Author Archive
Transitions
My current employer has made the decision to move to an Oracle-based ERP system. And the decision has been made to outsource DBA services. The only major system remaining on SQL Server will be Sharepoint. So my boss and I have agreed that I will be leaving at some point in the next six to [...]
My First SQL Saturday #sqlsat71
Yesterday was SQL Saturday 71 Boston. It was held at the Babson College Executive Conference center, and it was a pretty amazing experience. Not only were the venue and food fantastic, but the event itself was pretty amazing. SQL Saturday actually started on Friday evening with the speaker’s dinner. We met at the Top of [...]
SQL Saturday 71: My Slide Deck
I’m speaking at SQL Saturday today. Here is my slide deck. SQL Sat 71 Virtualization Success Story
Missing Values in IDENTITY Column
Somebody in the tech support department of our ERP vendor has to be hating me right now. I’m kind of okay with that. In a recent audit, the auditors wanted to demonstrate the integrity of our ERP system’s audit log and prove it hasn’t been tampered with. Considering the primary key on the table is [...]
Recreating Tables with User Defined Types
I just ran into an odd little problem. And of course, solving it turned out to be kind of fun. Since I don’t do a ton of development work, this little challenge took some thinking. We’re building a little datamart, and I want to pull a few tables from the source database onto a different [...]
Backup Sanity Check
One of my pet peeves is when an application thinks its smarter than its DBA. Our helpdesk system was occasionally complaining that the database hadn’t been backed up in the past 24 hours. And our helpdesk manager was understandably concerned. That’s when I started doing some digging. My backup script was occasionally skipping databases that [...]
Failing the Smell Test
In addition to being a DBA, I’m a bit of a travel geek. I have a great love of airplanes, aviation, and travel. Today, I was looking at flights and saw something that made me think that it was a total violation of constraints. Just looking at this made me cringe. US Airways flight 0729 [...]
When things work
I’ve mentioned in the past that our facility had some serious drawbacks during power outages. During our migration to our new facility and data center a few weeks ago, we lost power to the building. Again this morning, we lost building power. Let me tell you what happened. Our servers didn’t even blink. The UPS [...]
Migration
Tomorrow, my company moves into our new facility. It’s about 1.5 miles down the road from our old facilities. We were in two different buildings about 100 yards apart. Now, we’re moving into a single building. We’re a technology company who makes networking software and quite a bit of the hardware that runs our software [...]
New Project: Aviation Statistics
Most technology professionals have a lab or test environment where they can work and play. Unfortunately, I’m not one of them. Sure, I have a test environment, but it’s only for my ERP system. And my company is really particular about software licensing. I could never set up a test environment that wasn’t explicitly related [...]