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• Monitoring the Application alongside SQL Server

  - by Tony Davis

  Sometimes, on Simple-Talk, it takes a while to spot strange and unexpected patterns of user activity, or small bugs. For example, one morning we spotted that an article’s comment count had leapt to 1485, but that only four were displayed. With some rooting around in Google Analytics, and the endlessly annoying Community Server admin-interface, we were able to work out that a few days previously the article had been subject to a spam attack and that the comment count was for some reason including both accepted and unaccepted comments (which in turn uncovered a bug in the SQL). This sort of incident made us a lot keener on monitoring Simple-talk website usage more effectively. However, the metrics we wanted are troublesome, because they are far too specific for Google Analytics to measure, and the SQL Server backend doesn’t keep sufficient information to enable us to plot trends. The latter could provide, for example, the total number of comments made on, or votes cast for, articles, over all time, but not the number that occur by hour over a set time. We lacked a baseline, in other words. We couldn’t alter the database, as it is a bought-in package. We had neither the resources nor inclination to build-in dedicated application monitoring. Possibly, we could investigate a third-party tool to do the job; but then it occurred to us that we were already using a monitoring tool (SQL Monitor) to keep an eye on the database. It stored data, made graphs and sent alerts. Could we get it to monitor some aspects of the application as well? Of course, SQL Monitor’s single purpose is to check and monitor SQL Server, over time, rather than to monitor applications that use SQL Server. However, how different is the business of gathering and plotting SQL Server Wait Stats, from gathering and plotting various aspects of user activity on the site? Not a lot, it turns out. The latest version allows us to write our own custom monitoring scripts, meaning that we could now monitor any metric in the application that returns an integer. It took little time to write a simple SQL Query that collects basic metrics of the total number of subscribers, votes cast, comments made, or views of articles, over time. The SQL Monitor database polls Simple-Talk every second or so in order to get the latest totals, and can then store and plot this information, or even correlate SQL Server usage to application usage. You can see the live data by visiting monitor.red-gate.com. Click the "Analysis" tab, and select one of the "Simple-talk:" entries in the "Show" box and an appropriate data range (e.g. last 30 days). It’s nascent, and we’re still working on it, but it’s already given us more confidence that we’ll spot quickly trends, bugs, or bursts of ‘abnormal’ activity. If there is a sudden rise in comments, we get an alert, and if it’s due to a spam attack, we can moderate or ban the perpetrator very quickly. We’ve often argued that a tool should perform a single job well rather than turn into a Swiss-army knife, but ironically we’ve rather appreciated being able to make best use of what’s there anyway for a slightly different purpose. Is this a good or common practice? What do you think? Cheers, Tony.

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• It’s the thought that counts…

  - by Tony Davis

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

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• Music before bells and whistles

  - by Tony Davis

  Why is it that Windows has so much difficulty in finding content on its file system? This is not an insurmountable technical problem; on my laptop, I have a database within which I can instantly find text or names within millions of records, within 300 milliseconds. I have a copy of Google Desktop that can find phrases within emails or documents, almost as quickly. It is an important, though mundane, part of an operating system to be able to find files. The first thing I notice within Windows is that the facility to find files or text within files is called 'search' rather than 'find'. Hmm. This doesn’t bode well. What’s this? It does a brute-force search for file names? Here we are in an age when we can breed mice that glow in the dark, and manufacture computers that fit in our shirt pockets, and we find an operating system that is still entirely innocent of managing and indexing content in hierarchical data. I can actually read the files of my PC into a database, mimic the directory/folder hierarchies and then find files in a flash; but when I do the same with Windows Vista, we are suddenly back in a 1960s time warp. Finding files based on their name is bad enough, but finding files based on the content that they contain is more or less asking for an opportunity to wait 20 minutes in order to see a "file not found" message. Sadly, with Windows 7, Microsoft seems to have fallen into the familiar trap of adding bells and whistles before finishing the song. It's certainly true that Microsoft has added new features and a certain polish to Windows Search 4.0, the latest incarnation. It works more like a web search and offers a new search syntax, called Advanced Query Syntax, which allows you to search on file author, file size, date ranges (e.g. date:=7/4/09still does not work reliably. I've experienced first-hand its stubborn refusal, despite a full index, to acknowledge the existence of a file I know exists, based on a search for a specific term within that file that I know is in there somewhere; a file that Google Desktop search, or old wingrep, finds in seconds. When users hark back to the halcyon days of Windows XP search, you know something is seriously amiss. Shouldn't applications get the functionality right before applying animated menus and Teletubby graphics, or is advancing age making me grumpy? I’d be pleased to hear your views, as always. Cheers, Tony.

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• Synchronising Cut-and-Paste Activities in Ubuntu One

  - by Jackson Tan

  This was posted in the Ubuntu Forums but received no response, so I'm re-posting it here (with minor updates) in hopes that it will at least get some comments. Recently, I moved a large amount of contents (a few GBs) within the Ubuntu One folder (through cut-and-paste). Then I discovered how Ubuntu One does this is to remove them on the server side and upload all the files again in the new location. Obviously, this is undesirable because of the hefty uploading involved. Worse, since I have two computers synced to the same account, it is double the amount of traffic. Each computer took about one day to finish synchronising. Firstly, can anyone confirm that this is actually what's happening when we move folders? I'm using Ubuntu 10.04, by the way. Secondly, is there a way to cut-and-paste stuff within the Ubuntu One folder without uploading again?

