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• Monitoring Your Servers

  - by Grant Fritchey

  If you are the DBA in a large scale enterprise, you’re probably already monitoring your servers for up-time and performance. But if you work for a medium-sized business, a small shop, or even a one-man operation, chances are pretty good that you’re not doing that sort of monitoring. You know that you’re supposed to be doing it, but other things, more important at-the-moment things, keep getting in the way. After all, which is more important, some monitoring or backup testing?  Backup testing, of course. Monitoring is frequently one of those things that you do when can get around to it.  Well, as you can see at the right, I have your round tuit ready to go. What if I told you that you could get monitoring on your servers for up-time, job completion, performance, all the standard stuff? And what if I told you that you wouldn’t need to install and configure another server in your environment to get it done? And what if I told you that you’d be able to set up and customize your alerts so you could know if your server was offline or a drive was full? Almost nothing for you to do, and you’ll have a full-blown monitoring process. Sounds to good to be true doesn’t it? Well, it’s coming. We’re creating an online, remote, monitoring system here at Red Gate. You’ll be able to use our SQL Monitor tool (which you can see here, monitoring SQL Server Central in real time) to keep track of your systems, but without having to set up a server and a database for storing the information collected. Instead, we’re taking advantage of services available through the internet to enable collection and storage of this information remotely, off your systems. All you have to do is install a piece of software that will communicate between our service and your servers and you’ll be off and running. It’s that easy. Before you get too excited, let me break the news that this is the near future I’m talking about. We’re setting up the program and there’s a sign-up you can use to get in on the initial tests.

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• Tuning Red Gate: #1 of Many

  - by Grant Fritchey

  Everyone runs into performance issues at some point. Same thing goes for Red Gate software. Some of our internal systems were running into some serious bottlenecks. It just so happens that we have this nice little SQL Server monitoring tool. What if I were to, oh, I don't know, use the monitoring tool to identify the bottlenecks, figure out the causes and then apply a fix (where possible) and then start the whole thing all over again? Just a crazy thought. OK, I was asked to. This is my first time looking through these servers, so here's how I'd go about using SQL Monitor to get a quick health check, sort of like checking the vitals on a patient. First time opening up our internal SQL Monitor instance and I was greeted with this: Oh my. Maybe I need to get our internal guys to read my blog. Anyway, I know that there are two servers where most of the load is. I'll drill down on the first. I'm selecting the server, not the instance, by clicking on the server name. That opens up the Global Overview page for the server. The information here much more applicable to the "oh my gosh, I have a problem now" type of monitoring. But, looking at this, I am seeing something immediately. There are four(4) drives on the system. The C:\ has an average read time of 16.9ms, more than double the others. Is that a problem? Not sure, but it's something I'll look at. It's write time is higher too. I'll keep drilling down, first, to the unclosed alerts on the server. Now things get interesting. SQL Monitor has a number of different types of alerts, some related to error states, others to service status, and then some related to performance. Guess what I'm seeing a bunch of right here: Long running queries and long job durations. If you check the dates, they're all recent, within the last 24 hours. If they had just been old, uncleared alerts, I wouldn't be that concerned. But with all these, all performance related, and all in the last 24 hours, yeah, I'm concerned. At this point, I could just start responding to the Alerts. If I click on one of the the Long-running query alerts, I'll get all kinds of cool data that can help me determine why the query ran long. But, I'm not in a reactive mode here yet. I'm still gathering data, trying to understand how the server works. I have the information that we're generating a lot of performance alerts, let's sock that away for the moment. Instead, I'm going to back up and look at the Global Overview for the SQL Instance. It shows all the databases on the server and their status. Then it shows a number of basic metrics about the SQL Server instance, again for that "what's happening now" view or things. Then, down at the bottom, there is the Top 10 expensive queries list: This is great stuff. And no, not because I can see the top queries for the last 5 minutes, but because I can adjust that out 3 days. Now I can see where some serious pain is occurring over the last few days. Databases have been blocked out to protect the guilty. That's it for the moment. I have enough knowledge of what's going on in the system that I can start to try to figure out why the system is running slowly. But, I want to look a little more at some historical data, to understand better how this server is behaving. More next time.

