Another preview of SQL Server 2005
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=60405029

Nice overview of features:
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/2005/productinfo/sql2005features.asp

Uninstalling Reporting Services

Nice little problem here :x
Someone installed our DEV servers with French as the regional setting. Because my colleague and I don't like French (on a computer) we decided to change it to English. We had to uninstall RS to start with a fresh installation but that wasn't what RS wanted. The uninstall attempt just gave a message box "Fatal Installation Error". Very descriptive as an error :( When uninstalling from the setup.exe we would just get 1603 as an error code.

Reinstalling the French regional setting solved the problem. Uninstalled RS, uninstalled French and installed RS again.

Voulez-vous supprimer l'application?

For all you lazy people : http://www.uimapper.net/
Haven't tried it yet but I'm planning to use it sometime... lazy as I am ;-)

ON DELETE SET NULL

Check out this article about this new feature in SQL Server 2005

SQL Server 2005

Still waiting for Beta 3... latest rumors say it will be released in Q1. Although some say it will probably be June 5th on TechEd. Patience is a virtue I suppose :-)

These editions will be available:

• SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition , a complete data and analysis platform for large mission-critical business applications
• SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition , a complete data and analysis platform designed for medium-sized businesses
• SQL Server 2005 Workgroup Edition , an affordable, easy-to-use and simple-to-manage database solution for small to medium-sized organizations
• SQL Server 2005 Express Edition , a no-cost, easy-to-use version of SQL Server 2005 designed for building simple data-driven applications

Some nice features available even in the Standard edition are 64-bit support, Database mirroring and clustering.

SQL Server 2000 Workgroup Edition will be released too but that's not as exciting as 2005 now is it ;-)

Check out the movie here.

I've been experimenting with the UnsafeAuthenticatedConnectionSharing setting in order to speed up the WebService call time. I must say that the results are quite satisfying for the time being. Going from several seconds to sub-second response time. In our solution the service gets called about 60.000 times in a row so performance is a key factor in the process. Obviously there are some downsides to this property. Make sure you carefully study the security aspect before implementing this. In our case it is an application that uses just one user account and runs on a server without user intervention.

Code profiling in .NET, sweet performance :)

Check out this article about various tools. I also tried the JetBrain NetProf which imho wasn't too bad either. If you don't know the people from JetBrain check out ReSharper, that tool seriously rocks!

Finally got around to some C#'ing :-)
In order to generate the massive amount of reports I'm writing a multi-process, multi-threaded report generator.

Experimenting with the Enterprise Library (Patterns & Practices) which has some very nice features. The configuration tool is very handy and lets you visually configure the framework properties. Creating an Exception handler with logging is a matter of minutes.

To use it just create a reference to the DLL. Policies can be defined per exception and how to handle it.

try
{
int a = 10;
int b = 0;
int c = a / b;

}
catch(Exception ex)
{
bool rethrow = ExceptionPolicy.HandleException(ex, "General Policy");
if (rethrow)
{
throw ex;
}
}

The policy provides a couple of handlers:

• Custom handler: you create your own handler class
• Logging handler: logging to text file, eventlog, ...
• Replace handler: replace an exception with a new one, for example to remove sensitive data from exception information
• Wrap handler: to wrap an exception in another exception (InnerException), for example to pass exceptions from your data layer to your business layer which then handles the exception

I hope more posts will follow about the Enterprise Library!

Recently installed Panda Antivirus 2005... boy oh boy the problems I have.

- explorer.exe peaks 99% cpu usage
- browsing My Computer takes 20 secs per click
- Outlook no longer starts
- ...

I started sending mails 3 weeks ago (with occasional reminders), still no answer received. I uninstalled it yesterday and I will never buy anything from Panda Software again :-( It's bad enough that it doesn't work but I go completely crazy when people ignore my problems :-) By the time they answer my computer could be infected with 1000 viruses.

We're trying to create a reporting solution with Reporting Services here.

Although I am impressed with the power and features of Reporting Services there are still a lot of questions. Apparently there is little information on the net concerning more advanced topics. In case we find answers to the more 'difficult' questions I'll make sure I post them here. Stay tuned!

