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• Oracle Forms Migration to ADF - Webinar vom ORACLE Partner PITSS

  - by Thomas Leopold

    Tuesday, February 22, 2011 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM CET Free Webinar Re-Engineering Legacy Oracle Forms Migration from Forms to ADF - A Case Study Join Oracle's Grant Ronald and PITSS to see a software architecture comparison of Oracle Forms and ADF and a live step-by-step presentation on how to achieve a successful migration. Learn about various migration options, challenges and best practices to protect your current investment in Oracle Forms. PL/SQL is without match for what it does: manipulating data in the database. If you blindly migrate all your PL/SQL to Java you will, in all probability, end up with less maintainable and less efficient code. Instead you should consider which code it best left as PL/SQL..." Grant Ronald - "Migrating Oracle Forms to Fusion: Myth or Magic Bullet?" Re-Engineering existing business logic is mandatory for your legacy Forms application to take advantage of the new Software architectures like ADF. The PITSS.CON solution combines the deep understanding of Oracle Forms and Reports applications architecture with powerful re-engineering capabilities that allows the developer community to protect the investment in the existing Forms applications and to concentrate on fine-tuning and customization of the modernized functionality rather than manually recreating every module and business logic from bottom up. Registration: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/971702250   PITSS GmbHKönigsdorferstrasse 25D-82515 WolfratshausenDo not forget to check out these Free Webinars in March! Thursday, March 3, 2011 Upgrade and Modernize Your Application to Forms 11g Registration/Information Tuesday, March 15, 2011 Shaping the Future for your Oracle Forms Application:Forms 11g, ADF, APEX Registration/Information Tuesday, March 29, 2011 Oracle Forms Modernization to APEX Registration/Information Registration is limited, so sign up  today!Presented By:        Grant Ronald, Senior Group Product Manager,Oracle       Magdalena Serban, Product Manager,PITSS   Contact Us:            PITSS in Americas +1 248.740.0935 [email protected] www.pitssamerica.com       PITSS in Europe +49 (0) 717287 5200 [email protected] www.pitss.com   White Paper:      From Oracle Forms to Oracle ADF and JEE     © Copyright 2010 PITSS GmbH, Wolfratshausen, Stuttgart, München; Managing Directors: Dipl.-Ing. Andreas Gaede, Michael Kilimann, Dipl.-Ing. Dirk Fleischmann Commercial Register: HRB 125471 at District Court Munich. All rights reserved. Any duplication or further treatment in any medium, in parts or as a whole, requires a written agreement. If you do not want to receive invitations for events, meetings and seminars from us, then please click here.

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• Advantages of SQL Backup Pro