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• PASS 13 Dispatches: Memory Optimized = On

  - by Tony Davis

  I'm at the PASS Summit in Charlotte for the Day 1 keynote by Quentin Clarke, Corporate VP of the data platform group at Microsoft. He's talking about how SQL Server 2014 is “pushing boundaries” and first up is SQL Server 2014's In-Memory OLTP technology (former codename “hekaton”) It is a feature that provokes a lot of interest and for good reason as, without any need for application rewrites or hardware updates, it can enable us to ensure that an application can find in memory most or all of the data it needs, and can lead to huge improvements in processing times. A good recent hekaton use cases article talks about applications that need a “Shock Absorber” when either spikes or just a high rate of incoming workload (including data in ETL scenarios) become a primary bottleneck. To get a really deep look at this technology, I would check out David DeWitt's summit keynote tomorrow (it will be live streamed). Other than that, to get started I'd recommend Kalen Delaney's whitepaper. She offers a lot of insight into how it works and how to start to define memory-optimized tables, and natively compiled stored procedures. These memory-optimized tables uses completely optimistic multi-version concurrency control – no waiting on locks! After that, Tom LaRock has compiled a useful set of links to drill deeper, and includes one to Microsoft's AMR tool to help you gauge the tables that might benefit most. Tony.

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• Web Development Law/Ownership of Website

  - by Jackson Buddingh

  I'm a budding web developer, and I wondered if it was illegal to edit a website for a client to include a link that says 'encourage the owner of this site to pay their web developer' and follows up with a pre-made email encouraging the man to pay me. Here are the conditions: I've completed the work for the contract. I've asked to be paid, and tried to set up meetings with the owner. I've informed the owner of the site that my work will not continue unless I am paid. I should have been paid nearly a month ago (12/27) Any thoughts other than small claims? This is my first web-development job!

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• When done is not done

  - by Tony Davis

  Most developers and DBAs will know what it’s like to be asked to do "a quick tidy up" on a project that, on closer inspection, turns out to be a barely working prototype: as the cynical programmer says, "when you’re told that a project is 90% done, prepare for the next 90%". It is easy to convince a layperson that an application is complete just by using test data, and sticking to the workflow that the development team has implemented and tested. The application is ‘done’ only in the sense that the anticipated paths through the software features, using known data, are fully supported. Reality often strikes only when testers reveal its strange and erratic behavior in response to behavior from the end user that strays from the "ideal". The problem is this: how do we measure progress, accurately and objectively? Development methods such as Scrum or Kanban, when implemented rigorously, can mitigate these problems for developers, to some extent. They force a team to progress one small, but complete feature at a time, to find out how long it really takes for this feature to be "done done"; in other words done to the point where its performance and scalability is understood, it is tested for all conceivable edge cases and doesn’t break…it is ready for prime time. At that point, the team has a much more realistic idea of how long it will take them to really complete all the remaining features, and so how far away the end is. However, it is when software crosses team boundaries that we feel the limitations of such techniques. No matter how well drilled the development team is, problems will still arise if they don’t deploy frequently to a production environment. If they work feverishly for months on end before finally tossing the finished piece of software over the fence for the DBA to deploy to the "real world" then once again will dawn the realization that "done done" is still out of reach, as the DBA uncovers poorly code transactions, un-scalable queries, inefficient caching, and so on. By deploying regularly, end users will also have a much earlier opportunity to tell you how far what you implemented strayed from what they wanted. If you have a tale to tell, anonymized of course, of a "quick polish" project that turned out to be anything but, and what the major problems were, please do share it. Cheers, Tony.

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• Going Metro

  - by Tony Davis

  When it was announced, I confess was somewhat surprised by the striking new "Metro" User Interface for Windows 8, based on Swiss typography, Bauhaus design, tiles, touches and gestures, and the new Windows Runtime (WinRT) API on which Metro apps were to be built. It all seemed to have come out of nowhere, like field mushrooms in the night and seemed quite out-of-character for a company like Microsoft, which has hung on determinedly for over twenty years to its quaint Windowing system. Many were initially puzzled by the lack of support for plug-ins in the "Metro" version of IE10, which ships with Win8, and the apparent demise of Silverlight, Microsoft's previous 'radical new framework'. Win8 signals the end of the road for Silverlight apps in the browser, but then its importance here has been waning for some time, anyway, now that HTML5 has usurped its most compelling use case, streaming video. As Shawn Wildermuth and others have noted, if you're doing enterprise, desktop development with Silverlight then nothing much changes immediately, though it seems clear that ultimately Silverlight will die off in favor of a single WPF/XAML framework that supports those technologies that were pioneered on the phones and tablets. There is a mystery here. Is Silverlight dead, or merely repurposed? The more you look at Metro, the more it seems to resemble Silverlight. A lot of the philosophies underpinning Silverlight applications, such as the fundamentally asynchronous nature of the design, have moved wholesale into Metro, along with most the Microsoft Silverlight dev team. As Simon Cooper points out, "Silverlight developers, already used to all the principles of sandboxing and separation, will have a much easier time writing Metro apps than desktop developers". Metro certainly has given the framework formerly known as Silverlight a new purpose. It has enabled Microsoft to bestow on Windows 8 a new "duality", as both a traditional desktop OS supporting 'legacy' Windows applications, and an OS that supports a new breed of application that can share functionality such as search, that understands, and can react to, the full range of gestures and screen-sizes, and has location-awareness. It's clear that Win8 is developed in the knowledge that the 'desktop computer' will soon be a very large, tilted, touch-screen monitor. Windows owes its new-found versatility to the lessons learned from Windows Phone, but it's developed for the big screen, and with full support for familiar .NET desktop apps as well as the new Metro apps. But the old mouse-driven Windows applications will soon look very passé, just as MSDOS character-mode applications did in the nineties. Cheers, Tony.

