The Ashdar Partners Blog

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...