  - by Grant Fritchey

  Getting backups of your databases in place is a fundamental issue for protection of the business. Yes, I said business, not data, not databases, but business. Because of a lack of good, tested, backups, companies have gone completely out of business or suffered traumatic financial loss. That’s just a simple fact (outlined with a few examples here). So you want to get backups right. That’s a big part of why we make Red Gate SQL Backup Pro work the way it does. Yes, you could just use native backups, but you’ll be missing a few advantages that we provide over and above what you get out of the box from Microsoft. Let’s talk about them. Guidance If you’re a hard-core DBA with 20+ years of experience on every version of SQL Server and several other data platforms besides, you may already know what you need in order to get a set of tested backups in place. But, if you’re not, maybe a little help would be a good thing. To set up backups for your servers, we supply a wizard that will step you through the entire process. It will also act to guide you down good paths. For example, if your databases are in Full Recovery, you should set up transaction log backups to run on a regular basis. When you choose a transaction log backup from the Backup Type you’ll see that only those databases that are in Full Recovery will be listed: This makes it very easy to be sure you have a log backup set up for all the databases you should and none of the databases where you won’t be able to. There are other examples of guidance throughout the product. If you have the responsibility of managing backups but very little knowledge or time, we can help you out. Throughout the software you’ll notice little green question marks. You can see two in the screen above and more in each of the screens in other topics below this one. Clicking on these will open a window with additional information about the topic in question which should help to guide you through some of the tougher decisions you may have to make while setting up your backup jobs. Here’s an example: Backup Copies As a part of the wizard you can choose to make a copy of your backup on your network. This process runs as part of the Red Gate SQL Backup engine. It will copy your backup, after completing the backup so it doesn’t cause any additional blocking or resource use within the backup process, to the network location you define. Creating a copy acts as a mechanism of protection for your backups. You can then backup that copy or do other things with it, all without affecting the original backup file. This requires either an additional backup or additional scripting to get it done within the native Microsoft backup engine. Offsite Storage Red Gate offers you the ability to immediately copy your backup to the cloud as a further, off-site, protection of your backups. It’s a service we provide and expose through the Backup wizard. Your backup will complete first, just like with the network backup copy, then an asynchronous process will copy that backup to cloud storage. Again, this is built right into the wizard or even the command line calls to SQL Backup, so it’s part a single process within your system. With native backup you would need to write additional scripts, possibly outside of T-SQL, to make this happen. Before you can use this with your backups you’ll need to do a little setup, but it’s built right into the product to get this done. You’ll be directed to the web site for our hosted storage where you can set up an account. Compression If you have SQL Server 2008 Enterprise, or you’re on SQL Server 2008R2 or greater and you have a Standard or Enterprise license, then you have backup compression. It’s built right in and works well. But, if you need even more compression then you might want to consider Red Gate SQL Backup Pro. We offer four levels of compression within the product. This means you can get a little compression faster, or you can just sacrifice some CPU time and get even more compression. You decide. For just a simple example I backed up AdventureWorks2012 using both methods of compression. The resulting file from native was 53mb. Our file was 33mb. That’s a file that is smaller by 38%, not a small number when we start talking gigabytes. We even provide guidance here to help you determine which level of compression would be right for you and your system: So for this test, if you wanted maximum compression with minimum CPU use you’d probably want to go with Level 2 which gets you almost as much compression as Level 3 but will use fewer resources. And that compression is still better than the native one by 10%. Restore Testing Backups are vital. But, a backup is just a file until you restore it. How do you know that you can restore that backup? Of course, you’ll use CHECKSUM to validate that what was read from disk during the backup process is what gets written to the backup file. You’ll also use VERIFYONLY to check that the backup header and the checksums on the backup file are valid. But, this doesn’t do a complete test of the backup. The only complete test is a restore. So, what you really need is a process that tests your backups. This is something you’ll have to schedule separately from your backups, but we provide a couple of mechanisms to help you out here. First, when you create a backup schedule, all done through our wizard which gives you as much guidance as you get when running backups, you get the option of creating a reminder to create a job to test your restores. You can enable this or disable it as you choose when creating your scheduled backups. Once you’re ready to schedule test restores for your databases, we have a wizard for this as well. After you choose the databases and restores you want to test, all configurable for automation, you get to decide if you’re going to restore to a specified copy or to the original database: If you’re doing your tests on a new server (probably the best choice) you can just overwrite the original database if it’s there. If not, you may want to create a new database each time you test your restores. Another part of validating your backups is ensuring that they can pass consistency checks. So we have DBCC built right into the process. You can even decide how you want DBCC run, which error messages to include, limit or add to the checks being run. With this you could offload some DBCC checks from your production system so that you only run the physical checks on your production box, but run the full check on this backup. That makes backup testing not just a general safety process, but a performance enhancer as well: Finally, assuming the tests pass, you can delete the database, leave it in place, or delete it regardless of the tests passing. All this is automated and scheduled through the SQL Agent job on your servers. Running your databases through this process will ensure that you don’t just have backups, but that you have tested backups. Single Point of Management If you have more than one server to maintain, getting backups setup could be a tedious process. But, with Red Gate SQL Backup Pro you can connect to multiple servers and then manage all your databases and all your servers backups from a single location. You’ll be able to see what is scheduled, what has run successfully and what has failed, all from a single interface without having to connect to different servers. Log Shipping Wizard If you want to set up log shipping as part of a disaster recovery process, it can frequently be a pain to get configured correctly. We supply a wizard that will walk you through every step of the process including setting up alerts so you’ll know should your log shipping fail. Summary You want to get your backups right. As outlined above, Red Gate SQL Backup Pro will absolutely help you there. We supply a number of processes and functionalities above and beyond what you get with SQL Server native. Plus, with our guidance, hints and reminders, you will get your backups set up in a way that protects your business.

