I'm the proud papa of a new baby, Parker James Laborde! I have no idea what I'll do to rename my blog, because of course I can no longer be just “Carter's Dad.
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After weeks of testing and a small rollout we've finally put our new queue system into play for everyone. What a rush! There were glitches at first, when the new system was under heavy load for the first time, and we worked hard all day.
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So, you're in a low income bracket. On Food Stamps. But, you've got a home computer. And you're not sure whether its the frozen chicken or the tortillas that go in the cupboard.
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Often, I've found that I use some of the more well-known best practices, such as aliasing tables used in a query, fully qualifying the field scope even if you “think” there is no ambiguity, etc.
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I just can't say enough about how much I like using WebStasher (http://www.webstasher.com/index.html).
This is a tool for saving copies of web pages for yourself, which are then organized, and searchable, within your IE environment.
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I attended VSLive in San Francisco last week. It was good, but not great. The previous two years I had attended Connections instead, so this year I decided to go back to VSLive.
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All of those new Sales Guys are starting to pour in now :) Did you notice, that was a smiley? I think we're going to be able to handle the load after all!
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Last week we had Brian Moran here, from Solid Quality Learning. What a great experience. We had about two days of him just looking around, showing me examples of best practices that I had missed, looking into our actual workload, finding optimizations, etc.
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Work Queues
No matter how efficient your TSQL, of course the application's method of using your data can make all the difference. We're finding horrible inefficiencies in our application logic, and making some nice improvements along the way.
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I think someone could make it their whole job to work with SQL Server. Grin. OK, I know many people actually do :) But for my company, I do it when I'm not doing other stuff.
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So, here I am hip deep in the Performance Monitor.... Trying to get an idea of what a normal day looks like from the server's point of view. This stuff is SO interesting.
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I just got news that our company will be nearly doubling in size over the next six months! There's a lot to do in preparation for this, so I figured it would give me something to blog about :) Let the madness begin!
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Recently, I've come up with an idea for handing a vexing situation, and though it's working very nicely, I wonder what you, my fellow SQL Server developers, will think about it.
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A great article here: http://www.thetoque.net/031118/internetdown.htm well worth the read, very funny. Via Pashal L (http://weblogs.asp.net/pleloup/)
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Erik Porter has posted a great example of how to build a "skinnable" site in ASP.NET here: http://weblogs.asp.net/eporter/posts/39571.aspx.
He provides code in VB.NET and C#. The example is very basic, very readable, and not cluttered up with so many features that you will find it hard to pick out the bits you want to learn.
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In this post I'll be discussing a "trick" that will: enhance your coding experience while using Visual Studio (.old and .NET) enhance your email reading experience take at least 1 year worth of age from the perceived age of your PC get you a higher score on your favorite game So, what is this amazing trick, that will affect so many things?
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Here's one of those tricks that I'm sure I wouldn't need if I knew a bit more about what the heck I'm doing, but it helps me nonetheless....
A typical scenario for me, is that I get an assignment to work on a project for some new client, and I create the database on my laptop, and begin work.
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Like lots of people, I've wanted to store my ConnectionString in the web.config file. Again, like lots of people, I have different ConnectionStrings, one for the "live" server, one for the "development" server, and yet another for the "reporting" server.
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So, today I got a database .BAK file, and had to restore it into my server, where it had never been before. Having no documentation or information at all about the database, I went for it.
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Many TSQL books show you how to use @@Identity to get the identity of the most recently added row. Many articles online, or in magazines show the same. What you might not know is that it is potentially a source for some very hard to trace bugs in your application.
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