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  • EntityDataSource Control Basics

    The Entity Framework can be easily used to create websites based on ASP.NET. The EntityDataSource control, which is one of a set of Web Server Datasource controls, can be used to to bind an Entity Data Model (EDM) to data-bound controls on the page. Thse controls can be editable grids, forms, drop-down list controls and master-detail pages which can then be used to create, read, update, and delete data. Joydip tells you what you need to get started.

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  • What Counts for a DBA: Skill

    - by drsql
    “Practice makes perfect:” right? Well, not exactly. The reality of it all is that this saying is an untrustworthy aphorism. I discovered this in my “younger” days when I was a passionate tennis player, practicing and playing 20+ hours a week. No matter what my passion level was, without some serious coaching (and perhaps a change in dietary habits), my skill level was never going to rise to a level where I could make any money at the sport that involved something other than selling tennis balls at a sporting goods store. My game may have improved with all that practice but I had too many bad practices to overcome. Practice by itself merely reinforces what we know and what we can figure out naturally. The truth is actually closer to the expression used by Vince Lombardi: “Perfect practice makes perfect.” So how do you get to become skilled as a DBA if practice alone isn’t sufficient? Hit the Internet and start searching for SQL training and you can find 100 different sites. There are also hundreds of blogs, magazines, books, conferences both onsite and virtual. But then how do you know who is good? Unfortunately often the worst guide can be to find out the experience level of the writer. Some of the best DBAs are frighteningly young, and some got their start back when databases were stored on stacks of paper with little holes in it. As a programmer, is it really so hard to understand normalization? Set based theory? Query optimization? Indexing and performance tuning? The biggest barrier often is previous knowledge, particularly programming skills cultivated before you get started with SQL. In the world of technology, it is pretty rare that a fresh programmer will gravitate to database programming. Database programming is very unsexy work, because without a UI all you have are a bunch of text strings that you could never impress anyone with. Newbies spend most of their time building UIs or apps with procedural code in C# or VB scoring obvious interesting wins. Making matters worse is that SQL programming requires mastery of a much different toolset than most any mainstream programming skill. Instead of controlling everything yourself, most of the really difficult work is done by the internals of the engine (written by other non-relational programmers…we just can’t get away from them.) So is there a golden road to achieving a high skill level? Sadly, with tennis, I am pretty sure I’ll never discover it. However, with programming it seems to boil down to practice in applying the appropriate techniques for whatever type of programming you are doing. Can a C# programmer build a great database? As long as they don’t treat SQL like C#, absolutely. Same goes for a DBA writing C# code. None of this stuff is rocket science, as long as you learn to understand that different types of programming require different skill sets and you as a programmer must recognize the difference between one of the procedural languages and SQL and treat them differently. Skill comes from practicing doing things the right way and making “right” a habit.

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  • .NET vs Windows 8: Rematch!

    - by Simon Cooper
    So, although you will be able to use your existing .NET skills to develop Metro apps, it turns out Microsoft are limiting Visual Studio 2011 Express to Metro-only. From the Express website: Visual Studio 11 Express for Windows 8 provides tools for Metro style app development. To create desktop apps, you need to use Visual Studio 11 Professional, or higher. Oh dear. To develop any sort of non-Metro application, you will need to pay for at least VS Professional. I suspect Microsoft (or at least, certain groups within Microsoft) have a very explicit strategy in mind. By making VS Express Metro-only, developers who don't want to pay for Professional will be forced to make their simple one-shot or open-source application in Metro. This increases the number of applications available for Windows 8 and Windows mobile devices, which in turn make those platforms more attractive for consumers. When you use the free VS 11 Express, instead of paying Microsoft, you provide them a service by making applications for Metro, which in turn makes Microsoft's mobile offering more attractive to consumers, increasing their market share. Of course, it remains to be seen if developers forced to jump onto the Metro bandwagon will simply jump ship to Android or iOS instead. At least, that's what I think is going on. With Microsoft, who really knows?

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  • SMTP POP3 & PST. Acronyms from Hades.