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• IT Admin for Thrill Seekers

  - by Tony Davis

  A developer suggested to me recently that the life of the DBA was, surely, a dull one. My first reaction was indignation, but quickly followed by the thought that for many people excitement isn't necessarily the most desirable aspect of their job. It's true that some aspects of the DBA role seem guaranteed to quieten the pulse; in the days of tape backups, time must have slowed to eternity for the person whose job it was to oversee this process, placing tapes into secure containers, ensuring correct labeling, and.sorry, I drifted off there for a second. On the other hand, if you follow the adventures of the likes of Brent Ozar or Tom LaRock, you'd be forgiven for thinking that much of a database guy's time is spent, metaphorically, diving through plate glass windows in tight fitting underwear in order to extract grateful occupants from burning database applications. Alas it isn't true of the majority, but it isn't as dull as some people imagine, and is a helter-skelter ride compared with some other IT roles. Every IT department has people who toil away in shadowy corners doing quiet but mysterious tasks. When you ask them to explain what they do, you almost immediately want them to stop, but you hear enough to appreciate that these tasks are often absolutely vital to the smooth functioning of an IT organization. Compared with them, the DBAs are prima donnas. Here are a few nominations: Installation engineer - install all of the company's laptops and workstations, and software, deal with licensing, shipping and data entry.many organizations, especially those subject to tight regulation, would simply grind to a halt without their efforts. Localization engineer - Not quite software engineering, not quite translation, the job is to rebuild a product in a different language and make sure everything still works. QA Tester - firstly, I should say that the testers at Red Gate seem to me some of the most-fulfilled in the company. I refer here to the QA Tester whose job is more-or-less entirely to read a script, click some buttons and make sure the actual and expected values match. Configuration manager - for example, someone whose main job is to configure build environments so that devs can access their source code; assuredly necessary for the smooth functioning and productivity of the team, and hopefully well-paid. So what other sort of job in IT should one choose if the work of a DBA proves to be too exciting? Or are these roles secretly more exciting than many imagine? I invite you all to put forward your own suggestions. Cheers, Tony.

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• Trying to install postgresql:i386 on 12.04 amd64

  - by tim jackson

  Due to some legacy 32 bit libraries being used in postgresql functions I need to get a 32 bit install of Postgresql on a 64 bit native system. But it seems like there is a problem with the multiarch not seeing all.debs as satisfying dependencies. uname -a: 3.8.0-29-generic #42-precise-Ubuntu SMP x86_64 dpkg --print-architecture: amd64 dpkg --print-foreign-architecture: i386 apt-get install postgresql-9.1: returns postgresql : Depends: postgresql-9.1 but it is nto going to be installed postgresql-9.1:i386 : Depends: postgresql-common:i386 but it is not installable Depends: ssl-cert:i386 but it is not installable Depends: locales:i386 but it is not installable etc .. But I have installed ssl-cert_1.0.28ubuntu0.1_all.deb and locales_..._all.deb andpostgresql-common is an all.deb Does anyone have experience installing 32 bit packages on 64 bit systems that depend on packages that are all.debs. Or has anyone installed 32 bit postgres on 64 bit? Any help appreciated.

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• Flood fill algorithm for Game of Go

  - by Jackson Borghi

  I'm having a hell of a time trying to figure out how to make captured stones disappear. I've read everywhere that I should use the flood fill algorithm, but I haven't had any luck with that so far. Any help would be amazing! Here is my code: package Go; import static java.lang.Math.*; import static stdlib.StdDraw.*; import java.awt.Color; public class Go2 { public static Color opposite(Color player) { if (player == WHITE) { return BLACK; } return WHITE; } public static void drawGame(Color[][] board) { Color[][][] unit = new Color[400][19][19]; for (int h = 0; h < 400; h++) { for (int x = 0; x < 19; x++) { for (int y = 0; y < 19; y++) { unit[h][x][y] = YELLOW; } } } setXscale(0, 19); setYscale(0, 19); clear(YELLOW); setPenColor(BLACK); line(0, 0, 0, 19); line(19, 19, 19, 0); line(0, 19, 19, 19); line(0, 0, 19, 0); for (double i = 0; i < 19; i++) { line(0.0, i, 19, i); line(i, 0.0, i, 19); } for (int x = 0; x < 19; x++) { for (int y = 0; y < 19; y++) { if (board[x][y] != YELLOW) { setPenColor(board[x][y]); filledCircle(x, y, 0.47); setPenColor(GRAY); circle(x, y, 0.47); } } } int h = 0; } public static void main(String[] args) { int px; int py; Color[][] temp = new Color[19][19]; Color[][] board = new Color[19][19]; Color player = WHITE; for (int i = 0; i < 19; i++) { for (int h = 0; h < 19; h++) { board[i][h] = YELLOW; temp[i][h] = YELLOW; } } while (true) { drawGame(board); while (!mousePressed()) { } px = (int) round(mouseX()); py = (int) round(mouseY()); board[px][py] = player; while (mousePressed()) { } floodFill(px, py, player, board, temp); System.out.print("XXXXX = "+ temp[px][py]); if (checkTemp(temp, board, px, py)) { for (int x = 0; x < 19; x++) { for (int y = 0; y < 19; y++) { if (temp[x][y] == GRAY) { board[x][y] = YELLOW; } } } } player = opposite(player); } } private static boolean checkTemp(Color[][] temp, Color[][] board, int x, int y) { if (x < 19 && x > -1 && y < 19 && y > -1) { if (temp[x + 1][y] == YELLOW || temp[x - 1][y] == YELLOW || temp[x][y - 1] == YELLOW || temp[x][y + 1] == YELLOW) { return false; } } if (x == 18) { if (temp[x - 1][y] == YELLOW || temp[x][y - 1] == YELLOW || temp[x][y + 1] == YELLOW) { return false; } } if (y == 18) { if (temp[x + 1][y] == YELLOW || temp[x - 1][y] == YELLOW || temp[x][y - 1] == YELLOW) { return false; } } if (y == 0) { if (temp[x + 1][y] == YELLOW || temp[x - 1][y] == YELLOW || temp[x][y + 1] == YELLOW) { return false; } } if (x == 0) { if (temp[x + 1][y] == YELLOW || temp[x][y - 1] == YELLOW || temp[x][y + 1] == YELLOW) { return false; } } else { if (x < 19) { if (temp[x + 1][y] == GRAY) { checkTemp(temp, board, x + 1, y); } } if (x >= 0) { if (temp[x - 1][y] == GRAY) { checkTemp(temp, board, x - 1, y); } } if (y < 19) { if (temp[x][y + 1] == GRAY) { checkTemp(temp, board, x, y + 1); } } if (y >= 0) { if (temp[x][y - 1] == GRAY) { checkTemp(temp, board, x, y - 1); } } } return true; } private static void floodFill(int x, int y, Color player, Color[][] board, Color[][] temp) { if (board[x][y] != player) { return; } else { temp[x][y] = GRAY; System.out.println("x = " + x + " y = " + y); if (x < 19) { floodFill(x + 1, y, player, board, temp); } if (x >= 0) { floodFill(x - 1, y, player, board, temp); } if (y < 19) { floodFill(x, y + 1, player, board, temp); } if (y >= 0) { floodFill(x, y - 1, player, board, temp); } } } }

