The Ashdar Partners Blog

While at University in the eighties, I didn't learn much in the way of useful software development tactics or strategies. It was just a question of fulfilling the homework requirements and getting past the exams. I was an EE student and not a ComSci major, after all. When I started my first job out of college, which was as much about programming as it was engineering, I was introduced to version control in the form of the PolyTron Version Control System, or PVCS. At that time, I worked in a two-person coding group. PVCS kept us from stepping on each other's work and allowed us to track our changes, using nothing more than the legendary MS-DOS command line.   When I moved on to my second job, the coding environment was more complex and chaotic. I was surprised that the version control strategy consisted of occasionally pkzipping the source files. The product itself was somewhat confused. I've worked on many projects since then, and it always seems that the better-run p...

This blog entry consists of my notes and thoughts from the PSSUG meeting at Microsoft's offices in Malvern on 2012/12/12. Any misunderstandings are mine. The evening was broken up into three parts. First , Kevin Howell presented " Visual Studio 2012: A Complete IDE (Debugging and Source Control" . He covered some of the enhancements since Visual Studio 2010. He did a quick demo of server-side debugging of a stored procedure, and pointed out a few configuration changes that you must make to your solution before you can use this feature. Kevin particularly likes the schema comparison feature, now part of SQL Server Data Tools, which I think debuted back in Visual Studio 2008 or 2005 as an add-on/down-loadable thing. He points out that you need to be using the Premium or Ultimate editions of Visual Studio 2012 to use schema comparison feature. The comparison feature does seem greatly improved, even over Visual Studio 2010 and is light years beyond what was available...

With all of the flamage surrounding Windows 8, tablets and phones, I've been resisting making any comments. (I have so many negative comments to make about the Windows 8 UI that I sound like a crazed Unabomber, and there is little to be gained from venting at this point.)  For posterity's sake, I'm going to put down some random musings that might be fun to check back on in 2014. I believe that the end game for tablets will be Microsoft selling tablets directly and without apology. Microsoft's formerly joined-at-the-hip hardware partners will be left trying to sell 'traditional' PCs (laptops and desktops) with an increasingly tablet-ified Windows. Some vendors may take stabs at shipping Linux distros (again), but that has it's own set of problems. There just isn't enough pricing room when the market wants to buy a tablet for $300 and Microsoft wants $150 or more for their software. People seem to feel that the Surface tablets are too expensive to com...

Hey. Did you know that I am #78 on the All Time "Top Users" list at Stack Exchange's Database Administrator's site? I was surprised myself. Here is a link to my information page . Stack Exchange provides sites to ask questions about a number of topics ranging from technical things like databases or programming to less technical things like bicycles or philosophy. As a quick introduction, here is a link to their About page . Pick a topic at Stack Exchange and and learn from many top people in their fields. It is always informative to see the problems that people run into over and over. Better yet, create a login and help someone out.

Last Saturday, I attended SQL Saturday #121, at Microsoft's Malvern location, which is just outside of Philadelphia, PA, USA. I enjoyed all of the presentations that I attended and I thought that the event was well-attended. Microsoft has a very nice facility and this is the first time that I've really seen all of it. I snapped a few quick photos, which can be found on my twitter stream, @dstrait .   I've been attending SQL Saturday (and Code Camp) events for many years. The most strinking thing (to me) that I noticed about this year's event was that there were only two or three laptops, but there were five different people carrying iPads and at least one carrying some sort of Android tablet. One person had an external keyboard bluetoothed to his iPad. There were too many smart phones to count.  In the past, there would have been a couple of dozen laptops and I would have brought my own laptop. Once, I actually lugged my eight-pound Thinkpad 770ED around all day. Thi...

There has been ample coverage of Google+ and it's growth or lack of it. So much so, that I won't even bother linking to any. Everyone knows that Google+ is not heavily used when compared to usage rates from Facebook. From my personal vantage point, Twitter and Facebook still attract more users more quickly than Google+. Many who tried Google+ early on have given up on it. I'm not sure that Google+ usage compares favorably to the current usage of prior internet darlings MySpace and Friendster. When Google rolled Google+ out, it seemed like they wanted people to jump from Blogger to Google+. This would stem the losses to Twitter and Facebook. I recall seeing hearsay that Blogger would be eliminated.  Fortunately, that has not come to pass. To me, the nice thing about Blogger is that it is possible to get some return from your effort. Ashdar Partners has not made a dime directly from this blog. Being who I am, I like numbers and measurements. I do look at the blog's sta...