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• Getting a Database into Source Control

  - by Grant Fritchey

  For any number of reasons, from simple auditing, to change tracking, to automated deployment, to integration with application development processes, you’re going to want to place your database into source control. Using Red Gate SQL Source Control this process is extremely simple. SQL Source Control works within your SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) interface.  This means you can work with your databases in any way that you’re used to working with them. If you prefer scripts to using the GUI, not a problem. If you prefer using the GUI to having to learn T-SQL, again, that’s fine. After installing SQL Source Control, this is what you’ll see when you open SSMS:   SQL Source Control is now a direct piece of the SSMS environment. The key point initially is that I currently don’t have a database selected. You can even see that in the SQL Source Control window where it shows, in red, “No database selected – select a database in Object Explorer.” If I expand my Databases list in the Object Explorer, you’ll be able to immediately see which databases have been integrated with source control and which have not. There are visible differences between the databases as you can see here:   To add a database to source control, I first have to select it. For this example, I’m going to add the AdventureWorks2012 database to an instance of the SVN source control software (I’m using uberSVN). When I click on the AdventureWorks2012 database, the SQL Source Control screen changes:   I’m going to need to click on the “Link database to source control” text which will open up a window for connecting this database to the source control system of my choice.  You can pick from the default source control systems on the left, or define one of your own. I also have to provide the connection string for the location within the source control system where I’ll be storing my database code. I set these up in advance. You’ll need two. One for the main set of scripts and one for special scripts called Migrations that deal with different kinds of changes between versions of the code. Migrations help you solve problems like having to create or modify data in columns as part of a structural change. I’ll talk more about them another day. Finally, I have to determine if this is an isolated environment that I’m going to be the only one use, a dedicated database. Or, if I’m sharing the database in a shared environment with other developers, a shared database.  The main difference is, under a dedicated database, I will need to regularly get any changes that other developers have made from source control and integrate it into my database. While, under a shared database, all changes for all developers are made at the same time, which means you could commit other peoples work without proper testing. It all depends on the type of environment you work within. But, when it’s all set, it will look like this: SQL Source Control will compare the results between the empty folders in source control and the database, AdventureWorks2012. You’ll get a report showing exactly the list of differences and you can choose which ones will get checked into source control. Each of the database objects is scripted individually. You’ll be able to modify them later in the same way. Here’s the list of differences for my new database:   You can select/deselect all the objects or each object individually. You also get a report showing the differences between what’s in the database and what’s in source control. If there was already a database in source control, you’d only see changes to database objects rather than every single object. You can see that the database objects can be sorted by name, by type, or other choices. I’m going to add a comment such as “Initial creation of database in source control.” And then click on the Commit button which will put all the objects in my database into the source control system. That’s all it takes to get the objects into source control initially. Now is when things can get fun with breaking changes to code, automated deployments, unit testing and all the rest.

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• Databases in Source Control

  - by Grant Fritchey

  I’ve been working as a database professional for quite a long time. But originally, I was a developer. And I loved being a developer. There was this constant feedback loop of a job well done, your code compiled and it ran. Every time this happened successfully, you’d check it into source control. These days you have to add another step; the code passed all the tests, unit, line, regression, qa, whatever, then into source control it goes. As a matter of fact, when I first made the jump from developer to DBA/database developer/database professional, source control was the one thing I couldn’t believe was missing from the DBA toolbox. Come to find out, source control was only the beginning of what was missing from your standard DBAs set of skills. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not disrespecting the DBA. They’re focused where they should be, on your production data. But there has to be a method for developing applications that include databases and the database side of that development and deployment process has long been lacking. This lack of development and deployment methodologies is a part of what has given rise to some of the wackier implementations of Object Relational Mapping tools, the NoSQL movement, and some of the other foul cursing that is directed towards databases, DBAs, and database development by application developers. Some of that is well earned. A lot isn’t. But it is a fact that database professionals, in general, do not have as sophisticated a model for managing development and deployment as application developers do. We could charge out and start trying to come up with our own standards and methods. I’m sure people have done exactly that. However, I’m lazy, and not terribly bright. Rather than try to invent a whole new process, I’m going to look to my developer roots and choose instead to emulate the developers. They’re sitting over there across the hall from me working with SCRUM/Agile/Waterfall/Object Driven/Feature Driven/Test Driven development processes that they’ve been polishing for years. What if I just started working on database development the same way they work on code development? Win! Ah, but now I have to have a mechanism for treating my database like application code. First, I need a method for getting it into source control. That’s where Red Gate’s SQL Source Control comes into the picture. SQL Source Control works within SQL Server Management Studio to connect your database objects up to the source control system of your choice. Right out of the box SQL Source Control can link to TFS, SVN or Vault. With a little work you can connect it to Git or just about any other source control system. With the ability to get my database into source control, a lot of possibilities for more direct integration with the application development teams open up.

