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10 Tips for the SQL Server PowerShell Scripter Today’s blog is a bit unique. I was throwing around ideas with Chad Miller, and somehow we came up with the idea that he would share some tips for the SQL Server Windows PowerShell scripter. You can read more about Chad and see his other blog posts on the Hey, Scripting Guy! Blog site. read more... IBM's DB2: After 30 Years and a Look Ahead IBM's DB2 will mark its 30th anniversary June 7. Here's a glimpse at its roots and its future. read more... Another argument for stored procedures This is one of those religious/political debates that has been raging for years: should I use stored procedures, or should I put ad hoc queries in my application? I have always been a proponent of stored procedures, for a few reasons: read more... Indexes – Unused and Duplicates Indexes aren’t free, and many databases end up with unused indexes. Every time you make any update to a table you will be updating the clustered index (I assume no heaps, because I hate heaps), and every index that has uses one of the columns that were updated. Inserts and Deletes affect every column and will affect every index, with exceptions for non-typical indexes. These updates cost a lot, to the point that I have several processes that disable certain nonclustered indexes, do all of the work, then rebuild the indexes afterwards. read more... The joy of being a programmer I am programming since I am 10 and I am now 38. Today I measure how much good programming bring to my life, directly and indirectly. I’d like to give credit to aspects I love in this job. Hopefully some young people will read this and will consider maybe doing one of the most wonderful job on earth. read more... Type 'Atari Breakout' Into Google Image Search for a Cool Surprise Google is commemorating the 37th birthday of classic Atari game Breakout in the best possible way: It turned Google Image Search into a version of the game. read more... Type 'Beam Me Up' on Bing for a 'Star Trek' Surprise Microsoft's Bing search engine just got even more inventive, creating a strange new world where no web geek has gone before. To take a unique trip, simply type "beam me up" in the Bing search engine, and see what happens. read more... Session State Management in Windows Azure Web Roles One of the frequent questions that developers and customers ask me during my Windows Azure related discussion is how to manage session state in Windows Azure Web Role. With Web Roles supporting full IIS (previously it was just hosted web core), the inclination to fall back to the tried and tested methods of either in-proc where the session is stored in the webserver memory or store it in SQL Server is very tempting. A few queries also hover around out-of proc and storing them in State Server. read more... Want to work on Bing? Have I got an Easter egg for you! Even if you don't want to work for Microsoft and couldn't care less about Bing, this novel help-wanted Easter egg should bring a chuckle -- particularly when you learn the secret to displaying the egg with Firefox or Chrome. read more... Software developer wages fall 2 percent as workforce expands The U.S. tech industry added nearly 64,000 software related jobs last year, but as the workforce expanded, the average size of workers' pay checks declined by nearly 2 percent. There are multiple theories for the decline in pay, but a common one cited by analysts is simply that the new people being hired are paid less than those already on the job. read more... Improving ETL Processes My name is Ratna Rekha Koukuntla and I am a Senior SDET with Microsoft’s Sales and Marketing IT (SMIT) organization. I am working on a Data warehousing application involving multiple ETL jobs and Packages. Based on our customer needs to have monthly releases, we moved to an Agile software development lifecycle, and since then, have been experimenting with ways for quick test turnaround, particularly in the area of performance testing. read more... The DBA Detective: The Case of the Missing Index When problems arise in SQL Server, we're faced with a server full of suspects, including disk I/O, memory, CPU, incorrect or missing indexes, badly written T-SQL code, out of date statistics, and full disk drives. All of these have motive and opportunity to murder the performance of our databases, and it's the DBA's job to collar the culprit, quickly without relying on luck or heroics. read more... Flow Control in Always On Availability Groups – what does it mean and how do I monitor it? Flow Control is primarily a mechanism to gate or throttle messages to avoid use of excessive resource on the primary or secondary. When we are in “Flow Control” mode, sending of log block messages from the Primary to the Secondary is paused until out of flow control mode. read more... Monitoring SSD Performance Everyone wants to make sure they’re getting the best performance out of their solid state storage. If you’re like a lot of people, you want to make sure you’re getting what you paid for, but how do you know for sure that the drive is performing well? read more... Roll Logs – Backup Recovery Rolling log files for a day, especially with 15 or even 5 minute log backups is a pain at best. Here’s a slightly better way to do it. Set the two variables at the top to the directory where the log backups are and the database you’re looking to restore. It will, assuming you named your log backups as DatabaseName_Log*, display all log backups in that folder in chronological order into an output script which is best read when doing results to text (Query/Results To/Results To Text). read more... Job Schedules – SQL Agent To be fair, the majority of this code was grabbed from the internet, and this is not something I modified to the extent that I could call it my own. Michael Abair is the original author, and the original code can be found at the link below. My contribution is limited to very minor changes and a lot of hitting the tab key. I know it works just as well, maybe even 2ms faster, without the whitespace, but I had to do it. read more... Parameterizing an Excel Spreadsheet I’ve had a few discussions in the past week about not only including Excel spreadsheets on PerformancePoint dashboards, but specifically about how to pass values from Filters to the spreadsheet. I did a few demonstrations to show the capability to some customers. Immediately after a few of the demonstrations I received a emails asking me to explain how I accomplished passing the filters to the spreadsheet. I would explain that I added a parameter to the spreadsheet before I saved it to SharePoint. Each time the customer would say, I did not know that was possible. As a result, I have decided to document the steps in this blog. read more... Top 3 Performance Killers For Linked Server Queries One thing I have noticed in all my years as a data professional: few users understand (or care) how far away they are from their data. Quite often they expect instant results from their queries despite there currently being an upper bound due to things like network bandwidth, the speed of light, and the data sitting on a server on the other side of the world. read more... Storage Spaces/VHDx and 4K Sector Size This blog outlines a new twist to my previous blog outlining issues with 4K sector sizes. SQL Server - New Drives Use 4K Sector Size: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/psssql/archive/2011/01/13/sql-server-new-drives-use-4k-sector-size.aspx read more... Microsoft rushes Internet Explorer 8 patch release Just 11 days after issuing an advisory, Microsoft has released a patch for a bug in Internet Explorer 8 that bedeviled the U.S. Department of Labor earlier this month. Microsoft's speedy release of this patch "is an outstanding example of Microsoft's responsiveness to the security community and their users," wrote Andrew Storms, director of security of operations for security software provider Tripwire, in an email statement. read more...