The Ashdar Partners Blog

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...

Every so often, I find that a web site that I've casually used over the years has added features that I never learned about. This seems to happen with more and more frequency. Either I'm involved with too much stuff or I'm just slowing down. Usually, it's  LibraryThing  or  StackExchange . This time, it's  LinkedIn .  I have mixed feelings about LinkedIn. It's fine for what it is, but I find that I am getting more and more email that seems less and less focused on what I am interested in. I only scan the dozen or so LinkedIn emails that I've signed up for, one way or another, looking for contracting positions in the Philadelphia area or perhaps something remote that would let me work out of my home office. Prompted by  this  article, I reviewed my profile a bit, sharpened up some of my wording, added a few keywords to the "Skills" area, created a few saved jobs searches and I'm trying out a service that should update my LinkedIn feed when ...

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. This more-or-less monthly posting is a little light on content this month since my spare time has been occupied with SQL 2012, Windows 8 (client and server), openfiler (after an unfortunate experience with FreeNAS), VMWare ESXi, PowerCLI and my new (to me) dual socket, dual core Xeon 5150 workstation. Now, I just need the cost of hard disks to get back to where it was a year ago.   (As an aside, you need to patch ESXi 5 in order to get Windows 8 to install directly as an ESXi guest and boot properly. I would hold this against ESX if Windows 8 would have installed and booted as a VHD on my trusty Windows 7 laptop. That doesn work either. Since I needed to learn how to patch my standalone ESXi host anyway, having to download and install the patch could be seen as a postive thing.)   Generally speaking, I'...

A new version of SQL Server is almost upon us and Microsoft is having an online "launch event" on March 7th.  Go here to register . Question: Why can't I use my LiveID to register?

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  this  article on pricing in the virtualization market. Everyone I speak to about virtualization scoffs at Hyper-V when comparing it to VMWare. But, here's the thing: SQL Server took a healthy chunk of the RDMS space away from Oracle and DB/2 even though those products were arguably "better". Can Microsoft win a portion of the virtualization market with Hyper-V even though VMWare may have a better product? IT decisions seem to always boil down to price and familiarity, in some combination. Hyper-V is easy to get onto a Windows server and people have been grumbling about VMWare pricing lately. I read  this  very well written article on Microsoft Word versus Evernote (and versus a bunch of other things) by a person who spends a lot of time writing. I'm not a guru-level genius with Word, but I first used Word...

This is a short collection of articles that I have found particularly interesting in the last few weeks. This   article discusses benchmark scaling as the number of cores continues to grow on servers.  This article discusses Etsy's growing pains. It states something that I've felt for a long, long time--"If you are doing something clever, it's probably wrong." This (old) article discusses discipline in software development. It has me thinking that I should read McConnell's Code Complete again. I know I've boxed, moved and unboxed my copy several times in the last 10 years and it seems that there is a second edition.Tempus fugit.   This article discusses refactoring tables with no downtime. This isn't for every database. There is a good deal of work here (in terms of development, testing and DBA work) that you would not need to do in a 8x5 environment, when you can easily take the database offline for a while to do a migration or upgrade....

Whenever I do anything with an SSRS server, I always backup the key and park it somewhere. Automating that would be handy, and  this seems to fit the bill nearly 100%. The only additional think that I would like to see something that uses PasswordSafe or KeePass to keep a password, rather than a table.