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• Changing the Module title in DotNetNuke on the Fly

  - by grant.barrington

  This is an extremely short post, buy hopefully it will help others in the situation. (Also if I need to find it again I know where to look) We have recently completed a project using DotNetNuke as our base. The project was for a B2B portal using Microsoft Dynamics NAV as our back-end. We had a requirement where we wanted to change the title of a Module on the fly. This ended up being pretty easy from our module. In our Page_Load event all we had to do was the following. Control ctl = DotNetNuke.Common.Globals.FindControlRecursiveDown(this.ContainerControl, "lblTitle"); if ((ctl != null)) { ((Label)ctl).Text += "- Text Added"; } Thats it. All we do it go up 1 control (this.ContainerControl) and look for the Label called "lblTitle". We then append text to the existing Module title.

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• Getting NLog Running in Partial Trust

  - by grant.barrington

  To get things working you will need to: Strong name sign the assembly Allow Partially Trusted Callers In the AssemblyInfo.cs file you will need to add the assembly attribute for “AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers” You should now be able to get NLog working as part of a partial trust installation, except that the File target won’t work. Other targets will still work (database for example)   Changing BaseFileAppender.cs to get file logging to work In the directory \Internal\FileAppenders there is a file called “BaseFileAppender.cs”. Make a change to the function call “TryCreateFileStream()”. The error occurs here: Change the function call to be: private FileStream TryCreateFileStream(bool allowConcurrentWrite) { FileShare fileShare = FileShare.Read; if (allowConcurrentWrite) fileShare = FileShare.ReadWrite; #if DOTNET_2_0 if (_createParameters.EnableFileDelete && PlatformDetector.GetCurrentRuntimeOS() != RuntimeOS.Windows) { fileShare |= FileShare.Delete; } #endif #if !NETCF try { if (PlatformDetector.IsCurrentOSCompatibleWith(RuntimeOS.WindowsNT) || PlatformDetector.IsCurrentOSCompatibleWith(RuntimeOS.Windows)) { return WindowsCreateFile(FileName, allowConcurrentWrite); } } catch (System.Security.SecurityException secExc) { InternalLogger.Error("Security Exception Caught in WindowsCreateFile. {0}", secExc.Message); } #endif return new FileStream(FileName, FileMode.Append, FileAccess.Write, fileShare, _createParameters.BufferSize); }   Basically we wrap the call in a try..catch. If we catch a SecurityException when trying to create the FileStream using WindowsCreateFile(), we just swallow the exception and use the native System.Io.FileStream instead.

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• Tuning Red Gate: #5 of Multiple

  - by Grant Fritchey

  In the Tuning Red Gate series I've shown you how to look at a current load on the system and how to drill down to look at historical analysis of the system. I've also shown how you can see the top queries and other information from the current status of the system. I have one more thing I can show you before we need to start fixing things and showing how that affects the data collected, historical moments in time. For example, back in Post #3 I was looking at some spikes in some of the monitored resources that were taking place a couple of weeks back in time. Once I identify a moment in time that I'm interested in, I can go back to the first page of Monitor, Global Overview, and click on the icon: From this you can select the date and time you're interested in. For example, I saw some serious CPU queues last week: This then rolls back the time for all the information that's available to the Global Overview and the drill down to the server and the SQL Server instance there. This then allows me to look at the Top Queries running at this point, sort them by CPU and identify what was potentially the query that was causing the problem right when I saw the CPU queuing This ability to correlate a moment in time with the information available to you in the Analysis window makes for an excellent tool to investigate your systems going backwards in time. It really makes a huge difference in your knowledge. It's not enough to know that something happened at a particular time. You need to know what it was that was occurring. Remember, the key to tuning your systems is having enough knowledge about them. I'll post more on Tuning Red Gate as soon as I can get some queries rewritten. I'm working on that.

