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• How to Create Effective Error Reports

  - by John Paul Cook

  This post demonstrates some generic problem reporting steps that I encourage all users, whether developers or nontechnical end users, to follow. SQL Server has a feature that can help. So does Windows in some cases. More on those in Step 3. Step 1: Is the problem caused by a particular action undertaken on a gui? If so, you should get a screen capture. But if it is caused by executing some T-SQL code in a query window, just copy/paste the offending code as text. There are several ways to get a screen...(read more)

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• Many-to-many relationships in pharmacology

  - by John Paul Cook

  When I was in my pharmacology class this morning, I realized that the instructor was presenting a classic relational database management system problem: the many-to-many relationship. He said that all of us in nursing school must know our drugs backwards and forwards. I know how to model that! There are so many things in both healthcare and higher education that could benefit from an appropriate application of technology. As a student, I'd like to be able to start with a drug, a disease, a name of...(read more)

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• Printing PowerPoint slides in black and white

  - by John Paul Cook

  When I do SQL Server training, sometimes students want to print all of the PowerPoint slides and use them for note taking during class. For such purposes, the background is usually better off being suppressed. This is most efficiently done by changing Print Settings as shown below: Personally I recommend that people take notes directly in the slides instead of printing them. PowerPoint has a notes area. If you do want to print slides and notes, once again use the Print Settings to specify this:...(read more)

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• Using Alt-select in SSMS, Word, and elsewhere

  - by John Paul Cook

  A surprising number of database people and Windows users in general don’t know about Alt select . This is a Windows technique not unique to SSMS that allows a user to select an arbitrary rectangular region of text and delete it, cut it, or copy it. Where I find Alt select particularly useful in SSMS is when I have a bunch of inline comments that are too far to the right. I want to delete much of the whitespace in front of them to move them to the left without disturbing any of the rest of the T-SQL....(read more)

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• Genetic Considerations in User Interface Design

  - by John Paul Cook

  There are several different genetic factors that are highly relevant to good user interface design. Color blindness is probably the best known. But did you know about motion sickness and epilepsy? We’ve been discussing how genetic factors should be considered in user interface design in one of my classes at Vanderbilt University School of Nursing. According to the National Library of Medicine, approximately 8% of males and 0.5% of females have red-green color discrimination problems with the most...(read more)

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• Social media and special characters

  - by John Paul Cook

  I’ve previously blogged about using Unicode with T-SQL to put superscripts, subscripts, and special characters into text strings. Unicode is also useful in formatting social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and that dinosaur otherwise known as email. When you can’t set properties of text such as italicizing the subject line of an email message or adding subscripts to a Facebook post, Unicode can make it possible. There are Unicode characters that are intrinsically italicized. Others are intrinsically...(read more)

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• New free SQL Azure offer

  - by John Paul Cook

  Microsoft has a new and better way to get a free Azure account for a month. All you need to do to sign up is provide your Windows Live Id and register at http://bit.ly/CRAzurePass using promotional code DPCE01 . This is a great way to learn about SQL Azure and improve your skills. You might be interested in downloading the SQL Azure version of the AdventureWorks database from Codeplex ....(read more)

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• Windows 8 Consumer Preview and SkyDrive

  - by John Paul Cook

  SkyDrive integrates very nicely with Windows 8. More on that later. First, let’s discuss using Windows 8 x64 on VirtualBox. Since I wanted to test with x64 and didn’t have a Hyper-V server available, I used VirtualBox. The latest version of VirtualBox does list Windows 8 as a guest operating system choice. The first time I attempted the installation, I chose the experimental Direct3D graphics support. That didn’t work well. After what seemed like FOREVER looking at a completely black screen, I decided...(read more)

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• Surface Pro 3 first impressions

  - by John Paul Cook

  I traded in my Surface 2 (the trade-in program is now over) and bought a Surface Pro 3 with an i7 processor and 8 GB of ram. I greatly prefer the 3 by 2 aspect ratio of the Surface 3. After only one day of ownership, I’ve decided to purchase a docking station. I have a 7 year old desktop with a quad core Q6600 processor overclocked to 3.0 GHz and 8 GB of ram. It has a Plextor 512 MB SSD as the primary drive. It’s a very capable machine, but it does have a little bit, and I do mean only a little bit,...(read more)