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• Copy wrongs and Copyright

  - by Tony Davis

  Recently, a Chinese blog website copied, wholesale and without permission, a Simple-Talk article on troubleshooting locking and blocking. Our initial reaction was exasperation and anger, tempered slightly by the fact that there was, at the top, a clear link to the original, and the book from which it was extracted. On the day the copy was posted, our original article saw a 30K spike in visits, so the site clearly has a substantial following! This made us pause for thought. Indeed, we wondered whether it might not be more profitable, and certainly more enjoyable, to notify the offender of similar content and serve a "put up" notice, rather than the usual DMCA "take down" . The DMCA request, issued to protect our and our authors' assets, is a necessary but tiresome, chore. So often, simple communication and negotiation could have averted the need for it. We are, after all, in the business of presenting knowledge, information and help to the SQL Server Community. If only they had asked! Of course, one's attitude changes according to the motivation behind the copying of content. One of the motivations seems to be pure vanity; they do it to try to enhance their CV, or their company's expertise, by pretending to expertise they don't possess. There is a class of plagiariser, however, that is doing it purely for money, getting advertising revenue by attracting hapless readers to their site. Not content with stealing content, sites can invest in services that provide 'load-testing' for websites that is so realistic that even the search engines can be fooled. Stolen content, fake visitors, swindled advertisers. Zero-tolerance is really the only way of dealing with plagiarism, and action will only be completely effective once Bing, Google, and the other search engines strike out from their listings the rogue sites that refuse to take down plagiarised content. It is, after all in everyone else's interests. Cheers, Tony.

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• FloodFill Algorithm for Game of Go

  - by Jackson Borghi

  I'm having a hell of a time trying to figure out how to make captured stones disappear. I've read everywhere that I should use the FloodFill algorithm, but I havent had any luck with that so far. Any help would be amazing! Here is my code: package Go; import static java.lang.Math.; import static stdlib.StdDraw.; import java.awt.Color; public class Go2 { public static Color opposite(Color player) { if (player == WHITE) { return BLACK; } return WHITE; } public static void drawGame(Color[][] board) { Color[][][] unit = new Color[400][19][19]; for (int h = 0; h < 400; h++) { for (int x = 0; x < 19; x++) { for (int y = 0; y < 19; y++) { unit[h][x][y] = YELLOW; } } } setXscale(0, 19); setYscale(0, 19); clear(YELLOW); setPenColor(BLACK); line(0, 0, 0, 19); line(19, 19, 19, 0); line(0, 19, 19, 19); line(0, 0, 19, 0); for (double i = 0; i < 19; i++) { line(0.0, i, 19, i); line(i, 0.0, i, 19); } for (int x = 0; x < 19; x++) { for (int y = 0; y < 19; y++) { if (board[x][y] != YELLOW) { setPenColor(board[x][y]); filledCircle(x, y, 0.47); setPenColor(GRAY); circle(x, y, 0.47); } } } int h = 0; } public static void main(String[] args) { int px; int py; Color[][] temp = new Color[19][19]; Color[][] board = new Color[19][19]; Color player = WHITE; for (int i = 0; i < 19; i++) { for (int h = 0; h < 19; h++) { board[i][h] = YELLOW; temp[i][h] = YELLOW; } } while (true) { drawGame(board); while (!mousePressed()) { } px = (int) round(mouseX()); py = (int) round(mouseY()); board[px][py] = player; while (mousePressed()) { } floodFill(px, py, player, board, temp); System.out.print("XXXXX = "+ temp[px][py]); if (checkTemp(temp, board, px, py)) { for (int x = 0; x < 19; x++) { for (int y = 0; y < 19; y++) { if (temp[x][y] == GRAY) { board[x][y] = YELLOW; } } } } player = opposite(player); } } private static boolean checkTemp(Color[][] temp, Color[][] board, int x, int y) { if (x < 19 && x > -1 && y < 19 && y > -1) { if (temp[x + 1][y] == YELLOW || temp[x - 1][y] == YELLOW || temp[x][y - 1] == YELLOW || temp[x][y + 1] == YELLOW) { return false; } } if (x == 18) { if (temp[x - 1][y] == YELLOW || temp[x][y - 1] == YELLOW || temp[x][y + 1] == YELLOW) { return false; } } if (y == 18) { if (temp[x + 1][y] == YELLOW || temp[x - 1][y] == YELLOW || temp[x][y - 1] == YELLOW) { return false; } } if (y == 0) { if (temp[x + 1][y] == YELLOW || temp[x - 1][y] == YELLOW || temp[x][y + 1] == YELLOW) { return false; } } if (x == 0) { if (temp[x + 1][y] == YELLOW || temp[x][y - 1] == YELLOW || temp[x][y + 1] == YELLOW) { return false; } } else { if (x < 19) { if (temp[x + 1][y] == GRAY) { checkTemp(temp, board, x + 1, y); } } if (x >= 0) { if (temp[x - 1][y] == GRAY) { checkTemp(temp, board, x - 1, y); } } if (y < 19) { if (temp[x][y + 1] == GRAY) { checkTemp(temp, board, x, y + 1); } } if (y >= 0) { if (temp[x][y - 1] == GRAY) { checkTemp(temp, board, x, y - 1); } } } return true; } private static void floodFill(int x, int y, Color player, Color[][] board, Color[][] temp) { if (board[x][y] != player) { return; } else { temp[x][y] = GRAY; System.out.println("x = " + x + " y = " + y); if (x < 19) { floodFill(x + 1, y, player, board, temp); } if (x >= 0) { floodFill(x - 1, y, player, board, temp); } if (y < 19) { floodFill(x, y + 1, player, board, temp); } if (y >= 0) { floodFill(x, y - 1, player, board, temp); } } } }

