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• Inside Red Gate - Ricky Leeks

  - by Simon Cooper

  So, one of our profilers has a problem. Red Gate produces two .NET profilers - ANTS Performance Profiler (APP) and ANTS Memory Profiler (AMP). Both products help .NET developers solve problems they are virtually guaranteed to encounter at some point in their careers - slow code, and high memory usage, respectively. Everyone understands slow code - the symptoms are very obvious (an operation takes 2 hours when it should take 10 seconds), you know when you've solved it (the same operation now takes 15 seconds), and everyone understands how you can use a profiler like APP to help solve your particular problem. High memory usage is a much more subtle and misunderstood concept. How can .NET have memory leaks? The garbage collector, and how the CLR uses and frees memory, is one of the most misunderstood concepts in .NET. There's hundreds of blog posts out there covering various aspects of the GC and .NET memory, some of them helpful, some of them confusing, and some of them are just plain wrong. There's a lot of misconceptions out there. And, if you have got an application that uses far too much memory, it can be hard to wade through all the contradictory information available to even get an idea as to what's going on, let alone trying to solve it. That's where a memory profiler, like AMP, comes into play. Unfortunately, that's not the end of the issue. .NET memory management is a large, complicated, and misunderstood problem. Even armed with a profiler, you need to understand what .NET is doing with your objects, how it processes them, and how it frees them, to be able to use the profiler effectively to solve your particular problem. And that's what's wrong with AMP - even with all the thought, designs, UX sessions, and research we've put into AMP itself, some users simply don't have the knowledge required to be able to understand what AMP is telling them about how their application uses memory, and so they have problems understanding & solving their memory problem. Ricky Leeks This is where Ricky Leeks comes in. Created by one of the many...colourful...people in Red Gate, he headlines and promotes several tutorials, pages, and articles all with information on how .NET memory management actually works, with the goal to help educate developers on .NET memory management. And educating us all on how far you can push various vegetable-based puns. This, in turn, not only helps them understand and solve any memory issues they may be having, but helps them proactively code against such memory issues in their existing code. Ricky's latest outing is an interview on .NET Rocks, providing information on the Top 5 .NET Memory Management Gotchas, along with information on a free ebook on .NET Memory Management. Don't worry, there's loads more vegetable-based jokes where those came from...

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• Understanding each other in web development

  - by Pete Hotchkin

  During my career I have been lucky enough to work in several different roles within web development with many extremely talented people, from incredible designers who were passionate about the placement of every pixel right through to server administrators and DBAs who were always measuring the improvements they were making to their queries in the smallest possible unit. The problem I always faced was that more often than not I was stuck in the middle trying to mediate between these different functions and enable each side to understand the other’s point of view. The main areas of contention that there have always been between these functional groups in my experience have been at 2 key points: during the build phase and then when there is a problem post-build. During both of these times it is often easier for someone to pass the buck onto someone else than spend the time to understand the other person’s perspective. Below is a quick look at two upcoming tools that will not only speed up the build phase for each function, but  also help when it comes to the issues faced once a site has been pushed live. In my experience a web project goes through several phases of development. The first of these is design, generally handled as Photoshop files which are then passed onto a front-end developer. This is the first point at which heated discussions can arise. One problem I’ve seen several times is that the designer doesn’t fully understand the platform constraints that need to be considered, and as a result has designed something that does not translate very well or is simply not possible. Working at Red Gate, I am lucky enough to be able to meet some amazing people and this happened just the other day when I was introduced to Neil Kinnish and Pete Nelson, the creators of what I believe could be a great asset in this designer-developer relationship, Mixture. Mixture allows the front end developer to quickly prototype a web page with built-in frameworks such as bootstrap. It’s not an IDE however, it just sits there in the background and monitors the project files in the background so every time you save a file from your favorite IDE, it will compile things like LESS, compact your JavaScript and the automatically refresh your test browser so you can see the changes instantly. I think one of the best parts of this however is a single button that pushes the changed files up to the web so the designer can instantly see how far the developer has got and the problem that he is facing at that time without the need to spend time setting up a remote server. I can see this being a real asset to remote teams where there needs to be a compromise between the designer and the front-end developer, or just to allow the designer to see how the build is progressing and suggest small alterations. Once the design has been built into the front end the designer’s job is generally done and there are no other points of contention between the designer and the other functions involved in building these web projects. As the project moves into the stage of integrating it into the back end and deploying it to the production server other functions start to be pulled in and other issues arise such as the back-end developer understanding the frameworks that they are using such as the routes that are in place in an MVC application or the number of database calls that the ORM layer is actually making. There are many tools out there that can actually help with these problems such as mini profiler that gives you a quick snapshot of what is going on directly in the browser. For a slightly more in-depth look at what is happening and to gain a deeper understanding of an application you may be working on though, you may want to consider Glimpse. Created by Nik and Anthony, it is an application that sits at the bottom of your browser (installed via NuGet) which can show you information about how your application is pieced together and how the information on screen is being delivered as it happens. With a wealth of community-built plugins such as one for nHibernate and linq2SQL (full list of plugins on NuGet). It can be customized directly to your own setup to truly delve into the code to see what is happening, and can help to reduce the number of confusing moments about whether it is your code that is going wrong or whether there is something more sinister happening directly on the server. All the tools that I have mentioned in this post help to do one thing above all, and that is to ease the barrier of understanding between the different functions that are involved in building and maintaining a web application. In my experience it is very easy to say “Well, that’s not my problem”, simply because the two functions involved don’t truly understand the other’s point of view. Software should not only be seen as a way to streamline our own working process or as a debugging tool but also a communication aid to improve the entire lifecycle of a web project. Glimpse is actually the project that I am the designer on and I would love to get your feedback if you do decide to try it out or if you would like to share your own experiences of working on web projects please fill in your details at https://www.surveymk.com/s/joinGlimpse  or add a comment below and I will get in touch with you.