    - by mikef
    A busy SysAdmin will occasionally have reason to curse SMTP. It is, certainly, one of the strangest events in the history of IT that such a deeply flawed system, designed originally purely for campus use, should have reached its current dominant position. The explanation was that it was the first open-standard email system, so SMTP/POP3 became the internet standard. We are, in consequence, dogged with a system with security weaknesses so extreme that messages are sent in plain text and you have no real assurance as to who the message came from anyway (SMTP-AUTH hasn't really caught on). Even without the security issues, the use of SMTP in an office environment provides a management nightmare to all commercial users responsible for complying with all regulations that control the conduct of business: such as tracking, retaining, and recording company documents. SMTP mail developed from various Unix-based systems designed for campus use that took the mail analogy so literally that mail messages were actually delivered to the users, using a 'store and forward' mechanism. This meant that, from the start, the end user had to store, manage and delete messages. This is a problem that has passed through all the releases of MS Outlook: It has to be able to manage mail locally in the dreaded PST file. As a stand-alone system, Outlook is flawed by its neglect of any means of automatic backup. Previous Outlook PST files actually blew up without warning when they reached the 2 Gig limit and became corrupted and inaccessible, leading to a thriving industry of 3rd party tools to clear up the mess. Microsoft Exchange is, of course, a server-based system. Emails are less likely to be lost in such a system if it is properly run. However, there is nothing to stop users from using local PSTs as well. There is the additional temptation to load emails into mobile devices, or USB keys for off-line working. The result is that the System Administrator is faced by a complex hybrid system where backups have to be taken from Servers, and PCs scattered around the network, where duplication of emails causes storage issues, and document retention policies become impossible to manage. If one adds to that the complexity of mobile phone email readers and mail synchronization, the problem is daunting. It is hardly surprising that the mood darkens when SysAdmins meet and discuss PST Hell. If you were promoted to the task of tormenting the souls of the damned in Hades, what aspects of the management of Outlook would you find most useful for your task? I'd love to hear from you. Cheers, Michael

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  • Is this table replicated?

    - by fatherjack
    Another in the potentially quite sporadic series of I need to do ... but I cant find it on the internet. I have a table that I think might be involved in replication but I don't know which publication its in... We know the table name - 'MyTable' We have replication running on our server and its replicating our database, or part of it - 'MyDatabase'. We need to know if the table is replicated and if so which publication is going to need to be reviewed if we make changes to the table. How? USE MyDatabase GO /* Lots of info about our table but not much that's relevant to our current requirements*/ SELECT * FROM sysobjects WHERE NAME = 'MyTable' -- mmmm, getting there /* To quote BOL - "Contains one row for each merge article defined in the local database. This table is stored in the publication database.replication" interesting column is [pubid] */ SELECT * FROM dbo.sysmergearticles AS s WHERE NAME = 'MyTable' -- really close now /* the sysmergepublications table - Contains one row for each merge publication defined in the database. This table is stored in the publication and subscription databases. so this would be where we get the publication details */ SELECT * FROM dbo.sysmergepublications AS s WHERE s.pubid = '2876BBD8-3D4E-4ED8-88F3-581A659E8144' -- DONE IT. /* Combine the two tables above and we get the information we need */ SELECT s.[name] AS [Publication name] FROM dbo.sysmergepublications AS s INNER JOIN dbo.sysmergearticles AS s2 ON s.pubid = s2.pubid WHERE s2.NAME = 'MyTable' So I now know which

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  • The five steps of business intelligence adoption: where are you?