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• Tuning Red Gate: #3 of Lots

  - by Grant Fritchey

  I'm drilling down into the metrics about SQL Server itself available to me in the Analysis tab of SQL Monitor to see what's up with our two problematic servers. In the previous post I'd noticed that rg-sql01 had quite a few CPU spikes. So one of the first things I want to check there is how much CPU is getting used by SQL Server itself. It's possible we're looking at some other process using up all the CPU Nope, It's SQL Server. I compared this to the rg-sql02 server: You can see that there is a more, consistently low set of CPU counters there. I clearly need to look at rg-sql01 and capture more specific data around the queries running on it to identify which ones are causing these CPU spikes. I always like to look at the Batch Requests/sec on a server, not because it's an indication of a problem, but because it gives you some idea of the load. Just how much is this server getting hit? Here are rg-sql01 and rg-sql02: Of the two, clearly rg-sql01 has a lot of activity. Remember though, that's all this is a measure of, activity. It doesn't suggest anything other than what it says, the number of requests coming in. But it's the kind of thing you want to know in order to understand how the system is used. Are you seeing a correlation between the number of requests and the CPU usage, or a reverse correlation, the number of requests drops as the CPU spikes? See, it's useful. Some of the details you can look at are Compilations/sec, Compilations/Batch and Recompilations/sec. These give you some idea of how the cache is getting used within the system. None of these showed anything interesting on either server. One metric that I like (even though I know it can be controversial) is the Page Life Expectancy. On the average server I expect see a series of mountains as the PLE climbs then drops due to a data load or something along those lines. That's not the case here: Those spikes back in January suggest that the servers weren't really being used much. The PLE on the rg-sql01 seems to be somewhat consistent growing to 3 hours or so then dropping, but the rg-sql02 PLE looks like it might be all over the map. Instead of continuing to look at this high level gathering data view, I'm going to drill down on rg-sql02 and see what it's done for the last week: And now we begin to see where we might have an issue. Memory on this system is getting flushed every 1/2 hour or so. I'm going to check another metric, scans: Whoa! I'm going back to the system real quick to look at some disk information again for rg-sql02. Here is the average disk queue length on the server: and the transfers Right, I think I have a guess as to what's up here. We're seeing memory get flushed constantly and we're seeing lots of scans. The disks are queuing, especially that F drive, and there are lots of requests that correspond to the scans and the memory flushes. In short, we've got queries that are scanning the data, a lot, so we either have bad queries or bad indexes. I'm going back to the server overview for rg-sql02 and check the Top 10 expensive queries. I'm modifying it to show me the last 3 days and the totals, so I'm not looking at some maintenance routine that ran 10 minutes ago and is skewing the results: OK. I need to look into these queries that are getting executed this much. They're generating a lot of reads, but which queries are generating the most reads: Ow, all still going against the same database. This is where I'm going to temporarily leave SQL Monitor. What I want to do is connect up to the server, validate that the Warehouse database is using the F:\ drive (which I'll put money down it is) and then start seeing what's up with these queries. Part 1 of the Series Part 2 of the Series

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• Tuning Red Gate: #4 of Some