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• How the "migrations" approach makes database continuous integration possible

  - by David Atkinson

  Testing a database upgrade script as part of a continuous integration process will only work if there is an easy way to automate the generation of the upgrade scripts. There are two common approaches to managing upgrade scripts. The first is to maintain a set of scripts as-you-go-along. Many SQL developers I've encountered will store these in a folder prefixed numerically to ensure they are ordered as they are intended to be run. Occasionally there is an accompanying document or a batch file that ensures that the scripts are run in the defined order. Writing these scripts during the course of development requires discipline. It's all too easy to load up the table designer and to make a change directly to the development database, rather than to save off the ALTER statement that is required when the same change is made to production. This discipline can add considerable overhead to the development process. However, come the end of the project, everything is ready for final testing and deployment. The second development paradigm is to not do the above. Changes are made to the development database without considering the incremental update scripts required to effect the changes. At the end of the project, the SQL developer or DBA, is tasked to work out what changes have been made, and to hand-craft the upgrade scripts retrospectively. The end of the project is the wrong time to be doing this, as the pressure is mounting to ship the product. And where data deployment is involved, it is prudent not to feel rushed. Schema comparison tools such as SQL Compare have made this latter technique more bearable. These tools work by analyzing the before and after states of a database schema, and calculating the SQL required to transition the database. Problem solved? Not entirely. Schema comparison tools are huge time savers, but they have their limitations. There are certain changes that can be made to a database that can't be determined purely from observing the static schema states. If a column is split, how do we determine the algorithm required to copy the data into the new columns? If a NOT NULL column is added without a default, how do we populate the new field for existing records in the target? If we rename a table, how do we know we've done a rename, as we could equally have dropped a table and created a new one? All the above are examples of situations where developer intent is required to supplement the script generation engine. SQL Source Control 3 and SQL Compare 10 introduced a new feature, migration scripts, allowing developers to add custom scripts to replace the default script generation behavior. These scripts are committed to source control alongside the schema changes, and are associated with one or more changesets. Before this capability was introduced, any schema change that required additional developer intent would break any attempt at auto-generation of the upgrade script, rendering deployment testing as part of continuous integration useless. SQL Compare will now generate upgrade scripts not only using its diffing engine, but also using the knowledge supplied by developers in the guise of migration scripts. In future posts I will describe the necessary command line syntax to leverage this feature as part of an automated build process such as continuous integration.

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• Who Tests the Tester?

  It is scarcely surprising that it can take up to five years to release a new version of SQL Server when one understands the extent of the effort required to test it. When enterprises depend on the reliability of an application or tool such as SQL Backup, the contribution of the tester is of paramount importance. It is an interesting and enjoyable role as well, as Andrew Clarke found out by chatting to testers at Red Gate.

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• Avoiding Flicker with JQuery Tabs

  - by Damon

  I am a huge fan of JQuery because it seems like every time I want to do something it has a plugin that already does it.  Adding a tabbed interface to a web page was always quite an annoyance, but JQuery UI offers a pretty descent tabs solution (click here to see it).  If you read through the documentation, you'll find that you can create a tabbed interface by calling the tabs() method on an element containing an unordered list.  The only problem that I've experienced with the method is that on slower machines you can see the unordered list render out in its original state before being updated into the final tabbed interface.  A quick way to fix that issues is to set the CSS display property of the element to none, then call the show() method directly after calling the tabs() method.  This keeps the element completely hidden while JQuery sets up the tabs interface and eliminates the flicker. <SCRIPT type="text/javascript">      $(function()      {           $("#tabs").tabs();           $("#tabs").show();      }); </SCRIPT> <div id="tabs" style="display:none;">     <ul>         <li><a href="#tabs-1">First Tab</a></li>         <li><a href="#tabs-2">Second Tab</a></li>         <li><a href="#tabs-3">Third Tab</a></li>     </ul>     ... </div>

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• Getting started with Windows Azure

  - by jonhobbs

  Hi All, I'm going to sound like a complete newbie here but here goes... I've just signed up for a Windows Azure account and was hoping to get a simple hello world aspx page up and running in a browser to see how it all works but I can't seem to find a simple guide to getting a very simple web application running. I've got as far as setting up a "service" and going onto the "deploy" page but it's asking me upload an "application package". I've looked on MSDN but there aren't any simple guides, just reams of documentation talking about "roles" and "development fabric". For somebody that is proficient in HTML/CSS and knows a little abit about asp.net it may just as well be in another language. So, does anybody know how to upload a simple aspx page and then access it in a browser? Jon