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• Unit Testing TSQL

  - by Grant Fritchey

  I went through a period of time where I spent a lot of effort figuring out how to set up unit tests for TSQL. It wasn't easy. There are a few tools out there that help, but mostly it involves lots of programming. well, not as much as before. Thanks to the latest Down Tools Week at Red Gate a new utility has been built and released into the wild, SQL Test. Like a lot of the new tools coming out of Red Gate these days, this one is directly integrated into SSMS, which means you're working where you're comfortable and where you already have lots of tools at your disposal. After the install, when you launch SSMS and get connected, you're prompted to install the tSQLt example database. Go for it. It's a quick way to see how the tool works. I'd suggest using it. It' gives you a quick leg up. The concepts are pretty straight forward. There are a series of CLR commands that you use to configure a test and the test assertions. In between you're calling TSQL, either calls to your structure, queries, or stored procedures. They already have the one things that I always found wanting in database tests, a way to compare tables of results. I also like the ability to create a dummy copy of tables for the tests. It lets you control structures and behaviors so that the tests are more focused. One of the issues I always ran into with the other testing tools is that setting up the tests might require potentially destructive changes to the structure of the database (dropping FKs, etc.) which added lots of time and effort to setting up the tests, making testing more difficult, and therefor, less useful. Functionally, this is pretty similar to the Visual Studio tests and TSQLUnit tests that I used to use. The primary improvement over the Visual Studio tests is that I'm working in SSMS instead of Visual Studio. The primary improvement over TSQLUnit is the SQL Test interface it self. A lot of the functionality is the same, but having a sweet little tool to manage & run the tests from makes a huge difference. Oh, and don't worry. You can still run these tests directly from TSQL too, so automation has not gone away. I'm still thinking about how I'd use this in a dev environment where I also had source control to fret. That might be another blog post right there. I'm just getting started with SQL Test, so this is the first of several blog posts & videos. Watch this space. Try the tool.

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• DOAG 2011

  - by Grant Ronald

  This week is the German Oracle User Group (DOAG) one of the largest Oracle User Groups in Europe.  We have a strong representation from Oracle's Product Management Team.  I kick of things with Dummies Guide to ADF on Tuesday 10am Frank Nimphius explains Task Flows in 60 minutes Duncan Mills give an insight into Real World Performance Tuning for ADF. Susan Duncan explains the Amazing World of Application Lifecycle Management and Duncan Mills finished the day with ADF Mobile Development There is also a load of interesting sessions on Forms, Apex and ADF from customers, partners and Oracle employees from Oracle Germany.  Looking to be a great conference.

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• What is the Endeca MDEX Engine?

  - by Grant Schofield

  Today I would like to draw your attention to a really helpful article by Rittmanmead taking a deeper look under the covers at the Endeca MDEX engine; how it works, what's so different about it, and why that matters to customers. This will in particular be useful for the technical audience. The other articles in the Endeca Week series are equally useful for a wider audience. http://www.rittmanmead.com/2012/02/oracle-endeca-week-what-is-the-endeca-mdex-engine/

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• Enabling unattended-upgrades from a shell script

  - by Grant Watson

  I have a shell script to automatically configure new Ubuntu virtual machines for my purposes. I would like this script to install and enable unattended-upgrades, but I cannot figure out how to do so without user interaction. The usual way to enable upgrades is dpkg-reconfigure unattended-upgrades, but of course that is interactive. The noninteractive front end avoids asking any questions at all, and the text front end seems bound and determined to do its I/O with the tty and not with stdin/stdout.

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• Book Review: Oracle ADF 11gR2 Development Beginner's Guide

