Bookmark : Leaking Money

Does your group spend too much or too little? is a great read, demonstrating the 'hidden cost of junk'.

It can equally be applied to software purchases, developing software, developing databases, buying hardware etc...

Bookmark : SANs - HBA Queue Depth

This setting proved to be an issue on a client site.
Joe Sack sums up recommendations here in his SQL Server and HBA Queue Depth Mashup

Bookmark : Windows 7 32 Bit : Use all available physical memory

A hack that my colleagues assure me works -

32 Bit Windows 7 with full 4GB or 8GB RAM support

(i don't need it myself as I'm 64bit :) )

DOSsing around

Having just finished a command line scripting system, here are the bookmarks/ techniques I used.

I can't share it here, but I'm quite proud of the finished result, which allows me to recursively execute folders of .sql files and update a central table of which patches have been applied.

DOS Commands & Batch files

 

A little DOS for a poor DBA

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/scripting/64558/

DOS String Manipulation

http://www.dostips.com/DtTipsStringManipulation.php

DOS FOR command

http://ss64.com/nt/for.html

  

File name parsing in batch file and more idioms

http://www.rgagnon.com/gp/gp-0008.html

Loop files in a directory with a batch file

http://www.talkincode.com/loop-through-all-files-in-a-directory-with-dos-batch-493.html

Executing a folder of sql scripts

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2356524/dos-command-to-execute-all-sql-script-in-a-directory-and-subdirectories

for /r . %f in (*.sql) do @echo %f

for %i in (*.*) do echo %~ni

NB : You need to change "%i" to "%%i" for use inside a batch file.

Adding SQL ...

osql is command line tool from SQL 2000. Replaced by SQLCMD in SQL 2005+ and scheduled for deprecation but is still present.

osql -S{server} -d{database} -U{user} -P{password} -f 65001 -n -i{filename} -b 

See Solace : OSQL & SQLCMD 

Analyzing a SQL Database

Analyzing Table Issues

• Tables that are HEAPS (without Clustered Indexes)
• Tables without Primary Keys
  
• Tables where which have identity columns, yet NO Primary Keys defined!
• Tables without NonClustered Indexes
• Foreign Keys without indexes
  
• Tables with Triggers

Indexing

• DTA - Database Tuning Advisor (use with care)
• Missing Indexes

Misc

• Deprecated column types
• Implicit Data Conversions
• Table Row Sizes

Operational Issues

• Table Statistics
• Index Fragmentation Status
• Page Splits

Running XP in Virtualbox

To run Windows XP efficiently on Virtualbox...

• Use 1 core
• Disable PAE/NX

• Disable IO APIC
• Disable EFI

• Use SATA storage for the drives (you'll need to install drivers for this)

Disable VT-x/AMD-V
Enable Nested Paging
These appear dependent on support for them.

Ref : XP Speed Tips

Bookmark : Burnout & Balance

2 links from TechRepublic today -

Firstly - 10 things IT pros do that lead to burnout

How many of these can you relate to? I'd bet on at least 3 of them!


An earlier post has some suggestions to balance the situation however -

10 things you can do to keep your IT job from taking over your life

(It doesn't say not to blog past midnight though)