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• .NET Security Part 2

  - by Simon Cooper

  So, how do you create partial-trust appdomains? Where do you come across them? There are two main situations in which your assembly runs as partially-trusted using the Microsoft .NET stack: Creating a CLR assembly in SQL Server with anything other than the UNSAFE permission set. The permissions available in each permission set are given here. Loading an assembly in ASP.NET in any trust level other than Full. Information on ASP.NET trust levels can be found here. You can configure the specific permissions available to assemblies using ASP.NET policy files. Alternatively, you can create your own partially-trusted appdomain in code and directly control the permissions and the full-trust API available to the assemblies you load into the appdomain. This is the scenario I’ll be concentrating on in this post. Creating a partially-trusted appdomain There is a single overload of AppDomain.CreateDomain that allows you to specify the permissions granted to assemblies in that appdomain – this one. This is the only call that allows you to specify a PermissionSet for the domain. All the other calls simply use the permissions of the calling code. If the permissions are restricted, then the resulting appdomain is referred to as a sandboxed domain. There are three things you need to create a sandboxed domain: The specific permissions granted to all assemblies in the domain. The application base (aka working directory) of the domain. The list of assemblies that have full-trust if they are loaded into the sandboxed domain. The third item is what allows us to have a fully-trusted API that is callable by partially-trusted code. I’ll be looking at the details of this in a later post. Granting permissions to the appdomain Firstly, the permissions granted to the appdomain. This is encapsulated in a PermissionSet object, initialized either with no permissions or full-trust permissions. For sandboxed appdomains, the PermissionSet is initialized with no permissions, then you add permissions you want assemblies loaded into that appdomain to have by default: PermissionSet restrictedPerms = new PermissionSet(PermissionState.None); // all assemblies need Execution permission to run at all restrictedPerms.AddPermission( new SecurityPermission(SecurityPermissionFlag.Execution)); // grant general read access to C:\config.xml restrictedPerms.AddPermission( new FileIOPermission(FileIOPermissionAccess.Read, @"C:\config.xml")); // grant permission to perform DNS lookups restrictedPerms.AddPermission( new DnsPermission(PermissionState.Unrestricted)); It’s important to point out that the permissions granted to an appdomain, and so to all assemblies loaded into that appdomain, are usable without needing to go through any SafeCritical code (see my last post if you’re unsure what SafeCritical code is). That is, partially-trusted code loaded into an appdomain with the above permissions (and so running under the Transparent security level) is able to create and manipulate a FileStream object to read from C:\config.xml directly. It is only for operations requiring permissions that are not granted to the appdomain that partially-trusted code is required to call a SafeCritical method that then asserts the missing permissions and performs the operation safely on behalf of the partially-trusted code. The application base of the domain This is simply set as a property on an AppDomainSetup object, and is used as the default directory assemblies are loaded from: AppDomainSetup appDomainSetup = new AppDomainSetup { ApplicationBase = @"C:\temp\sandbox", }; If you’ve read the documentation around sandboxed appdomains, you’ll notice that it mentions a security hole if this parameter is set correctly. I’ll be looking at this, and other pitfalls, that will break the sandbox when using sandboxed appdomains, in a later post. Full-trust assemblies in the appdomain Finally, we need the strong names of the assemblies that, when loaded into the appdomain, will be run as full-trust, irregardless of the permissions specified on the appdomain. These assemblies will contain methods and classes decorated with SafeCritical and Critical attributes. I’ll be covering the details of creating full-trust APIs for partial-trust appdomains in a later post. This is how you get the strongnames of an assembly to be executed as full-trust in the sandbox: // get the Assembly object for the assembly Assembly assemblyWithApi = ... // get the StrongName from the assembly's collection of evidence StrongName apiStrongName = assemblyWithApi.Evidence.GetHostEvidence<StrongName>(); Creating the sandboxed appdomain So, putting these three together, you create the appdomain like so: AppDomain sandbox = AppDomain.CreateDomain( "Sandbox", null, appDomainSetup, restrictedPerms, apiStrongName); You can then load and execute assemblies in this appdomain like any other. For example, to load an assembly into the appdomain and get an instance of the Sandboxed.Entrypoint class, implementing IEntrypoint, you do this: IEntrypoint o = (IEntrypoint)sandbox.CreateInstanceFromAndUnwrap( "C:\temp\sandbox\SandboxedAssembly.dll", "Sandboxed.Entrypoint"); // call method the Execute method on this object within the sandbox o.Execute(); The second parameter to CreateDomain is for security evidence used in the appdomain. This was a feature of the .NET 2 security model, and has been (mostly) obsoleted in the .NET 4 model. Unless the evidence is needed elsewhere (eg. isolated storage), you can pass in null for this parameter. Conclusion That’s the basics of sandboxed appdomains. The most important object is the PermissionSet that defines the permissions available to assemblies running in the appdomain; it is this object that defines the appdomain as full or partial-trust. The appdomain also needs a default directory used for assembly lookups as the ApplicationBase parameter, and you can specify an optional list of the strongnames of assemblies that will be given full-trust permissions if they are loaded into the sandboxed appdomain. Next time, I’ll be looking closer at full-trust assemblies running in a sandboxed appdomain, and what you need to do to make an API available to partial-trust code.

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• Upcoming Webinar: Practical Performance Profiling presented by Jean-Philippe Gouigoux

  - by Michaela Murray

  Hot on the heels of releasing his new book, Practical Performance Profiling, I'm delighted that Jean-Philippe Gouigoux will be joining us on April 3rd to present a free webinar on optimizing .NET code performance. He gave me a sneak preview of his talk last week and there's a lot of really useful advice in there. He'll be discussing why he thinks 20% of performance problems account for 80% of lost time, before looking at some real examples of both server-side and client-side profiling, and covering a variety of best practices you can use to improve the performance of your own code. The webinar will be followed by a Q&A session where he'll be joined by Red Gate technical support engineer Chris Allen to answer any of your questions. Jean-Philippe has 10 years' experience in .NET, most recently as system architect at MGDIS, and was recently made a Microsoft MVP for his contributions to the .NET community. I'm really excited that he's found a gap between his day job and university lecturing to share his knowledge, and I hope you'll be able to join us on April 3rd - it's free but you do need to register in advance at https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/829014934. I'll see you there!