  - by Grant Ronald

  Packt Publishing asked me to review Oracle ADF 11gR2 Development Beginner's Guide by Vinod Krishnan, so on a couple of long flights I managed to get through the book in a couple of sittings. One point to make clear before I go into the review.  Having authored "The Quick Start Guide to Fusion Development: JDeveloper and Oracle ADF", I've written a book which covers the same topic/beginner level.  I also think that its worth stating up front that I applaud anyone who has gone  through the effort of writing a technical book. So well done Vinod.  But on to the review: The book itself is a good break down of topic areas.  Vinod starts with a quick tour around the IDE, which is an important step given all the work you do will be through the IDE.  The book then goes through the general path that I tend to always teach: a quick overview demo, ADF BC, validation, binding, UI, task flows and then the various "add on" topics like security, MDS and advanced topics.  So it covers the right topics in, IMO, the right order.  I also think the writing style flows nicely as well - Its a relatively easy book to read, it doesn't get too formal and the "Have a go hero" hands on sections will be useful for many. That said, I did pick out a number of styles/themes to the writing that I found went against the idea of a beginners guide.  For example, in writing my book, I tried to carefully avoid talking about topics not yet covered or not yet relevant at that point in someone's learning.  So, if I was a new ADF developer reading this book, did I really need to know about ADFBindingFilter and DataBindings.cpx file on page 58 - I've only just learned how to do a drag and drop simple application so showing me XML configuration files relevant to JSF/ADF lifecycle is probably going to scare me off! I found this in a couple of places, for example, the security chapter starts on page 219 but by page 222 (and most of the preceding pages are hands-on steps) we're diving into the web.xml, weblogic.xml, adf-config.xml, jsp-config.xml and jazn-data.xml.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you shouldn't know this, but I feel you have to get people on a strong grounding of the concepts before showing them implementation files.  If having just learned what ADF Security is will "The initialization parameter remove.anonymous.role is set to false for the JpsFilter filter as this filter is the first filter defined in the file" really going to help me? The other theme I found which I felt didn't work was that a couple of the chapters descended into a reference guide.  For example page 159 onwards basically lists UI components and their properties.  And page 87 onwards list the attributes of ADF BC in pretty much the same way as the on line help or developer guide, and I've a personal aversion to any sort of help that says pretty much what the attribute name is e.g. "Precision Rule: this option is used to set a strict precision rule", or "Property Set: this is the property set that has to be applied to the attribute". Hmmm, I think I could have worked that out myself, what I would want to know in a beginners guide are what are these for, what might I use them for...and if I don't need to use them to create an emp/dept example them maybe it’s better to leave them out. All that said, would the book help me - yes it would.  It’s obvious that Vinod knows ADF and his style is relatively easy going and the book covers all that it has to, but I think the book could have done a better job in the educational side of guiding beginners.

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• Oracle ADF PMs are UKOUG Conference 2012

  - by Grant Ronald

  Next week we'll have a (what is a collection of PM's called, flock? gaggle?) of ADF Product Managers attending the UKOUG conference in Birmingham.  Myself, Frank Nimphius, Chris Muir, Susan Duncan, Frederic Desbiens and Duncan Mills will all be attending.  We'll be covering a range of sessions and if you have any questions you'd like to ask about Oracle tools development, technical questions, migration, Forms to ADF, futures, mobile, anything!, then come up and say hi.

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• Which TLD would be suited to a personal site?

  - by Grant Palin

  I'm planning what is essentially a "business card" website for myself, and have been looking at domains. My primary site (a .com) is for my blog and portfolio and the like, but I want a separate site for basic information, contact, networks, and the like. In this light, there are a few TLDs that seem to be suitable: .info, .me, and .name. I'd appreciate remarks on the differences between these options, and suggestion on which would be suitable for my need.

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• Migrating Forms to Java or ADF, the truth and no FUD

  - by Grant Ronald

  The question about migrating Forms to Java (or ADF or APEX) comes up time and time again.  I wanted to pull some core information together in a single blog post to address this question. The first question I always ask is "WHY" - Forms may still be a viable option for you so "if it ain't broke don't fix it".  Bottom line is whatever anyone tells you, its going to be a considerable effort and cost to migrate from Forms to something else so the business is going to want to know WHY you spend all those hard earned dollars switching from something that might have been serving you quite adequately. Second point, if you are going to switch, I would encourage you NOT to look at building a Forms clone.  So many times I see people trying to build an ADF application and EXACTLY mimic the Forms model - ADF is NOT a Forms clone.  You should be building to the sweet spot of your target technology, not your 20 year old client/server technology.  This is also the chance for the business to embrace change, so maybe look at new processes, channels and technology options that weren't available when you first developed your Forms applications. To help you understand what is involved, I've put together a number of resources. Thinking about migration of Forms to Java, ADF or APEX, read this to prepare yourself Oracle Forms to ADF: When, Why and How - this gives you an overview of our vision, directly from Oracle Product Management Redeveloping a Forms Application with Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle ADF.  This is a conference session from myself and Lynn Munsinger on how ADF can be used in a Forms migration/rewrite As someone who manages both Forms and ADF Product Management teams, I've a foot in either camp and am happy to see you use either tool.  However, I want you to be able to make an informed decision.  My hope is that there information sources will help you do that.