OneNote is my favorite Microsoft productivity program. I would like to say that I have had a lot of experience with Microsoft's OneNote on mobile devices, particularly on smart phones. Unfortunately, I have just about no experience with OneNote on smart phones. I have been using OneNote on Windows desktops and laptops for well over four years. I've used both OneNote 2007 and OneNote 2010. OneNote was the program that convinced me to move from taking notes from simple text files. I had been taking notes that way since around 1989. Generally speaking, I'd rather have access to OneNote than Word, Outlook, or even Access (the database program). I think that OneNote is the worst-marketted product in Microsoft's stable. People just don't know about it. Two years ago, I was  using a Nokia E71 smart phone and awaiting the first modern Windows Phone devices. My expectation was that I could run OneNote on my smart phone and seamlessly edit my notes on my phone, the Micr...

After about 18 months of service, I have found that my mobile needs have outgrown my Motorola XT701. You can read earlier blog entries about my XT701 here . The old smart phone would take longer and longer to respond to touches, programs seemed to be spending time swapping, I had to remove some apps to free up storage space and there is no upgrade path from Android "Eclair" for the phone. So, though the lifespan of the XT701 seemed short, it seemed like time for a new phone. Our communications needs at Ashdar Partners are minimal, we rely on Verizon FIOS for the heavy stuff. I buy off-contract phones because I've got a decent ATT plan with a grandfathered price and ATT coverage generally works for us. It is less expensive to buy a phone outright than it is to get a subsidized phone on a contract and see a subsequent increase in the monthly bill. After some research, I settled on a Samsung Galaxy Nexus. The runner up was a Samsung Galaxy S II. The Galaxy Nexus seems a ...

This blog post mentions a few of the most interesting articles that I have read recently, or recently-ish, with a little bit of my commentary on each article. What's the difference between a temp table and a table variable in SQL Server?  This  is the best answer I have seen. Here is a short and sweet bit of  PowerShell code  that can make a persons life a little more enjoyable by providing some feedback to long-running processes. This  is from 2010, but I'd never seen it until now. I would temper it with Malcolm Gladwell's view that it takes 10,000 hours to become expert at something. (I am not sure if Mr. Gladwell originated that thought, but he has popularized it.) I'm not so sure that 'polyglot developers' will know everything there is to know about all of the languages on their resume, plus Active Directory administration, plus database clustering, plus SAN administration, plus VMWare, plus being up on the latest half-dozen NOSQL darlings, but may...

(With apologies to David Foster Wallace.) I follow various tags on stackexchange  sites, primarily database-related things. If you do this for long enough, you will see certain questions come up again and again. Frequently Asked Questions. FAQs. This is not a new phenomenon, it dates from the days of USENET and probably even before then One of those FAQs is: "OMG, something horrible happened to my database, I don't have any backups and now I think my boss will yell at me and hurt my feelings. How can I restore the data before that happens?". As a DBA, your first job is being able to restore the data . Just backing up the database isn't any good if you can't restore it. It doesn't matter if you are using SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, postgresql or any other data storage technology. It doesn't matter if you are an "accidental DBA" and would rather be coding. (I started my career as a coder and, frankly, I would rather be coding too.) People rely o...

I had an old Windows XP VHD that I used as a development environment for a client. I don't work with that VHD anymore, but I didn't want to just delete it. I did want to get the VHD off of my laptop to free up storage space and cut down on backup requirements. It seemed that the thing to do was to put in on my ESXi 5.0 host. But, how does one do that? Ah, a learning opportunity... One googles, and one finds that VMWare provides a tool called the "VMware vCenter Converter Standalone Client". This tool is aimed at industrial-scale conversions and it can handle a couple of different situations (different sources, primarily). I downloaded the  tool, installed it , and used it. It was surprisingly easy. I did get some warnings about not having some sysprep files in place. That was a little scary, but I had a fallback path (the old VHD). If the new VMWare VM was broken, I would only have lost some time and gained some experience. I ignored the error. (From goog...

This blog post mentions some of the most interesting articles that I have read recently, with a little bit of my commentary on each article.   I read  "Implementing SQL Server solutions using Visual Studio 2010 Database Projects-a compendium of project experiences" . If you are using "Data Dude" in VS, you should read it to. Even if you don't implement all of the suggestions that @jamiet, it will give you a better idea of what is possible. The downside is that you may have to put a fair amount of time into improving things like build output or creating data that can be loaded into a development database that might not match the size of the production database, yet provides enough coverage to provide realistic query plans and durations. PMs are not always sympathetic to spending  time on "features" that users do not see.  Having spent a lot of time with Database Projects myself, you can burn a lot of energy trying to get the tool to do what y...