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• SQL Relay - G is for GO

  - by fatherjack

  At the SQL Relay event last week all the UK user group leaders did a combined session - The A to Z of SQL - where we all took two letters of the alphabet and gave a 2 minute (it was strictly timed) talk on something SQL related beginning with those letters. It was quite a riot working through 26 different talks in an hour with 25 speaker handovers and the associated switches between SSMS and the slide deck. As a speaker I thoroughly enjoyed it and i hoe we informed as much as  we entertained the...(read more)

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• Single Item Recovery

  One of the more obscure parts of Exchange Server is the Dumpster. This allows the recovery of one or more deleted emails, in much the same way as the recycle bin in Windows, even if the user has purged them. Although it is seen as an alternative to backup, or as a means to document retention, it really provides a separate function, undoing an accidental deletion. Elie explains how to configure deleted retention items and how to recover a purged item.

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• SharePoint, HTTP Modules, and Page Validation

  - by Damon Armstrong

  Sometimes I really believe that SharePoint actively thwarts my attempts to get it to do what I want.  First you look at something and say, wow, that should work.  Then you realize it doesn’t.  Then you have an epiphany and see a workaround.  And when you almost have that work around working… well then SharePoint says no again.  Then it’s off on another whirl-wind adventure to find a work around for the workaround.  I had one of those issues today, but I think I finally got past the last roadblock. So, I was writing an HTTP module as a workaround for another problem.  Everything looked like it was working great because I had been slowly adding code into the HTTP module bit by bit in a prototyping effort.  Finally I put in the last bit of code in place… and I started to get an error: “The security validation for this page is invalid. Click Back in your Web browser, refresh the page, and try your operation again.” This is not an uncommon error – it normally occurs when you are updating an item on a GET request and you have not marked the web containing the item with AllowUnsafeUpdates.  One issue, however, is that I wasn’t updating anything in my code.  I was, however, getting an SPWeb object so I decided to set the AllowUnsafeUpdates property on it to true for good measure. Once that was in place, I ran it again… “The security validation for this page is invalid. Click Back in your Web browser, refresh the page, and try your operation again.” WTF?!?!  I really expected that setting the AllowUnsafeUpdates property on the SPWeb would fix the issue, but clearly that was not the case.  I have had occasion to disassemble some SharePoint code with .NET Reflector in the past, and one of the things SharePoint abuses a bit more than it should is the HttpContext.  One way to avoid this abuse is to clear out the HttpContext while your code runs and then set it back once you are done.  I tried this next, and everything worked out just like I had expected.  So, if you are building an HTTP Module for SharePoint and some code that you are running ends up giving you a security validation error, remember to try running that code with AllowUnsafeUpdates turned on and try running the code with the HttpContext nulled out (just remember to set it back after your code runs or else you’ll really jack things up).

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• SQL Monitor Alerts in Outlook Without Configuring Email Settings

  - by Fatherjack

  SQL Monitor is a Red Gate tool that I have a long history with and I have worked closely with the development team from a time before it was called SQL Monitor. It is with that history in mind I am a little disappointed in myself that I have only just found out about a pretty cool feature. Out of the box SQL Monitor keeps itself to itself, it busily goes about watching over your servers, noting down when things look suspicious, change drastically or are just out and out wrong. You have to go into the settings and provide email details (SMTP server, account details etc.) before it starts getting at all intrusive with warning and alerts on the condition of your servers. However, it was after installing the most recent version that I was going through the application screen by screen looking for new and interesting changes that I noticed something that had avoided my attention. On the Alerts tab there is an option in the left hand menu. I don’t know how long ago it appeared or why I have never explored it previously but it appears that you can see your Alerts in the format of an RSS feed. Now when you click that link you are taken to a page that is the raw RSS XML – not too interesting but clearly you can use this in an RSS aggregator. Such as Outlook. Note the URL in the newly opened page take it with you into Outlook. For me it is in the form of http://SQLMonitorServerName/Alerts/Inbox/Feed. Again, this is something that I have only recently noticed – Outlook can aggregate RSS feeds. Down below the Inbox, Drafts folders etc, one up from the bottom is RSS Feeds. If you right click that and choose to Add a feed then you can supply the URL for SQL Monitor Alerts: And there you have it, your SQL Monitor Alerts available in Outlook where you can keep an eye on the number of unread items and pick them off at your convenience.

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• Database Documentation - Lands of Trolls: Why and How?

  When database documentation is mentioned in an IT Department, everybody nods wisely, yet everyone does their best to avoid doing it. Attention to the database documentation can be the best invertment in time a development group can make. It is essential, and no system can be properly maintained without it. Feodor gives a sensible explanation and guideline for the unloved task of creating database documentation.

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• A quick look at: sys.dm_os_buffer_descriptors