    - by Red Gate Software BI Tools Team
    When I was in Orlando and New York last month, I spoke to a lot of business intelligence users. What they told me suggested a path of BI adoption. The user’s place on the path depends on the size and sophistication of their organisation. Step 1: A company with a database of customer transactions will often want to examine particular data, like revenue and unit sales over the last period for each product and territory. To do this, they probably use simple SQL queries or stored procedures to produce data on demand. Step 2: The results from step one are saved in an Excel document, so business users can analyse them with filters or pivot tables. Alternatively, SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) might be used to generate a report of the SQL query for display on an intranet page. Step 3: If these queries are run frequently, or business users want to explore data from multiple sources more freely, it may become necessary to create a new database structured for analysis rather than CRUD (create, retrieve, update, and delete). For example, data from more than one system — plus external information — may be incorporated into a data warehouse. This can become ‘one source of truth’ for the business’s operational activities. The warehouse will probably have a simple ‘star’ schema, with fact tables representing the measures to be analysed (e.g. unit sales, revenue) and dimension tables defining how this data is aggregated (e.g. by time, region or product). Reports can be generated from the warehouse with Excel, SSRS or other tools. Step 4: Not too long ago, Microsoft introduced an Excel plug-in, PowerPivot, which allows users to bring larger volumes of data into Excel documents and create links between multiple tables.  These BISM Tabular documents can be created by the database owners or other expert Excel users and viewed by anyone with Excel PowerPivot. Sometimes, business users may use PowerPivot to create reports directly from the primary database, bypassing the need for a data warehouse. This can introduce problems when there are misunderstandings of the database structure or no single ‘source of truth’ for key data. Step 5: Steps three or four are often enough to satisfy business intelligence needs, especially if users are sophisticated enough to work with the warehouse in Excel or SSRS. However, sometimes the relationships between data are too complex or the queries which aggregate across periods, regions etc are too slow. In these cases, it can be necessary to formalise how the data is analysed and pre-build some of the aggregations. To do this, a business intelligence professional will typically use SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) to create a multidimensional model — or “cube” — that more simply represents key measures and aggregates them across specified dimensions. Step five is where our tool, SSAS Compare, becomes useful, as it helps review and deploy changes from development to production. For us at Red Gate, the primary value of SSAS Compare is to establish a dialog with BI users, so we can develop a portfolio of products that support creation and deployment across a range of report and model types. For example, PowerPivot and the new BISM Tabular model create a potential customer base for tools that extend beyond BI professionals. We’re interested in learning where people are in this story, so we’ve created a six-question survey to find out. Whether you’re at step one or step five, we’d love to know how you use BI so we can decide how to build tools that solve your problems. So if you have a sixty seconds to spare, tell us on the survey!

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  • SQL Server APPLY Basics

    One of the most interesting additions to SQL Server syntax in SQL Server 2005 was the APPLY operator. It allows several queries that were previously impossible. It is surprisingly difficult to find a simple explanation of what APPLY actually does. Rob Sheldon is the specialist in simple explanations, so we asked him.

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  • SharePoint 2010 HierarchicalConfig Caching Problem

    - by Damon
    We've started using the Application Foundations for SharePoint 2010 in some of our projects at work, and I came across a nasty issue with the hierarchical configuration settings.  I have some settings that I am storing at the Farm level, and as I was testing my code it seemed like the settings were not being saved - at least that is what it appeared was the case at first.  However, I happened to reset IIS and the settings suddenly appeared.  Immediately, I figured that it must be a caching issue and dug into the code base.  I found that there was a 10 second caching mechanism in the SPFarmPropertyBag and the SPWebAppPropertyBag classes.  So I ran another test where I waited 10 seconds to make sure that enough time had passed to force the caching mechanism to reset the data.  After 10 minutes the cache had still not cleared.  After digging a bit further, I found a double lock check that looked a bit off in the GetSettingsStore() method of the SPFarmPropertyBag class: if (_settingStore == null || (DateTime.Now.Subtract(lastLoad).TotalSeconds) > cacheInterval)) { //Need to exist so don't deadlock. rrLock.EnterWriteLock(); try { //make sure first another thread didn't already load... if (_settingStore == null) { _settingStore = WebAppSettingStore.Load(this.webApplication); lastLoad = DateTime.Now; } } finally { rrLock.ExitWriteLock(); } } What ends up happening here is the outer check determines if the _settingStore is null or the cache has expired, but the inner check is just checking if the _settingStore is null (which is never the case after the first time it's been loaded).  Ergo, the cached settings are never reset.  The fix is really easy, just add the cache checking back into the inner if statement. //make sure first another thread didn't already load... if (_settingStore == null || (DateTime.Now.Subtract(lastLoad).TotalSeconds) > cacheInterval) { _settingStore = WebAppSettingStore.Load(this.webApplication); lastLoad = DateTime.Now; } And then it starts working just fine. as long as you wait at least 10 seconds for the cache to clear.