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• Black Screen on boot on a Lenovo IdeaPad Z575

  - by Davis

  So I tried to install Wubi. On boot, when I select Ubuntu it starts then I get a purple screen then black screen. My monitor is like completely off. So then I have to hold down my power button and shut it off. I boot it up then held shift and typed in "nomodeset" after the second to last line, but then when it boot it went into the command prompt thing and just stopped after "checking battery" or something. This is my first time installing any linux distro. I want to install it alongside windows and dual boot it with wubi because that is easy and simple. This is the laptop I have: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834246328

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• PASS 13 Dispatches: moving to the cloud

  - by Tony Davis

  PASS Summit 13, Day 1 keynote by Quentin Clarke and we're hearing about “redefiniing mission critical in the cloud”. With a move to the Windows Azure cloud comes the promise of capacity on demand, automatic HA, backups, patching and so on, as well as passing responsibility to MS for managing hardware, upgrades and so on. However, for many databases and applications the best route to the cloud is not necessarily obvious. For most, the path of least resistance is IaaS – SQL Server in a Azure VM. It removes the hardware burden but you still have to manage your databases and implementing HA for SQL Server is your responsibility. Also, scaling up comes at quite a cost – the biggest VM (8 CPU cores, 56 GB RAM, 16 1TB drives with 500 IOPS each) weighs in at over over $4500 per month. With PaaS, in the form of Windows SQL Database, you get a “3-copies replica set” so HA comes out-of the box, and removes the majority of the administration burden, but you are moving your database into a very different environment. For a start, it's a shared environment, with other customers using the same compute nodes in the cluster, and potentially even sharing the same database (multi-tenancy). Unless you pay for SQL DB Premium edition, the resources available for your workload will depends on how nicely others “play” in the shared environment. You'll potentially need to do a lot of tuning, and application rewriting to avoid throttling issues, optimising application-database communication to deal with increased latency between the two, and so on. You'll need aggressive application caching. You'll also need retry logic and to deal with (expected) node failure and the need to reconnect. In Tuesday's PASS Summit pre-con from the SQLCAT team, they spent a lot of time covering some of the telemetric techniques (collect into Azure storage the necessary monitoring data) to perform capacity planning, work out the hotspots and bottlenecks in your cloud applications. Tools like WAD (Windows Azure Diagnostics), performance counters SQL Database DMVs, and others, will be essential. Of course, to truly exploit the vast horizontal scaling that is available from the existence of thousands of compute nodes, you'll also need to need to consider how to “shard” your data so Azure can move it between nodes at will. Finding the right path to the Cloud isn't easy, but it's coming. I spoke to people one year ago who saw no real benefit in trying to move their infrastructure and databases to the cloud, but now at their company, it's the conversation that won't go away. Tony.  

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• Inappropriate Updates?

  - by Tony Davis

  A recent Simple-talk article by Kathi Kellenberger dissected the fastest SQL solution, submitted by Peter Larsson as part of Phil Factor's SQL Speed Phreak challenge, to the classic "running total" problem. In its analysis of the code, the article re-ignited a heated debate regarding the techniques that should, and should not, be deemed acceptable in your search for fast SQL code. Peter's code for running total calculation uses a variation of a somewhat contentious technique, sometimes referred to as a "quirky update": SET @Subscribers = Subscribers = @Subscribers + PeopleJoined - PeopleLeft This form of the UPDATE statement, @variable = column = expression, is documented and it allows you to set a variable to the value returned by the expression. Microsoft does not guarantee the order in which rows are updated in this technique because, in relational theory, a table doesn’t have a natural order to its rows and the UPDATE statement has no means of specifying the order. Traditionally, in cases where a specific order is requires, such as for running aggregate calculations, programmers who used the technique have relied on the fact that the UPDATE statement, without the WHERE clause, is executed in the order imposed by the clustered index, or in heap order, if there isn’t one. Peter wasn’t satisfied with this, and so used the ingenious device of assuring the order of the UPDATE by the use of an "ordered CTE", based on an underlying temporary staging table (a heap). However, in either case, the ordering is still not guaranteed and, in addition, would be broken under conditions of parallelism, or partitioning. Many argue, with validity, that this reliance on a given order where none can ever be guaranteed is an abuse of basic relational principles, and so is a bad practice; perhaps even irresponsible. More importantly, Microsoft doesn't wish to support the technique and offers no guarantee that it will always work. If you put it into production and it breaks in a later version, you can't file a bug. As such, many believe that the technique should never be tolerated in a production system, under any circumstances. Is this attitude justified? After all, both forms of the technique, using a clustered index to guarantee the order or using an ordered CTE, have been tested rigorously and are proven to be robust; although not guaranteed by Microsoft, the ordering is reliable, provided none of the conditions that are known to break it are violated. In Peter's particular case, the technique is being applied to a temporary table, where the developer has full control of the data ordering, and indexing, and knows that the table will never be subject to parallelism or partitioning. It might be argued that, in such circumstances, the technique is not really "quirky" at all and to ban it from your systems would server no real purpose other than to deprive yourself of a reliable technique that has uses that extend well beyond the running total calculations. Of course, it is doubly important that such a technique, including its unsupported status and the assumptions that underpin its success, is fully and clearly documented, preferably even when posting it online in a competition or forum post. Ultimately, however, this technique has been available to programmers throughout the time Sybase and SQL Server has existed, and so cannot be lightly cast aside, even if one sympathises with Microsoft for the awkwardness of maintaining an archaic way of doing updates. After all, a Table hint could easily be devised that, if specified in the WITH (<Table_Hint_Limited>) clause, could be used to request the database engine to do the update in the conventional order. Then perhaps everyone would be satisfied. Cheers, Tony.