  - by Jonathan Allen

  SQL Server places data into cache as it reads it from disk so as to speed up future queries. This dmv lets you see how much data is cached at any given time and knowing how this changes over time can help you ensure your servers run smoothly and are adequately resourced to run your systems. This dmv gives the number of cached pages in the buffer pool along with the database id that they relate to: USE [tempdb] GO SELECT COUNT(*) AS cached_pages_count , CASE database_id WHEN 32767 THEN 'ResourceDb' ELSE DB_NAME(database_id) END AS Database_name FROM sys.dm_os_buffer_descriptors GROUP BY DB_NAME(database_id) , database_id ORDER BY cached_pages_count DESC; This gives you results which are quite useful, but if you add a new column with the code: …to convert the pages value to show a MB value then they become more relevant and meaningful. To see how your server reacts to queries, start up SSMS and connect to a test server and database – mine is called AdventureWorks2008. Make sure you start from a know position by running: -- Only run this on a test server otherwise your production server's-- performance may drop off a cliff and your phone will start ringing. DBCC DROPCLEANBUFFERS GO Now we can run a query that would normally turn a DBA’s hair white: USE [AdventureWorks2008] go SELECT * FROM [Sales].[SalesOrderDetail] AS sod INNER JOIN [Sales].[SalesOrderHeader] AS soh ON [sod].[SalesOrderID] = [soh].[SalesOrderID] …and then check our cache situation: A nice low figure – not! Almost 2000 pages of data in cache equating to approximately 15MB. Luckily these tables are quite narrow; if this had been on a table with more columns then this could be even more dramatic. So, let’s make our query more efficient. After resetting the cache with the DROPCLEANBUFFERS and FREEPROCCACHE code above, we’ll only select the columns we want and implement a WHERE predicate to limit the rows to a specific customer. SELECT [sod].[OrderQty] , [sod].[ProductID] , [soh].[OrderDate] , [soh].[CustomerID] FROM [Sales].[SalesOrderDetail] AS sod INNER JOIN [Sales].[SalesOrderHeader] AS soh ON [sod].[SalesOrderID] = [soh].[SalesOrderID] WHERE [soh].[CustomerID] = 29722 …and check our effect cache: Now that is more sympathetic to our server and the other systems sharing its resources. I can hear you asking: “What has this got to do with logging, Jonathan?” Well, a smart DBA will keep an eye on this metric on their servers so they know how their hardware is coping and be ready to investigate anomalies so that no ‘disruptive’ code starts to unsettle things. Capturing this information over a period of time can lead you to build a picture of how a database relies on the cache and how it interacts with other databases. This might allow you to decide on appropriate schedules for over night jobs or otherwise balance the work of your server. You could schedule this job to run with a SQL Agent job and store the data in your DBA’s database by creating a table with: IF OBJECT_ID('CachedPages') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE CachedPages CREATE TABLE CachedPages ( cached_pages_count INT , MB INT , Database_Name VARCHAR(256) , CollectedOn DATETIME DEFAULT GETDATE() ) …and then filling it with: INSERT INTO [dbo].[CachedPages] ( [cached_pages_count] , [MB] , [Database_Name] ) SELECT COUNT(*) AS cached_pages_count , ( COUNT(*) * 8.0 ) / 1024 AS MB , CASE database_id WHEN 32767 THEN 'ResourceDb' ELSE DB_NAME(database_id) END AS Database_name FROM sys.dm_os_buffer_descriptors GROUP BY database_id After this has been left logging your system metrics for a while you can easily see how your databases use the cache over time and may see some spikes that warrant your attention. This sort of logging can be applied to all sorts of server statistics so that you can gather information that will give you baseline data on how your servers are performing. This means that when you get a problem you can see what statistics are out of their normal range and target you efforts to resolve the issue more rapidly.

