Tonight, I will be continuing the series of articles on the control flow tasks available in SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) to perform Database Administration (DBA) tasks. We will be designing a SSIS package that executes a transaction log backup on all user databases and save the results to a directory of my choosing. One of the most important job functions of a DBA is to have a recent backup chain in which a point in time restore can be performed. A backup chain consists of the most recent FULL…
Category: Other
These are articles that do not fit into a specific technical category.
Backup Database Task – Part 1
SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) is the newest release of the Visual Studio (VS) development environment for the SQL Server projects. I suggest that you use the 2010 VS Shell since the 2012 VS has some GUI color issues that are reminders of terminal screens in the early 1980’s. I hope they listen to developer feedback and fix this issue in a future release. I will be doing a series of articles on the control flow tasks available in SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) to perform Database Administration (DBA) tasks.…
2013 Goal Statement
I just finished blog entry one hundred yesterday. It is quite an accomplishment since it takes one to two hours to research, design, and compose an article. I figured it was time to reset my goals for the upcoming year. In the next thirteen months, I will be focusing on the Microsoft SQL Server Stack: Database Engine, Integration Services, Reporting Services and Analysis Services. I will of course throw an article off topic from time to time when it suits me. During this time I also want to update my…
Virtual Box – FTP Server Settings
I am continuing work on PROJECT ALPHA which is chartered to create a test environment for a PERL based Etract Translate and Load (ETL) solution. If you have correctly followed the previous Oracle Virtual Box articles, a working guest image of Windows 2008 Server now exists with the IIS 7.0 Web server role installed. Today, we are going to concentrate on configuring the FTP server. A local windows user account will have a home directory containing the test data file for the Perl program. The series of screen shots below…
Virtual Box – Windows Server Creation
Today, I am continuing working on PROJECT ALPHA. The project is chartered to create a test environment for developing a PERL based Etract Translate and Load (ETL) solution. I am assuming that you have correctly followed all Oracle Virtual Box – VHD Creation steps that we did last time. The installation ISO is listed as a bootable drive and will kick off when the Virtual Image is started. The series of screen shots below will walk you through installing Windows 2008 Server on the new virtual hard disk (VHD). Step…
Virtual Box – VHD Creation
Today, I am continuing working on PROJECT ALPHA. The project is chartered to create a test environment for developing a PERL based Etract Translate and Load (ETL) solution. One requirement of the project is to have a FTP server to stage test files. Window 2008 R2 Server comes with Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.5. As part of the installable server role, we can select the FTP options to meet our requirements. There are many virtual machine vendors of the market: Microsoft Virtual PC, VMWare Player, Citrix XenServer and Oracle Virtual…
Virtual Box – Know your hardware
Before today, I have written many articles that were concentrated on one topic in SQL Server or Perl or Visual Basic. Starting today, I am going to kick off a full blown development exercise named PROJECT ALPHA. The purpose of this project is to create a test environment for developing a PERL based Extract Translate and Load (ETL) solution. The following is a list of business requirements for this ETL project. A runnng trace file will be created in the LOGS directory. Connect to an FTP server using basic authentication.…
Calculating Primes – Part 2
Today I am going to talk about calculating primes. Not the Transformer movie in which Optimus Prime has to help the humans save the world. I am talking about prime numbers, a postive integer that is only divisable by one and itself. All other integers, greater than 1 are non-prime, composite numbers. We are going to refine the algorithm for calculating prime numbers by using the the fundamental theorem of arithmetic. Any positive integer can be divided in primes in essentially only one way. The phrase ‘essentially one way’ means…
Calculating Primes – Part 1
Today I am going to talk about calculating primes. Not the Transformer movie in which Optimus Prime has to help the humans save the world. I am talking about prime numbers in which the number is only divisable by one and itself. The Algorithm that I am going to introduce is a brute force method for calculating prime numbers. It is great for comparing the computing power of two machines by looking at overall execution times. This routine consists in dividing n by each integer m which is greater than…
Terminal Server Sessions
Many organizations still have servers running Windows 2003. The default number of sessions for Terminal Server, Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), is two without add more licenses. If an administrators disconnects from the server instead of logs out, there will be open RDP sessions. If you need to login for some DBA task you are performing, you might get the following screen which states all connections are full. How do over come this situation? There are two solutions that you can try: 1 – Use the admin console option of the…