  - by Grant Fritchey

  First time connecting to these servers directly (keys to the kingdom, bwa-ha-ha-ha. oh, excuse me), so I'm going to take a look at the server properties, just to see if there are any issues there. Max memory is set, cool, first possible silly mistake clear. In fact, these look to be nicely set up. Oh, I'd like to see the ANSI Standards set by default, but it's not a big deal. The default location for database data is the F:\ drive, where I saw all the activity last time. Cool, the people maintaining the servers in our company listen, parallelism threshold is set to 35 and optimize for ad hoc is enabled. No shocks, no surprises. The basic setup is appropriate. On to the problem database. Nothing wrong in the properties. The database is in SIMPLE recovery, but I think it's a reporting system, so no worries there. Again, I'd prefer to see the ANSI settings for connections, but that's the worst thing I can see. Time to look at the queries, tables, indexes and statistics because all the information I've collected over the last several days suggests that we're not looking at a systemic problem (except possibly not enough memory), but at the traditional tuning issues. I just want to note that, I started looking at the system, not the queries. So should you when tuning your environment. I know, from the data collected through SQL Monitor, what my top poor performing queries are, and the most frequently called, etc. I'm starting with the most frequently called. I'm going to get the execution plan for this thing out of the cache (although, with the cache dumping constantly, I might not get it). And it's not there. Called 1.3 million times over the last 3 days, but it's not in cache. Wow. OK. I'll see what's in cache for this database: SELECT  deqs.creation_time,         deqs.execution_count,         deqs.max_logical_reads,         deqs.max_elapsed_time,         deqs.total_logical_reads,         deqs.total_elapsed_time,         deqp.query_plan,         SUBSTRING(dest.text, (deqs.statement_start_offset / 2) + 1,                   (deqs.statement_end_offset - deqs.statement_start_offset) / 2                   + 1) AS QueryStatement FROM    sys.dm_exec_query_stats AS deqs         CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_sql_text(deqs.sql_handle) AS dest         CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_query_plan(deqs.plan_handle) AS deqp WHERE   dest.dbid = DB_ID('Warehouse') AND deqs.statement_end_offset > 0 AND deqs.statement_start_offset > 0 ORDER BY deqs.max_logical_reads DESC ; And looking at the most expensive operation, we have our first bad boy: Multiple table scans against very large sets of data and a sort operation. a sort operation? It's an insert. Oh, I see, the table is a heap, so it's doing an insert, then sorting the data and then inserting into the primary key. First question, why isn't this a clustered index? Let's look at some more of the queries. The next one is deceiving. Here's the query plan: You're thinking to yourself, what's the big deal? Well, what if I told you that this thing had 8036318 reads? I know, you're looking at skinny little pipes. Know why? Table variable. Estimated number of rows = 1. Actual number of rows. well, I'm betting several more than one considering it's read 8 MILLION pages off the disk in a single execution. We have a serious and real tuning candidate. Oh, and I missed this, it's loading the table variable from a user defined function. Let me check, let me check. YES! A multi-statement table valued user defined function. And another tuning opportunity. This one's a beauty, seriously. Did I also mention that they're doing a hash against all the columns in the physical table. I'm sure that won't lead to scans of a 500,000 row table, no, not at all. OK. I lied. Of course it is. At least it's on the top part of the Loop which means the scan is only executed once. I just did a cursory check on the next several poor performers. all calling the UDF. I think I found a big tuning opportunity. At this point, I'm typing up internal emails for the company. Someone just had their baby called ugly. In addition to a series of suggested changes that we need to implement, I'm also apologizing for being such an unkind monster as to question whether that third eye & those flippers belong on such an otherwise lovely child.

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• Tuning Red Gate: #2 of Many