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• SQL Cruise Alaska 2011

  - by Grant Fritchey

  I had the extreme good fortune to get sent on the last SQL Cruise to Alaska. I love my job. In case you don't what this is, SQL Cruise is a trip on a cruise ship during which you get to attend classes while on the boat, learning all about SQL Server and related topics as well as network with the instructors and the other Cruisers. Frankly, it's amazing. Classes ran from Monday, 5/30, to Saturday, 6/4. The networking was constant, between classes, at night on cruise ship, out on excursions in Alaskan rainforests and while snorkeling in ocean waters. Here's a run down of the experience from my point of view. Because I couldn't travel out 2 days early, I missed the BBQ that occurred the day before the cruise when many of the Cruisers received their swag bags. Some of that swag came from Red Gate. I researched what was useful on a cruise like this and purchased small flashlights and binoculars for all the Cruisers. The flashlights were because, depending on your cabin, ships can be very dark. The binoculars were so that the cruisers could watch all the beautiful landscape as it flowed by. I would have liked to have been there when the bags were opened, but I heard from several people that they appreciated the gifts. Cruisers "In" the hot tub. Pictured: Marjory Woody, Michele Grondin, Kyle Brandt, Grant Fritchey, John Halunen Sunday I went to board the ship with my wife. We had a bit of an adventure because I messed up our documents. It all worked out and we got on board to meet up at the back of the boat at one of the outdoor bars with the other Cruisers, thanks to tweets letting everyone know where to go. That was the end of electronic coordination on the trip (connectivity in Alaska was horrible for everyone except AT&T). The Cruisers were a great bunch of people and it was a real honor to meet them and get to spend time with them. After everyone settled into their cabins, our very first activity was a contest, sponsored by Red Gate. The Cruisers, in an effort to get to know each other and the ship, were required to go all over taking various photographs, some of them hilarious. The winning team of three would all win prizes. Some of the significant others helped out and I tagged along with a team that tied for first but lost the coin toss. The winning team consisted of Christina Leo (blog|twitter), Ryan Malcom (twitter), Neil Hambly (blog|twitter). They then had to do math and identify the cabin with the lowest prime number, oh, and get a picture of it and be the first to get back up to the bar where we were waiting. Christina came in first and very happily carried home an Ipad2. Ryan won a 1TB portable hard drive and Neil won a wireless mouse (picture below, note my special SQL Server Central Friday Shirt. Thanks Steve (blog|twitter)). Winners: Christina Leo, Neil Hambly, Ryan Malcolm. Just Lucky: Grant Fritchey Monday morning classes started. Buck Woody (blog|twitter) was a special guest speaker on this cruise. His theme was "Three C's on the High Seas: Career, Communication and Cloud." The first session was all on Career. I'm not going to type out all my notes from the session, but let's just say, if you get the chance to hear Buck talk about how to manage your career, I suggest you attend. I have a ton of blog posts that I'll be putting together over the next several months (yes, months) both here and over on ScaryDBA. I also have a bunch of work I'm going to be doing to get my career performance bumped up a notch or two (and let's face it, that won't be easy). Later on Monday, Tim Ford (blog|twitter) did a session on DMOs. Specifically the session was on Tim's Period Table of DMOs that he has put together, and how to use some of the more interesting DMOs in your day to day job. It was a great session, packed with good information. Next, Brent Ozar (blog|twitter) did a session on how to monitor and guide SAN configuration for the DBA that doesn't have access to the SAN. That was some seriously useful information. Tuesday morning we only had a single class. Kendra Little (blog|twitter) taught us all about "No Lock for Yes Fun".  It was all about the different transaction isolation levels and how they work. There is so often confusion in this area and Kendra does a great job in clarifying the information. Also, she tosses in her excellent drawings to liven up the presentation. Then it was excursion time in Juneau. My wife and I, along with several other Cruisers, took a hike up around the Mendenhall Glacier. It was absolutely beautiful weather and walking through the Alaskan rain forest was a treat. Our guide, Jason, was a great guy and it was a good day of hiking. Wednesday was an all day excursion in Skagway. My wife and I took the "Ghost and Good Time Girls" walking tour that ended up at a bar that used to be a brothel, the Red Onion. It was a great history of the town. We went back out and hit a few museums and exhibits. We also hiked up the side of the mountain to see the Dewey Lake and some great views of the town. Finally we hiked out to the far side of town to see the Gold Rush cemetery. Hiking done we went back to the boat and had a quiet dinner on our own. Thursday we cruised through Glacier Bay and saw at least four different glaciers including sitting next to the Marjory Glacier for  about an hour. It was amazing. Then it got better. We went into class with Buck again, this time to talk about Communication. Again, I've got pages of notes that I'm going to be referring back to for some time to come. This was an excellent opportunity to learn. Snorkelers: Nicole Bertrand, Aaron Bertrand, Grant Fritchey, Neil Hambly, Christina Leo, John Robel, Yanni Robel, Tim Ford Friday we pulled into Ketchikan. A bunch of us went snorkeling. Yes, snorkeling. Yes, in Alaska. Yes, snorkeling in the ocean in Alaska. It was fantastic. They had us put on 7mm thick wet suits (an adventure all by itself) so it was basically warm the entire time we were in the water (except for the occasional squirt of cold water down my back). Before we got in the water a bald eagle flew up and landed about 15 feet in front of us, which was just an incredible event. Then our guide pointed out about 14 other eagles in the area, hanging out in the trees. Wow! The water was pretty clear and there was a ton of things to see. That was absolutely a blast. Back on the boat I presented a session called Execution Plans: The Deep Dive (note the nautical theme). It seemed to go over well and I had several good questions come out of the session that will lead to new blog posts. After I presented, it was Aaron Bertrand's (blog|twitter) turn. He did a session on "What's New in Denali" that provided a lot of great information. He was able to incorporate new things straight out of Tech-Ed, so this was expanded beyond his usual presentation. The man really knows what he's talking about and communicates it well. Saturday we were travelling so there was time for a bunch of classes. Jeremiah Peschka (blog|twitter) did a great overview of some of the NoSQL databases and what they should be used for. The session was called "The Database is Dead" but it was really about how there are specific uses for these databases that SQL Server doesn't fill, but also that these databases can't replace SQL Server in other areas. Again, good material. Brent Ozar presented again with a session on Defensive Indexing. It was an overview of how indexes work and a deep dive into how to apply them appropriately in your databases to better support access. A good session, as you would expect. Then we pulled into Victoria, BC, in Canada and had a nice dinner with several of the Cruisers, including Denny Cherry (blog|twitter). After that it was back to Seattle on Sunday. By the way, the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle isn't a Science Fiction Museum any more. I was very disappointed to discover this. Overall, it was a great experience. I'm extremely appreciative of Red Gate for sending me and for Tim, Brent, Kendra and Jeremiah for having me. The other Cruisers were all amazing people and it was an honor & privilege to meet them and spend time with them. While this was a seriously fun time, it was also a very serious training opportunity with solid information coming from seasoned industry pros.

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• OCS Disaster Recovery – Part 1

  Office Communications Server stores its data in a variety of locations, which can make backing it up and disaster recovery a slightly tricky business. Thankfully, Johan Velduis is here to tell which databases and fileshares we need to worry about, and give us peace of mind.

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• F# and the rose-tinted reflection

  - by CliveT

  We're already seeing increasing use of many cores on client desktops. It is a change that has been long predicted. It is not just a change in architecture, but our notions of efficiency in a program. No longer can we focus on the asymptotic complexity of an algorithm by counting the steps that a single core processor would take to execute it. Instead we'll soon be more concerned about the scalability of the algorithm and how well we can increase the performance as we increase the number of cores. This may even lead us to throw away our most efficient algorithms, and switch to less efficient algorithms that scale better. We might even be willing to waste cycles in order to speculatively execute at the algorithm rather than the hardware level. State is the big headache in this parallel world. At the hardware level, main memory doesn't necessarily contain the definitive value corresponding to a particular address. An update to a location might still be held in a CPU's local cache and it might be some time before the value gets propagated. To get the latest value, and the notion of "latest" takes a lot of defining in this world of rapidly mutating state, the CPUs may well need to communicate to decide who has the definitive value of a particular address in order to avoid lost updates. At the user program level, this means programmers will need to lock objects before modifying them, or attempt to avoid the overhead of locking by understanding the memory models at a very deep level. I think it's this need to avoid statefulness that has led to the recent resurgence of interest in functional languages. In the 1980s, functional languages started getting traction when research was carried out into how programs in such languages could be auto-parallelised. Sadly, the impracticality of some of the languages, the overheads of communication during this parallel execution, and rapid improvements in compiler technology on stock hardware meant that the functional languages fell by the wayside. The one thing that these languages were good at was getting rid of implicit state, and this single idea seems like a solution to the problems we are going to face in the coming years. Whether these languages will catch on is hard to predict. The mindset for writing a program in a functional language is really very different from the way that object-oriented problem decomposition happens - one has to focus on the verbs instead of the nouns, which takes some getting used to. There are a number of hybrid functional/object languages that have been becoming more popular in recent times. These half-way houses make it easy to use functional ideas for some parts of the program while still allowing access to the underlying object-focused platform without a great deal of impedance mismatch. One example is F# running on the CLR which, in Visual Studio 2010, has because a first class member of the pack. Inside Visual Studio 2010, the tooling for F# has improved to the point where it is easy to set breakpoints and watch values change while debugging at the source level. In my opinion, it is the tooling support that will enable the widespread adoption of functional languages - without this support, people will put off any transition into the functional world for as long as they possibly can. Without tool support it will make it hard to learn these languages. One tool that doesn't currently support F# is Reflector. The idea of decompiling IL to a functional language is daunting, but F# is potentially so important I couldn't dismiss the idea. As I'm currently developing Reflector 6.5, I thought it wise to take four days just to see how far I could get in doing so, even if it achieved little more than to be clearer on how much was possible, and how long it might take. You can read what happened here, and of the insights it gave us on ways to improve the tool.