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• Excel 2013 Data Explorer and GeoFlow make 3-D maps quick and easy

  - by John Paul Cook

  Excel add-ins Data Explorer and GeoFlow work well together, mainly because they just work. Simple, fast, and powerful. I started Excel 2013, used Data Explorer to search for, examine, and then download latitude-longitude data and finally used GeoFlow to plot an interactive 3-D visualization. I didn’t use any fancy Excel commands and the entire process took less than 3 minutes. You can download the GeoFlow preview from here . It can also be used with Office 365. Start by clicking the DATA EXPLORER...(read more)

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• Working with legacy data

  - by John Paul Cook

  We encounter legacy data as a part of life. Colleges and universities have transcript records dating back decades or even centuries. Real estate property records in the United States go as far back as Spanish and British land grants in the 1500s. Very old records are completely paper based and may be completely manually prepared, perhaps typed on a typewriter or written in longhand with a quill pen. How long should transcripts be retained? Nola Ochs graduated from college at age 95 (can you imagine...(read more)

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• Speaking at Houston Techfest on September 8

  - by John Paul Cook

  I’m giving my talk on SQL Server and SSMS Tips and Tricks at Houston Techfest on September 8, 2012. It will be similar to the one I gave at last year’s Techfest and also the one I gave at the Houston SQL Server User Group meeting last month. It will be mostly different from the one I gave at the last SQL Saturday in Houston. I will cover regular expressions. If you bring your laptop with you, you can follow along with me to make sure you leave able to actually use regular expressions. If you are...(read more)

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• Windows Not Sleeping All Night

  - by John Paul Cook

  Having a computer wake up when you don’t want it to wastes electricity and drains the battery on mobile devices. My desktop had been waking up at night, so I assumed it was some network traffic on my home network. I unchecked Allow this device to wake the computer on my network adapters . Figure 1. Network adapter Power Management tab. That didn’t solve the problem. I included the screen capture in Figure 1 because it could be part of the solution for someone else. To identify the root cause instead...(read more)

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• Where to find PHP version usage stats?

  - by Darren Cook

  My original question was: what percentage of sites are using php 5.4.x? (As it has some very interesting new features.) With secondary questions like how many of the cheap web hosting places have upgraded, which versions of the linux distros include it, etc. But I'm coming up blanks. http://php.net/usage.php stops at July 2007, and the nexen.net website seems to have stopped in 2008. At SecuritySpace they only list the web servers, not php versions. The TIOBE link isn't what I'm after (it doesn't -- and couldn't -- break down by version number. I thought php.net might show download numbers, but I cannot see them anywhere. I kind of answered the distro question, but it requires a lot of clicking around at distrowatch.com. E.g. I see here that Ubuntu offers php 5.4.6 in the latest snapshot, but the latest release (Ubuntu 12.04) has 5.3.10.

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• NOSQL - Extracting keywords from PowerPoint using PowerShell

  - by John Paul Cook

  Yesterday I mentioned my desire to transform PowerPoint slides from just data to actual information. I've made good progress using PowerShell, but I need PowerShell help with a problem that I hope is of some general interest. Originally I considered using full-text search in SQL Server, but realized it wouldn't do what I wanted, thus the NOSQL approach. I need to extract the keywords from a PowerPoint presentation. On the File menu in PowerPoint 2007/2010, the Save & Send has a Create Handouts...(read more)

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• TechEd 2014 Day 3

  - by John Paul Cook

  There is some confusion about durability of data stored in SQL Server in-memory tables, so some review of the concepts is appropriate. The in-memory option is enabled at the database level. Enabling it at the database level only gives you the option to specify the in-memory feature on a table by table basis. No existing tables or new tables will by default become in-memory tables when you enable the feature at the database level. If you choose to make a table an in-memory table, by default it is...(read more)

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• Shakespeare and storing Unicode characters

  - by John Paul Cook

  This post is about the political issues involved with using multiple languages in a global organization and how to troubleshoot the technical details. The CHAR and VARCHAR data types are NOT suitable for global data. Some people still cling to CHAR and VARCHAR justifying their use by truthfully saying that they only take up half the space of NCHAR and NVARCHAR data types. But you’ll never be able to store Chinese, Korean, Greek, Japanese, Arabic, or many other languages unless you use NCHAR and NVARCHAR...(read more)

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• Do you know your DNS server?