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  • Building a List of All SharePoint Timer Jobs Programmatically in C#

    - by Damon Armstrong
    One of the most frustrating things about SharePoint is that the difficulty in figuring something out is inversely proportional to the simplicity of what you are trying to accomplish.  Case in point, yesterday I wanted to get a list of all the timer jobs in SharePoint.  Having never done this nor having any idea of exactly how to do this right off the top of my head, I inquired to Google.  I like to think my Google-fu is fair to good, so I normally find exactly what I’m looking for in the first hit.  But on the topic of listing all SharePoint timer jobs all it came up with a PowerShell script command (Get-SPTimerJob) and nothing more. Refined search after refined search continued to turn up nothing. So apparently I am the only person on the planet who needs to get a list of the timer jobs in C#.  In case you are the second person on the planet who needs to do this, the code to do so follows: SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(() => {    var timerJobs = new List();    foreach (var job in SPAdministrationWebApplication.Local.JobDefinitions)    {       timerJobs.Add(job);    }    foreach (SPService curService in SPFarm.Local.Services)    {       foreach (var job in curService.JobDefinitions)       {          timerJobs.Add(job);       }     } }); For reference, you have the two for loops because the Central Admin web application doesn’t end up being in the SPFarm.Local.Services group, so you have to get it manually from the SPAdministrationWebApplication.Local reference.

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  • Modernizr Rocks HTML5

    - by Laila
    HTML5 is a moving target.  At the moment, we don't know what will be in future versions.  In most circumstances, this really matters to the developer. When you're using Adobe Air, you can be reasonably sure what works, what is there, and what isn't, since you have a version of the browser built-in. With Metro, you can assume that you're going to be using at least IE 10.   If, however,  you are using HTML5 in a web application, then you are going to rely heavily on Feature Detection.  Feature-Detection is a collection of techniques that tell you, via JavaScript, whether the current browser has this feature natively implemented or not Feature Detection isn't just there for the esoteric stuff such as  Geo-location,  progress bars,  <canvas> support,  the new <input> types, Audio, Video, web workers or storage, but is required even for semantic markup, since old browsers make a pigs ear out of rendering this.  Feature detection can't rely just on reading the browser version and inferring from that what works. Instead, you must use JavaScript to check that an HTML5 feature is there before using it.  The problem with relying on the user-agent is that it takes a lot of historical data  to work out what version does what, and, anyway, the user-agent can be, and sometimes is, spoofed. The open-source library Modernizr  is just about the most essential  JavaScript library for anyone using HTML5, because it provides APIs to test for most of the CSS3 and HTML5 features before you use them, and is intelligent enough to alter semantic markup into 'legacy' 'markup  using shims  on page-load  for old browsers. It also allows you to check what video Codecs are installed for playing video. It also provides media queries  and conditional resource-loading (formerly YepNope.js.).  Generally, Modernizr gives you the choice of what you do about browsers that don't support the feature that you want. Often, the best choice is graceful degradation, but the resource-loading feature allows you to dynamically load JavaScript Shims to replace the standard API for missing or defective HTML5 functionality, called 'PolyFills'.  As the Modernizr site says 'Yes, not only can you use HTML5 today, but you can use it in the past, too!' The evolutionary progress of HTML5  requires a more defensive style of JavaScript programming where the programmer adopts a mindset of fearing the worst ( IE 6)  rather than assuming the best, whilst exploiting as many of the new HTML features as possible for the requirements of the site or HTML application.  Why would anyone want the distraction of developing their own techniques to do this when  Modernizr exists to do this for you? Laila

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  • SQL Server Unit Testing with tSQLt

    When one considers the amount of time and effort that Unit Testing consumes for the Database Developer, is surprising how few good SQL Server Test frameworks are around. tSQLt , which is open source and free to use, is one of the frameworks that provide a simple way to populate a table with test data as part of the unit test, and check the results with what should be expected. Sebastian and Dennis, who created tSQLt, explain.