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• New SQL Code Deployment Book and Damn I Need to Blog More

  - by Rodney

  Select datediff(d,'02/19/2009',getdate()) This value returned from the above SELECT statement  is 398 and that is the number of days since my last blog post.  As I was formulating my apology for this hiatus from blogging, it dawned on me that I also do not twitter (sorry tweet) and as apologies beget apologies, I then realized that instead of catching up on the backlog of blogs, I should write a book about what I have been most focused on in the past year, one month and 3 days.  That focus is my day job, which of course, most of us have. And that day job we share is why most of us read blogs, tweets, articles and even books in the first place. So my focus for the past year has been SQL code deployments and all of that entails. I am fortunate that Redgate has agreed to entertain my crazy notion of writing an entire book about this subject, which I have tentatively titled, "The Sound and the Fury". Wait..that is not right. Oh yes, a title more befiting a techical tome but with as much profundity, "Standardizing SQL Server Code Deployements - A Redgate Guide". The great American novel must wait a few more years. As I begin this journey, I am inviting you to assist me in the discovery process and even be interviewed and included in the book itself. How do you do deployments in your company? Do you have a documented process or no process? Do you do code review or cross your fingers? Do you work for a small company or a Fortune 100 company? Government regulations or  garage? It does not  matter to me. I am not here to judge. I worked for both companies myself and have seen many things that you can relate to.  If you would like to participate and are one of the 3 people still reading this blog after 398 days, please fill out my survey and let's get started.  http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/RRG86RH  

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• 5 Reasons why I hate WPF

  - by Richard Mitchell

  I decided to use writing a new tool as a way to learn WPF and MVVM and I thought I'd write down a few of my problems as a way of cathartic release. I decided to read a book before attempting WPF for the first time as I've heard others complain about the steep learning curve. I chose the rather excellent "WPF 4 Unleashed" by Adam Nathan to read through and "Pro WPF in C# 2010" by Matthew MacDonald as a reference whilst I programmed. 1 - Poor editing support for XAML The first thing I think any...(read more)

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• Procedural, Semi-Procedural and Declarative Programing Part II

  SQL Server accommodates a whole range of programming styles and will even allow you to create code that is wholly procedural. Is a declarative approach inevitably better? Can it be difficult to maintain? Can you avoid the performance problems of procedural code by using triggers? Joe adds some thoughts.

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• One eye on my dinner and one eye on SQL server

  - by fatherjack

  LiveJournal Tags: RedGate,Work Life Balance,Tips and Tricks,SQL Server This is somewhere between a Tweet and a proper blog article - would that be a Bleet? Anyway, I was at a local restaurant yesterday and after placing my order I was thinking about having to get home and log in to check some SQL Servers and then the thought came to me that as we were near civilisation there was likely to be a 3G signal that might actually make using the web browser on my phone bearable. It was surprisingly fast on my HTC Desire, it was almost as good as Wi-Fi. RedGate SQL Monitor works fine on the default HTC browser and here is the proof, me checking the servers while I am waiting for the meal to arrive. Everything checked out OK so I had the evening free from SQL Server. You can get a free 14 day full trial of a SQL Monitor from RedGate here or find out more about it at The Future of Monitoring. Disclosure: I am a friend of RedGate and as such regularly make positive comments about their products. I don't get paid for it but I do get free licenses for testing and reviewing purposes.

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• The emergence of Atlassian's Bamboo (and a free SQL Source Control license offer!)

  - by David Atkinson

  The rise in demand for database continuous integration has forced me to skill-up in various new tools and technologies, particularly build servers. We have been using JetBrain's TeamCity here at Red Gate for a couple of years now, having replaced the ageing CruiseControl.NET, so it was a natural choice for us to use this for our database CI demos. Most of our early adopter customers have also transitioned away from CruiseControl, the majority to TeamCity and Microsoft's TeamBuild. However, more recently, for reasons we've yet to fully comprehend, we've observed a significant surge in the number of evaluators for Atlassian's Bamboo. I installed this a couple of weeks back to satisfy myself that it works seamlessly with Red Gate tools. As you would expect Bamboo's UI has the same clean feel found in any Atlassian tool (we use JIRA extensively here at Red Gate). In the coming weeks I will post a short step-by-step guide to setting up SQL Server continuous integration using the Red Gate command lines. To help us further optimize the integration between these tools I'd be very keen to hear from any Bamboo users who also use Red Gate tools who might be willing to participate in usability tests and other similar research in exchange for Amazon vouchers. If you are interested in helping out please contact me at David dot Atkinson at red-gate.com I recently spoke with Sarah, the product marketing manager for Bamboo, and we ended up having a detailed conversation about database CI, which has been meticulously documented in the form of a blog post on Atlassian's website: http://blogs.atlassian.com/2012/05/database-continuous-integration-redgate/ We've also managed to persuade Red Gate marketing to provide a great free-tool offer, provide a free SQL Source Control or SQL Connect license to Atlassian users provided it is claimed before the end of June! Full details are at the bottom of the post. Technorati Tags: sql server