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• Oracle Linux / Symantec Partnership

  - by Ted Davis

  Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers sang the now famous lyrics:  “You like to-may-toes and I like to-mah-toes”. In the tech world, is it Semantic or is it Symantec? Ah, well, we know it’s the latter. Actually, who doesn’t know or hasn’t heard of Symantec in the tech world? Symantec is thoroughly engrained in Enterprise customer infrastructure from their Storage Foundation Suite to their Anti-Virus products. It would be hard to find anyone who doesn’t use their software. Likewise, Oracle Linux is thoroughly engrained in Enterprise infrastructure – so our paths cross quite a bit. This is why the Oracle Linux  engineering team works with Symantec to make sure their applications and agents are supported on Oracle Linux. We also want to make sure the Oracle Linux / Symantec customer experience is trouble free so customer work continues at the same blistering pace. Here are a few Symantec applications that are supported on Oracle Linux: Storage Foundation Netbackup Enterprise Server Symantec Antivirus For Linux Veritas Cluster Server Backup Exec Agent for Linux So, while Fred and Ginger may disagree on how to spell tomato, for our software customers, the Oracle / Symantec partnership works together so our joint customers experience and hear the sweet song of success.

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• Oracle Linux Partner Pavilion Spotlight

  - by Ted Davis

  With the first day of Oracle OpenWorld starting in less than a week, we wanted to showcase some of our premier partners exhibiting in the Oracle Linux Partner Pavilion ( Booth #1033) this year. We have Independent Hardware Vendors, Independent Software Vendors and Systems Integrators that show the breadth of support in the Oracle Linux and Oracle VM ecosystem. We'll be highlighting partners all week so feel free to come back check us out. Centrify delivers integrated software and cloud-based solutions that centrally control, secure and audit access to cross-platform systems, mobile devices and applications by leveraging the infrastructure organizations already own. From the data center and into the cloud, more than 4,500 organizations, including 40 percent of the Fortune 50 and more than 60 Federal agencies, rely on Centrify's identity consolidation and privilege management solutions to reduce IT expenses, strengthen security and meet compliance requirements. Visit Centrify at Oracle OpenWorld 2102 for a look at Centrify Suite and see how you can streamline security management on Oracle Linux.  Unify identities across the enterprise and remove the pain and security issues associated with managing local user accounts by leveraging Active Directory Implement a least-privilege security model with flexible, role-based controls that protect privileged operations while still granting users the privileges they need to perform their job Get a central, global view of audited user sessions across your Oracle Linux environment  "Data Intensity's cloud infrastructure leverages Oracle VM and Oracle Linux to provide highly available enterprise application management solutions.  Engineers will be available to answer questions about and demonstrate the technology, including management tools, configuration do's and don'ts, high availability, live migration, integrating the technology with Oracle software, and how the integrated support process works."    Mellanox’s end-to-end InfiniBand and Ethernet server and storage interconnect solutions deliver the highest performance, efficiency and scalability for enterprise, high-performance cloud and web 2.0 applications. Mellanox’s interconnect solutions accelerate Oracle RAC query throughput performance to reach 50Gb/s compared to TCP/IP based competing solutions that cap off at less than 12Gb/s. Mellanox solutions help Oracle’s Exadata to deliver 10X performance boost at 50% Hardware cost making it the world’s leading database appliance. Thanks for reviewing today's Partner spotlight. We will highlight new partners each day this week leading up to Oracle OpenWorld.

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• Standard way of allowing general XML data

  - by Greg Jackson

  I'm writing a data gathering and reporting application that takes XML files as input, which will then be read, processed, and stored in a strongly-typed database. For example, an XML file for a "Job" might look like this: <Data type="Job"> <ID>12345</ID> <JobName>MyJob</JobName> <StartDate>04/07/2012 10:45:00 AM</StartDate> <Files> <File name="a.jpeg" path="images\" /> <File name="b.mp3" path="music\mp3\" /> </Files> </Data> I'd like to use a schema to have a standard format for these input files (depending on what type of data is being used, for example "Job", "User", "View"), but I'd also like to not fail validation if there is extra data provided. For example, perhaps a Job has additional properties such as "IsAutomated", "Requester", "EndDate", and so on. I don't particularly care about these extra properties. If they are included in the XML, I'll simply ignore them when I'm processing the XML file, and I'd like validation to do the same, without having to include in the schema every single possible property that a customer might provide me with. Is there a standard way of providing such a schema, or of allowing such a general XML file that can still be validated without resorting to something as naïve (and potentially difficult to deal with) as the below? <Data type="Job"> <Data name="ID">12345</Data> . . . <Data name="Files"> <Data name="File"> <Data name="Filename">a.jpeg</Data> <Data name="path">images</Data> . . . </Data> </Data>