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• Restoring Databases

  - by Grant Fritchey

  I like the way Mike Walsh phrased it: You're Only As Good as Your Ability To Restore. Ain't it the truth. You may be taking backups, incrementals, and log backups of your databases. You may have DBCC in place, and all that fun stuff. But if you haven't restored the database, what do you have? You don't know. The trick is, restoring databases takes up a heck of a lot of space on your servers. To test all your productions backups, you'd need a system with as much space as production. unless.. Ever heard of SQL Virtual Restore? Check it out. With this, you answer Mike's questions and validate your backups without having to have twice the amount of space. That's a win, and we all know, winning is better than losing.

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• How likely are IE9 jumplists to be useful?

  - by Grant Palin

  Having installed the Internet Explorer 9 release, I've experimented with the jumplists feature available in Windows 7 - drag a site tab down to the taskbar to create a jumplist. Works for Facebook and Twitter, anyway. I have my suspicions about the utility of this feature - it's a neat and possibly useful feature, yet is limited to the combination of IE9 and Windows 7, plus sites implementing the appropriate code. Given the relatively small audience at this point, is there any value in adding code to support this feature? And would it likely be more useful for a web application (e.g. Twitter, Facebook) than a typical website?

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• django & postgres linux hosting (with SSH access) recommendations

  - by Justin Grant

  We're looking for a good place to host our custom Django app (a fork of OSQA) and its postgresql backend. Requirements include: Linux Python 2.6 or (ideally) Python 2.7 Django 1.2 Postgres 8.4 or later DB backup/restore handled by the hoster, not us OS & dev-platform-stack patching/maintenance handled by the hoster, not us SSH access (so we can pull source code from GitHub, so we can install python eggs, etc.) ability to set up cron jobs (e.g. to send out dail email updates) ability to send up to 10K emails/day good performance (not ganged up with a zillion other sites on one CPU, not starved for RAM) FTP or SCP access to web logs dedicated public IP SSL support Costs under $1000/month for a relatively small site (<5M pageviews/month) Good customer service We already have a prototype site running on EC2 on top of a Bitnami DjangoStack. The problem is that we have to patch the OS, patch postgres, etc. We'd really prefer a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering, like Heroku offers for Rails apps, where all we need to worry about is deploying our code instead of worrying about system software patching and maintenance. Google App Engine is closest to what we're looking for, but they don't offer relational DB access (not yet at least). Anyone have a recommendation?

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• Which Presentation Would You Like to See at the OUG Ireland?

  - by Grant Ronald

  A novel idea, and one I think one worth trialling, is the OUG Ireland are allowing the public to vote on which presentation I will give at the conference in March.  So, rather than the a paper selection committee choosing,  the OUG community can choose.I know that Oracle tried this at Oracle World over the last couple of year and I think its good to get some community input.If you are a member of the OUG you can vote here.

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• Calling Oracle Developers in Portugal - Fusion and ADF sessions

  - by Grant Ronald

  I'll be demonstrating the Oracle Fusion development experience and delivering an Oracle ADF Masterclass in Portugal on the 12th and 13th of April 2012.  This will be an opportunity to find out how Oracle develops their Fusion applications and an overview of the framework which is at the heard of Oracle's future: Oracle ADF. I'll also be part of a Q&A panel, so any questions on Forms/ADF, this is your chance!

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• Why do game engines convert models to triangles compared to keeping it as four side polygon

  - by Grant

  I've worked using maya for animation and more film orientated projects however I am also focusing on my studies on video game development (eventually want to be either programmer or some sort of TD with programming and 3D skills). Anyways, I was talking with one of my professor and we couldn't figure out why all game engines (that I know of) convert to triangles. Anyone happen to know why game engines convert to triangles compared to leaving the models as four sided polygons? Also what are the pros and cons (if any) of doing this? Thanks in advance.