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  • Consolidating SQL Server Error Logs from Multiple Instances Using SSIS

    SQL Server hides a lot of very useful information in its error log files. Unfortunately, the process of hunting through all these logs, file-by-file, server-by-server, can cause a problem. Rodney Landrum offers a solution which will allow you to pull error log records from multiple servers into a central database, for analysis and reporting with T-SQL.

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  • What's on Azure right now?

    - by RobbieT
    If you speak to Microsoft, they'll give you a number of active accounts, but what are those accounts actually running? It could be a collection of Hello World ASP.NET sites, or perhaps small exciting web start-ups, or maybe even the beginnings of large corporate moves to the cloud! I guess what I really wanted to know was who is using Azure but that's a much harder question to answer, so we'll stick to what for now. My super awesome comrade Theo Spears attempted to answer this by trawling every...(read more)

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  • Microsoft Access as a Weapon of War

    - by Damon
    A while ago (probably a decade ago, actually) I saw a report on a tracking system maintained by a U.S. Army artillery control unit.  This system was capable of maintaining a bearing on various units in the field to help avoid friendly fire.  I consider the U.S. Army to be the most technologically advanced fighting force on Earth, but to my terror I saw something on the title bar of an application displayed on a laptop behind one of the soldiers they were interviewing: Tracking.mdb Oh yes.  Microsoft Office Suite had made it onto the battlefield.  My hope is that it was just running as a front-end for a more proficient database (no offense Access people), or that the soldier was tracking something else like KP duty or fantasy football scores.  But I could also see the corporate equivalent of a pointy-haired boss walking into a cube and asking someone who had piddled with Access to build a database for HR forms.  Except this pointy-haired boss would have been a general, the cube would have been a tank, and the HR forms would have been targets that, if something went amiss, would have been hit by a 500lb artillery round. Hope that solider could write a good query :)

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  • TLS/SSL and .NET Framework 4.0

    The Secure Socket Layer is now essential for the secure exchange of digital data, and is most generally used within the HTTPS protocol. .NET now provides the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) to implement secure communications directly. Matteo explains the TLS/SSL protocol, and takes a hands-on approach to investigate the SslStream class to show how to implement a secure communication channel

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  • What Counts for A DBA: Observant

    - by drsql
    When walking up to the building where I work, I can see CCTV cameras placed here and there for monitoring access to the building. We are required to wear authorization badges which could be checked at any time. Do we have enemies?  Of course! No one is 100% safe; even if your life is a fairy tale, there is always a witch with an apple waiting to snack you into a thousand years of slumber (or at least so I recollect from elementary school.) Even Little Bo Peep had to keep a wary lookout.    We nerdy types (or maybe it was just me?) generally learned on the school playground to keep an eye open for unprovoked attack from simpler, but more muscular souls, and take steps to avoid messy confrontations well in advance. After we’d apprehensively negotiated adulthood with varying degrees of success, these skills of watching for danger, and avoiding it,  translated quite well to the technical careers so many of us were destined for. And nowhere else is this talent for watching out for irrational malevolence so appropriate as in a career as a production DBA.   It isn’t always active malevolence that the DBA needs to watch out for, but the even scarier quirks of common humanity.  A large number of the issues that occur in the enterprise happen just randomly or even just one time ever in a spurious manner, like in the case where a person decided to download the entire MSDN library of software, cross join every non-indexed billion row table together, and simultaneously stream the HD feed of 5 different sporting events, making the network access slow while the corporate online sales just started. The decent DBA team, like the going, gets tough under such circumstances. They spring into action, checking all of the sources of active information, observes the issue is no longer happening now, figures that either it wasn’t the database’s fault and that the reboot of the whatever device on the network fixed the problem.  This sort of reactive support is good, and will be the initial reaction of even excellent DBAs, but it is not the end of the story if you really want to know what happened and avoid getting called again when it isn’t even your fault.   When fires start raging within the corporate software forest, the DBA’s instinct is to actively find a way to douse the flames and get back to having no one in the company have any idea who they are.  Even better for them is to find a way of killing a potential problem while the fires are small, long before they can be classified as raging. The observant DBA will have already been monitoring the server environment for months in advance.  Most troubles, such as disk space and security intrusions, can be predicted and dealt with by alerting systems, whereas other trouble can come out of the blue and requires a skill of observing ongoing conditions and noticing inexplicable changes that could signal an emerging problem.  You can’t automate the DBA, because the bankable skill of a DBA is in detecting the early signs of unexpected problems, and working out how to deal with them before anyone else notices them.    To achieve this, the DBA will check the situation as it is currently happening,  and in many cases is likely to have been the person who submitted the problem to the level 1 support person in the first place, just to let the support team know of impending issues (always well received, I tell you what!). Database and host computer settings, configurations, and even critical data might be profiled and captured for later comparisons. He’ll use Monitoring tools, built-in, commercial (Not to be too crassly commercial or anything, but there is one such tool is SQL Monitor) and lots of homebrew monitoring tools to monitor for problems and changes in the server environment.   You will know that you have it right when a support call comes in and you can look at your monitoring tools and quickly respond that “response time is well within the normal range, the query that supports the failing interface works perfectly and has actually only been called 67% as often as normal, so I am more than willing to help diagnose the problem, but it isn’t the database server’s fault and is probably a client or networking slowdown causing the interface to be used less frequently than normal.” And that is the best thing for any DBA to observe…