  - by Grant Fritchey

  In the last installment, I used the SQL Monitor tool to get a snapshot view of the current state of the servers at Red Gate that are giving us trouble. That snapshot suggested some areas where I should focus some time, primarily in which queries were being called most frequently or were running the longest. But, you don't want to just run off & start tuning queries. Remember, the foundation for query tuning is the server itself. So, I want to be sure I'm not looking at some major hardware or configuration issues that I need to address first. Rather than look at the current status of the server, I'm going to look at historical data. Clicking on the Analysis tab of SQL Monitor I get a whole list of counters that I can look at. More importantly, I can look at them over a period of time. Even more importantly, I can compare past periods with current periods to see if we're looking at a progressive issue or not. There are counters here that will give me an indication of load, and there are counters here that will tell me specifics about that load. First, I want to just look at the load to understand where the pain points might be. Trying to drill down before you have detailed information is just bad planning. First thing I'm going to check is the CPU, just to see what's up there. I have two servers I'm interested in, so I'll show you both: Looking at the last 30 days for both servers, well, let's just say that the first server is about what I would expect. It has an average baseline behavior with occasional, regular, peaks. This looks like a system with a fairly steady & predictable load that probably has a nightly batch process that spikes the processor. In short, normal stuff. The points there where the CPU drops radically. that might be worth investigating further because something changed the processing on this system a lot. But the first server. It's all over the place. There's no steady CPU behavior at all. It's spike high for long periods of time. It's up, it's down. I'm really going to have to spend time looking at CPU issues on this server to try to figure out what's up. It might be other processes being shared on the server, it might be something else. Either way, I'm going to have to spend time evaluating this CPU, especially those peeks about a week ago. Looking at the Pages/sec, again, just a measure of load, I see that there are some peaks on the rg-sql02 server, but over all, it looks like a fairly standard load. Plus, the peaks are only up to 550 pages/sec. Remember, this isn't a performance measure, but just a load measurement, but from this, I don't think we're looking at major memory issues, but I may want to correlate these counters with the CPU counters. Again, the other server looks like there's stuff going on. The load is not at all consistent. In fact there was a point earlier in the year that looks pretty severe. Plus the spikes here are twice the size of the other system. We've got a lot more load going on here and I will probably need to drill down on memory usage on this server. Taking a look at the disk transfers/sec the load on both systems seems to roughly correspond to the other load indicators. Notice that drop right in the middle of the graph for rg-sql02. I wonder if the office was closed over that period or a system was down for maintenance. If I saw spikes in memory or disk that corresponded to the drip in CPU, you can assume something was using those other resources and causing a drop, but when everything goes down, it just means that the system isn't gettting used. The disk on the rg-sql01 system isn't spiking exactly the same way as the memory & cpu, so there's a good chance (chance mind you) that any performance issues might not be disk related. However, notice that huge jump at the beginning of the month. Several disks were used more than they were for the rest of the month. That's the load on the server. What about the load on SQL Server itself? Next time.

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• Why does Chrome video performance substantially degrade after waking from suspend in 10.10?

  - by Grant Heaslip

  Note: For some more details, some of which may not be true given what I've figured out, see this post. When I first boot my computer, video performance (both native H.264 HTML5 in YouTube and Vimeo, and in Flash) in Chrome is perfectly reasonable. CPU usage stays slow, everything works correctly, and the video is silky-smooth. But for whatever reason, if I suspend my computer then wake it up, video performance plummets. Full screen HTML5 video is choppy at best, and full-screen Flash video basically brings my computer to its knees (I'm talking less than a frame a second, and a 5 second lead time to leave full-screen after hitting Esc). Restarting Chrome doesn't fix this — I need to completely restart my machine before performance goes back to normal. Video performance in other applications, such as Movie Player, doesn't seem to be affected at all by the suspend cycle — it's only Chrome. I'm using a Lenovo X201, with an Intel GMA HD graphics chipset, and Intel compnents all around (I don't need any proprietary drivers). This didn't happen in 10.04, and I haven't anything that I think would have caused this to happen. It's possible that a Chrome release could have caused this, but it seems less likely than a regression between 10.04 and 10.10. Any ideas? EDIT: In response Georg's comment, logging in and out doesn't fix it. Restarting Compiz or switching to Metacity (at least by using "compiz/metacity --replace & disown" — am I doing it right?) doesn't help (actually, it seemed to help somewhat with Flash once, but I haven't been able to reproduce this). I'm not sure about GDM — when I use "sudo restart gdm" I get kicked back to the Linux shell (?), which I have no idea how to get out of. Also, I want to make very clear that this isn't just a case of Flash sucking (it does,but that's beside the point). I"m seeing the same general problem with HTML5 videos, and Flash is performing better on my Nexus One than it does on my Core i5 laptop. There's something screwy going on with Chrome and/or 10.10.

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• I'm Seeing Red

  - by Grant Fritchey

  Hello World! My move into the world of Red Gate is more and more complete with my shiny, new, red, blog. The goal of this blog is not to compete with, or replace, my blog over at ScaryDBA. Instead, this blog is where I can share things I find about Red Gate products and services. I can talk about the things that we're doing at Red Gate. I can talk about the things I'm doing at Red Gate. In short, this is my Red Gate blog. I'm still the Scary DBA, but over here, I'm painted bright red (and no, I was promised that no pictures were taken of that process). So look for tips and suggestions about Red Gate products, methods to help you do your job better using one of our tools, and anything else I can think of or comment on that supports you and our excellent software.

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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