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• The clock hands of the buffer cache

  - by Tony Davis

  Over a leisurely beer at our local pub, the Waggon and Horses, Phil Factor was holding forth on the esoteric, but strangely poetic, language of SQL Server internals, riddled as it is with 'sleeping threads', 'stolen pages', and 'memory sweeps'. Generally, I remain immune to any twinge of interest in the bowels of SQL Server, reasoning that there are certain things that I don't and shouldn't need to know about SQL Server in order to use it successfully. Suddenly, however, my attention was grabbed by his mention of the 'clock hands of the buffer cache'. Back at the office, I succumbed to a moment of weakness and opened up Google. He wasn't lying. SQL Server maintains various memory buffers, or caches. For example, the plan cache stores recently-used execution plans. The data cache in the buffer pool stores frequently-used pages, ensuring that they may be read from memory rather than via expensive physical disk reads. These memory stores are classic LRU (Least Recently Updated) buffers, meaning that, for example, the least frequently used pages in the data cache become candidates for eviction (after first writing the page to disk if it has changed since being read into the cache). SQL Server clearly needs some mechanism to track which pages are candidates for being cleared out of a given cache, when it is getting too large, and it is this mechanism that is somewhat more labyrinthine than I previously imagined. Each page that is loaded into the cache has a counter, a miniature "wristwatch", which records how recently it was last used. This wristwatch gets reset to "present time", each time a page gets updated and then as the page 'ages' it clicks down towards zero, at which point the page can be removed from the cache. But what is SQL Server is suffering memory pressure and urgently needs to free up more space than is represented by zero-counter pages (or plans etc.)? This is where our 'clock hands' come in. Each cache has associated with it a "memory clock". Like most conventional clocks, it has two hands; one "external" clock hand, and one "internal". Slava Oks is very particular in stressing that these names have "nothing to do with the equivalent types of memory pressure". He's right, but the names do, in that peculiar Microsoft tradition, seem designed to confuse. The hands do relate to memory pressure; the cache "eviction policy" is determined by both global and local memory pressures on SQL Server. The "external" clock hand responds to global memory pressure, in other words pressure on SQL Server to reduce the size of its memory caches as a whole. Global memory pressure – which just to confuse things further seems sometimes to be referred to as physical memory pressure – can be either external (from the OS) or internal (from the process itself, e.g. due to limited virtual address space). The internal clock hand responds to local memory pressure, in other words the need to reduce the size of a single, specific cache. So, for example, if a particular cache, such as the plan cache, reaches a defined "pressure limit" the internal clock hand will start to turn and a memory sweep will be performed on that cache in order to remove plans from the memory store. During each sweep of the hands, the usage counter on the cache entry is reduced in value, effectively moving its "last used" time to further in the past (in effect, setting back the wrist watch on the page a couple of hours) and increasing the likelihood that it can be aged out of the cache. There is even a special Dynamic Management View, sys.dm_os_memory_cache_clock_hands, which allows you to interrogate the passage of the clock hands. Frequently turning hands equates to excessive memory pressure, which will lead to performance problems. Two hours later, I emerged from this rather frightening journey into the heart of SQL Server memory management, fascinated but still unsure if I'd learned anything that I'd put to any practical use. However, I certainly began to agree that there is something almost Tolkeinian in the language of the deep recesses of SQL Server. Cheers, Tony.

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• Interviews: Going Beyond the Technical Quiz

  - by Tony Davis

  All developers will be familiar with the basic format of a technical interview. After a bout of CV-trawling to gauge basic experience, strengths and weaknesses, the interview turns technical. The whiteboard takes center stage and the challenge is set to design a function or query, or solve what on the face of it might seem a disarmingly simple programming puzzle. Most developers will have experienced those few panic-stricken moments, when one’s mind goes as blank as the whiteboard, before un-popping the marker pen, and hopefully one’s mental functions, to work through the problem. It is a way to probe the candidate’s knowledge of basic programming structures and techniques and to challenge their critical thinking. However, these challenges or puzzles, often devised by some of the smartest brains in the development team, have a tendency to become unnecessarily ‘tricksy’. They often seem somewhat academic in nature. While the candidate straight out of IT school might breeze through the construction of a Markov chain, a candidate with bags of practical experience but less in the way of formal training could become nonplussed. Also, a whiteboard and a marker pen make up only a very small part of the toolkit that a programmer will use in everyday work. I remember vividly my first job interview, for a position as technical editor. It went well, but after the usual CV grilling and technical questions, I was only halfway there. Later, they sat me alongside a team of editors, in front of a computer loaded with MS Word and copy of SQL Server Query Analyzer, and my task was to edit a real chapter for a real SQL Server book that they planned to publish, including validating and testing all the code. It was a tough challenge but I came away with a sound knowledge of the sort of work I’d do, and its context. It makes perfect sense, yet my impression is that many organizations don’t do this. Indeed, it is only relatively recently that Red Gate started to move over to this model for developer interviews. Now, instead of, or perhaps in addition to, the whiteboard challenges, the candidate can expect to sit with their prospective team, in front of Visual Studio, loaded with all the useful tools in the developer’s kit (ReSharper and so on) and asked to, for example, analyze and improve a real piece of software. The same principles should apply when interviewing for a database positon. In addition to the usual questions challenging the candidate’s knowledge of such things as b-trees, object permissions, database recovery models, and so on, sit the candidate down with the other database developers or DBAs. Arm them with a copy of Management Studio, and a few other tools, then challenge them to discover the flaws in a stored procedure, and improve its performance. Or present them with a corrupt database and ask them to get the database back online, and discover the cause of the corruption.