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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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• .NET Security Part 3

  - by Simon Cooper

  You write a security-related application that allows addins to be used. These addins (as dlls) can be downloaded from anywhere, and, if allowed to run full-trust, could open a security hole in your application. So you want to restrict what the addin dlls can do, using a sandboxed appdomain, as explained in my previous posts. But there needs to be an interaction between the code running in the sandbox and the code that created the sandbox, so the sandboxed code can control or react to things that happen in the controlling application. Sandboxed code needs to be able to call code outside the sandbox. Now, there are various methods of allowing cross-appdomain calls, the two main ones being .NET Remoting with MarshalByRefObject, and WCF named pipes. I’m not going to cover the details of setting up such mechanisms here, or which you should choose for your specific situation; there are plenty of blogs and tutorials covering such issues elsewhere. What I’m going to concentrate on here is the more general problem of running fully-trusted code within a sandbox, which is required in most methods of app-domain communication and control. Defining assemblies as fully-trusted In my last post, I mentioned that when you create a sandboxed appdomain, you can pass in a list of assembly strongnames that run as full-trust within the appdomain: // get the Assembly object for the assembly Assembly assemblyWithApi = ... // get the StrongName from the assembly's collection of evidence StrongName apiStrongName = assemblyWithApi.Evidence.GetHostEvidence<StrongName>(); // create the sandbox AppDomain sandbox = AppDomain.CreateDomain( "Sandbox", null, appDomainSetup, restrictedPerms, apiStrongName); Any assembly that is loaded into the sandbox with a strong name the same as one in the list of full-trust strong names is unconditionally given full-trust permissions within the sandbox, irregardless of permissions and sandbox setup. This is very powerful! You should only use this for assemblies that you trust as much as the code creating the sandbox. So now you have a class that you want the sandboxed code to call: // within assemblyWithApi public class MyApi { public static void MethodToDoThings() { ... } } // within the sandboxed dll public class UntrustedSandboxedClass { public void DodgyMethod() { ... MyApi.MethodToDoThings(); ... } } However, if you try to do this, you get quite an ugly exception: MethodAccessException: Attempt by security transparent method ‘UntrustedSandboxedClass.DodgyMethod()’ to access security critical method ‘MyApi.MethodToDoThings()’ failed. Security transparency, which I covered in my first post in the series, has entered the picture. Partially-trusted code runs at the Transparent security level, fully-trusted code runs at the Critical security level, and Transparent code cannot under any circumstances call Critical code. Security transparency and AllowPartiallyTrustedCallersAttribute So the solution is easy, right? Make MethodToDoThings SafeCritical, then the transparent code running in the sandbox can call the api: [SecuritySafeCritical] public static void MethodToDoThings() { ... } However, this doesn’t solve the problem. When you try again, exactly the same exception is thrown; MethodToDoThings is still running as Critical code. What’s going on? By default, a fully-trusted assembly always runs Critical code, irregardless of any security attributes on its types and methods. This is because it may not have been designed in a secure way when called from transparent code – as we’ll see in the next post, it is easy to open a security hole despite all the security protections .NET 4 offers. When exposing an assembly to be called from partially-trusted code, the entire assembly needs a security audit to decide what should be transparent, safe critical, or critical, and close any potential security holes. This is where AllowPartiallyTrustedCallersAttribute (APTCA) comes in. Without this attribute, fully-trusted assemblies run Critical code, and partially-trusted assemblies run Transparent code. When this attribute is applied to an assembly, it confirms that the assembly has had a full security audit, and it is safe to be called from untrusted code. All code in that assembly runs as Transparent, but SecurityCriticalAttribute and SecuritySafeCriticalAttribute can be applied to individual types and methods to make those run at the Critical or SafeCritical levels, with all the restrictions that entails. So, to allow the sandboxed assembly to call the full-trust API assembly, simply add APCTA to the API assembly: [assembly: AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers] and everything works as you expect. The sandboxed dll can call your API dll, and from there communicate with the rest of the application. Conclusion That’s the basics of running a full-trust assembly in a sandboxed appdomain, and allowing a sandboxed assembly to access it. The key is AllowPartiallyTrustedCallersAttribute, which is what lets partially-trusted code call a fully-trusted assembly. However, an assembly with APTCA applied to it means that you have run a full security audit of every type and member in the assembly. If you don’t, then you could inadvertently open a security hole. I’ll be looking at ways this can happen in my next post.

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• SQLBeat Episode 11 – Ted the Fred Krueger Halloween SQL

  - by SQLBeat

  In this episode of the SQLBeat Podcast I speak conversationally (Ok I will just say I converse) with Ted Krueger about Elm Street, where he works as a DBA who stores nightmares in SQL Server database tables. The joke about it being BLOB storage is only one of several that may scare you away from this Halloween Special. If you like listening to two SQL guys talking about the bands they used to be in, rainbow trout and video games, come on in. Bwaaaa Haaaa Haaa…..Ok I will stop. Download the MP3

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