Find the Scary DBA
Sort of like Where's Waldo but with geeks. I assure you, I'm somewhere in this photo.
Be Afraid
I mean me, not you. I've been accepted to present at PASS. I'm jazzed and totally freaked at the same time. I put in two abstracts, one based on my book, "Dissecting SQL Server Execution Plans" and the other based on an article I wrote published at SQL Server Central, "Deploying with DBPro to Multiple Environments." Why then am I freaked? I've spent a year delving into execution plans. I won't say I'm an expert, but I'm comfortable. I've been using DBPro for two years now, but I'm hardly eating and breathing it on a daily basis. Well, I wasn't. From this point forward I'll be neck deep in it daily. Watch for posts on this topic.
Buggy Whips
I just spent two days learning about project management and the Feature Driven Development methodology from Jeff De Luca. He's a fascinating and informative guy. He's actually going to be running a project and mentoring a bunch of people where I work. It's going to be interesting times. I expect to learn a lot. Why buggy whips? What the heck do they have to do with FDD? Nothing, directly. A big part of FDD is the development of business models. These models can, and usually do, directly correlate to objects/classes in code. Because of this, object oriented methods are, not an inherent part of FDD, but certainly easily automated and used by those designing and developing systems in FDD. Buggy whips? I'm getting to it. Mr. De Luca has spent…
FAST n Query Hint
Just because a doctor says take two aspirin, taking an entire case won't make you better. If one is good and two is better, 2 million might not be best. What the heck am I talking about? We have an application that for one reason and another, has some overly complex procedures and queries. A lot of time and effort has been spent getting these queries to work well. Some of that time & effort came from one Microsoft consultant, Bill Sulcius. He's a great guy, very smart, very helpful and I learned a lot from him. On a few of the queries that Bill helped tune, he added some query hints, FAST 1 and KEEPFIXED PLAN. Where he added these hints, he could demonstrate, with good sets of data…
Dissecting Execution Plans: Chapter 1
Tony posted the first chapter of the book over at Simple Talk. Now you can be cheap and decide if you want to read the rest of the book without spending money.
SCOM Custom Performance Collection
I've spent five days struggling with this, but I finally have a custom performance collection up and running. The documentation available for Operations Manager 2007 (SCOM), especially for customization, especially for databases, is weak, and that's being kind. However, there are some guys working hard out there to make a difference. If you need help, the System Center Forum is the place to go. In particular, this little ditty on using property bag objects finally cracked the code for me. The good news, I'm going to write this up in an article for Steve over at SQL Server Central. The better news, I can finally report progress in my daily stand-ups. Sheesh!
SCOM VBScript Testing: The Answer
It took a while, but I finally tracked down the information I needed. SCOM has an SDK. In the SDK is a nice little page showing how to test & debug scripts. One of the links on that page leads out here to a great article on the VBScript debugger. That's what I needed (along with the DLL's to register). Anyway, I've almost got my first monitoring script up & running. I'll post it on here once I do.
SCOM VBScript Testing
Surely there's an enterprising young developer (I'm out on two of those counts) who has written a testing engine to validate VBScripts for SCOM prior to implementing them. Where are you? I need you!
Did I mention that I love Red Gate’s Data Generator?
Because I do. I'm working on a set of tests for an article comparing TOP, MAX & ROW_NUMBER. I have a simple data structure and I need a bunch of data in order to create my tests. I wanted that data to be distributed a certain way, to mimic some production system behavior I've seen in the past. Last night I got it all set by mucking about with the seed values of the various columns to get it just right and load up millions of rows in only a few minutes and doing this all on my lap top. Great tool!