  - by John Paul Cook

  If you don’t know your DNS server is valid, you need to find out before July 9. The FBI found rogue DNS servers and replaced them with clean, safe DNS servers to protect the public. These safe, clean servers will be turned off on July 9, 2012. If your computer was compromised to use the rogue servers, it will stop resolving DNS queries on July 9 when the clean servers are turned off. The FBI has provided full technical details at http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2011/november/malware_110911/DNS-changer-malware.pdf...(read more)

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• Using Sizer for recording presentations

  - by John Paul Cook

  I needed to do some screen captures and recordings of SSMS and realized this is a common problem that many of you could use some help with. There is a freeware tool called Sizer (thanks to Paul Nielsen for telling me about it) that lets you chose your window size. I downloaded the zip file instead of the msi because I didn’t want to install anything. The extracted executable works perfectly as a portable application. After double-clicking the Sizer executable, an icon resembling a plus sign appears...(read more)

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• Web-based data generator

  - by John Paul Cook

  One of my coworkers told me about Mockaroo , a web-based data generator. I needed some test data for upcoming blog posts, so I decided to give it a try. It’s pretty good. I had to use Firefox because of problems running Mockaroo on Internet Explorer 11. Using the defaults except for changing the format to SQL, it generated output that looked something like the following. Mockaroo is so good that it generates fake data that could accidentally be real, such as email addresses. Consequently, I edited...(read more)

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• BI Beginner: Why to Use Excel 2013 Now

  - by John Paul Cook

  Most corporations and many individuals are slow to adopt new versions of Microsoft Office, particularly if the upgrade to the previous version was very recent. Excel 2013 is a special case and offers significant productivity enhancements. If you do business intelligence work or otherwise make your living with Excel, adding (notice I didn’t say upgrading to) Excel 2013 now makes a lot of sense. The Power View feature in Excel 2013 is a completely sufficient reason to add Excel 2013. It has to be enabled,...(read more)

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• TechEd 2014 Day 2

  - by John Paul Cook

  Today people asked me about backing up older versions of SQL Server to Azure. Older versions back to SQL Server 2005 can be easily backed up to Azure Storage by installing Microsoft SQL Server Backup to Windows Azure Tool. It installs a service of the same name that applies rules to SQL Server backups. You can tell the tool to backup or encrypt your SQL Server backups. You can have it automatically upload your backups to Azure Storage. Even if you don’t want to upload your backups to Azure, you might...(read more)

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• Windows Not Sleeping All Night

  - by John Paul Cook

  Having a computer wake up when you don’t want it to wastes electricity and drains the battery on mobile devices. My desktop had been waking up at night, so I assumed it was some network traffic on my home network. I unchecked Allow this device to wake the computer on my network adapters . Figure 1. Network adapter Power Management tab. That didn’t solve the problem. I included the screen capture in Figure 1 because it could be part of the solution for someone else. To identify the root cause instead...(read more)

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• Scammers on the lose pretending to be Microsoft

  - by John Paul Cook

  Minutes ago I received a phone call that the caller ID listed as “Out of area”, which I knew was a bad sign. It was difficult to understand the caller because of his very thick accent. He told me that he was from Microsoft and that my computer was throwing a large number of errors and he was calling to help me. He directed me to use Windows R to open a run dialog box, type eventvwr and then look at the Event Viewer. Within Event Viewer, he instructed me to open Custom Views and then open Administrative...(read more)

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• TechEd 2014 Day 2

  - by John Paul Cook

  Today people asked me about backing up older versions of SQL Server to Azure. Older versions back to SQL Server 2005 can be easily backed up to Azure Storage by installing Microsoft SQL Server Backup to Windows Azure Tool. It installs a service of the same name that applies rules to SQL Server backups. You can tell the tool to backup or encrypt your SQL Server backups. You can have it automatically upload your backups to Azure Storage. Even if you don’t want to upload your backups to Azure, you might...(read more)

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