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• SQLIO Writes

  - by Grant Fritchey

  SQLIO is a fantastic utility for testing the abilities of the disks in your system. It has a very unfortunate name though, since it's not really a SQL Server testing utility at all. It really is a disk utility. They ought to call it DiskIO because they'd get more people using I think. Anyway, branding is not the point of this blog post. Writes are the point of this blog post. SQLIO works by slamming your disk. It performs as mean reads as it can or it performs as many writes as it can depending on how you've configured your tests. There are much smarter people than me who will get into all the various types of tests you should run. I'd suggest reading a bit of what Jonathan Kehayias (blog|twitter) has to say or wade into Denny Cherry's (blog|twitter) work. They're going to do a better job than I can describing all the benefits and mechanisms around using this excellent piece of software. My concerns are very focused. I needed to set up a series of tests to see how well our product SQL Storage Compress worked. I wanted to know the effects it would have on a system, the disk for sure, but also memory and CPU. How to stress the system? SQLIO of course. But when I set it up and ran it, following the documentation that comes with it, I was seeing better than 99% compression on the files. Don't get me wrong. Our product is magnificent, wonderful, all things great and beautiful, gets you coffee in the morning and is made mostly from bacon. But 99% compression. No, it's not that good. So what's up? Well, it's the configuration. The default mechanism is to load up a file, something large that will overwhelm your disk cache. You're instructed to load the file with a character 0x0. I never got a computer science degree. I went to film school. Because of this, I didn't memorize ASCII tables so when I saw this, I thought it was zero's or something. Nope. It's NULL. That's right, you're making a very large file, but you're filling it with NULL values. That's actually ok when all you're testing is the disk sub-system. But, when you want to test a compression and decompression, that can be an issue. I got around this fairly quickly. Instead of generating a file filled with NULL values, I just copied a database file for my tests. And to test it with SQL Storage Compress, I used a database file that had already been run through compression (about 40% compression on that file if you're interested). Now the reads were taken care of. I am seeing very realistic performance from decompressing the information for reads through SQLIO. But what about writes? Well, the issue is, what does SQLIO write? I don't have access to the code. But I do have access to the results. I did two different tests, just to be sure of what I was seeing. First test, use the .DAT file as described in the documentation. I opened the .DAT file after I was done with SQLIO, using WordPad. Guess what? It's a giant file full of air. SQLIO writes NULL values. What does that do to compression? I did the test again on a copy of an uncompressed database file. Then I ran the original and the SQLIO modified copy through ZIP to see what happened. I got better than 99% compression out of the SQLIO modified file (original file of 624,896kb went to 275,871kb compressed, after SQLIO it went to 608kb compressed). So, what does SQLIO write? It writes air. If you're trying to test it with compression or maybe some other type of file storage mechanism like dedupe, you need to know this because your tests really won't be valid. Should I find some other mechanism for testing? Yeah, if all I'm interested in is establishing performance to my own satisfaction, yes. But, I want to be able to compare my results with other people's results and we all need to be using the same tool in order for that to happen. SQLIO is the common mechanism that most people I know use to establish disk performance behavior. It'd be better if we could get SQLIO to do writes in some other fashion. Oh, and before I go, I get to brag a bit. Measuring IOPS, SQL Storage Compress outperforms my disk alone by about 30%.

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• Hot Sessions for Oracle World 2012 - Cloud and Mobile Keynote

  - by Grant Ronald

  For those attending Oracle World 2012 Chris Tonas, VP of Application Development Tools, will be talking about Cloud and Mobile on Monday 1st Oct at 10:45am.  Having had a sneak preview of this session already is amazing to see how our development tools, specifically JDeveloper and Oracle ADF, are embracing mobile and cloud development.  If you want to know more, you'll have to come along to this session!

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• SQL Excursions

  - by Grant Fritchey

  Not everyone likes boats. Some people like hanging out, on dry land, maybe sipping a good wine. Interested in doing that AND learning some new stuff about SQL Server? Then you might want to check out SQL Excursions. Denny Cherry (blog|twitter), MVP and terribly sharp individual, has organized this new venture to supply small group training in combination with travel to interesting, and let's face it, comfortable, places. The first trip is already set for Napa Valley. The training will be by Denny and MVP, author, and all round great guy, Thomas LaRock (blog|twitter). Seats for this unique event are going fast. I'd suggest signing up soon. Oh, and did I forget to mention that Red Gate is sponsoring dinner at a fine restaurant? Well, consider it mentioned. Seriously, nice wine, great training, beautiful scenery, networking, all in one place. What are you waiting for?

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• Oracle Forms and Java JRE Auto-Update Problems

  - by Grant Ronald

  There have been a few threads regarding problems with the auto update of the JRE and Oracle Forms applications.  See this entry from Steve Chan and this entry on the error FRM-92095: Oracle Jnitiator version too low - please install version 1.1.8.2 or higher.  There are a few points to be aware of so Support have written up a note to hopefully make things clearer.  Log onto your Oracle support account and search for Note: 1470123.1.