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• Access Denied

  - by Tony Davis

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

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• New Wine in New Bottles

  - by Tony Davis

  How many people, when their car shows signs of wear and tear, would consider upgrading the engine and keeping the shell? Even if you're cash-strapped, you'll soon work out the subtlety of the economics, the cost of sudden breakdowns, the precious time lost coping with the hassle, and the low 'book value'. You'll generally buy a new car. The same philosophy should apply to database systems. Mainstream support for SQL Server 2005 ends on April 12; many DBAS, if they haven't done so already, will be considering the migration to SQL Server 2008 R2. Hopefully, that upgrade plan will include a fresh install of the operating system on brand new hardware. SQL Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are designed to work together. The improved architecture, processing power, and hyper-threading capabilities of modern processors will dramatically improve the performance of many SQL Server workloads, and allow consolidation opportunities. Of course, there will be many DBAs smiling ruefully at the suggestion of such indulgence. This is nothing like the real world, this halcyon place where hardware and software budgets are limitless, development and testing resources are plentiful, and third party vendors immediately certify their applications for the latest-and-greatest platform! As with cars, or any other technology, the justification for a complete upgrade is complex. With Servers, the extra cost at time of upgrade will generally pay you back in terms of the increased performance of your business applications, reduced maintenance costs, training costs and downtime. Also, if you plan and design carefully, it's possible to offset hardware costs with reduced SQL Server licence costs. In his forthcoming SQL Server Hardware book, Glenn Berry describes a recent case where he was able to replace 4 single-socket database servers with one two-socket server, saving about $90K in hardware costs and $350K in SQL Server license costs. Of course, there are exceptions. If you do have a stable, reliable, secure SQL Server 6.5 system that still admirably meets the needs of a specific business requirement, and has no security vulnerabilities, then by all means leave it alone. Why upgrade just for the sake of it? However, as soon as a system shows sign of being unfit for purpose, or is moving out of mainstream support, the ruthless DBA will make the strongest possible case for a belts-and-braces upgrade. We'd love to hear what you think. What does your typical upgrade path look like? What are the major obstacles? Cheers, Tony.

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• Linux DD command partition -to- partition

  - by Ben Jackson

  I just used the DD command to copy the contents of one partition over to another partition on another drive, like this: dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/dev/sdb2 bs=4096 conv=noerror sda2 partition was 66GB and sdb2 was 250GB. I read that by doing this the extra space on the drive I am copying to will be wasted, is this true? I wasn't worried about loosing the extra space for the time being however, I just ran: sudo kill -USR1 (PID) to view the current status of DD and it has written over 66GB of data, will it continue to write data until it gets to 250GB? If so, is there a way to stop the process without corrupting it as waiting for it to write blank space seems like a waste of time.

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• DAC pack up all your troubles

  - by Tony Davis

  Visual Studio 2010, or perhaps its apparently-forthcoming sister, "SQL Studio", is being geared up to become the natural way for developers to create databases. Central to this drive is the introduction of 'data-tier application components', or DACs. Applications are developed as normal but when it comes to deployment, instead of supplying the DBA with a bunch of scripts to create the required database objects, the developer creates a single DAC Package ("DAC Pack"); a zipped XML file containing all the database objects needed by the application, along with versioning information, policies for deployment, and so on. It's an intriguing prospect. Developers can work on their development database using their existing tools and source control, and then package up the changes into a single DACPAC for deployment and management. DBAs get an "application level view" of how their instances are being used and the ability to collectively, rather than individually, manage the objects. The DBA needing to manage a large number of relatively small databases can use "DAC snapshots" to get a quick overview of what has changed across all the databases they manage. The reason that DAC packs haven't caused more excitement is that they can only be pushed to SQL Server 2008 R2, and they must be developed or inspected using Visual Studio 2010. Furthermore, what we see right now in VS2010 is more of a 'work-in-progress' or 'vision of the future', with serious shortcomings and restrictions that render it unsuitable for anything but small 'non-critical' departmental databases. The first problem is that DAC packs support a limited set of schema objects (corresponding closely to the features available on 'Azure'). This means that Service Broker queues, CLR Objects, and perhaps most critically security (permissions, certificates etc.), are off-limits. Applications that require these objects will need to add them via a post-deployment TSQL script, rather defeating the whole idea. More worrying still is the process for altering a database with a DAC pack. The grand 'collective' philosophy, whereby a single XML file can be used for deploying and managing builds and changes, extends, unfortunately, to database upgrades. Any change to a database object will result in the creation of a new database, copying the data from the old version, nuking the previous one, and then renaming the new one. Simple eh? The problem is that even something as trivial as adding a comment to a stored procedure in a 5GB database will require the server to find at least twice as much space, as well sufficient elbow-room in the transaction log for copying the largest table. Of course, you'll need to take the database offline for the full course of the deployment, which is likely to take a long time if there is a lot of data. This upgrade/rename process breaks the log chain, makes any subsequent full restore operation highly complicated, and will also break log shipping. As with any grand vision, the devil is always in the detail. It's hard to fathom why Microsoft hasn't used a SQL Compare-style approach to the upgrade process, altering a database with a change script, and this will surely be adopted in the near future. Something had to be in place for VS2010, but right now DAC packs only make sense for Azure. For this, they're cute, but hardly compelling. Nevertheless, DBAs would do well to get familiar with VS 2010 and DAC packs. Like it or not, they're both coming. Cheers, Tony.

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