Recently a very nice article was posted on MSDN about Snapshot Isolation, check it out http://msdn.microsoft.com/sql/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnsql90/html/sql2k5snapshotisol.asp

Oh yeah... happy valentine ;-)

DevDays 2005

Tomorrow (and Wednesday) I will be attending the DevDays 2005 (http://www.microsoft.com/belux/nl/devitprodays/). I'll be taking the SQL Server 2005 track of course.

I did my last exam 2 weeks ago and I'm now an MCDBA (for what it's worth).

Yeah yeah, I know...

Euricom is now part of Dimension Data. Didata is a South-African company that specializes mainly in networking. Since they want to build a development network in Europe they chose Euricom to try and build it. Going from 24 people to 9624 in just a day, how is that for growth :)

http://www.didata.be

Hi,

Long time ago :( I've been really busy the past month.

Let's see what happened lately:

- SQL Server 2005 Beta 2 was released which is pretty cool. The new DTS is quite amazing, snapshot isolation level and obviously a lot more.

- Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 was release with .NET Framework 2.0. Notice that if you want to install both products (SQL & VS) on the same computer that you have to install SQL first as the .NET framework in the VS package is not compatible with the one included with SQL Server.

Some interesting links:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnvs05/html/Internals.asp

http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnvs05/html/BedrockAspNet.asp

http://msdn.microsoft.com/sql/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnsql90/html/DtSfSs05DF.asp

http://msdn.microsoft.com/sql/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnsql90/html/sql_ovyukondev.asp

http://msdn.microsoft.com/sql/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnsql90/html/sqlsvcbroker.asp

Visual Studio .NET 2005 Beta 1 is out!
Downloaded and installed it on my virtual machine this Saturday. Unfortunately I didn't get to the fun part of using it :( Hopefully this week will change that!

SQL Server 2005 Beta 1 is due this summer, that's at least what I hear. I've been reading about the new DTS and I got to tell you, it looks simply amazing!!! I can't wait for the first Beta to come out tbh.

Someone told me yesterday that people are born as a DBA. DBA's seem to be a special "kind". I can't evaluate this as I'm a DBA myself but I sure like it. And from the reactions I get from time to time I guess it takes a special "mind" to like databases.

TechEd this week in Amsterdam.
Unfortunately I can't make it :( Since some colleagues are already going someone has to be the sad lonely boy.

Be sure to check out the FalconStor people. It is a personal friend of mine, they have some pretty impressive software for storage hardware.

Hi,

Back from Spain already :( We had a nice little team building/course with Euricom in Cadiz which was really nice. We learned to work with the Euricom GUI Framework and Server Framework which are really great (Euricom). Apart from that we had some discussions about various aspects of development in .NET and presentations about Workflow management with Exchange, Sharepoint, Connecting to Java WebServices with .NET, ...

Obviously we did a little p-a-r-t-y-i-n-g while we were there :) I can assure you that the "Feria" of Chiclana is superb and I recommend it to everyone :D Came back with an enormous wishlist of Spanish music... Unfortunately I have no titles whatsoever which makes my quest quite difficult.

I'd like to thank my employer for this really awesome week and I'm looking forward to next year!

Still a lot of work here.

In other news:
Nobody used SET XACT_ABORT ON for the scripts we generate here. It seemed to be a bad idea to me so I started implementing this. Before if one little mistake was made in the errorhandling the transaction would commit giving us corrupted data. The test data had to be restored and well you know how it goes :)

This guy is running a nice experiment. For once someone WANTS you to spam... enjoy!!!
Spam spam spam

I've been playing around with transactions today. Not that it's the first time I've used them but I ran into some nasty nested ones. Oh, the horror of it all :(

I've been trying to change the IMPLICIT_TRANSACTIONS setting ON to prevent developers from calling stored procedures outside a transaction. The problem I'm having is that no error or warning is returned when the stored procedure gets called outside a transaction. If anyone knows a good way to solve this let me know mail me

*EDIT*
I think I found a solution.
Checking for the number of transactions active in the stored procedure should do the trick. The transaction count is 0 if no BEGIN TRANSACTION has been executed. Adding the following code to the start of my stored procedure will probably do the trick. If anyone has a better idea or a good reason why this solution isn't a good one, please feel free to mail me

IF @@TRANCOUNT = 0
RETURN

All is well that ends well :)

Signed my contract today!!! The most transaction intensive database in Europe and I'll be working on it :D

/me is happy