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• Ubuntu 12, chromium/chrome facebook not loading

  - by Grant

  this problem started with chrome, tried chromium to fix it. both have this problem, and after installed firefox no longer works with facebook. I found a threas with two fixes that work and what I need to know is how to make these fixes permanent. one is a cache permissions workaround. launching chromium from terminal with a redirect to a new self created cache in the home folder works. how can i repair the permissions issue with the cache or make a permanent change to the cache chromium uses? two, the ifconfig wlan0 mtu set to 1492, this setting doesnt seem to be perpetual after a reboot. this set of issues is I believe specific to my particular install as there isnt a huge issue from anyone else out there, i'm on a toshiba satellite laptop with a 50/50 HDD partition split with windows. This is likely causing the issue or contributing in some way but I wont run linux full time on this machine until I get these kinks a more permanent fix. Thanks in advance for any advice/answers.

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• Sharing My Thoughts on Space Flight

  - by Grant Fritchey

  This went out in the DBA newsletter from Red Gate, but I enjoyed writing it so much, I thought I'd share it to a wider audience: I grew up watching the US space program. I watched men walk on the moon for the first time in 1969, when I was only six years old. From that moment on, I dreamed of going into space. I studied aeronautics and tried to get into the Air Force Academy, all in preparation for my long career as an astronaut. Clearly, that didn't quite work out for me. But it sure could for you. At Red Gate, we're running a new contest: DBA in Space. The prize is a sub-orbital flight. When I first got word of this contest, my immediate response was, "And you need me to go right away and do a test flight? Excellent!" No, no test flight needed, plus I was pretty low on the list of volunteers. "That's OK, I'll just enter." Then I was told that, as a Red Gate employee, I couldn't win. My next response was, "I quit".eventually, I was talked down off the ledge, and agreed to help make this special for some other DBA. Many (most?) of us are science fiction fans, either the soft science of Star Trek and Star Wars, or the hard science of Niven and Pournelle, or Allen Steele. We watched the Shuttles go up and land. We've been dreaming of our own trips into orbit and our vacation-home on the Moon for a long, long time. All that might not arrive on schedule, but you've got a shot at breaking clear of the atmosphere. The first stage is a video quiz, starring Brad McGehee, and it's live at www.DBAinSpace.com now. Go for it. Good luck and God speed!

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• Last Chance At Space

  - by Grant Fritchey

  All entries for the DBA In Space contest have to be in by this Friday, the 18th. I’m so jealous of all of you who can enter this contest. Just think about it. You’re getting a chance to take a sub-orbital rocket ride. But, here’s the kicker, the chances are limited to data professionals. That’s a pretty small sub-set when you think about it. Further, you have to gotten the answers to the quiz questions correct, which only takes a little bit of honest research, but come on. That further limits the result set. You’ve really got an excellent shot at this (and the jealousy rears it’s ugly head again). If you haven’t finished your entry, go on over to the link and get it taken care of. There’s really no reason to not do it. Oh, and by the way, if you’re one of those (I’d say crazy) people who don’t want to ride the rocket, you can take the prize in cash. Although I’d be mighty disappointed in you if you did.

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• Azure

  - by Grant Fritchey

  I've been tasked to learn SQL Azure, as well as test all the Red Gate products on it. My one, BIG, fear has been that I'll receive some mongo bill in the mail because I've exceeded the MSDN testing limit. I know people that have had that problem. I've been trying to keep an eye on my usage, but, let's face it, it's not something I think about every day. But now I don't have to. Red Gate has been working with Azure, long before I showed up. They already released a little piece of software that I just found out about, it's called CloudTally. It gathers your usage and sends you a daily email so you can know if you're starting to approach that limit. Check it out, it's free.

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• Monitoring Baseline

  - by Grant Fritchey

  Knowing what's happening on your servers is important, that's monitoring. Knowing what happened on your server is establishing a baseline. You need to do both. I really enjoyed this blog post by Ted Krueger (blog|twitter). It's not enough to know what happened in the last hour or yesterday, you need to compare today to last week, especially if you released software this weekend. You need to compare today to 30 days ago in order to begin to establish future projections. How your data has changed over 30 days is a great indicator how it's going to change for the next 30. No, it's not perfect, but predicting the future is not exactly a science, just ask your local weatherman. Red Gate's SQL Monitor can show you the last week, the last 30 days, the last year, or all data you've collected (if you choose to keep a year's worth of data or more, please have PLENTY of storage standing by). You have a lot of choice and control here over how much data you store. Here's the configuration window showing how you can set this up: This is for version 2.3 of SQL Monitor, so if you're running an older version, you might want to update. The key point is, a baseline simply represents a moment in time in your server. The ability to compare now to then is what you're looking for in order to really have a useful baseline as Ted lays out so well in his post.

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