD CONSTRAINT pk_bigTransactionHistory PRIMARY KEY NONCLUSTERED(TransactionID) GO set context_info 0x0 go declare @msg4 binary(128) set @msg4=cast('Creating IX_ProductId_TransactionDate Index' as binary(128)) set context_info @msg4 go CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX IX_ProductId_TransactionDate ON bigTransactionHistory(ProductId,TransactionDate) INCLUDE(Quantity,ActualCost) GO set context_info 0x0   This doesn't include the entire script, only those portions that altered a table or created an index.  One annoyance is that SET CONTEXT_INFO requires a literal or variable, you can't use an expression.  And since GO starts a new batch I need to declare a variable in each one.  And of course I have to use CAST because it won't implicitly convert varchar to binary.  And even though context_info is a nullable column, you can't SET CONTEXT_INFO NULL, so I have to use SET CONTEXT_INFO 0x0 to clear the message after the statement completes.  And if you're thinking of turning this into a UDF, you can't, although a stored procedure would work. So what does all this aggravation get you?  As the code runs, if I want to see which stage the session is at, I can run the following (assuming SPID 51 is the one I want): select CAST(context_info as varchar(128)) from sys.dm_exec_sessions where session_id=51   Since SQL Server 2005 introduced the new system and dynamic management views (DMVs) there's not as much need for tagging a session with these kinds of messages.  You can get the session start time and currently executing statement from them, and neatly presented if you use Adam's sp_whoisactive utility (and you absolutely should be using it).  Of course you can always use xp_cmdshell, a CLR function, or some other tricks to log information outside of a SQL transaction.  All the same, I've used this trick to monitor long-running reports at a previous job, and I still think CONTEXT_INFO is a great feature, especially if you're still using SQL Server 2000 or want to supplement your instrumentation.  If you'd like an exercise, consider adding the system time to the messages in the last example, and an automated job to query and parse it from the system tables.  That would let you track how long each statement ran without having to run Profiler. #TSQL2sDay

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