Wednesday 29 February 2012

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...




Wednesday 15 February 2012

Thursday 9 February 2012

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

DOS String Manipulation

DOS FOR command

  
File name parsing in batch file and more idioms

Loop files in a directory with a batch file


Executing a folder of sql scripts

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 



Wednesday 1 February 2012

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)