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  • Contiguous Time Periods

    It is always better, and more efficient, to maintain referential integrity by using constraints rather than triggers. Sometimes it is not at all obvious how to do this, and the history table, and other temporal data tables, presented problems for checking data that were difficult to solve with constraints. Suddenly, Alex Kuznetsov came up with a good solution, and so now history tables can benefit from more effective integrity checking. Joe explains...

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  • Continuous Delivery and the Database

    Continuous Delivery is fairly generally understood to be an effective way of tackling the problems of software delivery and deployment by making build, integration and delivery into a routine. The way that databases fit into the Continuous Delivery story has been less-well defined. Phil Factor explains why he's an enthusiast for databases being full participants, and suggests practical ways of doing so.

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  • Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 - Part I

    Office Communications Server, which provides integrated voice, conferencing, IM, and telephony, is one of those products that are difficult to explain in simple terms. It takes a brave man to take on the task, and to provide a simple guide to installing it: Luckily for us, Johan is that man. In the first of a series, he explains what it is, how it benefits your enterprise, and how to make it happen.

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  • A Deep Dive into Transport Queues - Part 1

    Submission queues? Poison message queues? Johan Veldhuis unlocks the mysteries of MS Exchange's Transport queues that used to temporarily store messages waiting until they are passed through to the next stage, and explains how to manage these queues.

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  • Alerts are good, aren't they?

    - by fatherjack
    It is accepted best practise to set some alerts on every SQL instance you install. They aren't particularly well publicised but I have never seen any one not recommend setting up alerts for Error 823, 824 and 825. These alerts are focussed on successful access(IO) to the hard drives that SQL Server is using. If there are  any errors when reading or writing to the drives then one of these errors will be returned. Having the alerts on these errors means that any IO issues will be brought to the...(read more)

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  • The Mindset of the Enterprise DBA: Creating and Applying Standards to Our Work

    Although many professions, such as pilots, surgeons and IT administrators, require judgement and skill, they also require the ability to do many repeated standard procedures in a consistent and methodical manner. These procedures leave little room for creativity since they must be done right, and in the right order. For DBAs, standardization involves providing and following checklists, notes and instructions so that the results are predictable, correct and easy to maintain

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  • 3 tips for SQL Azure connection perfection

    - by Richard Mitchell
    One of my main annoyances when dealing with SQL Azure is of course the occasional connection problems that communicating to a cloud database entails. If you're used to programming against a locally hosted SQL Server box this can be quite a change and annoying like you wouldn't believe. So after hitting the problem again in http://cloudservices.red-gate.com  I thought I'd write a little post to remind myself how I've got it working, I don't say it's right but at least "it works on my machine" Tip...(read more)

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  • An Introduction to PowerShell Modules

    For PowerShell to provide specialised scripting, especially for administering server technologies, it can have the range of Cmdlets available to it extended by means of Snapins. With version 2 there is an easier and better method of extending PowerShell: the Module. These can be distributed with the application to be administered, and a wide range of Cmdlets are now available to the PowerShell user. Powershell has suddenly grown up.

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