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…
Moving System DB’s – Part 3
I was recently approached by my manager to free up a Direct Attached Storage (DAS) device from a test server so that it could be leveraged in a higher environment. To my amazement, both the system databases and binary executables were installed on the drive I needed to move. Today, we are going to concentrate on moving the binary executables from Drives D: and H:. The solution to this technical problem is to trick the database engine in thinking nothing has changed. In reality, two new drives will be carved…
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…
Moving System DB’s – Part 2
I was recently approached by my manager to free up a Direct Attached Storage (DAS) device from a test server so that it could be leveraged in a higher environment. To my amazement, both the system databases and binary executables were installed on the drive I needed to move. Today, we are going to concentrate on moving master and resource system databases. Here is a article from MSDN to use as reference. Moving the master database 1 – Open the SQL Server configuration manager. 2 – Select the SQL Server…
Moving System DB’s – Part 1
I was recently approached by my manager to free up a Direct Attached Storage Device (DAS) from a test server so that it could be leveraged in a higher environment. To my amazement, both the system databases and binary executables were installed on the drives I needed to move. From the lessons I learnt over the past few days, I am going to write a series of articles on moving a SQL Server system. Please refer to my database files article which explains how to move user databases. Today, we…
Managing Services
The SQL Server Enterprise database comes with many components to solve your business needs. Database Services – core relational database engine that executes TSQL SQL Server Agent – monitors database engine, fire alerts and schedules/executes jobs Integration Services – stores and executes ETL packages Reporting Services – manages, executes, and delivers reports Analysis Services – provides analytical processing and data mining SQL Server Browser – supports instance name resolution for clients All these components have one thing in common! They are all windows services that can be stopped, paused, and/or…
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…
Server Benchmarking
“I feel the need for speed” is a memorable quote by the character Maverick in the 1986 Movie called Top Gun. We all want to have a server that executes as fast as a Mustang, not as slow as Yugo. With today’s servers being built on Virtual Machines (VM), how can you tell if your server is slow? One way to determine server speed is to benchmark your physical laptop against the newly built virtual machine (VM). To do this test, you need to create a program that is both…
Excel Files
Business Users like to have data in a spreadsheet format. Since Microsoft Office is installed world-wide, it will be a common request for data in a XLS format. Let’s make believe that we have the business problem to write and read information about the first five presidents to a MS Excel file. The Cliché, there are many ways to skin a cat, does apply to technical solutions. I installed the write package (Spreadsheet::WriteExcel) and read package (Spreadsheet::ParseExcel) from CPAN to solve my problem. Both packages have more methods and properties…