The Bit Bucket

I was setting up mirroring at a client site today and started as I usually do by backing up the primary database and restoring it at the mirror. It would not start mirroring and complained that I didn’t have the latest transaction log backup: the mirror database …., has insufficient transaction log data to preserve the log backup chain of the principal database.

Somewhere along the way, the need to have a transaction log backup has crept in. So, to start mirroring, I just now backup the primary database to a file, backup the transaction log to the same file and then restore both on the mirror server. Then it starts fine.

2008-08-18

Fellow RD Tim Huckaby’s company has been really pushing the capabilities of the surface platform and building a really interesting set of apps. Most are still embargoed but this one is now allowed to be shown:

(link no longer available)

I suspect many of you will find it really interesting. Enjoy!

2008-08-17

Recently, I was working at a client’s site where SQL Server 2000 was still in use. They wanted to upgrade to SQL Server 2005. The only reason they were looking at the Enterprise Edition was for data-driven subscriptions in Reporting Services. The CEO certainly wasn’t interested in paying the sort of dollars required for that, just to be able to automatically email out a set of monthly reports to about 30 or so folk within the company.

2008-08-13

While I was prepping my full-text search session for TechEd Australia today, I decided to modify the thesaurus. I found the discussion in books online a bit confusing regarding the locations of the files involved.

What threw me was it said the default location of the thesaurus files was:

SQL_Server_install_path\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQL\FTDATA\

I went there and couldn’t find anything. I worked out that for ENU language, my file should be called tsENU.xml. I searched for that and found it in:

2008-08-13

The title pretty much says it all but for more information, check out Steve Lasker’s post.

2008-08-07

Well it was great news this morning that SQL Server 2008 RTM has hit the download sites. Also keep an eye out for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 which has been listed as coming August 11th.

2008-08-07

I’ve been doing another performance tuning job today and it highlighted to me once again that problem that a lack of indexes on foreign key columns can bring.

By adding indexes on the foreign keys on three tables, we saw a reduction of 87% in total I/O load on the server. There are other aspects of the system that I’m now working on but it really struck me that having SQL Server do this by default would avoid a lot of apparent performance problems. It would have to be one of the most common indexing issues that I see in my work.

2008-07-28

In the latest podcasts at www.sqldownunder.com , we’re giving away a Visual Studio MSDN Premium Online license for a year, courtesy of our friends at Microsoft. It’s a simple:

* you need to visit Quest’s site for info on Litespeed via the simple link http://shrinkster.com/10fn,

* read the article covering 10 things DBAs often don’t know about Litespeed

* email a description of two of them to questATsqldownunder.com (replacing AT with @) before August 17th 2008

2008-07-28

I’ve also been looking around for a new phone. It became much more urgent last week after I dropped my iMate.

After trying lots of phones, I ended up opting for an iPhone 3G. And after using it for a few days, couldn’t be happier with it. Well, not quite true, if it worked as a NextG modem as well, it would be even better as the data plans are quite costly here in Australia.

2008-07-22

I saw an interesting videopod from Steve Jones the other day where he noted that upcoming processors would have many more cores than now and hoping that DBAs won’t have to learn to write multiprocessor-style code. What was also interesting was the way he described that he learned some of this style of coding but later when he came back to it, he realised how much he thought he knew but didn’t.

2008-07-21